Rob LeFebvre - page 106

In Mac OS X Lion, Expose merged with Spaces and became Mission Control. When you tapped the default F4 key on your laptop (or F9 or use a three fingered swipe up on your trackpad) to launch Mission Control, you’d get the image on the top left in the screenshot above: all the windows of un-hidden open apps at once.

OS X Lion changed things up by grouping all the windows from each app together in Mission Control, like the image in the lower left corner of the above screenshot. This new style, continued in Mountain Lion is intended to be an easier way to find the specific window you’re using. If that doesn’t work for you, you’re not out of luck, provided you’re running the latest big cat OS.

Popular and useful note-taking and synchronization app Evernote has just updated its Mac app to version 3.30. The new version adds new keyboard commands, a new premium user account, new user controls and LinkedIn support, which is also now available in the web-cased Evernote client. In addition, Evernote sports a handy slideshow option for notes that involve pictures. This will look really nice using Evernote’s new Retina display support.

Ever wanted to try your hand at iPhone app development? The folks at Code School want to teach you, via a series of web-based coding courses focused on learning to code for iOS now available for backing at Kickstarter. The new set of coursework is called Try iOS, and it will use video, in-browser activities, and a hands-on approach to teaching anyone how to code for the iPhone.

We want to create Try iOS, a Code School course which teaches how to build your own iPhone apps. Our course will combine high quality screencasts, in-browser code challenges, and gamification principles to make learning fun. There will be no need to install anything, since students will build iPhone apps using our in-browser iPhone simulator.

Remember the excluded Samsung documents we told you about yesterday? The ones that Samsung sent out to the media after they had been denied the ability to enter them into court? We told you how Samsung’s lawyer, John B. Quinn, argued that sending them along to journalists was neither unethical nor illegal. Apple has a different opinion, which they filed in court today.

Taking notes and managing tasks can be a full time job. For many of us, the competing worlds of work, home, school, and hobbies can threaten to overwhelm all but the most organized among us. Unfortunately, not many of us (myself included) have the time or mental energy to create a system from scratch, forcing us to rely on software designers’ ideas about task management. There are a ton of apps out there to manage notes and tasks, but none that do it quite like Projectbook, an iPad-only iOS app available in the App Store now for $1.99.

The other day, I was goofing around with one of the slick new features of OS X Mountain Lion, AirPlay streaming from my Macbook Air to my Apple TV. I played some videos to my LCD TV right from the laptop, and then sent Diablo III up there as well. All worked well.

Then I wanted to get back to some writing, so I figured I’d send some music from iTunes over to my Apple TV, using the same AirPlay menubar icon that I’d sent the video over with. While I could hear the music from my TV, the Apple TV also displayed my computer screen. I didn’t want that, so I stopped AirPlay screen streaming, and clicked the button in the lower right corner of iTunes, and chose my Apple TV as an external speaker, like I’ve been able to for a while.

Turns out, there’s an easier way to do this, and one that doesn’t rely on iTunes.

Steve Wozniak, one of the two famous Steves who created Apple Computer back in the early days of Silicon Valley, went to the Museum of Modern Art in San Francisco this evening, unaware that a party was brewing there in his honor.

The surprise birthday party was thrown by Fusion-io, the company that employs Wozniak as chief scientist. Secretly invited guests arrived to find pink boas, noise makers, and a chance to play Tetris, according to AllThingsD, who took some photos at the event.

In the latest filing in the Apple vs Samsung patent case, the Korean-based electronics company argued that the documents they leaked after US District Judge Lucy Koh excluded as trial evidence were public domain, anyway, and that Samsung had done nothing wrong or unethical.

The Nevada Board of Economic Development endorsed a plan today, originally negotiated by the city council of Reno, to offer Apple $89 million in tax breaks in return for building a data center in the state.

Here’s an obvious yet often overlooked tip – something that I’ve personally looked at every time I use the Messages app on my iPhone, but never really “connected” with.

I’ve often needed to send along a specific text message, to a boss or co-worker, or even to a family member. I’ve often copied an individual message, then pasted it into a message of my own to the new person.

Starting in iOS 5 iOS 4, though, there’s an easier way – forwarding it. Here’s how.

Mail app, while not my favorite email client, is one that comes with the Mac OS X operating system. That hasn’t changed with Mac OS X Mountain Lion, either, and the Apple team has added quite a few enhancements and extra features to make Mail a nicer email client.

One such feature is In Line Find, helping you find text within the body of emails. Until now, you’d have to use a separate Find dialog that only gets you one result at a time. Hitting Command-G would take you to the next instance of the text you were looking for, and you’d repeat that keyboard combination over and over to find all occurrences of the text in your email. Not any more – it’s a lot better in Mountain Lion.

Betaworks purchased Digg, the social news aggregator, earlier this month. In that short span of time, the purchasing company has rebuilt Digg from the ground up to include editorial content instead of user-promoted news stories as well as better performance across the site.

In addition, a new iPhone app launched right alongside the revamped web site, giving iPhone users a new app-based interface for the site content. Betaworks promises more features to come soon, including personalization, commenting features, more accessible data, and some API development — all great stuff that promises Digg may not be as dead as some have claimed.

Today, Apple and Samsung both presented their opening arguments in front of US District Court Judge Lucy Koh in the second day of the legal case originally brought by Apple against Samsung for patent infringement. Samsung countersued, claiming its own patents were infringed upon. Apple Inc v. Samsung Electronics Co Ltd et al, No. 11-1846 began yesterday with jury selection, and opening statements were made today, along with some expert testimony by Apple designer Christopher Stringer.

Not surprisingly, Apple believes that Samsung has copied the iPhone wholesale. Korea-based Samsung continues to repeat that it has not copied anything, but rather a simple matter of American-style competition.

Lawyers for both sides squared off today in court with their opening arguments.

In the first day of actual testimony today, US District Court got to hear from the first expert witness, Christopher Stringer, a long-time Apple designer who worked on the original iPhone designs. His testimony described Apple’s design team as a group of 16 “maniacal individuals” who spent a lot of their time around a kitchen table, brainstorming new products.

Stringer wore an off-white suite and narrow black tie to testify, an outfit to complement his long hair and salt-and-pepper beard. He told the jury, “Our role is to imagine products that don’t exist and guide them to life.”

The process they use is unique, and includes a kitchen table.

Not getting enough Olympic information to feed your habit? Are you obsessing over every event, every result, cheering your team to victory? Well, perhaps the official London 2012 Summer Olympics App from The London Organising Committee of the Olympic Games and Paralympic Games Limited will fit the bill.

This app promises all the latest Olympic news, schedules, and result, letting you stay up to date with the latest happenings from all Olympic sports live while the games are happening. Here’s what it has.

When OS X Lion debuted, our old-friend Save As… had been sent packing for a new imposter, Duplicate. We tried to like this new one, but wow was it not the same. Luckily, Mountain Lion has brought Save As… back, only in a sneaky, less than obvious way.

We want to share how to see the Save As… command, of course, with a simple key press, but we’ll go even one step further, clueing you in on how to return good-old-Save As… to its former glory, in the exalted spot it used to reside in. Here’s how.

Redditor GrandHarbler is a musician and music teacher. He took to the popular social news sharing site today to start a conversation about how the iPad has improved his own practice, teaching, and music learning workflow.

As a musician, GrandHarbler has to practice every day. A lot. He works on goals that he times with an app called TaskMatrix, setting up 25 minute on and 5 minute off practice intervals called Pomodoros. He times them with a simple timer app, called 30/30.

According to a report by Strategy Analytics, smartphone shipments in general fell 5 percent in the second quarter of the current year, 2012. The market for smartphones in the second quarter of last year was 25.2 million, while this year’s second quarter only brought 23.8 million smartphones to the US consumer. In addition, Android lost ground to iOS, falling four points to 56 percent of the smartphone market.

While Android remains the top platform by volume in the US, Apple’s iOS is gaining, having risen 10 percentage points in the same period of time as last year, from 23 percent to 33 percent. We can only assume that the release of the iPhone 5, which many pundits believe customers are waiting for, causing a lull in current iPhone sales, will only increase Apple’s rising fortunes in the smartphone market.

An interesting jury has been selected today in the high-profile patent case between Apple and Samsung. Of course, any details about said jury would be interesting simply due to their inclusion in such a pivotal legal case, but the list does sound like somewhat of a lead in to a stand-up comedy routine. An insurance agent, an unemployed video game enthusiast, and a project manager for AT&T are three of the ten jurors selected today to decide the issues behind the patent case between the two electronics superstar companies.

If you have a lot of Bluetooth devices in your life, it’s probable that you’ve had it connect to your iPhone, iPad, or iPod touch when you didn’t want it to. If you get sick of scrolling through a long list of other people’s computers in your office, for example, you can just set up your iOS device to forget the ones you don’t want to deal with. In addition, if you’ve “forgotten” a device to get it out of your list, then suddenly need to re-find it again, we can help you with that, too.

Adding Twitter information to your contacts has been a slow, manual, one-contact-at-a-time affair. If you wanted to get all your friends’ Twitter names into the Contacts App before OS X Mountain Lion, you’d need to open Contacts, edit each contact, and paste or type their info into their specific contact card. The length of time that would take, depending on the number of folks you know and/or follow on Twitter, kept most of us from even thinking about doing it.

However, with Mountain Lion, Apple and Twitter have made it a lot easier. Here’s how to add them all in one fell swoop.

The Walking Dead is the definitive zombie tale of the past few years, moving quickly from indie hit black-and-white comic book to even bigger hit television series, and then as a Mac and PC game on Steam. If you haven’t played it there, you owe it to yourself to check it out on your iPhone or iPad – it’s really that good. Heck,if you have played it on Steam, you might want to check it out on iOS.

Ping never had a chance, but a recent report may show the way to Apple’s eventual success in the social media space. According to a report in The New York Times, “people briefed on the matter” say that Apple has been talking with the social media startup about making a strategic investment.

The numbers bandied about include an Apple investment stake of hundreds of millions of dollars, which might in turn increase Twitter’s high valuation of around $8.4 billion to a nicer-looking $10 billion.

In a not-so surprise move today, Apple filed a proposal with the US District Court that is handling Monday’s trial between it and rival Samsung over possible patent infringements. The surprise move today is the fact that Samsung agrees with Apple.

Both companies have to submit documents as exhibits in the wide-ranging trial, scheduled for Monday, and each company would like to keep it’s sensitive business data private. The two tech industry leaders today came up with a proposal that, if accepted, will have them jointly submitting documents they would like redacted from the public.

This one’s for the ladies parents out there. You know how you hand your iPhone off to your kid when you’re all waiting for the doctor? Or slide your iPad to the backseat for those long drives to Aunt Josephina’s house? If your kid is App Store savvy – and what kid isn’t, these days – they can rack up quite a bill installing apps that look cute to them but cost you real money. They can even wreak havoc with the simple tap-hold-wiggle dance, deleting your precious apps from your iOS device faster than you can say, “Do I need to turn this car around right now?!”

Luckily, there’s a simple, built-in way to prevent this from happening. Here’s what to do.