Rob LeFebvre - page 107

Are you wondering why I said anachronistic? Well, seriously, the old-school world of fake leather and book bindings is goofy enough when it’s a real world item (unless it’s the sweet BookBook case for your iPhone…drool), but the skeumorphic leather and book bindings in newly-named Calendar and same-old-name Contacts apps in OS X Mountain Lion are ridiculous. I haven’t used a paper calendar or address book in years, even in the days before the iPhone. I know – gasp – there was life before iPhones.

Here’s an app that will remove this fugly visual choice – then you can forever thank us for helping you use your digital world just a bit more, erm, digitally.

During the period of April 2010 and March 2012, gross margins on iPhone sales in the US ran 49 to 58 percent. Gross margins on iPad sales during the same period were much lower, according to a court filing in the Samsung vs Apple patent dispute that begins in earnest on Monday, scheduled to take place in U.S. District Court, Northern District of California, called Apple Inc v. Samsung Electronics Co Ltd et al, 11-1846.

The filing was unveiled today in a statement by an Apple expert witness, though Apple has declined to comment on the filing itself.

US District Judge George Daniels denied Apple’s proposal to move the patent dispute with Eastman Kodak Company out of bankruptcy court and into his own District Court today. If Apple had been granted the proposal, it could have been tough going for Kodak’s plans to actually sell the technology.

Today, a London court granted Apple’s proposal to postpone a controversial order given earlier this month that Apple must post a public notice on Apple UK website as well as several British newspapers. The reprieve will remain in effect until October, when Apple will have a chance to appeal the decision in a British courtroom.

Has this happened to you? You’re out and about with friends, and a text message (or iMessage) hits your iPhone. Being a serious iPhone user and Tweeter, of course, you’ve left your iPhone out on the tabletop. Unfortunately, the text message that shows up on your screen isn’t very flattering to the friend sitting immediately to your left. She sees it, gets upset, storms off. Nobody wins.

With a quick trip to Settings, however, you can prevent this tale of tears and keep your iMessages for your eyes only. Here’s how.

Mac OS X 10.8 Mountain Lion has over 200 new features. One of them resides in the Preview app, Apple’s answer to all of our PDF and image viewing needs. Mountain Lion tweaks the toolbar a bit, adds a new one, and allows a simpler annotation process. There’s also a new sharing option to go along with the highly publicized Documents in the Cloud initiative.

Steam, the online computer gaming portal, keeps track of what hardware its players are using to access the many games in its service.

Of interest in the exhaustive list of specs is the fact that 49.46 percent of Mac gamers on Steam game on a Macbook Pro. Which makes sense, of course, as that’s a pretty powerful laptop. From there, we see the iMac coming in at 28 percent, plain-jane MacBooks garnering 9.49 percent, and the MacBook Air, my personal machine, used by 6.29 percent of Mac Steam gamers. The MacBook Pro and MacBook Air both rose in the hardware charts, with an increase of .44 and .89 percent, respectively.

The Podcasts app, released by Apple last month, is a thing of potential beauty. I’ve already returned to a state of podcast listening due to the app, which lets me find and focus solely on the podcast content I need, without all the kludgy hassle of syncing and downloading.

Notice I said “potential” beauty. The app is really not ready for prime time, with freezes, crashes and a dearth of sync between, for example, an iPhone and an iPad. That’s set to change later today, according to “sources” mentioned at AllThingsD, with an update to the Podcasts app that should fix these issues, at least.

GarageBand is awesome, we know. But when it comes time to get a little more professional, professionals (and their pro-sumer brethren) choose Logic Pro, now owned by Apple.

If you’ve been using GarageBand on your iPad, of course, you might wonder how to get these files into Logic Pro, so you can add all the professional polish that such a Digital Audio Workstation provides, using the files you perhaps created on the road with your iPad. Or even the ones you created downstairs on your iPad – it’s cool. Because Logic Pro is not available on the iPad, but GarageBand is.

Time Machine, Apple’s amazingly simple backup solution, debuted in Mac OS X 10 Leopard and changed the way a lot of us kept our Macs backed up. No longer were we tied to complex software like Retrospect, or easily forgotten manual backup systems. Time Machine made backing up our Macs easy and automatic. Even more importantly, it just worked.

Flash forward to today’s release of Mountain Lion, and Apple has quietly added a feature many of us have been wishing for, whether we knew it or not – multi-disk backups. One of the best practices in data backup plans is to create more than one backup, and then take one of them off site (if at a business, say) for safekeeping. At home, having more than one cheap, capacious hard drive to backup to is added peace of mind, considering how often those cheap, capacious drives can fail.

SpellTower, the award-winning word game for iOS, is part of the first wave Mountain Lion-ready games in the Mac App Store today, with Retina graphics and support for Game Center leaderboards and achievements shared with iOS, a Mountain Lion only feature.

SpellTower is a word finding game – click your way through letters set up in a grid, creating words from adjacent letters. The visuals, the sound, and the simple pleasure of finding longer and better words all shine through, making it a joy to play. But how does a game designed for the touchscreen of your iPhone or iPad work on the Mac?

Renaming files in OS X is a fairly simple affair. Simply click a file name to select it, then click again (don’t double click!) to make the name editable. However, when you’re working with a file in your favorite app, a trip to the finder to rename it, or a trip to the Duplicate function may not fit within your workflow. It’s also just annoying. Why not just mess with the file directly from the file itself. Say,t he title bar? Well, in Mountain Lion, you can.

The US Patent Office has awarded Apple another patent tonight, this one for the Cover-Flow interface that showed up in iTunes 7.0 in 2006, and then in the Finder as a view option in 2007 with Mac OS X Leopard and the iPhone itself.

US Patent Number 8,230,360 is credited to Jeffery Ma, Gregory Dude, Rachel Clare Goldeen, Justin Henzie, and Fainer Broderson, with Apple as the assignee. This patent was filed on January 14, 2008, which is a far less amount of time than the mouse cursor one granted today as well, but still – four years?

Today, the US Patent and Trademark office awarded Apple a utility patent that covers the use of the mouse cursor that changes according to the context of the task it is engaged in. Called a “Dynamically Changing Cursor for User Interface,” patent number 8,230,366 describes the functionality of the on-screen mouse cursor when it changes to the familiar spinning beach ball, the green plus symbol when copying files, or the red number of items being moved from one disk to another.

Temple Run is an original, popular, and successful game by Imangi Studios. It was picked up by Disney to become Temple Run: Brave, a tie-in to the Pixar/Disney flick of the same name. If you haven’t already downloaded it, do so now. We’ll wait.

Pyramid Run is a horrible rip off of Temple Run. Do not download it. I’m not even going to link to it, but the similarities are clear. It’s not even a careful attempt to re-skin or remix the original. It’s a blatant cash grab, as you can see when you read the predominance of one-star reviews.

When worlds collide – this is ostensibly an iOS tip, but it involves a Mac App, which should technically be an OS X tip, but hey – you probably know how to print from your Mac. It’s more likely that, like me, you have a printer that you use with your Mac and it isn’t one of them newfangled fancy AirPrint ones, neither. While AirPrint protocol has been around since iOS 4, I still haven’t bought a printer with it built in. Hey, mine works just fine, still!

If so, you can print from your iPhone or iPad to the printer connected to your Mac, using Printopia 2, a $20 Mac utility available from developer eCamm.

PDF files are pretty much just pictures of documents. In point of fact, many of them are just that – scanned paper documents that are put into the PDF format, as it’s a fairly common one with free tools on all platforms. But what if you want to edit those PDF files? Or save them in a format that makes them easier to manage, like .doc or .docx files? There are many expensive options, like the fantastic Abbyy Fine Reader Express, available in the Mac App Store, but there are also two free, relatively painless ways to do this as well. Here’s how.

According to a new survey from Appcelerator, a mobile analytics and development company, developers for mobile platforms are moving to the enterprise market. When asked to choose one mobile operating system is best for the enterprise market in this year’s survey, the majority picked iOS (53 percent) over Android (38 percent). This is in marked contrast to last year’s survey, in which the platforms tied at 44 percent.

We reported a few weeks ago that Apple had parked scads of cash overseas, some $74 billion in cash. Looking forward to tomorrow’s earnings report, however, it can be argued that their financial numbers could be much higher if the cash, mainly parked overseas due to potential tax liabilities in the US, were returned to US Apple coffers.

According to the Associated Press and reported by USA Today, Apple typically understates its profits when compared with other multinational corporations, due to this “phantom tax” liability, a tax they may never have to pay. Like many multinationals, Apple is counting on the US lowering tax rates in the near future, minimizing the amount of tax they’d end up owing if they brought that $74 billion home.

At a settlement conference last week, Apple CEO Tim Cook and executives from Samsung Electronic disagreed on the value of the opposing parties’ patents. The two world’s largest companies of consumer electronics continue to disagree as the trial here in the US looms ahead, scheduled for July 30 in San Jose, California. According to a report by wire Reuters, Cook participated in mediation with Samsung’s Vice Chairman Choi Gee-sung and mobile chief Shin Jong-Kyun last Monday in the San Francisco area to potentially resolve the dispute ahead of trial.

As if.

One of the best tools in a photographer’s editing kit is the crop. Finding the best part of a picture and cutting out all else is a fantastic way to make an ordinary picture into a great picture.

You can do this right on your iPhone or iPad with the Photos app. Here’s how.

Sometimes, it’s just fun to compare scores with your friends. Without the urge to compete, we wouldn’t have sports, national videogame competitions, or reality television. Now there’s a new way to measure up against those around you – Solid State Drive (SSD) speed.

Ok, so it’s not really a thing, but here’s how you can benchmark your own SSD to compare it with other SSD devices, if you need to know how much faster one computer you own is than another. In fact, it’s a ton of fun to compare the speed of an SSD, say in this here Macbook Air, and that of a hard drive, like in my Mac Mini. Here’s how.

Art. It’s something we all aspire to from the earliest of age and a pursuit of all humankind, including ancient cave and modern city dwellers, folks from the suburbs and people from the Renaissance. Head into any art museum and you’ll see paintings along the walls made with a variety of styles, techniques, and philosophical points of view.

Would you like to “brush up” on your painting skills? Practice drawing with colored pencils, pen and ink, water colors? How about acrylics, oils, or pastels. You can on your iPad with Art Set, a $0.99 app from developer LOFOPI.

The iPhone is the top performer in the mobile ad monetization performance space, according to a new report from Opera Software. It is followed by Android devices, of course, and then a large gap in which the rest of the mobile devices are being left behind.

“The iPhone leads the smartphone OS pack with an average eCPM of $2.85,” writes the company in their first State of Mobile Advertising report. “Though it is closely followed by Android devices (at $2.10). The rest of the mobile phone field is significantly behind.”

Now that Apple is fixing the in-app purchasing exploit that Russian hacker Alexei Borodin brought to light this week, it seems as if he’s at it again. This time, however, it’s an in-app purchasing hack that works in the Mac App Store.

The method here is similar as the one Borodin used in iOS, with the user installing some fake security certificates and then pointing the Mac’s DNS servers at a false server run by Borodin. The remote server then pretends to be the actual Mac Store and verifies the purchase, bypassing the real system for in-app purchases set up by Apple and use by developers of Mac apps. Borodin claims that this system has allowed approximately 8.4 million free purchases so far.