Rob LeFebvre is an Anchorage, Alaska-based writer and editor who has contributed to various tech, gaming and iOS sites, including 148Apps, Creative Screenwriting, Shelf-Awareness, VentureBeat, and Paste Magazine. Feel free to find Rob on Twitter @roblef, and send him a cookie once in a while; he'll really appreciate it.
Here’s another one of those tips that should be blisteringly obvious, but isn’t.
If you try to send a photo via iMessage (or text message), you’re limited to one photo at a time. Go ahead and give it a shot. I’ll wait.
See? From the Messages app on your iPhone, you only have the option to take a photo or choose an existing one. What if you want to send more than one photo at a time, though?
Ever need to find a download from a while back, but can’t seem to figure out where it went? You’re sure you’re downloaded it, of course. Heck, I’m sure you downloaded it. But where is it?
Or what if you just want to track down a specific file you downloaded just before your Mac developed some issues? Or you need to make sure that nothing personal has been downloaded on a work Mac? The following Terminal command should help.
About a week after an incredulous tweet from Runic Games, Apple has taken down Armed Heroes Online, an MMO for iOS.
In the tweet, Runic’s community manager Brian Ward claimed that assets were stolen from Torchlight – a Mac and PC game available on Steam – to be used in the iOS game by Entertainment Game Labs (EGLS).
Various iCloud users are reporting that 20th Century Fox movies are now available for re-download via iTunes in the cloud. As Cult of Mac reported mid-March, Universal and Fox studios weren’t able to close a deal with Apple for iCloud availability due to licensing conflicts with HBO.
Universal Studios content was released for iCloud availability soon after, in April. Now it’s Fox Studios’ turn.
According to new plans filed with Catawba County, Apple is building a second data center near an already begun facility in Maiden, North Carolina.
The planned 21,030-square-foot data center will store server clusters, with a total cost of the 11-room building targeted at a little over $1.8 million. The permits filed include the installation of 22 air conditioners, five fans, 14 humidifiers, six electric heaters and heating ducts.
I use my iPhone camera to keep track of a lot of things. When I’m in the bookstore, I take photos of books I want to buy, or show friends. I take pics of meals to track what and how much I eat, and I take photos of my kids and pets as often as possible.
I don’t take video that often, though it has been known to happen. However, I can really see the utility in having some sort of audio recording capability along with my photo taking – sort of a quasi-video thing – and Phonogram does just that.
Apple’s presentation software Keynote is, in my opinion, a fantastic application for making presentations on your Mac. It’s easy to use, presents a unified metaphor for designing slideshow presentations, and makes using rich media a very simple process. Unfortunately, not everyone who uses a Mac will have Keynote, as it seems that Office is the de-facto standard in many businesses and computers.
Fear not, however, as viewing Keynote files on a Mac is super easy, even if you don’t have the Keynote app itself, which is also an affordable and very worthwhile $10 in the Mac App Store. Here are three ways to do just that.
I don't always use mobile Safari, but when I do...
One of the limitations of the iPhone and iPod touch version of Safari has always been a lack of tabbed browsing. Granted, there’s only so much space on the smaller mobile screen, but all the same – tabbed browsing is great.
So is being able to open tabs in the background, so that you can continue reading, say, an article on Cult of Mac, but still save an interesting link in another tab, just like you can on the Mac with a Command-click. With a simple Settings tweak, you can.
Here’s a possible scenario: you are looking though the folder that you put all your downloaded files in, noticing that it’s long past the time to clean it out. Then suddenly one particular file catches your eye. It’s an odd little mp3 file, perhaps, or an animated gif, but you just can’t remember where you got it from. What if you want more? Or want to hop back to the place you downloaded it to see if there are any more things like it?
US District Court Judge Lucy Koh rejected requests today from both Apple and Samsung regarding the parties’ proposal to keep portions of key legal documents out of the public eye during their upcoming patent case in California this month.
If you’ve been following all the current pre-trial back and forth between Apple and Samsung in the Apple Inc v. Samsung Electronics Co Ltd et al, 11-1846 case, in which Apple has claimed Samsung is infringing on several patents, Samsung has counterclaimed similar infringement arguments, and Apple’s request for a temporary sales ban on the Samsung Nexus Phone has been accepted and enforced by the court.
You’ll also know that Judge Koh has been steadily, one might say doggedly, dealing with both parties, trying to keep the case as relevant, simple, and direct as possible.
In a new visual for the Apple Store website, Apple has posted a “We’ll be back” note for potential web visitors. What’s news about that? Well, there are 18 different languages that rotate through, each (assumedly) saying the same thing. We’re assuming this is regular maintenance for the site, but will keep an eye on things just in case.
It’s a nice international touch, and in keeping with Apple’s continuing success worldwide. Click on through to see if you can figure out all the languages – feel free to share in the comments below.
Another day, another patent infringement story. Today, HTC brought a couple of counterclaims against Apple in Florida over two patents it bought from HP last December.
The case they’re asserting the claims in is one that started in 2010, with a Motorola lawsuit against Apple. Six of the twelve Apple counterclaims in that lawsuit also concerned HTC. While HTC motioned to transfer the case out of Miami, they had to respond to those counterclaims. They did so by filing their own counterclaims.
We're probably going to charge for everything we can get away with. Until we can't.
AT&T CEO Randall Stephenson responded today to the recent rumor that the telecommunications company is planning to charge customers for data used in FaceTime calls over 3G. The feature was announced for iOS 6 in June at Apple’s Worldwide Developer Conference (WWDC) in San Francisco.
Asked about the rumor at the Fortune Brainstorm Tech conference in Aspen, Stephenson acknowledged the rumor, but then also said it’s “too early to talk about pricing,” which may in fact be executive-speak for, “we won’t tell you how much we’re gonna charge.”
Using Apple’s recently released Podcast app for your browsing and discovery needs? Apple’s latest evolutionary step in the podcast world is a standalone app that took the podcasts out of the standard Music app and gave them a home of their own. This makes a lot of sense, as most podcasts are not strictly music. Audio, yes. Music? Not always.
The hype around the release of the app has been about discovery, of course, as giving the media type its own separate place for users to look at, complete with Apple’s own special sauce for featuring and categorizing things for their users, really helps us all find the podcasts we didn’t even know we wanted to listen to.
However, once caught up in the discovery process, you might not have known that you can subscribe to any podcast, whether it is featured or not, right from the Podcast app itself.
If you’re not careful when using Safari, you could end up with a screen full of open website windows. Safari’s default behavior when opening a new link is to do so in a new window. This drove me nuts until I figured out I could just Control-click any links and they’d appear nicely in a new tab instead of a new window.
On the occasions I forget that feature and end up with a ton of open windows, there’s always the “Merge All Windows” menu command in the Window menu. It’s a slick piece of kit, but I’d like to trigger it with a keyboard combination. Here’s how.
Even though Apple hasn’t confirmed the iPhone 5, nor whether it will use the mini SIM card it won the design proposal for, many European mobile carriers are placing orders for the tiny little smartphone cards in anticipation of the iPhone 5 launch, which is rumored to drop in September or October of this year.
So, check this out. The folks behind CameraSize, a clever little web site that compares camera specifications with easily viewable images for size comparison, have created SensorSize. Ever wondered what the camera on your iPhone 4S is packing? How about comparing it to other smartphones, point and shoot phones, or – gasp – actual DSLR cameras?
SensorSize will do it all, with a nice little infographic, as you can see above.
In the continuing saga of Apple and Samsung in the copyright infringement trial in California recently, it seems as if Apple has a much stronger position than many people might believe. This isn’t a case of Apple stifling innovation, but rather of Samsung knowing very well that it has a weak case in both the claims it is defending against as well as the claims it has brought to court itself.
Let’s face it, sometimes inspiration strikes when you’re mobile. You’re on the train, the bus, the airplane and the playlist magic just, well, happens. All the stars line up and you create, yes, the best. Playlist. Evar.
Then you get home and realize, with some chagrin, that you have no idea how to get them off of the iPhone or iPad you made it on. Instead of falling to your knees, weeping, and crying out, “noooooo!” you can actually just continue to read this tip.
Doing any design work? Creating an office newsletter, classroom report, or client brochure? Chances are you’ll be needing some fonts. The Mac may have ushered in the era of desktop publishing many moons ago, but we’re still at the mercy of our own (or our clients’) good taste or lack thereof.
If you’re trying to decide between different fonts for a particular project, you might want to print out a font sampler, which contains all the different fonts you are looking at in a nice, easily shared format. Font Book, the app that handles fonts on your Mac, can do this for you easily, at least in Mac OS X 10.7.3. Here’s how to make that happen.
Add this to your maybe calendar – 9 to 5 Mac is reporting that both US and overseas Apple Stores have a scheduled “overnight” on July 24th, leading the news site to speculate on the release of OS X 10.8, Mountain Lion, for the following day.
Getting tired of “Sent from my iPhone” as your mail signature on your iPhone? What about “Sent from my iPad?” Still bored? Yeah, me, too. I’ve changed my signature to something a bit more magical on the iPad, but I really didn’t think about adding some basic rich text formatting and some images in to really spice it up.
Lucky for me (and now you), Greg Sargent, student web engineer, has. Here’s how.
Copying files to a new Mac? Perhaps one of them newfangled MacBook Pros? While most of us use Migration Assistant to move our files from one Mac to a new one, it may not be an option in your particular case. I’ve definitely wanted to move just the bare minimum of files over to a new Mac before, and today’s tip should help with just that.
The Keychain is a place to store passwords and login information, and it’s fairly easy to move your Mac’s Keychain to a new one. Here’s how.
We all love Craigslist, right? I mean, this plain text website has changed the way I live, at least. I’ve posted a home for sale, advertised for job openings, sold musical equipment, and bought more than my fair share of similar items through the basic website since the early 2000s. In a short time the service replaced newspaper classified ads as my go-to method of finding local stuff.
But it’s just. So. Ugly. And it’s got super tiny on the screen, even when you’re using an iPad to access it. Which is where Craigslist the app comes in.
Both Samsung and Apple filed pre-trial juror screening questionnaires with the US District Court that is handling the patent dispute originally filed by Apple agains Samsung. Potential jurors will have to answer close to 750 questions unless Judge Koh, the District Judge who has been handling this case, asks for some winnowing of the number of questions. 49 of those questions are from Apple, with the remaining 700 filed by Samsung. That’s six pages to forty pages, respectively.