Rob LeFebvre - page 111

Did you know that you can send attached files from anywhere on your computer, using Mail? Simply right click on any file in the finder, move your cursor down to Services, and select New Email With Attachment. OS X will open Mail if it’s not already running, and set up a new message with that file as an attachment.

That’s all well and good if you use Mail. But what if you’ve opted for Sparrow, a popular third-party OS X email client? You might think you’re out of luck.

You’re not, and we’re going to show you how to make it happen.

The NPD Group reported today that the use of digital tablets like the iPad has more than doubled across the globe this year.

According to surveys of approximately 14,000 TV owners across 14 different regions worldwide, the research group found that a whopping 10 percent of those surveyed reported using their iPad or other tablet to watch video. This is up from about four percent of the same population surveyed a year ago.

In one of the more meta examples of self-referential design, this Kickstarter project plans to make iPhone cases out of – get this – wood from Apple trees. Each skin is laser-cut and matte finished, less than 1 mm thick, and attaches to the back of an iPhone 4 or 4S with an adhesive sticker.

Project creator Robert Magno (one letter combination away from being even more meta-fruit-like) wanted to keep things simple, a very Apple-like stance, to be sure.

The Reno, Nevada City Council today approved a deal that includes $89 million in tax abatements for Apple, representing a 79 percent overall reduction in Apple’s tax burden in the city. The tax breaks apply to county, city and state taxes, and will in part encourage Apple to invest $1 billion in northern Nevada over the next 10 years.

Project management is kind of a big deal, with college level courses, workshops, and seminars taught every day. Big companies hire people with these credentials to help them plan and manage their projects.

With software like OmniPlan, both the trained and untrained can manage personal and work projects with relative ease. It does help, however, to know what you’re doing before trying to organize a mission critical project, even if it is one for home, like building a dog house. All projects are made up of similar things, like timelines, human resources, financial considerations, and the like.

Let’s take a look at how to use OmniPlan to create a new Project – the first step to managing it.

If there’s one thing you can be certain of, it’s that date formats, measurement units and currency will generally be different when you travel to a different country. If you’re living in a new country, or working there, chances are this will be even more important to change on your computer, so as to make your written communication that much more comprehensible to your friends and co-workers in your new country. Mac OS X makes it easy stay in sync with the region you are visiting with just a few preference adjustments.

MacRumors received several reports today from Apple customers who have gotten emails from Apple. In the emails, they were told that the Retina MacBook Pros they had purchased on launch day (through Apple’s enterprise site) have been delayed, in some cases by up to a month.

One such email is quoted below.

Judge Lucy Koh handed Apple an injunction against Samsung selling their Galaxy Tab 10.1 in the US in the latest round of legal warfare between the two companies. Her decision comes after her previous denial of Apple’s request as well as a federal appeals court ruling for her to reconsider the request.

App analytics firm Localytics reported today that app retention is increasing across the mobile app market, while developers are looking at more than just downloads, like the number of times an app is actually used.

The firm also notes that the iPhone crushes Android in app retention, a measure of just that – how many times an app is used.

OmniPlan for iPad is touted as one of the more comprehensive project management apps available. With such a complex and robust app, it can be helpful to spend a little time with it and learn some of the best ways to use such a system.

First up, let’s look at creating a timeline for your project. In project management circles, such a chart is called a Gantt Chart. It basically places your tasks, goals, and project milestones on a timeline chart, to help project team members know what to do first, second, third, etc. This visual system helps managers know when things are getting behind.

When Lion debuted, the Save As… function had been removed from the File menu, and an interloper – Duplicate – was put in its place. The problem is that if you use Duplicate, you end up with two documents, one with “copy” appended to its name. In addition, Duplicate has no keyboard shortcut. This has made a lot of us sad.

While we’ve reported that Save As… functionality is coming back in OS X Mountain Lion, that doesn’t help those of us using plain-old Lion right now. However, with a little work around, we can get the same functionality until Mountain Lion comes out.

We’ve already talked about how your next iPhone should be a prepaid one, right? Heck, we’ve even discussed why Cricket might be your next iPhone carrier. It sounds like some folks must have been listening.

When Cricket started selling pre-paid iPhones as planned today, people lined up at the door before stores opened to get one of the newly available Apple handsets.

Seems like everyone’s playing catch up lately, right? First Microsoft’s Surface tablet is announced, and now Google TV looks like it’s getting an update that’s sure to put a little heat on Apple’s own hobby initiative.

Apple refrained from mentioning its TV product during the World Wide Developer Conference last week. According to Fox News, an announcement about an update to Google TV is coming at Google’s own developer conference this week, Google I/O. What will it include, we wonder?

The Wall Street Journal seems to think so, reporting that Orbitz points users of its online web travel booking service to different, sometimes more expensive, options when those users use a Mac.

What the heck, Orbitz?

Keeping your projects organized is hard; whether they’re for home, school, or work, projects tend to take on a life of their own. A good task manager can be essential to keeping the project moving, on time, and with a minimum of stress. wunderlist is available for the iPad, is free, and has some great features to boot, making it an obvious choice for many of us who need to manage our projects better.

Yesterday, we reported on a story about the new search algorithms in the iTunes App store. It was speculated that the new search results seen by iOS developers were due to Apple’s acquisition of Chomp, a search company that had found some success in the crowded market.

The developers who noticed the result reported better than average search rankings, with the implication that the new search would filter out the bad apps, only leaving the good ones.

Today, we heard from a developer of an app with a different story.

Recent keyboards for both desktop and laptop versions of Macintosh computers come with media buttons across the top of the keyboard where the F keys are. For example, my 11″ Macbook Air has F1 and F2 assigned to brightness, and F11 and F12 assigned to volume. When pressed, they increase or decrease the volume or the brightness one little tick mark at a time. But what if you want finer control?

Home movies rock, right? What better way to entertain the family than with moving pictures starring the kids at the beach, weird Uncle William putting carrots up his nose, and the four hundredth video walkthrough of your favorite amusement park. In the past, viewers of these home movies had to sit through hours of badly shot footage and horribly raw video and film of all sorts of activities. These days, however, Apple has saved us all with the creation of one of the best darn video editing packages for the average consumer, iMovie. With iMovie ’11, the development team has refined things to a high sheen, helping us all make short work of some fairly professional and complicated video editing activities.

To make things even easier, we’ve put together a list of tips, tricks, and tweaks to help you get the best out of iMovie, the video editing app for the rest of us.

Some iOS developers are noticing a change for the better in their app store search results, and it may in fact be due to Chomp, the app search company that made headlines this past February when it was announced that Apple had acquired it.

Let’s look at a few facts.

Apple Retail stores were the number one retailer last year, taking in more money per square foot than any other US retailer, including number two Tiffany, which made a bit more than half of that. Sounds good, right? Then take a look at what a retail employee, Jordan Golson, has to say.

“I was earning $11.25 an hour,” he said. “Part of me was thinking, ‘This is great. I’m an Apple fan, the store is doing really well.’ But when you look at the amount of money the company is making and then you look at your paycheck, it’s kind of tough.”

The disconnect between the incredible success of the corporation and the relatively low-end pay scale of its retail employees, as well as the reasons those retail employees continue to work for Apple, is the subject of a report in the New York Times today.

It’s our inalienable right as citizens of the modern world to take a vacation or a holiday, right? Well, instead of packing your whole family off to an all-inclusive Club Med vacation or Disney cruise, how about taking on one of the most time-honored summer vacation traditions, the road-trip. Long drives through scenic countryside with loving families and family pets are some of the best memories we all have, right? Right?

Well, at least we have iOS devices with us these days to both combat boredom and make sure we arrive where we want to. Here’s a veritable cornucopia of apps and ideas for road-tripping this summer, iOS-style.

Redditor saintt today posted a photo of one of the lowest-rent iPod mods that we’ve ever seen.

Dubbed by his co-workers as an “iHat,” this traffic cone-shaped monstrosity contained one song, and one song only.

A US judge today set a trial date for the US government’s lawsuit that accuses Apple and book publishers of conspiracy to fix the price of e-books. The case will begin June 3, 2013 and is based in part on antitrust charges, with the US Justice Department claiming that Apple colluded with five book publishers to artificially inflate electronic book prices in early 2010, when Apple was releasing the iPad.

In a post on the official Google Mac blog today, editor Scott Knaster wrote a final piece that closed the Mac-centric web log for good. Citing the current mainstream popularity of Apple, Macintosh computers, and of course the iPad, iPhone and iOS, Knaster says that he realizes that a special Mac blog is no longer needed.

We’ve spent a good deal of time on apps that will work on your iPhone, what with its built in cell-data capabilities, but wanted to find some great ones for you iPad-only owners as well. Yes, apps made for the iPhone or iPod touch can run in enlarged mode on the iPAd, but we’re kind of iPad snobs and really only want to run iPad apps natively. That’s why you’ll only find Universal or iPad-only apps in the next list for road-trips with your iPad.