Rob LeFebvre - page 93

There’s another way to get refurbished Apple stuff, and it’s…eBay? Oddly enough, the online auction retail site has a dedicated page for Apple certified Macs, iPods, and iPads, each coming with their own one year warranty just like they do in the onlineApple Store.

All the devices on sale through this eBay page are refurbished to seem like new, and even given new batteries in the case of iOS devices. The original operating system is also installed, and the unit gets a full round of testing, just like it does on the Apple Store.

The iPhone is a paragon of simple design. It packs a ton of complexity in a simple, easy to understand package. One example is the iconic Home button. One click of the iPhone, iPod touch, or iPad touch will wake your device, a click and hold will bring up Siri, and a triple click can enable a host of accessibility features.

Did you know, however, that you can set the speed at which the Home button will recognize your clicks? Added in iOS 6, this feature will be a boon to anyone with motor issue or even just those of us who want to slow down the speed at which we double or triple click that Home button.

How many of you still use the Mail app? Show of hands? Personally, I haven’t used it much since I migrated to Gmail, preferring instead the online interface and functionality (including tags) to a Mac-based solution. However, there are many folks who still use the email application that comes along with OS X and every new Macintosh computer.

If you’re one of those people, you know that the new version of Mail has a VIP mailbox, just like the one in iOS 6. On the Mac, this VIP mailbox shows all the email you’ve gotten from folks you’ve set as a VIP. If you don’t remember how to do that, see our tip on adding folks to the VIP list in OS X.

However, you might just want to show only VIP mail that’s in the Inbox, right? Not all of the VIP email you’ve gotten, ever. Here’s how.

Launched in February of 2009, OpenFeint was the first useful leader board and multiplayer matching service for iOS games. It was originally developed by Jason Citron’s Aurora Feint development team, and went on to become an SDK that iOS, and later Android, developers could include in their mobile games without having to build their own multiplayer, leader board, or achievement system.

In 2011, social gaming company GREE purchased OpenFeint for a reported $104 million.

Today, GREE announced that OpenFeint will no longer be supported, and that the service will end on December 14, 2012.

Aspyr Media, one of the top Mac game porting houses, has released new downloadable content (DLC) for the Mac version of Call of Duty: Black Ops. Titled Annihilation & Escalation, the pack includes eight new multiplayer maps along with two new zombie levels–a fan favorite.

The maps included are Hangar 18, Drive-In, Silo, Hazard, Hotel, and more, each with its own distinct environment and tactical advantages.

What goes up must come down, in physics and in investment. Stock prices for Apple have hit a low recently, down about a fourth of it’s value. Analysts believe that upcoming taxes on capital gains and investment dividends have stock holders rushing to get rid of as much as they can to avoid record tax hikes.

“No individual investment can defy gravity,” said the deputy chief investment officer for Wells Fargo, Erik Davidson.

One of the cool unsung new features of iOS 6 is the way it doesn’t ask you for a password every single time you go to make an app purchase. Remember those days? Ugh.

The downside of this convenience is that anyone who uses your iOS device within about 15 minutes of you having entered the password–like to buy that free game app for your kid, you know, the one with the in-app purchases–they will be able to purchase other apps or (gasp!) complete in-app purchases without entering the password. No, Apple, I really don’t want $100 worth of Smurf Berries.

Short of turning off in-app purchases–which, really, you should if you have children using your iOS device often–there’s another way to protect yourself from this kind of snafu.

Not to beat up on AirDrop or anything, but not all Macs can use the zero-configuration file sharing technology from Apple. In order to use AirDrop, you must have a a newer Mac, like a MacBook Pro from 2008 or later, a MacBook Air from 2010 or later, or a Mac Mini from mid 2010 or later (full list below)

Luckily, if you can connect your older Mac to an Ethernet cable and network, you can enable AirDrop on an older Mac. Here’s how.

Today, both Apple and Samsung were given the go ahead to include newer devices in their continuing legal battle over mobile smartphone and tablet supremacy, raising the stakes between the two tech giants. Samsung was granted the ability to include the iPhone 5 in its lawsuit against Cupertino-based Apple.

According to the Wall Street Journal, US Magistrate Judge Paul Grewal accepted Samsung’s revised request, thus allowing the company to attempt to prove infringement against Apple’s newest iPhone, a course of action the Korea-based company announced soon after its own defeat in the case against Samsung by Apple last month.

The jude also accepted Apple’s request to amend its own infringement lawsuit against Samsung to include newer products, including the Galaxy Note 10.1, the Galaxy S III, and the Jelly Bean Android Operating System.

If you haven’t played Rochard, yet, you might want to check this out. The gravity-bending, scifi adventuring, sarcastic-remark making space mechanic with a gravity gun is on the Mac for a mere $6.99. The latest update features iCloud support as well as some new language localizations, like Russian, Portuguese, Brazilian Portuguese, Polish, Czech and Turkish.

You can play Rochard with the keyboard and mouse, hook up a bluetooth PS3 controller, or grab a wired Xbox 360 controller to get your puzzle-solving, Metroid-Castlevania groove on.

I have a book I’m reading that I received from a book publisher. It’s an ePub file, which works well with iBooks. Since I love the interface in iBooks, I loaded the file on my iPad 3 and my iPad mini, so I would have it at home on the larger iPad and on the go on the smaller one. Sounds great, right?

I’d hoped to be able to sync my bookmarks, though, so I could bookmark the novel on one device and then pull up the bookmark on the next device I was reading it on. I couldn’t. I spent some time messing about on the internet, trying to figure out how to fix this issue. Apple has the answer, and it’s a lot simpler than I thought.

AirDrop is a pretty slick app that was first available in OS X Lion. It basically allows any Mac see any other Mac with the protocol enabled on the network, with no configuration or knowledge of file sharing needed. You just drop a file onto any available AirDrop icon, and your file heads over to that user’s Mac. No muss, no fuss, just simple.

At least, that’s the concept. In reality, I’ve not seen AirDrop ever work that easily. Luckily, there’s an alternative that’s even simpler: Any Send, a free Mac app that lets you send files to any other Mac using WiFi.

Telltale Games today announced that the season finale, Episode 5 of Walking Dead The Game, “No Time Left,” is slated to launch on all platforms next week, November 20th. This will be the first episode that comes out simultaneously on console, Mac, iOS, and PC. This is the final episode of critically acclaimed episodic game based on Robert Kirkman’s comic series, The Walking Dead.

We all have too many apps, I’m guessing. As an app aficionado, I have hundreds of apps across several pages, many of them buried within folders. iOS is organized for visual memory; I’m usually flipping through pages and looking for the app I need based on where it is on the page, how the icon looks, and what other apps it’s near.

Once past the first page or two, however, and especially in folders filled with a bunch of apps, that visual strategy starts to break down. Typically, I’ll swipe right from the Home screen and type in the name of the app, then tap on it to launch it. This works fine, but eventually takes more time than just knowing what folder the app resides in. Here’s how to find out.

Power users know that the more you can keep your hands on the keyboard, the faster you can get things done on your Mac. That’s the reason keyboard shortcuts exist, like Command-C to copy text, or Shift-Command-3 to take a screenshot. It’s perfectly acceptable to move your mouse to select the command from a menu, of course, but the keyboard shortcuts are just faster.

Spotlight, like most other OS X apps, has several shortcuts that can help you get around much more quickly.

So, you think the panorama feature on your new iPhone is pretty sweet, right? It allows you to take panoramic photos without any special post-shot software, and you can shoot left to right or right to left.

But what if you want to take a picture of a super tall Sequoia tree, for example? Or a skyscraper, for that matter? Turns out you can shoot really tall things, too, using this vertical panorama picture tip.

You might notice that your hard disk is constantly spinning on your Mac. If you check Activity Monitor, you might find out that the CPU is also being used up by the Finder, which typically doesn’t use a lot of CPU.

Turns out that the culprit could, in fact, be video files on your desktop. As you may know, OS X can play video files in their thumbnails and via Quick Look. To do this, it seems, your Mac needs to constantly be accessing the video file data, in order to have it ready to play at a moment’s notice. This eats up CPU cycles like nothing else on the desktop.

A study was presented at the 116th annual meeting of the American Academy of Ophthalmology yesterday that shows the benefit of backlit tablet computers like the iPad help patients with vision loss due to eye diseases read at a comfortable level again.

The study looked at all backlit tablets, scoring the iPad highest in terms of helping readers with low vision due to conditions like macular degeneration or diabetic retinopathy read at their previously higher and more comfortable reading level.

At a Techonomy conference today, two of the four panelists called out Apple as “most likely to succeed” at a session discussing how advertising could affect existing media companies.

While the session itself didn’t spend a lot of time on Apple, according to Techcrunch, the panel ended with an answer to moderator Dave Morgan’s question on predictiong the world’s most powerful media company in 2020. Digital agency AKQA’s Tom Bedecarre said that Apple would take the top spot, due to the several media delivery platforms that it owns or controls.

Another panelist and CEO of SocialFlow, Frank Speiser, agreed, adding that the time was ripe for a company like Facebook or Twitter to team up with Apple to help improve discovery, thus giving the partnering company a leg up in the media landscape.

It sure would be nice to change the order of the many calendars on the iPhone. Sadly, iOS 6 only lets you show or hide specific calendars with a tap on the calendar in question from within the Calendar app on the iPhone, iPad, or iPod touch.

You can, however, reorder the different calendars on your iPhone, just in a different way. Here’s how.

The iconic Mac startup sound has evolved over the years, but it is a distinctive part of being a Mac user. Sometimes, though, you just want to boot your Mac up silently. You can keep it from sounding out if you hold down the audio mute key on modern Macs (it’s that F10 key on my Macbook Air), but what if you want to disable it completely?

You can drop into the command line to do just that, it turns out. Here’s what to do.

Lucky Frame made one of my favorite games on iOS ever, Pugs Luv Beats. It’s no surprise, given the game’s focus on my favorite dogs of all time and a wicked-cool beat-making mechanic, adorable graphics, and a spin-off app, Pug Synth. They put out Bad Hotel, next, a quirky and innovative take on the castle defense genre that has the games studio’s signature graphic style and musical theme.

Now they’re taking a similar electronica vibe and marrying it with a two-button, arcade-style side-scrolling game on iOS called Wave Trip. And it looks a beaut.

A couple of days ago, Cult of Mac reported that Apple had been successfully sued by an internet security software company, resulting in a $368.2 million damages award due the patent holders. Apparently, that award sum just wasn’t enough, as VirnetX has filed another complaint, claiming that Apple willfully infringed four patents.

As if another suit isn’t enough of a craziness, these are the same exact patents that were involved in the first suit. This time, the suing company says, they complaint includes the iPhone 5, the iPad mini, and the latest iPod touch, products that were not yet released when the initial complaint was filed.

Mike Schramm writes about technology and games for Joystiq and TUAW during the week. He’s also a pretty decent guy. He also finds it fun to code on the weekends. I know, it makes no sense to me, either.

Schramm has just released his second iOS game to the iTunes app store, and it’s called Benediction. Actually, the full name is Benediction – a game by Mike Schramm, a name most likely necessitated by the many other apps out there with a version of the word ‘benediction’ in the title.

Benediction has three things going for it. Those three things got me to download the game, then play the game, then continue playing the game until I was forced to set my iPhone down and actually do some work. This is a great game, and you’ll be sad if you don’t check it out for yourself.

Did you know you could use Siri, Apple’s personal voice assistant, without unlocking your iPhone? Well, you can. Hold the Home button for the few seconds it takes for Siri’s purple microphone icon to show up, and you can ask it to do anything you like, like making a phone call, composing a Tweet, or sending an iMessage. This is a great feature for the person who owns the iPhone, but what about someone who finds your iPhone, or that one friend who can’t keep from messing with your stuff?

Luckily, you can turn this “feature” off, thereby preventing this from happening. Here’s how.