I love writing about giveaways and freebies because there’s no risk, you have nothing to lose, and you just might as well grab it if you’re even remotely interested in thing.
Like today.
It’s a free 130 page ebook on turning Photoshop files into websites/pages. Maybe it’s not up your alley, but I think it’s one of those things that could just be handy to have around. You might learn a tip or trick or be able to work with a designer/developer a little better on your next website project. Regardless it’s just this simple…
According to Dice, mobile app development is the second most sought after IT skill set. Photo: Apple
Dice’s monthly report of the IT job market continues to show that developers remain the most in-demand jobs. Fully half of the top ten jobs listed are for various kinds of developers with mobile app development ranking as the second most in-demand skill.
That’s not too surprising all things considered. As we noted this morning, a recent Symantec study notes that 59% of companies are actively working to create mobile versions of their internal line of business. That doesn’t even take into account customer-facing apps, which are more and more seen as a requirement.
Other in-demand development skills include Java, Microsoft .NET, web, and the rather generic software developer. Java stole the number one slot. With one exception, development skills make up the top five skill sets. The one non-developer position was related to data and network security.
Love it or hate it, Microsoft Word is one of the most ubiquitous apps around. If you write anything on a computer—Mac or PC—you’re going to have to have some interaction with MS Word.
Over the years, MS Word has become a lot more than “just a word processor” today it’s more like an electronic publishing tool. The thing is though, most people don’t know how to tap into all the power and tools in MS Word 2011.
Steve Wozniak recently spoke at the Entel Summit in Chile, and as usual, expressed his thoughts on emerging technology. Wozniak offered his opinion on Google Glass, Microsoft’s Surface tablet, and even the Kim Dotcom case surrounding Megaupload.
Until Instagram made the jump to Android, the photography social network was an iPhone-only affair. With plenty of web apps and even native apps like Carousel on the Mac, you can also use Instagram from your desktop computer. Thanks to a beautiful app called Instagrille, even Windows users can check their Instagram feed in style.
The free Instagrille program allows you to check your feed, make comments, like photos, see your notifications, and even download photos to your hard drive. Not bad.
Penn State MacAdmins Conference 2012 videos are a goldmine for Mac IT Pros.
If you’re an IT professional charged with rolling out Macs and iOS devices to employees in your company or students in your school, the Penn State MacAdmins Group has a wealth of new resources for you.
The group puts on an excellent annual conference for Mac and iOS administrators and IT professionals each year. The sessions cover just about everything you might need to know when it comes to developing a solid strategy for deploying and managing Macs and iOS devices in schools or business. Sessions are led by IT professionals with a solid background in Mac and iOS technologies. Real world experiences with the tools and processes involved are discussed along with tips, tricks, and advice.
If you weren’t able to attend the conference, however, you can view the sessions online.
Notification Center on the iPad isn’t that great. It functions just like the iPhone, meaning you pull down a window from the status bar to see your notifications. While that interface works nicely on the iPhone, the window isn’t scaled appropriately to the iPad’s larger display.
In OS X Mountain Lion, Notification Center makes more sense on a larger screen. Instead of coming down from the top of your Mac’s display, your notifications are displayed on the side of the screen. Want that type of Notification Center interface on your iPad? A jailbreak tweak called MountainCenter will make it happen.
Tired of typing in your email address to login to websites on your iPhone? I know I am. Heck, even typing on the iPad can get to be a pain, with every site LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, and the like asking for log in credentials – most of them wanting my email address or login name. Or, heck, password. You can use theiPhone autofill email address feature to make this process seamless.
Just like changing the default “OMW” text message auto-correct, here’s another idea on making the most of your iPhone time, rather than spending it typing in your email address, password, or street address.
Your favorite third-party Twitter app's days may be numbered.
Last March, Twitter told the developer community to stop making third-party apps and clients that “mimic or reproduce the mainstream Twitter consumer client experience.” Twitter said, “We need to move to a less fragmented world, where every user can experience Twitter in a consistent way.”
Fast forward more than a year later, and Twitter is slowly moving away from an open platform for developers to build upon. Twitter plans to implement stricter API guidelines for developers, and while there’s no concrete evidence that Twitter will shut down third-party apps altogether, the current landscape of great apps like Tweetbot and Twitterrific could look very different in coming months.
Try taking this chunky Bluetooth keyboard on the road with you.
Oh man, I can totally see myself taking this mechanical Bluetooth keyboard to the local bar and clackety clacking out a few posts every morning. It’s called the KBtalKing Pro and it is a rather clever little beast, a pro keyboard which is designed to work with – and switch seamlessly between – up to ten of your devices.
If RIM does go belly up, can Apple be ready to meet the security needs of RIM's customers?
It’s getting almost painful to read reports about RIM. The ongoing hype about how great BlackBerry 10 will be mixed with the reports of layoffs, inventory sitting around warehouses, the company’s share price plummeting – it all reminds me of the time one of my high school friends broke her ankle in gym class and hobbled around for nearly half a day trying to convince herself that she’d only sprained it.
Among all that news, however, is a question – can organizations that need incredible security manage in a world without RIM and the manageability made possible by its BlackBerry Enterprise Server (BES)? Is iOS up to that challenge? Is Apple up to or interested in making a major play for the enterprise market?
Is this graphic from the 80’s not the most amazing Apple II display ad you’ve ever seen? It’s got freaking rainbows and unicorns and even dolphins jumping out of the sea to play hopscotch with you. Shoot, it’s even got a cute little dancing penguin too! The only thing that would make it better is if Steve Jobs was riding a great white shark in the background with a laser attached to its head.
What do you think could be added to the graphic to make it even better? Let us hear your ideas in the comments.
The Sword & Sworcery remix album is way better than the lame game ever was.
Did you love the iOS game Sword & Sworcery? Nope, me neither – too much grind, and not enough find. But I totally dug the awesome soundtrack by Jim Guthrie. I bought it in lossless format and listened the crap out of it.
And now I’m into it for another $5, thanks to a remix album which has been released to celebrate the Japanese launch of the game. And if you’re into retro, rock or just good music, you’re in for a treat.
Steve Bloom's zebra photo was shot on film with a Canon EOS 1N
One of Apple’s hallmarks is that it says “no” to way more products than it says “yes” to. And this kind of perfection is what also lead photographer Steve Bloom to capture the amazing photo of stampeding zebras which features in the promo shots for the new Retina MacBook Pro.
Not only was he shooting on film while on location in Botswana, he almost missed the shot entirely rather than capture something less than perfect.
Vancouver hotel ditches traditional phones for iPhones - a process that may be easier than you'd think.
The Opus hotel in Vancouver made a somewhat shocking announcement last week. The hotel was ripping the landline phones out of its rooms and replacing them with iPhones. While that seems extravagant, it’s actually a rather brilliant plan.
The hotel, which already offers guests an iPad that can act as a concierge service, points out that offering guests, particularly international guests, an iPhone adds a lot of value. In addition to the value for customers, Apple’s free iOS management tools could make implementing such a program simple and relatively inexpensive – beyond the cost of the iPhones themselves anyway.
Why would Apple's new Maps app include references to Intel based graphics chipsets in its code?
Apple purchasing several mapping companies over the last fews years, Apple is finally replacing Google Maps with its own solution in iOS 6. But it seems the Cupertino company may be planning to expand it beyond iOS. One developer has discovered some code within the iOS 6 beta that indicates Maps will also be coming to OS X later on.
Using Tones might actually be more fun than hearing the result.
Tones looks to be just about the coolest way to create custom ringtones for your iPhone that I have seen. Then again, I haven’t seen many as I’m not a thoughtless teenager who thinks that other people want to hear his crappy music every time a call comes in.
Better still, Tones puts iPhone ringtone editing just where it should be: on the iPhone itself.
One analyst believes the iPad mini will launch for $299 this fall.
Although a new iPhone didn’t show its face during Apple’s WWDC keynote back in June, the Cupertino company did release a number of new products, including refreshed MacBook Airs, MacBook Pros, and Mac Pros; a new “next generation” MacBook Pro, and more. But according to one analyst, the Cupertino company’s fall event will be even bigger, with a new iPhone, a new iPad, and a new Apple TV all on their way.
Symantec "lost smartphone" simulation shows most people would try to access corporate data and apps on a lost device.
The bring your own device (BYOD) movement and the broader trend of increased mobile solutions are driving a very ambivalent dialog in most business, schools, and government agencies. On one hand, iPhones, iPads, and other mobile technologies are increasing user productivity and satisfaction (often while improving customer engagement). On the other hand, many devices contain sensitive data and are far from being truly secure.
A handful of studies released over the past few days highlight the often-schizophrenic nature of the discussions taking place in many workplaces – including on experiment that showed 83% of individuals finding a lost corporate smartphone would attempt to access corporate data on it.
Getting your app noticed by Apple may be easier than you think if you follow these tips.
As Apple’s App Store continues to grow at an incredible rate, it’s becoming increasingly hard for iOS developers to get their apps noticed. There are currently more than 700,000 titles already available, which is an awful lot to compete with if you’re a newcomer without any previous App Store presence.
But there are some things you can do to get your apps recognized by Apple, according to one of the company’s former engineers, Matt Drance. These five tips will help Apple’s review staff notice your apps, which gives you a better chance of getting it picked for one of the App Store’s featured sections.
“Dear Valued Customer” began the pitch e-mail for the iPhone 4/S microscope lens, and it looks as if just as much effort has gone into the product itself.
The lens will turn your iPhone into an examiner of the minuscule, promising 50x magnification for use in science, medical analysis, textile inspection “and more.”
How? Does it hook up the phone via dock-connector to an optically awesome array of magnifying magnificence? Does it put the iPhone itself at the center of a lavish layout of lenses? Not really. The “microscope” kit is instead something we’ve all seen before: a cheap plastic case to which you attach an add-on lens.
Let me tell you a story. Many years ago, I was a cocktail bartender in a busy London bar. I had just gotten a brand new dumb-phone (a Siemens if I remember correctly), a little silver candy-bar of crap, but it was my candy-bar of crap, and I’d owned it only a few hours.
On shift, I switched the phone to silent and put it in a rocks glass on the backbar, behind my station. The bottom shelf of the backbar had a small lip at the front. Partway through the busy shift I needed some Kahlua (for a Vodka Espresso, not a White Russian). I grabbed the bottle and the base caught the shelf-edge and sheared clean off. The Kahlua – of course – was dumped into the glass with my brand new phone.
I was lucky: this was before the days of moisture sensors and a quick wash later and I got a new handset from the store. Today, you might not fare so well.
Which is why I have mixed (no pun intended) opinions of the Cube.
Terminal is one handy app, I’ve got to say. There are a ton of amazing things you can do with it, as it’s essentially the back end control room of your Mac. All the Unixy underpinnings of your operating system can be accessed in here, and while it’s possible to completely hose your system with the wrong command (rm * comes to mind, for one), there are a lot of helpful things you can do with it as well.
RAM is the type of memory your Mac uses to run active applications in, as opposed to the kind of memory on your hard disc or SSD drive. The more memory you have, the faster memory-dependent apps (like Photoshop or Final Cut Pro, for example) will seem to run, and the more everyday apps you can run at once. While old-school Mac users will remember needing to close all the applications to free up memory, that’s really not as necessary as it used to be with the advanced memory handling routines in Mac OS X. However, on occasion, you might want to try the purge command in the Terminal.
Purge frees up the RAM on your Mac, telling each running app to release all the RAM it was given at launch that it is not currently using. It’s like a mini reboot without the stress.
Launch Terminal from the Utilities folder in the Applications folder. Once launched, type
purge
then hit Return on your keyboard and your Mac will force all your running apps to release the RAM they don’t need. This means you have more free RAM to run more apps, or to let heavy RAM using apps grab a bit more, running just a bit faster. You Mac may take a second or three to complete the purge task, but don’t worry – this is safe, and won’t bork your machine.
You won't be able to purchase Mountain Lion if your Mac can't handle it.
When Apple releases OS X Mountain Lion to the public later this month, the software will be available exclusively to the Mac App Store, just like its predecessor. However, this time around, the Mac App Store will confirm your system is capable of running the software before it allows you to purchase and download it.
Apple has been handed yet another blow in a U.K. courtroom after the High Court of England & Wales sided with Samsung today and decided that the Korean company’s Galaxy Tab series does not infringe Apple’s designs. The judge said Samsung’s products are recognizably different to Apple’s, and are therefore free to remain on sale in the U.K.
