Spotlight is a love it/hate it experience. Don’t stop reading if you hate it, however, because here’s a tip that shows how useful Spotlight can be if used correctly. A simple trick lets you search for emails or documents by a particular author, which can be extremely useful when trying to track down that elusive file or message.

The U.S. government declared the act of jailbreaking legal on July 26, 2010, encouraging hundreds of thousands of iOS users into hacking their devices, safe in the knowledge that their actions would incur no legal repercussions. The ruling certainly had a huge on the jailbreaking community, but the tables could be set to turn once again.

According to the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), jailbreaking could become illegal again this year, but you can do your bit to prevent it.

Meet one-eyed Evi, a one-dollar alternative to Siri which works on older (non-4S) iPhones.

She’s had a bit of a rough introduction to life, thanks to a much-hyped launch followed by 24 hours or so of struggling to keep up with demand.

Despite being labeled the first real competitor to the iPad, it seems Amazon’s 7-inch Kindle Fire tablet still has a long way to go before it can lure tablet users away from Apple’s device. Although it seemed to be incredibly popular when it launched last year, largely thanks to that attractive $199 price tag, Apple CEO Tim Cook says the Kindle Fire, and other “limited function tablets,” had no impact on iPad sales whatsoever.

Developers have already received several pre-release builds of Apple’s OS X Lion 10.7.3 software, and we had expected last week’s release to be the last one before the update goes public. But it seems there’s still some testing to be done. Apple has seeded yet another build to developers through the Mac Dec Center, this time with the build number 11D50.

O2, once Apple’s exclusive cell phone company reseller of iPhones in the UK, has been caught exposing user phone numbers in the headers sent to websites its customers visit while using its 3G network.

Fortune editor Adam Lashinsky’s highly anticpated Inside Apple book is now available for download in the iBookstore. The books is set to hit the shelves tomorrow, but iBooks users can get their hands on the juicy read right now.

Here’s another perspective on today’s numbers that should knock your socks off: Apple’s iPhone sales surpass the world’s birth rate. Not only has Apple become the top smartphone manufacturer in the world, but there are now more iPhones sold than babies born each day.

Following today’s incredible earnings report for the first fiscal quarter of 2012, Apple CEO Tim Cook sent out a company-wide email asking employees to meet in Cupertino’s Town Hall tomorrow at 10 AM. The email notes that the company will be talking about “exciting new things.”

This internal meeting follows the release of iBooks 2, iBooks Author and the iTunes U app at Apple’s education event in New York City last week.

Apple held its Q1 2012 fiscal earnings call this afternoon, and the company reported record-breaking numbers across the board. Revenue reached $46.33 billion with a net profit of $13.06 billion, more than doubling Apple’s profit since this time last year.

We’ve got a roundup of interesting numbers from this afternoon’s call for you to check out.

Today during Apple’s Q1 2012 earnings report, CFO Peter Oppenheimer revealed that Apple has a staggering $97 billion in cash, with over $60 billion currently held offshore. Oppenheimer said multiple times during the call that Apple was not letting its near-$100 billion in cash “burn a hole” in its pockets.

Tim Cook and Oppenheimer were very tight-lipped about what Apple plans to do with its gigantic cash reserve moving forward, noting that the company was “thrilled” to acquire the “fantastic tech talent” at flash memory firm Anobit.

Coincidentally, AAPL stock blew past its previous all-time high during after-hours trading today at over $450 per share. Apple has trumped Exxon Mobile again with a overall valuation of over $420 billion to become the most valuable company on the planet. Based on this past quarter’s iPhone sales, Apple is also the top smartphone manufacturer in the world.

You may or may not be familiar with George Hotz, a.k.a “Geohot.” Whether you know his name or not, Hotz’s influence as a hacker is monumental. He unlocked the iPhone for the first time back in 2008, and was responsible for several of the early iOS jailbreaks. His exploits have haunted Apple for years, and he was recently sued by Sony for jailbreaking the PlayStation 3.

Hotz was hired by Facebook last summer to presumably work on the social juggernaut’s security team, but he apparently no longer works for Zuckerberg. Now Hotz been spotted back in his natural environment: a hackathon.

A tiny note from today’s Apple earnings: 37 million iPhones were sold in Q1 of 2012, meaning that Apple is the top smartphone manufacturer in the world. The number one spot has previously been held by Samsung. There seemed to be no way that Apple could take the crown so soon.

Samsung said that it shipped (not sold) 35 million smartphones in the last quarter (analyst estimates were a more conservative 32 million), and Apple just sold 37 million iPhones. Way to go, Apple.

New from Tap Tap Tap is Serenity, a relaxation app for iPhone or iPad.

Relaxation app? What’s one of those? It’s an app for relaxing by; in this case, a digital jukebox of all things peaceful, calm, tranquil, and imperturbable. It plays sounds and moving images to lull you to sleep, or at least to a less troubled state. It’s an anti-alarm clock. Without the clock.

Apple has announced its earnings for the first fiscal quarter of 2012. The Cupertino company is pleased to report record-breaking earnings this time around, with $46.33 billion in revenue and a net profit of $13.06 billion. Last quarter Apple reported $28.27 billion in revenue and a net profit of $6.62 billion.

37 million iPhones and 15 million iPads were sold in the first fiscal quarter of 2012, making this quarter Apple’s most successful one ever. Apple also saw Mac sales climb to 5.2 million. The only decline in sales was the iPod, which declined 21% year-over-year to 15.4 million units sold.

It is common for the President of the United States to honor American heroes by inviting them to the annual State of the Union address. No surprise, then, that President Obama is tipping his hat to the legacy of Apple founder Steve Jobs at tonight’s State of the Union address by inviting Jobs’s widow Laurene Powell Jobs to share First Lady Michelle Obama’s box at the event.

The event is believed to be Powell’s first public appearance since her husband’s death.

Remember that amazing interactive iPhone we posted about a while back that was made up of nothing but CSS 3 + Javascript, with absolutely no image files used for rendering at all?

Yeah, that was pretty impressive. But you know what’s even more killer? How about Roman web designer Alessio Atzeni’s spiritual followup, which emulates Mac OS X Lion’s boot, login and desktop screens using only CSS3 properties, and no image files at all.

Amazing. Check out the full demo here. Steve Jobs was right: who the heck needs Flash?

[via iClarified]

What’s more valuable: the White House or the Apple Store? The most iconic and easily identifiable residence in the country might seem like the safer bet, but guess again: it’s actually worth just about as much as any one single Apple store.

The mobile Safari browser that comes baked into Apple’s iOS devices is quite possibly the best mobile browser there is. But what if you want don’t want to load mobile web pages? What if you want to enjoy websites in their entirety?

Unfortunately mobile Safari doesn’t let you do this, but a free third-party browser called Dolphin does. Here’s how to ditch the mobile web and load full, desktop websites on your iPhone.

Ever since the iOS 5 and the iPhone 4S first debuted, a small but extremely loud and angry minority of handset owners have reported extraordinary battery drainage, and despite the iOS 5.0.1 update, the problem is still unresolved.

It’s well known that the iOS 5battery issues are a software problem, but since Apple hasn’t been able to fix the problem in three months, maybe it’s time to give the jailbreak community a shot at things. In fact, that’s what a new Cydia tweak called iOS 5 Battery Fix claims to do… and initial buzz suggests that it may just have delivered on its promise.

What sort of numbers should Apple report later today for the first quarter of 2012? The third quarter surprised all analysts as Apple announced a rare under-performing quarter due to the late introduction of the iPhone 4S. Stung by that rebuke, professional analysts are offering conservative projections for the first quarter of 2012. This sets up a classic pros versus independents cliffhanger.

The Chronic Dev Yeam’s Absinthe jailbreak tool for iPad 2 and iPhone 4S owners has been updated to version 0.3. This latest update brings Linux support and minor cosmetic changes. A small bug fix for Windows users has also been included.

As part of its annual promotion to get more Americans to cram nacho cheese-flavored asbestos triangles down their gob during halftime, Doritos throws a Crash The Super Bowl contest where they invite fans to make their own commercials. Win the contest and your winning ad gets aired during the Super Bowl.

I don’t usually pay attention to stuff like this, but this entry for the contest is just wonderful. It portrays Siri (or a Siri-like) as a magical genie in a smartphone capable of automatically beaming bags full of Doritos, a festive sombrero or even three hot, bikini-clad girls into a bro’s apartment at just a long press of the home button, no questions asked.

The only problem? In Dorito’s land, Siri’s speech-to-text transcription abilities have a couple of small auditory processing kinks to work out. The result? A guy’s request for hot wild girls leads to him being torn apart by… well, you’ve got to see it for yourself. Brilliant.

[via iDownload Blog]

Apple is one of the best-known brands, so no wonder it paid Google just $18 million in 2011 for search traffic. By comparison, HP and Dell, which are breathing heavy to keep ahead of the Cupertino, Calif. tech giant ranked No. 1 and No. 2 for spending big bucks flogging their products online.

The ability to print documents from an iOS device is a feature that many of us find incredibly useful, but Apple’s implementation has its flaws — such as the need for an AirPrint compatible printer. But thank to xPrintServer from Lantronix, you can wirelessly print to almost any networked printer from any iOS device.