Category: Apple Computing
Apple Products from the current generation of items.
These tips can be used with the OS X terminal, iTerm, and most Linux shells. I have also verified the history works with the Windows “DOS Prompt”. It’s nice when things work out in a consistent cross-platform way. 😉 The history feature is useful when a programmer wishes to perform similar commands over again. In the past the process used to be more complex. Now it’s as simple as using the up arrow key. The down arrow key works to…
There is a story running in a Forbes Blog (http://blogs.forbes.com/elizabethwoyke/2011/03/04/is-best-buy-planning-to-give-ipads-to-all-its-sales-associates/) by Elizabeth Woyke that Best Buy is planning on giving all of it’s 180,000 retail employees an iPad to help them become better sales people. If proved true, it could be a huge gamble for the retailer which is struggling as of late, but it could also have a huge payoff since Best Buy is an Apple sales partner. Best Buy may be counting on their employees becoming better educated…
Conan O’Brien has been known for his ability to have the latest and greatest in Apple gadgets and to poke fun at them at the same time. While his iPhone skit was quite funny a while back, his new iPad2 commercial is absolutely brilliant in the manner it parodies the launch. Stating “Apple is getting a bit cocky” in his monologue, he then turns to the following commercial to take the joke home.
Many eons ago, or maybe it just seems like that, a man named Lord British (A.K.A. Richard Garriott) released a software package to the world which forever changed the manner in which computers and games were thought of. That game from so long ago (actually 1978) was Akalabeth, the predecessor to the now famous Ultima series of adventure role playing games. Now, when it seemed safe to emerge from the darkness safe from the threat of attack by an Orc,…
Oliver Goguel, author of the ActiveGS App announced that he was pulling the latest version of his app from the App Store. Version 1.21 had been submitted and was ready to be released when a bug was discovered in the app which would cause the iPad to freeze. The bug was discovered after a beta tester used the zoom lock feature and the entire machine froze. ActiveGS has been used for many years now on the Virtual Apple ][ website…
In obvious preparation for next weeks release of the iPad2, Apple has released the iOS 4.3 Gold Master to its developers. With the new technologies implemented into the new iPad2, Apple is hedging its bets that one week will be enough for most developers to catch up on the Apps and get the new Apps into the App Store prior to the release of the iPad. There are sure to be a ton of new apps utilizing the cameras and…
Apple introduced its new iPad 2 today at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts in San Francisco, California by none other than the master presenter himself, Steve Jobs. He mentioned that he could not let this historic announcement go by without showing up at the show, which is interesting because this presentation was a lot less historic than the iPhone coming to Verizon…. in my opinion anyway. Back to the iPad as it were, never owning an iPad myself…
The Mac has a unique way of setting up its $PATH variable. These are the locations the BSD portion of OS X looks at to find programs to run. In this case the list of paths can be found in the file /etc/paths. To edit it the administrator needs to sudo their favourite editor since the file itself is owned by root. For example “sudo pico /etc/paths”. This is useful for the programmer who wants to have their programs accessible…
Programmers are always looking for tools to make things easier. The Terminal program included with OS X is adequate. This alternative makes things a little less spartan. According to the documentation this is an active project where the author implements features from other shells. One thing I find useful is the use of the scrollwheel as the middle mouse button for copy and pasting selected text. It also uses PC (Linux) keybindings such as <Home> (beginning of the line) and…
Once again, the rumor mills have been running up all types of conjecture of what folks think the iPad2 will be. I can tell you what it will not be. It will not contain anything from the MacBook Pro other than 1 or two new technologies. Most of it will be rehashes and improvements of current technology. First off, memory has been a major issue on the machines from the get go. I have friends who have the 16gb model…
This week, we were thinking about the new iPad2 and the discussions of a holder for the machine came up. So we started searching and came up with a number of case hacks or cases themselves that we thought were absolutely brilliant. The funny thing is that in another few days, many of those hacks will have to change in order to accommodate the long awaited camera that is expected to be in the iPad2. But in the mean time,…
Apple and the BSD folks have included two of the four editors as part of the base install packages. The first goes by two names and is accessed via the terminal (Applications –> Utilities –> Terminal). They are either pico or nano (note the lowercase). These are almost as basic as one can get and still refer to them as full screen editors. The other editor included by Apple is Textedit. This is entirely accessed by the GUI. It has…
The A.P.P.L.E. iPhone app of the month is the program Mailroom. (http://www.usemailroom.com/) For those of you who have used the Mailplane app, this program will look quite familiar. This program allows the user of the app to control a number of GMail accounts at the same time. While the developers are different, there has been a cooperation between the authors of the two programs in order to make the iPhone based Mailroom just as good as the Mac based Mailplane…
The reason why people would want to set up one computer to store files for another computer are varied. For example I backed up my Linux box (PC) to a Mac before the power supply died. In my case the choice of a Mac comes down to two reasons. Ease of set up and stability. A common access method is to use ftp (file transfer protocol – note the lowercase letters). In OS X go to the System Preferences and…
A story on AppleInsider reports that tests using Benchmark 6.5 show the new line of MacBook Pro machines released this week by Apple, Inc. to be 13-53% faster. To read the whole story, go to http://www.appleinsider.com/articles/11/02/26/benchmarks_of_apples_new_macbook_pros_find_speeds_13_53_faster.html The new MacBook Pro information can be found on Apple’s website at http://www.apple.com/macbookpro/
For those who downloaded the now famous ActiveGS “Best of the FTA” iPhone Application this week, there is a piece of good news that all will appreciate. Oliver Goguel, the author of ActiveGS has already submitted version 1.21 to the App Store for approval. According to the post on the FTA Group on Facebook, “version 1.21 (build 3.3.298) being submitted to the Appstore : CRT display (as in the desktop version), 60FPS support on iPhone4 & iPad, and runtime option…
Apple, Inc. wasted no time in back to back announcements this week. With their MacBook Pro new models barely onto the show rooms, Apple announced their March 2nd event for the unveiling of the iPad2. Many people have speculated on the specs of the iPad2 for some time now and this is the first sign that we have that the iPad is not delayed as many sites were saying but that it will be available soon. The event for…
After 1.5 years of development and numerous rejections by Apple, the Free Tools Association (FTA) has finally broken through and had the Best of the FTA ActiveGS emulator approved by Apple. The emulator is an Apple IIgs emulator with apps produced by the FTA during the 1980’s and 1990’s. Further development of the app is ongoing and the new enhancements should be available soon in the App store. The Best of the FTA App is available for free download at:…
Title: Oregon Trail Publisher: Gameloft Cost: $1.99 Platform: iPhone Back when I was in junior high school, we had a very rudimentary version of the game Oregon Trail on our DEC PDP 11/40. Playing the game was as simple as making the right choices and typing BANG for the hunting scenes in the game. While very entertaining at the time, it was rather simplistic compared to the 1984 version of the MECC game Oregon Trail. The 1984 Version was a…
by Sean Henriques KillDashboard : a utility to disable the Dashboard on your Mac After seeing my lovely 4GB Macbook Pro come to a halt, I checked the Activity Monitor and was horrified to see that the Dashboard was taking up more than 1GB of Real Memory! I don’t know about you but I rarely pop into the Dashboard so I wrote up a utility to Kill the Dashboard quickly and posted on buzz. A request to share it soon…
