Apple news blog

Apple has seeded a second version of Mac OS X 10.5.4 to developers today. While the latest build (9e12) fixes a dozen more issues in Mac OS X Leopard, the biggest new feature to be supported will be Apple’s recently announced MobileMe service. Mobi…

Fortune reports on Apple and Intel’s strengthening relationship over the past few years. Apple switched from PowerPC to the Intel processors three years ago in a somewhat surprise move. Since then, Apple has successfully transitioned to the use of…

As part of the festivities, Apple handed out its Design Awards yesterday to what it considers best of breed applications and programs for the Mac and the iPhone. Most of the applications were beautiful, but some were of questionable …

Boinx Software is proud that its presentation tool for professional photographers, FotoMagico, was honored with the Apple Design Award (ADA) 2008 - “Best Mac OS X Leopard Graphics and Media Application Runner-up”. …

Prior to the iPhone software version 1.1.4, you could listen to the iPod audio over a Bluetooth headset if you did the trick of switching to the voicemail screen and selecting the headset for audio. This still works, but you can’t leave this screen and you can’t sleep the phone, or the headset audio is disabled.

What I found was that you can get the old functionality back by doing the following:

1. Start the iPod audio.
2. Go to the voicemail screen and enable the headset audio.
3. Double tap the home button to bring up the iPod controller.
4. Press “iPod”, which will take you to the iPod app.
5. Double tap the home button again, which will take you to the speed dial screen.

The headset audio will now be on, and you can also go to other apps or sleep the phone and it will continue. If you go back to the voicemail screen and move away from it normally, the headset audio will stop. In fact, you have to do this step to turn it off (I think a…

I recently got a Dell 20″ LCD to act as an external monitor for my MacBook through its Mini DVI-to-DVI connector. When working at night with only a small lamp for illumination, it was impossible to set the brightness low enough so that I wouldn’t have to squint at the screen.

Inverting colors using Control-Option-Command-8 made it just slightly more comfortable, but I didn’t fancy the weird colors. Calibrating the screen to a lower gamma didn’t do much either. In the end, I found these two freeware utilities:

• Nocturne
• Brightness Control

Both act by applying a color filter to make the screen look darker. I like Nocturne because it activates/deactivates darkening with a single click. I assigned a trigger to Nocturne in Quicksilver, and now I can get a dimmed screen with just a keypress … and no more bloodshot eyes!

Here’s a solution to a big problem with the Apple headset for the iPhone: the sound level in my headset had become so low, I could hardly could hear a conversation in the car. After some experimentation, I found the solution: high pressure air to clean the earpiece — evidently the plug was clotted. The same can of pressurized air I use to clean my camera was the solution for my iPhone headset as well. It is now loud and clear again.

BlackFoxfour says: Hmm, the IPhone looks nice and all, but I’m still not ready to trade my BlackBerry.

“Out of the 9 Apple Stores surveyed, there was a grand total of 393 machines. Of those only 18 were Mac Pros. That works out to a measly 4.5% of Apple Store floor space being devoted to Apple’s Pro machines. What was perhaps even more …

June 12, 2008 — San Francisco, CA — Apple Inc. last night announced the 2008 Apple Design Awards Winners. The awards were divided into two groups — Mac OS X and iPhone Software (using both the web and the iPhone SDK). read more.