Apple news blog

A pair of quarterly research reports released today reveal that Apple is continuing to experience growing U.S. market share among PC shipments.

Gartner’s report pegs Apple’s share of U.S. PC shipments for the second quarter of 2008 at …

Intel announced that it would be releasing its first quad-core processor for laptops next month.

“We’re bringing quad-core to mobile in August,” said Sujan Kamran, regional marketing manager for client platforms at Intel in Singapore….

Today, Apple sent out an email to MobileMe customers apologizing for the rocky transition from .Mac to MobileMe.

We have recently completed the transition from .Mac to MobileMe. Unfortunately, it was a lot rockier than we had hoped.<b…

Mac to MobileMe transition was a lot rockier than we had hoped but everything is now up and running,” Apple spokesman, Bill Evans, told Macworld. “We want to apologize to our loyal customers and express our appreciation for their …

Often programs like PearLyrics or SingThatiTune just don’t find the song I am looking for, and I have to find the lyrics manually. I found it tedious to find the lyrics in Safari, switch back to iTunes, highlight the song I want to add the lyrics to, open the song’s info panel, paste in the lyrics, and finally, close the window. So I wrote this simple AppleScript instead:

tell application "System Events"
    set sel to (the clipboard as text)
end tell

tell application "iTunes"
    set lyrics of current track to sel
end tell

I then bound this AppleScript to a keyboard shortcut using iKeys (any macro-capable program should work just as well). It will copy any text currently in the clipboard to the currently playing song’s lyrics.

I was helping a friend set up a MacBook. When we entered his username xxxx.yyyy@mac.com and password into iChat, the credentials were rejected by the server (”Incorrect password”). Though I was sure the password was correct, I reset it via the web, but to no avail.

Finally, having run out of other things to try, I entered the account as an AIM account, with “@mac.com” appended to the username. It worked straight away.

One of the new features in the iPhone 2.0 software is the ability to search your contacts (as well as an actual Contacts icon, instead of being forced to reach them from the phone section of the iPhone). The search field, however, is located at the top of the contact list, and is (strangely) not fixed in place. So if you scroll down, it scrolls off the top of the screen.

To get it back, you can scroll up, of course, but that’s time consuming. Instead, just tap the status bar (carrier, wireless strength, etc.), as you can do in Safari to jump to the top of a web page. This will take you to the top of your Contacts, bringing the search field back into view.

I can’t remember where I heard this one, though I think it was from a fellow Macworld writer during an iPhone 2.0 software conference call. Best as I can tell, though, it’s not documented in the latest version of the iPhone user’s manual (which is some 22 page…

If you have Windows-using friends who have sent you CDs burned in MagicISO’s proprietary UIF format, there’s now a way to handle them directly on the Mac. UIF2ISO (free and open source) will convert UIF images to Mac-usable ISO images. Just drag-and-drop the UIF image onto the UIF2ISO application icon, and it’s converted into a usable ISO image.

[robg adds: I haven’t tested this app. According to the program’s home page, source is available via git. The program is based the open source command line tool uif2iso by Luigi Auriemma, available on his tools page.]

You can add a soundtrack to a podcast, or play any two iTunes tracks simultaneously, by using Apple’s iPhone Remote app while in Front Row on your Mac.

Enterprise customers remain largely unimpressed with Apple’s efforts to promote the iPhone as a tool for business. While hordes of consumers worldwide are willing to stand in line for hours to buy one of the touch screen gadgets, …