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Apple has big plans to storm the beachead of Microsoft’s hold on the Enterprise market and sure enough, the Mac moved past Acer into 3rd place among PC makers in the US market during the 2nd quarter of this year. But Apple’s share of …

Apple will be webcasting their 3rd Quarter 2008 Financial Results on July 21, 2008. The 3rd fiscal quarter encompasses sales between April 1, 2008 and June 30, 2008. As such, results from the iPhone 3G and App Store sales will not be included in th…

A really cool music video with really clever graphics done on a MAC. The music isn’t bad either, its “Again & Again” by the Bird & the Bee.

Calendar syncing via MobileMe to an iPhone works great, except it doesn’t include subscribed calendars yet. (An Apple knowledge base article makes it sound like they are working on it.) Here’s a workaround that’s good for static calendars, like US Holidays or Jewish Holidays:

1. Select the subscribed calendar in iCal.
2. Choose File » Export… and save it someplace.
3. Choose File » Import… and select the file you just saved.
4. Uncheck the subscribed calendar so you don’t see duplicates on the local Mac.

Now your holidays or birthdays will be shown on the iPhone.

You may occasionally notice Time Machine is backing up an unexpectedly large amount of data, or maybe you’re just curious as to what actually changed between backups. Perhaps you’d like to tailor your exclusion list to keep the backup size down. Unfortunately, the Time Machine interface provide no means to find out what it is actually being backed up. Luckily, we can use the fact that Time Machine creates hard links of unchanged files to explore what it did back up, after the fact.

timedog is a Perl script (4KB download) which does just that. Use it like so:

$ cd /Volumes/TM/Backups.backupdb/myhost
$ timedog -d 5 -l

By default, timedog will examine the most recent backup, compare it to the one prior, and report all changed files. The -d flag controls the direc…

I don’t have the latest firmware (quietly released only when a restore is performed), but a lot of people have been complaining about abysmal battery life for the 3G iPhone (four to six hours). After a lot of trial and error, disabling push mail and only checking mail hourly has greatly improved battery life.

With wifi, Bluetooth, 3G, and GPS enabled, battery life is is more consistent with the first generation iPhone. A quick check of the Apple support discussion board reveals that others are coming to similar conclusions.

[robg adds: Disabling push email on first generation iPhones running iPhone software 2.0 should have similar benefits.]

If you have an external antenna on your AirPort Base Station, you may be able to extend the range somewhat, depending on how you originally connected the antenna. Here’s how to make sure you’re getting the maximum range possible:

1. Power down the Base Station.
2. Unlug your external antenna.
3. Power up the Base Station.
4. Plug in the external antenna.

The improved signal can easily be measured in AP Grapher or MacStumbler. It’s not a huge difference, but it made a marginal connection reliable again. Be aware that if you ever reboot the Base Station, you’ll need to be sure that the external antenna is unplugged while it reboots, otherwise the signal will drop back down to the “normal” level. This works on my white AirPort Extreme Base Station.

We take great care to ensure that our systems run with reasonable temperatures as that helps extend their lifetimes. We’ve used various applications to control the fan speeds on different systems but, with the upgrade to 10.5, our Intel-based iMac was left without a fan-control solution that worked adequately. To that end, I decided to modify the open source (GPL) FanControl to work with our iMac. The result is that I’ve generated two new versions of Fan Control, one for the Intel-based iMacs and one for the MacBook/MacBook Pro.

These versions also have some extended control capabilities over the original FanControl. The iMac version uses separate sensors to drive the contro…

According to foreign media reports, data collected by Net Applications showed that in June this year, the operating system users of Apple grew by 32 percent comparing to the same period last year.