Apple news blog

Apple’s system status message acknowledges the MobileMe Mail issue but claims only 1% of its subscribers are affected. If that’s the case, the problems would appear to have struck a particularly vocal 1%.

9to5mac claims to have heard from reliable sources that this years iPod nano revision will be individually multicolored. While the iPod nano currently comes in a number of solid colors, 9to5mac expects the new ones to contain multiple colors within …

Windows Vista’s architecture is actively hindering SanDisk’s ability to roll out its next generation of solid-state drives, says company chief Eli Harari. In statements made just after his company produced disappointing quarterly …

Apple has issued updates to their iLife suite of applications, including iPhoto and iMovie today. The updates are presently available through your Mac OS X Software Update:

iPhoto Update 7.1.4 (74 MB)
This update contains new …

Investment bank Piper Jaffray issued a note today based on Apple’s future outlook in 2008 and 2009. During their financial conference call, Apple told investors that they expect the company’s gross margins will by down to 31.5% (from 34.8%) in Q4 20…

Apple nailed it’s 3Q08 performance numbers yesterday, reporting higher then ever sales for its core Mac computer line and robust, higher-than-expected sales of iPod media players. With a 38% year-over-year gain in revenue under his belt …

Architosh points us to a Guardian.co.uk article from last week which details the upcoming trend of using GPUs (graphics processors) for day to day computing. As they point out, if you have a computer with either an ATI or nVidia graphics card, chan…

My company uses Exchange, and hearing Apple chime on about Exchange support started to get under my skin after my first few unsuccessful attempts at getting it to work.

What I didn’t realize is that Apple has SSL enabled by default. And since my company does not use SSL for Exchange, the verification process will always fail despite the Domain, Mail Server, and other settings from the configure new account screen being correct. The solution is to just save the broken settings, and then manually edit the account and disable SSL.

I hope that, in a future revision, Apple fixes the auto-detect settings that Entourage supports, or at least gives access to all settings from the Configure Account screen.

To make this hint work, you need to have a FireWire drive with two ports on it, two FireWire cables, and two Macs with built-in FireWire. To make things easier, I turned off AirPort and disconnected the Ethernet — I wanted to make sure that I was getting the full speed of the FireWire, as my second Mac only has 100base Ethernet capabilities.

Connect the FireWire drive to a Mac with file sharing set up on it, and then connect that drive’s other FireWire port to any other Mac. Next enable networking over FireWire in the Networking System Preferences panel. In the setup panel, give the computers manual IP addresses — I used 10.0.0.2 and 10.0.0.3, and a subnet mask of 255.255.255.0. Finally, simply connect to the Mac with the drive showing up in the Finder, and it will show up in sharing!

This allows you to network over FireWire and share a hard drive, which for me is useful for today’s task of backing up all of my DVDs onto the drive. It could be useful for a multitude …

I’ve created a simple Perl script that splits a text file into 4KB parts to use within iPod Notes. Usage is pretty simple:

1. Copy and paste the script (macosxhints mirror) into a plain text file named makenotes.pl on your system. Remember to make the script executable (chmod 755 makenotes.pl).
2. Put the script and the text you want to split into a directory. For this example, assume the directory is named book and located in your user’s home folder.
3. Open up a Terminal and go to that directory: cd ~/book
4. Run the script with the filename (or filenames) as arguments: ./makenotes.pl colourofmagic.txt

When run, the script will ask you to create a title for this book — this title is used as a directory name and as a prefix for the parts. For instance, if I use the title colour_of_magic, the …