Apple news blog

Section: Apple, Apple News, Retail & Apple Store Our fellow Apple fans in South Caroline can finally rejoice, as their first Apple Store is to open this weekend. Located at 301 King St. in Charleston, it will open on Saturday, …

Section: Apple, Apple News, Commercials, iPhone + Communications, iPhone Apple is at it again with three new iPhone 3G ads. This time around, they are much more like the original iPhone ads and less like the first iPhone 3G ad. …

Section: Apple News, Rumors, iPhone + Communications, iPhone Apple’s iPod nano and shuffle have gone the way of (Product) RED, and rumor has it that the iPhone is to do the same later this year. This may all be wild speculation, …

Section: Software + Apps, Miscellaneous, Third-Party, Mac + Computers, Software Macintosh and iPhone software updates and announcements for July 23, 2008: WebIS introduced Note2Self 1.0, their easy-to-use audio recorder for Apple iPhone …

Mac, MobileMe, Web Applications, Mac + Computers, Software MobileMe, Apple’s upgrade to their previous .Mac web service, has been available pretty much since the iPhone 3G launch. We’ve seen MobileMe 30 day extensions and MobileMe …

“In the competition between PCs and Macs, we outsell Apple 30-to-1. But there is no doubt that Apple is thriving. Why? Because they are good at providing an experience that is narrow but complete, while our commitment to choice often …

Windows XP and Vista users who update to iTunes 7.7 — the version required to access the App Store — receive a complimentary control panel applet for Apple’s MobileMe online sync and storage service, and some are not happy about it. …

AllthingsD republishes a memo from Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer to all Microsoft employees detailing an update in their corporate strategy. Ballmer specifically mentions Apple and their recent success:

Apple: In the competition between…

Mobile Safari on the iPhone does an amazing job displaying web pages. However, I find that in the context of viewing some web pages on the go, that this view isn’t necessarily the best way to read some pages. For example, even though the iPhone interface is awesome, I don’t really want to waste time zooming and messing with a page to read the actual content. I’d rather just load up a page, read my content, and move on. (Of course, the best solution would be if web designers designed alternate “iPhone-optimized” views that would look great on the iPhone, but only a few mainstream sites do this as of the time of this post.)

I discovered back in my Treo days that Google has a page that translates web pages to “mobile-friendly” versions. I find that loading pages using this URL reduces page load time, and makes them easier to read on the iPhone. So, I created a bookmarklet that allows you to take the current page in Mobile Safari…

I wanted an easy way to download a single enclosure from a podcast feed everyday. I also didn’t want to use iTunes, because this download would need to sync with my Palm Centro for an alarm, and iTunes stinks at exporting things. So I used Automator and iCal to do it. I thought I would save someone else the trouble by listing the steps here. This is the feed URL I was interested in: http://www.npr.org/rss/podcast.php?id=510101 — the single enclosure is a daily poem in the form of an MP3 file.

Here are the Automator steps:

1. Internet » Get Specified URLs (here is where you put the feed URL)
2. Internet » Get Enclosure URLs from Articles
3. Internet » Download URLs (specify a folder to save the MP3 to)

That’s it! You now have the podcast without using any extra apps. I also have Automator (after a five-second pause) get the new file, rename it to daily poem, and move it to a new folder. It then gets synced to my Palm with the Missing Sync…