Apple news blog

A ROM update for the HTC Touch Diamond was released on Wednesday, giving the phone a few added capabilities, with the addition of the 850MHz GSM band for calling — but not 850MHz 3G over HSPA for data — and a quicker response from the …

Motorola will break up its Home and Networks Mobility group in a move which is likely meant to prepare for a potential sell-off, according to a memo obtained by the Wall Street Journal. The company will purportedly create three …

AppleInsider claims that Apple will forgo the use of Intel’s Montevina chipset in their next generation laptops. Instead, Apple will either design their own chipsets or could adopt 3rd part chipsets from AMD or Via.

It should be sai…

Seth Weintraub, the author of 9to5Mac, publishes more information at ComputerWorld about what he has heard about the upcoming MacBook updates.

According to Weintraub’s sources, the new MacBooks will be thinner than the current MacBoo…

Toshiba Atom-based prototype from PCAuthority
With persistent rumors of some sort of tablet-based Mac, it is interesting to see what other device manufacturers are working on in their labs. Toshiba revealed last week a prototype devic…

MobileMe, the replacement for Apple’s .Mac service, officially launched July 11. The service is aimed at giving users the ability to simultaneously sync mail, contact, and calendar information between computers, iPhones, …

The iPhone app store is great, but some of the apps are poorly designed. One such design flaw can be seen in certain games that have music, but no volume control. This can often be fixed with the physical volume control on the iPhone, but what if you have an iPod touch, and the in-game music is too loud for your tastes?

It turns out that the new volume limit feature is a global setting, not just applicable to iPod music playback Go to Settings » Music » Volume Limit from the home screen, and set it to an agreeable level. This will automatically lower the volume of those pesky games.

You have to set it back when you’re done, if you want to have your iPod music louder, of course.

This is perhaps more of a curiosity than a hint, but it may be useful to someone out there. Did you know that if you send a URL as the subject of a Mail message, it will arrive as a link (if the recipient is also using Mail.app)?

The strange thing is that the URL will open the browser when clicked, but the cursor does not show the text as a URL (i.e. the cursor does not change to a pointing finger when over the text).

[robg adds: I had to experiment with this before I was able to get it working. To have the link work, you must compose in rich text mode (which makes sense), and there must be some body text. If you send a blank e-mail, then the URL isn’t parsed, even when writing in rich text mode.]

If, like me, you find the default white zip file icon in 10.5 bland and boring, then it is quite easy to change it if you are using the built-in Archive Utility:

1. Open up Finder and go to /System/Library/CoreServices.
2. Find the Archive Utility, Control-click on it and select Show Package Contents from the pop-up menu.
3. Navigate into Contents » Resources.
4. Make a backup copy of bah-zip.icns (or any of the other compressed icons you’d like to change) by dragging the file to a folder in your user’s home folder. The system will create a copy.
5. Find an icon you’d like to use, and copy it into this folder, renaming it to bah-zip.icns. I chose to copy the nice green bah.icns file from this same directory, renamed it to bah-zip.icns, and then copied it back in. (You will need to enter your admin password to modify this folder.)
6. Restart Finder or logout/login, and you will now have a nice customized zip icon …
   
   

Something that maybe not everyone has thought about with the iPhone is that the microphone is good enough to use in conjunction with an FM transmitter in the car as a speaker phone. This is a cheap and secure way to drive and speak at the same time.

The quality of the sound for the receiving part may not be the best, but it’s good enough and it’s better than using a headset. It even stops the music when the phone rings, such as a good installation of a phone kit for a car will do when receiving a call.