Apple news blog

Customers with legitimate options for video are triggering a large-scale drop in the amount of peer-to-peer (P2P) traffic, according to a published study of AT&T’s network. The DSL Internet provider found that while P2P traffic did …

… heavily compress the signal as well as a scarcity of channels. TV nonetheless has the advantage of reducing storage limits on the customer’s end, which have contributed to the maximum 720p limit on Apple TV and Xbox 360 movie rentals.

Apple is now offering registered iPhone developers with daily download statistics on how well their applications are doing in the App Store.

Before today, most developers had been left in the dark about their applications performance…

IEEE has approved a new version of IEEE 1394, better known to Apple users as Firewire. The standard, known as 1394-2008, encompasses all prior Firewire technology and provides complete specifications for speeds of 1.6 Gigabits/second and 3.2 Gigabit…

If you use Firefox, and you Shift-Return a search in the Google search box, Firefox will perform an “I’m Feeling Lucky” search and show you the corresponding page. However this is not the case with Safari, but you can get a similar result using the free Safari plug-in Safari Stand’s Quick Search feature.

In the SafariStand settings, enable Quick Search and add a new line called something like Google lucky. Set a shortcut (I use l) and define the URL as:

http://www.google.com/search?q=@key&btnI=I'm+Feeling+Lucky

You can now perform a Google “I’m feeling lucky” search directly in the URL address bar by typing something like l osxhints. When you press Return, Safari will open up the first match from Google.

I’ve been running djbdns on all of my servers for several years. I’ve also been running it on OSX for about three years.

Under 10.4 and earlier, when I specified a custom nameserver, the system would use only the nameserver(s) I specified. However, under 10.5 Apple has apparently changed that behavior, and uses my specified nameservers in addition to the DNS servers specified by the DHCP server. It shows the DHCP-provided server IP on the list, greyed out, so you can’t delete it.

For a while, I adopted a “grin and bear it” attitude — after all, the DHCP server at home is handing out the IP of my internal Linux server (also running djbdns) as the DNS server, so I was only unsafe when I used the laptop outside the house. However, with the recently ann…

I have several (more than 30) applications installed in my iPhone 2.0 (some of them are over 10MB). I’ve been a bit disappointed with the oh-so-slow syncs in iTunes due to the required backup process. Searching a bit, I found that I could disable the backups by setting a hidden iTunes preference. Quit iTunes, open Terminal, and enter this command:

defaults write com.apple.itunes DeviceBackupsDisabled -bool YES

Whe you next sync, your iPhone won’t be backed up, so the actual sync will go quickly. If you feel the need to back up your data again at some point, simply change YES to NO and sync your device (quit iTunes before changing the setting). After the backup is done, you can then disable backups again. If you want to restore a previous backup, you must set this value to NO before trying the restore.

[robg adds: The long backup times with iPhone 2.0 software are a real pain — while sometimes they seem speedy, my …

Copy the following AppleScript into Script Editor, and save as an application:

on open pdfFiles

  tell application "Finder"

    repeat with pdfFile in pdfFiles

      set thedestination to folder of pdfFile

      set theName to displayed name of pdfFile

      -- convert pdf to base64 and copy result to clipboard

      do shell script "/usr/bin/perl -0777 -e 'use MIME::Base64; $text = <>; $text = encode_base64($text); $text =~ s/\s+//g; print "data:application/pdf;charset=utf-8;base64,$text\n";' < " & quoted form of POSIX path of pdfFile & " | pbcopy"

      set theurl to the clipboard

      make new internet location file to theurl at thedestination with properties {name:theName}

    end...