Apple news blog

Universal Studios Home Entertainment today announced (via iLounge) that it will begin offering iPhone-enabled features on some of its future Blu-ray video releases. Universal’s initial launch for the concept will take place with the release of a spe…

Software Ops today announced the launch of My Eyes Only Photo 1.0, a new powerful photo encryption application for the iPhone and iPod Touch. My Eyes Only Photo is designed to secure photos on your iPhone or iPod Touch by password protecting and encrypting photos. It uses 256 bit RSA encryption to protect the photos. Users of the application can select photos from the existing photo library on their iPhone or use the camera to take photographs and store them directly into My Eyes Only Photo.

Apple is scheduled to release Q3 earnings this Tuesday July 21, after the market close. Thirty-six analysts track the stock with nine upward EPS revisions in the last 30 days and no downward EPS revisions in the last 30 days. piqqem leverages the ‘wisdom of crowds’ by allowing its users to vote on the price directions of stock and then applies its own propriety factors to calculate sentiment for a security. In their model, 0 is the lowest and 4 is the highest sentiment.

OfficeTime 1.5 for Mac and PC is easy to get started, offers dynamic live reporting and provides quick, customizable invoicing. Repeatedly, customers remark about how they have increased their billable hours. By listening to their requests, OfficeTime has added over 250 community improvements since version 1.0. If the process of tracking, reporting and billing clients is slowing down your productivity, then you’re wasting time not working on billable hours.

XChange UK and ThePowerXChange are pleased to announce the new Chartbot Barcodes for QuarkXPress and Adobe InDesign. Chartbot Barcodes is the only Quark/InDesign barcode package that lets users generate 1D, 2D and postal barcodes directly within their favourite variable-data extended technology module without using barcode fonts. Chartbot Barcodes is print production-friendly. It supports colour separations, spot colours and other features that professional workflows require.

Microsoft today announced that it will be releasing Microsoft Office 2008 for Mac Service Pack 2 later today, a free update bringing speed enhancements and other new features to the application suite. The update is scheduled to launch at 10:00 AM Pa…

I never thought I’d have a hint to post, but I recently learned something that is not well documented about short iPhone battery life. This only applies if you use WiFi on a business or enterprise server.

After getting my first iPhone (a 3GS), I was happy to see that battery life was relatively good and it accessed the web and email quickly on my home WiFi. It also worked, although a bit slower, on a 3G connection. At work, however, mail seemed to hang and the battery died in about four hours .. oh no!

I found that the phone was continuously trying to retrieve email, but was unable to do so. This not only drained the battery, but seemed to make the entire phone a bit sluggish while it tried forever to connect.

The reason for this is that many companies, mine included, block IMAP mail by blocking ports 993 and 587. Because they use Exchange (I don’t want to use my iPhone for their mail, only my personal Gmail), they block many ports that are not directly required…

Mac OS X lacks a good command line tool for following a Services Access Control List (SACL) tree of users and groups. If you don’t want to, or just can’t, use the GUI to list users in service ACLs of your Mac OS X server (or managed client), you need to parse the groups/nested groups/users tree one group at a time, using dscl. It’s really painful. As an alternative, I’ve created a script to handle this for sys admins.

I won’t promise you a killer command line tool with foolproof error and recursion handling, but I still believe I’ve designed a usable piece of shell script — even if it looks like it’s the worst code I’ve ever written (which is not true; I’ve made things way uglier). The source code is too long and messy to be just copy-pasted here; just download the getsacls.sh script (4KB) directly from …

Since the AT&T rates are so high for data, I have the smallest/cheapest plan available for texts and minutes, so I often get close to my limit at the end of the month. I therefore like to send my SMSs via the unlimited data email (###@vtext.com), and only make/answer calls to those that are in network when I’m running out of minutes.

Instead of going through each Address Book entry and adding emails to them manually after looking up their carrier through a service (such as this one at whitepages.com), I adopted ViViDBoarder’s excellent script to add the SMS emails, updating the code to work better with the current version of whitepages.com, and adding a little suffix representing the carrier to the mobile phone label so it says mobile att.

I wanted something I coul…

I often play a couple of albums one after the other, and had been using a scratch playlist for this purpose: Drag albums into the playlist, play albums, delete albums from playlist, then repeat the next time I want to do the same.

I’ve now discovered iTunes DJ can be used for this purpose in partnership with an empty playlist: Create an empty playlist and set iTunes DJ to source the songs from it. When you do, you’ll receive a warning prompt that the playlist is empty. iTunes DJ will now only play songs you drag into the list, stopping if it runs out; and clears out played songs after the amount specified in Settings.

This has the small benefits of not having to clear out a playlist, quicker right-click access to add songs to the play list, and it also means guests (iPhone/iTouch) can always request songs (though I haven’t tested this).

[robg adds: For more on iTunes DJ, check out this…