Apple news blog

Los Angeles Entertainment Group, the development group behind the hit puzzle game Power Grid for the iPhone are happy to introduce a 7-day sale for the game allowing users to buy it at 80% off. Power Grid is a game with a basic concept of restoring power to an apartment building through the manipulation of blocks into various positions. Power Grid has recently generated a lot of media attention for its addictive gameplay and mass appeal to a large demographic of iPhone users.

Apple’s MobileMe iDisk application for iPhone [App Store, Free], which has been listed as a forthcoming feature since Apple revamped its iPhone feature pages following its Worldwide Developers Conference in early June, is now available for do…

Macgamestore.com today announced the release of Burger Shop 2, the sequel to the wildly popular restaurant management game created by GoBit, Inc. In Burger Shop 2 you must rebuild your restaurant empire, adding new twists to your menu to entice new customers while uncovering the truth about what happened to your original restaurant chain. Burger Shop 2 features 120 levels of story mode, 120 levels of expert mode and endless play in Challenge and Relax Mode.

Eltima Software today releases Recover PDF Password, their popular password recovery tool for Mac OS X. The new version of Recover PDF Password enables Mac users to drag and drop a file into the app, press the Decrypt button and immediately save a copy of the file with protection removed. It supports all character encodings and is able to recover passwords, typed in any language and in any keyboard layout. Recover PDF Password can retrieve Unicode Passwords for protected Acrobat 9.x files.

MacRumors has heard that Apple has begun requesting that developers add keywords to their App Store application submissions in order to facilitate improved searching. As detailed in a report from AppleInsider, developers are permitted to enter up to…

Macware today is offering a discount at over half-off for MacBurn until August 1st. MacBurn brings the power of CD and DVD burning in one easy-to-use application for data DVDs, multi-session data CDs, audio CDs and more. Burn backups of your data or make a mix of your favorite tunes with a few simple clicks. You can even burn discs that can be read on Mac’s, PC’s or both. Burn backups of your data or make a mix of your favorite tunes with just a few simple clicks.

The following hint is useful to me because I use my iMac in my bedroom, and I don’t shut it down or put it to sleep. I prefer to sleep in the dark. Additionally, I don’t want people hopping on my computer and changing my stuff – so I need the password protection a screen saver provides.

Since 10.5 was released, my workaround has been to set Energy Saver to sleep the display after a certain amount of minutes, and set a screen saver to start one minute after the display sleeps. It didn’t always work, unfortunately.

Here’s my new solution. For this to work properly, you’re going to need to have either a hot corner set up to activate the screen saver, or have the screen saver set to a timer. It’s a good idea to disable Energy Saver’s display sleep. Then, download and install Sleep Display an…

As they didsn’t seem to exist, I have created two Mail templates to make it easy to share YouTube and Dailymotion videos within Mail.app. You can find everything you need on this page within my site.

Double-click on Dailymotion.mailstationery and YouTube.mailstationery to install them. Then place the Create New Dailymotion Message.scpt and Create New YouTube Message.scpt scripts in your user’s Library » Scripts folder to get to them on the menu bar. Launch the relevant script for the site you’re viewing, then copy/paste the permalink for Dailymotion or the URL for YouTube, and your email will be ready to send.

Feel free to improve these to suit to your needs.

[robg adds: The linked page is in French, but it’s fairly easy to see the four items that need to be downloaded. In case th…

Playing with Skype and iChat, my Mac froze and I had to force shut down. At the login window prompt, I typed my username and password and pressed Enter as usual, yet only the Time Machine Desktop screen (the one with the galaxy-like picture and stars of Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard) showed. It stayed like that forever. Eventually I found that pressing Command-Option-Esc and waiting some 30 seconds returned me to the login screen. From there, the story repeats.

Yet that was handy to reboot or shut down without forcing shut down. Repairing disk and permissions, running DiskWarrior, resetting PRAM, etc. did not help. I even trashed the preferences for Finder, Desktop and Dock. Even replaced the full Library and Desktop folders inside the user account suffering the issue from the latest Time Machine backup. Resetting the login password (after booting from the Mac OS X DVD) did not help either. The issue remained, but amazingly only on the standard booting account, but not on another e…

Thanks to a suggestion from Chris Herbert, we’re going to try an experiment: I’ll be sending out each day’s hints on Twitter, via (for now) my Twitter account. If you’d like to get these tweets, simply follow me on Twitter. The experiment starts with today’s hints, which will go live in a few minutes. (I’ll mark each tweet with a #macosxhints_tip hash tag, to make searching easier.)

As this is a manual process, the timing of the tweets may vary somewhat each day, but I’ll try to get them out around 7:30am Pacific time (the publication time of the hints). On those rare days when we run hints during the day, I’ll do my best to remember to tweet those, too.

Just one more way to keep up with the hints on the site, for those who prefer Twitter to RSS or checking the site manually.

Update: I had to change the hashtag — the hyphen caused a break in the link, so I cha…