Apple news blog

Los Angeles based bitCycle today announces Drunkalizer 1.0, their entertaining sobriety checker for iPhone devices. Using the iPhone’s built-in microphone, record your friend’s voices and play them back through Drunkalizer’s revolutionary anti-sobriety filtering to hear what they’ll sound like when they’ve had a few. Drunkalizer is not a scientifically proven sobriety check, nor a portable breathalyzer. However Drunkalizer is great fun and perfect for New Year’s parties everywhere.

In a pair of articles published over the past week, Hardmac reveals that Apple has been working to fight against fraud perpetrated against the company by third-party authorized service centers. According to the initial report published last week, th…

It suddenly took was taking iPhoto over a minute to load on my machine, with the spinning wheel visible during this whole time. This went on for days. I read various solutions online, and tried turning off program options.

Eventually, I found a solution to the problem. In iPhoto’s Preferences, on the Sharing tab,I disabled both sharing options (looking for and sharing). iPhoto then loaded nearly instantly.

[robg adds: I don't know if this is a widespread issue; I have sharing enabled on my two main machines here, and both seem to load iPhoto with no change in launch time based on this setting. I suspect a broader network issue is behind the problem, but if you're trying to troubleshoot slow iPhoto launch times, this may be worth trying.]

Apple Software Restore (ASR) has a font issue when used from the command line (asr), or from Disk Utility (Restore tab) in 10.6.

When booting off the imaged drive, upon first log in to each user account, a message pops up stating that the Lucide Grand font has been changed and restored. There are two ways to fix this issue:

1. Run Disk Utility from the 10.6 install disc: this insures that all caches are in sync.
2. In Terminal, do this: rm -rf /Volumes/some_drive/private/var/folders/*: this removes the font caches from the users’ accounts.

Hope this helps someone else.

I like to keep a weather page from Wunderground on my Opera speed dial. The monthly summary page contains the information I’m seeking (moon phase and sunrise/sunset). However, the URL contains a date, and the page displays information for that date. I was changing the date manually once a month, but this method doesn’t show accurate daily information. So, I wrote a perl script that changes the date every day. I use cron to run the script at midnight every day (I hate launchd; it’s overly complicated).

Opera stores information about Speed Dial links in a text file located at ~/Library » Preferences » Opera Preferences » speeddial.ini. This script closes Opera and changes the date in the URL in the speeddial.ini file.
NOTE: This script uses killall to close Opera, since cron will not properly execute AppleScript. Use care on a multiuser computer.
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The following is not a hint, really, but an observation of a cool non-publicized Snow Leapord feature.

While flying home from the west coast this holiday season and changing the time zone on my MacBook, I noticed a new feature on the map that you see in the TIme Zone tab of the Date & Time System Preferences panel: The map of the Earth changes based on the time of the year.

For example, if you set the month to August in the Date & Time tab of the panel, the map will display a lush green northern hemisphere. Setting the date to December changes the northern hemisphere to the appropriate snow cover.

Weiner Family Studios today announces A Family Matters 1.10 iPhone application has been selected by Apple for inclusion on the iTunes App Store What’s Hot list. This unique family-oriented mobile app emphasizes family communication over traditional video games that keep children busy. A Family Matters has specific activities and questions to entertain, educate and help you learn more about each other. A Family Matters is currently ranked #4 Top Paid Travel Application in the US.

Indie software developer Patrick Stein introduces JollysFastVNC 1.0, his powerful new ARD and VNC client for Mac OS X. Perfect for IT managers, web developers and casual users alike, JollysFastVNC was developed from the ground up utilizing the latest Cocoa technologies. It organizes the most useful features within an elegant user-interface that is powerful, intuitive and quick to work with. JollysFastVNC is very fast, and aims to be the best and most secure VNC client on the Mac platform.

Crossroad Solutions has announced a straight 50% off on the yearly subscription on Loosestitch, their web outliner. This attractive signup lasts from Christmas to the weekend of Jan 3, 2010. Loosestitch is a web based outliner that helps create and share outline documents, jot down ideas and view it at different levels. Outlines can imported from and exported to OPML files, and can also be embedded on your own site.

To celebrate the new years day, iHanWel is offering a sale for iBody 2.5. On January 1st, iBody will go on sale. iBody is a comprehensive health and fitness application for iPhone and iPod Touch devices. It is all you’ll ever need to monitor your body and motion progress. iHanWel’s mission is to help people stay fit and healthy.