Apple news blog

In honor of the 2009 Best App Ever Awards announcement, the world’s largest iPhone app promo code contest to give away over 1,000 copies of iPhone applications and games has been launched. Nominated developers have contributed 1,000 promo codes for over 110 different applications and games. The contest, which is open to all users with US iTunes accounts, has launched to great interest from users and developers.

Silicon Alley Insider reports on new data from market research firm NPD relayed by Piper Jaffray analyst Gene Munster showing strong Mac and iPod sales for Apple’s March quarter so far, well ahead of most analysts’ expectations. NPD’s numbers show M…

Hardmac notes that Apple has launched a MacBook Repair Extension Program for Hard Drive Issues, allowing customers of Apple’s early MacBook models to receive free repairs or compensation for previously-paid repairs related to hard drive failure. Bla…

In a pair of reports yesterday, Reuters noted that rumors of Apple dumping Google in favor of Microsoft’s Bing for the iPhone’s search functionality have hung in the air at this week’s Mobile World Congress in Barcelona. According to the first repor…

In an attempt to block the flood of spammy comments, I’ve now enabled comment moderation (and, hooray, disabled the annoying comment captcha). This means I’ll need to review your comments, though thanks to the way the system works, only your first comment will have to be manually approved (I hope).

You’ll see a message to this effect when you submit a comment; I’ll do my best to get to the queue multiple times per hour for today, just to see how it goes.

I know this isn’t ideal, but it seems better than the broken captcha system that resets the captcha characters every time you preview.

-rob.

Softpedia and Computerworld have noted a significant number of complaints from users of Apple’s new Aperture 3 professional-level photo editing and management application released last week. The complaints, which have been flooding Apple’s discussio…

PhatWare Corporation today announces PhatNotes 1.2 for iPhone and iPod touch devices. PhatNotes allows users to create notes and organize them by category, color, subject, priority, creation, authorization, and modification dates. It is the first notes organizer to offer natural handwriting recognition input in addition to keyboard entry as well as full synchronization with PhatNotes Desktop software. PhatNotes now includes a library of 150 icons which can be assigned to note items and folders.

After trying to script the login window multiple ways, I have come up with the perfect solution; this works 100% of the time when tested under OS X 10.4 and higher. We use this to log in computer(s) through Apple Remote Desktop by sending this script to computers sitting at the login window. This is great in a computer lab situation, where you may need to log in all the computers at once.

This method requires the username and password fields, but as long as you have a list of users with “Other…” displayed in the login window, it will work fine. Here’s the script:

#!bin/sh

cat >/tmp/Login_Automatically.sh <<-"EOF"

if [[ "$(who | grep console)" == "" ]]; then # Runs ONLY if no one is logged in

osascript <<EOT

set username_ to "username"

s...