Apple news blog

148Apps announced today that winners and nominees of its 2009 Best App Ever Awards, which were unveiled last week, saw a large sales boost following the awards announcement. As a result, some apps were bumped into the top 100 overall paid applications list, while others experienced a large increase in sales. Developers this week expressed their gratitude for the Best App Ever Awards, for help in generating greater exposure for the nominated and awarded apps.

Bloomberg BusinessWeek reports that the U.S. International Trade Commission (ITC) has granted a request made by Kodak last month for an investigation of Apple and Research in Motion regarding possible infringement of Kodak patents related to digital …

Reuters today reports on the secrecy demanded by Apple of its Asian manufacturing partners, profiling a sprawling Foxconn facility in Longhua, China complete where employees live and work while producing many of Apple’s devices.

Insid…

BoomTown today sat down with Adobe Chief Technical Officer Kevin Lynch to discuss the relationship between Apple and Adobe and the deployment of Flash on Mac as well as the iPhone and iPad. Apple’s decision not to include Flash Player capabilities o…

Veenix Technologies today announces TypeBook Creator 2.4, its highly acclaimed Macintosh font/type specimen book creation software for graphics professionals. TypeBook Creator features precision automatic font categorization via Veenix’s GlyphLogicEngine smart font technology. The new version features an innovative new approach to font organization which sorts fonts by energy and ranks them using an associative color, making it easy to index fonts of similar weights and more.

Earlier this week, we noted that an image had been posted to our forums purportedly showing Best Buy’s internal inventory system listing three unknown Apple products described only as “Dummy SKUs” and serving as placeholders for expected future produ…

I need to connect to a specific proxy server to access my university library services. I find it convenient to keep Safari for direct connections to the Internet, and another browser configured for access to the library via the proxy.

Firefox allows manual proxy configuration, but doesn’t handle PDF downloads correctly from all journal suppliers’ sites. Chrome handles the PDF downloads correctly, but there is no obvious way to specify a proxy in its preferences.

Extrapolating from a published hint for Windows, I found that launching Chrome from the command line while passing it --proxy-server=host#:port# works. There is nothing I could find in Chrome’s help pages, or on the web, that addresses this issue, so it may be useful. In Terminal, the final command looks like this:

open -a /Applications/Google Chrome.app --args --proxy-server=host#:port#

Replace host# and port# with the host and port numbers that you need to use.

…

While looking for the perfect product to keep my photos safe, I discovered that sometimes simple is best. My requirements were simple: ensure that all my digital photos, stored on a locally attached USB drive, were duplicated to another drive attached to my AirPort Extreme. My photos are in RAW format (specifically DNG files) and will never change, so I only need to concern myself with new files.

I checked out numerous commercial and free products for backup, synchronizing and more, and nothing quite fit the bill. Whilst rsync could probably do the job, I couldn’t get my head around the terminology to be sure I wasn’t risking the original files. Then I discovered the solution. So mind-bogglingly simple, and no third-party software required. In Terminal, I run this command:

cp -npRv "/Volumes/LocalUSB/Photos/" "/Volumes/RemoteUSB/Photos/"

Yes, it is the standard Unix copy (cp) command with a few options:

• n – Do not overwrite a…

  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  

If you’re moping around because you can no longer watch some of your favorite old Mac OS X screen savers because they were never updated for 10.6 (and never will be because the developers have dropped off the face of the Earth taking their source code with them), take heart.

The free application SaverPreview (from this page; scroll down to find it) can still play those old savers in a window, which you can then zoom to fit the screen if you want. If you have Rosetta installed, SaverPreview should even be able to play PowerPC-only screen savers, though I haven’t tried this.

Now you can while away the time doing something completely pointless, like playing old DOS games in an emulator.

[robg adds: This hint described how you might also be able to recompile older screen savers yourself, if the source was available.]

Syndicated Puzzles today announces Caveman Test 1.2 for iPhone and iPod touch. Cave paintings and wear marks on cave floors were the inspiration for the reinvention of a game called “Sticks and Stones”. With the availability of fire “Sticks and Stones” could have been played after a day of hunting and gathering. The materials needed and the simplicity of the game support this theory. Reintroducing the game to modern man, on the iPhone and on the iPod touch illustrates our evolution perfectly.