Richard Frisch gives a much better answer than the ones on this Quora question.
For the record, I bought AppleCare once. It was for my first Mac; a 12-inch PowerBook. I never needed AppleCare for that Mac, nor have I needed AppleCare for any other Apple computer or device I’ve owned since then.
Mustafa Al-Qinneh over at Teehan+Lax has also drafted up a concept for iMessage, along with some ideas for how regular text messages and incoming calls could also be incorporated with OS X. Mustafa’s concepts show some cool and interesting ideas for how things from your phone could appear and sync with your desktop. I like the idea of being able to read and respond to text messages from my computer, but I don’t like the idea of iMessage conversations appearing in the Mail app, side by side with emails. That would drive me bonkers; the last thing I want is a hook to keep my email app open for longer than it needs to be.
iMessage is awesome. Having the conversations available and synced between iOS devices is great. Having them also be available and synced on your desktop or laptop would be fantastic. I very much like this video concept that Jan-Michael Cart has put together — it is, more or less, a suped-up version of iChat that incorporates iMessage conversations.
John Banana produced and directed an animated short based on The Rocketeer to honor the 20th anniversary of the film.
(I just realized I haven’t seen this movie since it was in theaters; my parents took some friends and I for my 10th birthday party. Guess I need to add it to the Netflix queue.)
The OmniGroup posted a whole slew of short videos (videolets?) to their site which cover a wide range of topics and skill levels with OmniFocus. Definitely worth checking out.
(There’s a good 2-minute video on Perspectives that you may want to check out if you’re not too savvy with custom perspectives yet. They are, in my opinion, one the best and most-powerful features of OmniFocus on the Mac.)
This happens to me on a semi-regular basis: I hit the hotkey to bring up the OmniFocus Quick Entry Pane but nothing happens.
After waiting a few seconds wondering where it is, I’ll look over at my Dock to see that OmniFocus isn’t even running. I then launch the app, let it load, and hit the quick entry hotkey once again.
I’d rather my computer do the thinking for me in those moments. And so I hacked together this AppleScript.
When launched, the OopsieFocus script will check to see if OmniFocus is running. If OmniFocus is running then the script does nothing and OmniFocus brings up the Quick Entry Pane for you just as it should. If OmniFocus is not running then the script will automatically launch the app and bring up the Quick Entry Pane.
Using your global AppleScript invoker of choice (FastScripts, Keyboard Maestro, or Alfred are all fine choices) this script should be set to the same hotkey you use to activate the Quick Entry Pane for you.
Note for Keyboard Maestro users run this script with OmniFocus 2: you’ll need to save the script file to your computer and then execute the script file instead of running an in-line text script within the macro.
But only for stock SSDs apparently:
The new native TRIM support does appear to limited to stock Apple drives, as users who have installed third-party SSDs into their machines have reported that TRIM is not enabled by the update.
Moreover, the developer preview of Lion, which has always had TRIM support, does not support user-installed, 3rd-party SSDS either. Well, at least not on this machine.
With iTunes 10.3 and iOS 4.3.3 you can enable certain iCloud features from tomorrow, today.
On your devices using iOS 4.3.3, open the Settings app and select Store to turn on automatic downloads for music, books, and apps as you desire. On your computers using iTunes 10.3 or later, use the Store tab in Preferences and check what you want in the Automatic Downloads section.
Too bad there is still not an option that keeps iPhone apps from automatically downloading to your iPad.
New Pixar film due out next summer.
Yun Xie interviews Vikram Savkar for Ars Technica. Savkar is the Senior Vice President and Publishing Director at Nature Publishing Group.
According to Savkar, it seems there is a huge interest in digital textbooks:
Ars: How will you introduce digital textbooks to university professors and instructors? They’re the ones who will ultimately choose textbooks for classes.
Savkar: California State University is the first to adopt the interactive textbook, so they’ve helped spread the news. We only announced our plan for the textbook about a month ago, and 800 faculty members from colleges signed up the first day to get a demo.
I’m not surprised. The opportunity for digital text books has got to be wide open. Textbooks are a multi-billion dollar market and cost the average student $700 per semester. For the cost of one semester’s worth of textbooks a student could instead buy a tablet computer and then purchase cost-efficient, backpack-friendly textbooks at a lower rate for the next 7 semesters.
However, after reading this answer from Savkar during the interview, the future of digital textbooks suddenly seems a little less bright:
Ars: Would a student be able to read these interactive textbooks on laptops, iPads, Android phones, and other devices?
Savkar: Our textbooks are born digital, which means we created it for what digital can do. As I said before, we didn’t write a regular textbook, make PDFs, and put it online. Our textbooks will be available for iPad, smartphones, Androids, and other devices. These textbooks are born accessible.
What does it even mean these are “born digital” and “born accessible”? I fear it means they will be awkward, buggy, and frustrating.
If 1,500 blog posts are published every 60 seconds I wonder how many refreshes to Google Reader there are by subscribers.
Elegance is not stopping every two seconds to spell out your email to people that want to connect with you as you are trying to get out the door. Elegance is handing out a minimal, unique card.
A calling card from Hoban Cards is all about elegance.
Each calling card is hand printed on a 1902 Chandler and Price letterpress. For $75 you get 100 personalized cards with your name and the option of either your email or phone number printed on 100% 110lb cotton paper.
iLounge reports that “the price of the components required to add a Thunderbolt port to an external hard drive is roughly equal to the cost of a low-end hard drive itself.”
Chris Davies at SlashGear:
The first demo was a raw speed test, reading and writing to the drives with 4GB files. As you can see in the video, the MBP was able to write at up to 352.5 MB/s, while read speeds reached 827.2 MB/s. The company told us that the same setup had hit 870 MB/s peaks in their own testing.
Reading from an external drive at 870 MB/s? That is fast. Faster than the popular OWC Mercury Extreme Pro 6G SSD is even capable of.
When in comes to hardware stats like this I am still a dilettante, but if I’m understanding this right it means you wouldn’t even notice a speed difference if you had an external SSD hooked up via Thunderbolt. If you were simply buying an external to run backups to, there’d be little point to get an expensive setup like this. However, if you had one of the Thunderbolt-equipped iMacs with the non-user-replaceable HDDs in them and you wanted an SSD as your boot disk, it seems you could get one of these instead.