Apple discontinues sale of MobileMe retail boxes as overhaul looms

Apple discontinues sale of MobileMe retail boxes as overhaul looms:

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Source: appleinsider.com

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"Apple on Thursday removed the $99 MobileMe product from its online store and notified resellers that it has discontinued the retail box for its cloud-based syncing product, suggesting the company is prepared to launch a rumored overhaul of the service.

 The MobileMe single license and family pack are no longer available on Apple's online store. In addition, resellers have indicated to AppleInsider that both the MobileMe Single User product (identified as MC660Z/A) and Family Pack (MC661Z/A) have been declared "End of Life" by Apple.

Users of MobileMe were also notified of scheduled maintenance for the me.com website. The service's Web-based applications may not be accessible to some users for about a half-hour tonight, after which normal service is expected to be restored.

The changes come as Apple is rumored to be revamping the MobileMe service, and is also said to be considering making the product free. The New York Times reported this month that Apple plans to turn MobileMe into a free service that would serve as a digital "locker" where users could store photos, music and videos.

Apple has been rumored to be pursuing a cloud-based iTunes service, particularly for music streaming, for years. The Times said that such a move would negate the need for a large amount of local storage on mobile devices like the iPhone.
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• Apple removes MobileMe from online store, discontinues retail boxes (engadget.com)

Drift Off to Sleep With iTunes & New Sleepytime 1.1.2

Image via Wikipedia

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Source: macworld.com

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Have you ever wanted to listen to music as you drift off to sleep, and have the music turn itself off after you've made it to the land of Nod?
Most clock radios can do this, of course, but if you want to play music from your Mac until you fall asleep, it's more complicated.
Simplifying this process is the idea behind Sleepytime (Mac App Store link), a nifty application that can rock you to sleep with your favorite tunes.
Fire up iTunes and start playing whatever you want to listen to, and then launch Sleepytime.
Choose how long you want iTunes to play (in minutes, hours, or even days), as well as the duration of the fadeout that occurs after that time (in seconds or minutes).
Finally, you can opt to have Sleepytime display a soothing black backdrop with track information while iTunes plays.
Set a time to wake up, choose a playlist, and decide whether you want the "alarm" to start at full volume immediately or to fade in so you won't be jolted awake by the sudden sound.

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• Why Your iPod Won't Sync to iTunes (brighthub.com)
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Five Quick Tips to Speed Up Your Mac

Image via Wikipedia

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Five Quick Tips to Speed Up Your Mac

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Whether we want it to happen or not, our systems all get a little sluggish from time to time. Sometimes it's a full hard drive slowing ...

1. Do a widget inventory.

Widgets are easy to forget about. On a rainy afternoon you may add half-a-dozen just to check them out and then completely forget that they exist by the next morning. But some of those widgets will keep running even when you’re not using your dashboard. It’s always best to keep your widgets, like the rest of your digital life, stripped down to only what you’re actually using.

2. Declutter your desktop.

Windows users enjoy the luxury of having a small army of icons cluttering up their desktop without any ill effects. Us Mac users aren’t so lucky. Each icon on your desktop is treated by OSX as its own window. Same goes for the items on your dock. And while having a handful of icons on your desktop probably won’t make a noticeable impact on overall performance, a full desktop will. Time to get those organized and off the desktop! (just a sidenote, this one shouldn’t help Leopard users. It looks like OSX 10.5 finally tackled this problem.)

3. Keep an eye on the Activity Monitor.

While this may sound like common sense, you’d be surprised at how many little programs are eating up big chunks of your memory. The massive slowdown that prompted my most recent clean up was the result of a tiny little background application I used for PS3 media streaming eating up more than half of my systems available resources. While I don’t have a fix for the program, disabling did provide an easy fix for my system. Had I not checked the Activity Monitor I would have been losing my mind over this one.

4. Turn off unused features.

Remember that time last Spring you turned on Bluetooth to get that picture off your mobile phone? Or that roommate that wanted to jack your signal via internet sharing? Did you remember to turn them off? Take a hunt through your System Preferences and make sure everything you don’t actually use is disabled (but if you’re not sure, and we can’t stress this enough, don’t disable it. We’d hate to see you switch off something you needed and not be too sure on how to get it back).

5. Delete unused preference panes.

Every now and then we download programs that install preference panes, and then forget all about them. The real problem? Lot’s of these will load in the background at startup. Luckily it should be as easy as a right click to remove. If it’s not you can always manually delete them by going to / Library / PreferencePanes.

A lot of this is probably common sense, but it never hurts to see it spelled out. What tips and tricks have you found help you get the best performance out of your Mac?

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Easily download files from URLs on your Mac

Image via Wikipedia

Quickly download files from URLs | Mac OS X | Mac OS X Hints

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Source: macworld.com

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Using this tip, you will be able to create a service on OS X that will enable you to highlight a URL to download and use your new service to download it without opening any other application.

Let's say a friend sent you a link to an app or an MP3 file, and you just want to download the thing.
Normally, you'd copy the URL, open your browser, and paste the URL into the address bar. In some browsers, you'd even need to paste the URL into the address field, hit Enter, wait until the file loads, and then save it.
From the list of templates, select Service.
At the top right of the window, set the service to receive selected URLs in any application.
Then, in the Internet group of actions, double-click on Download URLs.
That will add it to the editing window on the right.
By default, it will download URLs to your Downloads folder; if you wish them to go somewhere else, select that other location from the Where drop-down.
Save the service and give it a name, such as Download Selected URL.
Now, in any app that supports services, find the URL of a downloadable file (or, for the purposes of testing, any URL at all) and select it with your cursor. Open the Services submenu from the application menu and select Download Selected URL from the list. (Or right-click on the selected URL and choose the service from the context menu’s Services section.)
The file connected to the selected URL should download to your selected folder.
If it's especially large, you'll see a spinning cogwheel on the right side of the menubar while the service is running; clicking on that will open a menu where you can cancel the download if you wish.
When the download is done, check the destination folder; your file should be there.
You can make this quicker by assigning a keyboard shortcut to your service: Open System Preferences and select the Keyboard preference pane.
In the Keyboard Shortcuts tab, select Services from the list to the left.
Find Download Selected URL in the list on the right and double-click to its right.
You can then enter a keyboard shortcut - Control-Command-D, perhaps - to assign it to your service.

Concepts:

Mac, download, app, Macworld, Prices, selected URL, accessories, keyboard, Customer Service, Publishing, Cameras, business, ipod, Leopard, Internet

Second iOS 4.3 beta picked apart for clues about upcoming iPad 2

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Source: arstechnica.com

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Apple has released iOS 4.3 beta 2 to developers, and some digging into various system files has already revealed clues to new features that may be coming to the next-generation iPad.

It also hints at new social media services, Ping notifications, and a possible February 9 announcement date for the next-gen iPad hardware.

Providing some clues about future camera features for the iPad is an image used to show a preview of what a new wallpaper image will look like on your home screen.

That image contains icons for what looks like FaceTime, Camera, and PhotoBooth applications.

This suggests that the upcoming iPad hardware revision, expected in the next couple months, will indeed have at least a front-facing camera if not also a rear-facing camera.

Other system files suggest that PhotoBooth will offer image filters like Thermal Camera, Mirror, X-Ray, Kaleidoscope, and more.

Additionally, this image shows that the icon for Calendar appears to be set to February 9.

9to5Mac speculates that this could be a hint that Apple will announce (though not necessarily ship) new iPad hardware on that date.

The same image in previous versions of iOS showed the date as January 27, the date the original iPad was announced.

Apple announcements have often been scheduled on Tuesdays in years past, though, and February 9 is a Wednesday.

Apple's special announcement events have been known to come on other days of the week, so this date is at least plausible.

Other evidence in iOS 4.3 beta 2 suggests that Apple is paying more attention to social media services for its mobile ecosystem.

For instance, Ping will now have the ability to receive push notifications (for whatever that's worth) in iOS 4.3.

Additional strings and messages buried deep within the system reveal a "Media Stream" feature that looks to be incomplete, leading to speculation that the feature won't be ready until iOS 5 or later.

However, it appears to reference features like "Find My Friends" to locate friends nearby, as well as sending "Photo Streams" to those friends.

The feature also seems to be connected to MobileMe, possibly for syncing and media storage, suggesting Apple will integrate more features into the service to justify its $99 yearly fee.

The social media features aren't iPad-specific, however, and are likely to work across iPhones and iPod touches as well.

Media Stream and Find My Friends probably won't surface until well after the next-gen iPad's expected launch in late March or early April.

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Image via CrunchBase

iPhone complex passwords with only numbers

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Source: hints.macworld.com
Contributed by: computergeeksjw - Jan 31, '11 07:30:00AM

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If you're like me, you decided not to use a 'complex passcode' on your iPod touch (or iPhone) because you can see each letter of the passcode as you type it, making it easy for someone to learn your passcode. Well, recently I decided to try a complex passcode with only numbers.

I discovered that if the passcode contains only numbers, the iPod will use an all-number keypad like the 4-digit passcode.

Here are a couple of screenshots to illustrate how this looks:

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Power Tip - How to really shrink the Dock

Image via Wikipedia

How to really shrink the Dock Operating Systems Mac OS X Hints Macworld

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Source: macworld.com

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You probably already know that you can shrink (or enlarge) the Dock by clicking and dragging the bars that separate the applications from folder stacks.
You probably also know that you can adjust the Dock size in System Preferences, by opening the Dock pane and draging the Size slider whichever way you want.
But these tools can only take you so far: They'll make the Dock small, but not really small.
To do that, you need to open the Terminal (Applications/Utilities) and type:

defaults write com.apple.dock tilesize -integer 8

Press Return, then type:

killall Dock

The number at the end of the command can range from 1 (too small to be useful) up to 16 (the smallest size you can achieve with those other tools); 8 is tiny but still visible.
To make such a small Dock useful, you'll probably want to turn on Dock magnification: In the Dock preferences pane, check the box by Magnification and adjust the slider.
If you want to get back to a more normal size, the easiest way to revert this setting is to open that preferences pane again and use the Size slider; as soon as you click and drag it, you'll be returned to the normal size range for the Dock.

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