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TheAppleBlog
TheAppleBlog, published by and for the day-to-day Apple user, is a prominent source for news, reviews, walkthroughs, and real life application of all Apple products.
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Fashion Your Firefox: Easily Find Add-ons

Today, Mozilla has released Fashion Your Firefox, a new Web application that enables Firefox users to customize their browser based on their interests and online activities. It provides a simple way to find appropriate add-ons that fit your lifestyles, showcasing them in a simple and easy-to-install way.

“One of the best parts about Firefox is the amazing richness of our 5,000-plus free add-ons,” said Mike Shaver, vice president of engineering at Mozilla. This new venture aims to personalize the browsing experience, allowing you to select a category of web user you feel you fit into. The categories you might fall into with Fashion Your Firefox are:
- Shutterbug: View and share pictures and videos online
- Rock Star: Listen to music while surfing, working, emailing or researching online
- News Junkie: Get the most up-to-date news and weather
- Shopaholic: Shop and take advantage of online deals
- Digital Pack Rat: Keep track of favorite sites, bookmarks and blogs
- Social Butterfly: Share, bookmark, and e-mail web pages via an array of social networking & bookmarking sites
- Finder and Seeker: Find and make information on the Web more relevant
- Decorator: Apply browser themes
- Executive Assistant: Organize online activities
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Apple Taking Orders for the 24″ Cinema Display

Apple has today started to take orders for their new 24″ LED Cinema Display. Shipping is stated to start sometime in November, and the screen is priced at $899. We have previously covered the announcement of the new displays and detailed their features.

This new device is the first display designed to make use of the new Mini DisplayPort currently only present in Apple’s notebook line. It sports Mini DisplayPort, USB and MagSafe connectors to really expand the experience of using a notebook. There’s also a built-in iSight camera, microphone, and speaker system that provide a “true desktop experience” — something not present on previous cinema displays. The addition of a notebook charging cable has been well received, and in-built DisplayPort may go some way to alleviate the problem with a shortage of converters.
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The iPhone Gets Stickier With Glue
I’m a social kind of guy. On the web, that means I’m a social media kind of guy. Which is why I was interested in Glue, a service from AdaptiveBlue that turns Firefox into one big trip to Indigo/DVD night/book club/music exchange. Now Glue for iPhone brings the same kind of experience to your mobile phone, so that you will never be too far away from someone else’s opinion about something you love again.

First, a little about the full, Firefox extension-based Glue network. Basically, you set up a profile (which can conveniently be drawn from your Facebook profile, no additional setup required) and sign in. Once logged in, whenever you visit a movie, book, or music product page, the Glue toolbar will appear at the top of the site, allowing you to interact on the item in question. You can read a summary of the product, find it on Amazon, YouTube, Rotten Tomatoes, and other sites, see recent friends who’ve interacted with it, recommend it to others and add comments. It’s almost like an instant-on Digg or delicious for multimedia products.
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Versions Subversion GUI Hits 1.0
Versions, the GUI-based Subversion client for the Mac, is now out of beta. It must have been at least a year ago, that I remember seeing some screenshots for Versions, and the development community drooled. But we had to wait. And waiting was hard.

Fast-forward to this summer when the first public-beta of Versions became available for download. You should have seen Twitter. Web and softare developers were giddy. Since then we’ve seen several updates to an already very nice beta, culminating with the 1.0 version, available today.

Versions offers the ability to visually browse repositories, see changes in your working copies, and easily set up new projects. There’s also a nice timeline view, letting you go back and see all the old edits on files and folers. Versions even gives you an easy way to set up a free remote repository using Beanstalk.

The GUI-based Subversion client idea isn’t new. There are a few applications, like svnX, that have been around for quite awhile. However, if you compare the screenshots and features between Versions and svnX, you can see why Versions is getting the buzz that it is.

Another application to keep an eye on is Cornerstone, which is looking very good. Cornerstone just debuted this summer and seems to be giving Versions a run for its money. This is a fantastic situation, much like VMWare Fusion and Parallels, where we get to see two excellent applications in competition against each other to make the best program.

Versions is a joint venture by Pico and Sofa. It requires Mac OS X 10.4.9 or higher (10.5.2 is recommended). You can download and try Versions for free for 21 days. After that it will set you back around $50.

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Will the MacBook Air Get a Carbon Fiber Bottom?
According to a rumor making the rounds last week, Apple is said to be exploring potential for using more exotic materials in the next revision MacBook Air. Appleinsider’s Kasper Jade reports that scuttlebutt suggests Apple is unsatisfied with the Air’s three-pound weight and looking into substituting carbon fiber as a fabrication material for a structural component currently cast from heavier aircraft-grade aluminum.

Carbon fiber is an extremely strong, lightweight and very expensive composite material — a species of fiber-reinforced plastic analogically similar to familiar glass-reinforced plastic (”fiberglass”). Carbon fibers themselves are only one component of the material’s composite matrix, the other being some sort of plastic resin such as epoxy, polyester, vinyl ester or nylon. Some nominal “carbon fiber” composites also contain other fibers like kevlar, aluminum, polypropylene, or glass fiber reinforcement.

Amazingly Strong

Carbon fiber itself (a tip of the hat to Wikipedia here) consists of extremely thin fibers about 0.0002–0.0004 inches (0.005–0.010 mm) in diameter and composed mostly of carbon atoms bonded together in microscopic crystals which are roughly aligned parallel to the long axis of the fiber. This crystal alignment makes the fiber incredibly strong for its bulk and weight. Several thousand carbon fibers are twisted together to form a yarn, which may be used by itself or woven into a fabric of extremely high strength-to-weight ratio material.

This combination of qualities has made carbon fiber composites a popular, albeit expensive, choice for use in aerospace, sailboat, sporting, musical instrument, consumer products, motor racing and motorcycle industries, where it’s been incorporated in everything from aircraft parts and laptop computers to bicycle frames and drum shells.
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ARM-Optimized Flash: Adobe Serious About iPhone
The ongoing back-and-forth between Apple and Adobe over Flash on the iPhone is well-documented. First it was, then wasn’t, then was, then probably wasn’t again a possibility. If we take Apple CEO Steve Jobs at his word, then the problem lies with Flash being too heavy and Flash Lite being too insubstantial. And as it stands, Flash appears to violate the existing terms of the SDK, an area where Apple seems unwilling to be flexible.

The latest move in this complicated chess game is by Adobe, and it’s not a direct retort. Instead, MacNN reports the multimedia powerhouse is announcing today that they will be rolling out an ARM-optimized version of Flash 10 in 2009, while not mentioning any specific phones by name. Of course, iPhone followers will know that the current processor for Apple’s cellular device is the Samsung ARM 1176, meaning that it would benefit from Adobe’s proposed optimization.
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Learning From Apple, Part 2: Resources & Free Online Seminars

In a previous article I described the abundant tutorials and tips Apple supplies online for their various software products. In this article I'll examine two other ways Apple provides learning tools for their software.

Resources

Apple's resources pages contain numerous links to information on a particular product. This can be information both inside and outside of Apple.

A typical resources page may list downloads available for the product, Apple support/discussion forums, third-party web sites, upcoming seminars, third-party books, links to PDF manuals, etc.
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