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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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Weekly App Store Roundup: Jan. 3, 2009

Grab a party hat, don your celebratory garb and prepare to get your freak on because, praise be, it’s the first ever Weekly App Store Roundup of 2009.

Indeed, with Macworld drawing near, attendees should immediately check out our very own Conference Schedule – it’ll make sure you’re consistently in the right place at the right time.

In the meantime, those who can’t make it can attend vicariously through TheAppleBlog: we’ll be bringing you the latest Macworld coverage throughout. And, if you can handle even more Apple-happenings being foisted into your giddy brain-box, then read on for my picks from the App Store this week.

This week I’ve been looking at Shoutcast Radio, SledMania, Fnorder and Crayon Physics.
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Mitigating a Missing Mobile Safari Security Feature

In the event you were too distracted by the festivities associated with the ringing in of the new year and missed the news: the internets are broken (again).

To be more specific, what has actually happened is a portion of the trust system that is the foundation of secure transactions on public IP networks has been found to be deficient, mostly due to laziness of services such as Verisign and RapidSSL and lack of knowledge/skill on the part of site owners.

The key to this deficiency lies in how SSL certificates are “signed” (a way of proving their validity). This post is not about the intricacies of public key infrastructure (PKI), so the takeaway is that certificates signed with a hash algorithm called “MD5″ really cannot be trusted anymore and those that are signed with the “SHA-1″ hash algorithm can be trusted (at least to the extent you trust the site you are visiting or the issuer of the certificate). If you are a site owner, make sure your current SSL certs use SHA-1 and insist that your certificate provider/authority (CA) does not use MD5 anymore.
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Getting the Most Out of Leopard's Quick Look Feature
I imagine most people using OS 10.5 have become acquainted with Quick Look, which is one of my favorite Leopard features. Quick Look’s basic function, as its name suggests, is as a quick and convenient way to take a peek at what’s in a file without actually opening the file, switching Finder views or opening the file’s corresponding application.

A quick recap for folks who may have gotten their first Mac for Christmas or recently upgraded to Leopard and not yet discovered Quick Look, just highlight the desired file’s icon in the Finder and press the Spacebar.

If the file is a text document, you’ll see a preview something like this. If it’s not big enough, click an arrow button at the bottom of the Quick Look window and it will zoom to full screen display.

If it’s an image file, the preview will appear like this with another icon beside the full screen zoom toggle icon that you can click if you want to add the picture to your iPhoto photo collection. Quick Look can preview all popular graphics formats such as JPG, TIFF, GIF, PNG, Camera RAW, and Photoshop, as well as PDF.
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Plan Your Macworld 2009 Schedule

At this past year’s SXSW one of the most popular “tools” used by attendees was a web app called SCHED. It was immensely helpful in figuring out what events were offered, who was going, and if you wanted to go.

I’m excited to announce that this is now available for Macworld 2009 courtesy of TheAppleBlog.

If you’ll be attending Macworld next week, this web app is the perfect way to figure out your schedule for the week. Best of all, it’s free. Nothing to pay for, no ads, nothing. Just pure, schedule goodness.

Some nifty features worth noting:
- Create custom schedules - Create an account and create your own personalized schedule that you can hook directly in to iCal.
- Search - There are hundreds of events. Using the search feature you can narrow that down significantly
- Most popular - Find out what events are most popular
- Group calendars - Create group calendars on the fly like so: http://macworld09.theappleblog.com/shpigford,gtmcknight,chirag
- Mobile Safari Version - Just go to http://macworld09.theappleblog.com on your iPhone/iPod touch and get an optimized version.
Hopefully we can pull together a TAB meetup…which of course will be on our SCHED.

Go check it out: http://macworld09.theappleblog.com

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The Ultimate Mac Browser Roundup

If any one application is near and dear to almost every Mac users heart, it is the web browser. With more applications becoming web based, and web applications becoming more complicated, the browser’s appearance, feel, and most of all performance become even more important. 2008 has been a big year for web browsers, with Firefox 3, Safari 3.1, and several massive improvements in javascript performance. 2009 is poised to be even more impressive in browser achievements, with new versions of most browsers in the works, and the promise of a new player with a big impact, Google Chrome.

Each browser was run through the industry standard Acid3 and SunSpider tests.

If you are looking for choice, performance, feel, or appearance, at least one of the 16 browsers below should fit the bill.
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Daily Apple: Thumbs, Cart Before Horse, Jobs Props, More Space, Cheaper, Served Up
We Invented The Thumbnail - Apple, along with Google and Microsoft, are facing another patent holder in yet another legal battle. This time, a Michigan-based company is claiming to have a patent pending on image previews for files and programs, aka thumbnails, which are used in Apple’s Finder and Cover Flow technologies.

Real (Fake) iPhone Nanos! - Rumor has it Apple will be introducing a new, smaller, cheaper version of the iPhone, which has already been dubbed the iPhone Nano by many. It remains to be seen whether or not the leaked cases and dubious looking photos will prove accurate, but there’s already a copycat out there. Pick yours up now in Thailand.

Jobs One of Best Head Honchos, Say Employees - That’s according to a survey by Glassdoor, asking employees to anonymously rate their top bosses. Nearly 300 people filled out the survey, and Jobs placed second, with a very favourable 90 percent. Maybe its his approachable taste in attire?

32GB iPhone at Macworld? - Add another rumor to the growing list surrounding Macworld. This one claims that the upper limit of iPhone storage will finally follow its iPod touch cousin, and double in size to 32GB. Not, by any means, a far-fetched possibility, but also not yet backed up by any reliable sources.

$99 iPhone, Courtesy AT&T - No, it didn’t arrive at Wal-Mart, who just started selling the iPhone at a $2 discount, but AT&T is selling the 8GB model, refurbished, for $99 dollars from now until the end of December. Of course, that’s still with a contract, so don’t go totally crazy.

Apple Home Server at Macworld? - Another Macworld rumor, this time regarding a possible home server-type upgrade for the Time Machine lineup. Check the details in-depth via the link over at 9to5mac.

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iPhone Developer Too Cheap to Buy Icons [UPDATED]
It may be the season of good-will, but one naughty iPhone-developer has decided to play the role of Scrooge in the iTunes App Store.

Movies, created by French developer, Olivier Bernal, went live at the App Store on December 19. The app, retailing at $2.99, allows users to grab essential information on the latest box-office releases.

The icon for Movies clearly features a watermark from iStockphoto, a royalty free image library, implying that rather than purchase the master image, Bernal has pilfered the preview sample.

This particular iStockphoto license (including the ‘Electronic Items for Resale’ addendum) is available for 115 credits. At 95 cents per iStockphoto credit, this would be a one-off cost of $109.25. Bernal would therefore need to generate only 37 sales of Movies to cover the cost of the image license.
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Rolando: Taking iPhone Gaming to the Next Level
Rolando has arrived, amid murmurs that it may be the best game out for iPhone and touch. And with compelling gameplay, awesome artwork and foot-tappingly funky music, it’s certainly my favorite game of the year.

Alongside being the season for frivolity and festivity, it’s that special time of year when the game industry ramps up the release schedule and hustles all the latest would-be hits out their studio doors and on to our computer and console screens.

Looks as good as it plays (cartoon finger not included)

This year, sat next to the DS and PSP, a new contender has joined the handheld race: with the iPhone being touted as a proper platform for gaming, the App Store is bursting at its digital-seams with fresh-faced gaming delights.

One of these bright young things to arrive at the App Store is Rolando, a puzzler-cum-platformer created by London-based game studio HandCircus. The publishers, ngmoco, seem to specialize in releasing weird, wonderful and compulsively fun gaming experiences: the kind of games which play just as good as they look, and they look appetite-whettingly delicious.
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NVIDIA Killed My 2007 MacBook Pro

In mid 2008, amid growing evidence, NVIDIA acknowledged that a significant number of its previous-generation GPUs (graphics processing unit) and MCPs (media and communications processors) for notebooks are failing at higher-than-normal rates. For readers who are not aware of this story, TheAppleBlog covered this piece of news back in October.

Three weeks back, I was personally afflicted by this problem. One fine morning, after arriving at the office of a client, I took my mid-2007 MacBook Pro out of my bag and proceeded to fire it up. The MBP never got past the startup chime; there was only a blank, black screen. I took the usual troubleshooting steps: resetting the PRAM and the SMC, booting from the OS X installation disc and from an external hard drive, and finally, plugging in an external display…all to no avail. It was then that my suspicions turned to the NVIDIA GeForce 8600GT graphics card in the MBP, even though I had not ruled out a misbehaving hard drive.
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Task Management With Things

The latest application from Cultured Code is Things, a task organizer and to-do list manager for Mac and iPhone. It centers around the ideas encompassed in Getting Things Done (GTD) and makes it easy to break down and organize tasks.

Far from being a straight forward To Do list manager, Things provides separation between tasks due now, scheduled for a future date, postponed indefinitely, or completed. Comprehensive features make searching and organizing your tasks a piece of cake.
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Keep Your World Together With Firefox

About seven months ago I made the decision to sell my Macbook and use only my iMac. I love this decision and I don’t regret it, other than one small issue…portability. This isn’t a huge issue but since I do quite a bit of traveling it does cross my mind once in a while.

Traveling without my iMac isn’t to say I go without a computer. I typically am given a loaner, or have a personal computer I am allowed to use on such trips, which is one of the reasons I decided I didn’t need my Macbook. However there is a catch, the computers I use are typically Windows machines. So how do I make the constant switch between the two machines without my own files, applications, or preferences? One simple application…Firefox.

One of the main issues I have with using a strange laptop is my hindered freedom when it comes to installing and customizing applications. However I was given Firefox to work with, which if used properly can be one of the most versatile and practical applications you can have installed. So how can you make Firefox bend over backwards for you?
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One Juicer: Managing the App Store Beast
There are many ways to keep on top of app releases. You could, for instance, just visit the app store on your iPhone and sort the lists by release date. You could also try AppSniper, an application designed solely with keeping tabs on iPhone releases and pricing. Or, you could go with a web or RSS-based solution, like AppShopper. Personally, I use a mix of all of the above, but I still feel like there’s something missing.
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Daily Apple - Update Updates, FFXIII: Awkward Controls, Copywrong, Check Means Yes, & The Vatican
Glitchy 10.5.6 Update Gets Improved - A week after its initial release, Apple has updated their, ahem, update, making it significantly less glitchy. People were experiencing problems with Bluetooth and Mail.app, among others. I jumped the gun, and I haven’t had problems yet, but I don’t generally use Bluetooth, so who knows if I’m fine or just blissfully ignorant.

Square-Enix Brings Game to iPhone/iPod Touch, Forget It Has Touch Controls - Maybe you noticed the new Square-Enix game, Final Fantasy: Crystal Defenders, now available in the App Store. Maybe you, like me, looked at the screenshots and thought “What the heck is that?”. That, apparently, is your on screen joystick, which you use to control the cursor, which controls the characters.

Psystar Lawyers: Maybe OS X Doesn’t Even Exist! - Not quite there yet, but they are claiming Apple didn’t properly copyright the operating system, making it fair game for anyone to use it on any machine. It’s only a matter of time before they claim none of us ever really existed at all.

MobileMe Online Apps Updated - Some much needed updates arrived for the online portion of MobileMe today. One of the most significant updates? the “Keep me logged in for 2 weeks” checkbox now actually does something.

Vatican Backs iPhone App - Yes, iBreviary has received the official Vatican seal of approval. It’s a $0.99 app designed by a Reverend and a web designer that allows users to load a number of different prayers and prayer books. No word yet on Pull My Finger’s still pending application for Papal support.

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SimCity: Create a Bustling Metropolis on Your iPhone

EA dropped SimCity ($9.99) for the iPhone recently, and I actually almost missed it. I was still buzzing over Hero of Sparta and I Love Katamari, both of which are also recent releases.

Of course, I had to put everything on hold and take a crack at SimCity, since the PC versions of the game had occupied so many of my youthful hours. Plus, I was pleased with Spore Origins, so EA had already begun to earn my trust on the iPhone platform. I really hoped they wouldn’t throw that relationship out the door with as precious a title as SimCity.
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Don't Expect Mass Enterprise iPhone Adoption in 2009
The iPhone has a lot of potential for enterprise use. It’s a powerful device, and it supports Exchange synchronization, and more and more, businesses are integrating Apple computers into their current IT loadout. Still, BlackBerry dominates the business market. Especially in more traditional corporate climates, the impetus required for a shift to Apple’s device isn’t there. At an organization I recently left, they were just undertaking BlackBerry adoption, and cautiously at that. Suggesting an iPhone solution would’ve been greeted by blank stares. Some involved in approving purchasing decisions wouldn’t even have known what one was. Yes, it is possible to be that insulated.

I still used my iPhone for work purposes, but not in a way that was fully integrated or supported by our in-house IT. It’s the type of thing that Forrester Research’s Michele Pelino sees as becoming more prevalent as we move in to 2009. Small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs) like the one I mention, according to Pelino, will see more of the iPhone, since their IT infrastructure is less strict, and open to a hodge podge of solutions supplemented by employees’ own equipment. Because of this, she sees iPhone adoption climbing to as much as 10 percent among SMBs.
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