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News, reviews, walkthroughs, and real-life application of Apple products
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TechUniversity: Kidproofing Your Mac
Keeping your kids safe and out of trouble on the Mac is easy with the help of the OS X Parental Controls and a few third-party tools.

In this TechUniversity screencast on Kidproofing Your Mac (subscription required), we’ll take you through what needs to be done and what tools are available to keep your kids safe.

Topics include…
- Limiting application usage
- Website restrictions
- Mail and iChat restrictions
- Setting time limits
- Checking web and chat logs
- Third-party web filtering
Below is a sample of the video. The full screencast clocks in at just over 11 minutes.

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WWDC 2010 Videos Now Available on ADC
Earlier this year, Apple restructured its Developer Program bringing the Mac developer program into the same $99/year subscription fee as the iPhone Developer Program. Just prior to WWDC, registered attendees to the conference were treated to a surprise of gaining access to all of the WWDC 2009 conference videos. Now, in a similar move, Apple has made the WWDC 2010 Conference Videos available for free to the Apple Developer Community via a special iTunes link from the ADC site.

Attending WWDC for the first time this year, I was not prepared for the overall quality of the conference itself. It really was a very well put together conference; in fact, I would go so far as to say it is among the best if not the best conference I have ever been part of. And I have been to, spoken at, and even helped put together my fair share of conference over the years. So what makes this conference so different from the rest?

Over 1,000 Apple engineers on site throughout the week. That’s a lot of talented individuals, and these talented individuals are all put to good use. The overall quality of each and every presentation was impressive. They were all as well polished and of the same professional style of the one delivered in the keynote by Steve Jobs, and equal in quality to that of each state of the union presentation also delivered on that first Monday. It is as if there is a special training class that all Apple staff must take to make them all professional iWork Keynote experts. Very little variance in the slide design. And each used animations as well as visual graphics to bring each particular point across brilliantly.

Then there was the delivery of each presentation. We are talking about engineers and IT managers for the most part. Not the best speakers in the world one would think. But one would be mistaken given that this is Apple we are talking about. Most presentations were tag teamed, and several different individuals took the stage to present a sub section of material for each topic. In one presentation in particular, I do recall that an engineer made a mistake in a highly technical demo, started to choke in front of hundreds of fellow developers, and instantly was replaced on stage with a fellow presenter that took over right where he left off, and continued the presentation. This was required as most presentations ended exactly on time like clockwork with little time to spare. Don’t expect getting out early at WWDC. These topics are jammed packed of useful information.
More on WWDC
This information should not be taken lightly either. The topics were very well thought out and seemed to lead developers in the direction of raising the bar of the overall quality of applications in the App Store today. Not only did these sessions introduce several new opportunities to design a better application, or redesign an existing application solely based on some of the new APIs and multi-tasking capabilities, but they also more clearly defined some of the core competencies of developing for iOS 4 and even changed the development life cycle itself by showing how and when to use specific instruments to make Apps better.

Given the clearly stated goal that Apple has for all of the apps being marketed in the App Store to be a cut above the rest, it only makes sense that Apple releases all of the session videos from this years WWDC freely to all registered developers. Development teams that invest the time necessary to review and adopt some of the concepts that are presented will be in a much better position to build better applications than those who do not.

So the ball is in your court, the sessions are there, online waiting to be viewed. Before you submit that new or updated app to Apple, take a brief look at some of the sessions, and see if there is not a thing or two you can use to make that next submission a better one.

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Find My iPhone: Now Available On Your iPhone
Apple has been on a kick releasing new applications for its iOS devices over the past few weeks. First, there was the iTunes Connect app, then there was the Apple Store app, and now, coinciding with a redesigned MobileMe, Apple has released the native Find My iPhone app for both the iPhone and the iPad.

Apple is no stranger to the fact that a growing majority of its customers own more than one Apple product. Seeing numbers like two million iPads in two months and 600,000 iPhone 4′s in the first day only add weight to this argument. To make it easier for users to keep up with their iDevices, Apple introduced the Find My iPhone feature in MobileMe that can use GPS (or Wi-Fi if the device is on) to locate your iPhone, iPad or iPod touch.

If you haven’t had a chance to use it or if you’re not a MobileMe subscriber, it’s a very compelling reason to consider Apple’s cloud-based service. Beyond just being able to locate an iOS device on a Google map, you can also remotely lock it, remotely wipe it, or push a message notification and sound to the device. Maybe you lose your prototype iPhone 4 at a bar and you need to remotely lock it or push a message to it saying “Please don’t post this prototype iPhone on Gizmodo.” MobileMe’s Find My iPhone service has you covered.

Some people do criticize the service for not pinpointing a super accurate position of where the device is located, so this is a great opportunity to point out a few technical limitations (such as GPS does not work indoors). However, if you’ve ever had your iOS device stolen, locating your device on a map is still very useful.

Apple’s MobileMe solution is great, if you happen to have access to a web browser to make use of it. But for those times where you are on your iOS device, logging into MobileMe and navigating to Find My iPhone can be time consuming. Apple’s free Find My iPhone app eases the burden.

The first Apple app to natively support the iPad, besides iBooks and the iWork apps, the Find My iPhone app keeps track of all iOS devices attached to your MobileMe account and brings the same great features like remote lock and remote wipe to your iOS device.

Find My iPhone on the web has also seen some updates, including a refreshed interface and displaying locations on a full screen map.

Check out the free app from the app store and let us know what you think! Is Find My iPhone the reason why you use MobileMe? Have you ever used the Find My iPhone message and sound notifications to help you find your iPhone under a pile of dirty laundry in your apartment? Or as a way to send free text messages to your spouse’s iOS device?

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MobileMe Gets a Makeover
MobileMe has just gotten a makeover, featuring the new webmail, now out of beta, and a refreshed navigation system.

A little over a month ago, Apple introduced a new beta version of webmail for MobileMe. The new version supported features like widescreen or compact views, mail rules, single-click archiving, faster performance and better security and more. Now that the new webmail is out of beta, Apple has unwrapped a few additional features.

Support for External Emails

You’ve always been able to read Mail from external accounts but a new feature (since the beta) will allow you to reply to emails and make it appear to be coming from that account.

The way this process works is a little strange though. Basically, you setup your email account, for example, a Gmail account, to forward its messages to MobileMe. Then you setup MobileMe with a “Send From” account. Your emails will then be sent through the SMTP server of your original email account (the Gmail account in this example) and to your receiver will appear to be coming from your original account. In practice, the setup works pretty well, though it’s still not true external IMAP support, which would be nice. On the plus side, you can add as many of these external accounts as you wish, a welcome upgrade from the previous version.

Improved Junk Mail Filtering

Another new feature since the beta is automatic support for tagging emails as Junk, similar to how Junk Mail filtering works in Mail on OS X. If it messes up and there’s an email you want that’s not junk, just click “Not Junk.”

New Navigation

Pulling a design cue from OS X, the navigation bar has disappeared from MobileMe and been replaced with something akin to the application switcher on the Mac. Clicking the Cloud icon (or using the keyboard shortcut shift + escape) will bring up the Application Switcher, allowing you to easily move to another MobileMe app.

Beyond just the Application Switcher, the refreshed blue navigation bar has also been extended to the other areas of MobileMe, bringing updated icons along with it. Most of the other MobileMe cloud apps function the same, but the Find My iPhone app also got a makeover (coinciding with the Find My iPhone native app).

What do you think of the new MobileMe changes? Do you prefer to use MobileMe through its web interface or just through your Mac or iOS device? Tell us what you think about the new webmail or how you think Apple could make it better!

For those interested in cloud computing or data centers, check out our Structure conference in June.

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