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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.
http://theappleblog.com
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Wall Street Journal, NPR to Open iPad-Only Websites
At least two major news media outlets aren’t going to let the iPad’s lack of Flash support keep owners of Apple’s latest creation away from their content. The Wall Street Journal (WSJ) and National Public Radio (NPR) are working on iPad-specific versions of their websites, set to launch next month alongside the official ship date of the iPad.

The websites will launch automatically whenever someone navigates to either NPR.org or WSJ.com, and will replace the standard sites, both of which feature pretty significant quantities of Flash content. Peter Kafka at MediaMemo also notes that this workaround ensures that iPad owners will be able to access content from the two news sources without the organizations having to rush out a dedicated iPad application.

According to Kafka, NPR is in the process of developing such an application, but it won’t necessarily be ready in time for the iPad’s launch. Also, having two options available for iPad owners means that no matter what a customer’s preference, they should be able to access all of NPR’s content. Just after the device hits the streets, consumer frenzy will probably be at its most heady, so anyone ready to go on day one stands to benefit the most by way of picking up new readers and/or customers.

The Wall Street Journal, which is owned by Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp. is doing something along the same lines, although it will be more sound and fury than substance. While NPR’s site is getting a complete overhaul, the WSJ will have a Flash-free front page, but if you start delving deeper into content, you’ll run into those annoying little mystery Lego icons. The WSJ and other sites using this tactic will likely wait and see how popular the iPad actually becomes before devoting many resources to a full-scale conversion.

Related Research from GigaOM Pro:
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BlackBerry to Lose More Ground to iPhone, Android: Survey
A new survey by research firm Crowd Science brings bad news for BlackBerry maker RIM, and some good news for Apple. The company that comes out best of all, though, is Google, whose Android operating system seems poised to see some major growth in the near future.

The survey, which Crowd Science performs semi-annually, addresses smartphone brand loyalty. This time around, it found that iPhone and Android customers were well satisfied with their choice of smartphone, but that BlackBerry is hemorrhaging users badly to both of those primary competitors.

A little over 90 percent of both iPhone and Android smartphone owners plan to stay with that OS when they purchase their next device, while nearly 40 percent of BlackBerry owners said they would opt for an iPhone next time around, and 34 percent said they’d go with Android instead of a RIM device.

It’s bad news for the Waterloo, Ontario-based BlackBerry maker, and this latest survey shows that Apple isn’t exclusively to blame for the company’s steady decline. According to Crowd Science CEO John Martin:

These results show that the restlessness of Blackberry users with their current brand hasn’t just been driven by the allure of iPhone. Rather, Blackberry as a brand just isn’t garnering the loyalty seen with other mobile operating systems.

For me, the real surprise is not that many are dissatisfied with RIM, which seems to have done very little but make incremental cosmetic upgrades with its devices over the last couple of years, but that Android is nearly matching the iPhone in terms of consumer awareness and desire.

Apple still has the advantage in terms of who its customers are and what kind of money they’re willing to spend — and on what — though. iPhone owners tend to be slightly older and more affluent, and are much more likely to buy paid applications compared to other smartphone users. Android owners skew younger and less affluent, and accordingly are much less likely to spend money on paid applications. And they do download more free apps than any other user group.

Finally, the Nexus One is making a big splash, even if it isn’t selling in droves. Android awareness in general jumped six percentage points to 66 percent since the last survey period, and 32 percent of BlackBerry owners would swap their current devices for a Nexus One right away, given the chance. That number jumps to 60 percent for users of smartphones not made by Apple or BlackBerry.

While RIM is the company that should really be scared by the results of this survey, Apple shouldn’t exactly be patting itself on the back, either. Android is making steady gains, especially among current smartphone users, and they seem to have scored a special place in the hearts of young consumers, which, when combined with the 90 percent-plus brand loyalty result, could pay off huge going forward.

Related GigaOM Pro Research (sub req’d):

Report: Surveying the Mobile App Store Landscape

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How-To: Create a Custom User Template in Snow Leopard

Setting up your OS to your liking can be an art for some. What if you need to set up Snow Leopard to present every user with the same look and settings? By following these steps you can have every user who logs into the machine receive the same look, feel and preferences that you desire. What we’ll be doing is creating a new user, setting it up to look how we want, then copying the settings so every new user will get those preferences.

Setting Everything Up
1. Login under your admin account and open up Accounts pane in System Preferences.
2. Click the + to create a new Standard user.
3. As an example, we’ll use the name testuser.
4. Log off and log back in as testuser.
5. Set everything up the way you want. I customized the Dock, Safari’s home page and the Finder preferences.
6. When you are done customizing, log off the testuser account.
Copying the Files
1. Login under your admin account.
2. Navigate to the /System/Library folder in Finder.
3. Right-click on the User Template folder and choose Get info.
4. By default, you cannot browse this folder. Change the permissions so Everyone has Read & Write permissions.
5. Now we can open up the User Template folder & copy the English.lproj folder to your desktop. This will be our backup copy in case we want to restore it back.
6. Open up Terminal and navigate to the User Template folder.
  cd /System/Library/User Template/English.lproj
7. Copy the testuser folder over, which will replace the defaults. You may get errors about some files that can’t be replaced. I haven’t seen it cause any issues though.
  sudo cp -R ~testuser/* .
  sudo cp -R ~testuser/.* .
8. Change the permissions for the User Template folder back so everyone has No Access again.
Test it Out
1. Create a new user to verify everything worked. I used the name testuser2.
2. Log off as admin and log back in as testuser2.
3. You will now see your customized settings. These will be used for all new users created on the system from this point on.
Conclusion

To put everything back the way it was, log in as admin and copy the English.lproj backup file on your desktop back to the /System/Library/User Template folder.

If you have a lab of Macs but aren’t using Open Directory, this is a nice solution to maintain some control over the OS presentation. This change will only affect new users. It has no effect on existing users, so keep that in mind. If you start getting constant requests for more customizations similar to this, setup a Snow Leopard Server and start using Workgroup Manager. The changes can be much easier to implement but the Server solution has a larger price-tag for that convenience.

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