AdventuresInMacOS

Apple today release version 3.0 of it’s iPhone / iPod Touch operating system which was announced at WWDC last week.

New iPhone features include…

• Lanscape keyboard (yay!)
• Peer-to-peer gaming (linking 2 iPods/iPhones over wifi for network games)
• Buy stuff from the iTunes store over WIFI (I thought you could already?)

In addition, iPod Touch users also get the following…

• Shake to Shuffle
• Parental Controls (so you can lock your parents out, presumably?)
• Automatic WIFI login
• Push Notifications even when apps aren’t running
• iTunes Store account creation

There’s even more, as you can see by visiting http://www.apple.com/iphone/softwareupdate/

Sadly, the update costs $9.99 or (£5.99 in the UK) - not too bad, but free would have been better! Definitely worth the update in my opinion.

UPDATE Great article - “iPhone 3.0 Update - 10 Hidden Features“

I’ve recently got really into Twitter, the social media phenomenon. I use TweetDeck, which gives me a great overview of what my followers are up to, who’s talking about me, Musoswire, etc.

One thing that Twitter does allow is hash tags. Hash tags allow you to tag a tweet (a Twitter message) with a phrase, allowing other to search for all tweets relating to a certain topic. Examples of popular hash tags include #followfriday, #blogmonday and #startrek.

But you may have noticed… there is no # key on the Mac keyboard!! So how to do you use hash tags? Well…. the # can be found by holding ALT and pressing 3 on the top row of the keyboard (pressing 3 on the numeric keypad doesn’t work).

It’s a small thing, but I’m really glad to have # back in my life….

Last night a friend of mine was asking how to forcibly remove a CD from his mac drive, cos apparently it had got stuck and wouldn’t come out. I Google’d (as you do), and gave him some answers which I thought I would share with you all in case you’re ever in a similar predicament.

First of all, always try the usual methods. If you’re mac has an eject key on a keyboard, press that and hold it down for a couple of seconds, until you see the eject graphic on-screen. The second method is to drag the CD icon on the desktop into the Trash. Both of these methods should eject the disc.

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The MacOS X operating system is generally pretty stable, but ocassionally things go awry. One element that seems reasonably tempremental are Widgets. Luckily, they’re quite easy to restart…

1. Click on the widget that’s dying on you to give it “focus”
2. Hold the APPLE key and press R
3. The widget will do a little an animation, and should be back working within 30 seconds

And that’s it!

OK, so I’m a bit late on this one! Forgive me, it’s been a busy month…

The annual keynote from Steve Jobs @ the MacWorld Expo is usually something to get very excited about. There’s always something very new and very cool announced, and there’s always a big buzz.

This year was the first time I’d followed the buzz via Twitter (we cancelled Sky TV, so I couldn’t watch it on CNBC or anything..). It was quite incredible to watch the volume of Tweets coming through solely regarding MacWorld. “super cool” as Jobs might say.

Unfortunately, Steve didn’t say anything. He pulled out due to his health (get well Steve!) and was replaced by Phil Schillier, who is (apparently) the “Senior Vice President of Worldwide Marketing”. Nice.

Let’s just say… he’s not Steve Jobs.

Although to be fair, he didn’t really have anything to be Jobs-y about - no real new products, no visions, no slam dunking of the opposition. In fact, the best he had to work with was new version of iLife and iWork. Not exactly the iPhone, really, is it?

Maybe I’m being too hard. It’s not Phil’s fault Apple had nothing cool to show us. All we can do is look forward to MacWorld 2010, and hopefully the return of Steve Jobs!

You can watch Phil’s Keynote speech here.

If you prefer the Firefox browser to Safari or Opera, you might be interested to know that the Mozilla Foundation has today released the final build of Firefox 3 for Windows, MacOS X and Linux.

Apparently, they are trying to break the record for a number of downloads in a 24hr period, so you may want to go download it and contribute to the record attempt.

There’s also an official FF3 launch party in New York, which you may wish to attend. More details courtesy of A VC.

What are you waiting for? Download Firefox 3 now!

I wanted to setup VNC on my server, and a client on my Mac. The idea is to enable easy control of my server from my main desk, rather than having to move to use the server.

So, I’ve been looking for a VNC client for OS X. After much trail and error, I’ve settled on JollyFastVNC by Patrick Stein. It’s a small, lightweight and VERY fast VNC client. Here’s the main screen…

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Fred over at A VC posted a hack (well, more of a workaround really) for gaining cheap WiFi for multiple computers when staying in hotels. 

As it’s all OS X based, I thought it might be of interest…

http://avc.blogs.com/a_vc/2008/03/a-hotel-wifi-ha.html

Cheers Fred!

I’m planning on writing a couple of major articles in the next few days about my experiences with Parallels and VMWare Fusion, but I just wanted to ask… have you looked in the Utilities folder?!

I was looking for a screen-grab tool to take a grab of IE8 (it’s running on Vista in a Fusion virtual machine…), so I wandered around and found Grab, along with a whole host of other stuff, hidden in the Applications/Utilities folder.

I’m not sure how many are unique to Leopard (I suspect not many), but there’s a fair few!�

Gonna have a play with those and report my findings. In the meantime, have you looked in your Utilities folder?

Ok, I’m really gonna have to stop putting exclamation marks in my post titles..

But this time, I really couldn’t help it… the Mac Mini has arrived!! How excited am I? So excited, I haven’t done any work all day! Well, I did a bit this morning, but as soon as the Mac arrived, there was no chance.

I unpacked it immediately. There’s hardly anything in the box…

…the Mac Mini, the power transformer, a plug, a DVI/VGA adaptor, Apple Remote for using Front Row, a completely useless manual (seriously Apple, save the trees…), and the MacOS X CDs. I immediately reorganised my office, and got the thing setup on an old 17″ CRT monitor…
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