Iphone Updates

Skitch is one of our favorite apps here at TUAW. In case you haven’t heard of it, Skitch is a very cool screen capturing app that makes it easy to capture stuff on your Mac’s screen, do some basic editing, and then share it with your friends via FTP, Flickr, or Skitch’s own service.

Skitch has been in private beta since Macworld 2007, but now you can get your hands on a beta version of your very own. My Mac has become ten times more useful to me with Skitch installed, so do yourself a favor and get this app posthaste.

If you head on over to the NY Times today, you’ll find an especially cute and well-done advertisement from Apple. In this, PC reacts to the Wall Street Journal quote in the banner ad and amends the pro-Apple ad by pasting “NOT” at the end of “Leopard is better and faster than Vista”. Be aware: watching the ad pretty much brought my 733 G4 to its knees and I couldn’t get the sound to work but since PC is my virtual advertisement boyfriend[1], watching the ad was a must-do.

[1] C’mon. Both you and I know that he secretly owns Apple products at home[2].

[2] I mean, really, who prefers ad-Mac to ad-PC? Readers? Do you? Speak up in the comments!

I’m a big fan of Etymotic headphones, and as soon as I got an iPhone I knew I wanted to replace the very cool included headphone/headset with something by Etymotic. Sadly, they didn’t make such a product, that is until Macworld. That’s right, campers, the hf2 from Etymotic combines the great sound from their ER-4 earphones with a headset so you can get all that great noise isolating action that Etymotic is known for and still be able to answer calls without pulling the headphones out.

The hf2′s cost $179 and are available now.

A big-old thank you to everyone who has written in to let us know that you can finally manage your iPhone media manually. Instead of having to sync the last 3 unwatched episodes of some show or another, you can just drag the shows you want to watch right onto that iPhone. Readers over at the Apple Support Boards are just as happy as I am. Select the Manually Manage Music checkbox and click Apply.

Yay!

Soon after Steve Jobs announced the new 1.1.3, Emil Hedaya realized that a simple meta-refreseh redirect would allow him to create custom icons for any webclip. All you need is a website of your own. You link to your custom pages and have them redirect you to the sites in question.

To demonstrate this he’s put together a set of iPhone shortcuts to his favorite sites (including Meebo, Fandango, Flickr and more). If you navigate to his page and webclip off those links, you’ll create some great looking icons on your SpringBoard Home page instead of the dull defaults.

With the installation of this major software upgrade, the best iPod becomes even more: the world’s best Wi-Fi mobile device. The upgrade—available from iTunes for just $19.99—adds five more great mobile applications to iPod touch: Mail, Maps, Stocks, Weather, and Notes. It also includes such new features as Web Clips, a customizable home screen, and the ability to watch iTunes Movie Rentals on iPod touch.

09:24am PST: Steve Jobs announces new features for the iPhone along with an already known iPhone SDK release in February.

iPhone v1.1.3 features include Google Maps cell tower triangulation called Skyhook Wireless for virtual GPS to pinpoint your general location and give directions to where ever. Skyhook Wireless has driven all around the USA in their vehicles and collected physical location data for triangulation. Google Maps also allows you to drop a pin on any location you’d like to add to memory. SMS now works like email, allowing one SMS to be sent to multiple individuals. You can now add bookmark icons called Webclips to websites on your home screen. You can add up to 9 pages of these Webclips on Springboard. Icons can now be moved around the screen and placed anywhere within the 9 pages of springboard. Lyrics can also now be obtained and placed transparently over album art.

All of the updates are available as a software update for free today.

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Less than half an hour until Steve Jobs’ Macworld Keynote, and over at SlashGear Vincent & James are waiting to go in to livecast the whole event. 

 

Will we see an ultraportable MacBook Air?  What about a 3G iPhone?  Check out the Livecast and find out!

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Available today with the free download of iTunes 7.6, iTunes Movie Rentals allows customers to rent movies for as little as $2.99 and watch them on their Macs or PCs, all current generation iPods, iPhone and Apple TV. Featuring movies from all the major movie studios—20th Century Fox, The Walt Disney Studios, Warner Bros., Paramount, Universal Studios Home Entertainment, Sony Pictures Entertainment, Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer (MGM), Lionsgate and New Line Cinema—iTunes Movie Rentals is expected to offer more than 1,000 movie titles by the end of February, including over 100 titles featuring stunning high definition video with 5.1 Dolby Digital surround sound. Movies can be rented directly from a widescreen TV using Apple TV.

Available as a free automatic download later this month, the new software announced today lets movie fans rent movies on the iTunes Store directly from their widescreen TV. With iTunes Movie Rentals and Apple TV—and with no computer required—customers can effortlessly rent movies just by clicking a button on their remote. By the end of February, they’ll be able to choose from a catalog of more than 1,000 titles, including over 100 titles in stunning high definition video with 5.1 Dolby Digital surround sound. DVD-quality iTunes Movie Rentals cost just $2.99 for library titles and $3.99 for new releases. High-definition versions are just one dollar more with library titles at $3.99 and new releases at $4.99.

The brothers Aspeslagh first wowed us with their award-winning iPhone video-conferencing app – and the mirrors needed to turn the handset’s rear-mounted camera into a forward-facing one – and now they’re back with software that streams video from the iPhone to a Mac via the WiFi connection.

 

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Twentieth Century Fox and Apple today announced iTunes Digital Copy for iTunes, which provides customers who purchase a DVD of a Fox movie title with an additional Digital Copy of the movie. The iTunes Digital Copy can be transferred effortlessly to iTunes and then viewed on a PC or Mac, iPod with video, iPhone or on Apple TV—just like a movie purchased and downloaded from the iTunes Store. In fact, the first DVD to debut with iTunes Digital Copy is being released in stores today. It’s the Special Edition DVD premiere of the Family Guy “Star Wars” parody, “Family Guy Presents: Blue Harvest,” and the first of many more to come.

Expect a huge EyeTV upgrade this Tuesday. TUAW has learned that Elgato plans to release EyeTV 3.0 on Keynote day. The upgrade will be paid (free updates for anyone who bought EyeTV 2 or a tuner after Dec 1 2007) and promises lots of new features. I’m a huge EyeTV fan–I bought mine last year during their Macworld special–and am looking forward to seeing what the Elgato guys have packed into this release.

UPDATE: We just found out a conflict with the Typical Mac User talkcast, so we’re moving the TUAW talkcast to 8:30pm ET, 5:30 PT.

This East Coast-West Coast thing is messing with our talkcast scheduling — we’ll be doing a special earlier show at 8:30 pm ET, 5:30 pm PT to stay clear of the all-important San Francisco cocktail hour. Engineering permitting, we’ll actually have multiple bloggers in the same room for the first time on the show; this should be fascinating. As always, can listen in on Talkshoe or call in on regular or VOIP lines; if you want to join in the chat, you’ll need a Talkshoe account and the client app.

The agenda for Sunday is 100% reader feedback, so you can let us know exactly what you want to see covered from Macworld Expo. We are hitting town with a five-person team this year, in addition to our alumni and colleagues at Engadget and Download Squad, so if you want us to track down the tiniest booth in the West Hall, we’re on it. Call in and give us our marching orders!

On Monday evening, schedules permitting, we’ll do another brief show to wrap up the predictions and rumors before the Big Tuesday Shindig. Keep an eye on the Talkshoe page for details.

Mac developer Ecamm has posted a sneak peak of iPhoneCam, an application that uses your iPhone’s camera as a wireless Mac webcam. You can stream video from your iPhone over its WiFi to any Mac video application, including iChat, Photo Booth, or Skype.

I have participated in one iPhone chat and while it’s not exactly the most comfortable way to use a webcam, you’ve got to admit using an iPhone is way up there on the cool quotient. You can watch a demo video here.

Just as there are multiple ways to save Automator workflows, there are also multiple ways to save AppleScripts. In this how-to, I will show you ways in which you can save your AppleScripts for future use.

Read on for all the details.

Continue reading AppleScript: saving scripts

Team TUAW will be covering Macworld 2008 in full force. We’ll have five people covering every aspect of the Expo. We’ll be doing tons of video stuff, liveblogging the keynote (bookmark this URL and get ready to refresh like crazy), twittering, sending out SMS updates, and talking to the Mac celebs, Mac developers, and Mac fans that converge on San Francisco every year.

You’ll notice a ‘Macworld Coverage‘ link on the top right of TUAW’s website. That’ll get you to all our Macworld 2008 posts, and you can even subscribe to that tag’s RSS feed if you don’t care about the rest of TUAW’s post during Expo week.

Sound off in the comments if you have anything in particular you would like to see included in TUAW’s Macworld coverage, and if you’re at the Expo why not say hello to us if you see us running around?

This time in Ask TUAW we’ll tackle questions on using your Mac as a WAP, limiting the amount of space Time Machine uses, recording shows from a cable box on your Mac, accessing the Mac partition from Windows in Boot Camp, and more.

As always your suggestions are most welcome, and questions for next week should be left in the comments. And now, to the questions!

Continue reading Ask TUAW: Mac as WAP, limiting Time Machine, recording cable and more

Steve Jobs doesn’t particularly strike me as someone who takes rejection well, especially when it’s his iPhone-baby that’s being turned down, so I can’t imagine things are particularly happy on this, the eve of the Macworld Keynote, with the news that China Mobile has rejected the Apple cellphone and pulled out of talks with the company.  While no official statement was made explaining their reasons, many have assumed that the high percentages of revenue Apple demanded from handset sales and game, music and video downloads were enough to sour any potential deal.  China Mobile’s CEO, Wang Jianzhou, has been vocally dismissive of revenue sharing in the past, and the network is obviously in a strong position being the largest in the country.

 

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This is probably one of the coolest freeware applications on the Mac that I’ve seen in a while. Have you ever placed a disc in your Mac’s drive, only to shut it down with the disc still in there? I know I have a couple of times. Now you will never do that again, thanks to DiscTop. When you load a CD or DVD into your Mac, DiscTop displays a disc-like icon on the desktop, letting you know that you currently have a disc inserted. When you eject the disc, the icon zooms off the screen.

The coolest thing about DiscTop is that when you insert a known DVD (say, The Simpsons Movie) you can set the artwork via an Amazon search and display it over top of the DVD icon. DiscTop even asks you what type of Mac you use and then positions the disc accordingly. For instance, I have an iMac Core Duo (early 2006 model), so when I use that profile DiscTop will make sure the disc’s icon is positioned where the optical drive is located. Very cool!

If you want to give DiscTop a spin it’s freeware and available at the developers website.

Dephi has been designing a concept application for real time control over a car. Using an iPhone and a GM Acadia, Delphi was able to demonstrate their concept by starting the car, rolling down the windows, and displaying real-time RPM data via the iPhone. This application is used with nothing more than a WiFi connection and Safari. Delphi is currently working on bluetooth capability without adding any more bulk to the device.

Head on over to Gizmodo to check out a video of Delphi’s concept car control webapp.

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The application Listen, developed by Erica Sadun is nothing new amongst cell phone users of other brands and service providers, but for iPhone users on AT&T, it’s a brand new sight. Listen takes a sample of a song and then looks for it in a song database. Listen then provides a Song Title, Artist, and Album name. Listen lets you search for the song on iTunes or email the information. All listen requires is that you hold the iPhone to the speaker and wait until it’s done recording the 5 second sample.

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All signs are pointing to an announcement of iTunes movie rentals at Tuesday’s Macworld Expo; that’s the conclusion drawn after a Bloomberg report quoted “people familiar” with Apple’s upcoming addition to the media download service.  Newcomers Warner Bros. and Fox will join existing studio partners Paramount, Walt Disney Co. and Lions Gate Entertainment Corp. in making their films available for temporary download, priced at $3.99 for 24hrs.

 

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Together with his intrepid film crew, documentary filmmaker Drew Wharton often found himself within feet of enormous bellowing 4,500 pound alpha males clashing mightily over females in estrus. It is A Seal’s Life, after all. The film (which debuted at the Monterey Bay Aquarium) tells the story of the world’s largest seal species—the northern Elephant Seal—behemoths that come ashore once a year to give birth, molt, and mate. “Apple technology saves me a ton of time and money,” notes Wharton, who edited the film in Final Cut Studio. “Our whole workflow is based on Macs, from field acquisition to post production. A Seal’s Life was made on a Mac from start to finish—for me, it didn’t make sense to do it any other way.”

From iTunes U, which lets students take educational podcasts on the road; to the computational tools running on Xserves, which allow students to see and explore the structure, function, and behavior of molecules; to the Digital Academic Television Network, which delivers live TV via a network connection using QuickTime as a client), Macintosh computers, servers, and software help educators articulate the “Wisconsin Idea.” Erasing completely the “borders of learning,” they depend on the Mac to let learning go on—for students and teachers alike—anywhere and at anytime.

The iPhone truly has come of age, with the first identified “in the wild” trojan for the cellphone being flagged up by security specialists Symantec and F-Secure.  “113 prep” or “iPhone firmware 1.1.3 prep”, as the malicious code is known, was first mentioned on ModMyiPhone.com, where users reported rogue software displaying the message “shoes” after they visited a third-party site and installed a bogus package claiming to be the leaked firmware upgrade.

 

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Marc Saltzman (usatoday.com) offers another reason to love your iPod: “great games. More than 20 downloadable digital diversions are now offered including Ms. Pac-Man,Sudoku,Texas Hold ‘Em and soon, Pole Position: Remix, based on Namco’s early ’80s arcade racing game.” In his CyberSpeak column, Saltzman also takes a close look at two of the latest games for iPod, ”Peggle” and “Phase.”

Having run through a couple of beta releases, it’s now prime time for FileMaker’s consumer-level organizer DB: Bento is shipping today in advance of Macworld Expo. The “database for soccer moms” product is $49 for a single user license, $99 for a family pack. We’ve got screen shots from Bento in our gallery for your perusal.

Note that Bento requires Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard, so if you were planning to deploy it to your uncle’s aging eMac, you might want to reconsider.

Please don’t go topless to Macworld. TUAW will be giving the rest of our t-shirts away next week, but for those of you who can’t make it to Macworld 2008 still have a chance to win a shirt. Six lucky winners will receive a TUAW shirt in their choice of large, medium or small (sorry, XL is no longer available). If you forgot what the shirts look like, here’s the gallery.

On to the rules:
o. To enter, leave a comment on this post (and validate it so it appears).
o. The comment must be left before 11:59pm EST. Contest ends at 11:59pm Eastern, January 8.
o. You may enter once.
o. Six winners will be selected in a random drawing.
o. Each winner will receive a TUAW t-shirt in their choice of Large, Medium or Small. One t-shirt per winner.

Complete Official Rules after the jump.

Continue reading TUAW t-shirts, just in time for Macworld 2008

Well, as Nik posted a bit earlier this morning, the Apple Store is indeed down worldwide. As commenters in that post noted, Apple has updated the Mac Pro line before major trade shows before, and as commenter John pointed out, Apple has just updated the front page of Apple.com announcing upgrades to the Mac Pro and Xserve line. I think it’s a pretty safe bet that these machines will be available as soon as the Apple Store comes back online.

So what are the specs? For the Mac Pro the machines are now 8-core standard (!) running up to 3.2 Ghz each (and this is on the new 45 nanometer Quad-Core Xeon). “Fastest Mac ever” is a phrase bandied around a lot — but in this case, it’s absolutely true.

From the press release, the basic configuration ($2799 US) includes:

• two 2.8 GHz Quad-Core Intel Xeon processors with dual-independent 1600 MHz front side buses;
• 2GB of 800 MHz DDR2 ECC fully-buffered DIMM memory, expandable up to 32GB;
• ATI Radeon HD 2600 XT with 256MB of GDDR3 memory;
• 320GB Serial ATA 3Gb/s hard drive running at 7200 rpm;
• 16x SuperDrive[TM] with double-layer support (DVD±R DL/DVD±RW/CD-RW);
• two PCI Express 2.0 slots and two PCI Express slots;
• Bluetooth 2.0+EDR; and
• ships with Apple Keyboard and Mighty Mouse.

Full CTO options are detailed in the press release linked above.

As for the Xserve, it now includes built-in accelerated graphics to drive up to a 23″ Cinema Display and front facing USB 2.0 ports. It is also taking advantage of the new Intel 45 nanometer core technology.

The basic configuration ($2999 US) includes:

• a single 64-bit 2.8 GHz Quad-Core Xeon processor with 12MB of L2 cache and a 1600 Mhz front side bus;
• 2GB of 800 MHz DDR2 ECC FB-DIMM RAM, expandable up to 32GB;
• a single 80GB SATA Apple Drive Module;
• dual Gigabit Ethernet on-board;
• internal graphics;
• two FireWire(R) 800 and three USB 2.0 ports; and
• an unlimited client license for Mac OS X Server version 10.5 Leopard.

The unlimited client license for Leopard OS X Server is pretty fantastic, as are the power and cooling specs. Full configuration details can be found in the press release here.

Thanks to all our tipsters who noticed that, indeed, the Apple Store is down at the moment all around the world. Unusual? Perhaps. It is after all the week before Macworld. But then again, it’s a Tuesday morning, and we all know that Apple chooses this day of the week to jest with us….

We’ll let you know if there’s any changes online.

Picture it: you’re riding in the car and a great song comes on the radio. You’re dying to know what it is so you can go buy it ASAP but there’s no satellite radio receiver to tell you what’s playing. How can you find out what song it is? Whip out your iPhone, put it near the car speakers, and watch the screen. Poof! There’s the song, artist, and album.

No, I am not kidding.

Our own Erica Sadun was inspired by someone who came up with the original idea, she set off to make it happen, and the result is Listen. It’s still “very beta” but, hey, it’s still one of the coolest iPhone hacks I’ve ever heard of. Go check it out and let us know in the comments how it works for you.

Continue reading Make your iPhone listen to your radio — and tell you what’s playing

Today, Andrea Jung joined Apple’s Board of Directors. Jung is currently the chairman and CEO of Avon. She graduated from Princeton University, and also serves on the board of directors for the General Electric Company, and is on the board of trustees for New York Presbyterian Hospital.

“Andrea is a strong CEO and marketer and we look forward to benefiting from her insights and experience as a member of Apple’s board,” said Steve Jobs, today.

Jung is the eighth member of Apple’s board of directors. As you may recall, the last member to join the board was Eric Schmidt, CEO of Google. Apple has recently come under fire about their perceived lack of diversity in the upper offices; this is a definite start to ending those comments. The current board of directors is made up of:

1. Bill Campbell (Chairman and former CEO, Intuit Corp.)
2. Millard Drexler (Chairman and CEO, J. Crew)
3. Albert Gore Jr. (Former Vice President of the United States)
4. Steve Jobs (CEO, Apple, Inc.)
5. Andrea Jung (Chairman and CEO, Avon Products)
6. Arthur D. Levinson, Ph. D. (Chairman and CEO, Genentech)
7. Dr. Eric Schmidt (CEO, Google)
8. Jerry York (Chairman, President and CEO Harwinton Capital)

The fastest Mac ever, the new Mac Pro has eight processor cores and a new system architecture that delivers up to twice the performance of its predecessor.* It combines two of Intel’s new 45 nanometer Quad-Core Xeon processors running up to 3.2 GHz, powerful new graphics and up to 4TB of internal storage, offering the ideal system for creative professionals, 3D digital content creators and scientists. The standard 8-core configuration starts at just $2,799.
* Based on estimated results comparing a preproduction 2.8 GHz 8-core Mac Pro with a 2.66 GHz Quad-Core Mac Pro running professional applications like Maya, modo and Logic Pro.

CorePlayer, a favorite amongst many Windows Mobile and other mobile platform users has been ported to the iPhone and iPod touch. CorePlayer offers media management to completely avoid using iTunes. An iPhone media player other than the iPod application could open doors to downloading MP3 files on the run through Seeqpod. Downloading files through Safari is possible with the Mobile Safari Download Plugin from iPhone hacker ‘hachu’. Not sure when it will be released, but they’re working on making it more iPhone friendly. Check the video after the cut for more a more in depth preview.

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Starting at just $2,999, the new Xserve has up to two Quad-Core 3.0 GHz Intel Xeon processors for 8-core performance, a new server architecture, faster front side buses, faster memory, up to 3TB of internal storage and two PCI Express 2.0 expansion slots for greater performance and flexibility. “With the latest Intel processors and no client access licenses, Xserve offers unbeatable server performance and value for under $3,000,” said Philip Schiller, Apple’s senior vice president of Worldwide Product Marketing.

At CES 2008, Flytunes introduced a personalized digital music service for the iPhone, iPod touch and other media capable phones. Flytunes lets you access over 20,000 radio stations anywhere a WiFi, or cell phone signal is available; something satellite radio cannot do (inside buildings). Flytunes is available free of charge and can be run on either PC or Mac. Flytunes will be available on their website as of January 21st, 2008. Their website and pictures look bad, so we’ll have to wait and see how this service comes along in it’s final debut.

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On the verge of signing a large order for PCs, the superintendent of Carterville City Schools quickly put down his pen when Technology Coordinator Sheryl McDonald demonstrated how an iMac could run both Mac and Windows applications. “Our superintendent just about lost it; he was so excited by the capabilities of Boot Camp. We saw that we could have the best of both worlds,” McDonald says. In no time, CCS cancelled its PC purchase plans and ordered a flock of iMac computers.

FileMaker today announced the immediate availability of Bento, its stylish personal database. With an iTunes-inspired interface, Bento offers you an easy way to organize—in one convenient place—all your contacts, calendars, projects, events, media, and other data. Affordably priced at just $49 ($99 for a five-license family pack), Bento runs on Mac computers running Leopard.

The GPS magicians at Magellan and the search wizards at Google have combined their relative (and also fantastical) talents to deliver the Maestro Elite 5340+GPRS, a GPS unit rocking some GPRS cellular capabilities. That wireless data’s going to be put to good use, enabling things like real-time traffic (see ya FM traffic receiver of yore) and creepy Google functionality like pointing out the closest proctologist (just around the corner!). But all this fancy technology isn’t coming cheap: the unit will retail for $1299, not to mention an as-yet-to-be-determined monthly GPRS fee. At that price, they oughta program in directions to your local poorhouse.

[Thanks, Rich]

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Flying out of beta status, Adium 1.2 made a full-fledged public release today. And we were just talking about the beta release right before Christmas… Starting with an improved menubar item and account management features, the new features and bugfixes in 1.2 get too numerous for this post, so be sure to head for the Adium blog to find out what’s new.

I will go ahead and mention one improvement that I’m personally excited about: AppleScript support has been improved in the new build and we’ll be seeing outside projects interfacing with Adium more easily now. Non-U.S. users will also want to take a fresh look at 1.2 as it now sports over a dozen localizations.

Adium 1.2 is free and available for download!

Thanks Samuel & Thomas!

When Steve first demonstrated Quick Look, I though it looked gimmicky. Interesting, for sure, but nothing I’d use regularly. Much like Star Wars Episode I: Fun when viewed for the first time, but I’ll never watch it again.

Three months later, Quick Look is my favorite feature of Leopard. It’s convenient, useful and very fast. With a tap of the space bar, I can identify files in the Finder without having to open a separate application.

Of course, it goes beyond that. With a little effort (and in some cases, plug-ins), you can get even more out of Quick Look. Here’s how.

1. Identify files on remote machines. I’ve been using Remote Desktop at my day job for a couple of years now. With a few clicks, I can observe or control a remote Mac. Leopard brings this convenience to home users with Screen Sharing. It’s useful, but files appear quite tiny when viewed on this screen-within-a-screen (and titles even smaller). Fortunately, Quick Look makes things much more legible.
2. Preview the contents of Zip files (plug-in required). BetterZip and the Zip Quick Look Plug-in both let you view the contents of a zipped file with Quick Look. In fact, Zip Quick Look’s display is dependent on a HTML file which you may alter to your liking. Here’s how to install Quick Look plug-ins.
3. Preview the contents of a folder (plug-in required). Much like BetterZip and Zip Quick Look, the Folder List plug-in lets you preview the contents of a folder. You can also customize its HTML-powered display and show or hide hidden files or time stamps.
4. Examine snippets of code with syntax highlighting intact. Here’s another tip that requires a plug-in. Qlcolorcode lets you preview your code with all the helpful highlighting you expect.
5. Examine files in the trash. Until Leopard, the Finder’s trash would keep its contents to itself. Anything you wanted to examine had to be moved back to the desktop. Fortunately, Quick Look lets you preview trashed items. Now you know precisely which item to yank out of there.
6. Prep your iWork documents for use with Quick Look. When you create a document with Numbers, Pages or Keynote, you can ensure that its preview will display the proper formatting by selecting the Include Preview in Document check box whey you save (or turn this feature on by default in the general preference pane).
7. Enhance TextMate. TextMate is the editor that geeks everywhere love (including the geeks at TUAW). Ciarán Walsh has written two Quick Look plug-ins for TextMate that let you preview items in a project or render Quick Look previews (for certain file types) using the TextMate syntax highlighter, respectively.
8. Preview fonts. Open a Finder window, select Cover Flow view and navigate to the font you’re interested in. Click the space bar and presto! Instant preview.
9. Quick Look and Cover Flow. I love the combination of Cover Flow and Quick Look. Open a bulging folder in the Finder and select Cover Flow view. Tap the space bar to preview the 1st file and then use the arrow keys to move the next one and so on. You’ll stay in Quick Look mode! Very cool.
10. Send images to iPhoto. When viewing an image with Quick Look – either from the Finder or attached to a Mail message – you’ll see a tiny iPhoto icon at the bottom of the window. Click it to send that image to iPhoto.

I hope you found these tips useful. And I still dislike Episode I.

I’m always, well, tickled by the things that can happen when you use Terminal commands that begin with “defaults write” — thus changing the preferences for applications, the Finder, and more, often in ways that you can’t accomplish via GUI pref settings. I also get a certain warmness from Leopard’s Data Detectors, but I have to confess I rarely use them. It’s fun to watch the things that Mail can pick up on, and I’ve often tested to see what exactly iCal will make of it, but I guess some people just get better emails than I do. Strangely, I do get dates and info via instant messaging on a more regular basis.

You can enable Data Detectors in iChat with one simple command in Terminal:

defaults write com.apple.iChat EnableDataDetectors 1

You can disable it using the same command, but change the ’1′ to a ’0.’ Now you get the fun job of calling your closest Mac-using relative and explaining Terminal so they can use a feature that Apple hid from public view for what I can only assume were valid reasons. I hope your aunt has her screen-sharing figured out.

Just yesterday, we told you about the new GUI version of Transmission. For those who prefer remote control, there’s also a web UI for the Transmission daemon, called (cleverly enough) Clutch, just updated to version 0.2. Clutch is an easy way to manage your BitTorrent downloads from anywhere you can access the internet.

Clutch is a front-end for the Transmission torrent engine; it doesn’t require the GUI version of Transmission, and the two tools don’t show each others’ download results. but if you use both you may see download results from one tool in the other’s list, say our commenters. Clutch uses the web server that’s built into Mac OS X, along with AJAX and PHP for the web interface. The app is a self-contained package that has all of the software needed to run the web interface; just open, set a few preferences, and then — boom — you’re done!

If you do not have a static IP address, or use a dynamic DNS service (such as DynDNS), then Clutch will give you a link to your current external IP address, so you can find and connect to your computer over the internet. You might ask “Why would I want to do that?” The answer is time management: BitTorrent downloads can take a while, much too long for you to wait around, and with this tool you can manage your downloads from work, school, or at the local Starbucks. Using this software means that you will have to open a port in your firewall (the default port is 9091, however, you may set it to use any inactive port above 1024 that you wish). Clutch 0.2 is open source and is available as a free download from the Clutch website.

Insanely Great Tees, purveyors of fine geeky t-shirts, is running a Macworld bonanza. All you need to do is instill laughter, tears or lust for Apple wares via a specially-designed form for Keynote predictions. If you’re a winner in one of the three categories (‘Humor’, ‘Imagination’ or ‘Accuracy’) then you’ll nab one of IGT’s fantastic t-shirts (or possibly three of the t-shirts — the contest announcement is a little unclear).

In addition to the keynote contest, the folks at Insanely Great have also designed what is likely to be a must-have piece of Macworld schwag: Ambrosia Software t-shirts. As we make our way around the show floor in little over a week’s time, we’ll be sure to take a detour to admire them. Keep an eye on our Macworld tag for our wall-to-wall coverage from the Moscone Center.

Transmission, long available in beta form, is one of my favorite torrent clients. BitTorrent, as you probably know, is a way to transfer or share files over the internet, for free, using a ‘swarm’ model to speed files along. Transmission makes the downloading of those files quite stunning, with its simplicity and ease of use. Transmission’s beautiful user interface goes nicely with Leopard, as it has been redesigned; not to mention, it’s 100% Leopard compatible. Some of the new updates in version 1.0 include:

• Group labeling, filtering, and sorting
• Leopard: Time Machine will ignore incomplete downloads
• Display remaining time for seeding transfers
• Ability to set global and per-torrent number of connections

Overall, this looks like a very nice release. It is available right now, for free, from the Transmission website.

Isn’t it wonderful that Address Book has a function built right in that allows you to merge duplicate entries? This becomes particularly valuable if you use a contact synchronization tool such as Plaxo. It’s so useful, you’d think that iCal would have something similar. As you know, if you’ve run into the problem of having multiple duplicate appointments polluting your iCal calendar, there’s nothing built in that will help you out of your mess.

Luckily, John Maisey has created both Leopard and Tiger versions of an AppleScript that will sift through the calendar of your choice and kill off duplicate appointments. Don’t be alarmed if it doesn’t appear to be doing anything when you first run it. In our brief test, it took about 13 seconds to delete 15 duplicate entries, so this script is no speed demon. But what it lacks in terms of speed, it more than makes up in utility.

As with any script or utility that deletes data, be smart and back up your iCal data before you try it.

In our last-of-2007 podcast, our resident AAPL-watcher Mike Rose pointed out Apple’s exceptional fiscal performance as one of the most important stories of the year. Quite rightly so: Apple had, by all accounts, a phenomenal year. There’s even predictions from analysts of AAPL reaching the frankly dizzying heights of $300 – $600 in the next 18 months – we’ll see how those fare, folks.

With the financial analysts talking about Apple stock’s seemingly rosy future, it’s perhaps surprising news that AAPL has lost 7.5% (dropping nearly $15) just today. That’s about $12 billion knocked off Apple’s market cap. With Macworld around the corner, Apple stock is the subject of much speculation already – both for us covering the ‘Keynote Index Fund’ here at TUAW and over at Wired (to mention but a few). Undoubtedly, there’s folks looking to partake in a little daytrading or trading over the duration of the entire Macworld week. With that in mind, might the Feds and SEC be more than interested in the interaction between the keynote (including its audience, one might fathom) and the effect it has on Wall Street?

For ongoing coverage of AAPL, check out our colleagues’ posts at Blogging Stocks:AAPL.

Disclaimer: The points mentioned above come from a personal, and strictly non-professional, opinion, and should not be considered investment advice. For advice on stocks and investments, always seek advice from a regulated financial advice professional.

Update: We ought to add that the market did indeed drop as a whole. However, the drop in Apple’s stock was disproportionate to the down day.

After selling 30,000 iPhones in the first five days, Orange reports this week that 70,000 iPhones were purchased in the first month. Nearly half (48%) went to new Orange customers, and 3,500 were sold unlocked.

I’m a bit surprised that the number of unlocked phones sold isn’t higher. Plus, if Orange sold 30,000 in the first five days and an additional 40,000 over the following three weeks, than that’s a significant drop in sales. Having gone on sale just before the holidays (November 29th), I thought sales would have been more consistent.

It will be interesting to hear what numbers Steve shares at Macworld.

Erica mentioned mdfind a little while ago. It’s not a brand new tool, but there hasn’t been a great deal of discussion surrounding it. For shell scripters and Terminal junkies, it’s a goldmine of search goodness that can make you never want to key out find . -name "letsgogetcoffeewhilewewait.rb" or even locate didcronupdatethedb.yet again.

There are two mdfind options mentioned at Mac OS X Hints that are worth a mention, one found only in the man page, and one found only in the usage info. The former being “-interpret”, which allows the advanced Spotlight query syntax to be used on the command line as if typed into the Spotlight window, turning mdfind "kMDItemContentType == 'public.jpeg'" into mdfind -interpret "kind:jpeg". Its opposing force would be “-literal”, which forces a literal interpretation of the query string. Any qualified Spotlight query should be usable with “-interpret”, so go ahead with mdfind -interpret "kind:image flash:1 modified:<=1/1/08 ex-girlfriend" to find those late-night pictures of last year’s special someone. That would take a lot of metadata work to pull off without “-interpret”.

The second option mentioned isn’t in the man page, but you’ll see it in the usage info if you run mdfind with no parameters. It’s the “-s” option that loads saved searches. It will look in ~/Library/Saved Searches unless a path is specified. So you can save a search in Spotlight called “PDFs from yesterday” and run mdfind -s "PDFs from yesterday" to launch the same search at the command line. See, I had to throw a “normal” search in there to keep you on your toes.

Terminal jockeys can mix these up with a few pipes, stir in some perl and sprinkle in a little awk to get some really great Spotlight soufflé. Of course, if you don’t like the command line and you’re still reading this, you’re a downright hardy trooper and I commend you. Go have a cup of coffee, you deserve it.