iPhones and iPod touches running 1.1.3 and later allow you to add applications to your Springboard home screen without restarting the entire Springboard process. A simple loader called "nikita" (who will play a big role in the upcoming SDK) allows you to notify when new apps should appear.

As part of today's feature article on making movies out of still photos, Michael W. and Debra Jean Dean whipped up this funny demonstration of good and bad background music. It contains five brief examples. See if you can figure out why each helps or hurts the presentation. Debra Jean reveals the answer after each segment. I burst out laughing...

Unlike Windows Vista, Windows Server 2008 (Standard Edition in this case) installed fine from an ISO file using VMware Fusion. I used Fusion's Windows Server 2008 Experimental preset installation configuration. It seems to be running smoothly with 512MB RAM allocated to the Guest OS. The one thing that surprised me is how huge a basic Windows Server 2008 Standard...

This week... SMARTReporter 2.3.7: Detect Bad Mac Drives; SkyDrive Ups Its Storage to 5GB; Newspond: Is This the New Digg?

There's been a lot of changes since Intel Macs and Parallels Desktop let Macs virtualize Linux and Windows back in 2006. And, Microsoft Windows Vista introduced its own set of challenges for virtualization. Here's a quick summary of some key changes over the past 2 years that affect virtualization decisions.

Using templates is a major time-saver for those of us who need to create the same, or at least highly similar documents over and over again. But what do you do if a specific application does not support templates? As long as you're handling text files, there's a solution that works universally across your Mac.

Oh man. What was I thinking. You do not need to use a core surface. The layer from a UIImageView works perfectly well

If you have a home automation that you want to control while you're away, via the web, Mac software developers are ready to help you out. And can iPhone solutions be far behind?

My long-time digital music futurist colleague (and sometime collaborator), Gerd Leonhard, has just published a book compiling some of the best of his blog writings and essays (over the past four years) on what's coming next for the music industry. It's aptly titled "Music 2.0". This book continues and expands on some of Gerd's ideas and emerging business models that...

After chatting with iPhone developer Cobra about his most recent UICoverFlowLayer example, I decided to simplify UICoverFlowLayer creation. What I found was this: programming cover flow is eerily reminiscent of programming tables. Like tables, you create a data source method in your main application. This data source supplies your coverflow layer with images on demand. And, like tables, you build delegate methods that react to selection changes. When a user taps on an image, you can catch that selection change and do something about it.