A few months back, my little team and myself were fortunate enough to assist a well-known software company release the latest version of their Mac OS X application. Among the improvements we recommended, and helped implement, was Sparkle-based updating. One of our testing points at the time was to ensure one could not reasonably trick the application, through Sparkle, into...

Did you buy AppleCare for your Apple __Fill_in_the_blank__ hardware product? Was the decision to buy or not buy difficult? This is an easy decision for two groups of people. These people sit on either end of the extreme for this decision. One group says, "I always buy extended warranty from Apple." The other group says, "I never buy extended warranty from Apple." However, for those of us in between those two extremes, to buy or not to buy AppleCare for a new Apple product can be a difficult decision to make. I looked at AppleCare prices as a percentage of the product price and came up with a few rules of thumb.

If you're a software developer and you honestly care about the user-friendliness of your software, it is not enough to simply guess which user interface works best for your application: you must _test_ your products with real users. A new usability testing tool for the Macintosh, called "Silverback," now makes user testing available even to those developers who have, so far, found the cost and effort associated with setting up a proper usability test lab forbidding.

For years, scads of readers have been receiving digital imaging guru Tim Grey's (almost) daily email newsletter Q&A called DDQ: Digital Darkroom Questions. Each email takes on a single user-submitted question to which Tim provides one of his salient, to-the-point, trying-to-un-confuse-you answers. We've collected the best of these and published them in Tim's new book, tearing up the charts at...

When you use Photoshop, nothing is more important than the ability to make selections. As a simple example, when you want to make a composite by moving a person from one background onto another, you need a way to select the person---in other words, to tell Photoshop which pixels you want to move. Besides this kind of large-scale selection, selection...

Now that the iPhone 3G is old news, and that developers are comfortably settling into their new development digs, the time seems ripe to investigate new ways the iPhone and the Mac — or the PC — could interact together. I have previously discussed the disappointing docking system, that seems to provide nothing to iPhone users, apart from the purely...

Electricity costs where I live are skyrocketing (49% in the past 12 months). I've always been interested and concerned about conserving power. But, I've really been taking a closer look over the past year. So, do you know how much power your Mac uses and what it contributes to your total monthly power bill?

Handling email has always been a kind of fight for me: unfortunately, I am highly susceptible to procrastination, so as soon as I spot a fresh mailing list digest or a new issue of my favorite Macintosh e-zine in my inbox amongst all those _important_ emails, it's the latter which immediately disappear from my "conscious field of vision." But I think I have found a remedy: simply move those less important emails out of the way and deal with them later, so I can check the more important stuff without being distracted. This approach turned out to work quite well and, thanks to Mail's rules and Smart Mailboxes, it can be fully automated, too.

I'm not maintaining this photo is a piece of great art per se. But I do believe that if you want to take interesting photos you need to look with fresh eyes at the everyday things around you. We were getting the boys haircuts. At the hair cutting place I saw this mirror and reflections of bottles and the street....

Late 1980s, deep in the basement of the Oberlin Conservatory: Strolling past the broken-down harp cases, a surprise visitor enters my electronic music class.