I am going to propose a vocabulary for thinking about the building blocks of mobility applications in the iPhone/iPod touch universe, a vocabulary based largely on an analysis of the composite set of existing functions already supported in these devices. My goal is two-fold. One is to attempt to connect the dots for would-be developers thinking about how they can emulate the best practices, services and workflows that have emerged around this platform. Two is to hopefully spotlight how Apple can provide maximize leverage for third-party developers by exposing well-defined APIs and providing tools around these function sets.

Apple has done a not-so-great job in documenting how to properly delete files from a Time Machine backup: Time Machine's online help doesn't explain how to do this, yet the solution is mentioned shortly on Time Machine's product page on the Apple website (it's under "Back up only what you need"). No wonder that, even though this topic has been addressed on several websites already, people keep asking how this works. Here's the answer to that question -- yet again.

You're resting comfortably on the couch at home. You need to do something on your Mac. Perhaps run an application or change to a different iTunes playlist. Can you do it without standing up and walking to your computer? Of course you can. Here's how...

After dumping strings from LayerKit, I'm pleased to have found two new previously unknown animations: mapCurl and mapUnCurl. These are the animations used in Google Maps to reveal the settings pane.

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.

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