Watch NBCOlympics.com video from the 2008 Summer Olympics on your Mac or iPhone. You will need Microsoft Silverlight on your Mac. But, your iPhone (or iPod touch) is ready to roll as-is without any changes.

Microsoft patched an Excel 2008 remote execution problem. So, you might want to go get the Office 2008 for Mac 12.1.2 update.

Graphical User Interfaces (GUIs) are commonly believed to make computers accessible by presenting virtual concepts through visual and spacial metaphors. For every action you wish to undertake in such interfaces, there is a corresponding physical object you can interact with: a button, a slider, a window. Our files and folders are neatly arranged on our desktop or stacked in our...

VMware Fusion 2 Beta 2 looks good when used with Microsoft Windows Vista or Windows Server 2008. I ran into problems when testing it with Fedora 8 though. It is a Beta release, however. So, I'm not passing judgement on it until I see the Release Candidate and production release.

Hidden preferences are among the favorite items covered in the Tips & Tricks sections of Mac-related websites, and the method usually presented for setting these preferences is via the defaults Terminal command. Thanks to a utility called Secrets, which compiles an extensive list of hidden preferences for the software installed on your Mac, there is a much more elegant and user-friendly way.

The future of Apple TV is the subject of much debate and controversy around the Internet. Yet, it seems to be a relatively simple, straightforward question. While Apple calls Apple TV a “hobby product,” this is clearly not an accurate description. No company in their right mind would ever invest the kind of money, time and energy that Apple has...

Of all the technological advances of the past decade, the concept and implementation of DRM is the one that irks me most. As you know, DRM or, to give it its full name, Digital Rights Management, is collectively used to refer to a pot-pourri of technologies whose primary aim is to ensure that the intellectual property of content creators is...

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.