If you’ve been looking to pick up your copy of Sean Hannity’s book, “Conservative Victory: Defeating Obama’s Radical Agenda”, but are having trouble finding a copy, it’s because you’re looking in the wrong section.
iPhone OS 4 Event Scheduled for Thursday
April 6th, 2010 
TAV This Thursday, April 8th, Apple will be holding a media event in which they will unveil what is being planned for the iPhone OS 4.0. It will take place at 10am Pacific Time on the Apple campus. If past similar events are any hint, SDK details will be announced with the actual SDK available shortly thereafter and the new OS itself available around June, but don’t be surprised if the iPad’s recent release pushes all of that back a little bit.
Initial iPad Reviews Are Very Positive
April 1st, 2010 TAV iPad reviews are coming in from marjor news sources all over the Internet with one overwhelming theme: They like it. The New York Times, USA Today, PC Magazine, Wall Street Journal, and TIME have all gotten a sneak peek at it and all have great things to say. The absolutely only consistent flaw that reviewers touch on is the lack of Flash, but that was known from the initial announcement and has been a constant complaint about the iPhone and iPod Touch.
Walt Mossberg, writing for the Wall Street Journal, even goes so far as to predict that it is the first step towards the death of the mouse:
For the past week or so, I have been testing a sleek, light, silver-and-black tablet computer called an iPad. After spending hours and hours with it, I believe this beautiful new touch-screen device from Apple has the potential to change portable computing profoundly, and to challenge the primacy of the laptop. It could even help, eventually, to propel the finger-driven, multitouch user interface ahead of the mouse-driven interface that has prevailed for decades.
Expect to see a lot more reviews just about everywhere you look as of the iPad’s official release this Saturday, April 3rd. I don’t personally plan on buying one, but I will spend some quality time with it at the Apple store and post my initial impressions as soon as I can.
Snow Leopard 10.6.3 Update Available
March 30th, 2010 TAV Weighing in at an impressively sized minimum download of 437.2MB (Much larger if you haven’t updated in a while), Apple released the latest updates for Mac OS X Snow Leopard sometime yesterday. The size of the update is more than justified, however, with the long list of fixes and tweaks it brings along with it.
Updates of note include, but are in no way limited to the following:
- Improve the reliability and compatibility of QuickTime X
- Address compatibility issues with OpenGL-based applications
- Address an issue that causes background message colors to display incorrectly in Mail
- Resolve an issue that prevented files with the # or & characters in their names from opening in Rosetta applications
- Resolve an issue that prevented files from copying to Windows file servers
- Improve performance of Logic Pro 9 and Main Stage 2 when running in 64-bit mode
- Improve sleep and wake reliability when using Bonjour wake on demand
- Address a color issue in iMovie with HD content
- Improve printing reliability
- Resolve issues with recurring events in iCal when connected to an Exchange server
- Improve the reliability of 3rd party USB input devices
- Fix glowing, stuck, or dark pixels when viewing video from the iMac (Late 2009) built-in iSight camera
Give The Gift Of iPhone Apps
March 26th, 2010 TAV At some point in your life, you might want to buy someone an App for the iPhone, iPod Touch, or iPad without having to simply buy a gift card and telling them which App to get. Until the latest iTunes update, this was impossible. Now, however, Apple is kindly allowing us to give the gift of Apps. Starting earlier this week, Apple now allows users to buy an app for a friend or loved one (or enemy, depending on the App) as a gift via the App Store. Next time you try to download a new App you’ll likely be prompted with a new copy of Apple’s ToS, which details the change in legalese. Before you get too excited, there are a few limitations: You can’t use gift cards to purchase an App as a gift for someone else, you can’t gift in-App subscriptions or purchases, you can’t “gift” an OS update for the iPod Touch, and, of course, App gifts are non-refundable.
Semi-Serious Side Note: If anyone reading this wants to buy me some fun new App to be reviewed here, just let me know in the comments.
An Apple By Any Other Name
March 25th, 2010 TAV Ever wonder how Apple got its name? A great article over at Business Insider reveals how Apple as well as 12 other Silicon Valley giants originally got their name.
According to their article, Steve Jobs’ favorite fruit is apples. “The company was three months late in filing for a name and a trademark, so one day Steve Jobs challenged the other founders to come up with a better name than “Apple” by the end of the day or else that’s what he would file. The rest is history.”
Why is Apple banning screen protectors?
March 18th, 2010 TAV Rumors coming in from various places around the web are reporting that Apple has decided to stop screen protectors from being sold in Apple stores. According to sources for MacWorld, “Apple will no longer sell such products, or any other products that adhere to Apple devices, in either the online Apple Store or Apple retail stores.” This apparently even includes the anti-glare film that is being sold to fit pretty much any Apple laptop. The reasoning behind this move is not exactly clear, as this has been one of the best selling iPhone and iPod accessories, but an educated guess would say that Apple doesn’t want to give off the impression that such protection is needed. This writer will, however, continue to keep one on his iPhone.
Although you will likely not find these at Apple stores, you can always still buy them online
Two New Gestures for the iPad, possibly iPhone and iPod Touch
March 11th, 2010 TAV Thanks to a great new discovery by 9to5Mac, there is news of two new types of gestures that have popped up in the iPad SDK 3.2b4. As seen in the picture below, the devices will presumably now include an option for developers to use a “3 Tap” and a “Long Press”. The long press is currently used exclusively by the OS itself for the pop-up copy menu; The 3 tap is used to toggle the display on or off while using VoiceOver. Both of these however, will now be available for developers to include within their applications to perform other functions. Although there is no official word yet that these will be also available to developers for the iPod Touch and iPhone, it is probably safe to assume that they will be.
Valve's Steam is Officially Coming to the Mac
March 9th, 2010 TAV They’ve been teasing us about this for quite some time, but now it’s official. Valve’s digital distribution service Steam is coming to Mac in April, and it is bringing it’s most popular titles with it. Left 4 Dead 2, Team Fortress 2, Counter-Strike, Portal, and, of course, the Half-Life series (along with Source) will all be available for Mac users everywhere. Not only that, but you will be able to play the games cross platform – starting on a Mac and continuing the game on a PC, or visa versa. Still not awesome enough? Mac and PC versions will be bundled together for a single price, so you don’t have to buy one copy for your PC and another for your Mac.
Here’s the press release:
VALVE TO DELIVER STEAM & SOURCE ON MAC
Leading Gaming Service Expands to Mac Platform
March 8, 2010 – Valve announced today it will bring Steam, Valve’s gaming service, and Source, Valve’s gaming engine, to the Mac.
Steam and Valve’s library of games including Left 4 Dead 2, Team Fortress 2, Counter-Strike, Portal, and the Half-Life series will be available in April.
“As we transition from entertainment as a product to entertainment as a service, customers and developers need open, high-quality Internet clients,” said Gabe Newell, President of Valve. “The Mac is a great platform for entertainment services.”
“Our Steam partners, who are delivering over a thousand games to 25 million Steam clients, are very excited about adding support for the Mac,” said Jason Holtman, Director of Business Development at Valve. “Steamworks for the Mac supports all of the Steamworks APIs, and we have added a new feature, called Steam Play, which allows customers who purchase the product for the Mac or Windows to play on the other platform free of charge. For example, Steam Play, in combination with the Steam Cloud, allows a gamer playing on their work PC to go home and pick up playing the same game at the same point on their home Mac. We expect most developers and publishers to take advantage of Steam Play.”
“We looked at a variety of methods to get our games onto the Mac and in the end decided to go with native versions rather than emulation,” said John Cook, Director of Steam Development. “The inclusion of WebKit into Steam, and of OpenGL into Source gives us a lot of flexibility in how we move these technologies forward. We are treating the Mac as a tier-1 platform so all of our future games will release simultaneously on Windows, Mac, and the Xbox 360. Updates for the Mac will be available simultaneously with the Windows updates. Furthermore, Mac and Windows players will be part of the same multiplayer universe, sharing servers, lobbies, and so forth. We fully support a heterogeneous mix of servers and clients. The first Mac Steam client will be the new generation currently in beta testing on Windows.”
Portal 2 will be Valve’s first simultaneous release for Mac and Windows. “Checking in code produces a PC build and Mac build at the same time, automatically, so the two platforms are perfectly in lock-step,” said Josh Weier, Portal 2 Project Lead. “We’re always playing a native version on the Mac right alongside the PC. This makes it very easy for us and for anyone using Source to do game development for the Mac.
Apple iPad Release Delayed Until April
March 5th, 2010 TAV 
