Back in the Dark Ages (iPhone 2.0 firmware) jailbreaking your iPhone had many points of merit. It could give you MMS, Copy & Paste, tethering, video recording, info on your lock screen and more. However, for me the reasons I jailbroke were for MMS, Copy & Paste, and internet tethering.
So when the much awaited 3.0 release was finally here, I thought to myself “Great, no need to jailbreak anymore.” I installed my developer’s copy of the beta firmware and there was much rejoicing with smooth, Apple home-cooked MMS, copy & paste, and internet tethering.
But then, as I watched episodes of Arrested Development via XBMC using my iPhone as the remote, or lay in bed on my side trying to read news feeds without the screen rotating when I didn’t want it to, I really really missed SBSettings. So it came to be that the day the jailbreak devteam released their official PwnageTool for 3.0 I immediate jailbroke my 3.0 iPhone. Just for one application: SBSettings. It really does bring that much convenience to the table.
Read why I still Jailbreak with 3.0 for SBSettings over at The Apple Blog
The clipboard in a modern operating system is one of the most useful and practical tools available. Being able to select some text or images, copy them to the clipboard, and then paste them in other places is indispensable (look at the uproar over the fact that the iPhone OS 1.0 & 2.0 did not support a clipboard to see how valuable it is). You most likely use it without giving it another thought.
The standard clipboard behavior is that when you copy a new item, it replaces the existing item. You can’t go back to the previous item as there is no history of items copied. This is what a Clipboard Manager does, providing a memory and browsing history so you can paste something, and then find it later, even after using the clipboard multiple times.
There are quite a few Clipboard Managers available for OS X, some free, some not. Check out 10 of them over at The Apple Blog.
Apple had finally released OS X 10.5.7, so I downloaded the combo updater in preparation to install on my three Macs. After installing the update on my MacBook Pro and my wife’s iMac without any issues, I ran the combo updater on my Mac mini that is hooked up to my TV.
My TV’s native resolution is 1360×768 and ever since I got the Mac mini, this has worked flawlessly and with an extremely crisp picture when using a DVI-HDMI cable. So it was to my dismay when, after installing OS X 10.5.7 and the mini rebooted, the resolution displayed was completely wrong. “Ah, it must have reset, I’ll go change it back,” I thought to myself. So I went to the Display preference pane in System Preferences and looked for 1360×768; but it wasn’t there. I blinked and looked again; It still wasn’t there. Read the rest of this article at The Apple Blog.
Quicklook is a great feature of OS X, allowing you to press the spacebar when a file is selected in Finder and quickly look at the contents. If you’re unfamiliar with Quicklook, check out this great introductory article.
As great as this is, there are a few occasions where it would be useful to quicklook a file that is not supported by default. Luckily, Quicklook is extendable with plugins; here are my favorite four.
Read more at The Apple Blog
Back in Feburary I took a look at the open-source database tool Sequel Pro and compared it against the commercial tool, Querious. Querious had the winning edge at the time, despite being for MySQL 5 only and costing money. It was only Sequel Pro’s support for MySQL 3 and 4 that provided any feature advantage. However, Sequel Pro 0.95 was released yesterday, and this release continues the steady pace at which Sequel Pro is catching up to the features and polished nature of Querious.
Read more at The Apple Blog
As reported recently all over the blogosphere, the world’s first Mac-based botnet is active after infiltrating people’s systems in January by way of a trojan hidden inside pirated iWork’09 installers. If you downloaded and installed iWork’09 from a torrent, binary newsgroup, or any other source not from Apple’s trial download links or official DVDs, you have a high likelihood of infection and need to do something about it.
Read how to detect and remove over at TAB.
Finally, the Rock has come back to video games, and for the first time ever, on the iPhone. Well, he did for a little while, anyway.
WWE Legends Of Wrestlemania was released on March 24 and being an avid wrestling fan, I immediately bought a copy. Meanwhile, on the March 30, TNA Wrestling was released, bringing the wrestling promotion wars to the iPhone and taking me to potential heaven. So here I am, ready to pit the two games against each other in a wrestling showdown of epic proportions, one not seen since the glorious WWF vs. WCW days of the late 90s.
Continue reading the smackdown at The Apple Blog
Disk fragmentation is an old problem that has affected every operating system throughout history. File fragmentation occurs when a single file isn’t located in the same physical location on the disk, but is scattered around. OS X does a great job at minimizing file fragmentation by rewriting files in contiguous space when a file is opened, is under 20MB and contains more than eight fragments. This works quite well to prevent heavy file fragmentation, but what it doesn’t prevent is free space fragmentation.
Read more at The Apple Blog
A few weeks ago I took a detailed look at two MySQL database tools Querious and SequelPro, comparing their feature set. These are by no means the only two options for accessing MySQL with a shiny UI — so here is a quick look at eight more MySQL front ends that are available for OS X. Read this over at the The Apple Blog.
As great and as easy as the OS X user interface is, sometimes it is quicker or necessary to jump into the deep dark bowels of your system on the command line. OS X ships with the very competent Terminal.app that allows easy access to this, but the default view into your machine is dull and boring. It doesn’t have to be. Here are a few tips to style things up a bit.
