Thursday, March 11 2010
Written by Michael Swengel on February 1, 2010
During an internal meeting in the wake of Apple's release of the iPad, Steve Jobs explained to Apple employees why the iPhone and iPad have yet to support Flash - and likely never will. Apple does not support Flash because it is so buggy. Whenever a Mac crashes more often than not it's because of Flash. No one will be using Flash. The world is moving to HTML5. Really? Flash is buggy? An archit...
Written by Michael Swengel on October 23, 2009
The iPhone OS and the App Store have been an excellent platform for programmers of all sizes to design and code applications for delivery to customers. Unfortunately, writing applications for the iPhone and iPod Touch requires a working knowledge of Apple's developer tools and the Objective-C programming language. The Objective-C programming language is the foundation of Apple's Mac OS X and the ...
Written by Michael Swengel on October 17, 2009
After taking my MacBook Pro in for a hard drive and optical drive replacement on the 10th, I was rather curious how the repair was going. Tuesday, October 13th, I called the Apple Store for a status update. I very nicely asked about the repair. The tech said they had not had a chance to get to it yet. Since it was only the second business day of the week, that's understandable. There were other...
Written by Michael Swengel on October 14, 2009
I have finally given in. My MacBook Pro is sick. It's hard drive had been clicking quite a bit. To some degree it's normal for a hard drive to click, but when it's constant and loud, you know something is up. Ironically, I confirmed the hard drive was bad when I attempted to create a small partition for Fedora Linux. I wanted to try out Fefora 11 since I have not used the distro since version 9...
Written by Michael Swengel on September 15, 2009
FIRST IMPRESSIONS As a graphic design fanatic, I'm always looking around at shiny new tools available to the design community. A friend of mine recommended that I take a look at Pixelmator. At the time, I was using OS X 10.5 Leopard. I proceeded to download the app and play with it. My first impressions were extremely favorable. The user interface is beautiful and well-designed. Several filters - ...
Written by Michael Swengel on July 24, 2009
With the release of Apple's iPhone and iPod Touch 3.0 software update, we have many great new features. While updating isn't mandatory, here's why I think you should. ----------------------------------------Cut, Copy, and Paste One of the things greatly lacking from previous versions of the iPhone / iPod Touch software is the ability to copy and paste. This always bugged me. For example, what if ...
Written by Michael Swengel on June 21, 2009
When you constantly download music, videos, software, etc on your Mac, it's easy to fill up your hard drive quickly. I'm always working with media - be it audio or video - for my media career. So, naturally, my hard drive gets filled easily. So, I'm sitting at my computer, and I get a message that my startup disk is almost full. Great. I guess I need to find some things to erase. The most ...
Written by Michael Swengel on June 21, 2009
Apple’s Mac OS X ships with several great screen savers. Even Microsoft and Linux have attempted to copy them over and over. Thanks to the power of the Mac operating system and Apple's Core Image technology - part of the operating system - it is easy to make any screen saver you choose into your desktop background instead of an image. Running a screen saver during normal use takes a lot of...
Written by Michael Swengel on June 2, 2009
There are many leaked pre-release downloads of the newest iPhone OS available. If you're not a developer, let me just say you should NEVER attempt to use a beta device operating system. However, if you did get your hands on one of these downloads and upgraded unwittingly, you may encounter issues. What if you want to downgrade back to OS 2.2.1? Nope. iTunes will just point and laugh - IF ...
Written by Michael Swengel on May 21, 2009
Apple's Mac OS X is a great platform. It's simple. It's elegant. It's powerful. Design professionals and videographers like myself rely on the simple, reliable power the Apple operating system brings to the table. However, there is a hidden feature many people don't know about that makes life easier much easier. It's called the Dashboard. Introduced in Mac OS X 10.4 Tiger, the Dashboard...
