Walkthroughs — GigaOM

Walkthroughs

Managing an application’s state can sometimes require complex interaction with persistence and messaging with various resources, or it can be as simple as keeping track of a counter from one view to the next. Read More »

In an iMac’s life, there are two things that you may find yourself wishing to upgrade, the memory and hard drive. Memory is easy enough to get to but the hard drive can seem a little daunting to some. Read More »

 
 

All too often an iPhone application’s launch sequence is an overlooked detail. The most common approach is to misuse the provided Default.png file as a splash screen. This detailing of an application is more than a little challenging if you want to get it right. Read More »

We’ve all been in the situation. Your mother calls you with a computer problem and you know it’s going to take at least an hour to walk her through the steps over the phone. Then she yells at you when you sigh out of frustration. If you … Read More »

You get a new Mac and even though you know you should, you don’t want to start over from scratch and reload the whole system. To make matters worse, you have Boot Camp installed and really don’t want to start over on the Windows side. So, … Read More »

I recently made the switch to the newest version of the web development application Espresso. After having used Coda for all my previous web development needs, I’m naturally making some comparisons between the two. I’ll leave the blow by blow evaluation to others but … Read More »

Computers get dirty, especially their human interface surfaces — keyboards and pointing devices. In some instances, dirt can even affect input device performance as well as appearance. Some time ago the faithful SlimType gave me a scare when the F and W keys stopped responding properly. … Read More »

So you’re loving your brand new Magic Mouse but are missing the ability to activate Expose and Spaces right from the mouse? Not to worry, we’ve got you covered. Using SIMBL and a neat little preference pane called MultiClutch, we can … Read More »

I’ve been playing around with Google Quick Search Box lately and am especially enjoying this services plugin from Martin Kuhl which lets you activate and pass input to OS X services right from within QSB. One snag though has been that services created through the … Read More »

Although I’ve been supporting Macs since they came out in 1984 (when I was in high school), I haven’t received any “formal” training. It has mostly been learning by doing, reading the occasional book and now of course, TheAppleBlog. Does formal certification really make a … Read More »

I was playing around with Google Quick Search Box recently and was really surprised by all the functionality it provides. Once I got it fully set up with plugins and services, I realized it can give me just about everything I used to rely on … Read More »

Did Snow Leopard leave your old AppleTalk printer out in the cold? Grab a hot cup of cocoa and warm your printer up with some of these handy tips to continue to use your classic AppleTalk printer with your state of the art operating system. Print Via … Read More »

More Must Reads

Originally introduced in OS X Tiger, Automator is a drag-and-drop form of scripting. You can create workflows to easily speed up many tasks. With each version of OS X, Automator has seen some improvements, but with Snow Leopard, it finally realizes its … Read More »

I took to the soapbox recently about the lack of flexibility in iPhoto for incremental backups. I still don’t have a great solution that suits my particular needs and desires, though some useful suggestions can be found in the comments of that post. But … Read More »

The Apple TV, as envisioned by Apple, is truly a very niche market device. You’re basically paying money for something that lets you pay more money to buy or rent music, movies and TV shows from the iTunes store. Sure, you can also stream content from … Read More »

Time again to pop a shell and dig into the deep, geeky Unix internals of OS X with Dig Into Unix. Today we are going to look at two top-shelf power tools for text editing: sed and awk. Sed is a Stream EDitor, and … Read More »

Welcome to another episode of TheAppleBlog’s iPhone Dev Sessions. We left off with a drum app tutorial called Bickboxx. For this tutorial, we’re building off of the first Bickboxx project, so go back and finish it if you haven’t already. Or if you want … Read More »

As any person who frequently uses email will tell you, email signatures are very important as they usually provide more information than just a standard name and email address from the sender. You can spice up an email signature since Mail offers support for HTML signatures. … Read More »

This time of year, it seems almost inevitable. There’s a forum post somewhere, a plea for help in the middle of the night, asking a time-honored question. No, it’s not “the answer to Life, the Universe, Everything!” It’s more profound than that: “I’m starting school this … Read More »

The OS X boot image epitomizes the simplicity and elegance of the operating system itself, showing a basic Apple logo set against a light grey background. I’m a huge fan of this simple layout, but was very interested to hear about BootXChanger, a tiny application … Read More »

As I mentioned in the My Netbook: The iPhone article, my iPhone is central to my life. But one area that’s been a challenge is getting text to and from it. As I mentioned in the article, most of what I write on the iPhone … Read More »

Aperture is a great photo management application, but may not be suitable for everyone. I recently made a decision to move back to iPhoto in order to use some of the features in the latest release. Several of these, such as face … Read More »

This is the third installment of our Dig Into Unix series, an ongoing look into the deep, geeky insides of the core of OS X. In the first part, we got to fire up the Terminal and take a look around … Read More »

One of the big, new features of the iPhone is its ability to tether. BlackBerrys have had this ability for a while, so below I have outlined how to tether your BlackBerry with your … Read More »

I previously wrote an article on how to stream your data from a Time Capsule and local computer over the Internet. After figuring out the basics of networking, I moved onto wanting to control my media center … Read More »

I recently switched from my iPhone to a BlackBerry. A few weeks after the transition, I have discovered my likes and dislikes between phones, and by far the most frustrating difference is the “syncing with computer” feature. An iPhone is literally plug and play, whereas a … Read More »

With the iPhone 3G S on sale in a matter of days, a rush of 3G and original iPhone owners will be selling their phones and upgrading to the new model. If you are planning on selling your current iPhone, there are a few simple steps … Read More »

Would you like to be able to use the magic of Bluetooth to automatically pause iTunes, set your away message in Adium, and lock the screen simply by standing up and walking away from your desk? Of course you would — it’s future-tastic (jetpacks not included)! … Read More »

There are a few really handy features in OS X that get very little attention – perhaps because they don’t have a snazzy GUI, or maybe it’s because they only appeal to certain users. Whatever the case, Summarize (found in the menubar under the Application menu) … Read More »

This is the first in a series on some of the more advanced functionality of Numbers, my favorite spreadsheet app. If you’re new to spreadsheets, or just want to make them look a little less like Microsoft Excel, this article should be … Read More »

The other day my friend called me to tell me that he bought this new product called Pogoplug. The Pogoplug is pretty cool; you plug it into the wall, connect a hard drive to it, then connect it to your local Internet, and you have … Read More »

MobileMe, Apple’s online personal information management (PIM) solution, has withstood quite the controversy. While some of the more fortunate subscribers, like myself, have had only positive experiences, others had to wait several months before syncing worked without reporting cryptic errors or silently failing. My only gripe was … Read More »

I always upgrade all of my Apple firmware as soon as the updates become available. I’ve never had a problem with any of the new firmwares, and most of the time they improve whatever product I am upgrading. I’ve never had a problem, that is, until … Read More »

You’ve seen all the different drum apps, right? Well, they’re really easy to make. In this iPhone Dev Sessions article, I want to teach you how to make Bickboxx, an actual app that’s in the iTunes App Store. Grab Bickboxx (FREE) from the iTunes … Read More »

When I moved into my new apartment I brought with me a 1TB Time Capsule that I was previously using as a network storage device because my old roommate already had a Linksys router. None of my new roommates had routers, so I decided to use … Read More »

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 … Read More »

Don’t you wish there were an easier way to quickly view upcoming appointments and your task list?  If you’re a fan of Google products, then follow these steps for an easy-to-use solution.  In the end you will have two new items in your menu bar: one … Read More »

In this tutorial, you will learn how to do the following: Create and run a Navigation-Based Application from XCode Create and add a user interface, designed in Interface Builder, as a sub-view to a navigation based application Navigate to sub-views from a UITableView Allow sub-views to access application data Creating and … Read More »

I’ve been having a lot of trouble streaming video on my MacBook Air recently. No matter which site I’m on, YouTube, Hulu, or Netflix, within a few minutes the video becomes choppy and unwatchable. Fed up with my computer’s inability to complete a task it should … Read More »

For this tutorial we’re going to build a simple clock that is orientation-aware, meaning that when you rotate your iPhone, the time rotates with it. I’m assuming you have a basic knowledge of the iPhone SDK. To get started, … Read More »

One thing I have always wanted to do is be able to sync my iPhone or iPod with any computer. Lifehacker had an article a while back on doing this, but … Read More »

Many Mac users are fortunate enough to have more than one machine. Whether it’s a home desktop and laptop, or a home and office machine, it can be very useful to keep some form of continuity between the two systems. This is easy enough to do … Read More »

When iWork ’08 was released it felt like a half-implemented suite for a whole host of reasons: lack of interoperability between the applications, very basic functionality, performance issues — especially with Numbers ’08 — and lack of scripting. Apple’s new iWork ’09 suite has addressed many … Read More »

Until very recently, Tor was always something I heard about online but never used. I never considered myself enough of a “hardcore” geek to really pursue it, but it turned out to be much simpler to use that I thought. So for those of you … Read More »

A couple of days ago I installed Windows 7 beta (32-bit, Ultimate version) on my 13″ unibody MacBook, and I thought I’d recount my installation experience in case some of you are curious how the other half (OK, the other 95 percent) live. Alas, this exercise afforded … Read More »

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