The Apple TV has gone from being just a “hobby” for Apple to one of the most useful devices that you can connect to your television. With one tiny box, the Apple TV brings you movies and TV shows from iTunes, Netflix, Hulu, HBO, ESPN and more. But you can also use it to listen to music and podcasts, run slideshows of your photos, play games, and display anything you can bring up on a Mac, iPhone, iPad, or iPod touch via AirPlay. And Apple TV isn’t just for entertainment — it makes a remarkably useful presentation device for the business and education worlds as well. In this first chapter of “Take Control of Apple TV,” Josh Centers lays out his roadmap for the rest of the book.
TidBITS Managing Editor Josh Centers joined host Gene Steinberg of the Tech Night Owl Live podcast to discuss Apple’s financial situation, the conflict between OS X 10.9 Mavericks Mail and Gmail, pros and cons of iOS 7 and 10.9 Mavericks, and why patents should be abolished.
Winter is coming, so what better time to catalog your media collection? Josh Centers gives you a tour of Delicious Library 3, the ultimate tool for managing physical books, albums, movies, and videogames.
Brett Terpstra’s Marked 2 is a powerful Markdown preview and editing app that shows you what your text will look like and provides tools to improve your writing.
One of the most welcome improvements in Mavericks is better battery life for laptops, the result of a variety of power-saving features. We show you how to make the most of them, and how to turn some of them off if they get in your way.
You might have noticed that some of your videos no longer have a Finder preview in Mavericks. Macworld’s Chris Breen discovered that Apple has deprecated many of its older codecs in favor of the iOS-compatible H.264 and MPEG-4. To watch older video files, you must convert them with QuickTime X, install Apple’s professional codecs (if you bought Final Cut Pro, Motion, or Compressor), or use a more capable app like QuickTime 7 Pro or MPlayerX.
An iOS 7 redesign of the popular Twitter client for power users, Tweetbot 3 is an all-new app, currently on sale for $2.99. Functionally, it adds background refreshing, tweet drafts, inline notifications, muting, iCloud syncing of timeline position and direct message read status, and more. Visually, the new design ditches Tweetbot’s traditional robot theme in favor of trendy flatness and custom transitions. It’s fun, but sometimes difficult to navigate. Regardless, Tweetbot 3 remains the fastest and most reliable iPhone Twitter app, especially with @name lookups in the tweet composer.
TidBITS Senior Editor Joe Kissell joined host Benjamin Alexander on the Pulling the String podcast. The pair discuss Joe’s TidBITS origin story, hulking out on Mail in OS X 10.9 Mavericks, Nisus Writer Pro, and Joe’s latest book, “Take Control of Upgrading to Mavericks.”
After Joe’s frustrations with how Apple Mail in OS X 10.9 Mavericks interacts with Gmail’s bolted-on IMAP implementation, he found himself having to choose between the two, and decided to stick with Mail, despite its problems in Mavericks. In this article for Macworld, Joe details how he moved his email from Gmail to a more standards-compliant IMAP email provider.
Fantastical 2 brings a “flat” redesign to the lauded iPhone calendar app, while offering both light and dark themes. New in this version is the capability to create, edit, and view reminders. You can also expand snippets with TextExpander support, use typed or spoken natural language to add reminders and events, see maps of event locations, and scroll through upcoming events in the Day Ticker. Temporarily on sale for $2.99, it’s a fantastic alternative to Apple’s humdrum Calendar app.
Bewildered by all the talk about OS X 10.9 Mavericks? We’ve sorted through Apple’s latest operating system to bring you the most useful tips.
Apple is still selling a ton of iPhones, but dividends, free software, and complex devices are cutting into the company’s bottom line. CEO Tim Cook is hoping it’ll be an iPad Christmas.
Tonx is a subscription coffee service that roasts the best beans in the world and ships them to your door, and now you can enter our DealBITS drawing to win a free bag of their freshly roasted coffee.
TidBITS Managing Editor Josh Centers joined host Benjamin Alexander on the Pulling the String podcast to discuss managing TidBITS, why Apple can’t get online services or podcasting right, rock concerts, being new parents, and the keys to success. Fair warning: there is some R-rated language.
Disney removed some of its movies, such as “The Lion King,” from sale from the iTunes Store. This wasn’t concerning in and of itself, since Disney regularly swaps movies in and out of its “vault,” but this time, a problem with iTunes prevented those who had purchased the movies from streaming or downloading them from iTunes in the Cloud. Thankfully, Apple and Disney soon fixed the issue, but it’s a reminder that cloud services can be unpredictable and that whenever possible, you should maintain local copies of important data.