Month: January 2015

TUAW is Closing Down

It has emerged that AOL will soon be shutting down ‘The Unofficial Apple Weblog’, also known as ‘TUAW’.

UAW has been around since 2004 and was acquired by AOL in 2005. It appears the closure is part of larger restructuring plans at AOL.  

CEO Tim Armstrong’s comments during the company’s fourth quarter earnings call in November:

“As we look out to 2015, our strategy and decisions will be driven by the following organizing principles,” said Armstrong. “Number one, we’ll focus our capital allocation resource management and management time against scaled assets and platforms. Two, we will organize our asset portfolio around scaled value and scaled growth assets. Three, we’ll simplify everything that can be simplified.”

Despite the closure of TUAW we still feel that Apple Resource will fulfil a vital gap in the Apple and Mac related sites by providing quality content over rumours and off the cuff quick fire reviews of software and hardware without extensive testing.

Tip: How to Create PDFs From Mail App on iOS

One of the biggest issues on iOS and Mail.app for me is the lack functionality to quickly create a PDF. I very often want to PDF a receipt or software license e-mail and file away, this isn’t built in as standard. 

There is a work around, you can send the e-mail out to a free web service called PDFConvert.me. You simply forward your e-mail to pdfconvert@pdfconvert.me, and wait until they send you the PDF back. The site has a great privacy policy, essentially they keep your file/email as long as is required to do the conversion, then its deleted. 

If you are savvy, you can create some e-mail filters to deal with the return e-mail i.e. forward to Evernote or OneNote, Of course that is another missing functionally on iOS Mail.app.

Now the features don’t stop there, you can use different mail to addresses for different functionality:

  1. attachconvert@pdfconvert.me = makes the e-mail attachments into PDFs.
  2. pdfconvert@pdfconvert.me = full e-mail conversion to PDF, including headers.
  3. noheaders@pdfconvert.me = full e-mail conversion to PDF, without headers.
  4. markdown@pdfconvert.me = converts markdown content into PDF.
  5. webconvert@pdfconvert.me = converts a weblink in an e-mail to a PDF. For example a link to a blog post will return a PDF of that blog post.

I’ve included a contact card that you can put straight into your iOS contact app for these addresses.

Apple Releases OS X Yosemite 10.10.2

Apple has released its second update to its Yosemite operating system, version 10.10.2. The update can be downloaded through the Software Update section of the Mac App Store.

The following release notes were included:

– Resolves an issue that may cause Wi-Fi to disconnect 
– Resolves an issue that may cause web pages to load slowly 
– Fixes an issue that caused Spotlight to load remote email content when the preference was disabled in Mail 
– Improves audio and video sync when using Bluetooth headphones 
– Adds the ability to browse iCloud Drive in Time Machine 
– Improves VoiceOver speech performance 
– Resolves an issue that causes VoiceOver to echo characters when entering text on a web page 
– Addresses an issue that may cause the input method to switch languages unexpectedly 
– Improves stability and security in Safari

The release notes indicate that this update solves some of the long standing Wi-Fi issues that users have been experiencing. This update also includes Safari 8.0.3 which is also available as a standalone update for Mavericks (7.1.3) and Mountain Lion (6.2.3).

Apple Releases iOS 8.1.3

Apple has released iOS 8.1.3 which includes a range of bug fixes and enhancements. These include: 

  • Fix for an issue that prevented some users entering their Apple ID passwords for Messages and FaceTime.
  • Spotlight bug which caused Spotlight to stop showing app results.
  • Issue that prevented multitasking gestures from working on the iPad.
  • Reduction in the amount of space required when performing an iOS update.
  • New configuration options for education standardised testing.

The update is available now via the ‘over the air’ download feature.