WordPress is among the more popular blog publishing and content management systems available. Some web hosting providers, such as GoDaddy and DreamHost, provide a relatively seamless and integrated WordPress installation process built into their dashboards. However, if you'd like to dip your toes into the WordPress waters and learn what lurks beneath it, but aren't yet ready to make a web hosting commitment (or switch, if your host currently doesn't support it) you can get you feet wet using MAMP.

• Coverflow
• Spotlight
• Resizing of icons
• Preview viewing modes
• Hiding windows in dock icons
• More organized keyboard shortcuts
• Location based setting of time and date
• Showing the date in the menubar
• Stacks
• Text and symbol substitution
• The re-emergence of the trash 'put back' feature.

For some, the recently released iTennis game in the iTunes App Store looked extremely familiar -- that's because it was a rather blatant ripoff of code provided by the iCodeBlog, a site known for its free iPhone coding tutorials. The original tutorial, written by Brandon Trebitowski, was apparently compiled and submitted by Peter Sheen of BlaBlaIncTech and placed on sale for $.99USD on iTunes in late May.

Trebitowski revealed the theft through iCodeBlog yesterday, and Jonathan Siegel got in touch with us regarding the situation. As response has gotten out through iCodeBlog, there has been a backlash through both BlaBlaIncTech's site and the App Store. As a result, around 4:45 Pacific Time, the game was pulled from iTunes.

In an attempt to contact someone from BlaBlaIncTech, I headed over to the site to find no contact information except for a support chat that was spammed with nearly 15,000 comments regarding the theft. While I was writing up this post, BlaBlaIncTech removed the link to its guestbook from the front page of the site. Ten minutes later, the game was gone from the App Store. Ten minutes after that, all mention of iTennis was gone from BlaBlaIncTech's site.

If you've always wondered how to draw a "ball of nodes" as featured in a variety of Mac OS X icons, wonder no more: Mike Rundle of flyosity.com has written a tutorial to show you how using Photoshop.

Rundle discusses "spheric realism," the process of understanding the materials, reflectivity, and roundness of a sphere, and how to accurately illustrate it digitally.

Clever users can easily adapt the technique for Illustrator, Acorn, or many other compositing tools that feature blur and blending mode support.

Rundle also offers a PSD file containing the artwork with no strings attached.

Thanks Todd!

Yesterday, I showed you how to simulate a photograph taken with a tilt-shift lens by using Photoshop CS3's Lens Blur tool. Today, we'll do something a bit more practical: clipping out an object that's not entirely in focus.

Clipping out objects that are out of focus can be something of a chore: either you have a hard, dark edge somewhere you don't want, or you have to settle for feathering the whole thing, leaving edges that should be sharp a little too blurry.

We'll be clipping out this old book, and dropping it on a new surface.

We all know Photoshop is a powerful tool. In two tutorials, I'll take you through how to use Photoshop CS3's Lens Blur filter to do two things: today, we'll make images look like they were shot with a tilt-shift lens. Tomorrow, we'll create clipping masks for objects that aren't entirely in focus.

Lens Blur gives the effect of a narrower depth of field, so some areas of your image stay in focus, and other areas are blurred. Combined with an alpha channel that defines areas of blurriness, you have a powerful way to create masks and alter photos.

The easiest thing to do is show you first how Lens Blur works in pictures.

Today with so many of us using our digital cameras to shoot short video segments, it's especially easy to forget that we're dealing with videos and turn the camera on its side for a portrait orientation. Unfortunately, most video programs are not set up to handle portrait video. The video ends up displaying on its side. QuickTime Pro makes it easy to recover from this kind of shooting calamity and restore the orientation you intended. Here's a gallery showing you how.

Gallery: Rotating a video with QT Pro

No doubt you know that sharing your internet connection on your Mac is easy. For instance, if want to turn any Mac with a built-in Airport card into a wireless router (e.g. with a cable or DSL modem plugged into the built-in ethernet port), all you have to do is go to the Sharing pane of your System Preferences select it and hit start. However, what if you want to do something a little bit more complicated? In this tutorial I'll cover some other ways for turning your Mac into a router, including over FireWire and adding a second ethernet port via USB (which can be really tricky).

If someone you know just got their first iPod, you might want to steer them towards this free iPod Tutorial. In PDF format, this tutorial introduces new users to all the basics of iPod use from creating an account at the iTunes Store to using the Hold switch to iPod software updates.

The 27-page tutorial promotes NotePage's FeedForAll and RecordForAll iTunes-compatible podcast software. (They put links to the software and a logo on every page. It's not subtle.) Still, it's a pretty decent tutorial, especially for the price.