System Articles on TUAW - The Unofficial Apple Weblog

Developers get a new build of 10.7.2

by Mike Schramm (Sep 16th, 2011)

As 9to5Mac reports, there's a brand new build of Lion 10.7.2 out there in the wild for developers, featuring focused work on iCloud, the Mac App Store, MobileMe, and a few other places like Mail, Spotlight, Time Machine, and even things like the AddressBook and graphics drivers. This is build ...

Dear Aunt TUAW: What are those lockfiles?

by Erica Sadun (Aug 16th, 2011)

Dear Aunt TUAW, With Lion, I'm seeing a lot of plist.lockfile in my Preferences folder. I'm assuming the "lockfile" business has to do with the new autosave stuff in Lion, but why would that apply to a preference file? Is this a bug or a feature? Your loving nephew, Darren Dear ...

TUAW's Daily Mac App: IceClean

by Samuel Gibbs (Jul 15th, 2011)

OS X does a pretty good job of maintaining itself due to its Unix core, but there are times when you'd like to run some of its self maintenance tasks manually, and that's where IceClean comes in. Just using the built-in Unix System Tasks that underlay OS X, you can clean out system caches for ...

TUAW's Daily Mac App: Onyx

by Samuel Gibbs (Jul 11th, 2011)

Cleaning up a Mac is something many users never do, but if you want to squeeze all the performance and disk space you can out of your Mac, you need a tool like Onyx. A free multi-purpose utility, Onyx lets you run a myriad of system tasks such as disk maintenance, cache clean-up and index ...

New developer tool will port Xbox 360 games to iOS

by Mike Schramm (Jun 24th, 2011)

ExEn is a brand new tool for developers that's designed to bridge the gap between XNA, Silverlight and iOS (and eventually Android). XNA stands for "Xbox New Architecture," and is the general API used by developers to create games for Microsoft's Xbox console, and ExEn purports to take those ...

TUAW's Daily Mac App: Translucent

by Samuel Gibbs (May 18th, 2011)

For the most part your Mac just works, but for some of us, we want a little more information on how well our Macs are working and what's doing what, when. That's where apps like the mainstay of the Mac monitors, iStat Pro and iStat Menus come in. Today we'll be taking a quick look at a small, ...

Making custom alert sounds for your Mac

by Chris Ward (Mar 7th, 2011)

When you're fed up with your Mac telling you it's not about to open the pod bay doors and wondering if, Dave, you really want to do that, you may want to think about making some custom sounds for it yourself. And as luck would have it, there's a great tutorial on how to do just that over at ...

Macworld Expo 2011: Smart Technologies' interactive whiteboards

by Mike Schramm (Feb 1st, 2011)

One of the most interesting booths at last week's Macworld Expo was that of Smart Technologies, who were showing off their interactive touch surface systems. These aren't necessarily Mac-related, unfortunately -- the equipment Smart sells is just an interface, or rather a series of interfaces ...

Elliptic Labs demonstrates its touchless user interface for iPad (with video)

by Mike Schramm (Jan 9th, 2011)

As promised a while back, we got to chat with Elliptic Labs here at CES, and CEO Stian Aldrin walked us through the touchless gesture technology his 15-person Norway-based company is developing as a prototype. The whole thing is based on ultrasound, it turns out -- a small speaker kicks out ...

BMW releases two apps for iOS

by Mike Schramm (Dec 29th, 2010)

BMW has released two apps for iOS this week. The first one, based on the Mini brand, is called Mini Connected, and it allows you to not only track information about your car, but also access web radio and audio versions of internet feeds, hooked up directly to your car's stereo. And on cars ...

Elliptic Labs to show off gesture-sensing iPad dock at CES 2011

by Mike Schramm (Dec 22nd, 2010)

Elliptic Labs has been working on gesture-sensing technology for a while now (where you can just swipe your hand in the air instead of actually touching a screen), and rumor has it that the company will be showing off a dock at next month's CES show for the iPad -- something that enables you to ...

Kinect running on OS X

by Mike Schramm (Nov 11th, 2010)

Microsoft recently released its Kinect motion sensor system for the Xbox 360 -- it's a little camera-equipped device that plugs into the game console and lets you control game titles, Wii-style, with just your body in lieu of any actual controllers. Just a few days after release, the hardware was ...

Keep your CPU under control with App Tamer

by Brett Terpstra (Sep 17th, 2010)

It's been a little while since we've heard from St. Clair Software, makers of the well-known system utility, Default Folder X (which we've covered before). You may recall that we caught up with St. Clair Software developer Jon Gotow at WWDC '09. Well, he's got something new to announce today: App ...

iPort: Wall-mounted home automation for iPad

by Mike Schramm (Aug 20th, 2010)

I have already seen the iPad used in home automation -- Savant is using an iPad app to hook up to some of their home automation systems, using Apple's tablet to control the TV, a whole entertainment system, or even do some remote control of house lights or HVAC, or even monitor cameras remotely ...

Barnes & Noble releases NOOKstudy for e-Textbooks

by Mike Schramm (Aug 5th, 2010)

As promised, Barnes & Noble has released their NOOKstudy app for both Windows and OS X computers -- you can get the app for free on their webpage now, and then use it to download textbooks for school this fall (either buying them at a discount compared to the real paper copies, or just checking ...