Macenstein

OMFG!! A ROUNDER HOME BUTTON!!!

In these the days of insane over analysis of all things iPhone, we find it odd that this one seems to have slipped under the radar. The recent photos from Gizmodo of the new 3G iPhone displays hitting Apple stores show a clearly “rounder” white shape on the home button than that found on either the 1st gen iPhone, or Apple’s 3G renderings on its site. Today’s leaked pictures of the 3G iPhone in the wild seem to imply the home button is indeed the same... Read More

Citation needed

I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again – you just can’t trust Wikipedia, kids. Faithful Macenstein reader Art Vandelay sent in the below shot taken from Steve Jobs’ bio (since corrected). See if you can spot the error: Early Years Jobs was born in San Francisco and was adopted by Justin and Clara (née Hagopian) Jobs of Mountain View, Santa Clara County, California who named him Steven Paul. It was discovered upon his birth that he was the... Read More

What’s your favorite keyboard shortcut combination?

As someone who has more or less raised laziness to an art form, I am obviously a huge fan of keyboard shortcuts. This afternoon, it occurred to me that my current all time favorite must be hitting the “U” key in Adobe After Effects. This simple button press (when a layer is selected) brings up all the current properties that you have applied keyframes to in a layer, and I would say it has saved me something like 2 years of “expanding layer properties” time... Read More

New multi-banner “Get a Mac” ads hit the “big sites”

Apple has rolled out a new one of those multi-banner Flash ads that are so hip with the kids, and put it up on some of those “big sites” (you know, the ones that have actual readers). Well, I would just like to throw it out there to Apple that they could likely buy a year’s worth of ads here on Macenstein for the amount they’re paying for a 2-day run on CNN. Of course, why would they bother buying the cow when they’re getting the milk for free? It... Read More

Celebrity Mac chick Sighting mention: Gwyneth Paltrow

Above: Paltrow models Apple’s new iGlove, which makes EVERYTHING multitouch. Ok, admittedly the above shot from Vogue doesn’t show Paltrow using a Mac (and I pretty much wore out the interweb looking for one… however, a quick “command+F” of her Vogue article (no, I am not going to actually read through that) and we come up with the line: “Gwyneth opens a little Mac computer and Googles Japanese restaurants on the Internet for lunch. She decides... Read More

Redefining “slow news day”: Testing Apple’s discussion forum quote indent level

Because it has to be done… I was trying to figure out if Apple had any plans to actually get DVD@ccess working in a usable manner (for launching PDFs from a DVD) when I came across this forum post. As you can see, in the discussion between Gary Scotland and frankev, the “reply” quote indent level gets very small at the bottom (about 6 words wide), yet does not seem to have plateaued before the post was marked “answered”. Read More  Read More

OK, now this is just getting embarrassing

Remember a couple weeks ago when I accidentally washed and dried my iPhone headphones? Miraculously, despite being somewhat crinkly, they appeared to work just fine. Well, for about a week anyway. After a week or so the left earbud began emitting a horrible static sound about 80% of the time, so it was off to the Apple store for another $20 pair of earbuds. Well, wouldn’t you know it, lightning has struck twice, and my brand new set of earbuds have followed in the in the... Read More

Forget the WWDC! WE’RE broadcasting live from the TMBG!

Sure, pretty much ANY Mac site can give you live streams from the World Wide Developers Conference, but how many can give you live updates from… The They Might Be Giants Concert at the Appel Farm Arts and Music Center in beautiful Elmer NJ!?! That’s right, (barring any technical difficulties) we’ll be broadcasting live updates from the concert as it happens. While we expect very few iPhone-related announcements, you never know. Apple is a very secretive company,... Read More

Random prize: Send us your local Apple Store Network screengrabs and get a free iTunes gift card

Man, it’s hard to find free help these days! I wanted to check out the amount and kinds of computers on display at various Apple Stores across the country, and figured the best way would be to ask Apple Store shoppers to send me screengrabs of the “Shared” window on whatever computer they were using. A quick Google search turned up hundreds of Apple Retail Store (ars) iChat addresses, so I added a bunch to my buddy list, and patiently waited for them to come... Read More

And now I’m on Twitter and FriendFeed

Well, I’m not sure why, but I signed up for Twitter and FriendFeed. I am pretty sure the status will never change from “Sitting alone in the dark in front of the computer”, but that doesn’t mean I don’t want to know about how much fun YOU’RE having. So add me, so I can live vicariously through my pretend friends. Thanks! (add me on FriendFeed)  Read More