Apple is the World’s Most Admired Company

The Most Admired list is the definitive report card on corporate reputations. Our survey partners at Hay Group start with about 1,400 companies... More
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Facebook Android App Gets Updated: Tag Your Friends

For all you Facebook Android users out there in green bot land, you may like to know that there is a new update available for your Facebook application that enables the user to get a bit more social with their Facebook friends.

According to the guys over on Droid-life, the new update for Facebook for Android delivers the ability for users to tag friends when updating their status along with being able to search friends easier, and add you phone number to your profile.

The Facebook for Android update also delivers numerous bug fixes and apparently if you want to tag your friend in a status all you need to do is to type in ‘@’ along with their name, similar to Twitter.

That’s about it in Facebook for Android version 1.5.3, so all you need do now is hit up the update button on your Android smartphone or head on over to the Android Market.

Video Editing on an IPod Touch

Q. Is it possible to edit a video clip I’ve shot on the iPod Touch, or must I transfer it to the computer to edit?

A. You can do very basic video editing on the iPod Touch: trimming the beginning or end of your clip. In the Photos app, open the video you want to edit from the Camera Roll album, and then tap the screen to bring up the playback controls, including the frame-viewer bar at the top of the screen.

With your finger, drag the end of the frame-viewer bar from either end of the clip until the part you want to keep is inside the yellow border. Next, tap the yellow Trim button at the top of the screen to cut the unselected frames. You can cut the original clip or make a new copy containing the selected video. Choosing to save the trimmed video as a new clip will leave the original file intact.

If you want to do more with your mobile movie production, like adding text, music and scene transitions, visit the iTunes App Store and search for video-editing apps for the iPod Touch or iPhone. You can find several, and most cost less than $5. If you find the editing experience cramped or limited on the small screen, you can always import the clips to your computer and edit them in a desktop video program.

Getting Personal

With AOL

Q. Periodically, I get a message on my computer that Windows is “Backing Up Personal Storage.” What is “personal storage” and what is its benefit?

A. If you are not using a dedicated backup program that is saving your data to an external drive or separate hard-drive partition, the message might be coming from America Online’s software. Instead of keeping your mail only online, where you need an Internet connection to see it, you can use the AOL program to save e-mail messages to your computer’s hard drive, through the Personal Filing Cabinet feature.

In AOL 9.0 and later, you can also save copies of your e-mail to AOL’s servers, so they won’t get flushed out of the system and are accessible from the AOL Web site as well as through the desktop software. AOL’s guide to using the Personal Filing Cabinet is at bit.ly/cMuAec.

TIP OF THE WEEK Need to step away from your computer for a few minutes and don’t want anybody snooping around your screen? In most recent versions of Windows, you can press the Windows key and the L key to quickly put up the login screen, which will not go away until the computer’s password is entered. Once you type in the password, the login screen goes away and Windows picks up right where you left off with your open files and programs.

Although Mac OS X does not have a direct keyboard equivalent for quickly locking up your screen while still leaving all your files and programs open, you do have a few options, including third-party shareware or turning on the Security feature in the Mac’s System Preferences to require a password to bypass the screen-saver program.

Another way to quickly lock the screen is to open the Mac’s Applications folder, then open the Utilities folder and start up the Keychain Access program. Under the Keychain Access menu, choose Preferences and turn on the checkbox next to “Show Status in Menu Bar.” A small Lock icon appears in the Mac’s menu bar. Click on it and choose Lock Screen to shut everybody else out of the Mac until you hit the Space bar and type in the system password. J. D. BIERSDORFER

iMac supplies constrained, indicating possible refresh soon

Filed under: Rumors, Mac

by Steven Sande (RSS feed) on Apr 19th 2011 at 5:15PM

If supplies of certain iMac models are any indication, a refresh of Apple's all-in-one iMac may be in the works. This would be the first update of the iMac line since July 27, 2010, when the Intel Core i3 / i5 / i7 machines first became available.

9to5 Mac is reporting that supplies of the desktop machine are constrained worldwide at this time. An anonymous tipster provided the blog with the screenshot seen at the top of this post, showing four standard versions of the iMac in constrained status with "no ETA" for new shipments.

Not only are iMac shipments constrained, but even replacement parts are currently in short supply. Graphics processors and hard drives are particularly hard to get in the U.S.

As we reported at the end of March, any upcoming iMac refresh would most likely migrate the platform to Intel's powerful Sandy Bridge processors, as well as the speedy Thunderbolt I/O standard that debuted in the recent MacBook Pro refresh. At that point, we speculated that the refresh would come in late April or early May, and that timeframe looks more valid every day.

If you're considering the purchase of a new iMac, you may want to put off that purchase for a month or so to benefit from any refresh of the line.

A visual history of NetNewsWire

Filed under: Mac

by Mike Schramm (RSS feed) on Apr 19th 2011 at 9:00PM

NetNewsWire is, as Second Gear's Justin Williams says, "the elder statesman of the Mac OS X platform." Brent Simmons' newsreader has appeared on countless "must-have" app lists, and was one of the most treasured pieces of Mac software since even before anyone outside of Cupertino knew the iPhone was going to exist. On the third birthday of his app Today, Williams takes a nice look at NetNewsWire, both how it has worked visually over the years, and how it has grown along with the platform and stayed relevant for so long.

The app originally started as MacNewsWire -- there were only a few set Mac news feeds, and no Safari, WebKit, or Core Data implementation (because those things, you know, didn't actually exist yet). Over the years, the app has both grown and become more tightly focused, aimed at both what users have requested and of course Simmons' own vision of what the app is supposed to be.

We've talked with Simmons before about translating the app over to iOS, but this is an excellent look back at NetNewsWire's history, and a great guide for how to keep a Mac app strong and popular for a long time.

News: Combined multitasking, search feature to debut in iOS?

Apple is planning to add a new combined multitasking and search view to a future version of iOS, according to a new report. Vietnamese-language Tinhte.vn has posted video of an iPhone running what appears to be a post 4.x version of iOS, complete with a redesigned multitasking interface. Instead of the row of app icons that currently slides up from the bottom of the screen when double-pressing the Home button, the version of iOS depicted in the video instead brings up a new view with nine thumbnails showing the current state of open applications; the app thumbnails can be pressed and held to bring up small black “x” buttons for closing the app, similar to what is seen when doing the same maneuver on the Home screen. In addition, the view has a “Search iPhone” box at the top that appears to function in the same way as the current Spotlight search, while the version of iOS depicted doesn’t appear to have a separate Spotlight search area to the left of the first Home screen. Tinhte.vn has provided correct reports of future Apple products in the past, however, it remains unknown whether the “test version” of the software seen in the video is legitimate, or if it will be included in any public iOS release. The video is available for viewing in embedded form below. [via Engadget]

Update: Tinhte has posted a second video showing the same interface running on a different iPhone. The phone in the second video carries an “XXGB” marking on the back, but in fact has 64GB of internal storage, and is seen running a version of iOS 4.0, suggesting that the thumbnail multitasking interface has been in development since before the release of iOS 4; it is still possible that Apple might move to a thumbnail-style interface in future versions.

Photo tour of Facebook’s new datacenter

Today I was very fortunate to have gotten a tour of Facebook’s new datacenter up in Prineville, Oregon (map). This datacenter is the most energy efficient in the world and only a handful of press got a look. We’ll have a video up after editing it, but here’s a look at the datacenter in photos. I shot all of these photos on an unmodified iPhone 4 with Instagram, that just got an update today. For the panoramic photos I was using Occipital’s 360 app.

Here’s the sight that we saw on arriving. Keep in mind this building is HUGE and there’s a sizable solar array out front (here’s a panoramic photo from inside that solar array), which doesn’t really power much of the datacenter, but powers some of the buildings around the site. Photos don’t really do it justice, but think about three average Walmarts put end-to-end :

Facebook is so big that it has its own flag:

Walking in, yes, we are in the right place:

Just past the Facebook sign is a monitor in the lobby that shows you the state of the datacenter and how well the cooling systems are working:

Inside the security door the local community made these quilts, which is their interpretation of what a social network looks like:

Walking in Thomas Furlong, director of site operations at Facebook, brought us into a huge series of rooms which “process” the air. First room filters the air. Second room filters it further.

Here’s Thomas showing us one of the huge walls of filters (these filters are similar to the ones in my home heating system, except here Facebook has a wall of them).

Here’s a better shot of just how massive this filtering room is:

Then the air goes into a third room, one where the air is mixed to control humidity and temperature (if it’s cold outside, as it was today, they bring some heat up from inside the datacenter and mix it here) and on the other side, there’s a huge array of fans, each of which has a five horsepower motor (today the fans were moving at 1/3 speed, which makes them more efficient).

Here you can see the back sides of one of the huge banks of filters:

Here Thomas stands in front of the fans:

Here’s a closeup look at one of the fans that forces air through the datacenter and through the filtering/processing rooms:

Finally, the air moves through one final step before going downstairs into the datacenter. In this final step small jets spray micro-packets of water into the air. As the water evaporates, which it does very rapidly, it cools the air. One room I didn’t take photos in was filled with pumps and reverse osmosis filters, which makes the water super pure so it works better when using it to cool in this way. One final set of filters makes sure no water gets into the datacenter. Here’s a closer look at the array of water jets:

Here you can see the scale of the room that sprays that water:

Here’s a closeup of one of the jets of cooling water:

Finally we got to follow the air down into the datacenter where there was a huge floor with dozens of rows. Each row had rack after rack of servers.

Here Thomas stands in front of just one of those racks:

This 180-degree view gives you a look down the main corridor (on the side you can see is only half the datacenter — these are the newer “Open Compute” servers, the other half they asked us not to take pictures of, and that contained their older server technology).

If you click here you can see a panoramic photo of one of these rows.

What does this all mean? Well, for one, it brings jobs to Prineville, which is a small town with about 10,000 residents in a very rural county (we drove about half an hour through mostly farmland just to get to Prineville). But listen to Prineville’s mayor to hear what it means for her community.

Which brought up the question: why Prineville. The execs who showed me around today said they chose the site based on an exhaustive search for the perfect combination of low-seismic risks, cooler and mostly dry weather, access to power and Internet trunk lines (Prineville is an old railroad community, and fiber lines run under the railroads here) and a variety of other factors including low tax rates and friendly climate to business, etc.

Anyway, it’s not often that you get to see inside a modern datacenter. You’ll be reading more about this tour, since there were other journalists there as well, hope you enjoyed these early pictures.

By the way, why did Rackspace send me there? For those who don’t know, I’m a full-time employee of Rackspace which is the world’s biggest web hosting company.

Because we’re already building a datacenter based on the “Open Compute” plans that Facebook made and put into Open Source (the datacenter as well as the specs for the machines is all in open source now). More on Open Compute here. Plus we’re datacenter geeks so love seeing how other companies do it so we can learn from what they’ve done.