Microsoft announced it was abandoning its attempted acquisition of Yahoo!, according to a statement from Microsoft. Steve Balmer, Microsoft CEO, said “Yahoo! will never know how good they could have had it,” “We continue to believe that our proposed acquisition made sense for Microsoft, Yahoo and the market as a whole. Our goal in pursuing [...]

The slides from my Macworld San Francisco 2008 session on setting up a WiFi network are now available as a PDF file. Thanks to all of you who attended and responded so enthusiastically. I was lucky enough to have great crowds for all four sessions — they were attentive, asked great questions and were very [...]

Thanks to instructions provided by The Joy of Tech’s Snaggy, RandomMaccess now has a custom icon for those who add it as a web clipping to their 1.1.3 iPhone. The technique is very straightforward. Simply create a 57×57 pixel icon, save it as a PNG with the name “apple-touch-icon.png” and drop it in the root [...]

I didn’t write my annual look at the state of the Mac for the upcoming year this time around mostly because it seemed what was ahead was fairly obvious, with the notable exception of what “one more thing” Steve Jobs might pull out of his hat at some point during the year. I had already [...]

Good riddance to a stupid idea. The interesting question to me is not so much what this means for iTunes, but what does the record industry think it means for iTunes? Three of the big four are selling their DRM-free tracks only on Amazon. Is it pure spite? Do they have promises from Amazon of tiered [...]

I did an interview with Chuck Joiner for his “MacVoices” podcast (one of several excellent podcasts he produces.) The interview went online today–unfortunately, I can’t hear it yet because of firewall issues at my office, so I don’t know how much of an idiot I sound like. (Always a concern for me when I speak [...]

For anyone interested, I’ll be giving a session at Macworld San Francisco this year. The nice thing is that it’s part of the Macworld Learning Center, so it’s free for all attendees — not just those who sign up for the conferences. I think the idea is to give the attendees a taste of what [...]

Here’s an idea for all you iPod/iPhone developers, and all I want out of it is a free unit. More and more often, I play my iPhone through my car stereo system, using a cassette adapter from the great folks at OtherWorld Computing. When I get a phone call, the podcast that’s currently playing fades out [...]

I completely skipped running Tiger on the Macs in my office — mostly over networking issues that never seem to have been resolved. We have two newer machines (both DP G5s) that came with Tiger installed. We found some workarounds for most of the issues, especially those dealing with our company’s proxy server. In a desperate [...]

Amazon’s try at an eBook reader, the “Kindle,” was released today. If anyone can make a product like this work, I think it’s Amazon (OK, and maybe Google). I really like the idea of taking the computer out of the equation. I also like that Kindle comes with free EVDO wireless networking that works only for [...]