And music from old backups…Unfortunately, now I’ll be tempted to mess with Automator for hours this weekend. Apple & Mac Simplify automator dropbox hazel mac productivity simplify torrentI never mess with Automator. should. It’s so awesome and powerful, yet I often forget about it. Tutorials ). This is not limited to torrent files. It’s anything. will be setting up additional workflows for movie and image files. Don’t want to mess with Automator (not sure why you wouldn’t, it’s pretty simple)? Take a gander at Hazel. Brilliant. MORE >>

Apple musicGarageBand 101: Using Magic GarageBand to create a jam-along band — from gigaom.com by Mark Crump. While you can use programs to buy individual songs to play along with, since Macs come with GarageBand pre-installed, this is a great feature many may not know about it. MORE >>

I was boarding a plane away from home as Apple’s announcement was happening, so I haven’t had the chance to dig into the details as I normally would, but just the news itself shows Apple is taking on yet another industry. What Apple did to the music industry is  a closer analogy to what is happening here than what they did to the phone industry, however. As Apple recreated the business of music publishing, they’re similarly shifting textbook publishing. Apple, once again making life fun. That may change,  however. MORE >>

Now that most fearsome protagonist Apple is stirring up the overcrowded eReader market, and book publishers are expressing concern. Will Apple transform and dominate the market for electronic print in the same way as it did with electronic music? I remember the Wimbledon men’s singles final of 1967. John Newcombe won. It was one of the most comprehensive thrashings of all time. But it was not the beating of Wilhelm Bungert that made the match so memorable. It was the very first time I watched television in colour. Now I see that 2010 is to be the year of colour. MORE >>

The folks at the new Apple Retail Store on Fourth Street in Berkeley told me I needed to back up my first-edition iPad that’s been sitting on the shelf for months. I’m surprised the message didn’t say something like, “For a mere $50 and an active Apple Care account, you won’t lose everything you’ve already paid for.” ” While I was at the Apple Store, I asked about iCloud. Today I bought an iPad2. Very cool device. Then I could restore my apps to the new iPad2. Okay, Now what? Dump those apps? Go figger. Big iron. Core memory. MORE >>