"To kick start Apple Week here at CotyGonzales.com, I've compiled a comprehensive list of Apple T-Shirt suitable for any Apple Fanboy or MacHead! And chances are, if you're a MacAddict like me, you probably own a few of these shirts already! Later in the week I'll be posting a list of Official Apple Released T-Shirts. They have a long history of releasing T-Shirts to members of specific Apple projects - be on the lookout for that coming sometime this week!"

Great list of t-shirts that offer something for everyone, with links on where you can buy them. Worth checking out!

"Today Google is kicking off its third installment of Doodle for Google, a yearly nationwide art contest for students in grades K-12. Eligible students can submit their own "Google Doodles," and the winning Doodle will appear on Google's homepage for one day. Plus the winner and his or her school will receive money and scholarships."

This year's theme is "If I Could Do Anything, I Would..." The idea, obviously, is to get those kids dreaming about what they would do or want to do in their future. You can get all the details at the official site and the school registration deadline is March 17th, with a deadline of submissions on March 31st, 2010. Cool contest.

"iPhone and now iPad Developers now have a more detailed way to see how app approvals are progressing. Apple added a clock a few weeks ago that displayed the percentage of apps approved within the last 14 days."

Any way that Apple can improve the developer aspect of the iTunes App Store is a good thing, but I'm not so sure how great this is for developers except in a general sort of way. The developers can see the percentage of new apps and updated apps that were approved within the last seven days, right now it stands at 98% and 99% respectively for them. Now if they made it so you could see how far along YOUR app was in the process that would be of greater benefit I would imagine. But kudos for Apple for improving the process in some fashion.

"The formidable Economist magazine has blessed Steve Jobs with a rare cover story examining the potential impact of the Jesus tablet. Even rarer, the iPad story is mostly positive, even if the religious imagery is over the top."

Yes, it is a little over the top in my opinion. You can read the story here.

"John Gruber of Daring Fireball is the most influential Apple pundit on the web, but readers often complain about the lack of comments on his website. In fact, Gruber's site is famous for not having comments. In an age when every website falls over itself to accommodate reader interactivity, Gruber stands alone. He has stubbornly resisted adding comments to his site for years."

Daring Fireball With Comments is live and you can toss a comment or two onto what Gruber has posted on his site. His reason for not allowing comments? In his words, it "takes away from what I'm saying." Yea so you can see why the word egotistical and arrogant are sometimes attached to his name. This should be an interesting experiment if nothing else. It appears that his isn't the only website that isn't allowing comments though.

"Macworld Expo's iMacworld 2.0 app for the iPhone and iPod touch is available at Apple's iTunes-based App Store in time for the show's February 9 kick-off."

If you are going, this will be a handy app to get around, since it has information on all the vendors and locations at the Expo. It also lists all the speakers and conference sessions as well as giving you the search ability for all events and products during the Expo, which runs from February 9th through February 13th, 2010 at the Moscone Center in San Francisco. More info on the Expo at their Web site.

"Mac OS X's System Preferences program is the one-stop shop for customizing many aspects of your operating system. Open System Preferences by choosing Apple menu -> System Preferences, or by clicking on the Dock icon that looks like a set of gears. Each preference pane is labeled to give you a clear idea of what type of elements it lets you change: Appearance, Spotlight, Displays, Network, and so on."

And he goes on to list the five that he likes the best, including taking control of your Spotlight searches as shown above in the screenshot from the preferences window. My favorite of the five? Disabling the CAPS lock, I hate that key!

"On Monday, Apple released iTunes 9.0.3. According to the release notes, the update's numero uno bug fix is "iTunes no longer ignores your ‘Remember password for purchases' setting." In other words, if you enable this iTunes Store option, you will no longer have to continue to re-enter your password each time you make a purchase."

This really annoyed me so I'm glad they finally fixed it. You can get info and download from the update page at Apple, but this should update automatically for you from the software update feature.

"Apple issued an update late Monday that supposedly fixes issues with the company's 27-inch iMac display. According to notes provided with the update, the fix 'updates the display firmware on 27-inch iMac systems to address issues that may cause intermittent display flickering.'"

You can get details at Apple on this update, but it's basically firmware update for the display in hopes that it will fix the flickering issues. No mention about the fix for the yellowing screen issues.

"Google Jan. 29 said it would cease fully supporting Microsoft Internet Explorer 6.0 for its Google Docs and Google Sites applications March 1. This pledge extends to other older Web browser versions, including Mozilla Firefox 2.0, Apple Safari 2.0, as well as Google's own Chrome 3.0. The move is Google's push to rid the messaging and collaboration world of the dated, insecure IE6 and put Google Chrome in its place. Chrome has 4.63 percent of the browser market and would love to chomp away at IE's 63 percent share."

Doesn't seem on the surface to be anything as sinister as forcing their way into marketshare, appears to me like its natural progression of things as software advances. But I suppose since IE 6 has over 60% of the market for browsers that it would be natural to assume Google was up to some skullduggery wouldn't it? What are your thoughts? 

"My colleague Dan Frakes has chimed in with his take on the five best surprises from the iPad's launch. I'm in total agreement with his list-well, except for the name thing. The iPad's design is elegant, the size seems about right for a device designed to surf the wWeb and handle e-mail and e-book reading. I really want to buy one..."

But he has reservations, although mine are quickly fading. The only thing he points out that I'm hoping they do fix when it comes out (hopefully with new OS for the iPhone as well) is the multi-tasking, or lack thereof. For a device such as this I think it really hinders it's usage if you don't have multi-tasking. The video camera? Nice but not essential for my needs however I can see that it would be beneficial for video chat. The lack of flash, no GPS on certain models and the video limitations don't really bother me for what I'm contemplating my usage might be for this device. What are your thoughts?

"Apple today uploaded the full iPad presentation (in 4 parts) to what appears to be its official Youtube channel. The videos can be viewed in 720P HD and in H.264 using Youtube's new HTML5 website."

So now no worries about that cool Apple video disappearing from YouTube since the user wasn't authorized to post. You can subscribe to their channel here.

"You probably all know a music lover/headphone snob that looks at you with despair every time you pull out your stock iPhone headphones. Too often, it follows by him trying to sell you on the "We can hear the difference" cult while pushing his dirty $600 piece of plastic in your ears."

I'm a bit tone deaf myself, so I never wanted to spend much on a set of ear buds, opting to stick with the earphones that came with the iPhone, even though they never stayed in correctly. So when Apple came out with their in-ear headphones I immediately upgraded for about $80.00 USD. They sound fine to me, but in my business of having to wear a headset for hours on end for about 14 years, I'm not the go-to guy for a sound quality opinion. I'm more impressed with the fact that Apple's In-Ear Headphones stay in my ears. So if you can't stomach the $100.00 USD Bose version, you might like Apple's In-Ear version, I know I do. But don't use me as a roadmap for the sound quality, and if that is the most important aspect for you, then you may want to consider the Bose as well. The author seems to like them just fine.

"Agile Web Solutions has announced 1Password 3.0.4, an update to its award-winning password and identity manager for the Mac. This deceptively minor update adds over 60 new features, changes, and fixes, and is available free to registered users."

Some new features with 3.0.4 such as Quick Look which lets you see file attachments for 10.6 Snow Leopard users to better organize and view files that were saved in 1Password. They also added tagging, improved the Wi-Fi syncing process (thank you very much) and improved importing options for those switching from other programs to 1Password. This is a paid upgrade but if you have purchased 1Password 2 on or after February 1 2009, you get free license upgrades to the new version. If you are outside that free upgrade period, you can still get a deal with single license upgrade at $24.95 USD and family upgrade for $34.95 USD, 17% and 30% savings respectively.

"Apple released iPhone OS 3.1.3 for the iPhone and iPod touch on Tuesday with patches for several potential security flaws. The update fixes flaws that could lead to arbitrary code execution or app crashes when playing maliciously crafted mp4 files, viewing maliciously crafted TIFF images, and accessing maliciously crafted FTP servers. It also fixes a USB-related issue that could grant access to data on locked iPhones, and fixes an issue where Mail could send unwanted data in certain situations when HTML 5 media elements load."

It is also supposed to improve battery level accuracy on the 3GS, fix a third party launch problem with certain apps and a compatibility issue with users of the Japanese Kana keyboard. This is a free update via iTunes.

"If the idea of setting up your networked Macs to share your iTunes libraries is just too much to bear, then these steps can help you to get sharing."

Not sure if any of you have tried this nifty feature with iTunes 9, but it works quite well. This article is a step-by-step on how to get it working so you can share iTunes items between multiple Macs.

Not sure if you use Mailplane, but if you use Gmail, you are missing out if you don't have this program. And now they have updated to version 2.1.4. This update fixes a few bugs and appearance malfunctions and is done through the program itself. If you don't have it, they do offer a free trial and single user license is $24.95 USD. 

"Mail storage is the organizational conundrum of the early 21st century for many longtime Mac users. On your hard drive, you probably have an e-mail archive literally dating back to the last century, containing a few thousand irreplaceable, keep-forever messages in an ocean of saved detritus. Searching is a pain, but "reorganizing" your archive is a fate worse than death, so you've gamely stuck to your system-until now, when Google Email Uploader for Mac presented a viable alternative."

You can check out the uploader here, but note that there are a couple of "wait, read this before you do it" elements. It doesn't upload to gmail or google mail accounts, only those that are hosted by Google Apps for your domain. And it requires Mac OS 10.4 or higher. But it will upload from Apple Mail, Thunderbird and Eudora, automatically finding the archives and uploading them. If you have more than 500 messages, however, it may take some time (the author noted it would take the program about 69 hours to do it all once he started the process).

"Last November, Robert McGovern bought a 27-inch iMac equipped with a quad-core Core i7 processor. When it arrived 12 days later, McGovern, a British citizen living in Germany, happily went about setting up his new desktop machine. That happiness lasted about half-an hour."

At that time he found out his screen was getting a yellowish tint along the edge and joined the many (at least from what the discussion board responses are showing) customers that are reporting the same problem to Apple. The biggest hurdle in these types of cases is to get Apple to acknowledge that a problem exists. Well now they have and are in the process of getting these machines fixed, however the turnaround on the 27-inch iMac for example, is about three weeks. If you want to find out if your machine may be one of the potentially jaundiced ones, check out this chart. There is also a lengthy write-up over at Gizmodo on this issue.

"Mien Software has released MediaEdit 3.1.8 for the Mac, a consumer-level video editing tool, which supports standard painting tools and multiple layers. This update improves stability and support for Snow Leopard. This free update addresses the following: Improved support for Snow Leopard, fixed issues with non-english characters in file names and fixed an issue where clips can become corrupted after a join and a split"

Admittedly, I don't do a lot of video editing, other than home movies so forgive me if you are already a user and know about this program. Seems like a nifty program that is compatible with all Quicktime formats as well as being able to paint directly onto the frames of a movie. If you have another program that you use similar what is it? This one is available for a free trial period, or you can purchase for $59.95 USD and is now compatible with Snow Leopard.