If your like me, the last fortnight has seen little activity other than watching Olympic skiing, skating, curling, hockey, luge, bobsled, Nordic Combined, curling, complaints about NBC, curling, aerials, and curling. With the Closing Ceremonies now a rapidly fading memory of Shatner songs and giant inflatable beavers, there’s never been a better time to start

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Filed under: Apple Corporate , Apple When a lot of people get their news electronically, skimming over headlines through news aggregators, RSS feeds, and retweets on Twitter, sometimes the majority of information people will get from an article comes from the headline. When a headline leans towards the sensational side, or doesn’t accurately reflect the information that’s actually contained in the article, it’s easy for poorly-represented news to spread like wildfire. This article from the UK’s The Daily Telegraph , regarding Apple’s self-initiated audit of its overseas manufacturing facilities, is a perfect example, with its attention-grabbing headline: “Apple Admits Using Child Labour.” The sub-headline isn’t any better: “Apple has admitted that child labour was used at the factories that build its computers, iPods and mobile phones.” Once a person reads those words, his or her knee-jerk reaction is most likely going to be one of disgust and horror. “How could you, Apple?” they might say. If this hypothetical reader owns a Mac or an iPhone, their eyes might glance over at it with anguished guilt; if they don’t own any products from Apple, it’s just one more reason not to buy them. If you dig beyond the headline, however, to the meat of the Telegraph ’s article, where the actual reporting finally begins? Then you get a completely different story as early as the first sentence: “At least eleven 15-year-old children were discovered to be working last year in three factories which supply Apple.” That’s pretty far from the image conjured by the headline, of legions of school-aged children lined up in factories and slapping together MacBook Pros when they should be slapping together algebra homework. Instead, we find a relatively small number of teenaged factory workers — reprehensible, but not unusual at all for overseas factories. The end of this first sentence is even more important, because it puts the focus where it belongs: three factories which supply Apple. Two paragraphs later, we find another very important bit of news not reflected in the headline: “Apple said the child workers are now no longer being used.” Other news sites performed better reporting on the matter, but at least one still had an easily misinterpreted headline. Read on to find out more. Continue reading TUAW Fact Check: Apple using underage labor? No. TUAW Fact Check: Apple using underage labor

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Section: Mac Software , Home and Personal , Miscellaneous / Other , Reviews Provides: Template based database creation and management Format: Digital download or CD Developer: FileMaker, Inc. Minimum System Requirements: Mac OS X v10.5.7, 867MHz PowerPC G4/G5 or Intel processor, 512MB RAM, CD drive Processor Compatibility: Universal Price: $49.00 single user, $99.00 family pack Availability: Out now Version Reviewed: 3.0.2 I’m the target audience for Bento 3, and that makes this a fairly easy review to write. I love having database functionality at my disposal, but I’ve never wanted to bother with learning FileMaker just to keep track of my CD collection, family recipes or the Appletell writing staff. More importantly, I didn’t want to pay for the functionality of FileMaker when I knew I wouldn’t use it beyond 20% of its capabilities. So, I’d end up buying multiple proprietary database programs. One for tracking movies and CDs. One for books. One for recipes.

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Let it snow, let it snow, let it snow. If you’re one of our more easterly readers, you’re probably getting sick of the stuff. Unless you’re a skier or a snowboarder or are inexplicably into curling. If you’re out a little further west, it’s just the thing for the slopes and you wish you were getting a little of that east coast action. And if you’re up north in Vancouver, you’ve been seeing it all the time. And in honor of the 2010 games, Mac|Life has a full slate of medals to hand out in the best writing of the week. Of course they’re all gold, silly. It’s Mac|Life, after all. Features: – 15 Awesome Google Services You Never Knew Existed – Will they stop at nothing? The constant stream of new products and services offered by the company that promises to "don’t be evil" come fast and furious with new stuff every half-second. We take a look at some of their lesser known services that just might auto-complete your life. – The Gregory Brothers Interview: Auto-Tune the News and Other Blatant Acts of Awesomeness – Seriously, need we say more

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I was thrilled to hear that current apps will be compatible with the iPad, but I’m more excited for apps that haven’t been written yet. Apps for the iPhone and iPod touch are designed for use while being held. There’s an exciting new use case that comes with the iPad — when it’s sitting in the dock. Owners not only have a new device to read news while on the couch, but they also have the perfect peripheral display. What’s a peripheral display? Something that provides basic information without distracting you from your primary task. It runs silently in the background and it’s there when you need to retrieve some glanceable information. You already use plenty of them every day: clocks, stock tickers, weather icons, unread email icons, etc

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The iPhone 3GS is like a Formula One car: fast, sleek and a thrill to drive. And then, every hour or so, it has to hit the pits to refuel (only, unlike refueling an F1 car, it takes hours, not seconds). Now, imagine if every F1 car had button on the steering wheel that the

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Filed under: Cult of Mac , Apple With TUAW’s Your First Apple series, we let you get a glimpse of our own histories with the Mac. My own history with Apple’s computers has been a bit convoluted. The first Apple computer, in fact the first computer of any kind I remember using, was an Apple II+. I was in kindergarten in Saudi Arabia at the time, so I don’t really remember much about those early experiences. Like many people of my generation, when I returned to the US I went to schools that had computer labs crammed full of Apple IIe computers. Of course, the only programs that were ever run on my elementary school’s Apples were marginally “educational” games like Where in the World is Carmen Sandiego?, Odell Lake, and the massively popular Oregon Trail. Meanwhile, my family had a KayPro PC at home, which meant my dad had to teach an eight-year-old kid how to navigate through the amber-lettered jungles of DOS — something I’m glad I’ll never have to do with my own kids. The Apple IIe was the only computer I used in school through 1990. I spent most of seventh grade cooking up little text-based adventure games in BASIC, and I even learned some rudimentary drawing and audio programming, all of which I forgot long ago. In mid-1990, the school revamped our computer lab with brand-new Macintosh Classics: the first Mac I ever used, the first machine I used that had a hard drive, and the first time I ever used a GUI to interact with a computer. Oddly enough, despite the huge leap in capabilities the Mac Classic had over the Apple IIe, we spent half of eighth grade using the Mac to learn how to type. I guess I should be thankful I learned to touch-type way back then, but spending several months on typing tutor software was a hard sell after spending the previous year doing actual programming . After that first year with the Mac, my experiences with Apple’s computers went through some rollercoaster-like ups and downs. Click “read more” to find out why.

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Section: iPhone / iPod touch / iPad , iPhone , iPod touch , iDevice Apps , Reviews Category: Stinger Table Hockey Seller: Stinger Games Requirements: iPhone OS 2.2 or later Compatibility: iPhone and iPod touch File Size: 10.6MB Version Reviewed: 1.1 Price: $1.99 Age Rating: 4+ Before I begin this review, I should disclose that rod hockey is my favorite arcade style table game. You can keep your air hockey and foosball. Give me something that requires a little more skill, a little more finesse, but also doesn’t take up as much room as a pool or ping pong table. I’m the guy who has priced out basement finishing jobs just so I have an excuse to buy a rod hockey table and put it somewhere appropriate. Or, maybe I can just play it on the iPhone, thanks to Stinger Table Hockey. As all of the iPhone air hockey sims were released, I kept thinking I’d love to see rod hockey, but had no idea how someone would be able to pull it off. For the most part, I think Stinger has. But first, here’s the game… Rod hockey (also known as bubble or table hockey, obviously) places (usually) 3D plastic players on rods, which you move in their lanes by pulling the rods at the ends of the table. You can spin them by turning the rods in an attempt to shoot the puck into the net. In Stinger Table Hockey, you move the players up and down in their lanes by tapping the player (or lane) and dragging your thumb up and down. You spin them to pass the puck or shoot by swiping your thumb left and right

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Section: iPhone / iPod touch / iPad , iPhone , iPod touch , iDevice Apps , Reviews Category: Stinger Table Hockey Seller: Stinger Games Requirements: iPhone OS 2.2 or later Compatibility: iPhone and iPod touch File Size: 10.6MB Version Reviewed: 1.1 Price: $1.99 Age Rating: 4+ Before I begin this review, I should disclose that rod hockey is my favorite arcade style table game. You can keep your air hockey and foosball. Give me something that requires a little more skill, a little more finesse, but also doesn’t take up as much room as a pool or ping pong table. I’m the guy who has priced out basement finishing jobs just so I have an excuse to buy a rod hockey table and put it somewhere appropriate. Or, maybe I can just play it on the iPhone, thanks to Stinger Table Hockey. As all of the iPhone air hockey sims were released, I kept thinking I’d love to see rod hockey, but had no idea how someone would be able to pull it off. For the most part, I think Stinger has. But first, here’s the game… Rod hockey (also known as bubble or table hockey, obviously) places (usually) 3D plastic players on rods, which you move in their lanes by pulling the rods at the ends of the table. You can spin them by turning the rods in an attempt to shoot the puck into the net. In Stinger Table Hockey, you move the players up and down in their lanes by tapping the player (or lane) and dragging your thumb up and down. You spin them to pass the puck or shoot by swiping your thumb left and right. It’s a fairly easy and intuitive method of control, allowing you to use two thumbs at once to control multiple players.

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  The Federal Communication Commission recently posted a whole lotta documents regarding the evaluation of a new phone from HTC.  Its model number (PB99300) is verrrrry similar to the Nexus One’s (PB99100).  It’s a CDMA phone (which is Verizon’s carrier tech of choice).  And if you sift through the technobabble, it’s clear that the phone passed its FCC tests with flying colors. So there’s a very good chance this is the Nexus One that’s scheduled to be Verizon bound — we just don’t know when, exactly.

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