x

At least one Microsoft executive believes that Apple designs are good enough to cite as a yardstick.

After revealing that Windows Blue would officially be called 8.1 at the JP Morgan Technology, Media, and Telecom Conference on Tuesday, Microsoft Chief Marketing Officer Tami Reller moved on to the topic of tablets, convertibles, and detachables.

"The HP envy x2 is a classic example of a beautiful detachable. When the tablet and base are together it looks like a MacBook Air competitor," she said.

How good is the Envy x2's design? "This 11-inch ultraportable laptop is cute, … Read more

The OS X Finder sidebar and Dock are convenient locations for favorite folders, documents, applications, and locations, and in addition the Dock offers a convenient place for minimized windows, as well as the Trash. For new user accounts Apple puts a default set of items in the Dock and Finder sidebar, but these can be customized.

The standard and perhaps intuitive method of adding items to these locations is to drag them there; however, it's not foolproof. If you inadvertently release your mouse before the cursor has reached the Dock or sidebar, then you chance copying or moving the … Read more

The X-47B prototype on Tuesday flew off an aircraft carrier and into the history books.

Today's achievement, the first-ever catapult launch of an unmanned aircraft from the flight deck of a carrier, promises to open up a new chapter in the annals of naval aviation.

The X-47B Unmanned Combat Air System demonstrator launched from the deck of the USS George H.W. Bush at 11:18 a.m. ET off the coast of Virginia. It executed several planned low approaches to the carrier -- a carrier landing will take place at a later time -- and then flew across … Read more

If you like sports highlights but spend more time on social networks than watching TV, Twitter and ESPN are going to do their best to meet your needs.

According to The Wall Street Journal, Twitter and ESPN plan to announce tomorrow a deepening of their existing relationship, agreeing on a pact under which the leading sports channel will unveil a wide variety of highlight clips in its tweets. The videos would be available on Twitter "shortly after" they take place live.

Naturally, the new arrangement -- which expands on a pact signed in December under which ESPN began … Read more

Last week Apple issued a firmware update for its entire Thunderbolt-supporting Mac lineup, which was intended to address some stability problems when using Macs in Target Disk mode. While the update works as intended for the majority of systems, a few have encountered problems, either applying the update or not being able to recognize Thunderbolt drives after updating.

If you are unable to install the update, you should first make sure that your system is one of the Thunderbolt-based Macs for which the update is intended. While Apple's Software Update service should limit the update's availability only to … Read more

Apple's Disk Utility program is the built-in drive and volume management tool for OS X that is included not just in the working OS X installation but also in the OS X installation and recovery volumes for an OS X system. While useful for checking system file permissions and fixing formatting errors, there are some instances where it may not properly manage some custom drive setups on iMac and Mac Mini systems.

In 2012 Apple introduced iMacs and Mac Minis with Fusion drives. This Fusion drive, in which a smaller solid-state drive is coupled with a larger hard drive … Read more

The highly anticipated and hotly rumored Motorola X phone may have just popped up in FCC filings earlier this week.

According to the paperwork, the Motorola device includes the model number XT1058, and supports earlier rumors that the X phone will be available on AT&T.

For one thing, the handset is enabled for a GSM network, and it appears to be operating on 1900/850 bands -- both factors are indicative of an AT&T device.

The report also notes that the phone has 4G LTE and NFC capabilities.

Ever since Google acquired Motorola, talk of the … Read more

MacFixIt Answers is a feature in which I answer Mac-related questions e-mailed in by our readers.

This week, readers wrote in asking about the potential drawbacks from using Little Snitch to block updates from XProtect, the media browser not properly handling Aperture libraries, the OS X Trash hanging when instructed to empty, and a problem with incoming network connection requests flashing too fast to make changes.

I welcome contributions from readers, so if you have any suggestions or alternative approaches to these problems, please post them in the comments!

Question: Potential drawbacks from blocking XProtect updates MacFixIt reader Paul asks:… Read more

The Common Unix Printing System (CUPS) is a collection of utilities and background services (along with their configuration files) that OS X uses to manage printers attached to your Mac.

If you are having difficulty configuring your printers or even just printing to them in OS X, one thing to try is to reset the print system, which will clear out your printers and allow you to set them up again from scratch. This service may appear to only remove your printers, but it in fact does a number of checks on the system and restores configuration files to factory … Read more