Whistler Blackcomb Live App

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The ski season is here and the snow at Whistler and Blackcomb has been incredible. The week I was there it snowed 7-12 cm each day. Best of all I downloaded the Whistler Blackcomb Live App for iPhone and it's awesome. You can track your season Edge Card passes, when you use them and how many you have left. The App has lift status, snow conditions, weather status, weather cams and best of all using GPS it can track every run. The run tracker tracks speed, vertical, distance and shows each run on a map. I have not been able to put the App down even when I am not skiing so I can see the conditions on the mountains and look forward to my next trip. So have you tried out the Whistler Blackcomb Live App?

Apple Reports Fiscal 2012 First Quarter Results

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Apple announced its financial results for the fiscal 2012 first quarter today. It was another record breaking quarter. Apple posted record quarterly revenues of $46.33 billion and record quarterly net profitsof $13.06 billion. A 27 percent increase in iPhones sold from the same quarter a year ago. That is just over 37 million iPhones. Apple also sold 5.2 million Macs, 15.43 million iPads and 15.4 million iPods. Way to go Apple, we salute you! Here is the official release from Apple.

iBooks 2 Textbooks

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Today Apple announced iBooks 2 for iPad featuring iBooks textbooks, an entirely new kind of textbook that’s dynamicn and interactive. iBooks textbooks offer iPad users beautiful fullscreen textbooks with interactive animations, diagrams, photos and videos. Included is a new iBooks 2 App for iPad, iPhone and iPod to view and interact with the new textbooks and also an iBooks 2 authoring tool for Mac. I think this is the future of textbooks for students.So what do you think about the new iBooks? You can watch the video at Apple iBooks.

YouTube Video Downloader

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I re-purposed my old iPhone 3G as an iPod Touch for my daughter. However, sometimes when we out of wireless coverage she cannot access YouTube to view her kids music videos. Well there is a solution for this, you can download a YouTube video downloader to convert the streamed YouTube video file to an mp4 file which can then be added to iTunes and synced to your iPhone. It's a bit of work converting each YouTube video file but I can now control what she watches instead of her accessing YouTube related videos. There are a number of YouTube downloader applications, some that are plugins for you browser. The application I use is called the Fastest Video Downloader, it's available for Mac and PC and it's also a certified CNet download file. Let me know which application you use to download YouTube videos?

Sir Jonathan Ive

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Apple's senior vice president of industrial design, Jonathan Ive, have been reported by BBC to have been placed on the list of people to be knighted this year. Ive described the honour as "absolutely thrilling" and said he was "both humbled and sincerely grateful". Per Apple's leadership page Jonathan Ive is London-born and is the senior vice president of Industrial Design at Apple, reporting directly to the CEO. Since 1996, he has been responsible for leading a design team widely regarded as one of the world’s best. According to Steve Jobs' biography by Walter Isaacson, Jobs confided that he had left Ive with "more operational power" than anyone else at the company. For me just opening the box of a new iPhone, iPad or Mac is an amazing experience, the design of box and it's contents is first class. Well done Jonathan you deserve being called Sir Ive. So what do you think about Apple's leadership team?

Cisco AnyConnect VPN on Mac Not Connecting

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I have been struggling to figure out why the Cisco AnyConnect VPN on my MacBook Air stopped working a couple of months ago. Access from my iPhone and iPad were fine but from my MacBook Air, AnyConnect kept disconnecting. The Cisco support forum and Google search is only as good as the search criteria you enter. Well, finally I found the answer to this frustrating issue especially as I was planning to work remotely during the Christmas break.

The problem rears it's ugly head when you enable the "Back to my Mac" application in MobileMe or iCloud. Both the "Back to my Mac" and Cisco AnyConnect VPN use a virtual adapter with the same name "utun0". Since MobileMe or iCloud initiates when your Mac starts up, it grabs the utun0 interface first, causing the Cisco AnyConnect VPN to connect and then disconnect immediatly. I know many Mac users have had this same issue so hope this post helps. Have you had problems with the Cisco Anyconnect VPN?

iTunes 12 Days of Christmas

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Received an email from iTunes early this morning promoting iTunes 12 Days of Christmas which starts today and ends January 6. Each day you can download a free gift from the iTunes Store. The offer includes a selection of songs, music videos, apps, books, movies and TV episodes. The cool thing is the first free gift is an exclusive EP from Coldplay which is my favourite group. The free download includes three songs, three music videos and iTunes LP. The offer is available for 24 hours only, until midnight (ET) today, so hurry up and download it. Can't wait to see what the free download is for tomorrow. Thank you Apple and thank you iTunes. Apparently, the offer is only available in Canada and some parts of Europe. So have you downloaded the free gift?