Well, don’t look now, but Mountain Lion brings even more of the iPhone/iPad features to the Mac. The juiciest payoff here is the suite of Mac apps that now mimic what’s on the iPhone/iPad, like Reminders, Notes, Messages and Game Center. Through your free iCloud account, all of these apps are synced instantly and smoothly across all your Apple gadgets. On the Mac, you type a reminder to yourself; it appears simultaneously on your iPhone.

6 cool Messages tips and tricks | TUAW - The Unofficial Apple Weblog

Télécharger le fond d’écran de Mac OS X Mountain Lion | Fredzone

Apple’s Mountain Lion update to Mac OS X is an affirmation of just how important the cloud and iOS integration has become to anyone who uses a desktop Mac.

iMessage Comes to the Desktop - Download Now

Apple - Press Info - Fair Labor Association Begins Inspections of Foxconn

Anger for Path Social Network After Privacy Breach -

iTunes for Mac: Moving your iTunes Media folder

How to Do a Clean Reinstallation of OS X Lion ~ LockerGnome

Apple wire

A friend of mine who's a senior engineer at Apple, he works on -- or did work on -- fake products I'm sure for the first part of his career, and interviewed for 9 months. It's intense.

First, the best leaders (and learners) have the widest field of vision. After Steve Jobs died, I, like everyone else, read and watched as much as I could about his life and work. One of my favorite sources of insights was an old PBS documentary called "Triumph of the Nerds," in which luminaries of Silicon Valley talked about what inspired their innovations. As Jobs talked about the original Macintosh computer, he talked less about semiconductors and software than he did about painting, music, and art.

"Ultimately it [creativity] comes down to taste," he explained. "It comes down to trying to expose yourself to the best things that humans have done and then trying to bring those things in to what you're doing...I think part of what made the Macintosh great was that the people working on it were musicians and poets and artists and zoologists and historians who also happened to be the best computer scientists in the world."

Maybe it’s time for stickers certifying humanely produced electronics.

Why does Apple manufacture abroad, and especially in China? As the article explained, it’s not just about low wages. China also derives big advantages from the fact that so much of the supply chain is already there. A former Apple executive explained: “You need a thousand rubber gaskets? That’s the factory next door. You need a million screws? That factory is a block away.”

This is familiar territory to students of economic geography: the advantages of industrial clusters — in which producers, specialized suppliers, and workers huddle together to their mutual benefit — have been a running theme since the 19th century.

And Chinese manufacturing isn’t the only conspicuous example of these advantages in the modern world. Germany remains a highly successful exporter even with workers who cost, on average, $44 an hour — much more than the average cost of American workers. And this success has a lot to do with the support its small and medium-sized companies — the famed Mittelstand — provide to each other via shared suppliers and the maintenance of a skilled work force.

The point is that successful companies — or, at any rate, companies that make a large contribution to a nation’s economy — don’t exist in isolation. Prosperity depends on the synergy between companies, on the cluster, not the individual entrepreneur.

As a new monthly feature for 12 Most, I will be interviewing leaders within their fields and gaining some personal insights into them beyond what we see everyday in their posts, tweets and blogs. First up is Guy Kawasaki,  a supporter of 12 Most from the earliest days, the co-founder of Alltop.com, an “online magazine rack” of popular topics on the web.

Not long ago, Apple boasted that its products were made in America. Today, few are. Almost all of the 70 million iPhones, 30 million iPads and 59 million other products Apple sold last year were manufactured overseas

In other words: Apple is trying to establish a rule that whatever I create with this application, if I sell it, I have to give them a cut. And iBooks Author is free, so this arrangement sounds pretty reasonable.