Slate-style computers have been around for a few years, but it took Apple to make them catch on with the general public in a big way when it introduced the iPad. This small, less than a pound-and-a-half wonder has sold millions of units in its first year for good reason: It’s well designed, feature rich, and opens up a world of...

Ever since I spotted and started reading my first computer book in 1981, I knew Information Technology (IT) was going to be an important part of my life. I feel privileged to have been able to make a career out of something I enjoy, and the fact that it changes on what seems to be a monthly basis means it never gets boring. It still...

The stats tell us that people are switching from Windows to the Mac in record numbers, but those stats don’t tell us why. Perhaps it’s because Windows users would like to actually enjoy using a computer for a change. Perhaps it’s because Macs just work: you take them out of the box, plug them in, and within minutes...

Did you ever imagine yourself writing a computer game and being able to make money selling it? With Apple’s iTunes App Store and the accompanying mobile devices iPhone, iPod touch, and iPad, it’s now easier than ever. Of course, that doesn’t mean it’s easy— there’s still a lot to learn about game...

Mac OS X offers an amazing development environment for scores of technologies. It seems that developers from numerous camps are migrating to Mac en masse. Scan the room at any Ruby or Rails conference, for example, and you’ll see programmers coding on Macs almost exclusively. As developers move to Mac, almost inevitably they...

FreeNAS is a free piece of software that turns a PC into Network Attached Storage (NAS). It supports connections from Microsoft Windows, Apple OS X, Linux, and FreeBSD. It supports RAID, has a simple web GUI, and modest system requirements. Since FreeNAS is an embedded operating system, it is compact, efficient, and dedicated to just one...

When I started playing with the first-generation iPhone back in 2008, I was amazed by the simplicity and versatility of the smart phone. With the iPhone in hand, I could take pictures, navigate with GPS, tell time, and of course, play games—especially when I was bored while waiting in line at the DMV for my license plate....

The development of Hypertext Markup Language stopped in 1999 with its final version, n.4, made by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C). Technology, however, has not stood still in the meantime: the W3C also worked on interesting projects such as the generic Standard Generalized Markup Language (SGML) to XML, as well as on new markup...