Macgasm

Apple and Amazon have a lot to celebrate as 2011 comes to a close, but Netflix might just like to forget it ever happened.

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The Apple Television (AKA iTV) has been making its way around the rumor mill the last couple of days. We’ve been holding off on publishing articles since they all pretty much say nothing; however, since they keep popping up, we thought we would round up everything from the last couple of days and put it into one article for your viewing pleasure.

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I was stumbling around the interwebs the other day and came across this little retro gem over at Poorly Dressed. It got me thinking about all the retro wear that was fairly easy to still get a hold of back in 2000. I used to shop sites like redlightrunner.com, which is a ghost of its former glorious self. You used to be able to pick up rainbow logo shirts for $15/$20, which made a great gift for a certain geeky boss of mine. Not all of this retro wear is standing the test of time though. I can’t imagine wearing any of the above items. I’ve collected some of the more authentic looking pieces out there. If you are in the market for original Apple logo gear just be careful to not get fooled into paying a high price for something that is knock off.

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Go, greased lightning! Reports are coming in that April of 2012 will be Intel’s initial big push for industry-wide adoption of their best-in-class data transfer interface called Thunderbolt. As of now, the only computer manufacturer to use Thunderbolt across their machines is Apple. Because it isn’t widely adopted, selection of Thunderbolt devices is limited, and that’s a little bit scary.

Apple is not new to the realm of early adoption of interfaces. They jumped fairly quickly on USB and Firewire, and that had mixed results. USB took off like crazy while Firewire is, for the most part, relegated to Mac users who use external hard drives or use video capture. Other than that, most peripherals use USB despite FireWire’s superior speed until very recently.

USB 3.0 was released a few years back, and it has gotten a non-trivial amount of traction amongst everyone but Apple. Even now, Apple hasn’t jumped on that bandwagon at all. Instead, they are betting heavily on Thunderbolt. Thunderbolt is superior technology, but that doesn’t mean much. If Thunderbolt doesn’t get picked up by enough manufacturers, we might be left with another FireWire situation — useful, but limited by device availability and mind share.

Source: DigiTimes

If you’re anything like I am, you probably find yourself using Mail.app as a bit of a ToDo list. Anything that kicks around in my inbox and that’s not deleted immediately usually means that there’s an actionable item I need to carry out within the email. Problem is that sometimes if I let it slip too long then I forget to address the email in its entirety. Instead, it just sits at the bottom of my inbox waiting for me to miraculously get to it at some point. That point never really comes for a lot of the emails. I’ve stumbled on a nice little tip today that’s going to help me get to the bottom of the problem, and I thought I would pass it along.

Did you know that you can drag and drop an email from your Mail.app directly into iCal? By dropping the email into iCal, you’re able to schedule in time to complete the task like you would any other event. The extra-cool thing about doing this is that iCal will create a link to the email in question so that you can reference the original email when the time comes to do something about your it.

This isn’t going to solve all of your email problems, but it will help you focus in on completing some tasks for the more important emails you get on a daily basis.

Have any other awesome tips? Tip us tips@macgasm.net

Application analytic company Localytics, a company that provides real-time insights into app usage, is reporting that this holiday season saw mobile usage for both iOS and Android grow a staggering 12 times between December 23 – 26 of 2011 compared to other weekends this year.

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Italy’s anti-trust authority has fined Apple 1.2-million dollars for misleading warranties and guarantees for its products. According to a report from The Economic Times and Reuters, Apple has failed to inform consumers of the free two-year assistance that they are entitled to in Italy.

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If you’re thinking advertising awards for 2011, you may want to take a moment and give some thought to Apple’s Siri ad that featured Santa Claus this holiday season. Ace Metrix, a TV ad analysis firm, has deemed the commercial the most effective advertisement of the 2011 holiday season.

Darrell Etherington at GigaOM:

The commercial does an excellent job of illustrating some of Siri’s features, but I have to wonder how quickly Santa would get lost in the wilderness once he leaves the US borders. Siri does not provide location services outside of the US. Are there any reports of Santa not showing up in Europe, China, or Australia? Maybe Santa only really cares about delivering gifts in the US these days.