Apple's first R&D center outside the US - in Israel

This looks more certain now. According to the Israeli newspaper, Ha'aretz, Apple will open its first R&D center outside the US, in Israel. Heading the center will be Aharon Aharon, an Israeli entrepreneur, who is in Cupertino right now, preparing for the job.

Aharon will probably be a Senior VP for VLSI as well, according to the newspaper sources.

Here is the link to the original article (in Hebrew), though you can run it through your favorite translation web site.

Google Currents Review - iOS

I was excited about Google Currents, especially about it's Google Reader support. I currently use Reeder and Early Edition 2, and I was sure Currents would replace them all.

What's the deal with Google Currents? Imagine my surprise when I saw this:

Apparently, you need to add your Google Reader feeds one by one! Unless I've missed something, this is the worst support of Google Reader that I have ever seen. I haven't even tried it to see if it actually supports syncing with Google Reader (i.e. if I read a story on Currents, will it disappear from Reader).

This is pretty bad... So long Google Currents...

Do a barrel roll

Try searching Google for:
Do a barrel roll

Pretty cool!

Do a barrel roll

iTunes Match is about to go live?

The music settings in ios5 have a new iTunes match option.
Turning it on results in a message you need to enable it on iTunes on your computer (so much for a computer-less environment).

Can't wait to get home and check this out.

Update: The iTunes Match on the iTunes Store is still "Coming Soon". Hope that it's really soon.

Slow OS X Lion App Store - Solved!

One of the biggest features of the new version of Lion - 10.7.2, the bug that caused the App Store to be extremely slow is now gone!

To anyone who hasn't witnessed it, the App Store was so slow, it was impossible to do anything with it. You'd open it up and see the beach ball for 10 seconds. You would click on a link, and again, the beach ball for a few seconds. It was virtually useless.

So if you haven't upgraded to 10.7.2 for the iCloud support, at least to it for this bug fix!

The iPhone cannot be synced. The required disk cannot be found. - on a Mac - Solved

Well, I thought that iPhone on a Mac would work without issues. Alas, that is not the case.

Yesterday, when trying to sync (wirelessly or wired), I got this annoying error: The iPhone cannot be synced. The required disk cannot be found.

It took me a couple of hours to find the solution on the web. I did find a few solutions, though they required tons of work (search for a problematic app and remove it, etc...).

The simple solution (OS X - Lion) is this - run Disk Utility, select your HD, and click Repair Disk Permissions.

It took half an hour, but solved this issue completely.

Do make sure to back up your machine regularly though. I have no idea if this could actually damage your data.

Airplay Mirroring on iOS 5 with iPad 2

This was one of the features that I was waiting most for - Airplay mirroring with iPad 2, using Apple TV. I wanted to use this feature for playing games on the TV,  as well as FaceTime.

Here are the results so far:

Fifa 12 - wouldn't work at all - got stuck at the game loading screen.
Zombie Highway and Asphalt 6 - working, but with a lag. In Asphalt 6 I kept crashing, and ZH wasn't that good either.

FaceTime was OK, with a slight lag also.

I guess it would work nice for presentations and such, but for video games, it appears to slow.

What do you think?