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.

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!

Cannot Sync Notes to iCloud in iOS5

Among the few issues I had while upgrading to iOS 5, one of them was pretty annoying - my iPhone couldn't sync Notes to my iPad.

I'll start at the beginning. My iPhone 4 kept failing to install iOS 5, so I installed my iPad 2 first. When I set up my iCloud sync for Notes, I was prompted to create a .me email account to be used for syncing. I did so, and it looked like it was working. When I opened Notes, I had an Accounts button, and there I could choose iCloud. Also, in Settings -> Notes, I could choose iCloud as the Default Account.

Later I successfully upgraded my iPhone, and set it to sync notes, but when I went into Notes, I noticed that there was no iCloud option. Furthermore, on my iPad, if I'd go to Settings -> iCloud -> Account, I would see an Advanced section at the bottom, with my .me account, but it was missing from the iPhone.

What I did to solve this was on the iPhone, go to Settings -> iCloud, and click Delete Account (make sure you have everything backed up!!!), reboot the iPhone, and set iCloud again. This time everything worked great, and I got the .me account added to my iCloud settings.

Air Display for iOS / Mac Review

Air Display allows you to extend your desktop to an iPad / iPhone. As simple as that. You only have to be on the same network for it to work.

You can either mirror what you see on your main display (but you would have to lower your resolution to that of the iPad), or have your iDevice act as a secondary screen.

Some useful examples. If you want to show a web page or document to someone outside your office, you can simply drag the window to your iDevice, and take the window with you (make sure to disable the screen saver first!).
If you want to see Flash enabled sites on your iPad, this is also possible, through this screen sharing.

You cannot type in the secondary screen, unless you have an on screen keyboard there as well. However, you can click, right-click, and scroll.

One important thing, which I was not aware of. As it is an extension of your desktop, when you switch desktops on your Mac, you also switch the desktop on the secondary screen (iDevice). This means that if you want to use Air Display to constantly show the same thing while you continue to work on your Mac and switch desktops, it won't work.

Anyway, I highly recommend this to anyone needing a second screen, and that already has an iPad. It works pretty fast (at least on my setup)!

iTunes link