Dave’s Answer:

I too use Spaces extensively. I think it’s one of the best hidden productivity features in Mac OS X and since I often run Windows 7 or Windows 8 in VMWare Fusion, one of my Spaces is often the completely different world of MS Windows. Good for keeping my brain agile, I suppose.

Until the most recent versions of Mac OS X, there was a System Preference panel just for Spaces that made it a breeze to work with, specify how many Spaces / virtual workspaces you wanted, name Spaces, etc. That’s gone away, however, so things are a bit more tricky to work with, especially since half the functionality has moved into the Mission Control while others have moved into a different System Preference.

Let’s have a look because I’d like to disable Dashboard having its own Space too.

To start, here’s the Mission Control view of my Mac with the usual bunch of windows and apps running:

Spaces shows up along the top, and if you look closely, the leftmost Space is labeled “Dashboard”. Let’s look a bit closer:

Now logically, since you can delete other Spaces here by just moving the cursor over them and clicking on the “X” button, that’s what we should be able to do with the Dashboard Space. But we can’t. Here’s that “X” button so you know what I mean:

You can see it on the top left on Desktop 2. But not on Dashboard. So now what?

To get this to work, we need to actually switch to the Mission Control system preference, whose icon you can see in the middle here:

Click on it and mostly this is about Mission Control with a little bit of Dashboard, but turns out that they’ve snuck some Spaces preferences here too:

A closer look reveals which one we want to tweak:

Simply uncheck Show Dashboard as a space and *poof* it’s gone. Have a close look at the other options while you’re here: you can see my default setup.

And now, when I jump back into Mission Control, there’s no Dashboard space in Spaces, as I’d hope:

Now why did Apple have to make this so complicated for such a simple feature?

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“The new Yahoo! mobile app is also smarter, using Summly’s natural-language algorithms and machine learning to deliver quick story summaries,” she adds. “We acquired Summly less than a month ago, and we’re thrilled to introduce this game-changing technology in our first mobile application. And, with the immersive imagery of our virtually endless newsfeed, the new Yahoo! app has both great technology and beautiful design front and center. Because searching for great content is also core to the Yahoo! experience, we’ve also improved the search experience with better video and image search.”

The app also comes with a great deal of personalization. You can select the types of stories you’re interested in, and within each article, you can select more topics you want and less of what you don’t.

The app is available in the App Store for the iPhone and iPod Touch in the U.S.

No word on other potential mobile apps utilizing the same technology.

Last week, Yahoo launched new mobile apps for Weather and Mail. The Weather app, which utilizes Yahoo’s Flickr property, is just for iPhone while the Mail app is for iPad and Android tablets.

Yahoo is said to have been in talks with Apple on deeper iOS integration.

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I’m only just coming up to speed on Reeder too, but the program seems elegantly designed and is super fast. However, it’s also currently tied pretty closely to Google Reader (as you’ll see) so switching means that we’re taking a leap and assuming that the developer is going to somehow break away from the Google API so that when things shut down in July we’re not all left in the dark. Still, that’s a pretty good bet and it really is a nicely designed application, so…

To get started, pop into the App Store and buy, then download a copy of the application. It’s a quick download, even if you’re tapped into a public wifi connection, and then double click to launch it.

Here’s what you’ll see:

As I said, there’s not really yet a “don’t use Google Reader” option. In fact, click on “Create an Account…” and you’ll be taken to Google Reader, not to an account management area on the Reeder web site. Oops.

Enter your account and password to connect the app with your Reader account and if you aren’t using 2-step verification (and you should be! learn more: How to enable 2-step verification for your Google account) you’ll log in. If you are using it for better account security, however, you’ll see this:

No worries. You need to use what’s called an application-specific password. Go to the Google 2-step page and scroll down to find the section ingeniously called “Application-specific passwords”:

(Note, I’ve tweaked the above image slightly to ensure you can read the text. Your layout will be slightly different)

Click on “Manage application-specific passwords” and scroll down past the list to find this box:

That’s the key! I used “Mac Reeder App” but you can specify whatever you want. Click on “Generate password” and it shows you a 16-char temporary password for Reeder:

Copy it from this page, go back to Reeder, and enter that as your password. That’s easy enough and it should be a one-time task, by the way.

Now Reeder can start pulling in your RSS data from Google Reader. Finally. It starts out rather empty:

After a minute or two, however, the data starts populating and you realize that Reeder has a pretty darn nice interface. Leftmost column is subscriptions, middle column is new articles for the selected site or list (I’ve clicked on “Unread” to read them all by date) and the right section shows the actual article:

To zip through your subscription updates, simply move your cursor to the bottom of the right pane, where there’s a black arrow pointing down. Now each time you click on it, you’ll move to the next new article:

Even better, there are some super useful keyboard shortcuts. Check out Preferences for a full list but here are a few to get you going:

I find that making the Reeder window really big and leaving my finger on the ‘j’ key lets me really zip through my articles, even faster than how I kept up with everything while in Google Reader. Nice!

Explore the preferences while you’re getting started, there are lots of useful tweaks you can make to the app.

And in terms of when Reeder will divorce itself from Google Reader? Well, we can all stay tuned for that update…

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We’re excited to launch the iBookstore in Japan with a wide selection of Japanese publishers and authors,” said Eddy Cue, Apple’s senior vice president of Internet Software and Services. “We think customers are going to love how engaging and interactive the books are to read, and how beautiful they look on iPad.”

The biggest grab for the iBookstore is a collection of digital novels from Ryu Murakami. The novels contain experimental ways to tell stories in a digital format, including the addition of interactive emails in each chapter.

Children’s books, like the charming Piyo-Chan: A Letter for Piyo, have been updated on the iBookstore as well to include new interactive and visual elements.

Apple’s real win against Apple, however, comes in the form of its exclusive selection of digital manga. The company announced that a full color version of Hirohiko Araki’s JoJo’s Bizarre Adventure Part 4 is exclusively available on the iBookstore.

With this news, expect Amazon to kick its Japanese Kindle business up a notch. There are a lot of readers in Japan, and securing exclusive titles is the way to win in that particular market. In fact, I’d be willing to bet that the winner will be whomever is able to secure Murakami Haruki’s next novel, which is set to be published next month.

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For reasons that I don’t fully understand, Apple’s made Spaces harder to work with than it was in previous versions of Mac OS X, notably Lion. In the new Mountain Lion — and presumably beyond — it’s really hard to enable it, and incredibly subtle to learn how to assign specific apps to specific Spaces.

What do I mean by that? Let’s say you set up three virtual workspaces, and your intent is to have the first be social media apps, the second your email program and the third your word processor. With a simple sideways three-finger swipe you can move between them and avoid a ton of on-screen clutter. A good thing!

Used to be that there was a specific System Preference for Spaces, but now while it’s ostensibly a part of Mission Control, it’s really not, and you’re left to your own devices (or my site!) to figure out how to get it up and running.

And in terms of assigning specific apps to specific spaces? That’s done with the Dock, believe it or not.

Start up an app, then click and hold its icon on the Dock. A menu pops up:

Now click on “Options” and you’ll see where they’ve tucked away this capability:

As you can see, there are three options under the “Assign To” section: All Desktops (how I have iTunes set up), “This Desktop”, and, if you’ve already assigned it to a Space other than the one you’re currently in, “Desktop X”. Or “None” if you want it to just appear in whatever Space you’re current in when you launch it.

So now you can see the strategy. Launch all the apps you want to assign specific spaces, then move from Space to Space assigning specific apps as needed.

Then the next time you launch the app, you’ll shift into the designated space for that application. Neat.

Why it’s so darn confusing and hidden? I dunno, maybe it’s going to be phased out in the next major release of Mac OS X? I hope not, I use it all the time…

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Separately, developers have discovered a reference in to 128GB iOS devices in the code in a beta of iOS 6.1. 9to5Mac reports:

Following the latest beta release of the upcoming iOS 6.1 iPhone, iPad, and iPod touch operating system, developers have begun tearing away at the software to see what secrets it may hold about the future of Apple’s devices. @iNeal made the discovery that iOS 6.1 beta 5 holds a reference to compatibility with 128GB iOS devices. Jeff Benjamin dug up the code that @iNeal is referring to, and he has provided screenshots of the evidence. He notes that iOS 6.0 does not include the “128″ system partition code.

Update: We understand that this 128GB code is also found in iOS 6.1 beta 3, which was released in early December.

Still, this may not mean that we’ll be seeing the 128GB model this year. ZDNet’s Adrian Kingsley-Hughes is particularly skeptical.

Apple released iOS 6.1 today for iPads, iPhones and iPod Touches, bringing LTE capabilities to more carriers.

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“It has been an incredible year for the iOS developer community,” said Apple SVP of Internet Software and Services, Eddy Cue. “Developers have made over seven billion dollars on the App Store, and we continue to invest in providing them with the best ecosystem so they can create the most innovative apps in the world.”

The company shared some words from some of the app developers. For example, Keith Shepherd, co-founder of Imangi Studios, said, “The success of our game Temple Run in 2012 was nothing short of astonishing. We were simply looking to create a game that was fun and easy to play, but once it hit the App Store, the game took off. This past year, we saw more than 75 million downloads of Temple Run on iOS.”

Things have been pretty good for Autodesk as well. VP of Consumer Products with the company, Samir Hanna, said, “Our success on iOS has been incredible. We set off with the modest goal of bringing SketchBook to iPhone users as a way of introducing them to Autodesk. Fast forward three years, we now offer 20 apps to iOS users that have achieved more than 50 million downloads, and we continue to roll out new creativity and design tools that appeal to both professionals and consumers.”

Filmmaker JJ Abrams, who co-founded Bad Robot, said, “The App Store provided us with opportunities beyond our wildest dreams. Our app Action Movie FX was designed to bring Hollywood special effects to anyone’s self-made video, whether that be on an iPhone, iPad or iPod touch, and we’re just thrilled that millions of fans around the world were as excited as we were about the possibilities that this app brings.”

The App Store has users in 155 countries. As tablet popularity continues to grow (there were reportedly more tablet activations on Christmas than smartphone activations), there is going to be a need for more tablet-specific apps. Apple says it has over 300,000 native iPad apps available in the app store.

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In the application, the leaf trademark covers 10 product classes. It’s expected that computers, educational material and film streaming services would show up, but it’s a little strange that Apple is also covering its bases in jewelry and footwear. Perhaps Apple will start to sell jewelry that features only the leaf of the Apple logo as some kind of minimalist design statement.

Apple’s zealous overprotection of its trademarks and patents should be expected at this point. Earlier this year, the company sued a European grocery store because its logo was an apple. The two logos looked nothing alike, but Apple still sued anyway.

It should be noted that this is only an application at this point. The trademark may not be granted to the company, but there’s always a chance that it will. At that point, we can look forward to Apple pursuing even more litigation against companies that dare feature any kind of similarly shaped leaf in its logo.

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Major Labels Fall Under Apple’s Spell Again: