Since Maciverse was founded, we’ve done our best to provide new and interesting insights on how to get the most out of your Apple Products. We hope that our hints, tips, reviews, and news are beneficial to you, our readers.

The number of visitors to Maciverse.com increases each month and we’d like to offer a bit more to our readers. We know that we don’t have all the answers to getting the most out of your Macs, AppleTv, iPhones, and iPods and hope that you, our readers, will be able to help all Apple users with their devices.

With that in mind, we’d like to announce the Maciverse Forums. The Maciverse Forums are structured to allow anyone to come and ask questions, give answers, and provide help for other Apple users. Additionally, we have seen from your comments that you often need unique solutions to the tasks you’re trying to complete. Maciverse Forums is the place to go ask for help and receive guidence from Dan, Aaron, and the rest of the Maciverse community. The forums can be accessed from the Forums link above.

So head over to the Maciverse forums, create an account, and let us get to know you. We hope that the forums will allow us all to help each other.

Apple recently made some updates to the way that you can purchase iPhones. Although they still don’t let you make the transaction online and have the phone sent to you, you can start all the pre-sale prep work before actually heading into get your phone.

From the iPhone section of the Apple Store, clicking “Find Where to Buy” now takes you to the iPhone 3G Buy Page. This page allows you to walk through the information an Apple Store employee would ask you when you go into to make your purchase and allows you to then send that information on to your closest Apple store.

Set a time that you’d like to make the purchase, head into Apple, and they should be all ready for you with your phone.

This is an interesting approach for Apple, and I’m sure many people wished they had this option when the phone was first released. It may have shortened the lines and saved a lot of people time. Additionally, it will time Apple Employees have to spend with new iPhone purchasers and instead lets them continue to do their best to sell customers other Apple products.

After Google announced that they were entering the Browser Wars we discussed the lack of capability to run their new Chrome Browser in OS X despite the fact that Chrome was build on Webkit, the same engine used in Apple’s Safari.

A few days later we found that Google was allowing individuals the capability to try and compile the latest Mac and Linux builds of Chrome. Unfortunately it was a more difficult process and few people were successful in actually getting the build to launch.

Now, Codeweavers is giving all Mac users the ability to play with Google’s new Chrome browser through their Wine technologies. Crossover Chromium takes the Google Chrome browser for windows and combines it with wine libraries to give Mac users the ability to launch and browse the web with Google Chrome.

The most interesting aspect of this is that Crossover does not need to be previously installed on oyur Mac to run the browser. Download Crossover Chromium from the Codeweavers website and launch the installer. It will take some time on the initial setup configuring the wine libraries for Google Chrome but will launch the browser to give Mac users the Google Chrome experience.

Although it won’t display as Google’s Chrome in the menu bar, the Crossover Chromium will look, act, and perform in OS X almost identically the way that the browser does on windows systems.

While the visual effects mimic that of Windows, we expect the official Google Chrome release to look more like Safari.

Apple updated Leopard to version 10.5.5 today which includes a number of General updates, updates to Address Book, Disk Utility, iCal, Mail, MobileMe, and Time Machine. The updates also should improve security on your Apple Computers.

Some of the highlighted improvements include:

1. Improved Spotlight Indexing Performance
2. iPhone and iCal Address Book Sync Capabilities
3. Extensive Graphics Enhancements
4. Mail sending robustness
5. Time Machine incorrect “not enough space” messages

For additional details and a complete list of updates view the Apple release notes.

Check for system updates to get the 10.5.5 version.

It appears that a number of users, myself included, were surprised to find that upgraded to iTunes 8.0 and then their iPod Touch to version 2.1 resulted in an unknown error (13213) and the delightful information that your ipod cannot be synced.

This message seems to continue to pop up randomly while your iPod Touch is connected even when no syncing of data was being conducted.

Luckily enough on the Apple Forums, a kind individual seems to provide the unique combination of steps to get iPod Touch 2.1 and iTunes 8.0 to play nicely together.

To restore syncing capabilities to your iPod Touch after a 2.1 upgrade:

1. Unplug your iPod Touch and turn it off. Hold the power button at the top until the red slider appears and power it down completely.
2. Quit iTunes 8
3. Relaunch iTunes 8
4. Plug in Touch - DO NOT TURN IT ON FIRST. Make sure it’s still off completely from step 1.
5. Should sync normally

Following this steps worked for me, although I must admit that I tried the “Restore iPod” approach first and that failed to work on its own.

I imagine Apple will release a fix shortly, but in the mean time, follow the steps above to restore syncing capabilities to your iPod Touch and be done with the annoying 13213 error.