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Apple Now Accepting iPad Apps, Planning “Grand Opening” of iPad App Store

Apple is now accepting iPad apps for a “grand opening” of the iPad App Store, according to an email just sent to registered developers.
“iPad will begin shipping soon and your opportunity to be part of the grand opening of the iPad App Store starts today,” the email says.
There’s no details about when the store’s grand [...]

Security Expert: “Mac OS X Is Safer, But Less Secure”

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Tech site H-Online has an interesting story today, quoting security expert Charlie Miller about his forthcoming talk at the CanSecWest conference next week.
He says OS X is full of security holes. There are lots more than in Windows, he claims.
And yet: OS X is a safer system to use. Why? Because, in the words [...]

Apple Devotes Entire Home Page To Jerome York Obituary

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If ever you needed a sign that Apple was a different kind of technology company, this is it.
What other computer manufacturer would remove its top-selling, hype-inducing, industry-altering new product from the prime spot on its website home page, and replace it with an obituary to an investor?
This is one of those “Here’s to the [...]

Coming Soon: Steve Jobs, the Sitcom

Fake Steve creator Dan Lyons just signed a deal to bring Steve Jobs to another small screen near you.
The half-hour series called “iCon” is billed by the presser as “a savage satire centering on a fictional Silicon Valley CEO whose ego is a study in power and greed.”
Making sure the barbs prick will be the [...]

Cult Readers Pick Chrome And OmmWriter As Best New Applications Of 2009

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Just before Christmas, we asked you: What were your favorite desktop apps of 2009?

Based on the responses we got, two apps got fractionally more mentions than most: Google Chrome, and OmmWriter. Neither of which were apps I expected to see topping many end-of-year lists.

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Chrome appeared as an official Mac beta just at the beginning of December, and with a bunch of features missing: no extentions, no bookmark manager.

But lots of people love it anyway. It’s fast as hell, the separate processes for each tab is great, the history manager rocks, and it’s been doing very nicely thank you.

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And OmmWriter? Wow, that was an app that really caught people’s imagination. When I first wrote about it at the end of November, I was somewhat bemused. I couldn’t see the appeal. But a lot of people could. OmmWriter has an enthusiastic following on Twitter and recently released an update with new features like word count and auto save. It’s clear that this is an app on the up, and development is ongoing in earnest. Keep your eyes on it.

One final brief thing to note is that Twitter clients also featured well in our list, with Tweetie, Tweetdeck, and Socialite all getting mentions. It’s a sign of Twitter’s growing dominance that desktop Twitter apps are cropping up on people’s lists of favorites.

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About the author

gilest

Giles Turnbull is a freelance writer in England. He is a columnist for PA, and has written for the BBC, Guardian, Daily Telegraph, MacUser, Macworld, and The Morning News. He has a blog you can ignore and a Twitter account you needn't follow.

Email the author | Read more posts by Giles Turnbull.

9 comments

    I dislike them both.
    The New Age ambient of Ommwriter makes me nervous, and my favorite new is browser is Camino 2

    +1 for Camino, Miguel. Chrome’s nice, but nothing has yet persuaded me to abandon Camino wonderfulness :)

    Yep, same here. I use Camino all the time. Only about once week I fire up Safari to check if a site has loaded properly in Camino, only to find out that Safari doesn’t do a better job than Camino.

    Google still gives me the creeps, and I still prefer Camino over Safari or Firefox. It’s probably not as fast as Chrome, but it’s still faster than the other two on my Mac.

    I looked at the ommwriter webpage and I thought WTF is it?
    How can that be? Mronic it seems to me.

    For me Camino displays pages Safari has problems with. Safari is my default browser though.
    Google takes away too much of my privacy to trust them.

    I’m completely bewildered by the popularity of Ommwriter – I always give new text editors a decent try-out, and this is the first one in 15 years on the Mac that has actually managed to make me *angry* (this may say more about me than Ommwriter, admittedly) once I’d established it definitely wasn’t a hoax designed to mock the GTD loons.

    I wouldn’t call OmmWriter a text editor. It doesn’t edit anything. It just gives a pretty, peaceful atmosphere for writers to write in – which is especially helpful for ADD sufferers or those with writer’s block. I’ve used it to churn out a few pieces and I’d go so far as to say the ambiance made my writing better.

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