So you want to know more about Mac OS X Lion, but you don’t have a developer account and can’t get your hands on a copy of it. What’s a Mac enthusiast to do?
Turn to Flickr, that’s what. There’s loads of interesting Lion photos and screenshots turning up there.
Reddit user labuzan posted a nice story today, detailing how a family iPhone went through the laundry, and what happened when they took the dead device to an Apple Store and told their story.
The results were not what you might expect.
Instead of charging for a replacement phone, the Apple employee serving them handed one over free of charge, saying: “We made an exception.”
Needless to say, a family already loyal to Apple just got its loyalty quotient increased by several notches.
YoruFukurou (“Night Owl”) is a high quality, totally free Twitter client that will appeal to a wide cross-section of people.
Brand new from the maker of desktop Gmail client Mailplane is Replies, an app designed for people who do a lot of customer support.
The idea was born from Mailplane developer Ruben Bakker’s own success with Mailplane. He was soon so inundated with support requests, he found himself writing similar replies time and time again.
So, enter stage right: Replies, an app to make that part of his job easier.
Reuben points out that, far from turning all his emails into clones of each other, Replies saves him time on writing the dull stuff and frees up time to add personalised extras. So his messages end up being more personal and more useful, yet take less time to write than before.
One nice touch is that Replies indexes the emails in your Sent items folder, which means you can quickly search for replies you’ve written before, then insert them into new messages.
The app will be in beta soon, so if you’re interested in trying it out, go sign up to the announcement list.
If you use Gmail, MobileMe, or a standard IMAP email account, you might enjoy the seductive unobtrusive behavior of Notify, which does quite a lot more than simply notify you of new messages.
That’s its most basic function, and in that it does the same job that many of its rivals do for free.
But Notify offers so much more, to the point where it’s very nearly a replacement email client – but one that sits out of the way in your Menu Bar.
Here’s the next would-be iPad competitor: the HTC Flyer was just unveiled today at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona.
The Flyer boasts a 7 inch 1024×600 pressure-sensitive screen, 1.5GHx processor, 32GB storage built-in (plus an SD card slot), WiFi, Bluetooth, cell network connectivity, and front- and rear-facing cameras. Oh, and it supports Flash.
The OS is Android with HTC Sense, a collection of HTC-specific add-ons designed to make using the device a little easier.
What I find interesting is the push HTC is making into portable gaming. Apple’s already taking a slice of the mobile gaming pie away from Sony and Nintendo, thanks to the iPod touch. Now HTC wants some of that pie too, and it’s promoting the Flyer as “a lightweight tablet that takes gaming to the next level”.
What do you think? Like the look of it? You should be able to get your hands on one later this year. By which time, of course, you might also be able to buy an iPad 2…
Apple has just announced the launch of App Store Subscriptions, a service “for all publishers of content-based apps”.
It’s the same system used for News Corp’s much-hyped The Daily.
The deal is simple: Apple takes 30% of all subs bought through the App Store. Publishers are allowed to sell subs via other channels if they wish, and keep all the money.
Or in a comment attributed to Steve Jobs in the official press release:
“Our philosophy is simple—when Apple brings a new subscriber to the app, Apple earns a 30 percent share; when the publisher brings an existing or new subscriber to the app, the publisher keeps 100 percent and Apple earns nothing.”
Back in Tip #27, we showed you how to use QuickLook, an extremely handy way of previewing all sorts of different files on your Mac.
QuickLook is particularly handy for checking out image files, especially when you have a folder’s worth, all with identical generic icons rather than thumbnail icons, and you’re not sure exactly which one you want.
It also has a hidden secret feature: you can zoom in to images while in QuickLook mode. Here’s how.
If you use online streaming service Spotify, you’ll know that the client software required for controlling it is pretty good.
It’s simple to use, and not too cluttered with controls and extras. Since I started paying £5/month for Spotify’s advert-free Unlimited service, I’ve been listening to it for many hours on end, and found only one problem: I have to switch back to Spotify to control it.
Now it’s true that Spotify can be controlled with your Mac’s existing dedicated iTunes buttons – F7 for previous track, F8 for play/pause, and F9 for next track. But this only works well if iTunes isn’t running at the same time. If both apps are open, they both respond to these commands, and audio chaos ensues.
Spotify Menubar is a simple free utility that solves this problem by allowing you to set up your own system-wide keyboard shortcuts for Spotify, so you can avoid the conflict with iTunes and still have easy keyboard access to your favorite songs.
It would be nice if Spotify Menubar had some clickable controls of its own, which would better justify its position on the Menu Bar in the first place. But for those of us who spend hours a day with our heads inside Spotify playlists, it’s a useful little widget to have around nonetheless.
New over at Photojojo is this bizarre $35 add-on for iPhone 3GS or iPhone 4: an 8X zoom lens kit.
You get more than just the lens. The kit comes with a slide-on case for your phone, on to which you attach the lens itself. There’s also a mini tripod so you can keep the whole thing steady.
It certainly looks weird, but it’s so cheap that I can see plenty of photo nerds jumping at the chance to play around with iPhone zoomery.
If you do, let us know what you think of it, or link to some of your sample images.
With these words, Nokia CEO Stephen Elop declared his intentions for the future as part of his company’s strategic partnership with Microsoft. Both companies are trailing in Apple’s wake and urgently need to catch up.
The first part of Elop and Steve Ballmer’s open letter is somewhat dull, but the final paragraphs contain the real meat.
“Today, the battle is moving from one of mobile devices to one of mobile ecosystems,” they declare. “Ecosystems thrive when they reach scale, when they are fueled by energy and innovation and when they provide benefits and value to each person or company who participates. This is what we are creating; this is our vision; this is the work we are driving from this day forward.”
And then this declaration of war: “There are other mobile ecosystems. We will disrupt them.”
I, for one, welcome our new Nokisoft overlords; and I’ll happily raise a glass to disruption. Let’s see what actual shipping products they come up with, shall we?
The keyboard you see here is something called an Alphasmart Dana – a somewhat niche tech product, but one much loved by a small band of users (myself included). Some professional writers love it for its weeks-long battery life, instant-on, auto-save, and durable shell.
Free-App Hero is a clever tracker for good quality free games on the iOS App Store. Note the use of the words “good quality” there; Free-App Hero has an editorial team that’s fussy, and cares about the recommendations it makes.
So they won’t recommend rubbish games, or ad-supported games, or games that start good but get worse, or games that claim to be free but turn out to be useless without an in-app purchase.
All they’re interested in is finding the good free stuff, and passing it on to you.
Free-App Hero isn’t free, but neither is it expensive. And if you really don’t want to pay for it, the Cheapskate Edition is just as effective.
As a direct result of downloading Free-App Hero, I’m now completely obsessed with King of Tennis, which is probably the most bonkers game I’ve ever seen. Great fun, though. And that’s what Free-App Hero is all about; delivering fun.
So how are things going over on the Mac App Store? What are developers noticing when their apps first go on sale there?
Marzban Cooper, one of the team behind zen word processor OmmWriter, spoke to Cult of Mac today with some interesting observations about the transition to the Store, and its effect on sales.
His only wish? That there was a similar store for Windows, so he could do the same with the forthcoming Windows version of the application.
All Macs come with a built-in todo list, which you can find inside the iCal application, although personally speaking I don’t get on with it there, and find it unwieldy to use.
Here’s a great tip that’s doing the rounds today. Chris Bowler uses his copy of Transmit as a file browser, because it has two viewing panes built-in, and lets you browse local files in each.
Anyone who has got tired of constantly having to open two adjacent Finder windows to transfer files from one place to another will see why this is a great idea.
Transmit comes with a handful of shortcuts for quick access to your Home folder, Desktop, or Documents folder. It also has a favorites feature – just drag any folder to the starred icon at the far left of the breadcrumb trail at the top of each pane. It also supports the Finder’s four different viewing modes (thumbnails, list, columns and CoverFlow). Great tip if you already have Transmit (or a similar two-pane FTP browser – anyone got any suggestions?) installed.
(Hat-tip to Minimal Mac for the link.)
If iPhoto leaves you cold, or perhaps doesn’t run so well on your older Mac, there aren’t many options for a similar application that combines photo editing and photo library management. Not many, except for Picasa.
Google’s free photo app is a great alternative to iPhoto, generously packed with features and a good choice for people who want to quickly upload photos to the web.
In most respects, it compares very well to iPhoto, including features like face recognition and geolocation data. It comes with a selection of quick edit presets, and easy (but basic) slider controls for detailed editing.
What’s particularly nice about Picasa, though, is its speed. It roars through photo libraries that leave rival photo managers struggling to catch up. On first run, it will zip through your iPhoto library – not copying any files (so don’t worry about disk space) – but indexing all your data there and building up its own copy of the iPhoto library.
Picasa is one of those things it makes sense to have around. It’s free, it’s packed with useful stuff, and even if you don’t put it to immediate use, there might yet come a day when you’ll be glad you have it to hand.
(You’re reading the 28th post in our series, 50 Essential Mac Applications: a list of the great Mac apps the team at Cult of Mac value most. Read more, or grab the RSS feed.)
The Stationery Pad is an often overlooked feature of Mac OS X, designed to let you create your own template documents.
It’s a very flexible system – pretty much any document you create can become a template.
Here’s how you use it.
At long last, ladies and gentlemen, after all these years of waiting, we finally have it: an app that puts cheese on your head.
Other folks have been waiting for Duke Nukem Forever, or for a 15-inch MacBook Air, or for democracy in their dictatorships, or even for basic stuff like world peace and an end to disease. Oh, and flying cars, people are still waiting for those.
But for the rest of us – for those of us who have longed for an app that puts cheese on our head – the waiting is over. iCheeseHead fulfils all our virtual cheese-on-head needs, and costs less than most real cheese.
Rupert Murdoch can keep his $30 million iPad newspaper. We can all have cheese on our heads now, and nothing else matters.
Back in the web’s Dark Ages, before anyone even dreamed of creating a logo for a markup language, and when messing around with default link colors was adventurous web design, the closest thing anyone had to online video was the animated GIF.
It was just a small series of still image files glued together, but when played in sequence they looked like movement. A million “UNDER CONSTRUCTION” animated signs bloomed across the early web.
Since then, the animated GIF has gone out of fashion. You don’t see them so much. But you might see more soon, and enjoy making your own, thanks to a new photo toy for iPhone called GIFvid.
If you bought your copy of excellent FTP client Transmit directly from its makers at Panic Inc, then stand up and shout “YAY”, because you can go grab yourself an updated version today.
But if you bought your copy via the magical Mac App Store, turn towards Cupertino and shout “BOO”, because the exact same update was submitted to their approval system three weeks ago, and still hasn’t been approved.
Here’s a fun one. Whatever you’re doing on your Mac, from any application or any document, try hitting all these buttons together: Control+Option+Command+8.
Bam! Your screen colors are inverted. Don’t worry, you haven’t broken anything, and this isn’t a bug. It’s a feature.
On The Job is an excellent tool for small business owners, freelancers, contractors, and anyone else who needs to charge clients for work.
Mizage, makers of the Divvy window management application, have come up with a clever way round the problem of migrating customers from traditional online purchases to official Mac App Store purchases: if you can prove you’ve bought their app twice, they’ll refund your original payment.
It’s only been active for a matter of hours as far as I can tell, but already at the time of writing, the official App Store Twitter account has over 36,000 followers and I expect it will soon attract many more.
This appears to be an account for the old skool iOS App Store. No doubt the newer Mac App Store will get an account of its own in due course.
