Mac apps - page 36

Apple launched the Mac App Store with over 1,000 apps back in January of 2011, and the digital storefront has been rapidly growing ever since. Thanks to warm reception from the developer community and the exclusive distribution of software like Final Cut Pro X and OS X Lion, Apple controls the largest and most vibrant PC software storefront in the world.

15 months in and the Mac App Store is home to more than 10,000 apps. While not as big a number as the iOS App Store’s 500,000+ titles, the success of the Mac App Store heralds the future of software distribution.

Looking to power up your Mac — and to do it for FREE? Well, Cult of Mac Deals has another great giveaway lined up for you — as in we’re giving 1 lucky winner The Mac SuperBundle!

The apps in this bundle can help you in a wide variety of activities, from digital media with Roxio Toast to searching for files more efficiently and effectively with Houdah Tembo to keeping track of your home inventory easily with Compartments.

All of these apps would normally retail for $453 on their own!

Following the announcement of the already-sold-out WWDC 2012, Apple has officially begun accepting nominations for its 2012 Apple Design Awards. Mac and iOS apps can be nominated to win the most prestigious developer awards Apple gives each year, and past winners include apps like Infinity Blade and Things.

Registered iOS developers can nominate apps today and Apple will announce the winners at WWDC in June.

Whoa. WWDC 2012 was announced just under two hours ago, and the conference has already sold out. Apple has confirmed the news, and devs who weren’t able to grab a ticket are out of luck.

Three years ago, WWDC sold out in a month. The next year took a week to sell out. 2011 took just 12 hours. This year took 2 hours. How fast will next year sell out?

Amazon today announced its “Send to Kindle” app for Mac users. The free tool can send documents from a Mac to registered Kindle devices (including the iOS Kindle app) wirelessly. Many are unaware that each Kindle account comes with its own email address, and Amazon lets its users send documents to devices through that address. Popular bookmarking service Instapaper also lets its users push articles to a Kindle account for reading later.

The new Send to Kindle app cuts out the email middleman for desktop computer owners.

Several weeks ago we brought you an exclusive look at the HackStore, an upcoming Mac App Store alternative for unapproved OS X apps and tweaks. After finishing up development, the HackStore is now available for everyone to download.

Cult of Mac Deals has another stellar app bundle lined up for our readers — with a total savings of over $400 on 9 great Mac apps! The apps in this bundle can help you in a wide variety of activities, from digital media with Roxio Toast to searching for files more efficiently and effectively with Houdah Tembo to keeping track of your home inventory easily with Compartments.

All of these apps would normally retail for $453 on their own. But thanks to Cult of Mac Deals you can get all of them for only $49 for a limited time. That’s an 89% savings!

The other day, I was setting up an iPad for a client of mine when I noticed that there was 5 Gb of space being used on the device. When I plugged the iPad into my Macbook Air and opened iTunes, it said that the iPad had 3.9 Gb of space in the “Other” category, but none of the files in the file sharing section of iTunes were that big. This conundrum led me to today’s tip.

Apple has released updates for three of its production apps, Final Cut Pro X, Motion, and Compressor. Verizon 10.0.4 of Final Cut Pro X, Motion 5.0.3, and Compressor 4.0.3 are all available now as updates in the Mac App Store. Overall stability improvements and multiple bug fixes have been included across the board.

When the App Store first launched on iOS, the need for an alternative marketplace quickly arose. Jailbreakers and power-users wanted a way to download and install apps that gave them more control over their devices than what Apple would allow.

That was how Cydia was born. Created by Jay ‘saurik‘ Freeman, the Cydia app store allows users with jailbroken devices to not only install apps that bypass a number of iOS’s built-in restrictions, but to more easily discover them.

On the Mac, there’s obviously no jailbreaking, but given the sandboxing restrictions placed upon App Store developers, there’s still a need for a Cydia-like alternative: an easy-to-use, curated catalog for apps that give power-users too much control over their systems for Apple’s comfort.

Enter the HackStore, which hopes one day to be as synonymous with user-empowered Macs as Cydia is with jailbroken iOS devices.

Apple has released a new version of its iAd Producer application with multiple additions and fixes. Overall speed and stability for version 2.1 has improved, and features like Twitter integration, support for the third-gen iPad, improved ad testing, and more have been added.

Remember when we told you about the amazing Reflection Mac app that lets you mirror your iOS device screen over AirPlay? Well, the developer of Reflection just updated the app with support for Apple’s latest iPad and its beautiful Retina display.

The huge update also includes support for recording audio as well as video from your iPhone or iPad. Several new features, including full screen ‘theatre’ streaming to your Mac, have been included in version 1.2 of Reflection as well.

The guys at MacLegion are back at it with their 2012 Spring Bundle. They’ve assembled 10 fantastic Mac apps from great developers and packaged them into an offering that’s hard to pass up. If you decide to purchase this year’s Spring Bundle, you’ll be getting $800 worth of Mac software for only $50. Doesn’t get much better than that.

There’s only a little over a week left before the bundle expires, so don’t hesitate to buy if you’re interested.

Following the release of iOS 5.1 and the long-awaited ability to delete individual photos from Photo Stream, a new version of iPhoto for Mac has been released with the same feature. You can now delete photos from your iCloud Photo Stream on all of your Apple devices and have your changes synced instantly.

Skype has released a new public version of its Mac app with full screen video mode for OS X Lion, automatic updates, improved group calling, and more. Version 5.6 includes multiple bug fixes and interface improvements.

A new Mac app called Reflection allows you to wirelessly mirror your iPhone 4S or iPad 2 screen on your Mac. Using the magic of AirPlay and OS X Lion, Reflection will allow you to view your iOS device’s screen in real time on your Mac display, no setup required. Screen activity can be recorded and saved to your desktop. You can even kick back and play your favorite iOS game on your giant iMac! Now that’s awesome.

Although Apple just announced OS X Mountain Lion last Thursday, Mac apps are already getting updated for compatibility with the next-gen OS. Mountain Lion is only available as a developer preview, but that hasn’t kept Smile from updating its popular PDF editor for the Mac, PDFpen, with Gatekeeper compatibility.

Smile makes great productivity apps for the Mac, like TextExpander. With this latest update to PDFpen, a Gatekeeper-friendly Developer ID has been added to help future Mountain Lion users install the app in a secure environment.

With a plethora of options available for any taste, it’s a better time to be a digital music fan than ever before. iTunes Match. Spotify. Rdio. Soundcloud. Grooveshark. There’s a streaming music service for every taste, a place for every song in the cloud no matter how obscure.

With all of these competing services floating around, though, finding music in your library isn’t as easy as it once was, though… mostly because you probably don’t have a central music library. Some of your favorite albums are on iTunes, while others might only be available on Spotify, or knocking around as demos on Soundcloud.

Wouldn’t it be great if there was an iTunes-like media manager to consolidate all of your music? An app you could use to just find that song on all of your services, no matter where it’s stored: just type it in and hit play?

There is. It’s called Tomahawk. And it’s awesome.

After nearly a year of private beta testing, Cultured Code has finally implemented cloud sync in its popular to-do app Things. Now available as a public beta for the Mac, iPhone and iPad, Things Cloud can be enabled and tested for free by any customer.

When task management apps started adding cloud sync over a year ago, Things users were left behind while the developers at Cultured Code took a laboriously long time to get their sync solution off the ground. Now that iCloud is out and cloud sync is a staple feature of nearly every productivity app, has Things missed the bandwagon?

Apple has brought the iOS 5 Notification Center to the Mac with OS X Mountain Lion. The new interface displays incoming notifications from different apps in one place, mimicking the functionality of the Mac app called Growl. You’ve most likely used Growl before whether you know it or not, as the tool integrates with many popular Mac apps for displaying notifications through popups.

With the birth of Notification Center on the Mac in Mountain Lion, one would assume that Growl has been sherlocked. According to the app’s developers, that is not the case. In fact, Grow will make Mountain Lion’s notification system even better.

Apple has informed Mac developers that the deadline for sandboxing apps has been extended to June 1st. The date was postponed last November and set to take place on March 1st. Apple has been working on technical specifications for third-party developers since.

For those that are unfamiliar, “sandboxing” is essentially confining an app’s system access to its specific functions or entitlements, thereby hindering the possibility of an app behaving maliciously on a system level. Developers now have more time to appropriately implement sandboxing into their apps for the Mac App Store.

Sometimes the morass of Mail windows on a Mac can just become too much. Various apps have tried to help manage this in various ways: Sparrow by bringing the streamlined Tweetie aesthetic to mail, Postbox by in-line quick replies, and so on.

Even so, more often than not, when I close Mail for the day, I’m closing about a dozen or two blank or half-written email windows that have been opened during the day, then forgotten. Why can’t sending an email be as painlessly fire-and-forget as sending an IM? Enter QuickMailer.

The VideoLAN organization has released VLC 2.0 “Twoflower” with a completely revamped interface, hundreds of bug fixes, performance enhancements, experimental BluRay support, and more. We told you that version 2.0 had hit the final design stage last week, and it’s finally ready to download!

I’m always looking for ways to enhance my music listening experience on the Mac. For the last several months I’ve been using Bowtie to control iTunes with keyboard shortcuts, and Ecoute is another great alternative for managing iTunes in a minimal, simplified way.

When the developers of Skip Tunes contacted me, I was intrigued by the app’s menu bar interface. For quick access to simple music playback controls, it doesn’t get much better than this.

Nik Software has released its Snapseed photo editor in the Mac App Store. We told you a couple days ago from CES that Snapseed was headed to the Mac, and the app is now available for $19.99.

Snapseed has been an incredibly popular photo editing app on the iOS platform, so much so that it even won an Apple “App of the Year” award recently. The beautiful design and robust set of features we’ve come to expect from Nik Software is now available on the Mac.