WIMP computing was invented during the Nixon Administration.
In 1973, Xerox PARC developed the Alto computer, the first to use all the WIMP elements of windows, icons, menus and a pointing device, also known as a mouse.
And it’s in this nearly 40-year-old paradigm that we find ourselves trapped by a quirk of human nature: We’re creatures of habit. We don’t like to change the way we do things. And so here we are, still using a mouse (most of us, anyway).
Before our full review next week, here’s a great little how-to guide on using geotagging in Lightroom 4. Adobe’s photo-editing and cataloging app has caught up with iPhoto and Aperture in its latest version, and you can now view any photos with embedded GPS co-ordinates on an in-app map. This means any of your iPhone photos can be browsed by location, which is a surprisingly useful tool.
But what if you want to reverse tag your photos? Say your camera doesn’t have GPS, but you have a track log recorded on a GPS device or with an iPhone app. How do you put this data together in a useful way? Below, Adobe’s Terry White shows us how.
Journalists and bloggers who have seen Windows 8 have almost universally loved it. Well, the Metro parts at least. It is clean, it jettisons a whole lot of Windows legacy junk and it just looks and feels so cool. But what happens when you put it into the hands of a regular user? Above you see a the father of internet over-sharer Chris Pirillo trying out Windows 8 on the desktop. The result is so frustrating I suggest you skip the first three minutes entirely.
Our affiliate partner MacUpdate is offering their new March 2012 Bundle featuring VMware Fusion 4, Drive Genius 3, PDFpen 5, Typinator 5, Star Wars: The Force Unleashed and five other top-notch apps for $49.99. Ten of the eleven apps have never been offered in a bundle before.
Here are the details:
Apple is getting really serious about using the iPad in large organizations. School and workplace admin people are going to be very pleased with Apple Configurator, a new Mac app which lets you — surprise! — configure multiple iPads at once, all from the comfort of your own computer screen.
With the number of MIDI controllers on the market, the search for a great portable controller can be daunting.
Let me introduce you to the Korg microKEY, my favorite mobile MIDI controller.
Valletta is yet another Markdown editor for the Mac, but one with a crucial difference. Instead of using a separate window to preview your document, it converts only the current line you’re editing, leaving the rest as clean and beautiful preview. It’s a clever idea, but we’ll have to see how well it works in practice.
The release of OS X Mountain Lion is still months away, but it’s never too early to save some money.
OS X Mountain Lion is going to be the first major OS X update sold and distributed exclusively through the App Store. This means that if you want to upgrade you must purchase and download it from the App Store. For savvy buyers out there, this might be a good opportunity to get a discount on your upgrade by taking advantage of special deals on iTunes Gift Cards.
A brand new update from Spotify adds a couple of great new features. The Mac and Windows versions of the subscription music service both now support gapless playback and crossfading of songs. There is also a scattering of other tweaks and improvements.
Booq’s latest range of bags know that your camera and your MacBook or iPad are intimately related. The Python camera bags not only carry your camera and lenses in safety and comfort, they also have space for your computer or tablet.
As the Mac approaches its thirtieth birthday and its progeny, the iPhone and iPad, grow to eclipse their parent, the resale and collector values of vintage Macs is steadily increasing. One of the things attractive to collectors when looking for old systems is original packaging – outer boxes and inside accessory packs. Such items add to period completeness and can significantly increase the value of an item.
The big new feature in Mountain Lion’s Mail app isn’t really a Mail feature at all: Notification Center will now flash up an alert for every new e-mail you receive. But this can get old fast, especially if you get a lot of e-mail. Thankfully, you can tweak these setting to be finer-grained, and a lot more useful. And you can do this by making your friends VIPs.
If you went ahead and loaded the developer preview of OS X 10.8 Mountain Lion onto your Mac, you likely already played around with the new Notification Center. Until you got bored and fired up Growl once again so you could enjoy notifications from all your apps, not just Mail and Calendar. Wouldn’t it be great, though, if all those Growl-capable apps could talk to Notification Center instead? With Hiss, they can.
Another Apple announcement, another de-emphasis on the Mac brand. It seems that every time Apple opens its corporate pie-hole, the venerable Macintosh brand drops down a notch in importance, and the Mac’s future demise seems more likely.
I was on a recent episode of Leo Laporte’s MacBreak Weekly, and after an hour and 45 minutes on a show with “Mac” in the name, the M-word was scarcely mentioned.
No, the Mac brand isn’t going away soon. I’m sure they’ll be upgraded and improved and sold for years to come. And they’re not failing in the market.
But it’s clear that the Mac will die. Sort of. Here’s what I’m talking about.
One of the big new Mountain Lion features is AirPlay Mirroring. This will let you beam your Mac’s desktop, videos and Keynote presentations to any screen connected to the Apple TV. This feature alone will probably sell zillions of Apple TVs into conference rooms the world over. But who wants to wait until OS X 10.8’s summer launch? With a couple of apps, you can use AirPlay on your Mac right now.
It’s amazing what you see when you look closely at numbers, and super-analyst Horace Dediu of Asymco looks closer than most. Parsing some of Tim Cook’s keynote speech at Goldman Sachs earlier this week, he did some digging came up with the incredible graph you see above.
With Mountain Lion, Apple has finally tied iCloud to the Mac desktop. While iCloud has worked seamlessly on iOS since launch, moving documents between iCould and your Mac was embarrassingly awkward, involving web browsers, dragging and dropping.
Now, it has been shoved deep into the heart of the OS, in the form of a kind of alternate Finder.
Imagine yourself at an Apple keynote event. A special, one-off launch for the newest version of Mac OS X. You see the familiar format: Phil Schiller and a couple of other Apple execs run through the successful sales numbers. Then they announce the new product, and then they work their way through a deck of pitch-perfect keynote slides.
It seems familiar, right? Only now imagine that you are alone. This presentation is for one person: you. This bizarro scenario is just what happened to Daring Fireball’s John Gruber last week when Apple briefed him on Mountain Lion.
It’s taken a while, but it seems that the dried up tear-duct that was the supply of Thunderbolt accessories is about to turn into a torrent of high-speed, daisy-chainable tears of relief. Hard drive supremo LaCie will at last sell you a 2big Thunderbolt Series external drive.
VLC, the cross-platform play-everything-and-we-mean-everything video client is about to go 2.0 on the Mac. And amongst all the new features is one very welcome change: A completely re-designed interface that makes it look a lot more at home on Apple hardware than the open-source v1.x ever did.
UPDATE: This article was written in 2012 and some of its predictions didn’t pan out. For a much more recent look at this subject, read 5 reasons Apple should dump Intel processors [Opinion].
Ever since Apple launched the new MacBook Air, analysts and Mac fans alike have gone wild speculating that Cupertino might dump Intel and use custom-made, ARM-based chips in their laptop line instead. Yesterday, more fuel was thrown on the fire when it was revealed that an Apple intern worked on porting OS X to ARM devices back in 2010. Even Intel has said it would be “remiss” of them to dismiss the possibility that ARM might steal their Apple business. On the surface of things, it looks like ARM might make its way to our MacBooks soon.
Is ARM really a threat to Intel? Yes, absolutely, and especially as we transition into Apple’s Post-PC world. But there is next to no chance Apple will replace Intel chips for ARM-based ones any time in the next five years. In fact, there’s a good chance the exact opposite could be true, and Intel chips will be powering our iPhones and iPads by then. Here’s why.
Labor activist Qiang Li says Apple is doing a much better job of monitoring factory conditions than Dell, Hewlett-Packard, Nokia and many others.
“I compared Apple with other cell phone companies, such as Nokia. And the conditions in those factories are worse than the ones of Apple,” he said.
However, Li says that conditions in the supply chain are not the responsibility of the suppliers themselves or the Chinese government. Apple ultimately bears responsibility, and the company should spend some of its record profits in improving conditions.
Update: To spice things up a bit – we’re now going to select TWO winners for this Mac Super Bundle featuring Parallels 7 – ONE for you and ONE for a friend. Check below to see how you and your bestie can WIN!
Note: if you previously entered in the giveaway you will still be eligible to win, but if you want to give your friends a chance to win, be sure to check out the new rules below!
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Want to know about everything you’ll get in the Mac SuperBundle? Head over to Deals.CultofMac for the full scoop and to make your purchase.
It’s time for me to sign off my tipster post here at Cult of Mac. For my final tip, here’s one of my absolute favorites from my book. It describes how to turn any USB memory stick or storage device into an ultra-secure filestore. When inserted into any Mac, a password prompt will appear, just like with expensive ‘government grade secure’ memory sticks, and the contents will be as equally inaccessible to anybody else.
Here’s how to access a secret setting to make your Mac’s volume very quiet indeed—ideal if you’re trying to listen to something in a very quiet room where somebody else is working or sleeping, for example. As a tip this can be filed under the category, “Cool! I never knew that!”.