Steve Jobs has just taken things back from Tim Cook, and now he’s announcing the first new product of the Back to Mac event. As predicted, it’s iLife ’11.

“I’d like to talk about iLife. It’s widely regarded as the best suite of digital lifestyle apps in the world. You can’t do this on any other computer. We improve it every year or two, coming out with new version.”

First up, he details the changes to iPhoto, which is gaining vastly expanded fullscreen support, as well as gobs of Facebook enhancements, easier emailing functionality and some new slideshows. There’s more though… and it only gets more impressive as the presentation goes on.

Now Tim Cook is talking a bit about the vibrant development side of things when it comes to the Mac.

“Now, with the share rising and the units rising much faster than the industry, we have a very vibrant dev community. We have 600k registered Mac devs. They’re growing at 30k per month,” he says.

Cook calls out game developers specifically, an area OS X has always been weak in, largely due to bad driver support.

“We have new devs like Valve. They’re bringing titles simultaneously to the Mac and PC. Like Half Life. This is great for the Mac, and a great shot in the arm for gaming on Macs.”

Even Microsoft is making money developing for the Mac. AutoCAD’s also coming back. OS X isn’t going anywhere.

As is his wont, and despite his appearance at an earnings call earlier this week, Apple is starting off the Back to Mac event with some earnings, this time putting the Mac business in context.

Last year, the Mac side of Apple’s empire account for $22 billion, or 33% of their revenue. So Mac is still big business for Apple, despite iOS’ huge success.

“To put this in some context, the mac company, if it were standalone… and we have no plans to do that… would be #110 on the Fortune 500.”

Apple is making three times what they did on OS X five years ago. They have 50 million users world wide. One in five PCs sold at retail is over 20%, and last quarter, the Mac grew two and a half fold.

That’s a lot of Macs sold. OS X might be second tier to iOS right now, but it’s still huge business.

With his usual fanfare, Steve Jobs has just strutted onto the stage at Apple’s own Cupertino headquarters for today’s Back to the Mac event.

Steve’s looking confident, and he has every reason to be with $50 billion in the bank. The big question is, what will Apple be announcing today to add to the corporate coffers? iLife ’11 and OS X 10.7 are definites, as is a new MacBook Air… but could we also see a Verizon iPhone, refreshed MacBooks and maybe the slam dunk of a totally new product that Apple has somehow managed to keep completely secret by the end of the next hour and a half?

Place your bets in the comments, but best do it quick: Steve’s about to open his mouth, and that’s when the bets begin to close, one by one.

[image via Engadget]

Professional post-production photo effects software complete with hundreds of detailed, fine-grained controls to create virtually unlimited artistic styles for under a hundred bucks?

No way, you say.

Way.

PostworkShop is software from Xycod, a small Hungarian company that has built creative artists — of whom a number use Macs, apparently — a tool that so exceeds its cost in value, it’s nearly as breathtaking as some of the work it can be used to create.

It’s either a dream or nightmare job: Microsoft taps you to come up with a campaign for the 2011 edition of Microsoft Office for Mac.

How do you make it cool? Avoid ridicule?

Director Dennis Liu took that challenge. The resulting teaser for the documentary series called “id3a01ogy” definitely answers the first question but may not be able to sidestep the latter.

Tweetie for Mac is still my go-to Twitter client on OS X… but man, is it getting long in the tooth. In fact, short of mere habit, I don’t know why I stick with it. It’s painfully behind the times when it comes to the features of more modern and well developed Twitter clients, it doesn’t handle stock Twitter functionality like retweets right… and the long promised updated, Tweetie 2, is still nowhere to be seen, despite Twitter itself acquiring Tweetie’s mobile versions. Is Tweetie for Mac vaporware?

For a little while, it certainly seemed so, as no lesser person than Twitter founder Evan Williams himself said that Twitter was not “actively investing” in Tweetie for Mac at this time.

That was pretty astonishing news… particularly to MacHeist director John Casanta, who says he’s been in contact with Tweetie dev Loren Brichter. Brichter was quick to allay fears: Tweetie 2 for Mac is still being worked upon, albeit less actively due to Twitter’s acquisition of their mobile products.

Great news… but when is Tweetie 2 coming out? I’m not really sure I can hold out much longer.

[via TUAW]

Okay, it’s not coming in a few weeks like it was originally rumored, but if you’re a long time fanatic for Sid Meier’s Civilization series, good news: we now have official confirmation that Civilization V is coming to the Mac in time for Christmas.

The port is being handled by one of the biggest names in OS X game ports, Aspyr Media, who also handled porting Civilization IV and its expansions to the Mac. Hopefully that means Civilization V will also be be available through Steam for Mac, just like its predecessor… and also like its predecessor, we hope that means Civilization V will be a Steam Play game, entitling the owner of the PC version to download and play the Mac version for free, and vice versa.

Just as they did for September’s iPod Event, Apple will be live streaming Steve Jobs’ ‘Back To Mac’ announcements later today, starting at 10:00AM PDT. You can find the official link here.

Like last time, the live stream is only open to people using Mac products. Here are the compatible devices:

• OSX 10.6 Mac running Safari
• iPhone running a minimum of iOS 3.0
• iPod touch running a minimum of iOS 3.0
• iPad

Don’t worry if you’re stuck on an office PC: we’ll be live blogging the event, as usual.

This marks the second time in recent years that Apple has live streamed their own event, supposedly to test their new data centers, although Apple did experiment with live streaming earlier in the decade… only for the whole site to keel over under the strain of just 50,000 viewers.

In just a few hours, Apple will announce a new version of OS X, and will almost certainly unveil new MacBook Airs and new versions of iLife/iWork. But we’re wondering if they won’t reveal one more thing: a social media network with the goal of creating millions of home-based Apple Genii at its core.

We’ve seen it in PC versus Mac sales, now a new report claims businesses are opting to buy more Macs than PCs. A quarter of all computers added in the enterprise in 2011 will be Macs, according to the Enterprise Desktop Alliance. Additionally, by next year, 70 percent of businesses will have Macs at the workplace.

“Much of the growth in Macs will happen in organizations that already have Macs installed,” the organization announced in a report. IT managers point to Macs being less expensive to manage, easier to configure and requiring less training and troubleshooting than Windows-based systems.

In just two and a half hours, we can all expect Steve Jobs to strut on stage and orgiastically unburden himself of the many new secret products and developments kept a lid upon in Cupertino for the past few months… but thanks to some too-eager web monkey’s blunder over on the official Apple support forums, we have semi-official confirmation of several new products that we now know to expect later today.

Apparently, the official Apple forums have already been setup with new sections dedicated to iMovie ’11, iPhoto ’11 and GarageBand ’11… all of which are applications to be found in the rumored iLife ’11 software suite that is expected to be announced today.

There’s more juicy gossip than that though: the Polish geeks who found the new product sections also found one for the new MacBook Air, as well as a “Reserved 2010” section, which could be just about anything. Does Steve have a surprise announcement up his sleeve, or will that Reserved 2010 sub-forum turn into an official section for Mac OS X 10.7 or even the CDMA iPhone?

If you mostly play around with Macs, you’ve probably never heard of Cool Master: the company usually dedicates itself to the task of making the sorts of outrageous, glowing computer cases favored by the sort of mouth breathing PC uber-nerds who list their Counterstrike stats on their curriculum vitaes.

It’s interesting, then, to see Cool Master release a product that can be used by Apple fans, even if it is as bog standard a gadget as an external battery pack.

Called the Choiix Power Fort 5.5 Whr, this battery pack is about the same size as an iPhone and has a single charge port on the bottom that will allow it to juice up any gadget under the sun capable of sucking down electricity through the USB standard.

For Apple-only households, this means you can juice your iPod Touch or iPhone up for an additional eight hours. iPods can expect another 48 hours of on-the-road battery life. Even the iPad should get a few extra hours from the Choiix, and Cool Master says that the 5.5Whr can be recharged up to 300 times while retaining 85% of its total capacity.

Is it worth buying? If you’re looking to recharge a variety of devices, it might be a good deal, but it’s hard to tell, given how cagey Cool Master is being about the price.

httpvhd://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dt2_lZFnpbQ

There’s plenty of Twitter clients on the App Store, from Twitter’s official software to power apps like TweetDeck, but watch this peaceful and somnolent video for the somewhat regrettably named Super Twario and you’ll have discovered one of the most pleasant Twitter clients around.

iBooks is plenty impressive, but despite Apple’s own leap into the realm of e-books, Amazon is going strong with the Kindle platform. They’ve managed to price the Kindle affordably enough at this point that few who only want an e-reader are likely to spend another few hundred on an iPad, and they’ve successfully managed to leverage their real strength against iBooks time and time again: if you buy a book through Amazon, you will not only be able to read it on every gadget out there, whether you have a Kindle, an Android smartphone, or a Mac… but thanks to their Whispersync technology, you’ll even be able to keep your bookmarks and annotations synced across every platform forever.

It’s nice to see Amazon fighting so ably against the competition of iBooks to their empire, and even nicer to see a new update to their Kindle for Mac software come down the pipeline which adds improved Whispersync functionality, which will allow you to keep your notes and highlighted passages synced across all your devices. There’s also a refreshed interface which looks much more Mac-like than previously.

If you buy Kindle over iBooks — and there’s absolutely no shame in that — go grab the latest update now.

The conventional hard disk drive may be going the way of the floppy disk, a retirement accelerated by Apple’s increasing use of flash memory in such popular devices as the iPad. Hard drive maker Western Digital could see shipments for netbooks and inexpensive laptops fall by 10 to 20 percent, the company CEO told reporters Tuesday.

CEO John Coyne told analysts investors should take a longer view about his industry in words meant to reassure a nervous Wall Street. “What I would say to investors is to look at the long-term demand for storage, the fact is the most appropriate solution for mass volume storage is hard drives and to look at the long-term progress the industry has made over the last 10 years,” he said in a call.

Obihai Technology, a tiny Cupertino start-up, this month brought to market its first product, the OBi110 — an unassuming $70 box with blinky lights that may well prove to be the most disruptive telephony device to come along in a decade.

The OBi110 is the physical hub in a multi-layered communications model the company believes can revolutionize the way consumers use their mobile, Internet and fixed-line telephony services, bringing emerging social networking behaviors together with maturing Voice over IP (VoIP) technology to create total communication freedom at the personal level.

With web and mobile-based software products, including an iPhone app presently in Beta testing, Obihai is poised to show the millions of consumers who’ve bought magicJacks and all 237 of them who’ve bought an Ooma just how IP telephony can be done.

AppBackr was launched this week as an invitation only beta. The service offered by AppBacker, Inc. of Palo Alto, California offers iOS app developers a new way to get cash advances for future app sales. Developers earn these advances by selling their apps wholesale to buyers via the AppBackr online catalog.

The return on the buyer’s investment depends on whether or not the app sells well. This sounds risky for the buyer, but not necessarily since they are expected to promote the app in magazines, blogs, etc. or they might just hire a good public relations firm to help.

Therefore AppBackr provides three very important services to app developers that are not very easy to come by:  marketing, financing, and an online wholesale sales catalog.

Jailbreak developer p0sixninja recently tweeted an image link that revealed a nicely jailbroken Apple TV. The jailbreak showed the injection of a new menu option which was like the ones used in hacks for the previous version of the Apple TV.

There is a lot more to do before this one will see prime time since the iOS based Apple TV generation two doesn’t even include an app launcher at this time.  It will be interesting to find out what Apple’s plans are for the new Apple TV. Perhaps a hint might leak out today during Apple’s special event.

This jailbreak isn’t publicly available yet so don’t get all excited just yet. Oh heck, go ahead be excited Apple TV fans. This looks like fun!

If you’ve ever spent any time exploring the world of OS X notebook applications, you’ll have bumped up against Eastgate Systems’ Tinderbox, without doubt one of the most powerful of them all.

It’s also one of the most expensive, and the one that polarises opinion most often. Tinderbox fans simply love the advanced features it comes with; critics point to the difficulty newcomers will have in getting to grips with them.

So, enter stage right: Twig, which although I’ve thought long and hard for a better term, is perhaps best described as “Tinderbox lite”. So what is it, exactly?

For those of us of a certain age, there’s an almost physical tug at the heartstrings when we see the distinctive Pacman profile. So if you like the thought of your MacBook’s lit-up Apple logo as a Pacman power pill, this decal by LastFuse should be on your Christmas “just-a-little-treat-for-myself” list. You can buy it in black or white from this Etsy store – be quick now, I have a feeling these will disappear fast.

This Wednesday, Apple holds a media event in Cupertino entitled “Back To The Mac.” As soon as they sent out the invitations, the internet started frothing with rumors. What will OS X 10.7 look like? Will there be a new MacBook Air? Will my iPad finally make coffee? The list of apple rumors is tremendous. Vegas odds makers are even taking bets on what Apple will unveil during the announcement.

I think the New York Times bits blog described the frantic Apple rumor mongering best:

When Apple makes an announcement about a coming press event it can sometimes feel like the National Hurricane Center has identified a new hurricane.

There is usually rampant speculation surrounding the importance and impact of the event: Will it be a Category 5 announcement with a revolutionary device, or a less-important Category 1, with basic updates to operating systems or gadgets?

Keeping with this tradition, the blogosphere was in full swing on Friday as technology experts and Apple fans tried to guess what Apple’s chief executive will announce next Wednesday when the company hosts “a sneak peek of the next major version of Mac OS X,” and other new products.

And this isn’t a new phenomenon. This happens Every. Single. Time.

I wanted to know why. How can a computer company create such a frenzied pitch about a routine product announcement? And what can other companies learn from the Apple method? After looking at Apple product launch and product development strategies, I have come up with a few deductions. Here are some of the secrets that make Apple fans incredibly loyal and the press keenly interested in Mac product updates.

Next time you go to the hospital, your doctor might whip out an iPad to show you X-rays,  check drug interactions or review your medical history.

These are just some of the uses doctors are finding for Apple’s handy tablet computer in the Chicago area where three local hospitals are iPad early adopters.

At MetroSouth Medical Center in Blue Island, the device “went through here like wildfire,” once doctors realized they could use the device to quickly access hospital records said Dr. Richard Watson, who works in the ER room. “At least half of our staff here in the emergency room has their own iPad and carries it and uses it.”

One expects great things from an app costing double its nearest competitor (which happens to be the excellent $5 Cyclemeter). And for the most part, BiCycle — a $10 cycling app that uses the iPhone’s GPS receiver to log data — delivers. But while the app is well-designed and contains features not found elsewhere, there’re a few gaping holes that should make potential purchasers pause before taking the plunge.

It’s war! Again. Or still. Whatever. Apple CEO Steve Jobs launched an “epic rant” during an earnings call this week blasting Google’s “fragmented,” er, “open” approach to apps and extolling the virtues of Apple’s “closed,” I mean “integrated” iOS platform.

“We think Android is very fragmented and getting more fragmented by the day… We believe integrated will trump fragmented every time.”

In retaliation, Google mobile strategy chief Andy Rubin apparently posted the following dorky reply on Twitter:

the definition of open: ‘mkdir android ; cd android ; repo init -u git://android.git.kernel.org/platform/manifest.git ; repo sync ; make’.

That’s a set of Linux commands for copying Android.

Does Rubin have a point? No, seriously. What’s his point?

Since Google hasn’t mounted a coherent defense against fragmen… I mean the open approach to mobile platforms, does anyone here want to try?

Go here to read the whole post on IT World.