Tomorrow on Cult of Mac, we’re starting a new series: the Top 50 Mac Essentials.
Inspired by our ongoing 100 Tips series, we wanted to put together a list of the desktop applications that newcomers to OS X ought to know about.
Each app has been chosen because it’s great value for money, or the best in its class, or does something useful that no other application does, or is too good to miss, or some combination of all of the above.
We’re still fine-tuning our list of 50, and of course your opinions matter too.
If there’s a desktop application you think should be included – something you’d recommend in a heartbeat to a friend who was just making the switch to OS X – please let us know in the comments.
We’re NOT including software that comes pre-installed with a Mac. But anything else, whether it’s made by Apple or a third party, whether it’s a full-featured suite or a simple one-task Menu Bar widget, is fair game.
(And yes, I know there aren’t 50 icons in the illustration above. That’s just there to, um, illustrate; it’s not intended to be a preview.)
(To see the entire list of 50 Essential Mac Applications: click here.)
Apple has introduced a new Technical Note for OS X 10.6.3 that allows third-party developers to use hardware acceleration to decode H.264 video.
Adobe’s failure to deliver acceptable performance under OS X has long been blamed by the company on the lack of this functionality. Only Apple computers boasting GPUs supporting the functionality (such as the NVIDIA GeForce 9400M, GeForce 320M or GeForce GT 330M) will be able to take advantage of it.
“We will be enabling support for hardware accelerated video decoding for Flash Player on Mac,” Adobe spokesperson Matt Rozen told Macworld. “Now that the required APIs are available, we are working on an additional Flash Player release to follow shortly after Flash Player 10.1 to include this functionality for the hardware configurations supported by the new APIs.”
Adobe’s only got themselves to blame here on out. Let’s hope they finally get Flash fixed on OS X.
One of the few real advantages Android has over iPhone OS is free turn-by-turn navigation: why spend $100 for the likes of TomTom when your smartphone already does the same thing for nothing? If you do a lot of driving, it’s pretty much Android’s killer app… except now it’s coming to the iPhone.
I can understand Google’s confusion here. As a company, Google’s all about making information freely available, but free turn-by-turn navigation is a big reason why someone might choose an Android handset over the iPhone. They’re torn: on one hand, they want to get their services in as many hands as possible, but on the other hand, they don’t want to eliminate one of the advantages of the Android platform by offering it on a competitor’s device. It’s a pickle alright.
Welcome to MacRx, a new category dedicated to some common setups, problems and headaches of All Things Mac. As we all know, how things should work isn’t always how they do work. Sometimes a little assistance can be in order.
This week an issue I’ve seen many users struggling with, Managing Bookmarks in Safari. As a Mac consultant I frequently run into clients who can’t find the bookmarks they’ve added to their systems, or have so many bookmarks saved that the list is virtually endless and unuseable.
Getting to know the ways in which Safari stores bookmarks, and coming up with a simple organizing scheme you can follow, will go a long way in preserving your sanity – or at least help save some time occasionally.
Steam for Mac is finally available in private beta form, bringing the popular gaming delivery system to OS X for the first time.
It’s looking pretty good compared to the PC version, although that charcoal color scheme is as dreadful as ever, and like most of the initial forays into Mac software development made by PC guys, the UI’s not quite up to Snow Leopard snuff.
None the less, Steam for Mac looks good enough and seems to work pretty well. I’m really excited about this: I really think a good delivery platform is exactly what is needed to galvanize more serious OS X game development.
Over at TUAW, TJ Luoma made note of something I wasn’t aware of: about a month ago, Apple quietly removed the “Downloads” tab from the Apple homepage. The page continued to exist, but it appears that Apple is no longer updating it.
On the one hand, Apple’s own Downloads page was always inferior to the likes of VersionTracker, I Use This or MacUpdate. The editorial resources they were employing to keep it up to date probably didn’t make sense when there were better repositories.
On the other hand, though, Apple’s Download page served an important role: it was an software repository that Apple neo-nates could easily find the first time they booted up Safari, offering a quick library of all the cool software they could use on their new Macs. The other, third-party Mac software repositories don’t have that sort of visibility to new Mac owners.
My guess is that Apple eventually intends to employ their App Store strategy with Mac software, but I wouldn’t expect anything like that to happen until either the next major version of OS X or iTunes. In the meantime, I think a lot of new Mac owners will acutely miss the presence of an updated Downloads section on the Apple homepage.
And that’s the bloody towel flying into the middle of the ring.
Software makers Adobe, mercilessly pummeled on the release of their Adobe CS5 suite by a new provision in Apple’s iPhone Developer Program License Agreement that prohibits apps made with translation tools, have just announced that they officially intend to abandon their iPhone app building technology included in the upcoming Flash CS5 software.
If you’re itching to Zerg Rush with the Windows world, great news coming from Blizzard: the beta to their sequel to the award-winning and still wildly popular space RTS, Starcraft II, will be coming to Macs next week.
It’s a bit belated, since Blizzard released the Starcraft II beta for PC users over two months ago, but welcome all the same. Blizzard is one of the few game developers who take releasing native OS X ports of their games seriously… a strategy which is looking increasingly prescient as Mac marketshare soars.
Microsoft and its upstart search engine Bing have partnered with mobile music system developer Melodeo to bring iPhone, iPod Touch and iPad users 100 great songs from every year between 1947 – 2009 – for free. Since coming out earlier in April at $1.99, the app Top 100s by Year has taken on sponsorship by Bing, been transformed into Top 100s by Year by Bing and is now free “for a limited time” on the iTunes App Store.
The app allows users to pick any year from ’47 – ’09 and hear 100 “songs that have stood the test of time to become the greatest songs for any given year” (according to the app description), streamed in random order over WiFi, 3G or Edge networks. Users can view a list of songs for any year and listen to a short preview of each, as well as buy the song on iTunes — but listening to songs in their entirety requires listening to the randomized stream. If a distasteful song comes up in the stream users can tap to move on to the next tune.
Bing, of course, offers up ads promoting its search engine every four or five tunes, though ads can be disappeared with a tap.
Another downside is that, unlike listening to songs from an iTunes library on the iPod app, Top 100s won’t permit other apps to run on a user’s device while it’s playing, at least not until iPhone OS 4.0 comes out and Melodeo upgrades the app to take advantage of the new OS’s multitasking functionality.
When it was first unveiled at CES 2009, one of the things I really liked about the Palm Pre was its integrated Facebook functionality. Instead of merely adding contacts to your phone manually, you had the option of subscribing to their Facebook contact details, which would automatically merge their phone numbers, email addresses and profile pictures into your local address book.
To me, it represented a much welcome paradigm shift in the way contacts are handled: instead of entering contact details manually, you subscribe to them and have them automatically updated on your handset.
Back in December I wrote about Cinch, a tiny little app that lets you drag application windows around to the edges of your screen, and have them instantly resize to something useful.
Cinch is mouse-oriented, but has a keyboard-oriented cousin called Sizeup. Today, a comment on that old post alerted me to a free, open source rival to Sizeup called ShiftIt.
Rally Up, the newish location based social networking app, released an update for iPad Thursday that immediately puts the upstart application ahead of the game for people who want to keep track of and interact with their friends on the iPad.
Taking full advantage of the iPad’s increased real estate, Rally Up’s unique map-based canvas gives the app a level of functionality and makes it interesting in ways that market leaders Foursquare and Gowalla have yet to achieve. By designing the app to take advantage of iPad’s support for popping info out and overlaying things on the same screen, Rally Up manages to let its users interact with the app in fewer taps and screen changes, allowing for more time to browse and interact with the content being constantly generated by users’ friends.
Because iPad usage patterns are likely to skew towards more time spent lingering over applications than the quick, get-in-and-get-out experience many desire from the iPhone, Rally Up’s focus on content — and the way it presents all of a user’s friends and their feeds in a single, map-based global view — makes using it a decidedly more immersive experience than other social networking apps can so far provide.
“The iPad really changes the experience of a [location based social app],” said Rally Up founder Sol Lipman. “It becomes less of a push app and more of a pull app, in my opinion. You want to sit and explore, not just wait until your friend tells you what they’re up to.”
I’ve been messing around with Opera Mini as much as I can today, and here’s what I make of it so far.
First thing: it’s fast. Most of the time, you get your complete web page downloaded and readable quicker than you would using Safari.
It also does a great job of downloading over crummy network connections. I spent most of the afternoon on a beach, at the bottom of a cliff that blocks out all but one bar of my phone network signal. 3G? Forget it. Even so, I was able to read about the new MacBook Pros, and even go browsing on apple.com to check out details, using Opera Mini.
There are quite a few similar services around, but Cloud is the latest of the instant file sharing apps, and it’s very nicely done.
The aim is to make sharing of files – any files – as quick and painless as possible. Whatever you wish you share, you drag up to the icon in your Menu Bar. The app does everything from there; uploading the file, creating a short URL for it, and putting that URL on your clipboard. All you need to do is paste it somewhere.
Cloud is still very young. It was only officially out of beta on April 1st, and there are still some rough edges. What I like about it is that the dev team are very open about what’s going on, as you can see from posts like this one on their blog.
It’s certainly exciting that the iPhone is getting multitasking… but with only the very last generation of iDevice’s supported, a lot of people are going to be left behind. Even Apple seemed a little bit embarrassed not to be rolling multitasking out across all devices.
Presumably, the issue is one of horsepower, but not complete inability for pre-3Gs devices to multitask. A developer has discovered that by switching just one variable, you can enable multitasking on the iPhone 3G fairly easily.
Personally, I wonder if Apple wouldn’t have been wise to be a little more flexible on their rigid performance expectations for multitasking. When Apple introduced the App Store, they essentially eliminated the biggest and most obvious reason why the average iPhone owner would choose to jailbreak their devices: the ability to run third-party software. Getting multitask on older iPhones and iPod Touches is going to be a big reason for people to start jailbreaking again.
Rally Up promises to cut social network noise, emphasize privacy.
Rally Up, a new location-based iPhone and iPad app from the innovative Santa Cruz, CA team behind 12seconds apps, made its debut in the iTunes App Store Wednesday, hoping to capture the attention of a growing fanbase for apps that leverage mobile communication technology to let people connect with one another.
For the past year the social networking game has been dominated by two players: New York-based Foursquare and Gowalla, out of Austin, TX. With loyal adherents numbering in the hundreds of thousands each, both companies have raised millions in investment funding and explored media partnerships with the likes of Bravo TV, Zagat and the Travel Channel to position themselves for a future in which everyone owns a smartphone and GPS technology allows their location to be pinpointed on a mythical matrix of Coolness.
Enter now Rally Up, which looks to capitalize on privacy concerns that have led many to remain skeptics of social networking apps. Rally Up touts itself as a unique vehicle for letting “real” friends share their wisdom and discoveries about the places they live and visit. “Foursquare and Gowalla are mainly broadcast apps,” said Rally Up founder Sol Lipman. “You check in somewhere and tell the Facebook and Twitter universes about it and there’s very little interactivity or real communication about the experience.”
Rally Up’s focus is more on combining microblogging with location, providing its users a platform for sharing text, videos and direct messages with one another. With an emphasis on the quality of a user’s friends in the Rally Up network, the app doesn’t support mass ‘Friend’ imports from Twitter or Facebook, rather it draws from the phone’s contact list or address book to populate the app with people a user is more likely to be interested in sharing with.
Within the app, any Rally Up contact can be set with a profile providing that contact with more or less access to a user’s comings and goings with Rally Up. The app also allows a user to choose between broadcasting his or her current location or letting contacts know where they are headed next to facilitate greater interactivity and social planning than other social networking apps allow. With 1.7 million points of interest at launch through integration with Open Street Map, Rally Up also has a look and feel distinctly different from the stylized GUIs of Gowalla and Foursquare, while also supporting many of the features that have made those apps so popular, including push notification, leaderboards and stamp/badge collecting.
With an iPad optimized version of the app also ready to go when the highly anticipated Apple tablet device launches April 3rd, Rally Up may be poised to turn the Check-in Wars into a three-front battle.
Rally Up went live as a free download on the iTunes App Store Wednesday.
If you’re wondering whether iPad is just going to be a big iPhone or iPod Touch, look no further than the preview released by iVerse Comics to see the depth and complexity of the iPad’s touchscreen features.
Comics and other traditionally text and image-based reading material have been somewhat less than satisfying to read on iPhones simply due to the size constraints of Apple’s smartphone display. With the impending release of the iPad’s significantly larger form factor all of that is about to change and it’s not too hard to predict the coming boom in digital book, magazine and yes, comic content optimized for the iPad.
“We’d all been waiting for Apple to announce the iPad, and once the specifics were finally known, our team began putting together our plans for the device the same day.” said iVerse Media founder and CEO Michael Murphey. Wanting to create a traditional comic book reading experience on the iPad, iVerse built “a completely new application from scratch, then [married] that to our existing app,” Murphey said. “The end result gives the user the best possible experience on whatever device they’re using.”
iVerse Comics features some of the biggest publishers in the comic book industry including Archie Comics, Ape Entertainment, Archaia, BOOM! Studios, IDW Publishing, titles from Image Comics creators, Marvel Comics, and many more.
Long time users of iVerse Comics will have the ability to download new, high resolution, iPad files of their previously in-app-purchased comics for no additional cost. iVerse Comics is available as a free download in the iTunes App Store now. The app includes 30 free comics with over 100 more available as in-app purchases.
With the iPad’s imminent arrival, we knew it would be coming, and now it’s here: load up “Software Update” now to slurp iTunes 9.1 down to your Mac. The update weighs in at 102.1MB.
As reported, the changes involve the addition of a “Books” category, some improvements to the way Genius Mixes are handled and the new, universal ability to downgrade songs on the fly to 128kbps AAC when transferring them to your device in order to save space… function previously limited only to the iPod Shuffle. Hurrah!
The only real thing to watch out for here? Some users are reporting issues syncing iTunes 9.1 with their jailbroken devices. The issue seems to be rare, and may be solved by a reboot, but if you’ve got a jailbroken iPhone, you might want to be wary here.
Sachin Agarwal is one of the founders of hip email blogging service Posterous – but he used to work for Apple, and like a lot of us, he has opinions about OS X.
With the iPad mere days away, no one’s likely to evacuate their various collection sacks if a new version of iTunes supporting iPad syncing drops this week. It’s a certainty, and MacRumors has a round-up of features to expect.
According to MacRumors’ source, the biggest change will be to add a new “Books” section for managing e-books, which will fuse with the existing “Audiobooks” category. To make everything easy, iTunes will automatically detect whether you’ve got an iPad or iPhone connected, to eliminate confusion as to whether or not books can be synced to the device.
Some big changes are also coming to Genius Mixes, iTunes 9’s auto-generated playlists, and will allow for more nuanced user control including the ability to rename mixes and rearrange them by dragging and dropping, as well as delete any unwanted Genius Mixes.
Another improvement is that all iPods will now have the option to auto-covert the bitrates of digital audio files to 128kbps AAC in order to save space and fit more songs on a device.
So you’re browsing around and doing your stuff, and you see some video on a web page that you want to watch.
Most of us will just watch it in situ, but what if it’s something special? What if it deserves to be displayed with a little more respect for the medium?
It’s a tiny utility that displays web videos in a minimal, chrome-less window of their own, very similar to the way QuickTime Player does its job in Snow Leopard.
Using Extract is as simple as pasting in the embed code for the video clip you want to watch.
Introducing Extract, Zach says: “Extract will also modify the embed code so that the video will expand as you resize the window. Then you can have it as large or as small as you want it.”
Here’s a quick demo video (which of course, you could always watch in Extract if you’ve already gone and grabbed it):
Officially, it’s “a computer mystery/romance set five minutes into the future of 1988”. It’s available for Windows, Linux and Mac, and it’s a joy for old-timers like me to behold.
What you see when you start Digital is how computers used to be. Back in the days when Cult of Mac would have been a roughly-stapled fanzine sold for 50 cents a copy (please send a stamped addressed envelope).
But it’s more than a nostalgia trip. It’s something else. Built by Ontario-based author Christine Love, Digital promises much more than just nostalgia. You might even get to save the world by exploiting a buffer overflow. That’s how old-school nerd superheroes used to do things.
Early last year, Palm bet the farm. They hired a bunch of ex-Apple engineers, killed off all of their old Palm OS devices and announced a new smartphone operating system, webOS, the first truly exciting alternative to the iPhone OS since its unveiling in 2007. They went all in, with their only conciliatory gesture to the existing Palm OS ecosystem a third-party emulator.
Unfortunately, as great as webOS is, that gamble hasn’t paid off for Palm: they are now in dire financial difficulty, and it looks likely that the once revolutionary mobile device maker will soon only be remembered as a footnote in smartphone history.
It’s a shame, and the death of Palm might otherwise have signified the final death of PalmOS, which — before the App Store — was perhaps the most vibrant, crowded and creative platform of mobile app development.
Good news for Palm OS nostalgists, though: the StyleTap emulator has just come out on Cydia, allowing anyone with a jailbroken iPhone or iPod Touch to use it to run Palm OS apps. It’s a bit pricy at $49, but at first blush, StyleTap looks pretty flawless. If the impending death of Palm has you finally considering trading your Pre in for an iPhone, StyleTap will help make that transition a bit easier.
