An Alpha version of the long-awaited BitTorrent client for Mac has been leaked, according to a post at Pirate Bay. The application is still in development, but as expected, looks very Mac-like, and reportedly runs better than its Windows counterpart.
BitTorrent’s VP of Product Management, Simon Morris, said in response to the leak, “An internal development build of uTorrent for Mac has been leaked publicly. It [is] an “alpha” quality build. We did not intentionally release this build and would strongly recommend folks not to use it as it isn’t yet complete or stable enough to be released to the public.”
Early user reports say the application is largely functional, though search appears to be broken. The good news for P2P lovers is that BitTorrent seems serious about releasing uTorrent for Mac in the near future.
A number of users are reporting iPhone 2.1 firmware appears to disable automatic email retrieval under certain circumstances, according to active Apple support forums
A number of users are reporting iPhone 2.1 firmware appears to disable automatic email retrieval under certain circumstances, according to active Apple support forums. Specifically related to the 2.1 update loaded onto various models of the phone, users report the phone will not automatically check for mail, whether set to fetch new items on a schedule or to push mail in real time, and will only download new mail when asked to do so manually.
It is uncertain at this time how widespread the problem may be, though at least one forum participant reports having “just received a telephone call from [an iPhone] product specialist, and he confirms that 6 other iPhones in their building are exhibiting the exact same problem,” adding, “This is a global problem. This in their eyes is a ‘major’ issue and is getting escalated as we speak.”
Is your iPhone running 2.1 failing to get mail unless you ask it to? Let us know in comments below.
Apple has denied AppStore certification to a third party developer’s mail application that the company says “duplicates the functionality” of the iPhone’s built-in Mail app. Angelo DiNardi’s MailWranger app claims to let users check multiple GMail accounts without manually logging in and out and to provide functionality unavailable through the iPhone’s native mail application, including support for threaded views, access to Google contacts, and support for easy mail archiving.
The dispute here recalls last week’s brouhaha over Podcaster’s denial of service based on similar claims the app would “duplicate the functionality” of the podcasting functionality of iTunes. Whether MailWrangler will follow Podcaster creator Alex Sokirynsky and resort to ad hoc distribution is uncertain at this time.
By any analysis, however, Apple’s gatekeeping behavior with the AppStore seems increasingly capricious. If “duplicating the functionality” of native apps is a standard, for example, can someone at Apple explain why there are nearly two dozen tip calculators in the AppStore?
Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak became fabulously wealthy using minimal resources beyond their own time and talent, working out of Job’s garage. Today, Jobs and the company he and Wozniak founded are making similar rags-to-riches stories possible with the iTunes AppStore and applications created by third party developers for Apple’s iPhone.
Steve Demeter, developer of a popular $5 iPhone game, Trism, announced he made $250,000 in profit in just two months, according to a story by Gadget Lab blogger Brian Chen. If his profits continue at their current rate, Demeter will earn $3 million by July 2009.
Demeter by no means tried to reinvent the wheel. Trism is basically a version of Bejeweled that uses the iPhone’s accelerometer to good advantage, giving the game what Demeter believes are the fundamental requirements for success at iPhone app development: unique gameplay and high replay value. He also designed support for an online leaderboard that creates community and says applications with great content sell themselves, something the developer of another popular game, Tap Tap Revenge, agrees with.
Bart Decrem was one of only four people who originally worked on Tap Tap Revenge, a free application that hit a milestone of 1,000,000 downloads just two weeks after its launch. Decrem’s company recently began inserting advertisements in the game, and it also has plans to release a premium version that will cost money in addition to the free app. He says iPhone development is “reminiscent of the early days of the web in terms of the amount of green fields and opportunity,” according to Chen. “You really don’t need a huge amount of capital. You need attention to detail and product, and that’s going to keep increasing.”
If you enjoy running a Windows game alongside your usual Mac applications, you aren’t alone. New numbers indicate U.S. sales of virtualization software is up 50 percent this year.
The sales increase would be even greater than the 41 percent jump in Mac hardware sales Apple recently reported.
Between $15 million and $20 million of Mac virtualization software has been sold so far in 2008, according to NPD Group analyst Michael Redmond.
Redmond, talking to Computerworld, credited Apple’s move to Intel processors for “encouraging more users to experiment with virtualization.”
Differing from Apple’s Boot Camp, which lets Mac users reboot into a Windows environment, virtualization software permits Intel Apple’s to run Windows applications within OSX. The most frequent uses of Mac virtualization is to play a Windows game that has yet to be released for the Apple platform or for developers to test software designed for Windows users.
Parallels Desktop and VMWare Fusion are the two leading virtualization software packages for the Mac. Parallels, introduced in 2006, has sold a million copies while Fusion (now Fusion 2) sold a quarter million copies since coming on the Mac VM scene in 2007.
Plumb Amazing’s Record app for iPhone turns the device into a nifty little field recorder for capturing interviews, lectures, songs, bird calls, meetings, car sounds (to play for Clik and Clak on Car Talk), reminders, ideas, your child’s first words, street musicians, podcasts, science notes, observations, the list is limited only by your imagination.
Sounds in Plum Record can be tagged with photos, and text, multiple tags can be added at different locations in a sound file like bookmarks, allowing you to jump to different sections of the sound file instantly.
Plumb Amazing also offers a free server for uploading files, or you can transfer them directly to your Mac or other disk server.
Available now in the AppStore for a measly $5, many AppStore reviews of this software are glowing, though several complain about bugginess that prevents transferring files to Macs running Tiger.
Apple released the OS X 10.5.5 update in the US on Monday afternoon to immediate acclaim as an all-out assault on bugs. Despite initial skepticism, even TUAW, which was first to the tape, acknowledged the release notes are “quite detailed.”
Gizmodo provided a laundry list of items addresed in the update, with MacWorld shortly touting 30 bugs fixed in the new software. Not six hours later, ComputerWorld upped the ante to 70 bugs fixed.
Security experts are finally satisfied the “Dan Kaminski exploit,” referring to the researcher who disclosed a critical flaw in DNS that made it much easier than originally thought to “poison” the cache of DNS servers, or insert bogus information into the Internet’s routing infrastructure, has been fixed.
Apple also updated Mac OS X’s implementation of BIND (Berkeley Internet Name Domain), the open-source DNS software maintained by the Internet Software Consortium (ISC), to keep it current with an early-August version that ISC released to solve performance issues that had shipped in the original fix for Kaminsky’s vulnerability.
The update also fixes a number of non-security flaws, according to the release notes. iCal and Mail both received more than half a dozen fixes, Time Machine got slapped around a bit, and MobileMe even came in for some love.
See the complete list of adjustments after the jump.
VMWare Fusion, one of the two leading virtualization solutions for Mac, has just been updated to 2.0. The $80 app is a free upgrade for all users of the previous version, and it adds several features that make it better to run Windows on a Mac, oxymoronic though that might sound.
You can read more about the upgrade here, or download it here. After all, it and Parallels are the only ways to run Chrome on a Mac, so…
Microsoft has maintained a publicly announced schedule for releasing Windows 7 in early 2010, but its internal calendar has June 3, 2009 as the planned release date, according to a report by InternetNews.com.
Stung, perhaps by the relentless ribbing its Vista operating system has taken at the hands of Apple advertising, along with countless jibes from pundits on the Internet, Microsoft plans to release a beta version of the new system at its Professional Developers Conference next month.
Inside sources confirm that internal builds of the redesigned platform have already been made available to partners for hardware and software certification. Windows 7 is not a whole new OS but an evolution of Vista, and will reuse the old kernel and device driver model. That means it would use the kernel in its newer state, when Microsoft updated it with Vista’s first service pack. It also means existing device drivers for Vista will work on Windows 7.
The percentage of iPhone 3G speed tests with extremely slow outcomes has been cut in half since Friday’s release of 2.1 software, according to Test My iPhone administrator Donovan Lewis.
Prior to Friday’s software update, 3G download speeds registering in the very-pokey 100 – 300kbps range accounted for 10 – 11% of all 3G speed tests done using the iPhone performance utility. Since then, results in the 100 -300kbps range account for just 5.37% of all 3G download tests. The site has registered over 250,000 3G tests since its inception. It also provides EDGE and Wifi testing and includes upload and download assessment, as well as testing for non-iPhone connectivity.
“We’re seeing an overall more consistent kbps score and the number of 3G tests where the user scored a real low 100kbps – 300kbps is down,” Lewis told Cult of Mac, adding, “I think that’s a real big improvement overall.”
Others have reported generally satisfactory reactions to the improvement with app handling and system crashes since loading their phones with the new software. How is 2.1 affecting your iPhone experience? Let us know in comments.
Apple has released iPhone 2.1 firmware as promised at Tuesday’s Keynote event in San Francisco. This highly anticipated software update is supposed to fix a host of bugs and provide performance enhancements that should dramatically improve the iPhone user experience, according to Apple.
Among noticeable upgrades, users should see improved cellular network connectivity, significantly improved battery life, dramatically shorter iTunes backups, improved fetching of e-mail and faster installation of third-party applications. The update also adds a repeat alert up to two additional times for incoming text messages, adds an option to wipe data after ten consecutive failed passcode attempts, and adds Genius playlist creation in iTunes.
Does your iPhone seem bigger, better, faster, more with 2.1 firmware? Let us know in comments below.
Genius certainly is a nifty little sidebar to your iTunes collection. After it’s collected every scrap of information about your library and sent it through the Apple ultra-computer you can select any song in your library and create an instant playlist from it. Oh, except for all the songs that aren’t in Apple’s iTMS database.
Since Genius bases all of its playlist making decisions off of the iTunes Music Store users’ hive-mind, it can’t make decisions about songs that aren’t in its database, or songs that no one has bought. That means no Beatles, no live recordings, no transferred vinyl and no public domain digitized cylinders.
Tangerine! figures out what songs go well together by actually listening to the song itself. After analyzing your digital library (about as long as Genius’s initial setup time) Tangerine! finds the beats per minute and the “beat intensity” of all of your music, after which you can generate loads of interesting playlists. Most important, you don’t just click a button and hope the computer knows how to crescendo, climax and lend some sort of feeling to the music, you can select different patterns of intensities to suit your mood.
Tangerine! also allows you to select more precise or longer playlist times than Genius. You can limit the playlist in the same ways as you would limit a Smart Playlist in iTunes – by genre, artist, etc. – and you can select a range of BPMs and beat intensities that your playlist should stay within. You can export playlists Tangerine! makes to iTunes, and if you buy Tangerine! ($25) you can export those handy BPMs to iTunes to give other playlist makers a leg up.
Tangerine!’s biggest problem: it’s a standalone application. It also requires that you leave iTunes open while it’s analyzing your music.
But those are small costs to the benefits of creating a great playlist on the fly and really understanding where it came from. After reviewing the main features and strengths of Tangerine! it becomes obvious that Genius is underpowered. Genius leaves you wondering how it made this playlist instead of giving you any type of control or understanding of how it picked it. Genius imposes the Apple hive-mind on your music more than any other product they’ve made so far.
I think it’s sad that Apple is under the impression that people want a sidebar application that does all the creative work for you, requires no real input, and generates playlists based on nothing but “what everybody else wants”. Sure you can base creative works off of the statistics in your boring grey database, but I think knowing where something came from, and understanding how to affect and change it gives it part its value.
It’s the grudge-match of the century (well, of the month… at least if you’re a web designer and are sick of iPod coverage): BBEdit 9, the old warhorse that’s been around for 17 years, versus the young pup from Panic Software, Coda 1.5. I’ve been using both over the past week, and my first impressions are below. Over the next 60, I’ll be using both apps for my web-design workflow (not programming nor copywriting) to see how the new versions measure up in that space and how much they can reduce my reliance on other software. In the meantime, here’s a brief overview, in brand-new, patented “yay” and “yuck” categories…
BBEdit 9
Yay: Non-modal windows for search finally don’t suck( ® etc.), speeding up find and replace massively. Being able to directly edit in results windows is great. Code-folding is now much easier to deal with using the keyboard. Projects work fairly well, providing a rapid way of caning through loads of files when editing. Document stats (live word count, line count and character count) are really good.
Yuck: Text completion just feels wrong: although it’s beneficial to writers as well as coders (due to including words rather than just code), it feels awkward, sluggish and not particularly accurate—it just doesn’t seem to ‘get’ what I want to input. The interface, while better than it was a few versions back, is starting to feel old. The preferences make me want to cry. Speed differences with large files don’t appear pronounced (or, frankly, in existence).
Coda 1.5
Yay: It’s like someone stuck a rocket up Coda’s bottom—the app feels so much faster than version 1.0, which I found borderline unusable. Coda’s speed bump has suddenly made its auto-complete very lovely indeed. The Clips window’s been sorted out, and you can now group clips; with tab triggers, you can easily add huge chunks of code or single elements. Multi-file search and replace is lovely.
Yuck: Still no custom shortcuts for invoking Clips from the keyboard. (C’mon, Panic! This is one area everyone else—even Dreamweaver—runs rings round you.) No code-folding. CSSEdit’s CSS tools still make Coda’s look a bit rubbish.
Overall
I’d rather like someone to smush these two apps together. Either that or improve BBEdit’s text-completion, workflow, and interface, or add to Coda code-folding, and keyboard shortcuts to its clips. Still, here’s to the next two months, where I’ll figure out which one’s really worth your time, web designer chums.
The most controversial omission of the iPhone’s feature set is its bizarre lack of copy and paste. While anyone who has spent a cursory amount of time trying to figure out the interaction design for multitouch copy and paste using Apple’s guidelines will discover that it’s a little bit harder than it seems.
Even so, it shouldn’t be out of Apple’s depth — they’re kind of the best in the world for interface design. Which is why it should come as no surprise that Apple had touchscreen copy and paste figured out on the Newton 15 years ago, as shown in option8’s video above.
Writer Scott Gilbertson has a very cool Mac netbook that cost him only $550.
It’s got a slick black case, weighs nothing, gets hours of battery life and runs Leopard, the latest version of Mac OS X. It’s not a MacBook Air.
It’s a hacked EeePC — a tiny liliputer , as they’re now called, fresh from Asus, a Tawainese manufacturer best known for PC motherboards.
Gilbertson’s netbook is the device Mac fans have wanted for years: A low-cost cousin to the beautiful but pricey MacBook Air.
It runs like a champ but has a couple of quirks (one big one) and may not be strictly legal, though Apple’s never going to prosecute unless these machines are sold commercially. Hit the jump for details.
Startup 280 North on Thursday released a new online programming language that promises to bring Mac-like software to the web.
Called Cappuccino, the programing language will allow developers to bring the look and feel of Mac OS X desktop apps to online apps. 280 North promises that online apps will have drag ‘n drop, copy and paste, undo and redo, and document saving functionality simply by pointing your browser at a URL.
A major trend in the development of Web 2.0 functionality is toward applications that work within your browser as opposed to relying on desktop programs that live on your hard drive and use up CPU resources every time you call on them. Cappuccino will let designers create apps like 280 Slides, the highly regarded presentation application the 280 North shop released in June to showcase the framework’s robust capabilities.
Unlike existing web app development frameworks, such as Prototype or Sproutcore, Cappuccino doesn’t expect its developers to know any HTML, CSS, and JavaScript – the languages used traditionally for standards-based web development. Cappuccino’s Objective-J works in every major browser, is completely extendable and comes with useful language features not available in JavaScript.
280 North co-founder Ross Boucher says “Cappuccino is an attempt to restore control of the language and basic building blocks of web development to the developers” and is quick to point out that it’s not about building web pages. “Cappuccino is about building applications – think 280 Slides, GMail, Meebo,” he says. “We believe the future of the core technologies of the web should not be in the hands of a select minority and that no one company [should] control the destiny of any other.”
Cappuccino is being released as open source software under the lesser general public license which Boucher and his colleagues hope will build a strong open source community around the development platform. “We believe in the importance of getting the entire community involved, so that we can experiment and move forward at our own pace.”
In addition to the 280 Slides site, Cappuccino developers have a Flickr Photo Demo and a Puzzle Demo to showcase the platform’s capabilities.
Salling Software’s MediaSync is a brand new application that synchronizes playlists, music, and podcasts in iTunes onto mobile devices from Sony, Nokia and Sony Ericsson. President of the Swedish software maker, Jonas Salling, says “There are a lot of frustrated phone owners out there who love iTunes, but can’t easily get their tracks onto their non-Apple device.” His application works with iTunes 7.6.x and 7.7.x, is compatible with many popular phone models, and requires Mac OS X 10.4.11 or 10.5.x. A Windows version is also available for Windows XP SP2 and Vista with Windows Media Player 11.
The basic installation is free, though the paid app features “smart” sync, allowing you to sync faster by minimizing the amount of data transferred in incremental syncs.
With a compatible phone connected to a USB port, you simply select the playlists and podcasts you want on your device. Media Sync not only uploads the music tracks and podcast episodes, but also replicates each actual playlist on your device and–on devices that support it–transfers play count metadata for each item, reinforcing the sense of having a piece of iTunes in your pocket. Although Media Sync works with most media in iTunes, it will not transfer DRM-protected content.
Veteran Mac expert and writer Joe Kissell is among the first to report that Google’s brand new Chrome browser appears to be “way faster” than Safari, even running in a virtualization environment like VMWare Fusion.
Kissell ran a quick, informal head-to-head on his MacBook Pro, comparing Safari on OS X to Chrome running under Windows XP and VMWare Fusion.
“Chrome launched in the blink of an eye (really shockingly fast) and I tried a few web pages side by side in Chrome and the Mac Safari, and they loaded noticeably faster in Chrome,” said Kissell.
Chrome is Google’s entry in the web browser sweepstakes, currently a Windows-only offering that launched today. The browser is based, however, on Apple’s webkit, the same rendering engine that powers the Safari browser. Mac and Linux versions of Chrome are in the works but Google has yet to announce a time frame for releasing those versions.
Kissell’s initial report came over Twitter, saying he ran Chrome in XP under VMware Fusion on a MacBook Pro and that it “is way faster than the Mac version of Safari on the same machine. Wow.” But some of his reaction may be chalked up to perception, and later off-the-cuff speed tests presented a mixed bag.
In tests done on a regular work machine with a zillion things running in the background, not a clean environment to be sure, but representative of the “real world” in which many are likely to use the browser,
Chrome launched in < 2 seconds in XP under VMware Fusion
Despite his admittedly highly unscientific testing, Kissell reported “AJAXy things like Google Docs seemed zippier in Chrome, but it’s possible that my perceptions are incorrect, because I expect everything in a Windows VM to be slower.”
Let us know in comments below how Chrome works for you.
The Hills screensaver is about the coolest screensaver I’ve seen for Mac OS X, but it’s not easy to get.
The screensaver shows beautifully rendered rolling green hills covered in perfectly-manicured grass. You fly over them as though gliding in a silent helicopter. It’s utterly hypnotic — and very relaxing, especially on a big display.
The developer, Chris Kent, was hosting it on a .mac account, but he exceeded bandwidth limits and it’s now gone.
Searching for it in Google brings up a bunch of old links — it’s very frustrating.
So we’re hosting the file here. Download The Hills version 1.1: hills-1-1.dmg.
Third party iPhone application developers have taken to paying each other $1 in order to get around communication restrictions in the iPhone developrs’ NDA, according to a story in the LA Times.
By making themselves “subcontractors” to one another, they can discuss issues related to programming for the iPhone, communications Apple has sought to restrict through the Software Development Kit’s Non-Disclosure Agreement. Developers have bristled at the company’s refusal to let the NDA expire now that the iPhone is available on the commercial market, with many feeling Apple’s continued restrictions are stifling innovation.
Some iPhone owners continue to report an alarming bug in the device that causes 3rd party applications to crash or fail to load and makes media stored on the phone inaccessible. Calling it a “tragedy of monumental proportions” given that the phone just launched in 22 additional countries over the weekend, writer Jonny Evans reports in MacWorld UK the “well-known bug means none of my third-party apps work, and I can’t access any media held on my iPhone.”
“Frequent requests to Apple PR have yielded no response at all – and people inside the company dance around the matter, or so it seems,” according to Evans.
When I was researching material for a long article about third party development programs for the iPhone back in March, one of the most common complaints I heard from users and skeptics alike was leveled at the lack of cut and paste functionality on Apple’s groundbreaking mobile device. In July, Apple spokesman Greg Jowsiak basically said cut and paste was a low priority as far as the company was concerned.
No surprise then, that third party workarounds for the missing tool began to emerge, with one fashioned by student developer Zac White among the more promising. Unfortunately, Apple has placed new roadblocks in the path toward letting you cut and paste text on your iPhone, according to White.
No word yet from Apple on whether cut and paste has been re-prioritized in-house.
Cyan games has announced that it has a three-person team working to port Myst to iPhone, a no-brainer decision that should finally provide something like a killer app game for the device. Way back in the early 1990s, Myst was briefly Mac exclusive, and it typified everything great about that era’s multimedia focus. It was HyperCard-based, it used CD-ROM, and the graphics were gorgeous. And now it’s making a comeback. Can’t wait.
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