Magic Launch is an OS X application that attempts to solve the creator codes problem that was introduced with Snow Leopard (see our original coverage here.
The issue didn’t affect everyone, only people who work with certain files in a variety of different applications.
Paul Riegler at the Executive Road Warrior blog wrote an interesting piece about what made him switch from an iPad to a new MacBook Air.
In short: the iPad was a nice portable computer, but the Air is better. It offers more flexibility and freedom. The iPad was a good solution but bulky (because Riegler was toting a keyboard for it too), and sometimes – not often – he found himself wishing for a plain old USB port, or the chance to see something in Flash.
Time Sink is a new tool from Many Tricks, who also make cool things like Butler and Witch.
Time Sink monitors how you use your Mac – which applications you use, and how long you use them for. It collates and aggregates this data over time, displaying it an attractive chart.
The Pwnage Tool by the DevTeam hacker group allows you to create custom iPhone firmwares for the purpose of jailbreaking, to get full control over your device (see why you should jailbreak here).
Currently, the Pwnage Tool version 4.1.2 allows you to jailbreak a device already on the latest firmware. However, it will NOT unlock the device, enabling it to be used with different GSM carriers worldwide.
You can also use greenpois0n by Chronic Dev to achieve the same. There’s practically no difference between the different tools, except for the fact that they come from different dev teams.
Chronic Dev has released its Mac version of greenpois0n, his 1-click jailbreak solution (see why you should jailbreak here). However, it will NOT unlock the device, enabling it to be used with different GSM carriers worldwide.
It is pretty easy to use and worked perfectly with my iPhone 4. Besides the tool, there’s a ‘Loader’ application that gets automatically installed on the iPhone after jailbreak, which gives you option to install Cydia.
You can also use Pwnage Tool by DevTeam to achieve the same. There’s practically no difference between the different tools, except for the fact that they come from different dev teams.
Here’s see how it works.
There are some people who simply don’t care what their computer is doing in the background; and there are others who can’t live without that kind of information.
For that second group of people, iStat Menus is a no-brainer.
Yesterday we posted some first impressions of the Mac App Store by a list of some of the finest software developers around. Overnight we’ve had more responses from more superb developers, so here for your reading pleasure are their initial thoughts about the Store and what it means for their business.
Overall the mood is positive, but uncertain. There are still many questions to be answered. Almost all the devs we’ve spoken to are keen to get started, but not quite sure yet how they’re going to make it all come together.
(And to all the developers who took part, providing comment for this post and yesterday’s, Cult of Mac would like to say a big, big thank you. You people rock.)
So now we know that OS X 10.7 Lion will be released next summer, and that many of its features will be based on the loop of feedback Steve Jobs described: the Mac influenced the iPhone, which influenced the iPad, which is now influencing the Mac once more.
Or to put it another way: expect lots of iOS-style controls, widgets and designs in Lion.
If you looked closely at the demos in yesterday’s presentation, you might have noticed one or two little details that offer hints of what’s to come.
This bit from yesterday’s event made me laugh out loud.
This was about 30 minutes in, and Randy Ubillos was showing us the new iMovie ’11 and its built-in trailers. Impressive movie soundtrack music blared out.
Randy turned to the crowd and said: “For the music, we went to London, to Abbey Road studios, and made original recordings with the London Symphony Orchestra.”
He dropped that in so casually, but just think about it for a moment.
For the sound effects used in one feature, in one application that lives inside a larger suite of media apps, Apple hired an orchestra, a conductor, a composer, Abbey Road studios, and all the paraphernalia that must have come with them. Caterers, hotels, management, hangers-on, producers, heaven knows who and what else.
That’s what you do when you have $50bn in the bank.
httpvhd://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6M1r-xsFw0Q
We’ve been playing around with the new beta release of FaceTime, and while it’s slim on features, we’re fairly pleased with the app considering it’s still in the beta phase. So far FaceTime for Mac is a simple replication of FaceTime from iOS, but it’s simplicity is what I like about it so far.
So this is what happens when you open FaceTime on your Mac, use it to call FaceTime on your iPhone, and then point the camera on one towards the camera on the other: infinite FaceTime!
Coming soon: infinite FaceTime inside infinite screensharing. Go on, I dare you.
This dream is collapsing. As long as we’ve got the timings right, we can ride the wake-ups all the way back to the real world.
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?
Yojimbo users, here’s the news you’ve been waiting for.
Yojimbo 3.0 is out today, and with it comes a companion iPad application that lets you take your Yojimbo database to go.
There’s very little information about Apple’s next big update to OS X, 10.7 or “Lion,” which may be previewed at Steve Jobs’ special “Back To The Mac” press event on Wednesday.
People are very excited, though, and they’re letting their imaginations run away with them. Among the features that have been suggested are an App Store for the Mac, multitouch controls, and iOS apps instead of the little-used Dashboard.
It’s an interesting list, but some stuff there that just isn’t going to happen… Here’s what is going to be in 10.7:
[Thanks to OS X Daily for the list]
George Hotz a.k.a GeoHot has released the Mac version of limera1n, his 1-click jailbreak solution. However, it will NOT unlock the device, enabling it to be used with different GSM carriers worldwide.
It is pretty easy to use and worked perfectly with my iPhone 4. Besides the tool, there’s a limera1n application that gets automatically installed on the iPhone after jailbreak, which gives you option to install Cydia.
Here’s see how it works.
Ingredients:
If you recently used Limera1n or GreenPois0n to jailbreak your iOS device, and want to make sure that iTunes doesn’t automatically update your device’s firmware whenever the next update is released by Apple, then here is a quick fix to prevent you from accidentally updating your iPhone/iPod/iPad.
One of the biggest problems with physical media is that it breaks. As soon as your DVD gets a couple scratches it’s rendered un-usable and worthless. Copying a DVD with encryption isn’t as easy as it should be. The good news is that with this walkthrough Cult of Mac will show you how to do it.
Secrets is a preference pane rather than an app, so once you’ve installed it, you’ll find it inside System Preferences, not in your Applications folder.
What is it? Think of it as “System Preferences Plus”. Secrets gives you point-and-click access to hundreds of hidden preferences in OS X and many applications. Without Secrets, the only way of changing these settings is by using a Terminal window and typing stuff like “defaults write com.apple.iTunes hide-ping-dropdown -bool TRUE” (which is the secret setting for hiding the Ping drop-down menu in iTunes.)
So if you’d rather avoid having to mess around with geekery like that, Secrets is your friend. You can browse through all the hidden preferences on your system, or filter them by application. So if you want Mail to always display messages in plain text, or if you want Safari’s tab bar to stay in view even when there’s only one tab open, or if you want to change how often Time Machine does its backups – well, you can change all of those, and loads more, inside Secrets.
It’s free to download, and frequently updated with new items as and when Apple and third party developers push out updates to software packages.
Windows users are accustomed to a “Print Screen” or “PrntScrn” button on their keyboard. When hit, the computer takes a picture of the current screen and saves it to the clipboard, ready for pasting into a graphics program.
So where’s the PrntScrn button on a Mac? How do you take a screenshot?
Vance L from Australia contacted us at 100tips@cultofmac.com saying that when he switched from PC to Mac, he spent 10 minutes looking for that button before realising it wasn’t there. But as he found out, there’s another way.
We all like our eyes. What a shame we subject them to such an endless onslaught of photons from computer screens all day long.
F.lux is an app designed to make your eyes feel a little more comfortable while working on a computer.
Most of us don’t need VoiceOver, the accessibility feature that’s built into the operating system of each and every iPhone.
But for one blind iPhone owner, it has been a life-changer.
Now that Apple has made iBooks available on all iOS devices users can read their purchased eBooks on a number of different devices. But what if you have a couple large RTF, DOC, TXT, or LIT files of your own that you want to view in iBooks you’re out of luck. In this tutorial we’re going to show you how to get digital and convert your documents into eBooks so that you can enjoy reading them on your iPad, iPhone or new iPod Touch.
Raskin for Mac is an intuitive Finder replacement for Mac OS, and is the single best reason to go out and buy Apple’s new Magic Trackpad: it totally transforms the desktop experience.
Raskin for Mac uses a visual interface to present all your files on a single page, allowing you to view, arrange and open documents, applications, files and images without opening the Finder. It’s like a giant zoomable photo contact sheet, and makes navigating files and applications very easy and fast. It is inspired by the work of Jef Raskin — the legendary computer interface designer and father of the Mac computing experience.
Somehow, Cult of Mac managed to completely miss OS X’s ten year birthday yesterday… an embarrassing lapse to be sure. Luckily, MacWorld was not going to let the anniversary pass without baking a cake, and so we’d take the time at this point, if you haven’t already seen it, to read their incredible retrospective on the first decade of OS X.
The entire article is worth a read, but this quote at the end from Avie Tevanian, the former VP of Software Engineering at both Apple and NeXT, was extremely interesting to me:
Apple had a 20 to 30 year lifespan in mind for OS X during its development, says Tevanian, but he suspects its fundamental underpinnings may last even longer.
Given OS X’s ten year birthday, that means that unless Apple has reconsidered its position, their Mac operating system may still be around in another decade or more. Even more striking is Tevanian’s insistence that the underpinnings of OS X will last more than 30 years: given Linux Unix is 41 years old, it’s not unheard of for the fundaments of an operating system to last that long, but it’s amazing to see just how long-sighted Apple’s vision for the best desktop operating system on Earth actually was even in its nascent years. It seems like we can expect OS X not only to last until 2020 or later, but make its way through the entire zoological gamut of jungle cats before it finally sheathes its claws.
If you work with multiple monitors, the following scenario might strike a chord: you’re busy working on a document in a secondary monitor, and you need to apply some software widget to the stuff you’ve just selected. You struggle to remember the keyboard shortcut but can’t; so you have to use the Menu Bar.
Problem is, the Menu Bar is back where your computer left it, on your primary monitor. Once in a while this might not be a problem, but if it’s a common occurrence in your workflow, it’s going to start getting irritating.
Binary Bakery’s MenuEverywhere is an application designed to solve this problem.
