software - page 19

When Apple updated the iTunes 10 icon earlier this year, it sparked huge controversy among Mac users everywhere — many branded the new icon ugly, lifeless, and unconventional. The debate showed that lots of Mac users like to see beautiful apps with beautiful icons.

Here are 15 of our favorite Mac OS X icons from 2010 that stand out for being beautifully designed, brilliantly colorful, and wonderfully unique. We’ve selected icons that make you want to find out more about an application, and that you’d proudly place in your dock for all to see.

We hope you like them. Check them out after the break. If you know better icons, please tell us about them in the comments. Free apps for the best ideas.

I love my new MacBook Air, but I’m terrified of it being stolen. I’ve been bitten on this before with a top-of-the-line, 15-inch MacBook Pro that was stolen (as I discovered later, by a drug-addicted friend) a mere two months after I bought it. The new MacBook Air’s an even bigger worry, since it’s light weight and small form factor make it all the more a target for a quick snatch-and-run.

Apple doesn’t have a Mac-centric version of their “Find my iPhone” app, but I’ve been looking into Hidden, an OS X application that hides in the background processes of your Mac and only broadcasts your Mac’s location when you go to the official website and tell it to ping your laptop.

If that sounds up your alley, there’s now officially no reason to give Hidden a download: usually $20, the application is now free for the rest of the month. Just go here to sign up.

Although Adobe itself is hardly on the ropes, having just scored their first billion dollar year in revenue, Apple continues to pummel Flash into the ground, like a berserker rabbit punching the occipital lobe of a downed enemy.

The latest blow? Apple has just launched iAd Producer, a new tool for online advertisers that allows them to create interactive iAd content in an easy, streamlined manner that would have previously required Adobe’s Flash developer tools.

After all the eggnog is consumed and the gifts unwrapped, your new and old Macs may need a bit of holiday cheer themselves. Whether you’re trying to setup a new system or infuse energy into an old favorite, a few MacRx columns on such matters resonated with our readers this year.

Read on for refreshers about Fixing Startup Problems, Speeding up Slow Macs, Troubleshooting WiFi Issues, Making Hard Drive Clones, and Managing Your Safari Bookmarks. Some things to do over the holiday break!

Word Lens is the app making jaws drop all over the internet this morning, thanks to this appropriately jaw-dropping demo video:

The video says it all, but you might be left wondering: is it a hoax? Can it really be as good as that?

Around this time every year we ask you, our lovely Cult readers, to tell us which new OS X desktop applications have caught your eye over the last 12 months.

Last year’s winners (by a hair) were Google Chrome and OmmWriter.

What do we mean by “new”? Ideally, we mean brand new applications that were launched for the first time this year. But we’re prepared to be flexible, so “new” can also mean major updates to existing apps. And don’t forget, we’re talking OS X desktop apps here, not iOS apps.

A few suggestions to get you started: Scrivener 2, Postbox, Office 2011, iLife 11, iTunes 10, Reeder, Kiwi, Transmit 4, Lightroom 3… the list is long.

The comments box is yours. Tell us what new software you loved most in 2010. The application with the most mentions is declared the winner, and will be featured in a follow-up post next week.

Hazel is software genius. It’s one of those tools that looks so simple to start with, but after a while, you realise just how powerful and flexible it could be.

Don’t have an AppleTV, or even a TV, but interested in beaming some of your iPhone’s videos to that inviting 27-inch iMac display? TUAW’s always ingenious Erica Sadun has put together a tricky new piece of software that fools your iPhone or iPod Touch into thinking its an AppleTV.

Remember that old Mac you had? That beautiful iMac. It was lovely. Still works, but these days it doesn’t get used much.

It was a G5. One of the 17 inch models. You think. Wait. Or was it 20 inch? Damn, have to get it out and measure it now. It had a 1.83GHz Intel. Or was it a 2.33GHz? Dammit. You really can’t be bothered to boot the thing up just to check. But now you want to know.

We’re pretty big on Dropbox here at the Cult, and it’s handiness as a transfer/storage utility for Macs and iDevices alike hasn’t really been challenged. That is, till now.

Spot Documents works with the same basic idea: Its free OS X or iOS apps can be used to upload a user’s e-junk to Spot Document’s cloud — in this case, hosted on Amazon’s S3 servers — where it’ll be stored and made available for download/viewing. The difference is that where Dropbox is pretty slim on options, Spot Documents seems to be substantially more powerful: Spotlight-like search, full previews even on iDevices, and the ability to play around with access options for multiple users. And more.

Skitch, the screenshot and image editor that’s been in beta since the day your parents were born (OK, since 2007), has finally reached 1.0.

If you’ve not tried Skitch before, now’s a good time to give it a spin. The emphasis is definitely on screenshots – taking them, and adding text, arrows, annotations and other fun stuff. It’s an app much beloved by writers of Mac blogs, who’ve made much use of it over the years for making quick-and-easy illustrations for their posts. Guilty as charged, Your Honour.

The deal with Skitch 1.0 is simple: you can still use the app for free if you like (“YAY!” cry the Mac bloggers), but if you shell out about $15 a year, you can get all sorts of sexy extras like no ads, more image formats, SSL encryption and more more more.

(Via delicious Brett at TUAW, oh yeah.)

iPhoto is one of Apple’s most popular applications. Bundled with every new Mac since 2002, millions of people have imported and manipulated billions of photos with this useful software. Every time you plug your iPhone or another camera into your Mac, iPhoto leaps to the assistance (whether you want it to or not).

With success come challenges. One common thing I’m asked about as an Mac consultant is how to manage iPhoto libraries that have gotten out of hand – thousands of photos, lots of duplicate items, and sometimes multiple copies of libraries. How do you get all this under control?

The guys at Evernote have just unveiled some new goodies in Evernote 2.0 Beta for Mac.

First up is sharing, and this includes some sweet new features. You can share any notebook, either with named individuals or with the entire world. These public notebooks have a URL (which you can keep to yourself, or tell the world – and search engines – about), and an RSS feed.

Software bundles are a great way to get lots of apps for cheaps, but quite often you end up paying for apps you have no need of and no interest in.

That’s where Give Good Food to Your Mac is different. In a style similar to the MacBundles we mentioned a couple of weeks ago, the Good Food deal is flexible.

You get to browse the list of apps on offer and pick out the ones you like the look of. The more you buy, the better the deal and the more money you save overall. Buy more than seven applications and you get 60 per cent off.

There’s a decent selection of apps on offer including lots of games. The store closes on December 10th. Happy bundle shopping.

For Mac users awash in social networking (and that’s like saying “for NASCAR drivers with the ability to make left turns”), today’s release of Flock‘s completely revamped browser — which, like its predecessor, is heavily integrated with social networking sites — should be exciting news.

It’s been a long wait for Mac users, as the browser completed its transformation from a Mozilla to a Chromium 7 skeleton. The new Flock arrived on Windows last summer, and Flock’s blog claimed an October release for the Mac version, with no word since then. But it’s here, it easily integrates major social networks right out of the box (Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and even LinkedIn) — and it’s fast.

We’ll take a closer look at Flock in our upcoming browser comparo. Stay tuned.

Thanks to the inclusion of WebSocket support for the iPad’s Safari browser in iOS 4.2, the doorway for collaboration through the web between the iPad and assorted devices has been flung open.

One of the first apps to take advantage of the iPad’s new trick is $10 SyncPad, which presents users with a faux whiteboard to scrawl notes on, then lets other users of the app scribble on that same whiteboard over the Internet, with the results showing up in realtime (well, almost — the developer, Davide Di Cillo of development company 39 Inc., told us it updates a little slowly, but that the problem’s been fixed in the latest update, which is waiting for Apple’s approval).

There’s no limit to the amount of collaborators, although each has to have (of course) the app and an Internet connection; the iPad-less can view the whiteboard through a web browser for free, but have to make do without being able to add input for the time being — although Di Cillo says they’re working on a fee-based version that’ll allow collaboration via a browser as well. There’s also a view-only free version of the app for the iPad.

A few months ago, it seemed like I switched OS X Twitter clients every other day. A long time Tweetie user, the lack of updates eventually made me ready to switch, but after plowing through client after client in rapid succession — Twitterrific, TweetDeck, twhirl, YoruFukurou — only to keep turning back to Tweetie for the admittedly nebulous reason that none of the competition felt “right” to me.

That all changed when I discovered Kiwi, my new go-to Twitter client. Despite the fact that a change to Twitter’s API meant that Kiwi often alerted me for @replies that hadn’t actually shot down the pipeline, I finally deleted Tweetie from my machine and became a Kiwi user full time.

I’m delighted to see, then, that Kiwi has been updated to its second major release, Kiwi 2. It fixes the aforementioned @reply bug, but also adds a host of new features like account grouping, inline images, gesture support for multitouch trackpads and the extension of its already-excellent themeable interface.

If you’ve been looking to trade in Tweetie for a client with more advanced features while retaining Tweetie’s simplicity and streamlined presentation, I’d recommend Kiwi 2 heartily. The ad supported version will cost you nothing, and removing the ads is a one-time fee of $9.95. Worth twice that, if you ask me.

Last week’s great disappointment was the discovery that Apple had mostly pulled AirPrint support from OS X 10.6.5, which would allow you to print documents directly from iOS to almost any shared network printer. Native AirPrint support was trimmed only to a small number of AirPrint-compatible HP printers, and while hacks exist to get AirPrint support back via the command line, they’re a little beyond the capability of most users.

Enter FingerPrint, a new application from Collobos Software that enables AirPrint printing over Bonjour for many of the omitted printers. It accomplishes its neat trick by fooling Bonjour into broadcasting your normal printer in such a way that iOS 4.2 can see it.

There’s a lot of Mac bundled out there, and they usually all offer pretty incredible deals on Mac software, but let’s face facts: usually, there’s only one or two applications you really want. If those two apps cost less than the asking price of the bundle, and if you were going to buy them anyway, then getting an additional eight apps for free is an obvious win… but what if you’re more ambivalent, or just plain cheap?

Enter MacBundles, which has an interesting new twist on the bundle software concept: the BYOB store. Essentially, this lets you look at their $50 bundle and either buy it all in a go or pick-and-choose the apps you want for $5.95 each… as long as you order a minimum of five.

Here’s the link to the Apple Support document describing the update and how to get it.

10.6.5 promises increased performance in playing well with Microsoft Exchange, better image processing with iPhoto and Aperture, adds SSL support for transferring files with iDisk, resolves an issue syncing Address Book with Google, allows systems with a Mac Pro RAID Card (Early 2009) to be put to sleep, and adds RAW image compatibility for additional digital cameras — among other things.

See the full support document for details.

A few days ago, computer company Sophos released a free anti-virus application for OS X.

According to the experts at Sophos, your Mac is vulnerable to malware – it’s just that there isn’t very much of it around. Yet.

But as Macs and OS X get more popular, that might change. So Sophos thinks it’s time you protected your computer.

So what does Sophos Anti-Virus for OS X do, exactly?

The name might not be giving too much away, but Coconut Battery should be installed on everyone’s notebook Mac. If it were called “Free Battery Health App”, it would do exactly what it said on the tin.

It shows you, with numbers and helpful colored charts, exactly what condition your notebook battery is in. It shows in an instant the current charge, and how much more you can charge it if you try; and more usefully, it shows the original capacity of your battery, and its capacity right now.

If you click the little disclosure triangle at the top right, you can save the current data for future reference. Keep saving snapshots at regular intervals, and you’ll be able to see at a glance how your battery is slowly degrading. Because that’s what happens, folks: over time, everso slowly and gradually, the battery in your Air or your Pro or your plain old MacBook is going to decline. As time goes on, its capacity to hold charge will decrease until the time comes to replace it. This is inevitable, I’m afraid, just like the death of your hard disk. It’s one of those things you need to plan for; and Coconut Battery is one of those apps that helps with that.

(You’re reading the 19th post in our series, 50 Essential Mac Applications: a list of the great Mac apps the team at Cult of Mac value most. Read more.)

If a new patent spotted by the USPTO archeologists over at Patently Apple is believed, Lion might boasts a new way to navigate menus that would make Mac OS X more suitable to touch input than ever before.

Lately, updates to Apple’s official Mac software suites have tended to be first rumored by the strange source of pages for the idiot’s guides seeded on foreign Amazon dot whatever bookstore pages… and sure enough, that oh-so-reputable source is already touting iWork ’11 as coming out sometime in the near future.

But when exactly? Probably shot down the tube along with the splintered iLife ’11 apps when the Mac App Store launches, according to reports.

TextExpander turns short text snippets into longer ones, saving you a great deal of time if you spend a lot of time in front of a keyboard.

You define your own snippets, and the shortcuts you’ll use to trigger them. Every time you type the trigger, the snippet takes its place instantly.