Iomega today announced a new Mac Companion Hard Drive which incorporates a large capacity desktop hard drive (2 TB or 3 TB models are available) with two USB ports to connect a printer or another external drive, two FireWire ports and an additional high-powered USB charging port for an iPad or iPhone.

With the new Iomega Mac Companion Hard Drive, Mac users now have a convenient and stylish way to quickly charge their iPads with the bonus of plenty of new storage capacity for their Mac computer,” said Jonathan Huberman, president of Iomega Corporation. “With more than nine million iPads sold in the last quarter alone, the new Mac Companion Hard Drive is the perfect complement for all those iPad owners.

Iomega has made special effort to make a device that matches and suits Macs, which is most notable in the design and stylings of the device – not only is it sleek with its metal enclosure but the very shape of the Mac Companion Hard Drive has been sculpted so that it sits perfectly on the iMac or Thunderbolt Display stand, tapering out at the back. The whole device is fairly simplistic but stylish in design and it hides all but the high-powered USB port at the back of the device. Iomega has left the three visible sides with nothing but the high-powered port on the right hand side of the device and four LED lights on the front panel of the device to indicate HDD capacity.

The charging port is a high-powered 2.1 Amp hookup that makes it easy and convenient to charge your iPad and other portable Apple devices so they’re ready to go when you are.

The hard drives are also pre-formatted as HFS+ so that they are compatible out of the box with Mac OS X, and whilst the lack of Thunderbolt is a little disappointing, this device looks like a solid option for anyone looking for an external hard drive for their Macs. The Iomega Mac Companion Hard Drive will initially be exclusive to Apple online and retail stores at a cost of $195 for the 2 TB model and $295 for the 3 TB model.

Jump past the break for some more pictures of the device.

(more…)

Earlier today, Apple posted a series of revised Mac OS X 10.6.8 updates aimed at both desktop and Server users to fix a number of bugs and issue from the previous 10.6.8 release, and ease the transition to Lion. The “Mac OS X 10.6.8 Supplemental Update” — showing up now in Software Update and available on Apple’s website — brings audio fixes when using HDMI or optical audio out, resolves issues with certain network printers and improves the transfer process of personal data from Snow Leopard to Lion, something that Apple also addressed with a separate Migration Assistant update last week.

The supplemental and combo updates for Snow Leopard are all available on Apple’s website, or directly through Software Update. The updates are recommended for all users running Snow Leopard, presumably looking to upgrade to OS X Lion in the near future. Direct links below.

- Mac OS X Server v10.6.8 Update Combo v1.1

- Mac OS X 10.6.8 Server Supplemental Update

- Mac OS X Server v10.6.8 Update v1.1

- Mac OS X 10.6.8 Update Combo v1.1

- Mac OS X 10.6.8 Supplemental Update

- Mac OS X 10.6.8 Update v.1.1

Spotify, the European music streaming service that has attracted millions of paying subscribers in the past two years, is finally launching in the United States, with some saying the big opening could happen as early as next week. For those not familiar with Spotify, the concept is very simple: instead of owning music, you stream it from the company’s servers that host a huge catalogue of songs from both major and less-known labels. You can build playlists, mark items as favorite, and pay to get unlimited access, higher quality bitrates, mobile apps and caching options for offline access. Whereas Apple’s upcoming iTunes Match service will scan songs you already own to mirror them online, Spotify lets you create your own online library of songs you don’t own (though a “buy” option has been recently introduced), but that you can stream at any time. It’s similar to other services like Rdio and MOG, but the company never managed to close a deal with US music labels and get the green light for launching its service until last week.

I’ve been a Spotify user for two years, and it’s completely revolutionized the way I listen to music. I still enjoy buying some music from iTunes, but Spotify’s biggest advantage over traditional marketplaces is that I can pay a monthly fee (or buy yearly access altogether with a gift card) to listen to just about anything I want, from any device. Spotify has a beautiful Mac client and an iPhone app that’s continually updated with new features; however, the company still hasn’t revealed its plans about an iPad app that would be much welcome one year after the iPad came out. (more…)

We’ve talked about myPhoneDesktop before on MacStories but we thought it deserved a short ‘re-review’ to accompany today’s giveaway. Keeping it simple, the premise of myPhoneDesktop is that it provides a portal through which you can easily transfer data and information from your desktop computer to your iPhone or iPad.

Broadly speaking the app transfers four types of data including phone data (both numbers and text messages), website URLs, text and images. When you send any of that data from your computer, and there is both a desktop and web client, it will be pushed straight to your device with a notification.

But where I think the app becomes most powerful is when you have the data on your iPhone or iPad. In the corner of the app it has the “Open in” icon where it literally has a wealth of options for your data. There is everything from the obligatory search with Google, to send by email, add to contact, send SMS or launching another app with that data. Importantly, the developers aren’t resting on their laurels, since we last talked about myPhoneDesktop there have been a few updates that continue to add more app integrations including Navigon and InstaTodo.

In reality I have only just scraped the surface of what this app can do, for example it also integrates with Google Voice and Skype, so make sure to check out the myPhoneDesktop website to learn more and get your own copy. Today we’re giving away 5 ‘double passes’ of myPhone desktop – in other words the five winners will receive two promo codes, perfect to give one copy to a iPhone-toting friend or family member, or (god forbid) use it as a belated Father’s Day gift. Details of the give away are past the break.

(more…)

BlackBerry PlayBook owners who also happen to have a Mac have been waiting for a BlackBerry Desktop release with support for tablet sync, which since launch has been exclusive to Windows PCs with RIM promising a Mac release (alongside many other features like a proper email client) this summer. Electronista reports users of Beta Zone (RIM’s beta distribution channel for various programs and enterprise tools) have now access to the 2.1 beta version of BlackBerry Desktop for Mac that adds media sync for photos and videos, but excludes standard functionalities like backups.

It’s not clear whether the new beta version also comes with music sync, contacts and calendar sync with iCal and Entourage, or the switch wizard to migrate data from a BlackBerry smartphone to the PlayBook. The new desktop app can be downloaded by participating in BlackBerry’s Beta Zone here.

Popular desktop sharing tool CloudApp — the app that was once teased “every Mac user’s dream” — is receiving a major update today that sees the release of the app in the Mac App Store for the first time since the January 6th grand opening, and the addition of several new features built on top of a complete rewrite aimed at making the app more stable, faster, and better integrated with OS X. CloudApp 1.5, available for download here, is a milestone update that turns a simple utility to share screenshots and files on the Internet into a full-featured “clipboard in the cloud” that now works in real-time, and can plug directly into a Mac’s system clipboard.

The first version of CloudApp, released last year, allowed users to quickly share almost anything on a Mac (links, images, documents, .zip files) by hitting a hotkey that sent selected items to the cloud, automatically returning a short URL to share with your friends on Twitter, Facebook, or email. What made CloudApp stand out from the crowd of Mac sharing utilities (like Tinygrab or Droplr) — elegance of the design aside — was the powerful Raindrop system that enabled developers to build plugins that connected CloudApp with other third-party applications like Chrome, Aperture, Photoshop and iTunes. With a single desktop shortcut, users could instantly share a .png of the Photoshop project they were working on, post a link of a song playing in Spotify, or shorten the URL of the frontmost browser window. And if you selected multiple files in the Finder and hit the shortcut, CloudApp would upload them simultaneously, too. Not to mention the fact that there was an option to automatically upload any new screenshot taken with the Mac’s Grab utility, and check out most recent files’ view count in the menubar. CloudApp 1.5 still has all these features, only they’re backed by a new Streaming API and a second hotkey that doesn’t require Raindrops, but simply uploads the latest item in your Mac’s clipboard, whatever it is.

As seen in the latest Cloud2go update, the Streaming API means files and shortened URLs pop up everywhere (desktop app, web, mobile clients) as soon as they’re shared, and the view count in the menubar and webapp updates in real-time as well. The app is constantly communicating with its servers to push recent items and display how many users have clicked on your links. Alongside bug fixes, however, the biggest new feature is the separation of the Raindrops’ keyboard shortcut and system hotkey: whatever you copy with the standard CMD+C action can be accessed and uploaded by CloudApp using a second shortcut that gets the latest entry directly from your Mac’s clipboard. This is incredibly handy in my opinion as you don’t have to rely on app-specific raindrops and conditions — you just copy something like you normally do and hit a shortcut to upload. It works everywhere, and it’s fast. The Raindrops are still there, though: they’ve been improved with an official SDK and update notifications, and I’m told new raindrops to upload new files from a specific Finder folder and QuickTime recordings will be released soon.

Overall, CloudApp 1.5 is a solid update that dramatically enhances the functionalities of the app. While retaining the simplicity that made the app popular in the first place, CloudApp 1.5 adds a series of new features that extend the app’s capabilities to a whole new level, making it extremely integrated with Mac OS X. Get it here.

Back in December 2009, I was browsing Ember looking for some cool new apps to cover on MacStories. As I browsed the online gallery to find interesting projects worth a mention on the site, I stumbled upon the first screenshots of a new RSS reader for Mac, Caffeinated. The app looked elegant and super-slick, and as you may remember from my initial coverage of the private alpha version, it was also a fast way to access Google Reader from the desktop. But since then, the app disappeared from our radars and lots of things changed in RSS app landscape: Reeder for Mac was released as beta, Google Reader clients for iOS started proliferating implementing features that weren’t previously possible on the desktop. Caffeinated, however, wasn’t dead at all: it was being rebuilt from the ground up, and that was a long process looking back at my first article. As promised by the developer a few weeks ago, a first beta of Caffeinated is finally available today.

From a design perspective, not much has changed since my initial coverage. The app still looks as slick as ever with minimal sidebars and iOS-like scrolling and cells, but it’s the underlying engine that went under a massive re-construction. The app is way faster than I remembered, perhaps not as fast as the current Reeder for Mac beta but definitely snappy and promising. The app takes less than a second to start up with a neat opening animation, subscriptions can be manually refreshed with a keyboard shortcut but there’s no way to set automatic reload times yet. In fact, this first beta of Caffeinated is so limited there’s no access to the Preferences yet, and sharing options haven’t been implemented. As the developer writes:

Caffeinated was built for speed and customisability. The app is theme-able, the API exists but I have yet to write documentation or build in appropriate preferences, if you are interested in themeing with this beta, just give me a shout and I can walk you through it – its really not that difficult.

This is mainly a usable taster of what is to come…so be patient ( I know you have already! ) but it will be worth the wait in the end.

Overall, this first beta of Caffeinated — quite possibly one of the most anticipated Mac apps of 2010, before some users lost hope and began to think the project went the way of the dodo — is pretty buggy and clearly unfinished, but it’s a sign of interesting things to come in the (hopefully) near future. If you want to take Caffeinated for a spin, go download beta 1 here.

Fluid, the popular tool that allows you to turn websites into “native” Mac apps, was finally updated to version 1.0 yesterday after 3.5 years of development, bringing the app to “stable” status and introducing a new $4.99 price point that unlocks “extra features” — some of them previously available for free in the beta versions. For those who are not familiar with Fluid, it basically enables you to turn any website into a standalone desktop application that — technically speaking — is nothing but a Cocoa wrapper. By wrapping a website into its own desktop package, Fluid gives you the “illusion” of having a native Gmail or Facebook app while, in fact, you’re simply running a webpage into a separate window. Fluid, however, has got its very own perks, like the possibility to choose a custom Dock icon for a website, or displaying unread badges for new items and notifications — something that a browser normally doesn’t through tabs. In this way, Fluid becomes a pretty handy solution to put your Campfire chats in the Dock, or get Gmail out of the browser and into its own desktop window.

The new version 1.0, improvements and bug fixes aside, comes with an optional $4.99 purchase that will unlock three features: userscripts & userstyles, separate cookie storage, and possibility to “pin” apps to the OS X menubar. Whilst the first two features are self-explanatory (separate cookie storage is new to Fluid 1.0 though), “pin to status bar” is the big addition to this Fluid release. Much like Twitterrific and Twitter for Mac can be toggled by a menubar item to hide / show the main window, Fluid apps can now live in the menubar and get out of the way when you don’t need them. If you combine this with some clever mobile user agent tweaking, you end up with a sweet way to create useful iPhone-like desktop apps that don’t clutter your Mac’s screen, but they’re still there.

Fluid is not available in the Mac App Store, but you can download the free version here. A $4.99 license can also be purchased here with a Paypal payment.

Currently the #1 free app in the iPad App Store, Terra Web Browser is one of those apps I didn’t know if I should take for a spin at first. There’s no shortage of alternative browsers for iPad: from the excellent iCab Mobile (which I use on a daily basis) to more innovative solutions like Sleipnir, it’s very easy to achieve the perfect browsing experience on the tablet if you think Safari is too limited and you’re willing to spend a few extra bucks. It needs to be mentioned, however, that unofficial browsers don’t get access to the latest Nitro Javascript engine goodness, and there’s no way on iOS to set a default browser other than Safari. Still, many users like me feel like having a (perhaps slower as far as webpage rendering goes) browser companion to Safari is necessary for more complex tasks like saving files locally, or displaying open pages as tabs under the main app’s toolbar. Again, iCab is quite possibly the perfect app if you’re looking for desktop-like interactions on the iPad.

Back to Terra, it comes from the guys behind ReaddleDocs and Calendars, and it’s free. I was a little skeptical at first because I really don’t need another browser on my iPad, but for what it does and for its current price, I have to say Terra is a really good app. All those positive ratings in the App Store can’t be completely wrong, after all. The app’s got a minimal interface with tabs, and you can go fullscreen with the tap of a button. Unlike many, many other apps that try to replicate fullscreen mode with semi-transparent icons on top of a webpage, Terra places a single button in the upper right corner. If you want to focus on something you want to read, hit fullscreen and forget about it. Thanks to the implementation of multitouch gestures, you can switch between open tabs with a three-finger swipe. The top toolbar gives you access to the usual functionalities of an iOS browser, such as address bar, refresh button, Google search, settings, bookmarks and action button. In the settings you can set a passcode for the app, choose to navigate in incognito mode (your cookies and history won’t be saved), change the user agent and modify the selected search engine. You can also import bookmarks from your computers, but you’ll have to use iTunes File Sharing for that. Bookmarks, history and “saved files” are located in a bookmarks popover on the left, but I couldn’t figure out how to export my Chrome’s bookmarks bar to Terra. I guess I’ll have to properly edit my exported .html file to make it work. The action button has got some interesting features as well: you can create a new bookmark, AirPrint a page, save a page locally for offline access, mail a link or forward to Safari.

What most impressed me about Terra, though, is how it handles tabs. Not only the app is stable and can handle dozens of open pages just fine (tested last night, 13 open tabs and none of them reloaded after several minutes of navigation), it’s also got a nice popup menu that will show a webpage’s full title as you tap & hold a tab. If you have a lot of open tabs and you can only see the favicons, that’s quite handy. Switching between tabs is not as fast as iCab, but it’s more than acceptable. The animations are smooth and, overall, the system works well.

Terra for iPad was a surprise. The app is free, but it does a lot of things better than many apps priced at $2.99 and above, without sacrificing its minimal approach to UI and responsiveness. Get it here.