“Don’t think of them as tablets. Think of them as windows that you carry.”
MacKeeper, A New Take on System Care
Though many people say you don’t need to do any kind of maintenance on Mac OS X, I’ve gotten used to run a couple of applications every two weeks or so to keep my Mac clean and healthy. Mac OS X is a great platform, but this doesn’t mean it can’t become slower over time, especially because of caches, logs and undeleted preferences. Did you know that when you trash an application, it leaves many stuff behind it and that if you don’t use a dedicated app uninstaller (like AppZapper) that stuff will remain there for good? Imagine that stuff being a bunch of 200MB cache folders and you get the idea. This applies for caches, system logs, binaries, unused language files.
Fortunately, there are some apps that enable you to perform maintenance tasks thus deleting that unused space, and I think CleanMyMac from MacPaw (which we previously reviewed here) is the leading app, powered by a great UI and a large set of features. Today I’ll take a look at the new kid on the block, MacKeeper, which aims at keeping your Mac healthy and clean, but comes with other additional functionalities that could really make it stand out from the crowd.
Opera Mini for iPhone Submitted, Official Video Preview
The day has finally come: today Opera has submitted the iPhone version of its browser to the App Store, and now it’s up to Apple to approve it.
Opera Mini, which is already available on other smartphones, is one of the leading browsers in the mobile scene, sporting a nice looking user interface and its well-known speed, achieved with to a compression method that involves Opera’s servers (like proxies) that should make the browsing experience a lot faster than MobileSafari’s one.
Whether this is good or not (would you redirect your traffic to an external server?), we can’t wait to find out how Opera compares to the other browsers available for iPhone OS, especially when for the navigation itself.
To get a better hang of how Opera Mini for iPhone works, you can watch the official preview video embedded below.
UDID Not
Craig Hockenberry on the problems developers had to face with beta testing, device IDs and Ad Hoc distributions:
”[…] the limitation for Ad Hoc provisioning should be based around individuals, not the devices that they own. It makes more sense to regulate Apple IDs rather than UDIDs. I want John Gruber to be able to run my apps on whatever devices he currently owns. I want to put my own name on the provisioning list and enable the five iPhone OS devices sitting on my desk. All that Apple cares about is that are only 98 other people besides Gruber and me.”
OweMe: Lending Manager App for iPhone
You know what really pisses me off? When someone comes with me for a beer on Saturday night and when it’s time to pay, he realizes he doesn’t have any money with him. Man I hate stuff like this, and every single time I have to stay quiet and lend this person some money - ‘cause it’s not very appropriate to give him a dose of “Ticci Hyper Mode” in a random pub. So there it goes, 5 Euros to John for the beer. Different scenario, my friend calls: “Hey man, would you please buy me that thing on eBay? I heard you’re good with computers. Oh of course, I’ll give you the money as soon as we’ll meet!” Fine, 20 Euros for that damn rare manga.
Fortunately, money always comes back to me but guess what - it’s a pain to remember who owes me something. And of course I won’t jot this stuff into Omnifocus. OweMe is a very nice application for iPhone which aims to collect all the things you’ve lent, and even those you owe, into a single window, powered by a good looking design which makes the dirty job a pleasure to look at.
Mockup Your Next iPhone Application with Interface App
I’m not a designer of any sort, but I can recognize a well made interface, wallpaper or icon when I see one. My girlfriend says I’ve got good taste in things, I say all that time spent on MacThemes at least was useful for something. Also, writing reviews everyday helped in developing my sense of “graphical taste”, and I think I’ve come to a good point when my eyes spot a beautiful UI meters away from the screen.
Sometimes I try to think as a designer though, and I guess it must be a hell of a job to come up with the right interface, with everything at the right place, for the right application. With the myriad of iPhone apps out there, many of them sporting lickable stunning UIs, there’s no lack of inspiration or references, but on the other hand that could become a problem when trying to be unique, still respecting the interface guidelines provided by Apple. More important, mixing custom design elements with standard ones might result in having an app that feels somehow awkward and weird. Designers and developers should mockup, wireframe and sketch before trying to put in design their thoughts, and what better than an iPhone application that lets you..mockup an iPhone app?
Meet Interface, a mockup and prototyping tool for iPhone…on the iPhone.
Can the Kindle Compete on the iPad?
Jim Dalrymple, at The Loop:
“What Amazon has going for it is a strong, existing customer base. For the same reason Apple’s competitors find it hard to compete in the music and video space, Apple will find it hard to compete against Amazon.
However, I don’t think that will last long. Apple has one of the best mobile delivery systems ever built in iTunes. That is going to be key to e-book distribution for Apple and they have a proven track record. They can get it done.”
Cathodique: Flashless Youtube Videos On Your Mac
I think Youtube is one of the websites where I waste most of my internet free time. I bookmark videos (especially music videos), watch rare and unreleased live performances of the artists I like, laugh at those compilations of internet memes, which never grow old. Together with Wikipedia, Youtube is a huge time waster, and since they rolled out the HTML5 playback beta feature, it’s even less memory consuming and stable to me.
But if Wikipedia has some dedicated clients (for iPhone, just check out Articles), the same doesn’t apply for Youtube: it’s quite difficult to come up with original ideas for a Youtube specific application other than allowing the users to download videos and let them browse videos as thumbnails in a grid.
Cathodique is an app I stumbled upon two days ago, it’s new, and it’s got some nice features that made me keep it in my Applications folder.
Air Contacts Winners Announced
Thanks everyone who entered the Air Contacts giveaway. Also, we’d like to thank the Project Cocoa developers for the promo codes they gave to MacStories.
Here are the winners:
Jonny
leesui
Kody
cjmegatron81
Davide85
You’ll receive the licenses in your inbox in a matter of a few hours. Stay tuned for other giveaways coming this week.
In the meantime, you can follow the official MacStories Twitter account as @macstoriesnet .