New MacBook Airs Shipping with Faster Samsung SSDs?

By Federico Viticci

As reported by Anandtech, Apple has apparently switched to Samsung as the supplier for the solid state drives that ship with the new MacBook Airs (late 2010 models). When the revamped MacBook Air line was unveiled and released last October, Apple relied on Toshiba to power the new machines built around flash storage – more specifically, they ditched classic hard drive enclosures using “blade SSDs”, which basically include only the chips needed by flash storage as detailed by iFixit. Those SSDs (available in 64 GB, 128 GB and 256 GB configurations) were manufactured by Toshiba and carried model number TS128C. It’s not clear when Apple exactly made the switch to Samsung – Anandtech goes on to say they’re not even 100% sure these drives are from Samsung, yet all signs point to that – but several users are reporting recently purchased MacBook Air units come with drives carrying model name SM128C.

The best part? According to initial benchmarks, the Samsung drives are noticeably faster, as you can see in the chart below.

The interesting aspect is that the SM128C models provide quite a nice performance bump in at least one performance metric. Benchmarks posted by users show that the SM128C manages up to 260MB/s read and 210MB/s write speeds. In our tests (and corroborating what users have reported), the TS128C only offers speeds of up to 210MB/s read and 185MB/s write. The SM128C also supports Native Command Queuing (NCQ) while the TS128C does not.

Again, there’s no confirmation Apple has switched to Samsung as the only supplier for MacBook Air SSDs, and this change might as well be a temporary solution adopted by Apple to face shortages from Toshiba. But, then again, there’s the high chance a MacBook Air purchased today features a faster SSD from Samsung. [via 9to5mac]

Official Moleskine App for iOS Now Available

By Federico Viticci

Moleskine, a popular brand of notebooks, diaries and sketchbooks, released its first official app for iPhone and iPad yesterday in the App Store, bringing the look and note-taking capabilities of Moleskine products to iOS devices – also adding features only possible on smartphones and tablets like geo-location and image inserting functionalities.

Once installed, you can choose between different notebook styles like ruled paper, plain, or squared. From the settings, you can set a text size, text color, or edit the cover picture that will appear upon launching the app. Moleskine uses a mix of custom UI elements and standard iOS graphics for displaying popovers and menus; the result is, in my opinion, very elegant and minimalism. Unfortunately, playing around with this first version I noticed there’s no way to sync the iPad app with the iPhone counterpart – your notes are going to stay local on each device.

Notes – or, as Moleskine calls them, “thoughts” – can be organized by category and location. The main screen, called myThoughts, displays two buttons in a bottom toolbar to visualize categories and location points. Once you create a new note, you’ll notice a clipboard icon in the top toolbar that allows you to bring up a custom, animated pop-up menu to rename the note, assign categories / colors / labels, choose paper styles and share via Twitter, Facebook or email. The animation of this menu is really nice, although it caused the app to crash a couple of times. As far as true note-taking capabilities go, you can type text, sketch and insert images. Both text and sketches can have different sizes and colors, whilst images can be zoomed and cropped before being inserted into a document. Text automatically wraps around an image as you move it around, but images (and sketches) will be removed when you share a note via email.

Overall, this app is a good first attempt to bring the Moleskine experience to iPhones and iPads. The lack of syncing might be a deal-breaker for many nowadays, and I believe Dropbox integration could come in handy and should be considered by the developers. The app is free in the App Store, and you can check out a gallery of screenshots below. Read more

Tea: An App for Tea Drinkers

By Federico Viticci

Released two weeks ago in the App Store, Tea for iPhone is a beautiful app that aims at becoming a one-step solution for seasoned drinkers and tea newbies alike that have always been looking for a centralized place to manage their brewing notes, favorite teas, suggestions and timer settings. Tea clearly isn’t an app for everyone: unless you’re really passionate about tea, your collection of leaves and, overall, the knowledge you’ve accumulated over the years, I wouldn’t suggest installing Tea from the App Store. But if you love drinking tea, this is the app to have, and quite possibly one of the most beautiful pieces of software that (together with Tweetbot) have landed on the iPhone recently.

The main screen of the app gives you access to various types of tea you can brew. In the bottom toolbar, you can access the settings to change the order of teas, group by brand and enable social sharing on Twitter and Facebook. A History button in the middle of the tab bar lets you see all the teas you’ve brewed at once, whilst the Scratchpad allows you to write down all your tea-related notes in a single location. When you add a new tea, you can choose Name, Brand, Type and Amount. Types vary from White and Green to Black and Oolong – you shouldn’t be disappointed by the options offered in Tea. The Amount tab lets you choose between different units like grams, kilograms and ounces. Once you’ve picked a tea, the Set Brew screen displays a rotating indicator that enables you to select quantity, number of cups, brewing time, and temperature. Everything is selectable with a standard iOS menu, and the interface design is really polished. Once set, tap “Brew” in the upper right corner to bring up a beautiful timer you can pause or cancel at any time. When the time is up, you can leave a note and a rating – which will be remember by the app for future brews and infusions.

With an impeccable attention to detail and a great feature set, Tea for iPhone is the best app to prepare your teas, collect notes, share your results and manage your inventory. You can find it in the App Store at $1.99 for a limited time.
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Instapaper Adds Revamped Dictionary, Terminology Integration

By Federico Viticci

An update to Instapaper for iPhone and iPad was released a few minutes ago in the App Store, and it adds a series of new features to the built-in offline dictionary that improve the efficiency of the “define” button during a reading session. First off, the design of the inline dictionary has been revamped to host more definitions, and interlinking between words. Everything’s faster, more compact, yet with more content than before. Thanks to a collaboration with Agile Tortoise, Instapaper’s dictionary can now also forward a definition directly to Terminology, which we’ve reviewed before. Terminology will automatically find the definition for the word you’ve selected, and show a button to go back to Instapaper thanks to the implementation of the the new x-callback-url draft standard. Handoff should also be supported in version 3.0.2.

You can find Instapaper in the App Store here. Read more

New Xcode 4.1 Build Hints At Lion Developer Preview 3

By Federico Viticci

Alongside an update to the OS X Lion Developer Preview 2, Apple also released a new version of Xcode 4.1 to developers, which reaches “Preview 3” status. The new build contains bug fixes and it’s available now in the Mac Dev Center.

This release requires Mac OS X Lion Developer Preview 2 Update and includes iOS SDK 4.3. Continue to use Xcode 3.2.5 or Xcode 4 on a Snow Leopard partition if you plan to submit Mac or iOS apps to the App Store.

An interesting tidbit from the release notes: Xcode 4.1 Preview 3 has been “updated to support Mac OS X 10.7 Lion preview 3” – which hasn’t been released yet. Mac OS X Lion DP 2 was seeded on March 30th, a few minutes after Apple posted an update for the Developer Preview 1.

Apple Releases Lion Developer Preview 2 Update

By Federico Viticci

Apple just informed registered OS X developers that an update to the OS X Lion Developer Preview 2 is now available. The update can be downloaded from Software Update on computers that have DP 2 already installed.

From systems that have developer preview 2 of Lion or Lion Server installed, run Software Update and download Mac OS X Lion Developer Preview 2 Update. You must also download Xcode 4.1 Developer Preview 3 available from the Mac Dev Center to build apps with this version of Lion.

If you have not yet downloaded developer preview 2 of Lion and Lion Server, get your redemption code from the Mac Dev Center then proceed to the Mac App Store to redeem your code and download Lion.

Three weeks ago, Apple released an update to the original OS X Lion Developer Preview to enable ”downloads of Mac OS X Lion seed builds from the Mac App Store”. It is unclear what kind of changes went into today’s update to Developer Preview 2, but we’re hearing build number is 11A430e. Mac OS X Lion DP 2 was released on March 30th.

Update: from the changelog, Apple says this update is recommended to all users running Lion Developer Preview 2.

Project Mag Has A Gyro-enabled Cover for iPad 2

By Federico Viticci

Project, the iPad-exclusive magazine launched by Richard Branson’s Virgin last year, was updated yesterday to include a new issue that, unlike the previous ones, makes extensive use of the iPad 2 hardware to bring an HTML5-based, gyroscope-enabled animated cover to the readers. Project has always stood out as an example of a digital magazine willing to experiment more than the competition with interactive elements and on-screen graphics; and although it’s not perfect – like most magazine, text isn’t selectable and the overall navigation is based on old print schemes – I have to say I’m always curious to see what the Project team comes up with for each issue. It started with a video-like animated cover, and it continues in the latest Issue #5.

The design team told us the new issue uses the gyroscope to control HTML5 canvas objects: you can pan horizontally by moving your iPad around and see the various movies characters featured by Project in this month’s cover. You can’t do much with this feature, but we think it’s really interesting that magazine designers are starting to play around with the iPad’s hardware capabilities – and we’re definitely looking forward to more examples of this kind of integration with content and hardware.

The latest issue of Project is available as a $2.99 in-app purchase.

Printopia 2.0: AirPrint From iOS To Your Mac Apps

By Federico Viticci

When I first reviewed Printopia by Ecamm back in November, I was impressed by how easily the app allowed me to send documents from an iOS device to a shared printer on OS X via AirPrint. The problem with AirPrint we discussed in November – which Apple hasn’t fixed yet – is that unlike the first betas of OS X 10.6.5 and iOS 4.2, the final versions of these OSes didn’t ship with AirPrint support for shared printers. AirPrint works out of the box with a bunch of HP printers, but Apple promised last year that it would also work with any printer previously configured and shared on a Mac. No need to install additional drivers on iOS: as long as a printer was shared on OS X, it would show up in AirPrint. With 10.6.5 final, that wasn’t the case. AirPrint support for shared printers was pulled at the last minute, and a series of unofficial hacks surfaced to re-enable it without reverting back to a beta of 10.6.5 (Mac OS X has reached version 10.6.7 since then). Among those hacks and apps, Printopia was without the doubt the most elegant one because it provided a GUI in System Preferences to manage shared printers, and allowed you to print a document to a virtual location on your Mac or Dropbox.

Version 2.0 of Printopia, released yesterday, builds on the great virtual printing functionality by adding support for unlimited printers in any location (could be your Downloads folder, the Desktop – you name it) and PDF workflows and applications as well. The feature is more exciting than it sounds on the changelog: with Printopia 2.0, you can send a document from your iOS device (through AirPrint) to any app on your Mac that can preview, say, PDFs. Example: I’m on my iPhone, and I find a PDF I want to read on my computer. Both devices are on the same local network (but it should work with this kind of VPN setup as well), and Printopia is running on my Mac. I take the PDF, and “print it” to Evernote. The document will automatically open in the Evernote app on my desktop. I tested this with Google Chrome, Preview, DEVONthink, Yojimbo, Numbers, Pages – it works really well. But there’s more. Not only you can print to applications, you can also print a document to an Automator workflow that supports the file type. Here’s another example: last night, I sent a PDF document to CloudApp’s own “Upload with Cloud” workflow, and AirPrint sent the document to CloudApp, automatically returning the file’s URL on my desktop.

Printopia 2.0 opens the door to a lot of possibilities for virtually printing documents anywhere on your computer, and of course support for physical shared printers is still there. Printopia 2.0 also introduces support for passwords you can assign to any virtual or real printer and settings for paper size / tray and colors.

If you want to get the most out of AirPrint and you have a Mac, Printopia is the utility to install. With support for real and virtual printers and system-wide integration with apps and Automator, Printopia is a full-featured solution to get any document from iOS on to the desktop. A demo version is available, and a full license can be purchased at $19.95. More screenshots below. Read more

It Gets Better: Apple Employees

By Federico Viticci

In the video after the break – posted on Youtube earlier today – some Apple employees share a personal message for the “It Gets Better” project – part of the Trevor Project, an organization ”determined to end suicide among LGBTQ youth by providing life-saving and life-affirming resources including our nationwide, 24/7 crisis intervention lifeline, digital community and advocacy/educational programs.”

The video is just so good, there’s no need to comment. Watch it below.
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