Pastebot, the excellent clipboard / data management utility from Tapbots, has just been updated to version 1.4 which, among other things, adds support for the much requested clipboard in the background. How that works, however, is a little different from what the developers originally had in mind. Read more
Omni Group Will Publish Apps In The Mac App Store
The Omni Group team has announced they will publish the same suite of desktop apps they’re porting to the iPad (OmniFocus, OmniGraffle, OmniGraph Sketcher, OmniPlan, OmniOutliner) in the Mac App Store. The announcement comes a few hours after the unveil of the Mac App Store by Steve Jobs at the Back to the Mac event. Read more
A Peek Inside The New MacBook Air
That was fast, iFixit. As usual when a new Apple product comes out, these have taken a look at what’s inside the new beast from Cupertino, and here some interesting notes:
Apple apparently doesn’t want you inside this thing. They decided to use 5-point Security Torx to attach the lower case.
This battery is 35 watt-hours. Previous revisions of 13” MacBook Air machines have included 37 or 40 watt-hour battery packs. Since this Air has a smaller screen and lacks a spinning hard drive, we’d expect run time to be somewhat better than earlier Airs.
Although in a different form factor, the new MacBook Air uses the same Broadcom Wi-Fi/Bluetooth chip as the current lineup of MacBook Pros.
Mac App Store Review Guidelines Breakdown→
Mac App Store Review Guidelines Breakdown
Nilay Patel at Engadget takes a look at Apple’s review guidelines for the Mac App Store. This caught my attention:
6.2 Apps that look similar to Apple Products or apps bundled on the Mac, including the Finder, iChat, iTunes, and Dashboard, will be rejected. This one’s quite odd, as there are lots and lots of Mac apps that look like Apple’s own apps – DoubleTwist looks like iTunes, for example, and almost every FTP app looks like the Finder in some way. And what about an app like Delicious Library, which actually inspired Apple apps like iBooks and iPhoto 11’s new books interface? This one’s going to be hard to enforce in a reasonable way.
FarmVille Lands On The iPad
Uh oh, look at what Zynga released today: an update to their world-changing (really, must be something like that) game FarmVille which includes native support for the iPad. The latest 1.09 update allows in fact iPad users to enjoy cultivating their farms with much more real screen estate and redesigned and more accessible menus.
The app is free. Go download it, but you’ve been warned: I heard this one’s pretty addictive. Screenshots and changelog below. Read more
Mac App Store: What Do Developers Think?
The announcement of the Mac App Store caused mixed reactions between developers and users alike. We don’t know if the App Store will work on the Mac platform, where we’re all used to software licenses, developer websites and no restrictions, but it’s very likely that Apple will nail this one once again.
MacStories polled a few developers about the subject, and I collected some thoughts from around the blogs of other devs. Here’s what they think of Apple’s latest plan for the Mac. Read more
David Pogue: “Office for Mac Isn’t an Improvement”→
David Pogue: “Office for Mac Isn’t an Improvement”
The new Office suite has gotten rave reviews from my counterparts at other publications. Clearly, something must be wrong with me; I think that, in day-to-day usability, Office 2011 is a big step backward.
The Mac suite now includes the Ribbon, a horizontal toolbar that’s built into Office for Windows. What I don’t get is this: Last time I checked, computer screens were all wider than they are tall. The last thing you’d want to do is to eat up *vertical* screen space with interface clutter like the Ribbon. Don’t we really want those controls off to the side, like the Formatting Palette in the previous Mac Office?
Walt Mossberg loved the new Outlook. Pogues hates it.
Apple Opens Mac App Store Section on Developer Forums
Since the announcement of the Mac App Store yesterday, many developers started wondering how would the whole thing actually work. Apple then posted its first version of the Review Guidelines for Mac developers, and those guidelines raised even more questions.
Now developers have a better place to discuss their Mac App Store-related questions and problems by going to a specific section in the Developer Forums.
The Mac App Store section is available here for developers.
Secret Feature: iLife ‘11 Still 32-Bit
You would expect the shiny new iLife suite to be running at full 64-bit smoothness, wouldn’t you? Not so fast, literally. GearLive reports the bad news:
So we figured that one unannounced “feature” would likely be that the iLife suite had been converted to 64 bit. After all, Snow Leopard has had more than enough time to mature out in the wild, and it seems that developers left and right have jumped onto the 64 bit bandwagon. That’s why we were sorely disappointed when we launched Activity Monitor and found that, unlike just about every other process and application we are running on the Mac Pro, the iLife apps are still labeled as “Intel” rather than “Intel 64 bit.”
Many speculated iLife ‘11 would be 64-bit compatible, but it appears that the engineering team didn’t have time to rewrite the codebase. Here’s to hoping for an update, or - worse - 64-bit coming in iLife ‘13. [via MacRumors]