Posts in mac

Leaked Picture Of The New MacBook Air?

Engadget just posted a picture of what appears to be the inside of the new MacBook Air, the one Apple is going to announce on Wednesday at the “Back to the Mac” event. The picture doesn’t show a 11.6-inch chassis, but a regular 13-inch one with extra room for battery cells and no hard drive. Does this confirm that Apple managed to stuff a SSD somewhere else in the unibody structure?

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It’s Here: AutoCAD for Mac Now Available

It’s been 18 years since the last appearance of AutoCAD on the Mac platform. 18 years during which professional designers and engineers all over the world were forced to use a PC, or install a copy of Windows on a partition on their Macs. Today, AutoCAD is coming back to OS X: it’s finally available for download (with a 30-day free trial) here.

Also available with educational discount for students, AutoCAD for Mac returns with a native interface and feel built on top of OS X unique capabilities, exclusive features for Mac users such as Cover Flow support and multi-touch gestures, also supported by the Magic Trackpad.

Our experience has been that AutoCAD for Mac is similar enough to the PC version that the transition is easy. We’ve found it to be a very powerful and reliable product that has all the functionality we need.”

Styles&Wood, the UK’s leading provider of property services to retailers, banks and commercial organizations, is one of the more than 5,000 participants who were part of the AutoCAD for Mac beta program. “We have been waiting a long time for AutoCAD to come back to the Mac,” said Andrew Handley, CAD development manager. “Our experience has been that AutoCAD for Mac is similar enough to the PC version that the transition is easy. We’ve found it to be a very powerful and reliable product that has all the functionality we need.

AutoCAD for Mac is available here. Check out the full press release after the break. Read more

New Version of Skype for Mac Coming “Soon”

This morning Skype launched a brand new version of its official Windows client with direct Facebook integration. That’s a biggie. And what about Mac users? We’re still left behind with a clunky old version of Skype that doesn’t even support multi-video chat, nor does it have the new UI introduced in the Windows counterpart.

Still, Skype promises we only have to wait a little more before we can put our hands on a “complete overhaul, both in terms of the way it looks, and in terms of functionality”.

No problem, Skype: we’re used to wait for Mac updates. Just one thing: where’s the iPad app, again?

Assorted Mac OS X 10.7 Hopes & Predictions

So Apple is holding a media event on October 20th and, judging by the invitation Engadget and BGR got, it’s going to be an event focused on MacBooks (October / November is the usual timeframe for new MacBook models to drop) and a new version of OS X, namely “10.7. Lion”. I mean, there’s a lion in there. It has to be a lion.

Tagline debates aside, I’ve been thinking about this a lot: Snow Leopard is state of the art desktop computing, how could Apple reinvent the wheel and introduce us to an even better, revolutionary (and yeah, maybe there’ll be a magical in there too) kind of desktop and portable computing?  Apple constantly iterates, yet sometimes they put a giant milestone in their timeline and they build the next 5 years around it. Look at Leopard: it set the foundation for the huge success of 10.5, and the evolution of 10.6. I think 10.7 will be another milestone, a new OS Apple will use as a foundation for years to come. 10.7 will set the bar really high once again, and it’ll mark the long-overdue definitive integration of the iOS ecosystem with OS X.

I’ve collected some hopes, predictions and expectations for October 20th event that have been floating around in my mind for quite a while now. See you on Wednesday, on the other side of modern computing. Read more

Chromium for Mac Gets Spiffy Google Instant Integration

I love Google Instant: since Google launched its new real-time updating version of the search engine last month, I’ve been using it regularly and, yeah, I like it. A lot. I know many people are out there would like to revert back to the old “type and press enter” system but hey - this is where we’re going. Sorry if you don’t like it.

For as much as I love Google Instant, when I’m in my browser I don’t really fancy manually opening Google.com every time I need to fire up a new query. My searches start from the new Omnibar instead (Google’s definition of the address bar) because the Cmd + L shortcut is just too useful and fast. For this reason, I’ve been looking forward to the Google team baking Google Instant right into the browser and finally, we Mac users can have it: the Chromium trunk channel for Mac was updated earlier today to include support for Instant right out of the box. Read more