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Apple Announces the New 13-inch MacBook Pro with Retina Display

During this afternoon’s Apple Special Event at the California Theater in San Jose, California, Phil Schiller announced the availability of the 13-inch MacBook Pro with Retina display, starting at $1699 for the base model.

The 13-inch MacBook Pro with Retina display features a 13.3-inch LED-backlit IPS display supporting a 2560-by-1600 (Retina) resolution (the world’s second highest resolution notebook computer), is lighter at 3.57 pounds (a pound lighter and now Apple’s lightest MacBook Pro), and is thinner in profile at 0.75 inch high (20% thinner than the previous generation). Connections include a Magsafe 2 power port, two Thunderbolt ports (10 Gbps), two USB 3 ports, a HDMI port, a SD card reader, a headphone port, a FaceTime HD camera (720p), and dual microphones. Inside the chassis, Apple starts their base model with an Intel Core i5 dual-core processor, 8 GB of onboard memory, and 128 GB of flash storage. Integrated Intel 4000 graphics is also present for graphics and video. For networking and wireless peripheral connections, Apple’s latest models support 802.11n and Bluetooth 4.0. As with its 15-inch sibling, the new 13-inch model nixes the optical bay (Apple USB SuperDrives can be purchased separately to read, rip, and burn CDs and DVDs).

Configurable up to a dual-core Intel Core i7 processor and 768 GB of flash storage (8 GB is the maximum amount of memory offered by Apple), the 13-inch MacBook Pro with Retina display is offered in two models:

• $1699 for a 2.5 GHz dual-core Intel Core i5 processor, 8GB of onboard memory, and 128 GB flash storage.
• $1999 for a 2.9 GHz dual-core Intel Core i5 processor, 8GB of onboard memory, and 256 GB flash storage.

For more coverage, check out our October 23 news hub and follow @macstoriesnet on Twitter.

Updated at 2:27 pm with additional pricing and model information.

Gain Magical Control Over Your Music Player With Flutter

It’s a bit like Minority report. Just raise your hand and your computer responds with an action. Motion-based controls with your hands, now more common with modern gaming consoles (PlayStation Move and XBOX Kinect), still feels a bit futuristic.

On personal computers and modern tablets, peripheral input and touch-based gestures won the race against camera-based gesture recognition. Still, some developers are in love with the idea of controlling devices without any actual hands-on. In small doses, this can be fun and useful. This is the case with Flutter, developed by a large team of developers at BotSquare.

Flutter is a small tool for recognizing motion gestures on OS X, which recognizes you via a webcam (iSight or external) to control your favorite music player. After downloading it, you have work through a tutorial to get to become familiar with the hand gestures. Flutter then sits in the background, with your Mac’s iSight camera on (obviously required for running Flutter) and awaits your actions.

The current version of Flutter (0.1.237 — don’t be afraid, it’s not a beta version, the developers just want to add more features before calling the app 1.0) supports three gestures: a flat open hand, and a fist with your thumb either pointing to the right or the left. Do those gestures in front of your webcam, and Flutter will recognize them and do the action associated with them. To make sure the app recognizes your hand’s action, you have to keep it one to four feet away from the camera.

With the open hand gesture, you can play and pause your music. Using the thumb either pointing to the right or left you go to the next or previous track. The Flutter team is working hard to implement more gestures such as volume control (I suggest a single index finger pointing upwards or downwards respectively for this one).

All three gestures work well in the current version — you just have to get used to the fact that you often need to move your hand a bit to make the camera notice it. Knowing where to position yourself at first so that your hand is inside the viewing area of your camera can be tricky at first. But after a while you also get used to it; when Flutter recognizes you it’s easy to use, looks like magic, and can be a very intuitive way of controlling your music player (the app currently supports iTunes, Spotify, VLC, and QuickTime; no Rdio support unfortunately).

Through the app’s drop-down menu, you can turn the camera on and off (for privacy and energy saving reasons), set Flutter to automatically launch at login, as well as report bugs and re-watch the aforementioned (very interactive and easy to understand) tutorial. The app also sends notifications to the Notification Center when you change apps to let you know that you’re still able to control the newly activated player with Flutter.

Flutter is a small app, although it’s not something I would recommend because not everybody needs it. However, I can imagine that lots of people would want to try it for the novelty of it. It’s a magic little piece of software that can be fun to use.

Flutter is available for free on the Mac App Store.

Behind The App: MoneyWiz

Early this year, I set out to find an iPad app that I could enjoy using to manage my finances. After a couple of days of looking, I settled upon MoneyWiz from the developer SilverWiz. Its developers describe it as “beautiful, powerful and easy to use”, and having stuck with the app since late January I’m inclined to agree. In my reviews of the iPad and Mac versions my overall take was mostly positive (there is also an iPhone version, but that I have yet to use).

After exchanging a few emails with Iliya Yordanov, the founder of SilverWiz, I thought it would be interesting to have a Q&A with him and learn a bit more about the app, similar to what we’ve done in previous interviews here on MacStories, but this time, I decided to change things up a bit. For this interview I’ve assembled all the various stories about MoneyWiz and the SilverWiz company that Iliya shared with me into a single story that (hopefully) gives you a fascinating and unique look behind the app and company.

Disclaimer: At the time of publication SilverWiz is one of the advertisers on MacStories; however, this article was in the works before the campaign began. Advertising on MacStories is not handled by editors but by BackBeatMedia, and has no relation to editorial content whatsoever.

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