Craig Hockenberry:
So, the next time you’re seeing general slowness on your Mac, don’t forget to give Launch Services a kick in the pants. Guaranteed to be more effective than zapping your PRAM.
My MacBook Air was feeling slow – especially when opening the Finder, clicking menubar items, and after waking up from sleep (at the login screen, I’d have to wait around 20 seconds for the keyboard to become responsive). It’s much better thanks to Craig’s tip.
You can find the Terminal command here.
Apple has published their Q2 2013 financial results for the quarter that ended on March 31st, 2013. The company posted revenue of $43.6 billion. The company sold 19.5 million iPads, 37.4 million iPhones, and ”just under” 4 million Macs, earning a quarterly net profit of $9.5 billion.
We are pleased to report record March quarter revenue thanks to continued strong performance of iPhone and iPad,” said Tim Cook, Apple’s CEO. “Our teams are hard at work on some amazing new hardware, software and services, and we are very excited about the products in our pipeline.
Apple added $12.5 billion in cash flow “from operations during the quarter”, ending the quarter with a cash balance of $145 billion.
Today, Apple has also announced they have doubled the capital return program:
The Company expects to utilize a total of $100 billion of cash under the expanded program by the end of calendar 2015. This represents a $55 billion increase to the program announced last year and translates to an average rate of $30 billion per year from the time of the first dividend payment in August 2012 through December 2015.
Interesting update to Apple’s often overlooked HTML5, CSS3, and JavaScript authoring tool for iAds: you can now create iBooks Author widgets, iTunes Extras, and iTunes LPs, alongside regular iAds.
You can create an iBooks Author widget for use in your iBooks Author projects. For example, you can create a widget that allows users to stream video from the Internet, draw using their finger, or interact with a timeline.
More information about iBooks Author support in iAd Producer 4.0 is available here. You can also find documentation for all the new features on the app’s official support page.
iAd Producer was first released in December 2010.
Pupil looks like a nice app to switch between multiple resolutions on a Retina MacBook Pro. The core feature of the app is a configurable menubar item that can list the resolutions you use the most, letting you instantly switch between them.
I can’t try Pupil because I don’t have a Retina MacBook Pro. However, Roman Loyola’s review at Macworld is positive. Pupil is $5 and there’s a free trial available.
I also like how you can “test” Pupil’s menu on the website.
We have many great deals for #MacStoriesDeals today. You can find us as @MacStoriesDeals on Twitter.
Alongside bug fixes and improvements for a minor 4.5.1 update, Pocket for iOS has added sharing to WordPress, Quotebook, and Twitterrific.
Quotebook is, as MacStories readers know, my favorite app for storing and retrieving quotes. I already use it with RSS, and it’s good to see Pocket supporting it with the share menu that was revamped in version 4.5.
Pocket 4.5.1 is available now on the App Store.
Ever since its original release two years ago, I’ve always wished Tweetbot could provide filters to separate the standard timeline from a “media” one containing pictures and videos. After the launch of Twitter’s own photo service and rise in popularity of services like Instagram, usage of pictures – either photos or screenshots – among the people I follow has skyrocketed. Apps like TweetGlass (nèe Quip) succesfully explored the concept of letting users browse “media updates” in a dedicated feed, so why not Tweetbot?
The latest version of Tapbots’ client, available today, does just that: it adds a media timeline to show only supported images and video tweets (the ones that you’d normally see displayed inline as thumbnails). Read more
Mikey Campbell:
As seen in the image above, Apple is no longer allowing developers to submit app description edits with the unique character sets, which in this case includes a checkmark, explosion, “no symbol” and a speech bubble. It is thought that others are included in the new restrictions, but that has yet to be verified.
It appears that Apple has also started restricting usage of glyphs that aren’t necessarily emoji.
I would welcome a change to text-only release notes. While emoji and other characters can add a bit of fun and personality to otherwise boring release notes, some developers were overusing them.
Big update for Twitterrific today, including automatic theme changing based on local sunrise and sunset times, automatic timeline refreshing after posting a tweet or DM, and improved VoiceOver support. The list of updates is long, but the rest is comprised of bug fixes and various improvements.
By the way, if you’re looking for those Trends, they’re buried in Search under the Tweets tab. For Favstar, you’ll also have to turn on those links in the Settings under Other Services.
For more information on Twitterrific, be sure to read our earlier reviews.
