Alfred for Mac Gets Extensions, Growl Support, New Lion Theme

Alfred, the application launcher for the Mac, received a fairly substantial update today which brings important new functionalities such as extension support, Growl integration for action outputs, a new theme inspired by OS X Lion, and several bug fixes. Personally, I’ve been a big fan of Alfred since its first release last year, and I’ve followed the development closely as I switched from Quicksilver (which came back from a long hiatus a few months ago) and started looking into the customizable search and launch environment offered by Alfred. In the past months, in fact, Alfred evolved into a minimal, yet powerful application launcher capable of doing a bunch of other things such as filesystem navigation, clipboard management, AppleScript launching and dictionary. I was particularly impressed with the 0.9 version, which allowed users to assign a keyboard shortcut to any AppleScript on your machine, similarly to how the popular FastScripts lets you pair a shortcut with a script.

Whilst the developers are still planning a major 1.0 release that will likely see the Powerpack (a set of premium additional features) become available as in-app purchase on Lion’s Mac App Store, Alfred 0.9.9 has been publicly released today and, in spite of what the version number suggests, it is a milestone release that sets the path for future Alfred versions and the kind of integration with the system the developers are willing to bake into their application launcher . Read more

GrowlingLion - A Lion Inspired Growl Theme→

GrowlingLion - A Lion Inspired Growl Theme

Lion has been released, and I wanted to make a theme that felt native to the new system, So I created Growling Lion based on the Safari 5.1 downloads window.

Two weeks ago, we covered Mono, a popular Growl theme that’s been updated to work on Lion. Inspired by the work of Christopher Lobay on Mono and Lion’s light color scheme in Quick Look and Aqua popovers, GrowlingLion is a new Growl theme by Andreas Heiberg that works on Lion and the latest release of Growl (before the app goes Mac App Store-only with version 1.3). I’ve installed the theme and I really like it, although I’d like it to have a bigger font.

You can download GrowlingLion here.

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1Password Safari Extension Gets Complete Redesign with New Features

Ever since the release of OS X Lion and Safari 5.1, the Agile Bits team has been busy updating its 1Password Safari extension to work with the new OS and the updated version of the browser, which brings major changes both on Snow Leopard and Lion. Whilst initial Lion support (alongside Firefox 5 and Fluid 1.0 compatibility) was rolled out on June 20, Agile Bits spent the last month releasing new public and beta versions of 1Password for Mac, tweaking its extension engine and re-implementing features requested by their customers in an attempt to bring old functionalities back to Lion and Safari 5.1. First came support for Safari 5.1 on Snow Leopard (which has less features than its Lion counterpart, but still is a major upgrade from Safari 5.0), then Agile Bits released 1Password 3.7 for Mac through the public beta channel, adding features like copy to clipboard from the extension, universal unlock (if 1Password is already unlocked, so is the Safari extension), improved Auto Submit and a bunch of other changes and optimizations throughout the app and extension. You can read more about 3.7 beta here.

In the meantime though, Agile Bits was working on a complete redesign for the Safari extension, teased on the developer’s blog exactly a week ago. The new extension is now live, and as usual it needs to be installed from 1Password’s desktop Preferences panel (more information here). Read more

“The Americana at Brand” Apple Store Opens in Glendale, California

Officially announced earlier this week and rumored for several months, the new “The Americana at Brand” Apple Store has opened today in Glendale, California, at 10 AM, roughly 500 feet away from the original Glendale Galleria retail location dubbed store R001, which opened on May 19, 2001. The Glendale Galleria Apple Store was the first location to be planned (thus the “R001”), but it opened a few hours after the Tysons Corner one because of timezone differences with the East Coast.

The new Apple Store in Glendale will serve as a way to drive customers to a second location relatively near to the highly trafficked Galleria store – this is not the first time Apple has opened retail stores with short distance between each other.

A MacStories reader sent us some photos of the new Store, which uses an all-new glass front panel with floating Apple logo, and obviously has new Lion signage and promo material, as well as iPad Smart Signs on the inside. We are told there was a line to get in earlier this morning, though we don’t know if Apple gave away promo material like t-shirts or postcards to celebrate the launch of the new store, as they usually do.

After the break, we have embedded more photos and two videos showing the grand opening and Apple employees cheering and clapping this morning.

[Thanks, Aditya] Read more

AppSumo Mariner Software Bundle Giveaway

Most people expect the basics: “All I need is a a good web browser, email client, and word processor.” Little by little, you get the itch to use your computer for more and more things. “I want to use my Mac for taking notes. I want to get rid of all this paper in my office and have it on my Mac. I hate Microsoft Word and need something just for print.” Given these three things, you know there has to be a bundle to maintain a practical workflow right? Well that’s why we have the Mariner Software Bundle.

Read more

Apple Finally Begins Rolling Out 90-Second Song Previews In International iTunes Stores

Nearly eight months after 90-second song previews started rolling out on the US  iTunes Store, Apple have today started transitioning a number of international iTunes stores over to the 90-second previews, a vast improvement on the 30-second previews. Currently we’ve noticed that the iTunes stores in Australia, UK, Canada, New Zealand and France and a handful of other European stores.

However, despite the beginning of this international rollout there are still a lot of songs that haven’t transitioned to 90-second previews – looking at the top 10 songs on iTunes in Australia found just half now have the longer preview period. For comparison all top 10 songs in the US have the 90-second preview, although keep in mind that not all the 10 songs were the same in the two stores.

That difference could just be because Apple has only just started to transition to 90-second previews in the international stores or because licensing deals are (as is very typical) delaying the transition to longer previews.  Nonetheless international iTunes users will no doubt welcome this change that has been awaited for quite some time.

[Via MacRumors, 9to5 Mac]

EGOTextMateFullScreen→

EGOTextMateFullScreen

This plugin adds native full screen app support to TextMate in Mac OS X Lion.

This one is for the developers. Thanks to Shaun Harrison, we have a bundle for TextMate that brings native full-sreen compatibility to Lion (via Nik Fletcher for pointing out this fantastic addition). In the meantime, MacroMates should be busy updating TextMate for Lion compatibility, and have posted a wiki detailing the bugs the developer is currently aware of.

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nvALT 2.1 Update Adds Auto-pairing, Simplenote Tag Sync, and More

A lot of hard work has gone into the latest release of nvALT, including better Multi-markdown 3 support (MMD3 has to be installed locally of course), a shortcut (⇧⌘L) for inserting links, Simplenote tag sync (which the author notes may choke on large note collections), the ability to pin the preview window when moving across apps (^⌘P then click the pin at the bottom of the window), and Textmate-like auto-pairing that will complete brackets for you as you type. (Pretty nice eh?)

Also available are browser extensions for Safari and Chrome that can get webpages and text into nvALT. The extensions allow you to interact with webpages and links to dumps its textual contents or selection into the text editor — nvALT can run text through Instapaper’s mobilizer to clean up the results as text splashes into view. Personally I’m not so big about dumping webpages into nvALT, but the extensions are available to download from elastic threads.

In nvALT’s future, Terpstra promises better Lion support for fullscreen mode (shown in my screenshot but I’m using a SIMBL hack which you can find here),  bouncy scrolling, and more.

You can download nvALT 2.1 and read about all of its features here!

Mac App Store Is Slow? Try This “Fix”→

Mac App Store Is Slow? Try This Fix

On Tuesday, I received the new MacBook Air (13-inch, base model) I bought from the Apple online store last week. After I booted it up and entered my personal information, I immediately launched the Mac App Store to re-install all my apps (and I also happened to get free iLife apps in the process). However, I noticed something: the Mac App Store was terribly slow, unusually unresponsive when compared to the same Mac App Store running on my 2008 MacBook Pro and 2009 iMac. I asked on Twitter, and lots of people seemed to share my frustrations with “beachballs”, slow loading times, and general bugginess of the program.

It was strange, because as I said the Mac App Store used to run okay on my two old machines. Apple’s App Stores have never been the fastest or most stable applications for the Mac, but they were acceptable. On my new MacBook Air, the Mac App Store displayed a beachball on launch, quit, and everything in between (including simple actions like loading a new Category). That was until 10 minutes ago, when reader Stu Helm sent me this tip from his personal blog that almost magically fixed my issues with the Mac App Store.

Stu writes:

  • Quit the Mac App Store with Command + Option + Q

  • Open Keychain Access from Applications > Utilities

  • Go to Keychain Access > Preferences > Certificates

  • Set ‘Certificate Revocation List (CRL)’ to ‘Off’

  • Quit Keychain Access

  • Relaunch the Mac App Store and you should be set

From a quick search online, I can see this is a rather old fix – I didn’t know about it. Like I said, it worked perfectly on my machine, and now the App Store’s slowness only depends on the speed of my Internet connection. The ‘Certificate Revocation List (CRL)’ was originally set to “Best Attempt” on my MacBook Air, though I have MobileMe Keychain syncing enabled, so I can’t confirm on the default settings in OS X Lion. As for CRL itself, you can read more on Wikipedia.

If your Mac App Store is acting weird, try this fix. Here’s a video of what it looked like before I set CRL to “off”.

Update: Obviously, you’re changing Keychain Access preferences at your own risk. Our only intention is to point out that, security issues aside, changing this preference “fixes” the problem for several users. Other readers are reporting that you can also set Keychain Access’ CRL back to “Best Attempt” after the first Mac App Store launch, and the app will stay “fixed” in the future. Nate Silva posted more information about CRL and the Mac App Store back in April.

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