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Apple Prepares For Retina Monitors With HiDPI Mode in OS X Lion

Digging through the build of Mac OS X Lion that was seeded to developers yesterday, MacRumors discovered the presence of “HiDPI display modes” which suggests that Apple is planning for the possibility of Mac displays running something similar to a Retina display sometime in the near future.

Developers would, as they have done on the iPhone, provide each UI element in two sizes, one in the size they currently are and then one at twice the resolution. It would work virtually identically to how Apple implemented the Retina display for the iPhone, with the high-resolution displays using the double sized UI elements so that physically the size of the elements would stay the same.

MacRumors gives the example of a 15” MacBook Pro that has a resolution of 1440x900 that could be doubled to 2880x1800 and then use an app’s UI 2X elements and which would leave the application’s UI elements the same physical size, but with much greater detail. Apple had previously dabbled in the notion of creating OS X a resolution independent OS through a number of methods from using vector graphics to providing bitmaps for multiple screen resolutions, but none had previously eventuated.

The HiDPI mode is not turned on by default and must be done so through Lion’s Quartz debug in Xcode.

[Via MacRumors]

Sparrow Lite Available in the Mac App Store

Sparrow, one of our favorite mail clients for the Mac, has just realeased Sparrow Lite via the Mac App Store. The Lite version integrates all the features of Sparrow but you can only use one Gmail mail account, it has ads by Carbon (very nice by the way), and your signature adds ‘Sent with Sparrow’ after your name.

Sparrow Lite is a great way to give it a try before deciding if you are interested in buying the full version for $9.99. Sparrow Lite is FREE and is now available in the Mac App Store.

OS X Lion Adds TRIM Support for SSDs

Here’s some great news for SSD owners like me (on a 2008 unibody MacBook Pro) or people that bought a new shiny MacBook Air with integrated Flash storage earlier this year: the developer beta of Mac OS X Lion adds support for the TRIM command on SSD. As you can see in the screenshot above captured by MacGeneration, there’s a “Oui” (yes) next to TRIM command info.

What’s the big deal with TRIM support? To put it simply, operating systems like Snow Leopard that don’t have TRIM support will treat solid state drives as regular, spinning drives when writing and deleting blocks of data. Snow Leopard doesn’t exactly know it’s dealing with an SSD, and while you’ll notice incredible performance improvements in daily usage, the same performances will slowly degrade over time without TRIM support. TRIM correctly tells the operating system which blocks of data are no longer in use in the solid state unit, and the OS passes the information along to the SSD controller so it can wipe blocks internally.

Basically: this is great news for SSD aficionados and, looking forward, a smart move from Apple as the move to solid state drives in all Mac computers seems inevitable.

OmniFocus for iPhone 1.9 Released with Improved View Settings, In-App Browser

A major update to OmniFocus for iPhone was released yesterday in the App Store, including support for new view settings that make it easier to switch between next, available and remaining actions or all items saved in OmniFocus. The OmniGroup developers also improved the design of the date picker (start and due dates) which now has a series of shortcuts to increment the start or due dates quickly by 1 day, 1 week or 1 month. Admittedly, being able to jot down a due date without having to manually scroll a list was one of the features I was really looking forward to have in OmniFocus for iPhone.

Other improvements in version 1.9 include a rewritten in-app browser (finally, it is much more stable and incredibly useful for those users like me that insert a lot of web links in tasks’ notes), Map mode available from the main screen and the possibility to view dropped contexts in the Context list.

OmniFocus for iPhone is available here. Check out the full changelog below. Read more

iFixit Tears Down 2011 MacBook Pro

iFixit didin’t waste any time and, shortly after the release of the new MacBook Pros, tore down a 15” model to see the changes performed by Apple in this revision. It turns out, not much. Most changes are visible in the logic board (quad-core processor, AMD GPU, Thunderbolt chip) and in the way the battery is attached to the laptop.

A few notes from the teardown below.

Battery life decreased from previous generations, as Apple is performing more accurate tests with more realistic estimates (their tests include Flash installed while browsing the web):

No pentalobe screws;

iFixit thinks Apple made some improvements to wireless performance under the hood;

Broadcom BCM4331 chip.

The RAM in this machine is PC3-10600 RAM. That’s the same RAM used in the 2010 revision of the 21.5” and 27” iMacs, but different from earlier Apple laptops. PC3-10600 RAM is backwards compatible with the PC3-8500 RAM in older MacBook Pro Unibody machines, but you can’t use PC3-8500 RAM in this machine

The wireless card bracket is aluminum, rather than the plastic in previous revisions. Perhaps this change was made for thermal reasons, as a visible pink thermal pad is used to transfer heat from the board to its aluminum bracket.

Holy thermal paste! Time will tell if the gobs of thermal paste applied to the CPU and GPU will cause overheating issues down the road.

Rumor: iTunes In The Cloud Will Let You Backup Your Music Collection, Stream It

At a shareholders meeting yesterday, Apple clarified its position on the massive data center they’ve been building in Maiden, North Carolina confirming that launch is set for a Spring 2011 and it will to host the iTunes and MobileMe services. Many, however, have speculated in the past months whether the move of iTunes to the cloud would bring a new way of streaming songs and albums sold in the iTunes Store through a monthly subscription, or an easy-to-use way of uploading your personal media to the cloud.

According to a new report by the Financial Times, the iTunes online service will simply function as a backup solution for your music collection, which will be available over the internet on all Apple devices.

Apple, which rocked digital music services such as Pandora, Rdio and MOG last week by announcing plans to keep 30 per cent of all revenues from subscriptions taken out through its App Store, has clarified its plans for using remote storage, known as the cloud, according to several music industry executives.

More than a year after buying Lala, a cloud-based digital music service, Apple is now looking to use the cloud mainly to allow users of its iTunes store to back up their collections and access them from any Apple device.

One person with knowledge of Apple’s plans said the company did not want to undermine the market that it dominates for paid downloads, likening its plans for the cloud to “insurance”.

Rumors surfaced in the past weeks suggested Apple was working on a new version of MobileMe that would work as a “locker” for your personal media, stored in the cloud and accessible from all your Mac and iOS devices. Such a system would not compromise Apple’s lead in the digital music distribution market, but would let users upload their music to an online service always available. In the meantime, Google is rumored to be finalizing the details of its Google Music service for Android devices, and European company Spotify is reportedly nearing a U.S. launch after closing deals with major music labels. Spotify lets you stream any song available in the service’s online library through a monthly Premium subscription; it appears at this point that Apple is building the exact opposite, a cloud service that will let you backup / stream the songs and albums you already own.

References of a “MediaStream” service found in the iOS 4.3 SDK suggested Apple might be working on a new platform to allow users to stream their media from the cloud to iOS.

Milestones

Today is Thursday, February 24, 2011. Today has been full of Apple news everywhere, especially here at MacStories. Today Federico, Cody, Graham and myself have been chugging hard on rumors, announcements, first looks, previews, etc. You name it, we’ve probably done it. With that said, lets talk about today some more.

Milestones, what are they and what do they mean to us? Well, to MacStories it means forward progress, growth and evolving. We are celebrating 5000 posts as I write this now. It also means birthdays and achievements. Today is Steve Jobs’ 56th birthday and look at what he has accomplished in his lifetime.

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Engadget’s Hands-On With The New MacBook Pros

The folks at Engadget got their hands on a new MacBook Pro, a $2,199 configuration with 2.2GHz quad-core i7, AMD Radeon HD 6750M, 750 GB hard drive, 4 GB of RAM. The machine “clocked a preliminary GeekBench score of 9647”. Unfortunately, they can’t test Thunderbolt devices right now:

We just got our new 15-inch MacBook Pro review unit, and although it looks almost exactly the same as the previous MBP, it has that fancy new Thunderbolt icon on the side, which ought to make I/O nerd hearts flutter the world over. Unfortunately, there aren’t any Thunderbolt peripherals on the market yet, so we can’t really test the new connection yet, but we can report that backwards compatibility with Mini DisplayPort performs as advertised and that all of our display adapters worked without issue – the first time we can ever remember Apple switching a standard and not requiring all new dongles.

They saw a demo with a prototype Promise RAID unit, however:

We also watched a 5GB file transfer in just a few seconds – all very impressive, but we’re definitely anxious to try some of this stuff ourselves once Thunderbolt devices start shipping sometime in the spring.

This is why Thunderbolt will (sooner or later) change the way we think of desktop connectivity.

MobileMe Retail Boxes ‘Move To Trash’, Free Version Soon?

Back on February 7, we posted that an Apple initiative was to eliminate their retail box inventory. Today, Apple is notifying resellers that the company is discontinuing the retail box version of MobileMe, moving completely toward digital sales. Existing stock will continue to be sold while supplies last. MobileMe has also been removed from the ‘Configure’ page options when you buy a new Mac.

If you didn’t already know, boxed versions of MobileMe only have an activation code (no DVD) and Apple’s famous promo materials. The main reason they offer a retail box is to have a physical MobileMe product in-store for visibility (and the artwork on the box isn’t too shabby either).

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