The Powerful Code Editor for iPad and iPhone — Now Free to Try
Yesterday we talked about a new Mac bundle from iUseMac which, in collaboration with ItaliaMac, is offering 9 great Mac apps (including the names of Picturesque, Renamer and Clean Text) at the price of $29. If you haven’t purchased the bundle yet (it expires in two weeks), you can get the chance to win one of the 5 bundles we have up for grabs here on MacStories.
Check out the giveaway rules below, and take at iUseMac’s included apps here. Read more
I’m not a Safari user anymore, but this extension from Brett Terpstra was just too cool to not mention it: with the click of a button, TabLinks can fill a pre-defined template with information about your open tabs. URL, title, window info – you name it. If you’re that type of user who always feels like he’s got too many tabs open at the same time and would like to save them for later, that’s exactly where TabLinks comes in handy. Read more
According to a report bu Cult of Mac, and confirmed by further analysis on Macworld, a pretty large number of MacBook Air early adopters are experiencing screen issues such as “weird colors in vertical lines”, freezes, crashes and “horizontal sparkling bands”.
Additional reports about the video problem have been posted to Apple’s discussion forums and for the people reporting it the symptoms can vary. I’ve even encountered the problem myself on my 13-inch MacBook Air.
The problem with kernel panics has been experienced by Cult of Mac staff that purchased 11-inch or 13-inch models. Users on Apple forums haven’t complained about this specifically yet, but they have been complaining about their new MacBook Airs crashing.
Dave Winer:
The iPad can run apps from another iOS device, the iPhone. Will the Mac be able to run apps coming from iOS, even if the Mac is a machine running OS X? We don’t know. The thing is, if iOS is actually OS X coming back to the Mac after 3 years of mobile adventures (and if Lion is “OS X meets iPad”), then Winer’s option could make sense. Developers could adapt iPad apps to bigger screens with relative ease, though I don’t know how you’d be supposed to run apps requiring tilt controls on a desktop computer.
In the end, it’d be a cool feature – as long as you don’t pay attention to the trade-off. Mobile apps don’t make any sense on the desktop, not as we think. Perhaps Apple will prove us wrong. The way I see it, Jobs simply wants to reinvent the way Mac software is discovered and distributed; a Mac App Store doesn’t necessarily mean the App Store is coming to the Mac.
If you use 1Password (why wouldn’t you?) and you happen to use Chrome as your default browser on the Mac, you may have noticed the latest 1Password beta introduces a brand new great looking Chrome extension. To enable beta releases in 1Password, open the Preferences, go to the Updates tab and check “Include Beta versions”. Install the beta update, and restart Chrome to activate the updated extension.
The new extension looks great, and finally brings proper 1Password support to Chrome. I heard many complaints from users in the past who didn’t want to switch to Chrome due to lack of 1P support.
Those days are over, the new extension looks (and works) very well.
We covered the Table Connect for iPhone (a 58-inch surface that mirrors your iPhone screen) a few days ago, and now the developers posted a video of the “device” in action: as you can see in the video above, the table requires you to start an app on the iPhone (likely available through jailbreak) and plug in the cable. Wifi is not supported at this point.
The two guys in the video seem to access the Springboard just fine, they swipe between pages and launch the Photos app. It doesn’t look like a fake, as many readers claimed. The iPhone also seems to be able to output UI elements on that bigger screen just fine.
The Table Connect is still in development, so we’ll keep you up to date with the project.
Update: some readers have pointed out that the guy in the video holds the power button down when firing up the app required to output the iPhone screen.
October has been a great month for iOS app development-related books: iPhone App Entrepreneur by David Appleyard and App Savvy by our friend Ken Yarmosh are two of the best pieces anyone interested in getting started with iOS development (or anyone interested in iOS, period) should read.
November brings another great book with it, this time tailored to Mac users who have found their productivity setup in OmniFocus. “Creating Flow with OmniFocus”, written by Kourosh Dini, MD – “a Chicago based psychiatrist, musician, author, husband and father who also happens to really enjoy technology” - is the ultimate resource that covers OmniFocus from the very first steps (setting up new projects and contexts) to advanced functionalities such as the much popular and loved Perspectives. Read more
We have already seen what can be achieved with the power and knowledge of open web technologies on iOS thanks to our buddy Steve Streza’s Swearch for iPhone. A webapp that lets you search on a variety of different search engines without requiring you to go look for the app in the App Store and wait for Apple to approve updates.
Great things can be achieved with HTML5, Javascript and a few lines of CSS.
37Signals unveiled today a side project they’ve been working on “just for fun”, available as a free webapp for iPad users at chalk.37signals.com. Chalk is very similar to 37Signals’ Draft (which is sold in the App Store) but it’s entirely browser-based and you can add it to your homescreen to get a nice icon and easy web access. As the name suggests, Chalk allows you to sketch on a chalkboard: you can use white and red colors, pick up the eraser, turn off the lights to focus on what you’re sketching and saving the result to your image library. All within Safari. Read more
As noted by 9to5mac, Skyfire will release its first iPhone app on Thursday, which will allow users to load Flash videos on the device using the startup’s on-the-fly conversion technology.
Skyfire takes a Flash video, sends it to its own servers and translates it to HTML5 on the iPhone in a few seconds. I’m not really sure whether Skyfire’s servers will hold up on Thursday, or if there’s anything more to be noted about this app besides Flash conversion. Read more
