This Week's Sponsor:

Textastic

The Powerful Code Editor for iPad and iPhone — Now Free to Try

Apple Silently Cuts Mac Mini Prices Outside The U.S.

If you live in Europe or in any other market outside the United States, here’s a nice surprise for you: Apple cut €100 off of the price of the Mac Mini, which is now available at €699 in the standard configuration with 2.4GHz Intel Core 2 Duo, 2GB memory, 320GB hard drive, 8x double-layer SuperDrive and NVIDIA GeForce 320M graphics. The price cut is also available in the UK Store, where the Mac Mini is now priced at £599.

Prices in the US remain unchanged at the moment of writing this. I assume these prices cuts in Europe are likely connected to Dollar - Euro conversion rates, or maybe Apple just wants to sell more Minis in the holiday season in Europe.

AppleCare Protection Plans Now Transferable To Any Device

According to the latest report by BGR, Apple changed its policy regarding AppleCare Protection Plans and transferability:

Starting immediately, an Apple customer will have the ability to transfer AppleCare Protection Plan coverage to a new device without having to cancel the current plan and purchase a new one. Though no formal announcement has been made to the public, Apple notified its employees of the new procedure on Monday.

This new system simplifies the purchase experience for customers and makes AppleCare even more relevant. Yeah, because in case you’re wondering – you need AppleCare.

miCal, Powerful Calendar App for iPhone

If you follow me on Twitter, you might have noticed I’ve been tweeting about Google Calendar integration on iOS since last week. Indeed, I’m looking at all the possible ways to integrate Google’s calendar utility on iOS, especially on the iPhone which is the device I always have with me. It turns out there are many ways to get your Google Cal up and running on the iPhone, the default one requiring you to create an Exchange or CalDAV account in Mail, Contacts and Calendars. In that way, you’ll be able to use Google Calendar in Apple’s default Calendar app and enjoy the additional sync services offered by Google (very similar to MobileMe).

Or, you can just go looking for a 3rd party calendar application in the App Store and play with features Apple didn’t implement in its default app. So I did, and here’s the first app I downloaded, miCal.

Read more

Penultimate 2.1: Now With More Natural Ink, Smoother Pen

We reviewed Penultimate for iPad when it first came out in April, a few weeks after the release of the tablet. Back then, Penultimate had a huge success and was one of the finest sketching apps for iPad which, thanks to the “fresh” factor of the iPad, managed to gain thousands of users.

Over time, though, many sketching applications came out with more complete feature sets and integration with online services. For instance, I’m using Noteshelf as my default handwriting / sketching app.

A new version of Penultimate was released last week, which doesn’t add support for additional online services but brings finer and smoother pens. The app’s digital ink now feels more natural, almost as natural as Noteshelf’s. Penultimate has come as long way, but I’m still waiting to see it bringing all the options and functionalities available in other applications.

Penultimate is available at $3.99 in the App Store.

Apple Opens iOS 4.2 App Submissions, iAd Coming To iPad

After the release of iOS 4.2 GM, Apple officially opened the submissions for apps compatible with 4.2 a few minutes ago. The “Get Your Apps Ready for iOS 4.2” page is available here and also confirms developers can now start integrating iAds into their iPad apps.

We haven’t seen iAds running on iPad just yet, but I believe the larger screen will surely contribute to making ad experiences even more immersive.

AppSwitch: Cool Process Management App for iPhone

My  good friend @kenyarmosh tweeted about this app a few hours ago and it immediately caught my attention: a process management app for iOS, like the ones seen on Android and, yes, the dekstop? How’s that even possible without breaking Apple’s ban of usage of private APIs?

AppSwitch, available at an introductory price of $0.99 in the App Store, monitors and provides detailed information about the apps running in the background on your iPhone. As a matter of fact, AppSwitch can monitor both running apps and background system processes, something that I haven’t seen in any other App Store app before - mainly because Apple doesn’t want users to know which system processes are running. With AppSwitch you can keep an eye on your iPhone memory usage (with an interface similar to the Mac’s Activity Monitor) and see which apps are actually multitasking and which are not, with the possibility to quickly jump to another app or to an app’s specific feature. Read more

Apple Releases iOS 4.2 GM Seed

Apple just posted iOS 4.2 Gold Master build in the iOS Developer Center. You can go download the GM seed now. Look for updates on what’s new in this (almost) final build here on MacStories in a few minutes.

Build number is 8C134. It’s a 549MB download for iPad and, as usual, it’s also available for iPhone 4, 3GS and 3G and iPod Touch 2nd, 3rd, and 4th gen. Read more