First (Public) Mac App Store Rejection?→

First Mac App Store Rejection?

LittleIpsum is a neat utility for Mac OS X we covered a few months ago here. By sitting in the menubar, it allows you to quickly copy Loren Ipsum text to the clipboard. The developers tried to submit the app to Apple for Mac App Store approval, and it got rejected. Why?

LittleIpsum v1.1.1 has been officially denied at the Mac App store due to not meeting the following guideline:

2.8   Apps that are not very useful or do not provide any lasting entertainment value may be rejected.

I’m sure many applications have been rejected so far, but this is the first public post from a developer I’ve seen talking about it. Seems like it’s going to be a very different store than we first thought. [via]

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Notational Velocity Alt→

Notational Velocity Alt

nvALT is a fork of the original Notational Velocity with some additional features and some interface modifications. It is a work in progress.

This fork by Brett Terpstra comes with widescreen layout, a shortcut to collapse the notes panel, Markdown, Textile and MultiMarkdown support, HTML source code tab in the Preview window. It’s really a highly customized version of the original NV, possibly inspired by Elastic Threads’ mod. The Preview window is amazingly useful.

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Trickle: The “Passive” Twitter App That’s Perfect On Your Desk

Twitter clients for iPhone and iPad, in spite of their substantial UI differences, are basically all geared towards the Twitter power user who wants to be able to do a lot of stuff with his Twitter timeline: check on users’ profiles, retweet, save to Instapaper, search, access lists, and so forth. Most Twitter clients for iOS are aimed at enabling you to enjoy the full Twitter experience.

Trickle, released a few days ago, is different. It runs on the iPhone and iPad as a universal app, but instead of bringing many of Twitter’s features to mobile devices, it focuses on turning your Apple device into a minimal, Helvetica-based, constantly up-to-date Twitter widget. Perfect for your desk, possibly with your iPhone or iPad in a dock. Read more

Microsoft Update for Office 2011 Improves Stability

For students and busy bees sporting Microsoft Office 2011, a 110.5 MB update just hit the pipes. Microsoft’s AutoUpdater should catch the latest update, which improves stability when opening Microsoft documents from third party applications, and fixes issues that caused Outlook to previously crash. You can find a direct link to the update at Microsoft’s Download Center, and you can find more information pertaining to the December 13th update at Microsoft Support.

Gazaro Protect Saves You Money Post Best Buy Purchase

I hate having to wait for a good deal. Take a good pair of headphones for example – you absolutely shouldn’t sacrifice the miracles of good sound pumping through your ear holes for Apple’s ear buds (sorry my little white friends). A hundred bucks can pick you up a pair of in-ear Shures that are leagues beyond those tacky ten dollar gel buds you’ve gunked up with pocket lint, and it’s better to just pick up the damn things now instead of shortening your life span through another lousy teeth grinding music session. But what if a Christmas deal comes along a week later? You could have saved a Jackson or two! Not to worry savvy consumers, Gazaro Protect continues to save you cash after the fact, ensuring you’ll get the best deals out of your Best Buy purchases.

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Toshiba Is Building A $1 Billion Factory To Make Apple Displays

Reuters is reporting that, according to the Nikkei business daily, Toshiba will build a $1.19 billion factory (that’s 100 billion yen) to make LCD panels, “mainly to supply to Apple Inc’s iPhones”.

The company’s wholly owned unit, Toshiba Mobile Display Co, will construct the facility in Ishikawa prefecture and the plant will churn out low-temperature polysilicon LCD panels, which allow for high-resolution images, the paper said.

Work on the plant will start by early next year, with the production due to begin in the second half of 2011, Nikkei said.

Could this mean that Apple is moving away from its current suppliers of LCD panels, or are they simply looking for other ways of getting the panels into the production chain? Reuters is reporting that Toshiba will “mainly” supply to Apple, which lead us to think that the manufacturer will also make displays for, say, Android or Windows Phone 7 devices.

So is Apple looking for exclusivity or just more manufacturers?

MacStories Giveaway: Win A Copy of Screens for iPhone & iPad

Screens is an excellent new VNC client by Edovia which, unlike other similar apps in the App Store, it’s not aimed at letting you move a cursor on your computer through the iPhone and iPad. It’s an app specifically meant to take advantage of the platform it runs on – iOS – so that you can actually touch your computer remotely.

From my review:

The “simple approach” doesn’t stop at touch controls, however. Once you’re controlling OS X on your device and you’d like to do some actual stuff with it, Screens offer two separate keyboards to execute most of the commands you know and love on the Mac. The first keyboard is a standard iOS keyboard with an additional bar on top which allows you to navigate using the arrow keys, or press Mac-only keys like Command and Control. Those buttons stay pressed until you tap on them again — useful. The second keyboard, though, is much more functional: it contains the same Mac-only and arrow keys on top, but there are no letters at the bottom. Instead, you get these “action buttons” that let you perform tasks that would require a series of taps and dialogue boxes instead. For instance, you can cut, copy, minimize, log out and activate Spolight with a single tap. Huge time saver.

We have 5 copies of Screens to give away to lucky MacStories readers. Check out the giveaway rules below (it ends tomorrow!), and if you can’t wait the app is available here. Read more

#MacStoriesDeals - Monday

In case you missed our announcement earlier today, we’re starting another new feature, this one being a daily occurrence. We’re calling it #MacStoriesDeals. If anymore show up during the day, we’ll be sure to update this list!

Here’s some great deals for today on iOS apps that are on sale for a limited time, so get ‘em while they’re hot!

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