Tearing products apart is now a form of “art”.
GTA, one of the most popular “mature” videogame series which sold million of copies on consoles and handhelds, is coming to the Mac. And it’s coming with a trilogy, a package containing GTA III (the first 3D episode of the series), GTA Vice City and the acclaimed GTA: San Andreas, my favorite GTA episode so far. The games originally came out on Sony’s PlayStation 2.
The Grand Theft Auto series has been one of the most highly demanded titles by the Mac community. The availability of this incredible franchise on the Mac underscores TransGaming’s role in transforming the overall Mac gaming market,” commented Vikas Gupta, President & CEO of TransGaming, in the press release. “These games will be widely available and will be a great catalyst to the increasing popularity of gaming on the Mac.
GTA Trilogy for Mac will be released on November 22nd. You can preorder it now on Amazon. Can’t wait.
Simplenote is a neat web service that comes with native iPhone and iPad apps (and a couple of widgets for the Mac, too) which enables you to store your notes in the cloud. I’m a huge fan of Simplenote, and it’s undoubtedly one of the most popular apps available in the App Store.
Hidden is a new iPhone app by Coding Robots (I’m hearing the developers are also working on a Simplenote-based task management app) that can access your standard Simplenote notes, but also allows you to keep private notes no one but you can read. Read more
As noted by 9to5mac last night, AirPlay went missing on the iOS 4.2 GM for iPhone 3G. The feature was there in the previous betas and was working fine, allowing users to stream audio (no video to Apple TV yet, it needs an update) to AirPlay-compatible devices.
Apple apparently removed the feature when releasing the GM build on November 1st:
After speaking to multiple developers and users testing out the iOS 4.2 betas, we have determined that AirPlay did in fact work on the iPhone 3G at one point, meaning the AirPlay functionality was definitely removed from Apple’s two-year-old iPhone at its GM stage. The reason this is an issue is because Apple states, even on their own website, that AirPlay is supported on ALL iOS 4 devices.
Even though it is believed that people nowadays don’t print much (I surely don’t), Apple’s removal of support for AirPrint shared printing on the latest version of OS X, 10.6.5, raised a few eyebrows. They had announced the feature, but they didn’t deliver with 10.6.5 – even if previous developer version of the OS update had AirPrint enabled.
It seems like it was too unstable to make it to the final version, but some are suggesting the folks at Cupertino are dealing with patent trolling issues for shared printers in AirPrint. We don’t know. Read more
A few days after Microsoft released Kinect (and years later Apple’s interest in the device), a motion-based game controller for the Xbox 360 console, a group of hackers managed to modify the device’s settings, hack it and let it run on Windows 7.
Microsoft of course isn’t interested in this kind of hacks and will never support such efforts – also because there’s not really much you can do with Kinect on computers. It “runs” and displays the images it captures from the camera, but you can’t do much after all. Read more
Damon Albarn, Blur’s singer and frontman of Gorillaz, announced the follow-up to Plastic Beach (3rd studio album of Gorillaz) has been recorded entirely on an iPad. He’s aiming at a holiday season release. In an interview with UK music magazine NME, he said:
I’ve made it on an iPad – I hope I’ll be making the first record on an iPad. I fell in love with my iPad as soon as I got it, so I’ve made a completely different kind of record.
I wonder how many music apps were necessary to get the album recording done on the tablet. Perhaps they needed to deploy their own app? We look forward to whatever Mr. Albarn has in store.
When developers noticed Apple was deprecating Java on OS X, there was quite a mess on the internet. Today, Apple announced that is joining Oracle to bring the OpenJDK project on the Mac in order to maintain Java.
Apple will contribute most of the key components, “including a 32-bit and 64-bit HotSpot-based Java virtual machine, class libraries and a networking stack”.
With OpenJDK, Apple’s Java technology will be available open source for developers to contribute to. Press release embedded below. Read more
I’ve been waiting for this update: when IA Writer first came out, I couldn’t use it. I was already running iOS 4.2 beta on my iPad, and the app had a few bugs with the new operating system. The focus mode wasn’t working (and that feature is possibly the most important one in the app), custom keys didn’t match.
With the latest 1.0.2 that showed up a few minutes ago in iTunes, the app is finally ready for the elusive OS. Subfolders and auto-sync aren’t included yet, but they’re coming soon.
Finally, I can use IA Writer. Go get it, as it seems totally worth it.
