Gourmet Live and Rewarding Experiences→

Gourmet Live and Rewarding Experiences

Gourmet Live is something new, and interesting, and I’m excited that Gourmet Live is doing so well — as I write this, it’s the #1 iPad Lifestyle app in the store, and just below the Top 10 for free apps overall. But I’m far more proud of the ideas that inform and inspire it, because while the app is just in its very first version, the ideas are deep enough to support Gourmet Live evolving into something truly fantastic. So I thought I’d offer a little peek behind the scenes, because I think it represents something new, and it’s gonna take a ton of insight from a bigger community to help it reach its potential.

As John Gruber reminds us, Gourmet is now only an iPad app.

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Jackass Of The Week: Ansa.it→

Jackass Of The Week: Ansa.it

Italian news agency “Ansa” fails at reporting a complaint from the “Osservatorio Antiplagio” against an iPhone app called “What Country” (link) which associates “mafia” to Italy. In a brief paragraph, Ansa doesn’t provide details about the OA complaint and instead states that Apple itself released the app “for iphone, ipod and ipad”. Google translation here.

This is journalism. [via Mauro Marchesi]

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iAds - 21% of Mobile Market by Year’s End?

First let me take a minute to point something out. A few weeks ago Carol Bartz, Yahoo! CEO, told Reuters the iAd system will “fall apart for them.” Boo hoo Yahoo. Okay, let’s move on, but nice try Carol!

By the end of 2010, Apple is predicted to have matched Google in the percent of ads in the mobile market at 21%. According to Bloomberg Businessweek, “Google, Microsoft, and Yahoo! have swiftly lost share in the U.S. mobile advertising market to Apple’s new iAd(s).” Google’s share will drop to 21 percent, from 27 percent last year. Yahoo will drop to 9 percent, from 12 percent last year. Microsoft will drop to 7 percent, from 10 percent. (numbers by researcher IDC) Read more

Do We Really Need Tweetie 2 for Mac?

Last week I wrote that Tweetie 2 for Mac is alive, and should be released soon. Finally, I would say: after a quite embarrassing “MacHeist beta” delay and a series of announcements from Brichter himself and other personalities over at Twitter, we should definitely we able to get our hands on Tweetie 2 in a matter of a few months. And I repeat, we should. We don’t have any more information about this besides the fact that the app is alive and will be free under Atebits’ name.

My question is, though: do we really need Tweetie 2? Read more

iPod Nano + Dreamcast VMU = Nostalgia

This is for all you old school Sega Dreamcast users - a hardware mod to use your old Virtual Memory Unit (VMU) as a handy-dandy sixth generation iPod Nano case. Just open the VMU unit, place the Nano inside the case, fit the headphone wire (with some work) and put it back together. Not only does this destroy Apple’s minimal design principles but it gives your Nano a protective beige case - but isn’t it cool? Pictures and video goodness below. Read more

More European FaceTime Commercials

Last night we reported that some major Italian TV channels started airing the first iPhone 4 commercials, all of them focused on FaceTime. It turns out that the commercials are the same across all Europe, UK and Spain included. Check out the videos here if you missed them last night.

3Italia has posted two new ads on their official Youtube channel, and I have to say they’re a lot better than the first two. They’re emotional, human, simple and effective. We’ve embedded them after the break.

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TotalFinder: What Mac’s Finder Should Have Been

Over the years I’ve tried many solutions to make the default OS X file manager, Finder, better and more suitable to my needs: PathFinder, a 3rd party application that can live on top of Apple’s Finder and brings dual-pane navigation and tabs to the mix, plus some custom Applescript and Automator workflows that allowed me to easily perform certain tasks like “move these files to another location” or “copy newly downloaded files with .pdf extension in Dropbox”.

None of the aforementioned apps and scripts managed to work for me for more than a month. I grew tired of them, and most of all I grew tired of PathFinder living as a layer above Finder, but not really replacing it. I even tried to completely replace Finder.app in CoreServices, you can guess how it ended. I wanted a better Finder with dual-pane navigation and tabs, but I also wanted to be able to tweak it and customize it, yet retaining the stability and efficiency of the default Finder.app. I didn’t want a standalone app, I was looking forward to something that would let me modify the native app without replacing it. A few weeks later TotalFinder by BinaryAge came out (as an alpha build) and I immediately started testing it.

A year later, here we are with a final 1.0 build of TotalFinder and months of reinvented workflow to talk about. TotalFinder reinvented the way I interact and work with OS X so much that I cannot imagine going back to Apple’s default file manager anymore. Read more