OS X Releases Of The Day: Alfred Powerpack, Swatch 2.0

Alfred, the new kid on the block of “applications to search on your Mac” Cody reviewed back in March, can now be extended with a £12 ($18) “Powerpack” that allows you to quickly navigate your Mac’s filesystem and perform actions with files and folders.

The first Powerpack also includes support for an iTunes Mini Player, but the developers are promising way more feature in the next iterations of the addon such as Clipboard integration, Applescript and Address Book integration. Alfred Powerpack is available at £12 here.

Swatch (missed our Fuel Collective week?) is a must-have tool for any designer, and the long-awaited 2.0 version was released earlier today. The new version sports a brand-new UI design (I love it) and comes with many new features such as the possibility to create and manage collections, support for ACO, ASE and CLR files, customizable cursors and possibility to switch from the standard Color Wheel to CMYK, RGB or HSB sliders.

Swatch 2.0 is available at $9.95 here.

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iMac Touch Finally Shows Up in Patent - And It Runs Both OS X and iOS

There’s this iMac Touch rumor that has been floating around on the internet for quite a while now: back in January Digitimes reported that Apple was working on a 22-inch touch-enabled Mac in addition to the iMac line, then 2 months ago LoopRumors claimed that Apple was developing a touchscreen iMac running iOS. I called that rumor “absurd”, and you know why? Because a desktop computer running only iOS doesn’t make sense.

But a desktop computer capable of transitioning from OS X to iOS depending on the device’s orientation? Now that’s interesting.

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Latest Shaw Wu Report on CDMA iPhone: 2012?

For American users, the long-rumored Verizon CDMA iPhone is starting to look like the famous unicorn. Or the white iPhone. Or anything else that Apple never shipped. And indeed, reports from well-known Wall Street “analysts” don’t help, either.

Shaw Wu, a guy who has a history for being wrong about Apple (see here and here), is now claiming that Apple is indeed working on a CDMA iPhone with Verizon (oh really?) but that the whole project might slide to 2012 if Apple decided to team up with Sprint and T-Mobile instead. Oh, but they could also wait for LTE to become a more used technology and skip the whole CDMA thing. Oh, but they’re also in talks with Verizon about a SVDO iPhone (voice and data at the same time). This note has been issued to investors. To me, he sounds pretty confused.

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Prizmo: Beautiful OCR for iPhone

In my attempt of achieving the perfect paperless office, I tried a large number of OCR (optical character recognition) apps for Mac over time. For those of you not familiar with OCR, it’s a technology that scans any kind of document starting from a good-quality photo and extracts text from it. Text you can edit and save, no matter the language or characters used in the document. On the Mac, I settled with Prizmo, an amazingly powerful and good-looking app by Creaceed which can scan and organize your documents.

Last week Creaceed released the first iPhone version of Prizmo, which sports the same beautiful UI as the Mac counterpart and aims at becoming the ultimate OCR solution for iPhone users. I tested the app, and threw some documents in its database. Has the paperless office really gone mobile? Read more below to find out.

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