iStat Menus 3: Beautiful Stats For Your Mac

I have a late 2008 Macbook Pro, and one could argue that maybe it’s time for me to consider an upgrade to a new model. Maybe with some SSD and new processor goodness. I think that my machine is still a great one though, with its 4GB of RAM and a pretty capable hard disk: it’s been able to do so many things for me in these two years that I don’t see it being replaced anytime soon, actually. But, I think that’s a given that I should keep an eye on its internal stats: you know, stuff like the battery health, CPU usage over time and memory consumption.

I’ve always done that with the iStat Pro dashboard widget from Bjango (former iSlayer), but last night I decided to upgrade to iStat Menus 3. Here’s why you should do the same.

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Steve Jobs: “Life Is Fragile”

Every day we think about Steve Jobs, CEO of Apple. But every single day we forget that Steve Jobs is just a man, who goes through the difficulties and misfortunes of life, just like us. And we also know that he had to face pretty bad difficulties in his life - like a liver disease, which forced him to get a liver transplant last year.

BusinessInsider reports an email from Steve Jobs in response to James, a guy from Cupertino who lost his girlfriend last year due to a melanoma that quickly spread to her liver. He shot an email to Steve just to say thanks for his interest in this cause and, surprisingly enough, Steve replied.

This is not an email about business, it’s about life. It’s about the human side of Steve, the one we forget about every single day. Maybe this is not as interesting as the latest iPhone market share in Japan, but we think that sometimes stories are more important than numbers. Check it out after the break.

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Want to Capture Everything and Anything? Voila!

The Mac draws a lot of attention from bloggers who love to create and share content. Great tools like Skitch, Little Snapper, SnapIt, Camtasia Studio, and Screenflow enable us to capture content as it appears on the screen, edit it, format it, and ship it across the Interwebs effortlessly. Separately, these tools are awesome in their own rights. Together, it’s possible to have a super app. Voila (version 3.0) for the Mac takes a little of everything from these mastered tools, and brings them together into a one stop shop that should hopefully attend to all your needs. How do we feel about it? Read past the break to find out.

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Chaos Rings Headed to the iPad

Square Enix’ Chaos Rings has turned out to be a huge hit in the App Store: after all the positive reviews and users’ feedback, Chaos Rings (which, for those who don’t know, it’s a typical japanese RPG) is now the top grossing app in nine countries, and the devs  confirmed it’s also headed to the iPad as “Chaos Rings HD”.

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iPhone in Japan: 72% of Smartphone Market

Good news for Apple: Businessweek reports that the shipments of the iPhone to Japan have more than doubled in the past year, taking 72% of the smartphone market.

“Shipments of the iPhone, which began selling in Japan in July 2008, climbed to 1.69 million units in the year ended March 31, Tokyo-based MM Research Institute Ltd. said in a report yesterday. That raised the total to 2.3 million, Hideaki Yokota, an analyst at the research firm, said by telephone today.

The iPhone helped smartphone sales more than double last fiscal year in Japan as shipments of regular mobile phones shrank, according to the report. Smartphone shipments will probably exceed 3 million units in the 12 months started April 1, even as the overall market is forecast to contract for a third year, it said.”

I’d be curious to see some stats for Italy though. Very good numbers, anyway.

Newsprint Goes 1.1, 10 Copies Up for Grabs

Remember Newsprint? It’s the RSS application for iPhone we reviewed a while ago here, and I was quite impressed by that first release of the app. The interface surely looked different but good, there were some interesting features to be explored for future releases and, overall, I just liked it.

Finally, Hashbang Ind. has released an update to Newsprint, the 1.1 version, which brings a lot of stability improvements and fixes requested by the users.

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