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The New Mac Pro Arrives Tomorrow→

With a press release, Apple today announced that the new Mac Pro, originally introduced at WWDC, will be available tomorrow, December 19. From the PR:

The Mac Pro is available with a 3.7 GHz quad-core Intel Xeon E5 processor with Turbo Boost speeds up to 3.9 GHz, dual AMD FirePro D300 GPUs with 2GB of VRAM each, 12GB of memory, and 256GB of PCIe-based flash storage starting at $2,999 (US); and with a 3.5 GHz 6-core Intel Xeon E5 processor with Turbo Boost speeds up to 3.9 GHz, dual AMD FirePro D500 GPUs with 3GB of VRAM each, 16GB of memory, and 256GB of PCIe-based flash storage starting at $3,999 (US). Configure-to-order options include faster 8-core or 12-core Intel Xeon E5 processors, AMD FirePro D700 GPUs with 6GB of VRAM, up to 64GB of memory, and up to 1TB of PCIe-based flash storage.

As we wrote in October:

The new Mac Pro is all about being small, quiet, yet entirely capable of delivering performance for today’s audio and visual professionals. The Mac Pro, unlike desktop towers of old, has been designed into a compact round aluminum canister that sucks heat away from components using a single unified thermal core. While uniquely shaped, components in the new Mac Pro are user accessible, with connectivity to server racks and other peripherals being mitigated through an array of Thunderbolt 2 ports.

The new Mac Pro is Apple’s latest crown jewel, assembled in the US and packing an incredible amount of hardware innovations. More details are available at the Mac Pro’s official webpage.

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How iOS 7 Affects App Development→

TidBITS’ Matt Neuberg wrote about how iOS 7 is turning app development on its head, for better and for worse. As an interface molded by transparency and text, Apple has made several improvements under the hood that put content front and center. Of those improvements, rendering and laying out text is one area in iOS which has been completely overhauled.

iOS 7 also provides developers with full access to the Mac OS X text layout engine, Text Kit. How developers will use this new-found power is anybody’s guess, but drawing styled text in sophisticated ways will be vastly easier. Expect to see inline images, tab stops, text “decorations” of various sorts (such as special colored underlines or word backgrounds), and text arranged in interesting shapes.

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Typeset Lets You Mix and Match iOS 7 System Fonts for Finding the Perfect Combination→

Developers building iOS 7 apps may want to download Typeset by MartianCraft, a free app that lets you preview iOS 7 system fonts side by side. Typset includes layout cards for previewing how fonts look in various configurations, tools for adjusting line spacing and font sizing, and the option to mark saved sets as favorites for later browsing. A $5.99 in-app purchase unlocks Typeset Pro, which enables the option to export the end result as a predefined stylesheet or PDF. Download it from the App Store.

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Mailbox for iOS Updated With Support for iCloud and Yahoo Mail→

Now available on the App Store, the latest iteration of Mailbox adds support for iCloud and Yahoo Mail accounts. While iCloud and Yahoo Mail are the most likely alternatives to Gmail, I am surprised to see Outlook.com left out of the mix. Personally, I’m still looking forward to having general IMAP support so I can add my self hosted email accounts. The latest version also introduces background syncing for devices running iOS 7, which means your email will already be in your inbox before you even open the app (previously you had to wait for the app to pull down the latest emails after it was opened). Download the latest update for free from the App Store.

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Mastered for iTunes and iTunes Match→

Kirk McElhearn, experimenting with CD rips, tries to figure out what exactly iTunes Match doles out once music has been matched in the cloud.

If you rip a CD, match it, then download one of the files from the cloud, you don’t ever see the Mastered for iTunes badge. I have a handful of CDs for which only Mastered for iTunes files are available from the iTunes Store (these are new releases where labels only provide files for this format). I added them to my iTunes Match account, matched them, deleted my originals, then downloaded the matched files. I compared them with my original rips (using the methods described below), and saw that these files were not the same; I was clearly getting the Mastered for iTunes files from iTunes Match. But the files don’t display the Mastered for iTunes badge.

So for files that are matched, then downloaded, if there is only a Mastered for iTunes version on the iTunes store, the files you download will be in Mastered for iTunes format; yet you won’t know that. The Mastered for iTunes badge is displayed only when there is a bit of metadata in purchased files that tells iTunes to display it.

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Duo, A Browser for Viewing Desktop and Mobile Websites Side by Side→

Duo is a browser with no settings and no search functionality, specifically intended to show websites in desktop and mobile views next to each other. It’s handy for Webkit development, includes dev tools, and can be launched from a bookmarklet via your browser of choice. You can’t change the user agent, and it doesn’t automatically refresh as you edit webpages with your favorite text editor, but it’s an otherwise inexpensive tool for testing responsive designs on the fly. You can grab it for $4.99 in the Mac App Store.

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How Mac Experts Organize Their Files→

My friend Lex Friedman asked me a few questions about the way I organize files on my Mac, and it was my pleasure to reply with some of my favorite apps and tricks. Notably, Hazel is the app that saves me so much time every day – I don’t know how I’d use my Mac without it.

The script shown in my Hazel screenshot comes from this post and it relates to the way I use CameraSync and Hazel to upload my iPhone’s photos to Dropbox and sort them automatically.

Make sure to check out how John Siracusa, Katie Floyd, and Casey Liss also organize their files here.

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