This Week's Sponsor:

TRMNL

The E-ink Companion For Your Favorite Tools

Posts tagged with "mac"

Portal 2 Available For Pre-Order Now

Well after some delays, Portal 2 is now finally available for pre-order for an expected release of April 18th.  Mac users can pre-order the game for US$44.99 on Steam or at selected retail shops, some of which have special pre-order offers;

Special pre-order offers vary at participating outlets around the world and include a variety of dollars off and/or exclusive in-game content for those who reserve the game for purchase before it is released the week of April 18. These include $5 off the full price, exclusive in-game skins for the coop bots (Atlas and P-body), and more.

Read more

Sparrow for Mac Update: Faster, AppleScript Support

Since its release in the Mac App Store last week, Gmail desktop client Sparrow has been sitting among the top paid software charts and has gained a huge userbase. The app is clean, minimal and it perfectly blends the typical Gmail environment into a Mac-like package that reminds us of Tweetie. I like Sparrow, and although general IMAP support is still nowhere to be seen I have been using as my default email client for the past week (I use Gmail on a daily basis, more specifically Google Apps).

The developers are working hard on making Sparrow a full-featured email app for the desktop, and this begins today with the first update – available now in the Mac App Store. Sparrow 1.0.1 comes with improved sending speed for outgoing messages (it used to takes a few extra seconds to send an email in version 1.0), a finally-working menubar mode, basic AppleScript support – which I’ll make sure to try out. Loading times of conversation threads have been improved as well.

Sparrow 1.0.1 is available here. We look forward to version 1.1, which should bring IMAP compatibility and more.

The Untold Story Of The First Mac→

The Untold Story Of The First Mac

Aza Raskin shares a memo from his father Jef Raskin, one of the creators of the original Macintosh. An interesting tidbit about the vision of an integrated system, already growing at Apple back in the 80’s:

There were to be no peripheral slots so that customers never had to see the inside of the machine (although external ports would be provided); there was a fixed memory size so that all applications would run on all Macintoshes; the screen, keyboard, and mass storage device (and, we hoped, a printer) were to be built in so that the customer got a truly complete system, and so that we could control the appearance of characters and graphics.

Full document is available here, and it’s a must read. Thirty years ago, designers and engineers at Apple were already thinking about issues like software fragmentation and user’s ability to tinker with a device.

Permalink

iOS Developers Making Leap to the Mac→

iOS Developers Making Leap to the Mac

Chris Foreman at Ars Technica reports about several iOS developers porting their apps to the Mac App Store:

These developers warned, however, that it wasn’t fair to make direct comparisons with the iOS App Store at this early stage. For one, every iOS device has access to the iOS App Store, while only those who applied the Mac OS X 10.6.6 update can access the Mac App Store. And, as Crawford pointed out, there are more iOS devices in active use than there are Macs.

Frampton compared initial sales volumes to the early days of the App Store on the iPhone. “The overall size of the market seems very similar to the early days of the iOS App Store, and in fact I get a very distinct feeling of déjà vu,” he said. “The Mac App Store market may never catch up, but it certainly has a lot of room to grow.”

“Sales tend to eventually level out and that’s yet to happen on the Mac App Store,” Comi agreed.

As more users upgrade to 10.6.6 (a friend of mine ran Software Update a week ago, almost a month after the Mac App Store introduction), there will still be a considerable userbase stuck on previous versions of Snow Leopard. That’s the problem with the Mac App Store coming as an “add-on” to the OS. However, I believe that, in the end, apps will be the reason why these people will be “forced” to upgrade to the latest SL version. The more great apps are released in the Mac App Store, the more people will say “Hey, maybe I really need to update”.

It’s not the Mac App Store as a “feature” by itself, it’s the ecosystem of a platform for great software.

Permalink

Manuals on Amazon Suggest Late July Launch for Lion

Several manuals for the upcoming Mac OS X 10.7 Lion have been spotted by 9to5 Mac on the Amazon.UK website and all are set to be released sometime around late July, hinting that the OS will also launch around that time. WWDC is expected to be from July 5 to July 9 and it would make sense for Lion to be released shortly after WWDC as these manuals seem to suggest.

Whilst the release date of these guidebooks don’t confirm a late July launch it makes a late July launch likely because there have been several previous cases of Amazon guidebooks effectively revealing a products launch date, such as Office 2011 last year.

Some of the manual covers include references to the already known features of Launchpad, Mission Control and changes to the dock, all of which were revealed in the ‘Back to the Mac’ event late last year.

[Via 9to5 Mac]

Nokia Borrows iMovie Loop For Microsoft Partnership Announcement

If Nokia’s recent announcement to partner with Microsoft wasn’t enough to stir up the #fail hashtags on Twitter, leave it to the Apple geeks to point out that Nokia is using their biggest competitor’s theme in their recent announcement. While Apple’s audio loops are royalty free, it’s still amusing to see a competitor using the Macbook theme (Pendulum) in their Microsoft get-together. Check out what Adrian Boioglu from Boio.ro has dug up after the break.

Read more

Bejeweled 3 for iPhone and iPad Coming, Eventually

If you’re a loyal Bejeweled fan (dare we say “addicted”), then you must be happy to know that, eventually, Bejeweled 3 will “probably” come to the iPhone and iPad. Why the “eventually” and “probably”? The game, developed by PopCap Games, was released as a digital download for Windows and Mac last December and, especially on the Mac side of things, several gamers decided to put the download on hold, waiting for a mobile iOS counterpart. Good news is, hope isn’t lost as PopCap Games’ Garth Chouteau hints at the porting in a recent interview with Pocketful of Megabytes, which you can read here.

When asked about an iOS version, Chouteau says:

As mentioned above, we’re traditionally somewhat slow to adapt our games to other platforms after launching them on PC/Mac… Bejeweled 3 for iPhone/iPad is probably something we’ll do…eventually…!

Bejeweled 3 for iOS, if priced correctly and made universal in the App Store, would undoubtedly jump the charts in a matter of a few days. The game is popular, people want to play, PopCap wants as many downloads as possible – sounds like a plan, right? Yes, but we have to wait. Eventually, it will come. Hopefully sooner than later. [via TUAW]