The Powerful Code Editor for iPad and iPhone — Now Free to Try
This one’s a useful bookmarklet you can use in your default browser to send the current webpage title and link to Twitter for Mac. Works great – too bad Twitter for Mac doesn’t offer a way to wrap links in your own shortener instead of the not-so-popular t.co.
Install here.
So are you loyal AT&T iPhone people switching over to Verizon after the big announcement today? I really doubt I leave AT&T. Anyway, here’s today’s deals on iOS & Mac (Store) apps that are on sale for a limited time, so get ‘em while they’re hot! Read more
Winner of an Apple Design Award in the iPad category in June 2010, Vito Technologies today released a Mac version of Solar Walk, available now in the Mac App Store at $2.99. Pretty much like Star Walk for the iPhone and iPad (which Cody originally reviewed here), Solar Walk for Mac is a full-featured 3D solar system model that allows you to move between stars and planets with your mouse, zoom in to check on the planets’ details and read accurate descriptions about them. You can zoom out to view the entire galaxy (well, at least through what’s known of this galaxy), see a planet’s inner structure and learn about its history of exploration. The 3D graphics aren’t breathtaking but they get the job done, the popover menus with descriptions seem to be taken out of the iPad app.
The app also allows you to move in time to see the position of planets and satellites in a certain day, month and year. There’s even a 3D mode that will require you to wear cyan-red glasses – too bad I don’t have them here right now. Neat stuff anyway.
Solar Walk is available in the Mac App Store at $2.99. A demo video of the iPad version, very similar to the Mac counterpart, is embedded below. Read more
We have talked about the coolness and the hacking possibilities offered by Microsoft’s Kinect before. First we heard Apple almost bought the technology from its original creators in 2008 (the rest is history, it got sold to Redmond), then we saw Kinect connected and displaying stuff on OS X and also somehow hooked up to a computer and an iPad with…futuristic cubes.
Now, thanks to the Mac App Store, we have a free 3D viewer for Kinect. When connected to a Mac via USB, the app can visualize tridimensional images of the depth data, and map RGB values onto this depth image. You can zoom, rotate and, of course, take a good screenshot with your Mac to show to your friends on Twitter.
Kinect 3D Viewer for Mac is free and available here.
A few days ago, I stumbled upon this new application in the Mac App Store called Apptivate, sold at $2.99. Reading through the app’s description, I learned that it was an easy tool to assign keyboard shortcuts to a variety of things on a Mac: apps, files, folders, Automator workflows and even Applescripts. It was a $2.99 purchase. I clicked the Buy button. Read more
Notificant by Caramel Cloud is a new app available exclusively on the Mac App Store that provides an easy, fast and reliable solution to create and send notifications to all your personal Macs and a selected email address. The app is deeply tied to a cloud infrastructure – as the developers’ name suggests – and it allows you to forward as many notifications you want, at any given time. It’s one of those apps that doesn’t reinvent anything (notification apps have been around for a while, and we recently reviewed Alarms for Mac) but takes a simple approach and throws the advantages and speed of the cloud in the mix.
Basically, Notificant is a simple tool to sync reminders in the cloud. The app takes care of all the sync stuff and forwarding to your personal devices, you just need to write down entries, hit save and forget about it.
Is the Mac App Store great or what? Here’s today’s deals on iOS & Mac (Store) apps that are on sale for a limited time, so get ‘em while they’re hot! Read more
As noted by 9to5mac, a new service has been recently introduced in a number of Apple Stores: “personal setup” for Mac computers. The personal setup service for iOS devices has been around for a quite a while now; to better introduce customers to the OS X ecosystem, Apple is now rolling out this new service to help new users get around the basics of a Mac, the Mac App Store, iTunes and email accounts.
This is minor news for Mac aficionados but will be very helpful for people new to the Mac and for the wider range of consumers. The service will go live in some stores as soon as Tuesday but we’ve heard that other stores will be launching the service in the next few weeks. The new service is very similar to the “setup room” that is currently featured at Apple’s Covent Garden store in London.
The service was actually launched a few days after Christmas in some Apple Stores, we’ve been told from a separate source. The internal name for the service is “Custom Configure” – “personal setups” are actually One to One data transfers. It is unclear whether or not the service will be branded “Personal Setup” in the future. As part of the equation, Apple is also going to feature dedicated “Mac stations” to better help customers through this Mac setup process and Stores will soon replace some iPod and iPod touch tables for “personal setup tables”, we’re told.
This new personal setup service for Macs is going to be a big part of the experience at Apple Stores. Just like the Genius Bar for customer support, Apple wants to offer easy and immediate help to people who just bought a new Mac. We think it’s a great idea.
The Mac App Store is off to a great start. More than 1,000 apps already available, some of them ports of old and popular Mac applications, some of them new ones specifically built and designed for the new Store. Some long-time Mac developers even decided to ditch their previous distribution systems and go Mac App Store-exclusive. More than 1 million downloads happened on the Mac App Store’s first day, and the first sales numbers show that the effect on the popularity of existing Mac apps has been incredible.
The developers of Alfred, an application launcher and Spotlight replacement for OS X, reported thousands of new downloads in the first 24 hours, while Evernote, a cross-platform “memory tool” and digital assistant, announced a 1800% increase of sign-ups through the Mac client, released for free in the Mac App Store. But a picture, as they say, is worth a thousand words, so here’s the Mac App Store effect visualized in a simple graph. Read more
