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Posts tagged with "mac"

AirPlay Video From iOS To Mac With AirPlayer

If you’re familiar with AirPlay, you know that it’s a pretty sweet technology that allows you to stream audio and video from any Mac or iOS device to an Apple TV, AirPort Express Station (audio-only) and AirPlay-compatible speakers. That’s the way it works. You can’t stream from Mac to Mac, iOS to iOS, or Mac to iPhone and iPad – although there’s a way to do that via jailbreak.

AirPlay’s streaming is great and almost “magical”, but it has its limitations, possibly due to the fact that Apple introduced it less than a month ago with the release of iOS 4.2. Ever since AirPlay hit the internet with the final public build of 4.2, hackers started working on mods to make it work in any app (video streaming from iOS apps is limited to Apple’s applications), on any device. TUAW’s Erica Sadun, for instance, has been busy working on a solution to make AirPlay work backwards, from iOS to the Mac.

The result is AirPlayer, “a custom Bonjour AirPlay service that pretends to be an Apple TV” that runs on your Mac. It’s a Mac app that can accept  incoming AirPlay video streaming from iOS – very simple. Read more

#MacStoriesDeals - Tuesday

In case you missed our announcement yesterday, we started another new feature, and it’s called #MacStoriesDeals. We’ll try our best to update the list throughout each day.

Here’s some great deals for today on iOS & Mac apps that are on sale for a limited time, so get ‘em while they’re hot!

Read more

Why The Mac Needs Cydia

There was a time when tweaking OS X was a mostly unknown practice not so many users were willing to dedicate their time to. Modding the basic functionalities and look of the Mac required you to delve deep into forums, tutorials, Terminal hacks, resource packages, manual installations, broken mods on each software update. Modders always had a hard time trying to figure out how to best hack the Mac to make it perform and look the way they wanted.

Cydia for iPhone changed that. The whole jailbreak community changed the approach to modding and hacking on Apple devices. By providing a unified experience that’s similar to the App Store model, but for tweaks, Cydia offers anyone the possibility to create something and release it publicly or privately for free. The “something” mentioned above is mostly made of tweaks, apps, themes and app mods Apple would never accept in its App Store. But that’s fine: Cydia was meant to provide a place for the stuff that couldn’t find its way past the app review team’s gates. A place that, together with the freedom of installations, also grants automatic updates, easy discovery and detailed information about what you’re going to put on your devices.

As you may know, Cydia had such a great run so far that its creator Jay Freeman, a.k.a. Saurik, developed a native version for jailbroken iPads and announced the acquisition of former competitor RockApp. With the help of members of the Dev Team, they updated Cydia in the past weeks to feel even better on the iPad, and eliminate some annoyances such as a laborious queue functionality. From several standpoints, Cydia is even more intuitive than Apple’s own Store. Read more

More On Cydia For Mac→

More On Cydia For Mac

Ok, so Cydia is coming to the Mac. But what will it bring to the OS X platform, which starting January 2011 will have not one, but two ways of installing software? Just as I assumed last week, it’ll bring easy installation of mods and tweaks without having to do those things manually, through the Terminal, and keep them updated after that. The unification of desktop hacks.

Chris Foresman over at Ars Technica reports:

Freeman created a new version of MobileSubstrate which has calls simply “CydiaSubstrate.” This new version can run on both iOS as well as Mac OS X on the desktop. “Just like you can make all these modifications on the iPhone, you can make these same modifications on the desktop,” Freeman said. “Until now, there has never been a way to easily install modifications to the system or third-party applications, as well as keep them updated.

True. Installing themes have been a complete mess (remember Magnifique?), not to mention those neat hacks and mods (to the Finder, for example) that magically disappear on every OS update. But there’s more:

CydiaSubstrate-based modifications can also target a particular application for modification, as well. “For instance, users that have jailbroken iPhones would like to have a modified version of iTunes that does not ask to update iOS when the device is plugged in, since the update might overwrite jailbreak modifications,” Freeman said. “Or perhaps you want to change the frequency that TimeMachine performs backups to something other than the stock settings. CydiaSubstrate makes this possible in an easy way that average users could install and update them.

This is exactly what tinkerers on OS X wanted, and needed. Cydia for Mac will simply be the iOS version brought to the desktop.

Back to the Mac.

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First (Public) Mac App Store Rejection?→

First Mac App Store Rejection?

LittleIpsum is a neat utility for Mac OS X we covered a few months ago here. By sitting in the menubar, it allows you to quickly copy Loren Ipsum text to the clipboard. The developers tried to submit the app to Apple for Mac App Store approval, and it got rejected. Why?

LittleIpsum v1.1.1 has been officially denied at the Mac App store due to not meeting the following guideline:

2.8   Apps that are not very useful or do not provide any lasting entertainment value may be rejected.

I’m sure many applications have been rejected so far, but this is the first public post from a developer I’ve seen talking about it. Seems like it’s going to be a very different store than we first thought. [via]

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#MacStoriesDeals - Monday

In case you missed our announcement earlier today, we’re starting another new feature, this one being a daily occurrence. We’re calling it #MacStoriesDeals. If anymore show up during the day, we’ll be sure to update this list!

Here’s some great deals for today on iOS apps that are on sale for a limited time, so get ‘em while they’re hot!

Read more

How To: Create Social Playlists In Ping

Last week, Apple launched a new feature for Ping users: social playlists. As the name suggests, a social playlist allows you to group two or more songs together and share the playlist with your friends (followers) on Ping.

It’s a very simple and effective concept, but the menu to get started with it is somehow buried into Ping’s homepage. Here’s how you can create your first social playlists. Read more

Grappler for Mac Grabs Music and Videos From The Web

I know a lot of people who don’t listen to music through their iTunes library, or a Music folder saved somewhere on their computers. Every time they want to listen to their favorite band, they fire up Youtube. This behavior is particularly common among my friends, who find it “easier” to search for a video rather than organizing a media library. Maybe they just don’t want to buy songs and don’t feel like downloading pirated copies, either. I don’t really know why they keep doing this.

There’s also another reason why people listen to music through Youtube: rare footage and live performances. iTunes offers a large selection of official live performances from thousands of artists, yet Youtube manages to keep an impressive archive of unofficial, yet high quality, footage from millions of bands. That 1994 Oasis concert at New York?  Go find it on iTunes if you can. Sometimes the quality isn’t exactly record-like, but the average user (and fan) doesn’t care.

That’s where an app like Grappler for Mac by The Little App Factory comes in handy: it’s a beautiful and simple utility that helps you save music and videos from the web, especially Youtube.com. It’s deeply integrated with iTunes, so you can have the best of both worlds with an organized library that relies upon a huge web archive. Read more

ReTweetie Adds Native Retweets to Tweetie for Mac

Tweetie for Mac is one of the most popular desktop clients for the Mac, even if version 2.0 still has to show up and the app hasn’t been updated to support Twitter’s latest functionalities such as retweets, lists, real-time streaming. As I said, though, Tweetie for Mac still manages to be one of the most used apps by Mac users.

Developer Nick Paulson, feeling the need of native retweets in Tweetie for Mac and tired of seeing the old “RT @” or “(via @) being used by the app, wrote a plugin that adds Twitter’s native retweet functionality to Tweetie for Mac. It’s called ReTweetie, and it’s available here. Read more