Posts tagged with "mac"

Will Mac App Store Users Really Miss Demos? Probably Not.

The big news this morning is that Apple clarified its position on demos and trials in the upcoming Mac App Store and confirmed what we thought would happen all along: developers can’t have demo versions of their apps in the Mac App Store. Only full-featured retail versions will be accepted. Clearly, Apple doesn’t want to offer limited-time or “half baked” apps in its new Store, and it’s forcing Mac developers to go the iOS way with either free or paid apps.

That is going to cause a few problems and headaches for many, many OS X developers. For years, they have been trained to release demo / trail versions of applications, with a paid version to purchase immediately or after the trial runs out. And indeed Apple suggests just that: keep hosting trial versions on your website, because you’ll be able to insert a link to it in the App Store description page of the app. Just as it’s possible now in the iPhone and iPad App Store. Read more

Borderlands: Game Of The Year Edition for Mac Available→

Borderlands: Game Of The Year Edition for Mac Available

Bloodthirsty bandits. Vicious monsters. Tons of loot. Lock, Load and face the madness. Gearbox Software’s acclaimed sci-fi hit comes to the Mac complete with all four expansion packs. Borderlands is a unique hybrid of first person shooter and role-playing game with a super sharp visual style and a compelling 4 player co-op mode.

The game is out on Amazon now, or you can buy it on Feral Interactive’s website. I played this on a PC months ago, it’s a real gem.

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Weet for Mac: The New Tweetie? More Like A Promising Beta App.

Weet for Mac was released yesterday as a first beta, and it quickly made the rounds of the internet as dozens of blogs covered the app, and thousands of users went ahead and downloaded the beta hosted on Droplr. It seems like until Loren Brichter comes out with his long-awaited Tweetie 2, there’s a real, tangible need of Twitter clients for OS X.

My guess is that, plain and simply, Tweetie still manages to be the best desktop Twitter client for many users. Sure it doesn’t support native retweets, it hasn’t got support for Lists yet and it hasn’t been updated in months – but the interaction and navigation methods developed by Brichter are still far superior than most clients available on the Mac.

That said – we don’t want to write another Tweetie-related post here – let’s take a look at Weet. It’s a first, rough and not-so-stable beta, but I think that it gives us an idea of things to come in this app, the path the developers have chosen with the app’s interface and the overall feeling. Read more

Apple Takes Down AirPrint Hacktivator, But It’s Already Back Online

Remember AirPrint Hacktivator? It was a neat little hack thrown together by the folks over at Netputing which, by copying system files from the old developer betas of OS X 10.6.5, could enable AirPrint support for shared printers on the public version of 10.6.5. Admittedly, it wasn’t the most polished and “legal” hack, but it worked. And people liked it. And blogs covered it.

Too bad that when you publish software that re-distributes Apple’s source code, it comes a point where Apple legal makes a call. That’s exactly what happened to Netputing: they got an email from omm.com (one of Apple’s legal representatives) and were forced to remove the old versions of AirPrint Hacktivator, the one that copied old system files back into OS X 10.6.5. Read more

Apple Confirms: No Demos In The Mac App Store

Following last night’s seeding of a new build of Mac OS X 10.6.6, Apple updated its Developer News portal with a few tips for developers to consider before trying to submit their Mac apps for approval. Among these tips (which include file system usage and custom graphical controls), Apple confirmed what many developers feared since the Mac App Store was announced: Apple won’t accept any kind of demo, trial or beta version in the new Store.

Apple is, in fact, suggesting developers to host demos on their own websites, as the Mac App Store only accepts retail versions of apps:

Your website is the best place to provide demos, trial versions, or betas of your software for customers to explore. The apps you submit to be reviewed for the Mac App Store should be fully functional, retail versions of your apps.

We don’t know yet if Apple will provide a way to better showcase links to developers’ website in the App Store description pages (right now, the iOS App Store features two links buried under an app’s description, right above screenshots) but sure this is bad news for many developers who were hoping Apple would announce the possibility to release demo versions in the Mac App Store.

The Mac App Store opening isn’t too far away now, so we’ll know more about the whole process in the upcoming weeks.

Weet for Mac Beta Now Available, Looks Beautiful

Weet, a popular Twitter client for iPhone released a few months ago (my review here), is now available for Mac users as “beta”. You can download the first version here.

From what we have seen so far, Weet for Mac looks like an extremely polished and elegant app to access your Twitter timeline. It seems like the developers did a great job in implementing lots of features, too. The app presents a tabbed interface at the top to let you switch between your timeline, mentions, direct messages, lists and search. The search tab contains your saved searches and trending topics. In the Lists tab, you can subscribe to a new list or check on your existing ones.

Weet’s interface is very clean and resembles the iPhone counterpart, great pixels by designer Marcelo Marfil are all over the place. After 5 minutes of usage, I can say I like the subtle tones of the “message bubbles” in the timeline, but I’m not sure about the huge scrollbar you can see in the screenshots. The app comes with multi-account support and lots of other stuff to tweak in the preferences. It’s also pretty fast at fetching tweets, although there’s no visual notification of refresh. Weet for Mac also features a Mute feature and keyword block functionalities.

Look for a detailed review here on MacStories tomorrow.

More screenshots below. Read more

FlickrExport 4.0 for iPhoto and Aperture Released

FlickExport by Connected Flow is a popular plugin for Apple’s iPhoto and Aperture which allows users to upload photos to online photo sharing service Flickr without having to leave the app. Today Connected Flow announced the release of a major update to FlickrExport, which reaches version 4.0 and, among a number of overall performance improvements and a simplified user interface, adds several new functionalities to an already powerful and full-featured package.

FlickrExport for iPhoto adds the possibility to upload videos, while both the iPhoto and Aperture versions got support for multiple Flickr accounts. All you have to do to add a new account is open FlickrExport’s window (which will sit on top of iPhoto or Aperture) and log in with your Flickr credentials. Switching between accounts is as easy as selecting one in a dropdown menu. Both versions are now also capable of uploading photos to multiple photosets, a much requested feature in version 3.x. Last, FlickrExport for iPhoto finally lets you edit a photo’s license once the photo is uploaded. Read more

So, Uhm, Soon You’ll Be Able To Use AirPrint With 6 More Printers

We thought AirPrint would make us print again, thanks to the power of iOS 4.2 and printers shared through OS X or Windows. It turns out achieving stable driverless printing ain’t that easy even for Apple, and the engineers at Cupertino were forced to remove support for AirPrint on OS X 10.6.5. We’ve already heard this story.

Steve Jobs promises more is coming soon and a few alternative solutions to print via OS X have surfaced, but as it stands now AirPrint officially works only with 7 HP printers out of the box. Read more

Old Macs Still Rock→

Old Macs Still Rock

Of course, using Tiger means I personally couldn’t use a lot of the apps I require, like Espresso, nor could I manage Photoshop or InDesign with such a small visual canvas. I can’t stand notebooks anyway. But the intended audience wasn’t me. I chose Tiger over Leopard because it was intended on being used by people in an office environment, who needed word processing, internet, and email. And this is what most people use a computer for. They’ve been using the iBook for the past week, day-in day-out, and I’ve received no complaints so far — they have no clue that the brushed metal UI is ugly, even though they also have a Snow Leopard Mac mini running.

Techno-lust can lead to a flawed vision, making it difficult to see the true value in things.

Such a re-discovery wouldn’t be possible on iOS. You can’t download old versions of apps, and if you run the latest version most likely you’ll end up frustrated by the lack of optimization on older units.

You’ve got to play the update game with iOS.

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