Two weeks ago we reported that Adobe might be working on a Mac version of its popular audio editing tool Audition, as seen in a leaked Youtube video. Last night Adobe confirmed that a Mac version is indeed in the works, and that a beta version will launch later this year.
Posts tagged with "mac"
Yes, Adobe Audition Is Coming to Mac OS X
Transmission Goes 2.0
Transmission, the popular cross-platform torrent client, has been updated over the weekend to the final 2.0 version. Beta versions of 2.0 have been released in the past months for testing.
Transmission 2.0 brings very important changes such as a new compact view on Mac OS X, faster startup times and verification of data, a local peers discovery feature and optimization of downloads according to bandwidth available. Check out the full changes here, and check for updates if you’re running an old version of Transmission.
iHub to Bring Wireless Local Network Syncing to OS X and iOS
There’s two problems I ultimately have with iOS and the devices that support it. The first is push notifications, and the second is the stupid cable. Focusing on the cable, why hasn’t Apple implemented a wireless solution yet? While they dilly-dally with a much wanted feature, Macworld reports that Nova Media has announced their own solution for wireless syncing called iHub.
Apple Releases Mac OS X 10.6.4
Apple has just released Mac OS X 10.6.4. It’s available in Software Update and comes as a 313 MB download. Check out the full changelog after the break.
The New All Aluminum Mac mini with HDMI
While all of us expected to awaken to iPhone 4 pre-orders, none of us expected a rather serious Mac mini update that’s available online and in stores this morning. Their smallest Mac now features HDMI out and an SD Card Slot - big upgrades for the tiny desktop that make it suitable for hooking up to the big screen. Also included is our usual Nvidia 320M integrated graphics, and the choice of a 2.4GHz or 2.66GHz Core 2 Duo processor, making it 2x faster than the previous model. Firewire 800 also stays on the Mac Mini, but it has lost a USB port with the feature updates - which is fine by me.
But Mac fans such as myself are most excited with Apple’s amazing visual refresh, which casts the Mac mini in an 1.4-inch-thin unibody all-aluminum enclosure over a round rubber panel that allows customer access to replacing RAM. The Apple team completely reinvented the guts by including a new green, space saving power supply which completely eliminates the need for the brick - all you need now is a single straight cable. A powerhouse that only consumes 10 Watts of energy when idle (85W when active), the Mac mini is also Apple’s most energy friendly Mac yet. Cupertino, this is a job well done.
Instant FTP & SFTP Uploads with OneWay
On Symlinks
Shawn Blanc has published two interesting posts (here and here) about the process of creating symbolic links on Mac OS X, following up to Gruber’s post from last week where he wrote about his configuration of Yojimbo’s library synced and backed up with Dropbox.
I’d like to cover two neat ways of playing around with Symlinks (for a basic knowledge about the subject you can head over the Wikipedia page) which involve the terminal, and I’ve found them very useful so far.
My Backup Workflow
You’ve probably read John Gruber’s post about backups last week, the one where he talked about his experience with a damaged internal hard drive and, luckily for him, the way he managed to save data with Dropbox, Super Duper, Disk Warrior and a couple of external hard disks.
I think John made some strong points in suggesting to purchase not one, but a couple of external hard drives - as you really don’t know when a hard drive is gonna fail. Just as an internal drive can die, so a Firewire one with all your backups can.
Anyway, there are some other practices I’ve gotten used to follow over time I’d like to talk about.
Organizing Files: The Librarian Syndrome
But the more important conclusion is less obvious, which is that nearly everyone can benefit from the use of software that doesn’t require explicit file system management at all.
Instead of putting music files into a folder, all you had to do was put it into iTunes. Once you’ve added a song to iTunes you no longer need to worry about where it actually is in the file system
To argue that users should embrace manual file system management for every bit of data they wish to store is to argue against human nature.
This is not an argument that all software should abstract the file system by using the library paradigm, but just that more software should.
- John Gruber, The Untitled Document Syndrome -
It wasn’t long time ago, though I can’t remember very well. I’m talking about the day I realized I needed a better solution to store all my documents, as the Finder simply couldn’t do that anymore. Maybe it was some months ago, back in September / October, when I made up my mind and decided to give Yojimbo a second, in-depth spin. I fell in love with it, much like I did with Things from CulturedCode the second time I tested it. Guess there’s a second time for everything, right?
Problem is, I couldn’t use a hierarchical folder system anymore. With hundreds of documents to manage (be them .pdf files, spreadsheets, reports, casual but still important notes) and new pieces of text each day, the situation became unmanageable and yeah, Finder was slow and cluttered. So I started using Yojimbo which allowed me to enter any kind of information both manually and in other ways like the Quick Panel or the Drop Dock. Be sure to read my previous post about if you missed it. I still have Yojimbo in my dock, if you ask.
A few weeks ago I discovered and wrote about a new app, iDocument, which wants to be the ultimate solution for storing and retrieving documents on Mac OS X. iDocument lets you import documents, tag them, organize them in folders and smart collections.
If you work with your Mac, you need a powerful centralized solution to sort and archive files. In this post I and Cody will take a look at 4 different systems (Finder, Yojimbo, iDocument, Leap) and discuss how they actually work, in which cases. We’ll surely miss a lot of apps, but we wanted to focus on those we know and use on a regular base.
Enjoy.