Posts tagged with "mac"

Thomas Brand On The History of Camino→

Thomas Brand On The History of Camino

Thomas Brand has published a detailed overview of Camino’s timeline and unfortunate demise earlier this year due to Mozilla’s decision to officially discontinue Gecko embedding, which Camino uses. For those not familiar with it, Camino was the advanced browser in the early days of OS X when Safari wasn’t out yet and IE was still the only decent choice for Mac users.

Even though I still have Camino installed on my computer it fails to qualify as a reliable alternative browser less than two months since its last update. I am saddened that Camino must die in the effort to save Firefox, a browser that has gotten just a bloated as the Netscape Suite it once replaced. By losing Camino we will not only see the end of a browser that once made the Mac great, but the end of development community focused solely on the advancement of a Macintosh only application.

As written on Camino’s blog back in March, the future beyond version 2.1 (current release) is “unclear”.

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ZeroNinetyNine’s Second Mac App Store 24-Hour “Bundle”

ZeroNinetyNine had great success with its first bundle, which we covered last month. In the first ZeroNinetyNine deal, 11 apps from 8 independent developers participated. During the 24 hours of December 1, 2011, every app in ZeroNinetyNine received a place in the Top 20 of Paid Apps in US Mac App Store, and also conquered the tops of Mac App Stores in France, Russia, China, Canada, UK - all over the world. Partners in ZeroNinetyNine sold more than 100,000 apps in just 24 hours! These are very good numbers and now they are trying to do better by offering a second “bundle.”

The second ZeroNinetyNine 24-hour “bundle” includes 12 apps for 99¢ before they return back to their everyday prices. Since the Mac App Store doesn’t allow apps to be bundled and sold together, ZeroNinetyNine has found a unique way to do so by designing a well-designed holding page with all the applications in their “bundle”. Several independent developers have simultaneously dropped the price of their apps for one day sale on Mac App Store for just 99¢ per app.

The apps that are included in this one-day 99¢ sale are:

Some of the apps retail for as much as $34.99.

If you have a few dollars sitting around or some iTunes credit left over from the holidays, check out these killer deals. Also, be sure to sign up on the ZeroNinetyNine page to be notified when the next deal will be coming out.

Sonora Public Beta Now Available

Just a few hours ago I listed Sonora, a new music player for OS X, among the new Mac apps to watch in 2012. I did not know Sonora was ready for the public beta, which is now available for everyone.

Being a beta, don’t expect the app to not crash sometimes, display strange errors, and lack the amount of polish you’d expect from a finished product. Still, some functionalities exclusive to Sonora have already been implemented and they’re working: full-screen mode for Lion, built-in Last.fm scrobbling, iTunes importing, music and queue controls from the top bar. I particularly appreciate the design of the icons in the navigation bar, which is very iOS-like for some reason (same for the popover controls). Songs you add to Sonora’s queue can be rearranged, or you can clear the queue entirely. The app supports Growl notifications and album artwork can be embedded in the song metadata.

That’s it for the first public beta of Sonora. Clearly we still don’t have an iTunes competitor here – the road ahead is very long when you consider the amount of stuff you can do with iTunes – but Sonora 0.6 shows some interesting ideas with a lot of potential. We’ll be following the development of this app in the next months very closely.

Download Sonora’s first public beta here.