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Posts tagged with "os x"

Thunderbolt Firmware Update Released

A few minutes ago Apple released Thunderbolt Firmware Update through its downloads website and the desktop Software Update control panel, targeting all machines running the recently introduced Thunderbolt I/O connectivity standards. Until today, Apple has released new MacBook Pros and iMacs featuring the Thunderbolt technology from Intel. The update brings “performance and stability fixes”.

This update provides Thunderbolt performance and stability fixes.

When your computer restarts a gray screen will appear with a status bar to indicate the progress of the update.

Do not disturb or shut off the power on your computer during this update.

Apple’s release notes don’t specifically mention the targeted machines so we assume it applies to all 2011 Macs with at least a Thunderbolt port. The new MacBook Airs rumored to be getting a Sandy Bridge and Thunderbolt update later this month or in July will likely come with these fixes pre-installed, so if you need to download the patch now go ahead and pull the 486 KB package from Apple’s website.

Mac OS X 10.6.8 Now Available

Apple has just released a new version of Mac OS X Snow Leopard, reaching version 10.6.8. The update is available now in the Software Update control panel, or Apple’s website. Among various bug fixes including issues with Preview and the well-known Mac Defender malware, 10.6.8 “enhances” the Mac App Store to get it ready for Lion in July.

Changelog:

  • Enhance the Mac App Store to get your Mac ready to upgrade to Mac OS X Lion
  • Resolve an issue that may cause Preview to unexpectedly quit
  • Improve support for IPv6
  • Improve VPN reliability
  • Identify and remove known variants of Mac Defender

Below are the direct links for all the updates (including Security) Apple released today:

OS X Lion Concept: iMessage App

Ever since Apple unveiled iMessage for iOS 5, its new universal messaging protocol to send free text messages, videos and pictures to other iOS users, many have wondered whether the new app would be integrated with the Mac as well, perhaps in a new version of iChat. iMessage for iOS brings some new functionalities like delivery and read receipts in real-time, as well as sync and Messages.app integration, but it resembles the desktop iChat in the way it visualizes new messages, or lets you see when a person is typing. With the upcoming iCloud integration in OS X Lion, launching this Fall and available right now to developers for testing as a beta add-on, there is the possibility Apple will release a standalone iMessage app for Mac in the Mac App Store once iCloud is available for all. Just like they did with FaceTime, the app could be sold for $0.99 in the Store, and pre-installed by default on new systems.

Based on this kind of speculation, designer Jan-Michael Cart, creator of other iOS 5 concepts we posted ahead of WWDC, has come up with an interesting idea for iMessage on OS X Lion. The messaging protocol could have its own desktop app powered by real-time notifications, bounce on the Dock upon receiving new messages, and have a Mail-like toolbar for composing new messages and search among existing ones. We imagine having a desktop iMessage app could mean users would be able to rely on system-wide integration with Services to send any text to iMessage, as well as start a new FaceTime session from a contact in iMessage or the Address Book.

The concept video is interesting and we have embedded it after the break. iMessages are currently enabled in the iOS 5 betas for iPhone, iPod touch and iPad, but some code strings found in the latest Lion developer preview suggest Apple might be working on a desktop counterpart to launch later this year.
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Macs Now Account For 11% Of Corporate Computers, Windows PCs Still Dominate With 87%

A new report out today shows that whilst Microsoft may still completely dominate the enterprise landscape in terms of desktop computers, Apple is still making steady progress in the market. According to market research by Forrester, the share of Mac OS X in corporate USA has climbed from 9.1% in April 2010 to 11% in March this year.

Ben Gray, co-author of the report, attributed the increase in Mac OS X’s share of the market because of a shift towards “BYO [bring your own] device programs” that workers were pushing for - workers are now expecting Mac and iOS support. Such “consumerization” of the enterprise has been driven by the popularity of the iPad which has shown some significant penetration in the enterprise market - driven by workers wanting to bringing their own iPad into work.

Nonetheless, as Macworld notes, “Microsoft remains a hegemony in the enterprise – 86.7% of all corporate computers run one of its operating system”.  Windows XP, over a decade old, remains the dominate OS in the enterprise with 59.9% of the market, Windows 7 is next with roughly 21% and then Vista with just 6.2%.

[Via Macworld]

My 10 Favorite Apps To Share Content Between iOS and OS X

Let’s face it, if you’re a Mac user who also happens to have an iPhone, iPad, or both, chances are you’ve been there before: with two devices in hand and a computer on your desk, how do you share stuff between them? What are the apps that enable you to share content across different devices, simultaneously and perhaps over the Internet as well?

In this post I’ve collected 10 iOS apps that are making my workflow more streamlined and connected on a daily basis, but before I delve deeper into the list I think I should define the “content” from this page’s title and the kind of “stuff” I want (and need) to share. With Lion approaching its final release in July and iCloud set to deliver a state-of-the-art OTA experience for users and developers alike, it seems like Apple has taken the necessary steps to free iOS devices from the need of a cable, building new features aimed at easing the process of sharing content between different machines and devices. Take Lion as an example: AirDrop, a new menu baked into the Finder, will allow Mac users to easily share files and documents with computers (and thus friends) nearby, over a WiFi network. Or, perhaps more importantly, the new iCloud APIs with instant push and cross-platform sync will enable developers to build better applications that take advantage of the cloud to keep their data synced and always up to date with the most recent changes. Whilst services and apps have been syncing content through their own backends for years, it’s the promise of a free iCloud infrastructure from Apple that’s convincing developers to ditch third-party solutions like Dropbox to rewrite their software with iCloud in mind. We’ll see the first result in September.

So what’s the content to share? What’s the stuff I find myself needing to share across devices every day? Links, photos, screenshots, PDFs, notes – you name it: as OS X and iOS become more intertwined on each software update, data needs to easily get out from one app to another. And in spite of an iCloud on the horizon, there hasn’t been a universal solution to share anything between a Mac and an iPhone.

In this article, I take a look at 10 iOS apps and services with some sort of Mac counterparts that have helped me over the past months in getting data out of my iPad and iPhone, and onto my MacBook Pro, iMac, and the cloud in general. Read more

1Password for Mac Adds OS X Lion Support

1Password for Mac, the must-have utility we at MacStories use on a daily basis to manage and organize our web logins, credit card data and anything else that can go into AgileBits’ secure and encrypted database, was updated a few minutes ago to include support for OS X Lion and Mozilla’s latest desktop browser, Firefox 5. For those who have been keeping an eye on 1Password’s releases, you might have noticed the developers put great effort into building an amazing Google Chrome extension that allows you to easily access your web logins, identities, or generate passwords for new accounts. The Google Chrome extension was far superior to the Safari 4 counterpart, which was stuck on old interface schemes with less features and a clunky menu to fill web fields and account credentials. 1Password 3.6 finally brings the same extension seen on Chrome to Safari 5.1 on Lion and, after a quick test, I can say the extension looks even better than Chrome’s version as it’s powered by a neat animation for opening / closing. Overall, the new 1Password extension on Lion looks great, it’s fast and, from what I’ve seen so far, very stable when browsing around, filling logins and generating new passwords.

1Password 3.6 also adds support for apps created with Fluid 1.0, as well as Firefox 5. As AgileBits have added support for OS X 10.7 and Mozilla’s new browsers, the developers recommend people willing to use Leopard or older versions of Firefox to stay on 1Password 3.5.9. Support for new OSes and browsers aside, 1Password 3.6 is filled with welcome minor changes and bug fixes: whilst you can see the full list when upgrading from 3.5.9 to 3.6 in the built-in changelog screen, let me highlight that the new 1Password supports the latest Dropbox file configuration for sync, and it brings improved backups to detect problems with the app’s backup folder. On top of that, Lion-specific improvements will make the app a joy to use for those who have already made the jump on Apple’s new big cat.

1Password is a priceless utility that at $39.99 (Mac version) will change the way you manage, save, organize and keep data safe on your computers. The Mac app can be downloaded here, and you can find iOS counterparts for iPhone and iPad (with sync) here, here, and here.

CleanShot Removes The Clutter From Your Mac Screenshots

How many times have you found yourself taking a screenshot of your Mac, only to realize that all that clutter on your desktop won’t make any good once the picture goes online, straight to Twitter or any other service where people can take a peek at your icons and apps? Let’s be clear about this: if you’re one of those people who care about the elegance and minimalism of your Mac desktop, being able to take perfect screenshots is nice; but you’re a blogger and you write about apps on a daily basis, you need to be able to take clear, simple screenshots that put the focus on the app, rather than those PDF documents and folders sitting behind the app’s main window. For this very reason, developer Stefan Fuerst at Media Atelier has created CleanShot, a $4.99 Mac utility that will help you grab better screenshots without the clutter of all your open apps, documents, and desktop folders.

CleanShot basically allows you to take a screenshot of your default desktop at different resolutions, with one app at the time in the foregound if you want. Once launched, CleanShot pops up as an overlay to your current desktop setup, removing all the apps from your view, focusing on the one you were working on. In addition to displaying one app and the default OS X background, CleanShot removes all desktop folders and icons, strips away content from the menubar and lets you even choose what default icons to display up there, such as AirPort, battery and Spotlight. In this way, you’ll be able to create “default” screenshots that don’t come with your personal stuff like documents, apps, and so forth.

As for the resolutions available in CleanShot, you can tweak them in the settings, but by default the app comes with standard ones like 1024x768, 1280x800, as well as the one currently set on your machine. In the settings, you can choose a custom desktop background; upon exporting, CleanShot will allow you to choose between a standard file saving menu, or a “copy to clipboard” action.

At $4.99 on the Mac App Store, CleanShot is an indispensable tool for bloggers, and a useful addition for those users constantly willing to take perfect screenshots without any clutter. Give it a try.

Apple Details Lion Upgrade For Education and Business

TUAW reports an Apple Sales document released today details the upgrade process for business and education customers willing to purchase OS X Lion when it comes out in July. Apple has already outlined the Lion Up-to-Date program, which will allow customers who have purchased a Mac from Apple or authorized reseller to get the new OS for free, by filing a request within 30 days of Lion’s release. According to the Sales document, the upgrade path for business customers will be the following: by calling 1-800-854-3680 or using the Business Store, a minimum purchase of 20 license will cost customers $29.99 per license. With the same minimum purchase of 20 licenses, Apple is offering “maintenance contracts” (which will ensure a free upgrade to the next version of OS X) at $49.99 per license.

As for education, schools will get Lion at $39.99 per license with a minimum order of 25 licenses as part of the Apple Software Collection package, which includes OS X, iLife and iWork. TUAW also explains other licensing and deployment options:

Existing Volume License, Maintenance, and Apple Education Licensing Program customers will receive one redemption code for each contract that can be used to download Lion from the Mac App Store. That single copy of the Install Mac OS X Lion application is used to install Lion on other Mac systems at the school or business.

Once the install app has been downloaded, administrators just copy it to the target systems and run the installer. Administrators can use the System Image Utility in OS X Lion Server to build NetInstall (link to PDF) or NetRestore images to assist in performing mass deployments.

Apple has announced OS X Lion will come out in July at $29 exclusively on the Mac App Store as digital download. More details on the upgrade process and re-installation options due to the lack of physical media will likely be posted soon after the launch of the OS.

Send2Mac: An Easy Way To Send Webpages To A Mac Browser

Over the past few weeks I’ve mentioned on Twitter and in a couple of articles a service I’ve started using on my Macs and iOS devices, a simple tool that has contributed to making the process of sending webpages to remote computers incredibly easy. Send2Mac, a free service by developer Bastian Woelfle, installs as an app on your Mac and a bookmarklet in your browser to enable you to instantly send a webpage from any device or computer, to another Mac. It doesn’t matter where the target Mac is, or what kind of Internet connection you’re using on your iPhone, iPad, or office PC: as long as you can run a web browser and the remote Mac is connected to the Internet, the webpage will magically open in a few seconds.

In the past months, I’ve actually been busy trying to find the best way to remotely send webpages from a device to another. First, I came up with a Dropbox tweak to email links to myself, and watch them open in my desktop browser. Then I stumbled upon Push Browser, an iOS app and Chrome extension that enables you to send webpages back and forth between devices and desktop computers. I love Push Browser, but it’s got one major downside: on a Mac, it’s limited to Google Chrome, and I haven’t heard back from the developer about a possible Safari or system-wide integration. That’s why I thought of giving Send2Mac a try: rather than having a dedicated extension for each browser, this app directly plugs into a Mac’s default browser, whatever it is, and can send webpages to it. Simple. On the other end, Send2Mac generates a unique bookmarklet for each of your target machines, based on an API key thet you’re given randomly every time you visit send2mac.com to set up a new computer.

It works like this: I have two Macs, and both of them run the Send2Mac utility in the background. My MacBook Pro and iMac, however, have been assigned different API keys: they’re different, because they correspond to two different bookmarklets that let me send webpages from my iOS devices – or other computers I might happen to have. So when I’m on my iPhone and I find a webpage I’d like to check out later on my iMac, I hit the “Send2iMac” bookmarklet and it goes straight to the iMac, in a couple of seconds. If I want the page to open on my MacBook Pro, I hit the bookmarklet for that computer. If I want the page to open on my iMac, but while running Lion, I have another bookmarklet. It’s really simple: each target machine and OS has its own key and bookmarklet. No menus to navigate and no interface, you hit a button and the webpage travels from a browser to another.

I’d pay for Send2Mac if it were a premium service, but it’s surprisingly free and “might be really buggy”, as the developer writes on the app’s website. In my tests, I’ve found Send2Mac to work reliably as it’s even capable of launching a closed browser with the new webpage I sent because it’s a process that runs in the background all the time, alongside the default browser of your Mac. You can configure Send2Mac on iOS and Mac browsers, send webpages from Mac to Mac, iOS to Mac and even Windows to Mac as long as you have the bookmarklet installed.

You can start using Send2Mac by heading over here with your device, and generating a new API key for your Mac.