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Posts tagged with "os x"

Twitterrific 4 for Mac: A Sneak Peek

As promised last weekend on Twitter, the Iconfactory has just posted the very first sneak peek of Twitterrific 4.0 for Mac, a major new version of the popular Twitter client.

There’s no release date or pricing info yet, but the app will require Snow Leopard due to some of its new features and, from the looks of it, it appears that Twitterrific for iOS highly inspired the development of this new version.

Back to the Mac, indeed.

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“Mac Developers Are Laughing at the Mac App Store Guidelines”→

“Mac Developers Are Laughing at the Mac App Store Guidelines”

Jonathan Rentzsch:

Studying the details of Apple’s current implementation, it becomes clear Apple crafted the Mac App Store policies primarily with its own interests in mind, not of its customers and certainly not its developers.

My fellow Mac developers are laughing at the Mac App Store guidelines. They’re reporting that apps they’ve been shipping for years — a number of them Apple Design Award-winning — would be rejected from the Mac App Store. These are proven apps, beloved by their users. The current guidelines are clearly out-of-touch.

Maybe not just its own interests in mind, but there’s no doubt Apple has something to fix here. Does the 90-day timeframe sound like a “let’s gather feedback before the thing goes live” strategy to anyone else? How long before revised guidelines?

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Mac App Store: What Do Developers Think?

The announcement of the Mac App Store caused mixed reactions between developers and users alike. We don’t know if the App Store will work on the Mac platform, where we’re all used to software licenses, developer websites and no restrictions, but it’s very likely that Apple will nail this one once again.

MacStories polled a few developers about the subject, and I collected some thoughts from around the blogs of other devs. Here’s what they think of Apple’s latest plan for the Mac. Read more

Is Apple’s Lion a Lion?

Yesterday Apple gave us a sneak peek at some features coming in the next major iteration of OS X, Lion. For those who missed it, Lion will be available starting next summer, and more previews will likely be shown in January (when the Mac App Store will open), at the WWDC ‘11 or, perhaps, at another Lion-focused event. We don’t know yet.

Yesterday’s preview, however, was built around a simple concept: Apple brought OS X to the iPhone and iPad and created a new mobile operating system called iOS from it; now the best features experimented on those devices are coming back to where it all started, the Mac. Read more

Apple in Business Land→

Apple in Business Land

Rex Hammock:

I’ve watched closely (as both a customer and writer) as Apple has made attempts to better serve small business and corporate customers.

But I have a hard time believing Steve Jobs has ever obsessed over the B2B marketplace the way he’s obsessed over the materials that go into the glass staircases of major Apple Stores.

Perhaps because he has (in my opinion, brilliantly) focused the company’s products so much on great design that delights consumers, Apple’s varsity squad of product designers may have lacked the bandwidth to apply such attention to designing products that display such a deep understanding of how businesses use technology.

I just wonder if Jonathan Ive has ever sat in on a meeting where a discussion was taking place on how small business managers want to share contacts and calendars among their employees, for instance?

It’d be nice to see an update to this tomorrow, but I think the whole event will be focused on “OS X Lion Sneak Peek”.  Just for the sake of comparison, this is how Apple promotes the upcoming enterprise features in iOS 4.2 for iPad, business apps, iPhone in business and profiles.

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OS X Releases Of The Day: Acorn Beta Adds WebP Support, Cyberduck 3.7

Two interesting updates for two popular OS X applications: Acorn image editor and Cyberduck FTP client got lots of new features and bug fixes worth mentioning.

The latest Acorn beta added support for Google’s WebP image format, meaning that you can now open WebP images inside the app and export them using the Web Export menu. Acorn beta also introduces Quartz Composer compositions as filters, and the very popular tilt-shift effect.

As for Cyberduck, it gets the ability to upload files with a temporary name and rename them after transfer is complete, import Transmit favorites (nice) and the possibility to copy files between browser windows in different sessions.

If you’re willing to know everything about these two new releases, check out the full changelogs below. Read more

Mac OS 10.7 Dreams→

Mac OS 10.7 Dreams

Ben Brooks shares some interesting points:

Updated Finder -  Any Mac power user will tell you, Finder is showing its age. Tabs are the biggest wish for most people. I would settle for better network drive support, for both WebDAV servers and network shares.

Yojimbo / DEVONthink type App - File folders are so 1999, today we just like to search or see things organized for us. This would be in addition to Finder, giving us a place to store and search all of our files, view and edit them – think iTunes for the rest of your crap.

Saving No More - I just feel greedy at this point, but one of my favorite features of Notational Velocity is that I don’t have to worry about hitting save. All that is done for me and backed up – saving needs to be a thing of the past. I can just imagine the commercials comparing saving on a Mac versus saving on a PC.

The Finder needs better WebDAV support (I’m forced to use Transmit for that, which is a great app anyway) and system-wide autosave would be great, even if ForeverSave has been doing that (kind of) for quite some time now.

The Yojimbo / DEVONthink app, though? I’m sold. I was a Yojimbo user until December of last year, then I switched to DEVONthink (Pro Office version) and never looked back. Even if DEVONthink’s approach is more “professional” (I feel bad for using this term, but that’s it) and complex than Yojimbo’s, I get Ben’s point here: a way for Mac users to throw anything to the Finder and see it properly organized, saved, tagged - whatever organization system you prefer - without any additional effort. That’s what these apps do: they can receive any kind of data easily and store stuff for as long as you need. It’s just a giant bucket where you throw items in, but it’s a well organized bucket.

Now imagine that app, with desktop sync capabilities, on iOS.

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