I lean on Skype (and Macs) pretty heavily, so when a fairly substantial update for the VOIP/messaging service goes live, my ears tend to perk up. The new Skype 5.6 update has me especially tickled — it’s now available for folks of the Mac persuasion, and it thankfully packs a handful of bugfixes as well as a slew of new (and arguably overdue) features. → Read More
Retickr, a social news reader application for Mac OS X, received a big update today, as well as a new round of funding. The startup just closed its Series A of $1.5 million led by the Lamp Post Group, the investors who had previously put $150,000 into the company’s seed round.
The app, which combines RSS, social networking updates and news, is not your standard feed reader, but rather attempts to personalize your news reading experience the more you use the product. → Read More
Whenever you see those photos and stories of the crazy crowds at Apple stores in China, they seem to always be about the launch of a new iPhone. But if Apple has its way, soon those masses will be clamoring for something else as well: Mac computers.
Apple CEO Tim Cook, speaking earlier this week at the Goldman Sachs conference, noted that China accounted for $13 billion in sales last year for his company, and in that time, sales of Mac computers in China went up by 100 percent.
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Following up on our earlier coverage of Google’s Chrome browser for OS X Lion, it looks like development is moving along faster than expected. Specifically, swiping gesture support has already been fully implemented (in the right direction now too), and now a proper full screen mode has hit the Canary build of the browser as well.
Shortly after Lion’s launch a few weeks ago, we noted the Chrome was working, but it was a bit wonky. Because Lion changed some gestures by default, page swiping was broken. And Chrome’s own full screen mode wasn’t truly compatible with the functionality that’s built into Lion. No less than Chrome SVP Sundar Pichai said that Google was working on the issues, but noted that “it will take some time”. → Read More
Following Google’s stellar earnings last week, Apple has today announced their own earnings for their Q3 period. As expected, they’re good. Massively good.
Apple set several new records in terms of both revenues and sales. Most notably, Apple’s revenue was a staggering $28.57 billion — over $5 billion ahead of their (always low) guidance, and almost $4 billion ahead of the $24.92 billion that Wall Street had been expecting. What’s perhaps craziest about those numbers is that they’re a new record for the company, and it comes in a non-holiday quarter (typically the best for consumer electronics companies). Apple’s last holiday quarter earnings, Q1 2011, saw revenues of $26.7 billion.
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Right on the heels of releasing Skype 5.5 for Windows, featuring deep Facebook integration, the company has just rolled out a new version of its voice and video calling software solution for Mac.
Skype 5.2 for Mac is available now and is much more worth the download than the 5.1 updated version of the beta Mac software released back in November 2010.
With the new version, Skype for Mac users can not only do group video calls (which was already available in the beta product) but also share their screens during such calls. → Read More
Users of Google Chrome are probably aware of the three channels you can use depending on how cutting edge you want to be (and how much you mind bugs): Dev, Beta, Stable. But ever since last year, there’s actually been a fourth channel as well that’s less publicized: Canary. Sadly, it has been a Windows-only build until now. But it looks like that’s about to change.
Given the talk in the Chromium development forums, it looks as if Google is just about ready to push out a Canary build of Chrome for OS X as well. In fact, it looks to already be working, they just need to add a download link somewhere so that people can actually get it. And that seems likely to happen soon. → Read More
My love of Boxcar should be pretty clear at this point. Because I’m an information junkie, it’s probably the app I use the most on my iPhone/iPad besides Safari. And earlier this year, they brought the notification goodness to the web as well. Now they’re taking the next step: native Mac support.
Yes, Boxcar is here for the Mac. The app resides in your toolbar and when clicked shows a drop-down with all of your notifications as they come in in realtime. You can set it so a sound goes off with every new message and if you have Growl installed you can get a visual notification as well. → Read More
Back in October of last year, the day before it was formally unveiled, I wondered if OS X Lion would be the last of its kind. There were two main arguments: the big cat name choice and the colossal rise of iOS. With today’s news that OS X father Bertrand Serlet is leaving Apple after 14 years (and 22 years working with CEO Steve Jobs), the question has come roaring back to life.
Apple has been giving OS X big cat nicknames since 10.0 (though they started off as informal codenames at first). The forthcoming latest iteration, OS X 10.7, has been given the name “Lion”, the king of the jungle. But more important than the name is what’s inside Lion: iOS-like features. A transition is happening. Apple made this very clear during the initial preview of Lion. It’s OS X meets the iPad. → Read More
In a press release issued earlier this morning, Apple has announced that Bertrand Serlet, SVP of Mac Software Engineering, will be leaving the company.
Craig Federighi, Apple’s VP of Mac Software Engineering and Serlet’s long-time protégé, will assume his responsibilities and report directly to chief exec Steve Jobs.
Serlet originally joined Apple in 1997 and has played an instrumental role in the development of Mac OS X. → Read More
When Sparrow first launched in October of last year, I raved about its design and simplicity, but noted a few downsides. One was that it was Gmail-only. And even though it was Gmail-only, it lacked some of Gmail’s power features, such asPriority Inbox. With version 1.1, both of those issues have been addressed. And a whole slew of new features more has been added.
First and foremost, Sparrow now has general IMAP support. This means that on top of Gmail, you can use the client for all of your email. This means Yahoo, AOL, Mobile Me, anything. It even supports custom IMAP from services like Rackspace, Fastmail, Zimbra and others. → Read More
Earlier today my colleague MG Siegler wrote about EightBit, a new social game and included the above video, with plenty of demo screencasts of the EightBit app. Those screencasts were via Sound Stage 1.3 for Mac, a desktop app that in addition to recording HD desktop screencaps, hooks into an iOS simulator to take screen captures of iPhone app demos.
The app launched its new revamp yesterday and is currently the #1 developer tool in the Mac App Store, just breaking into the top 100 paid apps. Along with its basic functions, it allows you to customize backgrounds and directly upload your videos to YouTube. → Read More
Apple has officially launched its JointVenture support for small businesses. Support comes from the Apple store and will be provided by the Apple Genius Bar. The plan is only available to business customers when purchasing a Mac, but the $499 service will include training and support for up to five “systems,” which include iOS devices and Cinema Displays. → Read More
Back in October of last year, we wrote about Sparrow, a beautiful new mail client for the Mac. But whereas most mail clients are now web-based, Sparrow decided it was time to focus on making a great native email experience once again. And today that gamble appears to be paying off. Sparrow 1.0 has just launched in the Mac App Store and it has immediately shot to the number one paid app in many countries around the world, including the U.S.
And that feat says a lot for Sparrow, considering the app is $9.99. But it’s absolutely worth it. As we wrote in our initial review, Sparrow is a Gmail-centric client that brings a Tweetie for Mac (now Twitter for Mac) look and feel to email. At the time, it was still in beta, and we noted that there were some performance issues. But most of those have now been smoothed out and a whole range of new features have been added, including full support for Gmail labels. → Read More
During the earnings call following Apple’s blockbuster Q1 2011 results, a questions was asked about Apple’s Mac business as it relates to the iPad business. The iPad business, after all, is growing much faster (and just overtook the Apple portable computer business in terms of revenue). So is it affecting the Mac business by eating into it?
“Was there any cannibalization? Honestly, I don’t know for sure. But yes, I think there is some cannibalization,” Apple COO Tim Cook (who is the acting head of Apple while Steve Jobs is on medical leave) said in response. This echoes the thoughts Jobs had last quarter when asked the same basic question. “The iPad is clearly going to affect notebook computers,” Jobs said at the time. → Read More
At one point, a long, long time ago, Twitter was just a super simple website with some SMS integration. Then it became a slightly more robust website. Then it became an iPhone app. Then an Android app. Then an iPad app. Then a very robust website. BlackBerry, Windows Phone, etc. Now, as of today, there’s an official Mac desktop client, Twitter for Mac. Just about all of the bases now seem to be covered — except one: Windows.
Following the Twitter for Mac launch this morning, I asked the company if they had plans to do a Windows-based desktop version next. “For now, we only have the Mac version. We don’t have plans for a PC version — though we never say never,” a Twitter representative told me. In other words, eventually, yes there probably will be one. → Read More
The Mac App Store just launched this morning (it is a separate app store from what’s in iTunes that comes with the latest update to Mac OS X), and already the top free app is Twitter for Mac. I just installed it and started to play around with it. My first impression is meh.
Twitter for Mac is a stripped down version of the excellent Twitter for iPad app. Imagine if you took just the left-hand stream column in the Twitter for iPad app and launched that as a widget on your desktop. It feels like a half-hearted attempt to me. I’ll give it this: it is very fast, and it stays out of the way. But it is jarring because it doesn’t operate the same way that Twitter for iPad, or even Twitter.com operates. When you click on a Tweet with a link, it doesn’t expand into a second pane with the page opened underneath like the iPad app does. Instead it launches a new tab in your browser. That is a recipe for tab overload. Also, the only indication of when a Tweet is in reply to another Tweet is a too-subtle conversation balloon which appears when you hover over the Tweet. Finding the conversation view is not completely obvious. You have to doubleclick the Tweet or click on the conversation bubble. → Read More
Apple this morning announced that the Mac App Store is now open for business, as previously announced, with more than 1,000 free and paid apps.
The Mac App Store brings the iTunes App Store model straight to the Mac – it’s available for Snow Leopard users through Software Update as part of Mac OS X v10.6.6. → Read More
For a long time after the launch of the iPhone, despite thousands of apps for just about everything you can imagine, there was no killer RSS reader app. That changed when the 2.0 version of Reeder arrived earlier this year. It’s so good that I often prefer using it to reading feeds in Google Reader, long my go-to RSS reader. And the iPad version is even better. And now it’s about ready to launch in beta for the Mac.
While the blog Macstories did a preview back in September when the software was in early alpha, it has come a long way since then. And developer Silvio Rizzi has given me permission to do a short preview of what you can expect when the beta hits (sometime in the next couple of weeks, he hopes). I’ve been using the app for months now, and it’s finally feeling rock-solid. And it has completely replaced Google Reader for me. → Read More
It feels like we’re on the verge of something — “feel” being the keyword. Personal computing has more or less been the same for a few decades now. It’s the mouse, the keyboard, the monitor, and the machine. With things like notebook computers, this has been altered a bit, but it’s the same basic idea. But with the rise of smartphones and now tablets, the whole concept is finally starting evolve. And it looks like OS X Lion will be a key to this transition.
On stage last week during their Back to the Mac event, Apple gave a sneak peak at some of what they have in store for the next version of OS X. Of note, CEO Steve Jobs made it very clear that it has been born out of the concept of “OS X meets iPad”. In other words, OS X meets iOS, Apple’s touch-based operating system. → Read More
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