Today’s PSA is brought to you by the letter L. What word starts with L? Linen! If you’ve ever used Google Docs, you’ll recall that the interface is wildly ugly. Well no longer. Using a plugin and a nice big Linen JPG, you can turn GDocs into a thing of beauty.
For whatever reason (probably for SEO), a Brisbane, Australia driving school is hosting this Linen background for GDocs and is offering a set of simple instructions to set it up. While I don’t want to ruin their Google juice, here’s how to do it:
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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
Mountain Lion, Apple’s latest version of OS X, is currently in beta. However, it is in a stable enough form that some journalists were given sneak peeks over the past few days. I’ve been working with the OS for most of the last week and weekend and, as a public service announcement, I’d like to state that while Mountain Lion is a compelling upgrade to OS X it’s not currently ready for prime time.
To be fair, the worst version of OS X I ever used was an early build of Lion. This build essentially rendered my machine useless and made me cry uncontrollably when my Time Machine backups failed. Never, as they say, again.
However, being a glutton for punishment, I gave Mountain Lion a spin. → Read More
With today’s reveal of the next version of OS X - OS X 10.8, aka Mountain Lion – Apple is more deeply integrating its iCloud service into the operating system itself. No longer will storing your documents in the cloud feel like an extra, value-added feature – it will feel like part of the OS itself. The cloud is just another drive, Apple seems to say, and saving to the cloud should look and feel no different than saving to your Documents folder or your Desktop.
The idea, of course, is not novel. It’s what startups like Dropbox are doing today: making a drive that appears like any other, but that can be accessed from any machine. While on the surface, it’s easy to dub iCloud “Apple’s version of Dropbox,” the truth is actually more complex: it’s about building a new computing paradigm. → Read More
At Apple’s WWDC event last June, Twitter made a new best friend: Apple. The tech giant announced that it would bake the social network into every single iOS device by way of the new iOS 5 software. This left many stunned for two reasons. 1) Apple rarely does such deep partnerships with third-parties. 2) It wasn’t Facebook.
It was all-around a huge win for Twitter. And a win for Apple as well, as it has been proven throughout the years that they don’t get social — a subject which was a topic of debate again yesterday coincidentally. Apple needs to build it’s own social network, Dan Frommer argued! No, they need to get their social platform right, argued TechCrunch editor Eric Eldon. Well, today they’re taking a big step: by doubling down on Twitter. → Read More
Confirmed: Apple can still surprise.
On July 20 of last year, Apple began a journey. With OS X Lion (aka OS X 10.7), the company started taking some of what they had learned from iOS, and the iPad specifically, and putting it in their more mature OS. Today, that transition continues with OS X Mountain Lion.
Yes, Apple is already ready to show off the next version of OS X — technically 10.8 — just seven months after the last version was released. → Read More
First, let me apologize for the headline. And now, the news. It appears that Mac OS X Lion isn’t exactly taking the Mac world by storm: after brisk initial sales following the July 20 release of 10.7, growth seems to have stagnated.
This is based on visitor tracking by analytics firm Chitika, whose latest numbers indicate that Lion is still a long way from catching up to Snow Leopard and even plain old Leopard, which despite being several years old is still making up a fifth of their Mac visitors. Lion? Stalled at 16%, up just 2% from the end of September. It’s a reverse hockey stick. → Read More
Apple CEO Tim Cook just announced that Apple sold six million copies of Lion, the company’s latest operating system. Apple released Lion on July 20, adding new iOS-like features to the OS operating system and improving system performance. → Read More
I’ve been using a pretty cool app of late called Fantastical. It’s OS X-only but I suspect the Windows crowd would get a kick out of it as well.
Basically it’s a natural language calendar app. You can paste (nearly) anything into its little window and it will automagically create an event. “Dinner with Joe at 5pm on Thursday” works just as you would imagine it would and unless today is Thursday, Fantastical will figure things out. It fumbles sometimes with word order and ends up setting all day lunches with “Tuesday” but most of the time that’s reparable with a few keystrokes. → Read More
Lion is here — and as MG summed up in just 3,000 words, it’s great.
No operating system is perfect, though. At least, not for everyone, and especially not right out of the (non-existent) box. Looking to make your Lion experience that much better, we’ve bundled together a bevy of tips and tricks that you really ought to have ready on your first trip into the new OS. → Read More
Although you won’t find any Apple users who will admit it, Macs do occasionally crash and fail, sometimes in spectacular ways. In my experience, while they have far fewer visible errors, the ones that users end up seeing are more serious than the scattered Windows annoyances and driver issues. But by and large, recovery and error management haven’t needed to be among Apple’s marquee features.
Graceful failure is a merit, but not something you want listed next to Mission Control and AirDrop.
So it’s no surprise that an interesting little feature built into Lion is receiving next to no promotion — though Apple is far from hiding it. The improved recovery console is a nice feature, but it’s the Internet Recovery thing I’m more interested in. → Read More
If all goes according to rumored plan, OS X Lion should hit stores by July 14 alongside new hardware to run the new OS. I’ve played with the Gold Master over the weekend and I’m pleased to report it is stable and a unique version of OS X, more complete than other, iterative updates like Snow Leopard. I won’t bore you with all the new stuff under the hood but let’s look at a few of the cool new features MacLovers will soon be using on a daily basis. → Read More
That didn’t take long. iPhone Dev Team just released a 4.3.3 jailbreak for the following devices:
iPhone3GS
iPhone4 (GSM)
iPod touch 3G
iPod touch 4G
iPad1
AppleTV2G (v4.3 8F202)
Meet Witness. Witness is the little Mac app that turns iSight into a motion-activated security camera. If an intrusion is detected, Witness will send instant alerts to users along with videos and stills to their iPhone or iPad. → Read More
Five days ago, we reported that Apple was gearing up to release a new build of the OS X Lion Developer Preview. Sure enough, that’s exactly what they did today as build 11A419 has been seeded to developers.
This matters for a couple of reasons. First, it’s the first update to the OS X Lion preview which many developers complained was fairly buggy. Despite the bugs, the preview went a month without any updates. More importantly, this is the build that Apple is considering to be a “GM1″ revision internally, we hear. And yes, it’s said to be much more stable and complete than the previous build. → Read More
It has been one month since Apple unveiled a developer preview of their latest operating system, OS X Lion. And while the initial deployment was a bit rocky, Apple appears to have worked through their initial Mac App Store distribution issues. And now another update looms — and it’s potentially a big one.
Specifically, Apple is gearing up to deploy an OS X Lion update to developers that they may be classifying as the “GM1″ release, we’ve heard. “GM” or “Golden Master” is a title reserved for software that is complete. But from what we’ve heard, this is only the initial Golden Master candidate. In other words, don’t get too excited just yet. → 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 February of 2007, 83.24 percent of users visiting TechCrunch did so from a Windows machine. One year later, in February 2008, the stranglehold remained firm at 80.44 percent. In February 2009, the number was at 74.04 percent. Last year, it was 61.59 percent. And this year? The number of people visiting our site from Windows machines dipped to 53.84 percent.
The writing is on the wall.
Look at those numbers again for a second. In four years, Windows share among TechCrunch readers has fallen 30 percentage points. That’s incredible. → Read More
It has now been at least a year since I last used the optical drive on any of my computers. And now I’m really starting to believe I never will again. Which I love.
Last October, I noted that I was ready for the launch of the new MacBook Airs because I realized I had never once used the optical drive on my MacBook Pro. It was simply a huge waste of space. And since I’ve switched over to the Air — the best computer I’ve ever owned — I have zero doubt that this optical drive-free experience will soon be the reality for all Mac computing. And now it’s clear that OS X Lion will be the final ingredient needed. → Read More
If there was any doubt in peoples’ minds that Apple intends to kill off the optical disc, it was put to rest today. This morning’s unveiling of the OS X Lion Developer Preview came with the news that it would only be available one way: through the Mac App Store. And while Apple wouldn’t say if they intended to release the final version of Lion to consumers this summer in the same way, it’s pretty clear that they’re going to do just that.
But this important push into the post-optical disc era hasn’t exactly been smooth sailing for all so far. → Read More
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