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A useful collection of tips for Messages for Mac by Amit Jain. I’ve always thought there wasn’t a way to add new lines or switch between conversations, so I’m glad Amit put together this post.
Unfortunately, these tips don’t fix Messages’ problems with memory usage and out-of-sync conversations – which I have been experiencing since the app’s first release.
We have many great deals for #MacStoriesDeals today. You can find us as @MacStoriesDeals on Twitter.
A beta release of my default podcast client for iOS. Here’s our review of Instacast 3 from last year.
Nate Boateng, who has been testing the app, posted a first look on his personal blog:
The Vemedio team once again worked with Marcelo Marfil to create a wonderful UI that is easy to understand, and looks beautiful. The interface has many of the same components as the iOS counterparts, but restructured nicely for the Mac. You have two main views; Subscriptions and Lists. Like on iOS, Subscriptions show your full list, while Lists are the equivalent of Playlists on the iPhone and iPad —showing your default and custom lists.
I look forward to playing more with the app. From what I’ve seen so far, it looks good, but, being a beta, sync reliability will need more time.
Briefs has a complicated history.
In September 2009, independent developer Rob Rhyne showed a demo of an iPhone prototyping tool called “Briefs” at the C4[3] conference in Chicago. The day after the presentation, Daring Fireball’s John Gruber called Briefs “impressive” in the way it hit “the sweet spot between simplicity and usefulness”. Back then, Briefs was often described as a “framework” for turning image-based app mockups into animated prototypes; in January 2010, Alex Vollmer published an in-depth review of the first version of Briefs, explaining how you could use Xcode, the command line, and image files to create a “brief” (the name of Briefs’ file format) that, once loaded on a device, would become an animated prototype. Briefs was meant to let developers better understand the “flow” of an app design before turning it into actual code; on the flip side, it also enabled the creation of more realistic mockups that wouldn’t necessarily ship as commercial products. An example of this was the popular “Services Menu for iPhone” concept posted by Chris Clark and created with Briefs.
In the summer of 2010, Briefs’ rejection spiral began. Apple first rejected Briefs for iPhone in June 2010, citing rule 3.3.2 of the App Store Review Guidelines, which said that no app could download interpreted code. Developer Rob Rhyne assumed that the aforementioned notion of an “app framework” could be the culprit, so he resubmitted the app. In August 2010, after attending WWDC 2010 and waiting three months for App Store approval, Rhyne decided to take a break from the project and he open-sourced the 1.0 code. “I still have some good ideas for the platform”, he wrote, “and I hope to get back to them in good time. However, it’s time to focus on other work and projects that can get into the App Store”.
In late March 2011, after nearly a year spent talking to Apple’s review team about Briefs and after another rejection, Rhyne formally announced Briefs would never come out on the App Store, recommending people to keep on using the open-source version on GitHub. For many, that appeared like the end of Briefs.
Three months ago, Rhyne sent me an email introducing a new beta of Briefs, this time with a dedicated “Author” app for Mac, plus iPhone and iPad “Players”. After two years of hiatus, I was skeptical: I thought that Briefs was destined to be perpetually relegated in the limbo of cool app ideas that never were.
Briefs, available today at $199, is an iOS prototyping tool for professionals. It comes with a standalone Mac app that allows you to build and test live prototypes, and a free Briefscase iOS app that lets you test prototypes directly on your iPhone and iPad.
After nearly two years, Twitter updated its official Mac client today. The app, which was presumed “dead” several times, has been updated to include Retina graphics, support for uploading photos, and 14 new languages. Twitter also says “more improvements” will come.
In a tweet, project lead Ben Sandofsky has announced he’s “taking a break” from Twitter for iOS to focus on the Mac version full-time.
One of the updated Mac App Store screenshots reads “Search in real time. Multitask. Express yourself.” – and I found the use of “multitasking” particularly interesting as many often suggested Twitter didn’t care about their Mac app because of the existence of Twitter.com.
The app doesn’t come with any additional changes, but I’m curious to know if Twitter will update it to include its latest additions to the iOS client, namely Cards, the Connect tab, and Discovery. As for OS X itself, it’d make sense for Twitter to consider Mountain Lion’s existing notifications (which currently open in the Twitter website). There’s no doubt Twitter for Mac has a quite a bit of catching up to do after two years.
In case you missed it, here’s my original review of Twitter for Mac from January 2011.
We have many great deals for #MacStoriesDeals today. You can find us as @MacStoriesDeals on Twitter.
We have many great deals for #MacStoriesDeals today. You can find us as @MacStoriesDeals on Twitter.
We have many great deals for #MacStoriesDeals today. You can find us as @MacStoriesDeals on Twitter.
Riccardo Mori:
Remember: hard drives die unexpectedly in most cases. (Solid State drives too, in case you’re wondering). It will happen when least you expect it. It will happen at an inconvenient time. You will be bothered. If you don’t have a backup of your stuff, you will also be panicking. Be prepared.
Wise words. Thomas Brand also had a good piece about Time Machine:
When I was a Mac Genius in 2004, Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard had yet to be released, people were not backing up. When a Mac came to the Bar that wasn’t booting, that was making strange clicking sounds, I got scared. The diagnosis was simple, the hard drive hard failed. The repair was straightforward, the hard drive had to be replaced. But someone would have to tell the customer that if there wasn’t a backup, they had lost everything. That someone was me.
I use SuperDuper, and run a backup on a weekly basis. SuperDuper helped me recover from hard drive crashes in the past, and it couldn’t be easier to use (because you don’t really use it, after all).
However, I’m not as anxious about backups as I used to be. With the move from local storage to cloud services, I feel comfortable knowing that my documents always exist somewhere. I see this every time I set up a fresh install of OS X: my documents, passwords, and photos are in Dropbox and Evernote, my music is on Rdio, my purchased apps are on the Mac App Store, and if they’re not, I have a license saved in my Gmail account. My movies and TV shows are on Plex and iTunes in the Cloud.
I’m not saying backups aren’t important. But I’m lucky enough to not having to work with large files that require local storage, and I know that restoring my Mac from scratch isn’t as painful as it would have been three years ago.
