Posts tagged with "mac"

The (Big) Numbers Apple Touted At Their iPhone Event

At yesterday’s iPhone event, Tim Cook took to the stage and as he has done at previous events, he gave the audience an overview of Apple’s business. He ran through various statistics of how the iPhone, iPad, Mac and other aspects of Apple’s business are doing. The numbers he gave were clearly chosen very carefully to shine the best possible light on Apple and were an important premise to the first Apple keynote in which he presides as CEO. But regardless of how carefully chosen, its clear that Apple is doing exceptionally well, virtually across its entire business.

We’ve reviewed the keynote and laid out all the key statistics he showed off into each of Apple’s product categories, so make sure to jump the break to view them all.

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Growl 1.3 Now On The Mac App Store: $1.99, Completely Rewritten


Back in July, we reported the next version of Growl, a popular notification system for OS X, would be available exclusively on the Mac App Store as a paid app. The reason behind the choice to go Mac App Store-only at $1.99 was to provide users with an app up-to-date with Apple’s technologies and standards for software that can released on the Mac App Store. As we noted in our article, that meant the Growl team had to rewrite the app completely, and start contacting third-party developers – over the years, Growl has generated its own ecosystem of apps compatible with desktop notifications – to make sure their software would be compatible with Growl 1.3.

The new Growl is now available on the Mac App Store at $1.99. While we’ll have a detailed, in-depth review of the app later this week, it’s worth noting now that Growl has indeed made the transition to paid app, but it’s also sporting a whole new architecture, UI, notification list, and themes.

Growl 1.3 comes in a new app form that has a menubar icon to activate/pause notifications, and a new Preferences window to see notification history, supported apps, configure themes, and more. History can be customized to show only a certain amount of recent items and days, and you can even search past notifications and events. The new Growl comes with almost 20 themes pre-installed, and you can style an application’s overlay notifications (the ones that Growl will briefly display on screen) in Growl’s Preferences. You can also create and install your own themes with basic CSS/XHTML/Javascript language.

One of the biggest new features of Growl 1.3 is the Rollup window – from a first look, it appears to be Growl’s unofficial response to Apple’s Notification Center for iOS. Because Growl keeps working even while you’re away from your computer, the Rollup window will collect the notifications you’ve missed in a single place, allowing you to review them later. There’s also a new Network option that enables you to forward notifications to another Mac, or to receive them from another computer running Growl.

Other features mention in the App Store’s description:

  • Speech display for hearing your notifications.
  • Send Growl notifications from Cocoa, AppleScript, or over the network.
  • Networking so that two or more Macs can forward notifications to each other.
  • Can work with the iPhone and iPad via Prowl.

Growl 1.3 is available on the Mac App Store at $1.99. Make sure to check out the app’s new website and Screenshots page, whilst Developers can visit this links to learn more about Growl 1.3 and its technical changes. Looks for a full review of Growl 1.3 on MacStories soon.

Gradient for Mac Public Beta: Creating Simple CSS Gradients

Gradient, made by JUMPZERO, is a simple yet powerful Mac OS X app that lets you easily create CSS gradients by getting rid of the clumsiness of vendor prefixes. The user interface is beautiful and works wonderfully. Gradient is in open beta for any designer that wants to help test the app out or see what Gradient will be able to do.  In Gradient, you can pick/select/input the colors and then define which type of gradient you’re looking for; click the Copy button near the bottom of the application window and paste the generated code into your favorite editor.

Gradient is customizeable as to which browser needs support by opening the preference pane and activating the radio buttons for the browsers you are going to support. No need for Internet Explorer? Simply uncheck the button. Gradient not only supports linear gradients but radial as well, just move the slider over to the type you need. The gradients’ directions can be altered by the directional arrows for linear and by using the radial-center-matrix-button for radial gradients. Before you decide to copy the CSS, you can preview the code in-app by clicking the CSS button. A hovering code box pops up and displays your code all within Gradient.

Gradient lives in your dock, menubar, or whatever mix you want. You can click the menu bar icon to activate the app and get to work. You can also click either of the two large top colors to bring up the OS X built-in color selector or click the magnifying glass icon to bring up the zoom tool to use on every pixel of your Mac’s screen.

Gradient feels very polished for only being in beta 2, and it looks like this will be a great tool for web designers looking for a simple yet intuitive way to create CSS gradients. Gradient’s development roadmap consists of adding HSL input & output, SASS syntax and multiple step gradients. No details on the app’s release date have been provided, but it should be soon according to the website.

Apple Releases iTunes 10.5 Beta 9

Apple has released a new beta of iTunes 10.5 to developers this afternoon, re-enabling some iTunes Match functionalities that have gone missing after the iCloud music library reset that several developers reported on Apple’s Dev Forums this week. iTunes 10.5 beta 9, available now, contains bug fixes and improvements over iTunes 10.5 beta 8, which was seeded earlier this month.

iTunes 10.5 is required to sync devices running iOS 5, and it brings a number of optimizations and improvements to iTunes’ code, which now runs natively at 64-bit on Lion. The first beta of iTunes 10.5 that implemented support for iTunes Match – Apple’s upcoming backup and scan & match service for music in the cloud – was seeded in late August.

iTunes Match will launch this Fall alongside iCloud, and it will be compatible with OS X and iOS 5 devices.

Control Multiple Macs with Teleport

I don’t always use two Macs simultaneously, but when I do, either there’s an Apple keynote or I’m trying new apps.

That’s how I stumbled upon Teleport, a free OS X utility, last year when I needed to switch back and forth between MacBooks during an Apple keynote, and why I decided to take the app for a spin again now that’s been updated for Lion. Teleport isn’t new to Mac users – in fact, it’s been around since Tiger and it’s probably the most popular app to control two Macs on the same local network. Now that version 1.1 is out with support for Lion and multi-touch gestures, I thought a fresh mention would be appropriate.

Teleport is extremely simple in what it does, although it uses some advanced technology to accomplish it: once installed in System Preferences, Teleport allows you to move your cursor (and keyboard) between multiple Macs. Teleport recognizes Macs “shared” on the same network, and through a system similar to Apple’s “hot corners” and based on Bonjour, it lets you “teleport” the mouse across screens.

Shared Macs that have Teleport activated in the settings will show up with their respective desktops in the app’s panel; you can arrange Macs placing them next to a main computer’s screen so you’ll remember how to switch displays, and configure options in a dedicated sub-menu. These options include handy things like “switch only if key is pressed” or “share pasteboard”. In this latest version of Teleport you can assign a keyboard shortcut to switch to another Mac, and Lion’s gestures are fully supported so you’ll be able to perform three-finger swipes and other Mission Control trickery on a Mac running Lion.

When controlling my iMac through my MacBook Air’s trackpad and keyboard, I was able to drag & drop files using Teleport, and have the contents of the pasteboard from my MacBook Air automatically synced on my iMac. There are several utilities to control how the pasteboard is shared and synced across local Macs, but Teleport manages to make the whole process “invisible” in a package that also happens to do much more.

For instance, Teleport supports encryption for file transfers, and you can read more about it on Abyssoft’s website and the ReadMe file included in the download. Long story short: you can generate your own certificate to activate encryption and it’s even easier if you already have a .Mac account. Also in Teleport’s settings, you can enable a menubar item, bezel, and sound notifications. The sound effect is particularly neat when you switch between Macs, as it really gives you the sense of something “travelling” between two spaces (Teleport also displays a quick animation at the side of your screen). Control requests are also handled well between shared Macs, with options to “ask me if host can be trusted”, “reject if host not already trusted” and “automatically accept”. If you leave Teleport always running, when a shared Mac comes back online a red indicator will flash on the previously configured side of the screen.

Version 1.1 includes a few more features like:

  • Host specific options: you can define the switching and sharing options per host, to have different settings.
  • Propagated options: the options you set for a host also apply when coming back from it.
  • Full multi-screens support: all screens of shared Macs are now visible, so pairing a secondary screen is much easier than before.

Teleport isn’t new, but it’s nice to see the app working well on Lion with gestures and multiple displays. If you happen to control multiple Macs every once in a while, give Teleport a try. It’s a free download (and make sure to donate if you really like it).