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Posts tagged with "mac"

Sleipnir Beta Comes To OS X with Group Tab Management and Sync

In the past months, I’ve reviewed several alternative browsers for iOS, and eventually settled with Grazing 2.0 because of its great multitouch support and push features that allow me to effortlessly and reliably share webpages across the Mac, iPhone and iPad through push notifications. However, amidst the plethora of shameless Safari copycats and relatively clever iPad browsers, there was Sleipnir, an iPhone app developed by Japanese studio Fenrir that impressed me with an innovative interface, and group tab management aimed at enhancing the iPhone’s browsing experience with the possibility of grouping tabs/websites by context through large thumbnail previews. Months later, Sleipnir came to the iPad, bringing an overhauled interface with bigger previews, and a new navigation system specifically built for the tablet. And now a beta of Sleipnir is available on the Mac, porting many of the functionalities seen on iOS to the desktop.

Sleipnir for Mac is in beta, and much is expected to change before the final release. The app is already compatible with OS X Lion, though it doesn’t support native full-screen mode in this first beta version, and some features like bookmark import are not working on my machine. In spite of the app being a little rough around the edges, Sleipnir for Mac is already pretty solid, and with free bookmark sync through the Fenrir Pass service it provides and interesting solution to use a non-default browser (like Safari) or more popular browsers like Google Chrome on iOS or the Mac.

On the Mac, Sleipnir displays tabs as mini-thumbnails in an address bar-free toolbar, which also contains a search field, a new tab button, and, optionally, your bookmarks. In spite of the lack of an address bar by default, Sleipnir lets you manually type in an address with the standard CMD+L shortcut (it will slide in the address bar), and it enables you to keep an eye on the currently opened webpage by visualizing its domain in the upper right corner (something that Mozilla has also been experimenting with in Firefox). The selected tab is constantly marked by an indicator that runs through the toolbar as you switch between pages, whilst tabs can be closed by clicking on the “x” button, or by using the CMD+W shortcut.

The biggest feature of Sleipnir is always been tab management through groups, and this has been ported to the Mac as well. Groups on the Mac are accessible from a window called “TiledTab”,  which displays large previews on a linen background, with groups in the bottom section of the page. You can move thumbnails between groups, search for tabs and rename groups, though I couldn’t find an option to delete existing groups or create new ones in this beta. Tab groups are useful if you usually keep a lot of tabs open and have been looking for ways to link related webpages together – furthermore, you can move between groups from the TiledTab UI with a two-finger swipe.

In the Preferences, Sleipnir lets you setup free bookmark sync using Fenrir Pass, and as we’ve seen before on the iPhone and iPad, Sleipnir’s implementation of bookmarks include things like an archive button, ribbons, and labels for deeper organization of saved webpages.

Sleipnir for Mac won’t replace the Safaris and Chromes of this world, but it’s got the feature set and ideas to become an alternative browser that you might want to use outside of your main browsing environment – say for research purposes (groups are great for that) or just to keep a different set of bookmarks always in sync between OS X and iOS.

You can download Sleipnir for Mac beta here, and get the universal iOS app for free on the App Store.

Launch Of Refreshed MacBook Air and Lion Boosts Recent Mac Sales Numbers

Last month’s release of new MacBook Airs and OS X Lion seems to have given Apple a significant boost in sales for the first month of the September quarter. The latest statistics from NPD reveal that year-over-year, Mac sales were up by 26% - to put that into context it means that Mac growth outpaces the growth of the PC market six-fold.

Piper Jaffray analyst Gene Munster believes that if that kind of growth continues Apple will easily make the estimates of 4.5 million total Mac sales for the quarter. He noted to his clients that the Lion, MacBook Air and Mac Mini launches in mid-July helped inflate Mac sales for the month. However, he did caution them that “these tailwinds will fade throughout the September quarter and year-over-year compares get slightly tougher in the last two months of the quarter”.

The rapid Mac sales growth has seen the platform outpace the growth of the PC market for 21 consecutive quarters and most believe that trend will continue for some time yet. Ben Reitzes of Barclays notes that they expect Apple to continue to gain share in Macs in the long term, despite the iPad’s presence. He adds that their “estimate for Mac growth of 18 percent year-over-year for Apple’s C3Q, may turn out to be conservative even though the global economy appears to be slowing quite a bit.”

[Via AllThingsD]

Evernote 3.0 for Mac Released: New Lion-only Features and Redesigned Interface

Following the release of a new Evernote app for iOS earlier today that brought a completely redesigned iPad interface, rich text editing and support for viewing shared notebooks, the Evernote team has followed up with the release of Evernote 3.0 for Mac, a major update to the desktop app that aims at enhancing the experience for new OS X Lion users, as well as introducing several fixes and improvements under the hood for both 10.7 and older OS X versions.

Like Evernote 4.1 for iPad, Evernote 3.0 for Mac brings a new design for the “all notes” view, which, however, unlike the tablet version is not really enabled “by default” and requires users an extra click to be accessed. The Evernote developers, in fact, have decided to unify the Mac and iOS experience by bringing the iPad’s interface back to the Mac only in full-screen mode, which is fully supported on Lion. As I previously teased in my MacBook Air review, the new Evernote for Mac doesn’t simply scale up content when entering full-screen mode (which can be activated from the upper right corner of the application’s window): rather, Evernote changes the standard List, Snippet or Thumbnail views to a new “full-screen Snippet” one that looks exactly like its iPad counterpart. Bigger snippets offer a broader view of text and images within notes, and they also provide a way to check out a note’s creation date and time. Full-screen mode in Evernote also features the same month headers seen on the iPad, it allows you to close them at any time, and it displays a note counter next to each month. Read more

Marked 1.2: Rewritten from the Ground Up

This one goes out to all the Markdown nerds out there (I’m one of them). Marked 1.2 is out, and it’s packed with tons of new features. The interface should be pretty familiar, although you have to like the new persistant word count that you can toggle on and off. CSS styles have been changed up a bit (if you’re not using your own — I used Horizon which is similar to the multi-column style), but asides from the tweaks on the surface of Marked, we have some usability improvements that should make everyone really happy.

Directly interact with the preview and source code using standard highlighting and copy shortcuts to grab text and quickly paste it in the application or web service of your choice. Bundled inside is a new MultiMarkdown 3 binary that’s efficient and better handles big files (for those writing another “Hitchhikers Guide to Markdown” manual), along with web document presentation and compatibility for everything from HTML and ERB (that’s Ruby shenanigans for those wondering). Hit command+E to edit text in your favorite editor, or find where you put down the Master Sword with command+R to bring the file into view from the Finder. Not geeky enough? Marked does a better job of knowing where you are in the document, and will even follow along if you’ve reached the bottom of the page. You can limit text width in the preview, supress link highlighting if you’re going to print (yes, printers till exist), and opening new preview windows can be opened to float on the desktop.

That’s just scratching the surface of what’s available in Marked if you write in Markdown — I use it on a daily basis here at MacStories, and I’m sure you fellow Geekstorians will find it just as useful. Check out the changelog to Marked (it is MASSIVE), read Brett Terpstra’s update, and check it out on the Mac App Store (it’s only $2.99).