Good news, Ping users: Apple’s music discovery service just got official Twitter support, according to the Twitter blog:
Starting today Ping, iTunes’ new social network for music, and Twitter are making it even easier for people to share music discoveries with their friends by putting Ping activity, song previews and links to purchase and download music from the iTunes Store right in their Tweets on Twitter.com.
Consumer Reports thinks the MacBook Air 11-inch is a very good computer in terms of ergonomics and display, it’s versatile and has good performances. As The Loop reports, in fact, Consumer Reports gave it a 67 out of 100 rating in its latest “Laptop Ratings & Reliability”, available to subscribers.
As The Loop points out, the highest computer in that category used to be the Toshiba Satellite with a 51 out of 100. Read more
iLounge noticed Apple is now selling iBooks gift cards in its retail stores. The cards were spotted in the Washington D.C. area Apple Store, and it’s an interesting move because regular iTunes Gift Cards worked just fine with the iBookStore.
I guess Apple wanted to make it clear that books can be bought with a gift card, and I assume those cards are going to be huge this holiday season. I still haven’t spotted them here in Italy, though.
As noted by MobileCrunch, alternative 3rd party iPhone browser Skyfire did great in its first weekend in the App Store. Even though the app wasn’t exactly off to a great start (the developers had to pull the app as they couldn’t keep up with the server demand), it still managed to win the hearts of thousands of iPhone users who apparently needed a browser capable of playing Flash videos:
The company isn’t sharing exact numbers, but they did just tell me that their download numbers for their first weekend on the store were well over 300,000. At $2.99 a pop, that works out to one hell of a bounty. SkyFire isn’t walking away with that whole million, of course; Apple’s going to get their 30% cut, which brings SkyFire’s share down to somewhere between $600-700,000.
You can add this to the “iPad as a…” list. Spotted by 9to5mac, an iPad has been used in Lithuania during a protest against the government:
If the Western World use iPad for business and entertainment, in Lithuania the iPad is used by pensioners in demonstrations against the government.
Magical?
Steven Troughton-Smith found a way to make printer sharing work on 10.6.5, but you’ll need an old developer version of the OS to enable it:
What I consider the best app currently installed on my iPhone and iPad just got a lot better. With the 2.3 update (which is still propagating in iTunes as I’m writing this) developer Marco Arment introduced so many fixes, refinements, optimizations and new features it’s really hard to keep track of them. Instapaper basically got a lot better, both on the iPhone and on the iPad’s larger screen (perfect for reading, if you ask me).
You can now send articles to OmniFocus, QuickReader and all the previous sharing options have been fixed to work properly again. The app now also supports a “ihttp://” URL scheme: every time you find something interesting in Safari you want to send to Instapaper (assuming you can’t get the other options to work, such as the bookmarklet) just add an “i” before the regular URL and tap Go. Instapaper will open. Genius.
On the iPhone, the article list now includes a few lines of text like on the iPad. iPad updates are faster, I can confirm. The iPhone can now toggle the Dark mode from the font panel, and you can set the app to automatically switch to dark mode at night.
Seriously, you gotta take a look at the changelog yourself (embedded below) and go download Instapaper right now if you still haven’t. Highly recommended. Read more
Just like we previously reported, it looks like Apple removed AirPrint support from 10.6.5. Available to developers in previous beta versions, the feature allowed iPad, iPhone and iPod Touch users on iOS 4.2 to print documents to printers shared via Mac OS X or Windows.
It turns out AirPrint now only works with supported HP printers, as noted by Macworld and Ars Technica. We’re also getting reports from readers who have already installed 10.6.5 (which came out a few minutes ago) confirming that, indeed, AirPrint to shared printers from iOS 4.2 GM isn’t working. Read more
The long-awaited OS X 10.6.5 update is finally out of the cage and available for you to download in Software Update. Mac OS X 10.6.5 is the the fifth maintenance update for Snow Leopard – version 10.6.4 was released in June 2010.
