Posts tagged with "mac"

Xmarks Sold To A “New Owner”, Definitely Not Dead

Good news, Xmarks fans: the service is not dead. Actually, it’s definitely alive and looking forward to introducing free and premium plans under a new owner, the official Xmarks blog reports.

I’m pleased to announced that we’re in the final stages of completing a sale of Xmarks to a new owner who is 100% committed to keep our great browser sync service running smoothly.

The Xmarks service will evolve to have both a free component and a premium component – we’ll share all the details once the deal is done.

Many doubts and questions arose when Xmarks announced it was shutting down back in September due to the impossibility to find a feasible plan to keep things going. Loyal and regular users of the free bookmarking service signed dozens of petitions to keep the service alive and pledged thousands of dollars through unofficial campaigns to save Xmarks.

We look forward to the future of Xmarks.

Mac App Store Name Squatters Already A Problem for Developers

Yesterday Apple opened app submissions for the Mac App Store, which as promised at the Back to the Mac event by Steve Jobs will be opening in less than 90 days – around February 2011. Developers can now submit their applications for Apple’s approval – something you want to do now as we still don’t know what policies Apple is going to adopt on the Mac.

When a developer submit an app for Apple’s approval, he has to pick up a name. But the App Store always had a problem with name reservations: developers were able to register a name, block it so no other developer could use it and never upload an actual application for approval. The name was there, frozen, but no app with that name was ever submitted. This practice is known as “name squatting”. After thousands of complaints by frustrated developers who had seen their app’s name “stolen” by suspicious individuals, Apple acknowledged the problem in mid-September and introduced a new policy: you can register an application name, but if you don’t upload anything in 90 days you’ll receive a notification informing you that in 30 days that name will no longer be assigned to you and it’ll be “unlocked” once again. With people sitting on unused names for 2 years, that was a quite welcome change. Read more

Skype 5 Beta for Mac Now Available

A few minutes ago Skype released the long awaited version of Skype 5 for Mac, a new iteration of the world-leading communication tool that brings a lot of new features and a redesigned interface to OS X. Skype 5 for Mac is labelled as a beta product for now.

Skype 5 for Mac brings complete Address Book integration, group video calling (finally, as this was one of the best features of the Windows counterpart), a new mini control bar, support for offline instant messaging, user profiles and a floating dialpad.

Check out the demo video above.

Leaked Apple Document Confirms MacBook Air Issues, Software Update Coming

Looks like BGR has managed to find a good source amongst Apple Geniuses: according to a new leaked internal document, Apple has acknowledged the MacBook Air bugs we talked about two days ago.

Apple hasn’t publicly addressed the issues yet, and the document clearly says the information are not to be disclosed externally. The document mentions the display flickering issues many users have experienced, together with colors fading to light after waking from sleep. The suggested solution? Close the lid, wait 10 seconds and open the computer again.

Apple also confirms an upcoming software update will fix the issues.

iPhotoSync Lets You Effortlessly Transfer Photos Between iPhoto Libraries

If you have recently upgraded to iPhoto ‘11 (I bet many of you have) and you still haven’t found the time to set up that Dropbox-based library synchronization between all your computers you read about on some blog or forum board, perhaps you’d like to wait to give iPhotoSync a try. I was indeed about to drop my entire iPhoto library in Dropbox, but then I realized that iTunes (apps and music) was my priority, so I went for a local sync option. iPhotoSync is an app that can run in the background as an “agent” and allows you to sync iPhoto libraries across multiple Macs running on the same local network.

Developed by Haystack Software (the same guys behind Arq for Mac) and completely compatible with the latest iPhoto versions, iPhotoSync is really simple: make sure you have two Macs running iPhoto and iPhotoSync on the same local network, fire up the app on both Macs, let the iPhoto libraries communicate with each other. For instance, you’ll be able to pull all the new photos from another Mac’s iPhoto library, automatically sync photos added to a specific event, automatically sync photos added in the last month. Basically, iPhotoSync transfers photos back and forth.

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John Gruber On The Idea of iPad Apps Running on Mac OS X→

John Gruber On The Idea of iPad Apps Running on Mac OS X

I can prove it, practically, that iPad apps aren’t going to run on the Mac as a standard feature. iOS apps do run on Mac OS X, today, in the iPhone/iPad emulator that ships with the iOS developer kit. Ends up they’re just not that pleasant to use on a Mac. Gestures that are natural and fun with direct touch are awkward and clumsy using a mouse or touchpad.

And we thought this idea of iOS apps running as “widgets” on the desktop had been buried in the darkest corners of the blogosphere. Turns out some people are still claiming it’d be a “great addition to OS X”. Too bad Apple is not Adobe, and they don’t care about “cross-platform interoperability” as much as they care about “single-platform excellence”.

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Mac OS X Dock Built Using CSS3

We featured cool CSS experiments before: iOS icons in CSS, a Kinetic type video, a 3D rotating molecules demo that works great on the iPad earlier today.

Web developer and interface designer Michael Hüneburg, rebuilt the standard OS X dock using CSS3 animation and including reflections, bounce effects, labels. He also used some additional icons inspired to the popular iTunes 10 one. Check out the experiment here.

This is a quick CSS3 experiment trying to replicate the Dock of OS X, complete with labels, animations, reflections and indicators. It uses CSS transitions for the magnification effect and the :target pseudo-class and CSS animations for the bouncing effect.

The CSS-based dock works great on Webkit desktop browsers, but you won’t able to get the magnification effect on iOS due to the obvious lack of mouseover events.