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Posts tagged with "mac"

Weather HD for Mac Brings Beautiful Forecasts to the Desktop

Weather HD is a popular weather application for iPhone and iPad by development studio vimov which, unlike most weather tools that display current conditions and weekly forecasts through icons and data sets on screen, comes with a selection of beautifully animated videos that depict the weather conditions of your location. Weather HD animates a cloudy and dark sky when a thunderstorm is coming, and lets you view a green field with grass moving in front of you in case of a windy but sunny summer day. If you’ve tried the iPad app last year, you know what to expect – a very few numbers, lots of video and animations.

The Mac version of Weather HD, released today, takes where the iOS counterparts left off to offer even more videos, and bigger ones with new scenarios and conditions. The app is a 225 MB download for a reason: it’s full of video content that will be displayed on your Mac’s screen as soon as you enter your ZIP code or city name. In the Mac app, though, there’s more than the iPad version. You can set up notifications to be alerted when temperature drops below a certain amount of degrees, and quickly check out the hourly forecasts from an icon in the menubar. You can enter multiple locations, as well as choose to run the app in windowed or fullscreen mode. In the main screen, animated forecasts run on the right panel, and a series of tabs in the upper left hand corner get you access to a slew of other functionalities. You can check out severe conditions and moon phases in-app, or switch to the Map view and apply different layers on your location like clouds, temperature, humidity and wind. When you’re done, the additional panel slides back to reveal video forecasts in their full glory again.

Weather HD has never been an app for weather professionals and geeks, but the Mac app packs more features than its iOS siblings. Videos look good, and whether or not the whole concept can become annoying after a few days of usage it’s totally up to you. But at $3.99, I think vimov is off to another success in the App Store. Read more

Picturescue Recovers Photos from iOS Backups

When an iPhone or iPad gets stolen or lost, we immediately worry about our personal data stored on the device (like email, contacts, passwords and history) being accessed by someone else with no good intentions. Whilst Apple’s free Find my iPhone service allows us to easily block and wipe a device that’s no longer with us, the loss of personal media like photos and videos is something we can’t fix remotely, at least not yet. Picturescue, a new Mac app by developers Pádraig Kennedy and John Ryan, provides a dead-simple solution to recover photos from an iOS device: rather than plugging directly into an iPhone or iPad, Picturescue reads the backup stored locally on your computer to retrieve photos and export them in their original format to a new location. This means that, provided you’ve synced your device with iTunes and you’ve decided to save an unencrypted backup (Picturescue can’t read encrypted iTunes backups for now), you’ll be able to view photos and export them at any time. It’s as easy as firing up the software, selecting the device in the sidebar, and choosing the photos to export.

Picturescue can be downloaded for free if you only want to view photos found in the backup file, and a $4.99 purchase gives you the possibility to export. The lack of support for encrypted backups is a major downside, but considering iTunes defaults to unencrypted backups on Mac and Windows machines, this shouldn’t be a problem for all those people that don’t care about password-protecting their iOS device backups. Get the app here.

Second Build of Mac OS X 10.6.8 Seeded to Developers

Last night, Apple seeded the second build of Mac OS X 10.6.8 to developers. The new build, weighing at around 1 GB, carries number 10K524 and it’s available now for download in the Mac Dev Center. According to people familiar with the new release, focus areas mentioned in the seed notes are still AirPort, Graphics Drivers, Mac App Store, Networking, QuickTime and VPN.

The first build of 10.6.8 was seeded last week on May 13, coming as a surprise for those who thought Mac OS X 10.6.7 would be the last Snow Leopard update. Apple is expected to unveil the final version of 10.7 Lion at the WWDC in June with a public release this summer, leading many to believe 10.6.8 will be the last maintenance update for machines running Snow Leopard.

Ars Investigates Recent Mac Malware→

Ars Investigates Recent Mac Malware

MAC Defender has changed everything,” one Apple Store Genius, who requested to remain anonymous (we’ll call him Lenny) told Ars. “We probably get 3 or 4 people with this per day. Most of them only got as far as installing the program and haven’t entered their credit card details.”

Lenny went on. “This always sparks a debate at the bar on whether antivirus software is necessary on the Mac. This is difficult, as the store sells several antivirus products implying that Apple supports the idea, but as many customers point out, the sales guys aren’t shy in making the claims for Mac OS X’s security. Internally, Apple’s [IT] department mandates the use of Norton Antivirus on company machines.

Following the controversy that sparkled after the large diffusion of MAC Defender (covered here) that rose (again) the inevitable question as to whether being scared of malware on a Mac is nothing but crying wolf, Ars Technica takes a step back and tries to analyze the situation interviewing Apple employees, Geniuses, and various representatives of antivirus / security companies. Whilst it’s kind of obvious that antivirus makers will always recommend their products because you have to keep your machine secure, the takeaway from support specialists is interesting: there’s no need to panic, but people are undoubtedly coming over asking for help with this recent malware.

Of course, the peculiar nature of Mac Defender (it’s a “scanning software” that asks for your credit card details, and it’s downloaded through a malicious script from certain websites and Google Image Search) raises another issue: users are installing the software by manually going through an installer and giving it their passwords – this shouldn’t happen. Anyone who’s a little skilled in computing should know that stuff you didn’t want to download shouldn’t be granted permission to run in the first place. And MAC Defender comes as a whole installer. On the other hand, I don’t think it’s really about crying wolf (though some people like to run overly sensationalistic headlines), as much as it’s about the fact that this malware ultimately exists. Fact.

Ars has an interesting read, and our friends at TUAW have a pretty handy guide detailing the removal of MAC Defender. The best tip, however, is still the same: don’t execute programs and documents you don’t know.

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Internal AppleCare Document Directs Employees Not To Help With Malware Removal

An internal AppleCare document posted earlier this week reveals that Apple is investigating ‘Mac Defender’ – a recently unleashed malicious application that pretends to be an anti-virus application when users download it. The document, which Apple clearly notes is for internal use only, tells its employees not to confirm or deny whether the application has been installed on a users computer, not to attempt to remove it or escalate the issue.

The bizarre document, which is posted in full after the break, seems to be instructing Apple employees to take no part in resolving malware issues on a users computer.

AppleCare does not provide support for removal of the malware. You should not confirm or deny whether the customer’s Mac is infected or not.

However, the document does tell employees to instruct customers that if the Mac Defender installer pops up on their screen, to cancel the installer and delete the installer immediately. Whilst if the application is already installed they are told to tell the customer to make sure all security updates have been installed with Software Update and then direct them to the “What is Malware?” document. But the document is clear in saying that Apple doesn’t deal with malware – even recommending anti-virus software in the Mac App Store.

Explain that Apple does not make recommendations for specific software to assist in removing malware. The customer can be directed to the Apple Online Store and the Mac App Store for antivirus software options.

[Via ZDNet]

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DropIn Enhances Dropbox with Menubar Drag & Drop, Filters, Previews

I rely on Dropbox on a daily basis to sync files between computers, my iTunes music library and have access to folders shared with the MacStories team or my friends. In fact, Dropbox is the first app I install on every new Mac or fresh installation of OS X, being the service that stores my most important data, app libraries, and more. But for as much as I love Dropbox and couldn’t work without it anymore, I loathe the desktop Mac app. Not the syncing service that displays a badge next to my files or folders, or the preference panel that (in the latest version) allows me to set up selective sync: I can’t stand the menubar utility, which is an icon that does nothing but displaying my available space on Dropbox and changing its looks depending on whether Dropbox is syncing or not. It doesn’t do anything else, and more importantly it sits in the menubar but it doesn’t let me drag files onto it for quick uploading.

Meet DropIn, a $1.99 utility from the Mac App Store that enhances your local Dropbox installation by letting you drag files in the menubar, browse recent files, set up notifications and filters. Sure, it’s another icon in the menubar, but at least it lets me do a bunch of things the official app can’t. DropIn has two main functionalities: it displays a preview of recently changed files and enables you to create filters for the files you want to see in there; it comes with a Droplet feature that allows you to move files to Dropbox by dragging them onto the menubar, avoiding the Finder altogether. In DropIn’s preferences I told the app to simply copy files into my Dropbox main directory, but you can choose sub-folders as well or enter your account ID to upload files to the public folder and get a link in your clipboard automatically. This one’s a feature I’ve been looking forward to have on my Mac because I dislike stacks in my dock, and I’d rather have an icon in my menubar instead of having to open a new Finder window every time. And it works great in DropIn.

As for recently changed files and notifications, this is something you can do with the official Dropbox app and Growl, but DropIn lets you set up the number of updated files to display in the dropdown menu and it’s also got inline previews and a button to reveal a file in the Finder. Furthermore, you can set up advanced rules in the Filters section to show / hide specific files and make sure you’re only being notified about things you care about, and not those info.plist files from iTunes.

At $1.99, DropIn is a great addition to Dropbox, if only for the drag & drop functionality that makes it incredibly easy to move anything to your personal cloud. You can get the app from the Mac App Store here. Check out more screenshots below. Read more

OS X 10.6.7 Changes Finder Sidebar Behavior→

OS X 10.6.7 Changes Finder Sidebar Behavior

Adam C. Engst at TidBITS:

With Mac OS X 10.6.7, Apple not only messed up (and then fixed) font handling (see “OpenType PostScript Fonts Troublesome in 10.6.7,” 27 March 2011, and “Apple Releases Snow Leopard Font Update,” 26 April 2011), they also changed the way you remove items from the sidebar. Now, instead of just dragging items out, you must either Command-drag them out or Control-click them and choose Remove from Sidebar.

I’ve noticed the change too: I was trying to drag a folder out of the “Places” tab, but it wasn’t working. At first I thought I had to restart my Finder for some reason, but that didn’t work either. So I realized maybe something had changed since the 10.6.7 software update, and tried to CMD-drag like I would for items in the menubar. Items in the Finder’s sidebar now share the same behavior of draggable items in the top menubar; Engst believes the change was made after some complaints about accidental removals happening too often, but, frankly, I never removed an item from the Places tab by accident.

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