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Great news! We’ve selected our five winners. Each of the entrants listed below will be receiving an email with further instructions on how to claim their prize.
A huge thanks to the folks at Tumblita for sponsoring this giveaway and to all of you that entered. We’ll be back with another competition soon and next time your name could be on that list of winners!
Just over 6 months after the current release of OS X was released, codenamed “Lion”, Apple is already teasing us about the next major update to its default operating system, Mountain Lion. The preview of OS X 10.8 was released today to registered developers with Apple, with summer touted as the general release date to the public.
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Since Alfred was released last year, it’s become an essential timesaver for pretty much every single Mac user, as it allows you to launch applications and find files quickly and easily. Now, the Cambridge-based company have pushed out an update to this popular app, Alfred 1.1, adding several improvements and a few new goodies.
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There’s been a lot of discussion in the past couple of years in the Mac community about the level of importance OS X and the Apple desktop experience has in the overall hierarchy at Apple. For instance, PCWorld recently posted a piece boldly titled, “Mac OS Dwindles in Importance to Apple.”
Our poll question today is aimed at getting your opinion on this. Do you feel like OS X development and progress has taken a backseat in Apple’s eyes to the newer and more exciting iOS platform? Cast your vote in the poll and let us know.
Once you’ve voted, answer an even more important question in the comments: is this a good thing? There’s perhaps an inherent bias in the question that assumes that putting less attention towards OS X in favor of iOS is somehow negative. Maybe it is, maybe it isn’t. If iOS truly is the future of Apple, then isn’t it good that they’re diverting so much time, effort and resources to that project?
However, many of us still work on a Mac desktop for 40+ hours per week and therefore might not be too happy at the thought of Apple putting our beloved operating system on the back burner. Then again, maybe this argument is void and Apple hasn’t slowed their progress on OS X in the least. What do you think?
Our featured sponsor this week is Photo Transformer, an amazingly simple and fast way to find and process images.
Photo Transformer is a super fast image browser. No need to build a library, just point it at a folder or directory of folders and it will instantly dive in and find all of the image files. From here you can browse the flexible thumbnail grid and quickly filter the results by file type, size, date created, etc.
Once you’ve targeted the images that you’re looking for, you can build custom actions that process them in bulk. For example, if you have a thousand high-res PNG files that you need to convert to low-res JPG files, you simply set up the action, hit the play button and watch the magic.
As a photographer, I frequently need to take the large files from a shoot and downsize them for Facebook uploading. Photo Transformer makes this a snap. As a bonus, I love using it simply as a lightweight image browser. It’s much quicker than some of the bulkier alternatives like Adobe Bridge.
Go Get It!
If you’re looking for a faster way to browse and bulk process images on the fly, Photo Transformer is definitely an app to check out. Stop by the Prosoft website for more information or grab your copy from the Mac App Store today.
Josh’s post yesterday, Five Slick Menu Bar Apps for Controlling iTunes, reminded me how much love there is for menu bar apps. Particularly those with the purpose of controlling (taming) iTunes (the beast).
Today we’ll be looking at which iTunes controller came out as AppStorm favourite, the new Mac apps released this week, and why you should buy Apple stock, amongst a host of other exciting things (NOTE: I’m in no way qualified to give financial advice, that was a joke). In the inimitable words of Dave Dameshek, let it begin!
There are few game categories that I enjoy exploring and playing more than indie games. There’s something about supporting indie games and their developers that feels like I’m “doing my part.” It’s sort of like the “buying local” of video gaming. But there’s also the feeling of awe and excitement I get when I play amazing games that were birthed into existence without the aid of a major developer or publisher. If you also enjoy indie games, then you probably know that the Mac App Store has, thus far, been a goldmine for such games.
Limbo is an independently developed side-scrolling puzzle game from Playdead that is available on a multitude of platforms. I first played it on the Xbox Live Arcade, but didn’t really get a chance to play all the way through it until I downloaded it on my Mac. Today I’m going to delve into the world of Limbo, and since the best part of playing the game is not knowing what comes next, I’m going to try to do it as spoiler-free as possible! Hit the jump to read on.
You don’t have to go far to see work from Mike Lee, in fact there’s a decent chance you’ve got some of his work already on your devices. Mike (or as he likes to call himself, ‘the world’s toughest programmer’) has been involved with the development of Delicious Library, the official Obama ’08 application and even the Apple mobile store app.
This man knows his software and rather than continuing along this very successful path, he decided it was time to give back to the developer community and he created Appsterdam – a community built for creating applications. Read on to see Mike’s story and how it all started for him.
A couple of weeks after Adobe revealed an upgrade offer to CS6, the latest reincarnation in its popular Creative Suite, which includes such big software names as Photoshop, Flash and Dreamweaver, to any existing CS3 and CS4 owners, the San Jose-based technology shed a little more light on its upcoming cloud service, namely Adobe Creative Cloud.
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OS X Lion was announced way back in October of 2010 and released in July of 2011. You’ve now had lots of time to prep for the switch and over six months to make the purchase and upgrade your system (granted that your Mac can handle the upgrade). So have you? Are you running Lion on your primary Mac or are you still on Snow Leopard?
For the readers who are still kicking it old school, we want you to chime in as well. Are you still running Leopard or perhaps something even older like Tiger or Panther? We want to know!
After you vote in the poll, leave a comment below and tell us why you run the version that you do. If you’re on an older version, is it because you simply haven’t felt the need to upgrade, haven’t had the cash or are you being help back by an older Mac that can’t upgrade any further?
