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It’s been a long two years since the release of Snow Leopard, and with all the fanfare surrounding Apple’s mobile devices recently, many Mac users, myself included, are feeling a little left out. Lion’s much-anticipated release follows Apple’s promise to bring focus “back to the Mac” by integrating advancements from iPhone and iPad development into the Mac platform. In its attempt to bring the best of iOS to the next generation of OSX, Apple has some people worried that Lion will turn their Macs into giant iPads, or introduce iOS-like restrictions to the Mac. Now that this cat is finally out of its cage, let’s dive right in and see what Lion has to offer!
Unlike Snow Leopard, which featured mostly behind-the-scenes improvements and few obvious changes, Lion is a feature-packed major update that will noticeably change the way you use your Mac. Lion comes packed with over 250 new features, so let’s take a look at some of its biggest selling points (in no particular order).
It’s the day we’ve all been waiting for, OS X Lion is finally available for public download in the Mac App Store.
Apple tossed in a few surprises for the day as well with some welcome hardware updates. Let’s very briefly take a look at what’s going on just to keep you up to date around the Mac user water cooler.
Services like Instapaper and Read It Later are a really great way to store a selection of articles that you’d really like to read but don’t necessarily have time for when you discover them. However, as just about everyone who uses these services knows, it’s far too easy to throw articles in your queue while promising yourself that you’ll read them only to completely forget they exist.
The phrase “out of sight, out of mind” is quite appropriate with these particular web services. ReadNow seeks to change that by giving you a native way to manage and read your saved articles. Who knows? If they’re always in your menu bar, you just might read some of those articles!
Choosing between a default Mac utility and a more powerful third party client is always difficult. Tighter system integration and the “free” aspect are on your side with the built-in tool, but there’s often a shortage of the kind of powerful features that a freestanding application offers.
Font management is a perfect example of this. Font Book is a decent way to manage your fonts, but creative professionals and anyone else who deals with fonts daily might find it fairly lacking.
Today we want to know how you manage your font library. Do you use third party software or have you stuck with the tools that Apple has provided? Cast your vote above, then leave a comment letting us know which font management apps you’ve tried and which you like the best.
We’d like to take a moment to say a big thank you to this week’s sponsor, Postbox.
Postbox is one of the most powerful alternatives to Mail.app that you’ll find anywhere and is a simply incredible email client. In addition to your favorite standard Postbox features like tabs and beautiful reply formatting, Postbox 2.5 sports several brand new features that make it even more irresistible.
New Interface!
The Postbox interface is now simpler and more intuitive, plus there’s a fresh new theme for the Mac by Benjamin De Cock, and a new icon set by Kenichi Yoshida.
64-Bit Support
On the Mac, Postbox 2.5 is now running in 64-bit mode, so it can take advantage of all the computing power your Mac has to offer.
Vertical View
Postbox now supports a double-row Vertical Thread Pane View, which makes more efficient use of widescreen displays.
Postbox 2.5 is available for purchase on the Mac App Store. Not convinced? No worries, you can download and try the app for 30 days free from the Postbox Website.
It’s time for another “Ask the Editor” post today. A big thank you to everyone who sent in their questions – it’s great to have the chance to help you out with your Mac-related queries and quibbles.
Today I’ll be offering some advice about apps for taking student notes, concentrating, dimming your screen and managing your contacts. Read on for some awesome tips and tools to make your Mac experience even better.
If you’re a regular Mac.AppStorm visitor, then you probably love apps as much as we do. You might even have some ideas floating around in your head for an app that you’d like to build whether for your own purposes or to strike it rich on the Mac App Store.
The biggest hurdle to many would-be developers is a complete lack of knowledge of where to even start! How are Mac apps created? What skills are required? Where do I go to learn these skills? Today we’ll find out!
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We’d like to take a moment to say a big thank you to this week’s sponsor, Screeny
Screeny is a beautiful, simple and effective utility for taking screenshots and recording screencasts. The controls are basic enough that you can pick the app up immediately and powerful enough that you can create just what you want with almost no effort.
Screeny was just updated with some awesome new features like auto-uploading via CloudApp, multiple frame rates for video and the ability to record system audio. You can see these features in action on the new intro video.
And of course, all of things that make Screeny so amazing are still around:
- Record video of your screen at any size.
- Optionally capture audio from your computer’s microphone when recording video.
- Snap an image of your screen at any size (even across multiple monitors).
- Videos saved down at highest possible quality, and can be exported for web, etc. using Quicktime.
- Set your recording canvas size by entering a specific pixel dimension or by choosing some handy pre-set dimensions or by clicking, dragging & expanding the recording canvas.
- Customizable keyboard shortcuts for all recording actions.
Screeny is available for purchase on Apple’s Mac App Store.
Apps that make your pictures look more interesting by adding filters and effects to them have become a really popular niche in the mobile app market recently, especially with apps like Instagram that just keep getting bigger. That’s why today we decided to bring you a few of the best apps for achieving these and other types of effects, but on your Mac.
Come take a look at our favorite effect and filter apps!
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The Mac App Store has been out for quite a while now and we like to check in from time to time to see what you guys think of it. The most honest way that we give a product an up or down vote is with our wallets so today we want to know how many paid downloads you’ve made from the Mac App Store to date (free app downloads don’t count).
Choose one of the options on the right and then leave a comment below telling us which apps you’ve purchased and what you think of them. Also feel free to chime in on the overall pricing scheme of the App Store. Do you think apps are fairly priced for the most part? Too high? Too low? Your opinion matters and we want to hear it!
