Other Sites
How Apple Doesn't Respect Its Users - Pages 4.3 vs. BBEdit 10.5
Could Your Smartphone Be Your Next PC?
12" PowerBook G4 to the Rescue Once Again
15 Tweaks To Make Moving to Lion or Mountain Lion Less Of A User Interface Culture Shock
How to Replace Your MacBook Pro's Hard Drive with an SSD
Mellel Lite: New Lite Word Processor for the Mac Introductory-Priced At $5.00
Battery Guru 1.5 Free App for OS X: Battery Life Monitoring
DCommander 1.0 released - Two-Pane File Manager for Mac
How Apple Doesn't Respect Its Users - Pages 4.3 vs. BBEdit 10.5
TidBITS’ Adam C. Engst critiques Apple's lack of respect for its customers -- especially Pro users of Apple products as tools of theiir livelihoods.
Mr. Engst frames the issue with this observation: "Like any craftsman, I care deeply about my tools, because without them, I can’t do my job. But unlike a carpenter or plumber, my tools change constantly, putting me in the unenviable position of having to evaluate each new version."
The problem, Engst explains at some length, is that Apple evidently takes little or no regard for how changes it makes to its software tools will affect users, particularly if sprung on them with no warning, as recently happened with how Apple changed the EPUB export function in Pages 4.3, neglecting to make any mention of it in the upgrade release notes.
For example, he reports how changes rendered Pages 4.3 essentially useless for him and his TidBITS colleagues' publishing page layout purposes. A somewhat kludgy workaround downgrade to Pages 4.2 was ultimately achieved, but Engst says Apple’s silent change to Pages 4.3 cost them 10-15 person-hours of work.
Adam Engst cites BBEdit developer Bare Bones Software as an exemplar of how software developers whose version upgrades break vital workflow functions for users should respond and react, explaining how coincidentally the recent BBEdit 10.5 upgrade also caused him problems last week, and praising how "Bare Bones Software’s transparency and solicitude toward their customers resolved the problem quickly," in fact discovering that it already had by issuing a BBEdit 5.2.0 bug fix upgrade to the “Search and Replace” Automator action, which had him back in business in 20 minutes. Engst observes that by being transparent about changes and open with pre-release builds, Bare Bones made him feel that they actually cared about helping him get his work done with BBEdit.
By contrast, he says that the Pages debacle has him starting to feel like Charlie Brown and the football, with Apple playing the part of Lucy, and that while he's not going to make any precipitous moves, when it comes time to look for new software tools, he'll be looking for ones from companies that won’t keep pulling the ball away from him.
You can check it out at:
http://tidbits.com/article/13519?rss
Could Your Smartphone Be Your Next PC?
PCMag's Tim Bajarin explores the prospect of smartphones (or perhaps more likely - phablets) displacing the PC in mobile computing space, citing two key emergiing technologies that he thinks could make that postulate a reality relatively soon.
He notes that the first key technology is based on the new mobile quad-core CPUs in almost all new smartphones coming from Qualcomm, Nvidia, and Intel, observing that although they are low-voltage processors, most of them run at clock speeds of 1.5GHz up to 1.8GHz, which gives them PC-class computing power and well as graphics cores thet do a pretty good job of delivering PC functionality on a smartphone.
The second technology is ca Bajarin cites is called Mobile High-Definition Link, or MHL, which is a mobile audio/video interface standard for connecting portable electronics devices to high-definition displays - a spec. that is supported by dozens of industry companies and is already deployed in more than 100 million smartphones - the major producer of specific MHL chips being Silicon Image, whose newest MHL 3.0 spec and special chips in development he's been informed will allow all MHL 3.0-based smartphones to be powerful enough to turn an MHL 3.0-compatible laptop shell into a real laptop and deliver a true PC experience. If this happens, says Bajarin, "then the smartphone really does become a PC and, in many ways, will change the way we most likely think about PCs in the future."
For the full commentary visit here:
http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2414715,00.asp
12" PowerBook G4 to the Rescue Once Again
Low End Mac's Dan Bashur reports how while his 17" quad-core i7 MacBook Pro has served as his anchor machine for nearly a year, with his 12" PowerBook taking a back seat, he's recently developed have a newfound appreciation for it the old G4 laptop.
Over the holidays, the big MacBook Pro suffered a major hardware failure, happily with two days left on warranty, and he hastened to purchase AppleCare extended warranty coverage through January 2015.
However, while the 17-incher awaited repair with a new MagSafe board and logic board, Bashur returned to the 12" 1.5 GHz PowerBook G4 - which he says proved truly a great backup and still powerful enough to support everyday browsing, 360p YouTube, Photoshop CS2, and handle plenty of emulators and such, and with iTunes 10.6.3 and other needed updates to QuickTime and Leopard 10.5.8 keeping it still a good enough Mac to sync his 3rd generation iPad.
You can check it out at:
http://goo.gl/OKXGe
15 Tweaks To Make Moving to Lion or Mountain Lion Less Of A User Interface Culture Shock
Mac.Tuts+'s Johnny Winter says:
In the last two iterations of OS X Lion and Mountain Lion Apple has been making some bold moves in respect to the way the computer operator interacts with the machine. Bold in the sense that the changes are quite a departure to the way in which people have been used to using OS X in the past....
While there are reasons for Apples changing the UI of recent versions of OS X, its up to you to decide whether these changes are an improvement or a detriment to your workflow.
Winters provides 15 quick fix tips to help you make Lion and/or Mountain Lion a little more familiar.....
You can check it out at:
http://goo.gl/okOdC
How to Replace Your MacBook Pro's Hard Drive with an SSD
Laptop Mag's Michael A Prospero says:
Want to squeeze even more performance out of your MacBook Pro? As our resident Geeks Geek would say, then get an SSD, you putz! Adding an SSD will make your Mac boot faster, copy files in the blink of an eye, and make the system more responsive when multitasking.
For this how-to, we replaced the hard drive on a 15-inch MacBook Pro (non-Retina) from 2012 with a 480GB Mercury Extreme Pro 6G SSD from OWC, which costs $579. That works out to about $1.21 per GB. By comparison, if you bought the 512GB SSD from Apples site, that would run you $800, which is $1.56 per GB.
Fortunately, its fairly easy to replace the hard drive.
Prospero walks us through the process in an illustrated tutorial here:
http://goo.gl/ojvYD
Mellel Lite: New Lite Word Processor for the Mac Introductory-Priced At $5.00
Mellel Lite is a new yet time tested word processor, building on the strengths of its older brother, Mellel 3.1 (also released today), and including almost all the features found in Mellel, except for a handful of expert options. Mellel Lite is offered now at a special introductory price of $5.00 USD, to be gradually raised to $19.00 USD.
Cut from the same cloth as its elder brother Mellel, and also bearing the same version number (3.1) Mellel Lite punches hard: It's "lite" but chock full of features; new but also a veteran, as it is based on Mellel; Extremely affordable yet... well, at an introductory price of $5 US (final price: $19 US) it is indeed very affordable. Users can update to any expert features not available in Mellel Lite or to Mellel via in-App purchase.
"Mellel Lite is light, but buy no means a limited edition of Mellel," says Eyal Redler, chief developer at RedleX. "We were planning for a long time to complement Mellel with younger, lighter brothers, for both the Mac and the iPad (planned). Mellel Lite is a first step in that direction, and except for a small number of features mainly meant for text-experts, Mellel Lite is a full-blown word-process, that can stand proudly next to the best."
Alongside Mellel Lite 3.1 RedleX also released today Mellel 3.1, including features such as an improved template browser with easier access to templates and recent documents, bibliography and citation style mapping, improved import of RTF, retina display support (partial), and more.
Mellel Lite's feature list includes, amongst others:
(*) Auto-titles
(*) Footnotes and Endnote
(*) Templates
(*) Lists
(*) Tables
(*) Markers
(*) Track Changes
(*) Outline
(*) Sort
(*) Line Numbering
(*) Insert images as floating or inline objects
(*) Advanced Find and Replace
(*) Character Styles
(*) Paragraph Styles
(*) Column Styles
(*) Page Styles
(*) List Styles
(*) Export and Import to/from MS Word DOC, RTF, Plain Text and OPML
(*) Statistics and Word Count
(*) Special View options and full screen
(*) Inset Date and Time
Language Support:
English, Bokmal, Norwegian, Chinese, Czech, Danish, Dutch, Esperanto, Finnish, French, German, Greek, Hebrew, Italian, Japanese, Romanian, Russian, Spanish
System Requirements:
(*) Requires Mac OS X 10.6.6 or later
(*) 85.7 MB
Mellel Lite 3.1 is $4.99 USD (or equivalent amount in other currencies) and available worldwide through the Mac App Store in the Productivity category. Mellel Lite 3.1 and Mellel 3.1 are fully compatible with Mountain Lion (Mac OS 10.8).
Mellel 3.1:
http://www.mellel.com
Download from Mac App Store:
http://goo.gl/DQSxB
Purchase from RedleX:
http://store.kagi.com/cgi-bin/store.cgi?storeID=MQK_LIVE
Download Mellel 3.1 :
http://d1riogbqt3a9uw.cloudfront.net/mellel310b18.dmg
Facebook Profile:
https://www.facebook.com/mellelwordprocessor
Trackback URL:
http://goo.gl/wFZDx
Battery Guru 1.5 Free App for OS X: Battery Life Monitoring
MacDaddy has released Battery Guru 1.5 free for OS X, their battery monitoring system that resides in the menu bar and displays essential current information about the current state of the battery.
Battery Guru monitors and presents real-time information on exactly how much current a battery is using at any given moment and display it in the menu bar, allowing users to monitor battery life and manage applications and web pages that are draining the battery excessively. Displaying the current battery capacity, the amount of charge it can hold compared to when it was new, the number of times a battery has been discharged and recharged, the date a battery was manufactured, exact battery temperature, and an accurate percentage of the current charge of a battery, Battery Guru give users precise information to better manage and optimize battery life.
Version 1.5 is an upgrade to version 1.0 which was released 6 months ago and quickly climbed the ranks of the Mac App Store, at its peak reaching the second most downloaded app overall on the German edition of the Mac App Store, making it the second most downloaded item of all programs of all categories, surpassed only by OS X 10.8 Mountain Lion itself, distributed as a downloadable self-installer.
Battery Guru allows you to get more life out of your battery. Like with most resource usage, most of the batteries power goes to causes which are unimportant to you, but the charge gets squandered because without this app you are unaware of what is using it. Battery Guru will monitor and present current information on exactly how much charge a battery is using at any given moment and display it in the menu bar. This allows users to keep an eye on power consumption and close unnecessary pages or applications that are draining the battery. After becoming accustomed to the application, it will become second nature to keep an eye on the amount of power that is being used, and to notice when it is higher than it should be and to start closing down likely culprits.
Battery Guru will also show how you fast your battery is recharging. This can be very useful information because the charge rate of a battery also drastically varies, depending on various factors. You will understand what they are, and understand the optimal amount of time to charge a battery for if you want to go on to use portably as quickly as possible afterwards.
Feature Highlights:
(*) See how fast your battery is discharging. Useful for preserving life
(*) See how fast your battery is charging. Useful to see optimal charge times and battery health
(*) Precise information to better manage and optimize battery life
(*) View current battery capacity and milliamps usage
(*) Easily identify and manage battery-draining applications
(*) Tools help optimize battery life
(*) Access important battery information to optimize system usage
(*) Information on number of recharges and manufacturing date
When using a computer, the amount of time a user has until the battery runs out varies drastically. The reason a battery sometimes drains quickly is usually due to one of two reasons. Sometimes an app that is not even in use will remain in the background constantly using 100% of one processor core and draining the battery. Having a Flash application open in a tab is a common cause of this phenomenon. Secondly, a MacBook Pro comes with two graphics cards: one that uses little power, and one that is much more powerful and uses significantly more power. If a user is running OS Lion on a more recent MacBook Pro, the OS will automatically switch between the two. However, occasionally an app or a webpage will remain open, holding the power-hungry graphics card open, and unnecessarily draining the battery charge.
Battery Guru also provides a secondary but equally important function. By providing information that users do not usually have access to, this app gives users the tools to optimize their battery life and function. It will show the current battery capacity compared to the capacity it had when it was new. It also provides information on the number of times a battery has been discharged and recharged, the date a battery was manufactured, and the exact battery temperature. Battery Guru's information on current battery charge is a more exact percentage than provided by the operating system, giving users accurate and actionable battery information.
Each portable Mac comes with a "Smart Battery," that already knows this battery information and holds it internally. Battery Guru is the means of accessing this relevant information, allowing monitoring of the current battery state and awareness of the functioning of the computer system. Users may set Battery Guru to start automatically at login, providing a seamless interface with the computer system.
Version 1.5 brings in:
(*) Temperature display in Fahrenheit as well as Celsius
(*) Improved graphics
(*) Various bug fixes and improvements
"The battery you have in your portable Mac may be a lot more sophisticated than you were aware of," says MacDaddy's CEO, Ben Slaney. "And you can get more usage out of it! Battery Guru is the means to accessing the advanced information your battery holds internally. Once you get used to having it in your menu bar, you will never want to be without it again."
System Requirements:
(*) Requires Mac OS X 10.6 or later
(*) 1.0 MB
Battery Guru 1.5 is free and available worldwide through the Mac App Store in the Utilites category. It is also available for download form the MacDaddy website.
MacDaddy:
http://macdaddy.io
Battery Guru 1.5:
http://macdaddy.io/mac-battery-guru/
Download from Mac App Store:
http://goo.gl/00kQj
Download from MacDaddy (zip):
http://macdaddy.io/BatteryGuru.zip
Mac App Store Download Stats:
http://macdaddy.io/battery-guru-download-stats/
LinkedIn Profile:
http://www.linkedin.com/pub/ben-slaney/44/714/1bb
Twitter Profile:
http://twitter.com/NomadicCoder
Trackback URL:
http://goo.gl/jqvQT
DCommander 1.0 released - Two-Pane File Manager for Mac
DevStorm Apps has introduced DCommander 1.0, an advanced two-pane file manager for Mac OS X. Optimized for quick access and user-friendliness, DCommander gives you full control over your computer's filesystem as soon as it's started. Optimized for quick access and user-friendliness, DCommander provides a perfect file management companion for new Mac users transitioning from other operating systems, as well as advanced power users that demand more control of their computer.
Features include:
(*) Two side by side file windows
(*) Name, size, kind and date sorting of files and folders
(*) View hidden files and folders
(*) Terminal integration
(*) Quick access to native Terminal, Console, Activity Monitor and Disk Utility applications
(*) Full support for drag & drop operations
(*) Quick file viewer with text and hex viewing mode
(*) Full keyboard navigation
(*) Quick look integration
(*) Support for external drives
(*) Ability to compress files and folders
(*) Retina display support
(*) Fast load time
(*) Free updates
(*) And much more
System Requirements:
(*) Intel, 64-bit processor
(*) OS X 10.6.6 or later
(*) 3.4 MB
Pricing and Availability:
DCommander 1.0 is available for $9.99 (USD) on the Mac App Store worldwide through the Utilities category. Limited promo codes are available for media representatives.
DevStorm Apps:
http://www.devstorm-apps.com
DCommander 1.0:
http://www.devstorm-apps.com/dcommander-mac/
Purchase and Download (MAS):
http://goo.gl/nuZt8
Trackback URL:
http://goo.gl/3yrmv
Tags: News ď Tech-Industry ď
