The open-source project team that released Sequel Pro 0.95 three months ago has just released 0.96. The update adds polish to the application, making working with it more pleasurable — if you can ever call working with databases pleasurable.
They’ve also added some new core functionality and optimized the backend. To me, this feels like more than a 0.01 update. With every update of Sequel Pro, the open-source project continues to close the gap between itself and commercial competitors such as Querious.
Read more at The Apple Blog
The Apple TV, as envisioned by Apple, is truly a very niche market device. You’re basically paying money for something that lets you pay more money to buy or rent music, movies and TV shows from the iTunes store. Sure, you can also stream content from iTunes on a computer, but when trying to stream from a central generic media device, the out of the box software just doesn’t cut it.
It is, however, possible to customize your Apple TV with unauthorized third party software (much like a jailbreak for iPhones/iPod touches) to transform it into a fantastic cheap media player (with certain limitations).
Read how at The Apple Blog
If you were to navigate to lingon.sourceforge.net or smultron.sourceforge.net today, you would see the following text on your screen:
“Hi!
First of all I’d like to thank you for your interest in my applications. But I have now come to a point where I don’t have the time to spend on the applications that they deserve so I have decided to not release any more versions for the foreseeable future.
Cheers,
Peter Borg”
Read more at The Apple Blog
The Boy Genius Report is claiming to have received a tip that Blu-ray support will be coming to iTunes 9, which may be arriving as soon as next month. Also reportedly in iTunes 9 is the long sought after ability to arrange iPhone/iPod touch icon positions from within iTunes, instead of having to do it on the device itself. In addition there will be some kind of integration with Twitter/Facebook and Last.FM — presumably this would allow sending the currently playing song to the social networking sites, removing the need to run a separate application to do this.
Read more at The Apple Blog
As much as we all love our Macs, we still generally live in a Microsoft business world and need to connect and work with Windows boxes. While Microsoft does release its own Remote Desktop application to facilitate Mac users connecting to Windows machine, I’ve never been impressed with the interface for it (on either Mac or Windows). I’ve much preferred using the open source CoRD project.
Two years since the last release of CoRD, its development team have finally released version 0.5 bringing a whole heap of polish to an already excellent software package. For me the killer feature that CoRD has over Microsoft’s official client is the ability to have multiple connections going at once, all selectable from a list. The work flow becomes similar to a tabbed interface (although its not actually tabs).
Read more at The Apple Blog
The folks over at NewsGator have seemingly given up on consumer news feed syncing and have seceded to the superiority of Google Reader.
First it was NewsGator’s Windows syncing feed reader Feed Demon that got the switch from NewsGator syncing to Google Reader syncing. Now its the Mac client’s turn and the esteemed reader NetNewsWire has now switched syncing services too. Yeterday’s announcement by NewsGator states that its will be taking its NewsGator Online news feed reading and syncing service offline by the end of August. This leaves little time for NetNewsWire to fast track a stable switch to Google Reader syncing, but yesterday the first public beta of NetNewsWire 3.2 was made available.
Read more at The Apple Blog
The iPhone/iPod 3.0 OS allows third-party applications to utilize the device’s Bluetooth capabilities for two-player games. The first (and only) application I had that supported this in an update was Flight Control, and since then, whenever my wife and I are on a train, we occupy our time playing this.
The huge advantage of multiplayer Bluetooth compared with Wi-Fi is that you just need the two devices, no Wi-Fi access points or Internet connectivity is required. This is truly awesome, although as we cry, “Arrrgh sooo close!” loudly on public transport we can get some strange looks. We’ve loved playing Flight Control, but I thought that by now there must be a good number of other Bluetooth-enabled games. So I’ve searched the App Store and found the following games are the only ones that support multiplayer gameplay over Bluetooth. This list will hopefully grow soon with more complex quality titles.
Check out what I found at The Apple Blog
Years ago I discovered a little futuristic hovercraft racing game on the PlayStation called Wipeout. The concept was simple, and in many ways it was pretty much the same gameplay as Mario Kart or Crash Bandicoot Nitro Kart. What set it apart was that there were no cartoon graphics, and no toy weapons, just stunning futuristic graphics, unique craft handling (being hovercrafts) and the most important element: speed. These crafts could go really fast.
So as an avid fan of the Wipeout series, when I found out about Phaze I immediately had to try it. Phaze is pretty much a Wipeout clone for the iPhone. There’s nothing new added, it just takes the concept and translates it. This suits me fine. The question is how good the implementation is. Does it capture the magic that got me hooked to Wipeout all those years ago?
Read my review at The Apple Blog
I love reading interviews with developers, finding out some of the behind the scenes information on the makings of their products. Even more so when they’re my favorite products, the ones I use every day. Being able to put a personal face and story behind an end-user application puts a human story on the technology that I find fascinating. So, in the first of hopefully many such interviews, I caught up with Steve Gehrman, founder of CocoaTech, maker of the esteemed Path Finder application — a super charged alternative to Apple’s own Finder.
Read my interview with Steve over at The Apple Blog
I’ve never been as organized as I am with the combination of my MacBook Pro, iPhone, and Google Calendar. Sure, before I crossed the line to Apple, I had tried to use Thunderbird (with Lightning’s Calendar plugin) to keep organized, syncing to my Windows Mobile phone, but it was always clunky and slow and not worth the effort when things didn’t “Just Work.” Since tasting the sweet Apple pie, I now have multiple Google calendars shared with my wife and synced to both of our Macs and iPod touch/iPhones with Spanning Sync. We are now totally organized and its awesome.
However, like any data system, it’s a case of garbage in, garbage out. The combination of data corruption and synchronization is one that can wreak total and utter havoc on the most organized of people, rendering us as useless as a fish out of water. To combat the potential of this scenario, the folks over at Spanning Sync have released a public beta of its new utility, Spanning Tools.
Read more at The Apple Blog
