Apple News, Analysis and Podcasts

Apple's next Mac OS X update, Mountain Lion, is just around the corner. However is this OS update worth the fuss or upgrade? We expect the price to be $29 USD, like it was for Snow Leopard and Lion. We also expect it will be easy to download and install via the Mac App Store. We also don't see any big technology changes (32bit to 64 bit, PowerPC to Intel, removal of Rosetta, etc), so compatibility with apps that run in Lion shouldn't be a big deal either.

Demo or trial software is a great way for users to try out the software before buying it. It may not be a big deal for software that costs less than $5, but it is for software that costs more. Shareware software has been doing this for more than a decade. Trial software would also greatly clean up Apple’s Mac and iOS App Store that has multiple versions of the same software.

Apple could clean up the Mac and iOS App Stores by offering users a trial version of each software application. It could be built into the App Store and could have a 5 or 15 day trial period, much like renting movies on iTunes. Users would also benefit from such a feature by letting them try out the software before they buy it. Developers would not have to build multiple versions to convince users to purchase their software. Will Apple add trial software to the App Stores?

There are hundreds of companies that want to track people on the Internet. These companies include Google, Facebook, DoubleClick just to name a few. Users are their product, not the customer. They use that information to make money by selling it. Some people may be fine with that, but most want to protect their privacy.

Some users will delete their cookies every so often to try to protect their privacy. These companies can still track those users once they go back on the Internet. The best way to protect one’s privacy is to keep those companies from leaving cookies or bits of information on the computer.

 A Retina Display is an upgrade the users can really see. It will be a huge improvement for Mac users as it is for iOS users. There will need to be some big changes in order to bring Retina Displays to the Mac.

The Mac OS will need to be able to support that resolution and it needs high resolution graphics files. Display manufacturers will need to produce Retina Displays in larges sizes. Graphics processor manufacturers, like Nvidia and Intel, will also need to improve their chips to drive these high resolution displays. The Mac software developers will also have to modify their software to support the new display sizes. How will these developers view these new changes?

The Latest iPad, which debuted a couple of weeks ago, now includes a Retina Display. The pixels are small enough on a Retina display that the user can not see them at normal viewing distances. It gives the user a very crisp and sharp display, which is great for viewing pictures, movies and reading text.

How does that compare with other Apple products? The Macbook Air does have a higher resolution option, but it is no where near the pixel density of a retina display. The iPhone 4 and 4S Retina Display have 326 pixels per inch or PPI. The new iPad comes in a little under that with 264 PPI. Generally, people hold the iPad farther away, so the pixels are still unnoticeable. The current MacBook Air PPI comes in at around 130 depending on the screen choice. The MacBook Air has half of the PPI of the new iPad. Will that change soon?

 The makers of Byword have updated their Mac application to include iCloud syncing. This new version can move files from the finder to iCloud. It can then open, save and edit those same files. Files that are saved onto iCloud are also stored on the local hard drive for off-line editing. This is only the first step for an iCloud editor.

In order to make full use of iCloud, files will need to be editable on more than just the Mac. The Byword developers have just solved this problem by releasing a version for the iOS. It is a universal application for both the iPhone and iPad. Does Byword have anything that makes it stand out from the rest?

 It was recently discovered that Google has been circumventing Safari's cookie controls. Google has been leaving third party cookies from its sites and ad sites they own. This happens even when the user tells Safari to block them in the application's preference panel.

Cookies are used to set site preferences so users can see the same site next time they return. They are also used to log into an account and set location information. While these are good things, cookies can also be used to keep track of what the user does or where the user goes on the Internet. Some may be ok with this, but many are not. The user should have this control, not the ad agencies.

Pixelmator is the top selling application in the Mac App Store Graphics & Design category. It is a very good photo editor for less than $30. Many things that can be accomplished using Photoshop, can also be done with Pixelmator.

Pixelmator’s website has a number of tutorials. It used to be that these were the only resources available. That has now changed since Pixelmator has grown in popularity. Some additional Pixelmator resources are listed below:

This is part 2 of a 2 part series on cloud service comparisons. Part I of Cloud Services Comparison >

SugarSync: SugarSync is a cloud service that competes well with Dropbox. Both services sync files between the cloud and multiple computers and devices. Unlike Dropbox, SugarSync can sync any folder or folders on a computer. Files can also be emailed to one’s SugarSync account, which comes in handy on mobile devices. 5GB of free space is included as a standard option, which fairs well compared to most other competitive offerings that start at only 2GB. SugarSync plans are also a little cheaper than the rest, however, SugarSync does have some issues. The service itself is pretty slow and it takes up more memory than Dropbox. The software is also more complicated to navigate and use. For iOS users, very few applications are setup to access SugarSync files. While SugarSync covers the basics, it just does not have enough advantages to replace Dropbox.

Apple’s iCal has been greatly improved with the iCloud service. Users can now sync their To Do lists and calendars across multiple Macs and iOS devices for free. This simplifies and makes it easier to manage one’s life. Yet, iCal is slow at handling multiple calendars and To Do lists.

iCal makes adding non-default items to calendar events or To Do items difficult. One has to change the calendar or list after it has been created, which greatly slows down the process. This builds a big enough barrier to prevent iCal from being useful in everyday life, like grocery lists and tasks around the house. But here is a solution.

Adobe customers could previously upgrade their Creative Suite from three versions back. So customers could upgrade to Create Suite(CS) 5, from CS 4, CS 3, and CS 2. Many customers either can't afford or don't want to spend the extra cash to upgrade every version. These customers usually upgrade CS every other or every third update. That will all change with Creative Suite 6.

Pixelmator has come a long way since it was introduced back in September of 2007. It has become a full feature photo editor and graphic creation application. Yet, there are still some important features missing.

With Pixelmator 2.0 coming out earlier this fall, the developers have plugged up many of the holes for features that were missing, but not all. One of the holes they didn’t add was layer styles. While everything in layer styles can be done in Pixelmator, layer styles offer two big advantages over the manual methods. Layer styles are editable and are much faster to create. Duplicating layers is an easy work around for future edits. Are there work arounds for speeding up the process?

Photoshop is the most feature rich photo editor on any platform, but that does not mean it is always the best tool for every job. Just recently the developers of Pixelmator released version 2.0 of their photo editing application. The question this article will attempt to answer is "Can one use Pixelmator instead of Photoshop?" not whether Pixelmator is better than Photoshop.

Despite its lower price, Pixelmator does have a number of advantages over Photoshop and those include:

For those who use OS X at its core level (UNIX, aka Darwin), a very handy utility is the Terminal.app. Terminal.app is a quick way to drop down to the UNIX level of the operating system and perform some deep level coding. Or it can also be a way to navigate around the operating system if point-and-click isn't your thing.

With Lion Terminal.app got a few cool features, one of which is making windows blur when in the background. This is especially handy when you have multiple windows open at the same time, but want to focus on one. However, there seems to be a drawback to Lion's version of Terminal.app and that is Lion's Auto Save feature.

Yesterday I took some photos with my iPhone 4. When I got back to the office I plugged the iPhone into the USB connector and watched as my iPhone synced with iTunes and iPhoto...  or so I thought.

With the release of iOS 5 and Mac OS 10.7.2, Apple has added iCloud features to both operating systems. One of the applications that has benefited is Safari, Apple's default web browser.

It happened to me again yesterday morning. I was giving a presentation at a conference on the subject of e-mail marketing. There was an HDTV in the room and I couldn't use it. Instead I used the projector provided by the conference. Why couldn't I use the HDTV? Cords.

Like Steve Jobs was, I consider myself very particular about presentations. How I look when giving a Keynote means as much as the quality of the content. If the messenger gets in the way of the message, the message falls on deaf ears because of distractions the messenger creates. For example, all the other presenters at this conference were using PC's and Powerpoint. As expected, their slides were boring, full of words and just plain awful. Each new slide was more of the same — lots of text, a poor graphics and then someone yammering for time to eternity about all the words... Wake me up when it's over.

 The Mac platform has three major Internet browsers: Apple's Safari, Google's Chrome, and Mozilla's Firefox. All three are very capable browsers that can run the latest webpages and web applications. Previous reviews have given Safari the edge, but all three have been recently updated. In light of these new updates, it is time to take a look at all three again and see how they compare.

Given that each is more than capable of browsing today's Internet, we will look deeper into the strengths and weaknesses to find a winner. The following list gives our browser ranking and a short review why they placed where they did.

Apple is set to announce a new iPhone next week. With the announcement of a new iPhone, Apple should be releasing a new version of their mobile operating system, iOS 5 and the new cloud service, iCloud.

Apple is moving away from MobileMe and iDisk to iCloud, a new way to store files on the Internet. Yet, this new iCloud is still a service and requires a subscription to use if you want more than 5GB. For those who don't trust Apple or don't want another subscription, there are alternatives.

The Mac App Store (MAS) lacked most of the valuable software when Apple first debuted it last January. At that time it was a poor place for users to find new software. Most of the apps on the MAS were of low quality, except for Apple's.

That has all changed in the past ten months, as more and more of the top developers are either moving completely to the MAS or are selling on both the MAS and in the tradition way. Pixelmator was the first major software to test the waters and it grossed over one million dollars. That's simply too much money for other developers to pass up.

 This week's "App of the Week" is Bejeweled, a game I play everyday on my iPhone. It is available on many platforms including the iOS, Mac and the Web.

On the iPhone, Bejeweled 2 has four different games: classic, action, endless, and blitz. Blitz is probably the most addicting of the four as scores can be compared with friends on Facebook. Blitz also only lasts 1 minute, so it can be played over and over anytime you have a minute to kill.

Few people have used the Terminal application and even fewer understand it. The goal of this new series of articles at T-GAAP will teach Mac users to use the Terminal and its commands to change the way the Mac OS runs.

The Terminal gives users access to some pretty powerful tools inside the Mac OS. These tools allow you to get under the hood of the OS engine in a new way. The first article will give just a taste of the power inside the Terminal application.

This week's app is a folder synchronization tool called arRsync. This is a great tool that can backup or synchronize folders and files. Any folder that the finder sees, whether local or network based, can be synchronized.

arRsync does a nice job of backing up folders from one's local hard drive to an external or networked hard drive. The best part about this tool is that it is free.

 If you are tired of using iTunes or email to transfer photos to iPhone or Aperture, there is a better way. With a push of a button, you can have all your new photos transferred from an iPhone to iPhoto, Aperture or a folder on the Mac.

This week's application is a utility to make transferring files from the iOS to the Mac easy. Photosync is $2.99 for a universal iOS application, but it is free for the Mac and in the Mac App Store.

This week's "App of the Week" is a game for the Mac: Land Air Sea Warfare. This real-time strategy game pits two to four similar armies of different colors against each other on different types of battles fields. While there are many types of victory options, the main one is to just wipe the opposing enemy off the map by building the biggest army. LASW does have some team options (player + computer vs computer + computer), but no multiplier (player vs player) options at this time.

Each army has a multitude of different types of units to attack the enemy like submarines, tanks, helicopters, destroyers, bombers, fighter planes, and hovercrafts. There are also plenty of defensive units like walls, anti-aircraft jeeps, surface to air missile launchers, 155mm caliber canons, anti-air SAM launchers, long range artillery, torpedo launchers, and heavy defense installations.

Unlike the Mac, Windows lets applications install files all over the system and program folders. The result of Windows allowing apps to install files or DLLS in many locations is it can wreck havoc with operating system stability. Apple has a better approach.

OS X confines application files to the application, system's library, and user's library folders. Some application preferences are system wide and others are specific to a certain user (which is why there are two library folders), but hints in OS X Lion suggest things are about to change.

There are many good applications for digital painting on the Mac and Pixelmator and Photoshop are just two of them. Both offer the core tools needed for digital painting. Digital painting used in many areas like 3D surfacing, story boarding, concept art, and matte painting.

In this, my fifth and final comparison between Photoshop and Pixelmator, I will compare Photoshop and Pixelmator for digital painters and see if an other applications might be better suited. I will also give my conclusions on comparing Pixelmator to Photoshop.

Most professionals in the print industry use Adobe Photoshop, Illustrator and InDesign. Each application servers a different purpose. Pixelmator was not designed to compete with them, but that does not mean it can’t be used for print use.

Print work takes on many different forms and Pixelmator can easily fit into many workflows. Does Pixelmator have all the tools required for print work? Let’s look and see.

Photographers have a different set of features that they require in their main application. Adobe tried to support this with Adobe Bridge in Photoshop and although some like it, most find it very slow and difficult to use. To answer the needs of digital photographers, Adobe, Apple and others stepped up to create an application dedicated to photography. Applications like iPhoto, Aperture and Lightroom have become the digital hub for photographers.

iPhoto has a very limited set of editing tools and is mainly used to organized photos. Aperture and Lightroom, on the other hand, have many more powerful tools to quickly edit and manage photos. When it comes time to really manipulate a photo, these applications don’t have the tools that Photoshop and Pixelmator have. This article will mainly compare image editing and manipulation tasks in Pixelmator and Photoshop.

Pixelmator is an image editing application made only for the Mac OS. It was first released back in 2007 and has gone through many updates in the past 4 years. At the beginning of June, the team at Pixelmator announced their upgrade to version 2.0. This new upgrade is due this summer and adds many features that their customers had been asking for like vectors tools, dodge and Burn tools, and an improved text tool.

Pixelmator has a strong set of core tools for image editing. There is a natural tendency to compare it with the 800 pound gorilla of image editing, Adobe Photoshop. Photoshop has many more tools and filters than Pixelmator, but it is also ten times the price. Are there tasks where Pixelmator is better than Photoshop? In this 5 part series, I will examine many tasks Photoshop is currently used in and see if a software application that is one tenth the price can replace Photoshop.

With Apple's announcement of OS X Lion, iOS 5 and iCloud, Ballmer and the Redmond collective must be picking themselves off the floor trying to figure out what just happened.

Alas, not all is lost for Microsoft — if they follow my simple advise. Well, thinking about that again, the chance Microsoft might listen to reason instead of the Windows/Office juggernaut is slim to none —and slim left town!

Apple changed the way users purchased Mac applications when they created the Mac App Store at the beginning of the year. Even though it still does not have all the biggest software titles for the Mac, it still is the first place to look for new applications. Can anyone else compete with it?

Amazon is set to find out by creating their own app store for the Mac called Mac Software Downloads. Is there enough room for two stores and can they compete? Lets take a look at the Amazon store experience and see how it compares with the Mac App Store.

Is it June already? Well not quite, but certainly close enough to really start sinking our teeth into what we will find at the WWDC in 2011.

Having personally attended several Mac trade-shows back in the day (not any recently since Apple has canceled such events), the anticipation for Steve or "JobsCo" to reveal something new is no different this time around. Matter of fact one can argue the stakes are even higher with so many more irons in the fire.

I've been a Photoshop user since 1992 starting with Photoshop 2 (that's "2" not "CS2"). I worked in technical support for a color printer manufacturer and we needed to use and learn Photoshop because our customers were using it to print to our printers. Sometimes customers would send their files so we could troubleshoot them and figure out why they weren't printing the way the customer expected. This type of troubleshooting required research, working with Adobe and a lot of trial and error. With all that experimenting I became pretty adept at using Photoshop. Over time there were other titles that came and went, like CorelDraw and Painter, but nothing ever seemed to hold a candle to Photoshop, but then I encountered a game changer.

For those looking into virtualization software, here is a succinct review of Parallels Desktop 6, with a splash VMware Fusion thrown in for good measure. In business there are still instances where Windows is required for OS X users. Many accounting packages and financial desktop-based software solutions are still tied to Windows-only versions.

Times are changing rapidly, but for Mac business users it isn't quite a 100% Windows-free world (not yet at least). To get us Mac users through the slog that is Windoze, apple.it-enquirer delivers a solid review. Who is this article written by? Good question. It only credits "Admin" but it is likely written by the site's publisher Erik Vlietinck. The quick verdict is that Parallels 6 Desktop is outpacing VMware Fusion in many user friendly areas. Games, boot time and file swapping between OS environments, Parallels is winning the war. 

Adobe released version 10.3 of their Flash Player this week. The key areas of improvement are auto-update notification and security control. Both of these features are welcome additions to the Flash Player for Mac users. Does this new version have any new performance enhancements?

As with the last major release 10.2, it is time to run Flash Player 10.3 through its paces to see if there are any performance improvements for Mac users. The tests below were conducted on the same machine and webpages as our previous tests. The latest versions of Safari and Firefox were used to compare Flash Player 10.2.152 with Flash Player 10.3.181 on the chart below.

Apple opened the Mac App Store in January of 2011. Since then, several big developers have added their applications to the store like Omni Group and AutoDesk. Still many more big and small developers have yet to add their applications. While the Mac App Store application quality has improved slowly, there is still a long way to go before it is the main place to get all applications on the Mac.

Even if the Mac Apple Store does not have all the best applications, there are still a lot of great new and old applications to be found there. Today, we will look at two new and one old utility that can be found in the Store.

Some say the iPad does not need a file structure application like Finder on the Mac. That may be fine for content consumption, but not for content creation. Those that want to use the iPad as a productivity device will want to have a finder like application. Storing files in the application and syncing through iTunes is horribly slow and cumbersome at best.

Accessing stored files is a must to create content or be productive. If only one device is used, those files can easily be stored on that computer or device. A problem arises when someone starts to use more than one device. Making sure files are up-to-date on every device or computer can become a headache. This headache can be solved by using Dropbox.

Remembering passwords can be a daunting task these days with hundreds of websites now requiring them. One option is to use the same password or to use simple passwords that are easy to remember. This leaves your web presence and even credit cards vulnerable to theft. A better answer is to use an application like 1Password by Agile Web Solutions. 1Password uses a single master password to store all your passwords in a 128-Bit AES encrypted file.

The key features or advantages of using 1Password are:

Mobile Pond has updated their Photogene for the iPad again. They fixed several bugs that caused a crash when viewing photos with IPTC data. They also added Dropbox to their list of export options. This is a big advantage for Photogene as Dropbox allows for seamless file transfer between the iPad and the Mac. For photographers looking for a way to leave their MacBooks at home, Mobile Pond just brought that dream a step closer.

Photogene still does not display all of the IPTC meta-data from Aperture, but the developers are looking into it and hopefully will have an update in the coming weeks. So far, this new update has been bug free. The developers have built a very nice app, yet there are some areas that could be improved.