We all love it when the time comes along and Apple has a new piece of hardware or software for us to play with and get our teeth into. It has been a couple of months since the latest iPad was introduced to the world, and apart from a few betas of OS X Mountain Lion which was pushed out to registered developers of the respective development programs, Apple loving masses haven't had anything new to tinker with for a while. With the new iPhone coming later this year and iOS 6 likely to be released alongside it, that only leaves OS X Mountain Lion as a relatively affordable option to grab right away.
One of the driving forces behind the popularity of cloud computing and services like Dropbox and Apple's iCloud is the level of accessibility that it brings, and in a lot of circumstances it can make day-to-day computing activities a lot simpler than before. Rather than having to make constant backups of information or carrying external hard drives or USB drives around with us, having important data and files stored in the cloud allows us to quickly get access to that information from pretty much wherever we are as long as we have a network connection.
Apple is all set to release the next version of OS X – OS X 10.8 “Mountain Lion” – as we’ve received news that the company has sent out (or “seeded”, the correct technical term for procedure) the code complete Golden Master version of Mountain Lion to specialists at AppleCare. Check out the details after the jump.
For those amongst us are who registered members of the Twitter micro-blogging service and also happen to own an iPhone, iPad or iPod touch will know that when it comes to choosing a Twitter app, it is a difficult choice. Out of the multiple Twitter apps available on the App Store, they all pretty much offer the same experience packaged into a different user-interface, that was until Tweetbot came along and raised the bar with an entirely custom UI mixed with great gestures and user interactions.
Firefox's well-documented six week release cycle means as soon as one version arrives, the beta of the next edition is no more than a couple of days away. True to that motif, just two days after Firefox 14 was released for Windows, Mac and Linux, Firefox 15 beta has arrived, which, among other things, takes care of a few nagging memory leaks.
Sparrow, the creator of those very popular iOS and OS X applications, has just been acquired by Google, in a move which will certainly raise more than a few eyebrows. Sparrow has dedicated its existence on making some altogether great apps for Apple's platforms, but it is the Big G that has decided to swoop for the start-up, and Sparrow will now join the Gmail team to "accomplish a bigger vision."
Many of us here at Redmond Pie use Windows on a Mac. There are two reasons behind this controversial use of a Mac. The first is that because productivity takes a huge hit when you can’t find certain things in OS X that you’ve been sub-consciously using in Windows for so many years; we’re not saying these features aren't there, it’s just that it takes extra time and effort to find them. Secondly, there are a few programs that are either not available on OS X (Windows Live Writer and Visual Studio is a prime example) or doesn’t work as well (Google Chrome, for instance!).
Mozilla's Firefox has been around for quite a while now, and despite Google continually pushing updates of its fast-growing Chrome browser, Firefox has continued to remain resilient, altering its own release schedule in a bid to stay relevant. Hence, here we are at Firefox 14, and just six weeks after Firefox 13 was seeded on Mozilla's servers, and the fourteenth iteration still manages to offer a bunch of useful changes.
Twitter is one of the most popular social networking sites on the planet, and although it doesn't yield the same amount of active users as Facebook, it offers a fantastic niche platform from which people can communicate in the here-and-now.
Although most of the details with regards to Apple's much anticipated OS X Mountain Lion are already public domain, the Cupertino company has now revealed which specific Macs will be upgradable once the next iteration of its desktop operating system does emerge. If you're in ownership of a MacBook released prior to 2007, you'll be disappointed to learn that you'll need to grab yourself some new hardware if you wish to sink your teeth into Mountain Lion, since it's thought it will simply not run on 32-bit GPUs.
