Where Have All The Fart Apps Gone?
Armando Rodriguez, TechHive
Adobe Illustrator continues to be a capable and comprehensive vector illustration package. Users of Illustrator CS4 (and earlier) will find a lot of compelling reasons to upgrade to version CS6, but the decision isn’t as clear-cut for users of CS5. Overall, Illustrator CS6 feels less like a full upgrade and more like a refinement of the previous version. The updated user interface is gorgeous and there are modest performance gains, but those benefits alone are hardly worth the $249 upgrade price.
A cool, customisable interface, visible when you choose, shows users recently used documents, folders and applications so you don't need to go digging around when you need them again. Cleverly, users can drag and drop files from Trickster to Finder or any other application, open files and applications from Trickster, preview them or reveal them in your Mac's Finder.
Essentially, Apple loaned me a brand new laptop—which I purchased and was ultimately reimbursed for as a form of collateral—until I was able to order the upgraded computer I actually wanted, the one we all knew it made more sense to buy.
Shops in the teeming transit hub have seen an iBoost in their bottom line ever since the world’s biggest Apple Store opened there late last year, averaging a 7.5 percent hike in profits, MTA officials said yesterday.
For about a year, Macs have been shipping with a fancy new port on the side called Thunderbolt. We're just on the cusp of seeing this new port on Windows-based PCs, too. What exactly is Thunderbolt, and should you make sure your next computer has it?
Steve laughed — but he rejected it immediately. He said that demo crashes are an unavoidable part of the business, and that his own demos could fail as easily as Gates’. He didn’t want to taunt Gates for something that was beyond his control.
What you can do is vary the Apple supplied features, without varying the hardware and API platform that your third-party developers are targeting.
Long-term, the switch to iCloud should make for a better-than-ever syncing solution — not just for Yojimbo, but for Mac apps in general. Short-term, however, this is confusing for users and an enormous headache for developers, especially those with apps that predate the Mac App Store.
That’s what many Mac developers are dealing with right now. An app does syncing through MobileMe. Now, it needs to do it through iCloud. Fine. But Apple won’t let an app use iCloud unless it’s sold in the App Store. Fine. But Apple won’t approve an app for the App Store unless it’s sandboxed. And for many developers, sandboxing means that half of their app’s features will either no longer work at all, or will need to be dumbed way, way down. Selling your app there also means being cut off from any kind of simple and direct line of communication with your users.
It’s nice to see podcasts get the same kind of attention as ebooks, though Apple does have a tougher row to hoe here, thanks to full-featured competitors like Downcast and Instacast. Still, a standalone Podcasts app goes a long way towards decluttering iOS’s media playback capabilities, a trend which has already seen Apple split the iPhone’s iPod app into Videos and Music.
At minimum, the new rules represent a major (and hopefully only temporary) setback. It's going to take some time — maybe even a couple of years — before developers learn how to do everything they need to do under App Store restrictions, and Apple learns which of these restrictions could stand some loosening up. And until that happens, there will be some very real limitations on how good a Mac app can be.