Eltima has put their top ten apps for Mac on sale for $50. That’s nearly $470 off $520 worth of apps. Grab Eltima’s Black Friday deal before December 9!
I’m a huge fan of CloudMounter and Uplet. Those two apps alone would cost $50, so the rest are icing on the cake, as far as I’m concerned.
OWC is accepting pre-orders for their Thunderbolt 3 Dock, due to ship in February, starting at $280 (depends on the length of the Thunderbolt cable you want included). The Dock is obviously in response to Apple’s latest MacBook Pro announcement I wrote about yesterday.
In yesterday’s rant, I mentioned some would have to spend upwards of $200 for dongles to gain the ports they found necessary. The OWC Dock is a bit more than that, but also gives you significantly more options than straight dongles from Apple.
As you can see in the image above, the OWC Thunderbolt 3 Dock includes plenty of ports. 5 USB 3 ports, Firewire 800, Ethernet, Display Port, audio-in and SD Card slot are included, along with two Thunderbolt ports capable of driving 4K displays. And the device is powered, so it can charge your iPhone.
OWC’s Thunderbolt 3 Dock comes in Space Gray or Silver, and cable length varies between .5 meter 40Gb/s transfer speed and 2 meter 20Gb/s.
Apple recently released new MacBook Pro models with great hype. As someone who is in the market for a new Mac in the next year, I watched the keynote with a pretty good amount of excitement and anticipation.
At the conclusion of Apple’s keynote presentation, I found myself staring at the screen with a dazed and confused look on my face.
For years I’ve had a MacBook Pro for taking work on the road. I do light design and image retouching on it, as well as email, web browsing and writing. At the home office I use a top of the line iMac with 32GB of RAM, Core i7 processor and upgraded video card for the heavy lifting in Photoshop, InDesign, etc.
I’ve been thinking a lot about my impending upgrade the last year or so, and decided that I could probably live with just one fully upgraded MBPro and buy an Apple Thunderbolt Display to use when I’m at home. This would save a lot of hassle with file syncing and twice the time spent upgrading and maintaining two computers.
But then Apple Event happened last week and I feel like I’m stuck in a place I don’t want to be. I absolutely love the macOS, but I’m left wondering how Apple and the rest of the world ended up so far apart on their definition of a Pro user.
The new MacBook Pro with its Touch Bar looks cool at first glance, and I can totally see how the average consumer might find it too cool to pass up. The problem for me (and by me, I mean most pros) is that anything found in the Touch Bar can be found in the menus—and probably has a keyboard shortcut associated with it. If it does, I probably know it and use it regularly. So I look at that fancy colorful Touch Bar, shrug my shoulder and… pfffft!
But that’s just one feature, right? Then I look under the hood and find more pfffft! than I think I can chew. A limit of 16GB of RAM. How do they call a Mac a “Pro” computer when you limit it to 16GB of RAM? The reason, according to Apple’s Phil Shiller, is that they wanted to keep the power-consumption down to preserve batterly life.
It’s a PRO computer. Most pro users sit at a desk most of the day, with the MBPro plugged in. Don’t even get me started on the comparatively low-end video card Apple chose to include. It’s not that it’s bad, it’s just that it’s not a pro-level video card. Period.
The ports… that’s a big issue. Look, I get that technology moves forward. I never complained when Apple chose to switch to Lightning ports on the iPhone. But that’s mostly because I don’t have to plug anything into my iPhone other than the charger. My Mac is another thing completely. Not only do I plug my USB-A iPhone into it, but my USB-A microphone, USB-A DSLR camera cable, USB-A Bluetooth headphones (for charging) and multiple USB-A storage drives. With the new MBPro, some users will spend up to $200 on dongles to connect existing devices to the new MBPro. That’s just crazy.
Apple no longer makes stand-alone displays, opting instead to work with LG to produce a fully compatible 5K display that has an iSight camera, plenty of ports and gorgeous image quality. The price is better than Apple’s former offering, too. So there’s really no problem there, other than the problem of perception.
But the big white elephant in the room is that rumor sites claim that Apple will be updating the MacBook Pro next year with faster processors, RAM upgradeable to 32GB, better video cards, battery-efficient OLED screens and more. Of course, some of those rumors don’t match up with reality. So who knows what to believe.
I’m not sure what to make of the current MacBook Pro, or the rumors that Apple is already working on the device pro users wanted. I get that Intel is to blame for the low-power processors and the effect it has on Apple to provide more RAM and video cards, but then why even release the laptop upgrade? Why not just wait a few more months and release the better device when it’s ready?
It makes me wonder what the next iMac or Mac Pro will be, or even IF they will be. What I know for sure is that my plan to go with a single Mac, the MacBook Pro, are on hold until next year… and even then I may have to alter those plans depending on what Apple does.
I used to be a pure Apple fanboy, but that description is no longer valid—at least not in the year 2016.
Apple has made a combo updater for the latest version of the macOS operating system available for download.
The macOS Sierra 10.12.1 update improves the stability, compatibility, and security of your Mac, and is recommended for all users.
This update:
– Adds an automatic smart album in Photos for Depth Effect images taken on iPhone 7 Plus
– Improves the compatibility of Microsoft Office when using iCloud Desktop and Documents
– Fixes an issue that may prevent Mail from updating when using a Microsoft Exchange account
– Fixes an issue that caused text to sometimes paste incorrectly when using Universal Clipboard
– Improves reliability of Auto Unlock with Apple Watch
– Improves security and stability in Safari
Ever want to download the audio or full video from a YouTube video and couldn’t figure out how to do it, or the silly little browser extension you have simply stopped working? I’ve written about Airy in the past, it’s a fantastically simple YouTube downloader for the Mac that just works.
Airy allows you to download as many YouTube videos as you want, including entire channels or playlists—two new features new in Airy 3.0. You simply paste a YouTube video URL into Airy, or use the Airy bookmarklet in your favorite browser to add the current video to the Airy download list, and boom—video(s) downloaded. And if you have to move on to other things and quit Airy before your videos are finished downloading, don’t worry. Airy will remember where it left off and continue the downloads the next time you launch the app.
The cool thing about Airy is that it not only allows you to choose the size/quality of the video (including 4K and 8K Ultra HD videos), but also offers the option of downloading only the audio portion of the YouTube video in MP3 format. Very slick!
Airy’s interface is simple. There are no frivolous features or doodads to complicate things. It does one thing, and does it extremely well. And unlike those pesky, ad-infested browser extensions, the developers seem to keep Airy working even with updates to YouTube’s back-end, browser updates and OS upgrades.
I’ve had to place YouTube videos in numerous PowerPoint/Keynote presentations, and have downloaded countless videos I’ve wanted to save for offline viewing. I’ve tried dozens of apps and browser plugins. Airy is by far the best in my experience.
Airy 3.0 is available for OS X 10.7 and up, including the macOS Sierra beta (and I’m sure the shipping version later this fall), and costs $19.95. You can get Airy for 30% OFF using the following code: THGM-DSC which drops the price to below $14.
Unless you’ve been in a coma for the last several months and just woke up a few minutes ago, you’ve no doubt read all about everything Apple offered up at the September event yesterday. If you haven’t, I’m not going to re-hash it all here—maybe you can watch a 5-minute catch-up video.
The following are just a few of my thoughts on the major touch points of the presentation: (more…)
I can’t say definitively this wasn’t in El Capitan (because I have no machines running it anymore), but I noticed that in macOS Sierra, we finally have a Keep Folders on Top in List View option built-in to the system. You can find the feature in the Finder Preferences (When on the desktop, hit Command + ,)
No more SIMBL app hacks required!
If you missed my review of CloudMounter, the app that integrates popular cloud-based file storage/syncing services with the Mac’s Finder, take a look at it—it’s an awesome app for the Mac.
If you’re interested in buying it, you can SAVE 30% by heading over to Eltima Software’s CloudMounter purchase page and using the code CLM-3O-GMac (it should already be applied if you use the link). The code is valid for discounts on any Personal, Team or Company license.
Dropbox, Google Drive, Microsoft One Drive, FTP… there are all sorts of file storage and syncing sites out there, and you probably find yourself using more than one, if not several.
When I first tried Eltima’s CloudMounter, an app that gathers all those services and more into one menubar item, I wondered why I would need it; after all, I already have access to them via the respective service apps. After using CloudMounter for a week, I began to notice that it was more useful than I originally thought. (more…)
Ultimately, only you can answer that. Apple has chosen a direction with the Mac’s GUI that is quite a departure from even the recent past. Lots of people love it, and lots of people don’t like it at all. I find myself somewhere in the middle.
When I look at the icons above individually, I like all the new ones. But collectively, when compared to the old ones, they don’t work as well. First off, Apple has chosen to go decidedly whiter with their icons. In a crowded Dock, they all sort of blend together. None of them are easily recognizable at a quick glance. Second, some of them make no sense. Take the new Photos app icon—what in the heck do a bunch of color blobs represent? The old iPhoto icon was clear in what it represented.
But it doesn’t stop with icons. The entire GUI has gotten lighter, more “blended in,” and sometimes confusing. Overall, I still love the Mac’s interface. Lately though, I’m finding more and more “little things” that really bug me.
Nicholas Windsor Howard has a great two-part article about the subject (complete with plenty of screenshots) that’s worth the read. Part one can be found here, and part-two here. Take a look and see if you agree with his opinions.