Apple | Mac
Eltima has released version 3.0 of CloudMounter for Mac, bringing some major changes to the cloud storage management app. If you’re unfamiliar with it, take a look at my review of CloudMounter here.
Read more “CloudMounter for Mac updated, drops price to free for popular services”
Adobe Illustrator
EpicPxls has provided the new Google logo, and icons for Google, Google+, Maps, News, Business and Translate in vector format. They look great. At first glance, anyway.
Read more “New Google logo & icons in vector format”
General
The story is interesting in the fact that it sets a precedent (in Canada) for the ever-gray area of “expectation of privacy.” As is usually the case with these legal stories, all the genius’ in the comment section are more fun to read than the brief article.
General
I’m not sure what people’s fascination with making the email process into anything but email, but apparently Google is on board. Gmail wasn’t bad enough, now there’s Google Inbox. I wonder how long it’ll be before they kill this, too.
General
Adobe has been ranked #2 on Fortune’s World’s Most Admired Software Companies list this past week, while Apple topped the list of overall Most Admired Companies, followed by Google, Amazon, Coca-Cola, and Starbucks.
Apple | Mac
If you’re like me and find Flash to be an annoyance with its constant crashing, slowing down your browsing, security risks, and ramping-up of your Mac’s cooling fans when in use, you’ll no doubt want to turn off/remove Flash from your Mac. If you use Firefox or Safari, you simply have to remove the System Preference Pane item by right-clicking the icon and choosing to remove it.
If you’re using Google’s Chrome browser, it’s a bit more difficult. That’s because Google includes Flash as part of the browser itself. Thankfully, they’ve included it as a plug-in which can be turned off.
Type about:plugins in the URL bar and hit Return/Enter. A list of the plug-ins you have installed is displayed. Note that these are plug-ins, not extensions you install from the Chrome Store. Find the Adobe Flash Player plugin in the list and tick the Disable checkbox. After restarting Chrome, Flash will be off.
The downside is that Flash will be re-enabled the next time Google updates Chrome, which is quite often. You can download Flash blocker extensions, but I prefer to completely remove it and save myself the overhead of having yet another extension installed.
General
Macworld has put together a nice piece on how to get started with Google+.
General
Google’s Chrome browser has been updated to take advantage of Retina MacBook Pros. But the more interesting thing is that Chrome can now access your Mac’s camera and microphone natively. Previously, only plugins like Flash were able to do it. I’m not sure this is the best thing for user security, but it’s one more step in a Flash-free world.
Apple | Mac
With Instagram, Facebook chose to allow it to live-on for now – but I suspect it will eventually get fully integrated into Facebook’s brand apps. Unfortunately, Google has not been as kind. They’ve made it clear that they have no intention on adding features to it in the future. It’s dead. And while Facebook only hired the developers and not purchased the apps themselves, they’re essentially dead as well.
I’m not suggesting that you should not buy apps from independent developers. They’re what makes the Apple community great. And I absolutely do not blame any developer for selling their company for large sums of money. They worked hard to create a great app or service and they deserve the rewards.
But you should take these recent acquisitions into consideration when you purchase your next app that may be a mission-critical one. Let me give you an example. Read more “Recent acquisitions should make you wary of buying new apps”
General
Simple is always better. Simple-to-use always beats feature-rich-but-complicated. If you believe that, then you know why Facebook is beating the digital pants off Google+ in the social media arena.
Facebook is a fairly simple service:
There’s very little thinking or learning-curve involved with using Facebook. Finding new friends is dead simple using Facebook, as is finding brands you wish to follow, and sharing photos and video. There is very little in the way of techy lingo used on the site, and outside of the privacy controls, the entire site is easy for even the most non-geek user to navigate and use. Now let’s look at Google+. Read more “Why Google+ is losing the battle with Facebook: It’s simple”
General
For those who are interested (or obsessed) in knowing their website’s Google Page Rank and Alexa ranking, as well as keeping up with competing website rankings, Rranks is a quick and easy way to do so.
Simply type the web address of the site you want to check into the box and you’re instantly given the site’s Page Rank, Alexa rank, and age of the site right down to the day.