Author: Blancer

Apple’s music creation and audio production apps, Logic Pro and Logic Express, have just received updates via Software Update.

Both apps have been updated to version 9.1.4, which provides support for importing projects from Garage Band for iPad. The download for Logic Express is 138.74 MB in size, while that for Logic Pro weighs in at 192.48 MB.

The updates are available through Software Update, or can be downloaded directly from the following links:

Logic Express Update: http://support.apple.com/kb/DL1015

Logic Pro Update: http://support.apple.com/kb/DL1014

Software Update: Apple Logic Pro, Logic Express originally appeared on TUAW on Tue, 24 May 2011 17:15:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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It’s almost summer, so thoughts turn to rock climbing, scenic vistas, maybe a geyser or a cool mountain lake. If you’re thinking of travel to any of the 58 US national parks, or any of the places in the National Park System that include seashores, battlefields and recreation areas and more, I think the new Chimani National Park app is for you. The free iPad and iPhone app gives you an overview of the place you want to visit, interactive maps and some Wikipedia-based information. It also provides a to-do list, letting you mark where you’ve been and where you’d like to go. The app also provides a web link to the official site for each National Park Service-administered location.

I’ve previously reviewed the Chimani National Park guides that deal with some specific locations. This latest app is a much less detailed guide, but I was surprised to learn of national park facilities in my area that I didn’t even know were there. There is also an option to get a lifetime subscription to the National Park Traveler News website for $1.99.

Continue reading Get ready for summer travel with a free National Park guide

Get ready for summer travel with a free National Park guide originally appeared on TUAW on Tue, 24 May 2011 17:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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San Jose Judge Lucy Koh is forcing Samsung to hand over new and unreleased mobile devices to its rival Apple. Apple’s lawyers will get a chance to look at these devices as part of its infringement case against Samsung. In this complaint, Apple is accusing Samsung of violating a variety of utility patents, design patents, and trade dress registrations for its suite of iOS devices.

The phones and tablets requested by Apple include the Samsung Galaxy S2, Galaxy Tab 8.9, Galaxy Tab 10.1, Infuse 4G and Droid Charge. Apple will be looking closely at the packaging and the Touchwiz UI used by the Korean manufacturer to see how closely it mimics Apple’s iPhone, iPad and iPod touch. Specifically, Apple is looking for elements that will confuse people into thinking the Samsung devices are the same as the iPhone.

In response to Apple’s complaint, Samsung countersued Apple for patent infringement in Korea, Japan and Germany. Both cases are slowly making their way through the legal system in each of these countries.

Apple asks Samsung for prototype devices originally appeared on TUAW on Tue, 24 May 2011 16:30:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Apple’s iBooks app and the iBookstore have been available since March of last year, but don’t appear to have made as much of an impact as the much older Kindle platform from Amazon. Just last week, Amazon chief Jeff Bezos announced that the company is now selling slightly more electronic books than the dead-tree versions. Last October, one of our bloggers noted that the iBookstore was “one big failure,” citing the lack of titles as his main concern.

I feel the same way. Although it seems as if things are slowly getting better, I still find myself searching for electronic books in both the iBookstore and Kindle Store, and the majority of the time I buy them from Amazon. Personally, I do like the look of iBooks a lot more than I do Kindle books, and I find incredible numbers of typos in Kindle books. But I still go to the Kindle Store for most of my ebooks simply because I can find what I want to read.

During a discussion with several of my fellow bloggers yesterday, it occurred to me that there are a few things that the Kindle electronic publishing platform does much better than the iBookstore. Read more to see some suggestions on what Apple could do to better compete with Amazon’s Kindle ebookstore and dominate the ebook market the way that the iPod and iTunes have come to rule the music business.

Continue reading How Apple iBooks could compete with Amazon’s Kindle in the ebook space [updated]

How Apple iBooks could compete with Amazon’s Kindle in the ebook space [updated] originally appeared on TUAW on Tue, 24 May 2011 16:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Welcome to Ask TUAW, your favorite weekly question-and-answer column. Do you know what my favorite thing in the entire world is? No, besides grilled cheese sandwiches. That’s right! Questions! We can never have too many questions! You can’t have a Q&A column without the Q, so please go to the comments of this post and ask away. To get fabulous answers, we need your fabulous questions. You can also email your questions directly to ask [at] tuaw.com, or ping us on Twitter.

Now, queries! Dan writes:

The place I work refuses to upgrade their version of Exchange to anything newer than 2003. They also won’t enable IMAP for email.

On my iPhone and iPad, I have no problem using Exchange 2003, but on the Mac it’s a different story. Apple Mail will only see newer versions of Exchange, and even Microsoft’s Outlook 2008 can’t use this version of Exchange Server.

I know you could use the God-awful Entourage software or run a Windows program in emulation, but isn’t there anything else? I would have thought that with the plethora of new Mac-based mail apps, there would be at least one that could do mail as well as the iPhone. Help me!

Continue reading Ask TUAW: AirPlay and the Apple TV, Exchange 2003, enterprise iOS management and MobileMe calendar publishing

Ask TUAW: AirPlay and the Apple TV, Exchange 2003, enterprise iOS management and MobileMe calendar publishing originally appeared on TUAW on Tue, 24 May 2011 15:30:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Apple’s music streaming service is inching closer to launch according to industry sources. Earlier rumors suggest Apple already inked licensing agreements with three of the four major record labels, including EMI Music, Warner Music and Sony Music. The one remaining holdout is Universal Music, which is still working with the Cupertino company.

Besides the record labels, Apple also needs to obtain publishing rights from the individual music publishers. Insiders claim only a small amount of cash is keeping Apple from inking these final agreements, but these negotiations can be long and messy.

There is supposedly some tension between the music publishers and the record labels that has to be ironed out before Apple can launch its online streaming service. The record labels are not happy that publishers are getting the bulk of the cash Apple has put on the table for its cloud service. Wisely, the Cupertino company is reportedly playing the two music entities against each other and letting them duke it out. Apple hopes this money problem can be resolved and negotiations will wrap up in time for a WWDC announcement.

Apple, publishers reportedly close to completing cloud music deal originally appeared on TUAW on Tue, 24 May 2011 15:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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The folks over at MacHeist are apparently revving up for another big sale, and this time to celebrate the event, they’ve gone all out. Previous versions of the sale have featured a web-based metagame, but this time the game has move onto iOS, with the release of a US$.099 app called The Heist.

It’s very well done, of course, with plenty of secrets to figure out. Some of them are more traditional. The app has basically four different puzzle minigames (one’s a Sudoku variant, while others are like sliding tile puzzles or the car parking puzzle game), each with a number of different puzzles to solve within them, all in the goal of opening up the big MacHeist door.

There’s also a metagame to this one with an actual prize (I’ve heard it’s a Steam game) coming to anyone who can conquer all of the puzzles. And as an interesting trick at the beginning of the app hints, there’s an actual story that’s going on behind the scenes here.

The Heist wraps a lot of puzzles and fun in the MacHeist project’s signature style. You might not be able to crack all of the codes (though I’m sure someone out there will), but it’s an enjoyable venture anyway.

MacHeist releases The Heist for iOS originally appeared on TUAW on Tue, 24 May 2011 14:30:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Dear Aunt TUAW,

I love Evernote and use it regularly on my MacBook Pro and my iPhone. Lately, though, I’m finding myself in places with both devices, but the MacBook doesn’t have an internet connection and is therefore unable to transfer data from one device to the other without attaching a cable. Since both devices have Wi-Fi and Bluetooth capabilities, it seems like there should be an easy solution to wirelessly transfer files that I would typically use Evernote for. Do you have any suggestions?

Your loving nephew,

Bill G.

Continue reading Dear Aunt TUAW: Help me transfer Evernote data without the internet

Dear Aunt TUAW: Help me transfer Evernote data without the internet originally appeared on TUAW on Tue, 24 May 2011 14:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Computers are like cars: while the vast majority of owners are happy to drive around in their car for years, exactly the way they came off of the dealer’s lot, some people want to customize their wheels immediately. It’s not surprising that for some owners of Apple’s popular MacBook Air, the first thing that they want to do is supercharge their lightweight laptops with a bigger, faster flash drive.

Macworld did a series of tests of the Mercury Aura Pro Express SSD upgrades from OWC (Apple refers to the drives as flash storage, while OWC calls them SSDs) that can add those precious GBs to your Air. What they found was that while the marketing materials for the OWC drives claim huge performance leaps for MacBook Airs equipped with those drives, the company is using automated tests that don’t mimic real-life laptop usage.

The test results revealed that in many cases, the SSDs showed mixed performance results when tested in common tasks such as using Adobe Photoshop CS5, importing and processing images with Aperture and iPhoto, and performing common file actions in Finder.

That’s not to say that the OWC SSDs aren’t worthwhile. On the contrary, the drives are about the only way for MacBook Air users to increase storage capacity past the 256 GB maximum for the stock 13-inch Air, and the 128 GB of storage in the maxed-out stock 11-inch Air.

For more details of the lab results from Macworld’s tests, be sure to check out their post.

Macworld experiences mixed results with MacBook Air SSD upgrades originally appeared on TUAW on Tue, 24 May 2011 13:30:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Have you ever wished you could get that private dear-diary experience in a digital form? I’m not talking about the kinds of things you share with the world on a blog or the schedules you keep in iCal, but the old-fashioned diary into which you poured your life experiences?

Diarie attempts to capture that traditional analog experience on your Mac. It gives you the appearance of a binder with diary entries on one side and an index on the other. You can embed images, title your entries under a date and even password protect it so that only you have access to it — perfect for those who use a shared computer. The typeface and text size are customizable, but that’s about it. A simple, straightforward diary.

While the daily diary has gone somewhat out of fashion, if you’re looking to keep your memoirs somewhere, the US$1.99 Diarie is a well-crafted, if slightly limited offering that’s well worth considering.

TUAW’s Daily Mac App: Diarie originally appeared on TUAW on Tue, 24 May 2011 13:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Thomas Pleasance has released a beta of AirPlay for Windows Media Center, which does just what you think: it streams video and photos to a Windows Media Center PC via Apple’s AirPlay.

To get started, install Apple’s Bonjour for Windows and Pleasance’s client on your Media Center PC. From there, fire up your iPhone or iPad and send over some photos or movies (note that music isn’t supported yet).

The Digital Lifestyle has posted a hands-on with the setup, noting, “I was impressed how quickly video playback started, within seconds of selecting Windows Media Center Airplay option my Media Center PC was playing the video and without leaving Media Center at all.”

Sounds good! Let us know how this goes if you try it out.

AirPlay for Windows Media Center beta now available originally appeared on TUAW on Tue, 24 May 2011 12:30:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Condé Nast has officially launched subscriptions today for iPad editions of Wired and GQ. The Wired and GQ apps are free, and readers can buy either single issues at US$1.99 a pop or a full year for $19.99 through in-app purchases. The subscriptions automatically renew until you cancel them, so if you’re curious about the magazine and don’t want to be billed monthly for single issues, buy the subscription and cancel as quickly as possible.

Current subscribers to the print versions from the US and Canada can access their digital subscriptions from within the app at no extra cost. Past digital issues of Wired are available for in-app purchase for $3.99, and you’ll be able to do the same with back issues of the digital edition of GQ. You can read a full TUAW review of the Wired app here.

Wired, GQ in-app purchase subscriptions launching today originally appeared on TUAW on Tue, 24 May 2011 12:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Update: GigaOm has retracted the story; their post was indeed based on the 2010 WWDC press release. Oops.

Apple has NOT confirmed that Steve Jobs will be presenting the keynote address at this year’s WWDC this June in San Francisco, but that’s what this post by Charles Jade over at GigaOM was saying.

It’s always a treat when Jobs can participate in Apple events. His ongoing health issues and medical leave from Apple make him less of a guaranteed speaker and more of a delightful surprise when he feels well enough to appear.

Unfortunately, GigaOM jumped the gun on this one. There is no official announcement from Apple and the only press release showing a SteveNote at WWDC is from last year (thanks to Ars Technica’s Jacqui Cheng for pointing that out).

We’ve reached out to Apple for comment and will update if we hear anything. Not to say for sure that Steve wouldn’t appear at WWDC, but as far as we know right now, he’s not.

Steve Jobs NOT confirmed for 2011 WWDC keynote, false alarm originally appeared on TUAW on Tue, 24 May 2011 11:18:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Opera rolled out version 6 of its popular web browser for iOS today. The latest version of Opera Mini now supports the iPad and the Retina Display of the iPhone 4, two major upgrades that should bring a smile to the face of iOS users. Opera Mini 6 also adds smoother panning and improved pinch-to-zoom to bring the user experience on par with mobile Safari.

Other salient features include the ability to share pages directly with social networks (Twitter, Facebook and My Opera) as well as support for Arabic, Chinese and similar non-Latin languages. If you’re looking for an alternative to Safari, Opera Mini 6 is definitely worth a look. It is available for free from the App store.

Opera Mini for iPad now available originally appeared on TUAW on Tue, 24 May 2011 11:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Apple has unofficially reached 500,000 approved iOS apps in the App Store. The report comes in the form of an infographic from 148Apps, Chillingo and Chomp. The group has assembled a Facebook page to celebrate the milestone.

Some goodies from the infographic:

• In 2010, “App” was declared “Word of the Year” by the American Dialect Society.
• The value of all apps that are currently live in the store is over $800 million.
• US$3.64 is the average price of a paid app, while 147,966 apps are free.

There’s been no official comment from Apple, though we suspect it will be pleased to tout these numbers at WWDC once confirmed. You can check out the full infographic here.

Apple unofficially reaches 500K approved iOS apps in the App Store originally appeared on TUAW on Tue, 24 May 2011 10:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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