Macgasm

The first thing people switching to Macs look for these days is Office for the Mac. While Apple has an excellent office suite of their own, most aren’t willing to leave behind Microsoft’s rendition after making the switch.

Thanks goodness Microsoft put together the Mac team all those years ago, and their continued support means a lot of people are happy today—Office: Mac 2011 is officially ready for purchase. We’ve been working with an evaluation copy for the last little while, and should have a comprehensive review in the upcoming days.

Here are a couple links to some early thoughts by others around the industry.

• Walt Mosseberg’s review
• David Pogue’s review in the New York Times

You can buy Office:Mac 2011 Home and Student edition on Amazon for $109.00.

Think about that for a minute. Three years ago, we watched as Steve Jobs unveiled the first iPhone. That proved to be the genesis of the leading touch screen smartphone, to which competitors are only now catching up. Apple in the meantime introduced the iPad, which has stood alone in the marketplace for most of 2010.

As a result, sales have skyrocketed, and those two products, the iPhone and the iPad, account for 60% of Apple’s sales last quarter. This is from two products, or two product segments even, that didn’t exist three years ago. The touch screen smart phone? Unheard of. We were in the land of BlackBerry and keyboards. The touch screen tablet? An unmitigated failure. Until the iPhone and the iPad, with the revolutionary iOS and Apple’s keen insight into UI, this product segment was nonexistent. And now it accounts for more than half of Apple’s sales.

It’s no wonder that Apple wants to roll back some of those lessons learned in UI back into the main OS, with the next revision of OS X Lion. Using the iOS devices as a testbed for UI, and taking the best elements of it back into the fold of OS X will undoubtedly boost the halo effect; people like to go with what they know. If you feel that it’s easy to flow from your iPhone or iPad to a Mac, you might consider buying one more seriously. Apple is not afraid to innovate, and it’s a smart move.

Article via Asymco

Those white iPhone holdouts have been waiting for quite some time now. Just when it seemed like Apple was going to quietly put the white version to bed, it has made an appearance on Apple’s iOS application. Along side the updated (V1.1) application, Apple has re-introduced the ability to not-reserve the white iPhone 4 alongside its black counterpart.

While the white iPhone was available in the store (iOS) briefly, you couldn’t actually click on it to make a reservation. Instead, when clicking on the white option, you were met with a notice: “Because of high demand, we are not currently taking iPhone reservations.” Go figure. Just when you think you’ve finally caught a glimpse of a unicorn, it falls through your clutches yet again.

But it gets worse, the White iPhone has gone missing again from the iOS application, at least in Canada.

Which is it Apple?  Is it going to be released, or not.  If not, just tell us so we can all move along and give up the dream.

Article Via SlashGear

If you’re a small business user with a couple of employees, there’s a good chance you’ve already heard of Daylite, and if you haven’t, you should really  check it out. The team management application is phenomenal at keeping track of your employees and ensuring that everyone is maximizing their time and efforts on your projects. Daylite has a contact manager, group calendars, project management tools, task lists, and an iPhone application. It’s pretty great.

The Marketcircle team, who are also the creators of Billings, has announced that they will be adding an iPad application to their Daylite lineup, and they’ve begun seeding the application to a private group of beta testers today.

There’s no ship date yet, but it’s nice to know that they’re on the right track.

As an aside, they’re also hiring for a bunch of Junior positions, so if you have a particularly panache for coding or designing you might be an idea candidate.

Article Via Marketcircle Blog

Imagine opening an app and seeing photos of yourself. Even worse, photos of yourself in nothing more than a bikini. Even worse, the app is called eXtreme Cam Girls. As reported by the New York Post, this did in fact happen to Rebecca Battino, a yoga instructor and model from Long Island. The photos were taken three years ago, when Battino was 16-years-old. How these photos got from iPhoto on her Mac to a random app remains a mystery, although theft has certainly been suggested. Not surprisingly, her photos have subsequently made their way around the internet.

Battino is suing both Apple and the app developer, Samba Studios, for $1 million in damages for copyright infringement. However, Battino does not object to the photos themselves, just to their use without her permission. eXtreme Cam Girls has since been removed from the App Store.

Article Via TUAW

Photo Credit: NYPost and Raymond Kaskey

It’s been offered on iPods and iPhones, and now Apple is offering free personal engravings on their iPad lineup as well. So if you feel the need to send personalized notes to loved ones over the holidays on a new iPad, you can now do it.

They’re also likely offering bulk orders to business customers, but we were unable to find that listed on their website.

Article Via Apple

Pixelmator, the alternative Photoshop applications, has announced that they are going to be on board with the Mac App Store.

Pixelmator has given a few reasons as to why they are onboard, including: less time on their update system, web store, licensing, and anti-piracy measures. They also mention that they will be able to spend more time on, wait for it, wait for it… creating applications, which is always a plus.

Despite the relatively short article, the comments shed light on some other interesting items. One user asks about porting existing users over. Pixelmator doesn’t have an answer for this yet, but maybe they should be looking to Apple to provide a method for this.

A potential method would be to provide promotional codes to existing users. But the limitation for this is the lack of availability outside the United States.

Another user inquires if Pixelmator will be turning off the App Store that they are currently using. Pixelmator says that they will not being turning off their current store, for a while at least. My guess is that this will depend on whether the alternative purchasing makes enough money.

Another question was whether Pixelmator 1.X would be in the store, or if Pixelmator would just start with 2.0. It turns out they are going to start with the 1.x application.

So there is one developer on board, and I am sure there are a bunch who are about to jump on. There are still a bunch of unanswered questions regarding the App Store. But only time will tell. I am sure that it will be a long process with some give and take on both sides.

Article Via Pixelmator
Photo Credit: Apple

With the third major expansion, Cataclysm, set to be released on December 7th, 2010, Blizzard has already begun laying the foundation for a fourth expansion pack.

According to Gameinformer, Senior Producer John Lagrave thinks it’s going to be “pretty f’ing awesome.” As a former WoW player, I find it pretty amazing that the franchise has had as much staying power as it has had to date. They had me during the first release, during Burning Crusade, but lost me with Wrath of the Lich King, and they won’t have me with this fourth expansion.

While Lagrave laments about how awesome everyone thinks the fourth installation is going to be, the franchise has gotten pretty stale for a lot of people. There will always be hardcore fans willing to see a franchise through to its death, but for me, it’s just going to be more of the same. I can only take so much grinding and leveling before I go absolutely crazy.

What’s this doing on a Mac Blog?  Well, Blizzard has been phenomenal at releasing games simultaneously on both Windows and OS X platforms, so we’re going to support them as much as we can.

How many of you are excited about this news? Better yet, do any of you still play WoW religiously?

Article and Image Via GameInformer