Macgasm

I’ve been a big fan of Sparrow since I tried the free version when it first came out. Since those days it has made an appearance on the Mac App Store and in those four months there have been over 300,000 downloads of the app. It has also raised around $250K in funding from people like Tweetie creator Loren Brichter as well as Kima Ventures and Dave Morin. Now there is some exciting news from the CEO Dom Leca: Sparrow is bringing social layers to email. (more…)

Nicholas Tatonetti, a doctoral candidate in Stanford’s biomedical informatics program, discovered an interaction some people may have while on an antidepressant named Paxil and a cholesterol-figthing drug named Pravachol. Side effects notably included high blood sugar.

Tatonetti discovered the connection using his MacBook Pro.

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The trend of minimalist text editors has really been taking off lately, both on iOS and on the Mac. Byword is an app that came out fairly recently, offering a clean, simple, relaxed atmosphere for writing that has a nice vintage feel to it. The app has both light-on-dark and dark-on-light writing modes, for writing that’s easy on the eyes during the day or at night.

The app’s most popular feature is its distraction-free full-screen mode, which is the mode users will likely spend the most time in. It’s designed to give you a typewriter-like distraction free typing environment. If full-screen mode isn’t your thing, the app also offers a more traditional but equally clean and simple windowed mode. This will be useful to those who need to do multitasking, such as viewing reference materials in a browser window while writing an article or paper.

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Everybody’s favorite iOS-only photo app and social network is growing up.

Yesterday at TechCrunch Disrupt, Instagram co-founder Kevin Systrom announced that the free service is posting ten photos a second, up from six per second just a few months ago.

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Reports have surfaced that Apple PR’s team in the UK has been inviting journalists to WWDC, set to kick off on June 6th in San Francisco.

The reports have once again kicked off rumors that Apple will be releasing its next iPhone at the conference. The iPhone 3G, 3GS and 4 were all announced during the keynote, but it has been largely held that the company will just be focusing on software this year.

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Have you ever walked into a room and wondered whether you had anything in common with the person next to you?Or wanted to know if they are on any other social networks like Twitter and Facebook? Well now you can with an iPhone app called Sonar.

Sonar is a mobile profile for local social networking. The founder of Sonar, Brett Martin, says the app has the ability to tell you “that the guy sitting across from you is facebook friends with your college roommate, the dude by the jukebox is a VC that you follow on twitter, and the cute girl by the bar also likes the Arcade Fire and Hemingway.”

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Touted by its creators as a “vintage case for MacBook Air,” the BookBook for Air basically wraps two leather-bound hardback book covers around your laptop. The vintage look is completed by a stylized zipper enclosure that loosely resemble the pages of your grandfather’s mystery novel collection that you were never allowed to touch.

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Well, the honeymoon is over, folks. We can no longer enjoy the ‘security through obscurity’ that Mac users have been fortunate enough to experience up till now. Hot on the heels of the MacDefender fake antivirus app, Intego today has discovered a new variant called MacGuard.

What makes Mac Guard so dangerous is that it can install itself without needing your administrator password. All the MacDefender variants (including MacProtector, MacSecurity, and now MacGuard) pretend to be antivirus programs, and ask for your personal information and credit card information, tricking the user into thinking they are registering and purchasing the software. In reality, the information is simply being sent along to the creators of the fake program.

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