Macgasm

Those Angry Birds are everywhere nowadays; the new Simpsons if you will. Exploding on the iOS scene two years ago, the ludicrously popular series is expanding to mediums outside of the digital realm. Soft toys, clothes, even a future cookbook — its Finnish developer, Rovio, is putting everything behind the series.

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Well, well, what have we here? It looks like OS X Lion wasn’t the only new thing on the Mac App Store. For the first time, Adobe has an app on the Mac App Store: Adobe Photoshop Elements 9 Editor (a rather cumbersome name, don’t you think?). No longer relegated to the backwater of the Amazon Mac Software Downloads page that launched in May, Adobe has made it to the big leagues.

So what is this app from Adobe exactly? Well, as you might expect, it is Photoshop Elements, with a twist. Elements is already a scaled down version of the full Photoshop, and the Photoshop Elements 9 Editor is a slightly less featured version of the regular Photoshop Elements. Mainly, it loses the Elements Organizer, a tool for managing images, and instead relies on the user to organize their photos in iPhoto instead. In fact, Photoshop Elements 9 Editor is meant to be used in tandem with iPhoto, as a way provide more advanced photo editing features that are not available in iPhoto.

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So…   Google has been granted App Store approval for the official Google+ app for iPhone, and it’s a welcome addition to my ever-expanding desire to part ways with Facebook.

One thing that was rather annoying is that you couldn’t get the Google+ app on the iPad or iPod touch. A clever workaround has been discovered though, and you can now install it to the iDevice of your choice!

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You know how in the past, whenever we talked about who sold the most phones, Nokia would always seem to surprise us by being at the top of the list? Oh, it’s because worldwide they sell a lot of phones, we rationalized. Well, no longer, at least when it comes to smartphones (and really, does anyone care about anything else besides smartphones right now?)

Nokia released its second quarter financials today, and stated that it sold 16.7 million smartphones, which is well below the 20.3 million iPhones that Apple sold in the same quarter. In fact, Apple sits at the top of the heap, followed by Samsung, which analysts expect will announce somewhere in the neighbourhood of 19 million smartphones sold in the second quarter.

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When it comes to the MacBook Air, a lot of people seem to think that it just doesn’t have the guts and gumption of the MacBook Pro. Trust us, we hear it a lot in our comments. When someone asks, “What computer should we buy” and we recommend the Air, we get laughed at. “It’s not powerful enough” they say.

Here’s some proof to support our recommendation. According to Electricpig and some Geekbench results, the MacBook Air is running circles around the 2010, 17-inch MacBook Pro. If you had any questions about the power and potential of the MacBook Air, the benchmarks certainly start to tell a different story than most would assume.  Pro may be synonymous with speed, but Air definitely isn’y synonymous with crappy-ass, slow netbook.  Don’t believe us? Check out the benchmarks.

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I have to admit, I’ve been convinced since day 1 that I’d be replacing Facebook with Google+.  I, like many people, waited around for the iPhone app to drop before making the switch official, to make sure it’d be efficient.

Luckily, I don’t have to wait any longer, as Apple has approved Google+ for iPhone and it is available in the App Store! I had a chance to sit down and really play with it and put it through the ringer.

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With all the other news today, Apple slipped out version 3.5 of Apple Remote Desktop.

The new update brings Lion compatibility as well as some new features, including the ability to log into a separate session than the session the local user is in. This allows sysadmins to log into a Mac and work without the local user — sitting at the Mac — ever knowing it.

Click past the jump for a full changelog…

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Show Notes

Host: Stephen Hackett, Joshua Schnell

This week’s podcast is a little different from previous Macgasm podcasts in that we didn’t have any topics set out before hand. We just talked about stuff. Turns out it was probably one of the more fun podcasts we’ve ever done. We were also temporarily joined by Bobby Ghosal, founder of FLUD for a little bit.

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