Macgasm

“Oh, Wow.” That was my first reaction to Writer for Mac. My next one was “Freaking sexy!” Ok, I admit — I’m very much a sucker for minimalist things (I tend to avoid clutter, bloat, and unnecessary complexity), especially when it comes to software. That said, Writer for Mac is the cleanest writing environment I’ve yet seen for the Mac. Yes, I’ve tried WriteRoom, ByWord, and others. They are good, and I’m certainly not discounting them by any means, but Writer just has that last level of polish that makes it feel “right.” It feels like how an Apple-designed writing app should feel. You could even say it’s what TextEdit could have been.
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Within a matter of weeks, the BBC is set to roll out a new iOS app to its field journalists that will enable them to report live from the field using nothing but an iPhone. The app will allow reporters to use the iPhone to broadcast live video, audio, or other commentary in real time via a 3G connection on the field. This will make the iPhone even more useful to reporters, and marks a significant adoption of the device in a field typically requiring thousands of dollars worth of expensive video cameras and satellite transmission equipment.

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Phone-It, a new Cydia app for jailbroken iPads, has just been released as a $20 download. The app, developed by iPhone hacking group iPhoneIslam, literally allows you to make real telephone calls from your iPad. This is not a VOIP, Skype, or Google Voice-based solution. This is the real thing, essentially letting you use your iPad as a portable desk phone.

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Apple confirmed that they indeed did recall what they referred to as an “extremely small number” of Verizon iPad 2 3G units last week. The company’s announcement also detailed the reason for the recall. They said that these iPad 2 units were accidentally flashed with identical MEIDs, effectively making them all clones of one iPad. Obviously, each MEID is supposed to be absolutely unique to only one iPad, so this would have rendered the iPads unusable on the Verizon network, which would have seen them as duplicate entries of a single device.

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This morning, Finnish mobile phone maker Nokia issued a press release announcing that it had won a patent lawsuit against Apple claiming that Apple had been using some of its patents without permission. The announcement stated that Nokia won the lawsuit, and that Apple will now be required to pay out one large, fixed settlement in addition to smaller royalties to be paid out over time.

This patent battle between the two massive corporations has been going on for years, with Nokia filing an earlier lawsuit against Apple last year, culminating in a victory for Apple in March of this year. The two companies have been suing each other back and forth for about two years now, having started this spat back in 2009.

Apple is currently in the process of suing Nokia… again.

Article Via TUAW

Last week, reports came out stating that the MacBook Air would be updated on Wednesday of this week. An update to those rumors suggests that in fact it is the unlocked iPhone 4 models that will be arriving stateside on Wednesday, and that the MacBook Air is slated for a slightly later release. It is likely that the updated MacBook Airs may be released in either late June or July to coincide with the retail release of Lion.
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With all of Apple’s announcements about Lion at WWDC, one was particularly paradigm-changing. Lion will be accessible only via the Mac App Store. This immediately creates a lot of questions. How will we put Lion on an empty Mac? How will we restore in the event of a problem? With more and more developers (including yours truly) using Lion on a daily basis, we are discovering all of the new OS’s ins and outs.

Here’s what we know so far.

Recovery

To recover a Lion installation, and do a clean install or reinstall, you simply reboot while holding the option key. This brings up a list of partitions available for you to boot from, one of which is the new “Mac OS X Recovery” partition created by Lion when it’s originally installed. You simply mouse or arrow-key over to that partition and press return, which boots you into recovery mode.

This is where things get interesting (read: sticky). Apple has done a few weird things with Lion to make it a “cloud” friendly OS, and some of them are not necessarily good things.
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Are you one of the many people who just signed up for MobileMe and are wondering what’s going to happen to that hundred bucks you just spent? If so, you’ve got nothing to worry about. If you want to stick with MobileMe, you can. Apple will keep the service open for its existing users until June 30, 2012.

If, however, you decide to bail on MobileMe and stick it out for iCloud this fall, Apple has announced that they will give you a pro-rated refund. The company has just posted a refund request form on their website that will allow you to get a pro-rated refund based on the amount of time you’ve actually been using your one-year subscription of MobileMe.
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