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How to get Notification Center to show you what's playing in iTunes
OS X's Notification Center was introduced in Mountain Lion and is now your one-stop location for all alerts. Besides the customary notifications for incoming emails and reminders, you can also use Notification Center for other content like the title and artist of the current track that's playing in iTunes. As showcased by OS X Daily, Now Playing uses AppleScripts and Terminal-Notifier to display the current iTunes track and the artist's name along with your other notifications. The app also works with streaming services like Spotify. Now Playing can be downloaded from Mediafire and installed on your OS X Mountain Lion machine. Another alternative is iTunification from Onible. Inspired by Now Playing, iTunification lets you display the current track and artist in Notification Center and has the added benefit of Growl support. Besides the track and artist name, the Growl option also allows you to display cover art and setup custom alerts. Both of these apps are scaled down versions of GrowlTunes which adds playback controls your menu bar and displays the current track and artist as a Growl notification.
Send a Tweet via Notification Center using this handy AppleScript
Wouldn't it be great if you could send a tweet via Notification Center's "Click to Tweet" feature without needing to take your hands off of the keyboard? Apparently Stack Exchange user Ewwis thought so, too, and he wrote up a nice little AppleScript to do so. Macworld's Kirk McElhearn, who is a fan of AppleScripting and shortcuts, highlighted this script this morning. Just copy, paste and save the script below, launch it with a keyboard shortcut with LaunchBar or another similar utility, and you'll be tweeting in an instant.
OS X 10.8 Mountain Lion gripe list
To be sure, I think OS X 10.8 Mountain Lion is the best OS Apple has ever released. It feels like a completed version of what Mac OS X 10.7 Lion should have been. It's fast, it's clean, it melds some iOS concepts to OS X and, for the most part, it just works. That being said, no OS is entirely perfect and there are some gripes my colleagues an I have about Mountain Lion. We've compiled them into the list below. Now, most of these gripes are minor and they'll probably be corrected in future updates like 10.8.1 -- at least, we hope so. After reading through the list (which may grow) feel free to add your own gripes in the comments. And please, don't let this list of minor gripes put you off the OS. It really is the best one Apple has ever released. Mail Wobbly scroll on external monitor. No "Reply to sender." Signature sticks when changing accounts (Exchange only). Calendar Accepts invitations in the top calendar, not the default Exchange calendar (and not the account that received them). Displays menubar Mirroring only. Notification Center @mention tweets don't show from people you don't follow. Notification Center/Mail Clicking on an email message in Notification Center should take you to that specific email's inbox in Mail, NOT the universal inbox for all your different email accounts. Safari Under Safari>Preferences>Passwords the list of websites and your usernames should probably be hidden until you enter your administrator password. The passwords are already hidden by default but it seems like a security problem when anybody using your computer could see what websites you go to and what your usernames for the websites are. Knowing your usernames gives them one less thing to hack. Not to mention it tells people exactly which sites they should target you at since they know you're a member of the sites by looking in Safari's preferences. Safari JavaScript bugs render some websites unusable. Loss of RSS button in Safari means users have to jump through several hoops to subscribe to feeds. They also have to spend money to buy Reeder for Mac (or another RSS reader). Stock Widget You can no longer rearrange the order of stocks. Stocks don't sync with Stocks app on iOS devices (they never did, but they should). General: Numerous graphical "tearing" issues throughout the OS on the MacBook Pro with Retina Display. Most prevalent in TextEdit and Mail. "Open Recent" has disappeared from opening dialog splash box in many apps, most notably iWork apps. No "share" button in TextEdit. "Save As..." behaviour is completely contrary to how it worked pre-Lion. MacBook Pro with Retina Display has serious wake-from-sleep issues. Requires hard reboot more than 50% of the time. 3rd party apps: Microsoft Office apps refuse to hide. Sandboxing (or something else) seems to be preventing the iStat Menus Dashboard widget from delivering data on CPU processes.
Growl 2.0 SDK available, adds Notification Center integration
Growl has made its 2.0 SDK available, weeks after announcing that it planned to add a Notification Center action display to the program rather than letting it get Sherlocked by OS X Mountain Lion. The SDK also adds improvements to the Mist positioning system and various bugfixes. The 2.0 SDK and the older 1.3.1 SDK are both available through Growl's downloads page. [Via The Verge]
Mountain Lion 101: Silencing Notification Center alerts
Mountain Lion's Notification Center is handy. It displays banners and alerts from notification-aware apps to keep you informed of changes, like a new Twitter mention, Calendar event or email message. That last one can get distracting, depending on how much email you receive. Here are some ways to tame email alerts: Disable alerts and banners in System Preferences. Open System Preferences and click Notifications. Select Mail from the list on the right and then click None. You'll no longer see email notifications. Quit Mail. Apple's Mail app won't push notifications if it isn't running. Turn them all of at once. Open Notification Center on your Mac and swipe up to the very top. Move the slider labeled Show Alerts and Banners to the Off position to silence all pop-up alerts and banners (they still appear listed in Notification Center itself). Slide it back to On to restore alerts and banners. If you're worried about a notification popping up when you're making a presentation, don't be. Notification Center is smart enough to recognize when you've got Keynote open and silences notifications on its own. Additionally, it won't display alerts or banners on a mirrored display.
Mountain Lion 101: Notification Center in a hot corner
Apple's Mountain Lion introduced Notification Center to the Mac. This handy feature lets notification-aware apps display pop-up style alerts when something changes, like an incoming email message, Twitter mention, Calendar appointment and more. Apple notes that you can access Mountain Lion's Notification Center by swiping your trackpad or Magic Trackpad from left to right. Alternatively, you can click the Notification Center icon in your Mac's menu bar (here's a more thorough look at Notification Center options). Those are great, but I use a third option. Specifically, I've assigned Notification Center to a hot corner by following these steps: Launch System Preferences and click Desktop & Screen Saver. Click the Screen Saver tab, then click Hot Corners. Click the drop-down menu at your corner of choice, choose Notification Center and then click OK. Now the Notification Center will appear every time you move your cursor into that corner. I suspect you're wondering why, so I'll tell you. First, I run my MacBook Air connected to an external display with the lid closed. Also, I don't have a Magic Trackpad and finally, I've been using Hot Corners for years to trigger Exposé and Spaces, so it's an action I'm used to performing.
Tweetbot for Mac's latest alpha adds experimental 'snap-together' column layout
Tweetbot's been offering a rough-around-the-edges alpha version on its upcoming refresh for a few weeks now, but it's the latest update that's caught our attention -- again. There's several substantial changes that could tempt you away from other desktop Twitter clients. These include a new multiple account view, with separate columns that can either be docked to your main feed or left in their own window. You can spin out mentions and search results into their own space, and even adjust each column's height and width -- if you're looking to squeeze even more Twitter content into a single screen. A new menu bar icon offers access to your multiple accounts, new tweets, direct messages and mentions, while the latest build also improves support for media upload and Mountain Lion's notification bar. Tweetbot's alpha is still free to try for now, but once the kinks are eventually worked out, expect to pay for the finished article.
Mountain Lion 101: Notification Center
As part of our continuing coverage of Apple's newest operating system -- OS X Mountain Lion -- we're taking a look at many of the new features that made their way into the code. Notification Center finally arrives from iOS-land, where it's been giving us notification of emails, tweets, Facebook posts, and other incoming information. By default, Notification Center in Mountain Lion appears on the right side of the display, popping in when you either click the menu bar icon (which looks like an outline list), or swiping in from right to left with two fingers from the far right side of a trackpad. Notifications from a particular app, say Mail or Twitter, are grouped together. Users can either click on a specific notification to see it in the context of the app, or dismiss all of the notifications listed by clicking an X next to the app name. Pulling down on the Notification Center strip displays a toggle for turning alerts and banners on and off. If you can't stand being interrupted, you just slide the toggle to off and won't see notifications until the next morning. For Twitter users, there's a Click to Tweet button that appears at the top of the Notification Center if you enable that feature -- I'm guessing, but I'd be willing to bet that a Post to Facebook button will be added this fall. At the bottom you'll find an icon that takes you to the System Preference pane for Notifications seen at the top of this post. All apps that support Notification Center appear in a scrolling list on the left side of the Notifications preference, and by clicking on each entry you can select what kind of alert you want to see (including no alert), how many items you want to see in Notification Center, whether or not to have an app icon as a badge on the list, and whether or not to play a sound when receiving a notification. The latter is an important setting. You might want to hear your alert tone every time a tweet mentions you or upon receiving an email, but trust me -- it can get old very quickly. Being able to shut off alert tones is a very nice feature. There are two different types of visual alerts that appear on your Mac screen; banners, which appear in the upper-right corner of your screen and fade away after a few seconds, and alerts, which stay on the screen until you dismiss them. I find the banners to work best for things like incoming tweets and email, while alerts are perfect for Calendar notifications and Reminders. For those of us who use Growl at the present time for notification, you may remember our post from last month that talks about the plans of the developers to support Notification Center in Growl 2.0. While that version is not currently available, you should expect to see it in the near future. The bottom line? I'm not sure that Notification Center is a big enough feature to warrant the upgrade to Mountain Lion, but it's a useful addition to OS X and one more sign that the Mac's operating system and iOS are getting more alike every year.
Tweetbot for Mac arrives as free alpha, we give a quick hands-on
Seemingly anyone who's used an iPhone (and often the iPad) knows Tweetbot -- it's often the go-to Twitter app for those who prefer not to go the official route. It's to those users' delight, then, that Tapbots just posted a free alpha version of Tweetbot for Mac. As you'd anticipate, it's an attempt to bring much of the app's power user mojo to the desktop world: you can check just retweets of your content, mute overly chatty people or hashtags, and otherwise get more control than just watching your stream drift by. It's even (mostly) Retina-ready for that new MacBook Pro. Alpha does mean that there will be a fair amount of things missing; it won't tap into iCloud or Mountain Lion's Notification Center until it's official, for example. But if you're willing to deal with that and a few potential bugs, it may be time to brush other apps aside -- just note that you'll need Mountain Lion or newer when the app is ready to face the Mac App Store, even though it works with Lion today. We've had a quick spin with the app, and it largely does what it says on the tin: it's Tweetbot, on the Mac. The primary differences are changes that make sense when a mouse pointer and a larger screen area are available. You can reply, retweet, or view whole conversations from buttons that appear as you hover, rather than using the myriad taps and swipes of the iOS apps. It's a wonderfully minimalist app, if that's your thing, and you can open multiple windows (currently through a keyboard shortcut) to get some of that TweetDeck-style power user layout. Our main gripe? Tweetbot on the Mac always updates in a live stream, and there's no option for intervals; if you follow a lot of people, there's a chance you might miss something. Still, for an alpha, it's a decidedly polished and useful effort that doesn't leave us wanting like a few clients, including Twitter's own.
Gmail for iOS gets notification support and persistent logins, brings joy to Apple mobile masses
It took quite awhile for the official Gmail app to arrive for our Apple-toting friends, but when it debuted, it lacked many features enjoyed by Android users. Well, today the iOS Gmail app got a refresh that brings it a bit closer to the green bot version. Chiefly, notification support to allow folks to set up banner alerts and lock screen notifications, so they no longer have to check their inbox for new messages. Not only that, the app now has persistent login capability, meaning no more re-entry of your Gmail credentials every time you're preoccupied slaying space pigs for a few hours. Interested parties can hit the source link to get the new goodies.
OS X Mountain Lion Preview updated with Do Not Disturb feature
So, you're tapping your manifesto into a Macbook, but twitter, RSS and email alerts keep clamoring in your face. How to finish that latest screed with such distractions? In the "where has this been all my life?" category, a new update to OS X Mountain Lion Preview 3 has a Do Not Disturb option, which stonewalls all notifications and banners. The feature, which could be useful on plenty of other devices too, can be armed with a mouse click on the menu bar or a left swipe on a trackpad. Some other iOS-style tweaks debuted in Preview 3 include the Game Center, Notes, Airplay Mirroring and Reminders. Now, back to fomenting that revolution.
Mountain Lion Developer Preview 2's new features detailed
When Apple dropped the second developer preview of Mountain Lion on Friday it didn't see fit to include release notes, instead leaving it to us and the rest of the blogosphere to dig up the new features ourselves. The big ones are clearly Twitter alerts in the Notification Center and the introduction of tab syncing in Safari through iCloud. The latter of which should sooth iPhone fans that were jealous of Chrome for Android. Smaller enhancements were also turned on, including warnings when a program asks to access your contacts and location-based alarms in the Reminders app -- which can be shared with your iOS-based mobile device as well. We'll keep looking for more, but let us know you discover any new features in the comments.
Quickpick and Launch Center: A first look at two similar iOS launcher apps (Updated)
Over the past few days, I've been testing a new app from App Cubby. The app, called Launch Center, uses the iOS 5 Notification Center as a launch tool for a limited number of actions. In other words, you bring up Notification Center and tap an item to go to a website, launch an app, or perform another action. App Cubby submitted the app to Apple a few days ago, but another developer (Neoos GmbH) hit the App Store first with a similar app named Quickpick. I took a look at both these Notification Center launcher tools to let you know which does the job better. Both these apps do their magic by leveraging the way the iPhone handles some specially-crafted URLs. While Notification Center is designed to give you rapid access to the apps behind your alerts, these customized alerts use some of the same URL schemes deployed by Iconsettings and other tools to navigate rapidly through the iPhone's Settings app. It's important to understand that mechanism a bit, since it does limit the range of what these tools can do (although it's the only way they can work on a non-jailbroken phone, given Apple's restrictions on inter-application communication). Updated: Although the Launch Center app works identically to Quickpick, David Barnard of App Cubby just notified me that the app was turned down. The note he received: "We noticed that your app included inappropriate use of Notification Center, which does not comply with the iOS Human Interface Guidelines." This is another example of the inconsistency of the App Store approval process. Barnard notes that he'll wait until after the holidays to resubmit Launch Center. Updated (12/20/2011): Apple just pulled Quickpick from the App Store as well, citing the issues with 'inappropriate use of Notification Center." Launch Center The first of these two apps that I tried was Launch Center (US$0.99). The app has been submitted to the App Store and was actually the subject of a NY Times story about developers rushing to get apps approved prior to the annual Christmas iTunes Connect shutdown. It's not in the App Store as of this morning, but the links included here should work once the app goes live. There will also be a page on the App Cubby site for more information. Launching the app displays a nice wood background with three separate buttons that can be added to your Notification Center for quick access -- Flashlight (which turns on the iPhone flash for use as a flashlight), Tweet (opens a Twitter send dialog), and Google My Clipboard (takes whatever is on your clipboard and performs a Google search on it). %Gallery-142106% Tapping the "gear" button that's usually reserved for settings actually opens Welcome to Launch Center, a four-page mini-manual that describes how to change settings so that Launch Center works most effectively. This includes moving the Launch Center links to the top of Notification Center to make life a bit more "scroll-free." To add new items to Notification Center, tap the Edit button and you're greeted with a list of five different actions you can add -- Speed Dial, Text Message, Email, Launch Website / App, and Post to Facebook. When the Speed Dial button is tapped, your contacts list is opened. Tap a name and then a phone number (home, work, mobile, etc...) and a one touch speed dial button is added to your Notification Center. Text Message and Email work similarly, asking for the recipient in your contacts list and addressing a blank text or email message. Launch Website / App is something completely different. Not only can you create Notification Center buttons for websites, but many apps can also be launched from Notification Center using this. There's a link at the bottom of the "Link Properties" edit screen that allows you to look up app URL schemes that work with Launch Center. That link is directed to handleopenurl.com, home of a long list of OpenURL-compatible apps and actions. For example, the top item on the list is 1Password Pro, which you can set up to be launched from Notification Center. Other popular iOS apps that are included on the handleopenurl.com site are Evernote, Air Sharing, the App Store, iOS Settings, Echofon, GoodReader, IMDB, iTunes, Kindle for iPhone, Navigon, Pocket Money, Shazam, Skype, TweetBot, and Waze among others. Finally, although Launch Center is not a universal app, running it on iPad doesn't present too much of an issue since you're only using the app to set up the shortcuts. Quickpick Quickpick (US$0.99) bills itself as "the universal iOS launcher." The app is universal, so you purchase it once to run on both iPhone and iPad. Quickpick can add up to 10 action entries to the iPhone/iPod touch Notification Center or up to 20 on the iPad. After launching the app, you're presented with a minimalist interface. There's an edit button, a "+" button, and a large About Quickpick button. The latter button points you to online web documentation, allows you to tell a friend about the app, contacts Neoos support, or recreates Quickpicks. A Quickpick is an entry in your Notification Center that can be tapped to perform an action. %Gallery-142105% The way that both Quickpick and Launch Center work is that they place links into the Notification Center. Quickpick provides a manual method of adding Quickpicks -- typing in a title to signify what action is performed as well as a properly formatted link -- and a Composer to automatically fill out the link field. For example, if I want a Quickpick to go to the TUAW website, I can tap the Open Website button in the Composer, and it pre-fills the Link field with "http://www." All I need to add is a title like "Go to TUAW" and fill in the URL. To create a Quickpick to mail my fellow TUAW editors, I can select "Compose New Mail" from the Composer and then pick an address -- or group -- to send an email to. With a tap of the "Mail TUAW Leads" Quickpick, Mail opens and I have a pre-addressed message ready to go. Quickpick is set up to create four different type of Quickpicks from the app -- Call a phone number, send an email, go to a website, or compose an SMS message. That's the problem; although there are a number of different URL types that can be used on iOS devices to perform a lot of actions, those are the only four that are listed. There's a link in the FAQs for the app to "handelopenURL.com" (yes, it's misspelled, although it goes to the proper site when clicked) where you can see all of the different URL schemes that can be used with Quickpick. To put your Quickpicks at the top of the Notification Center, you go to Settings > Notifications, select Edit, and slide Quickpick to the top of the list. The Verdict The two apps basically do the same thing, but I'd recommend that readers wait and spend their $0.99 on Launch Center. Why? It's more polished. Not only does the app present some nice eye candy in terms of the user interface, but the Welcome to Launch Center pages do a nice job of providing setup help. Launch Center's "Google My Clipboard" and "Flashlight" features are also quite useful right off the bat. Neither of these apps, however, holds a candle to what's available in the jailbreak world. To see a good example of what Notification Center could be, take a look at IntelliScreenX ($9.99, Cydia store only) from Intelliborn.
Daily Update for December 14, 2011
It's the TUAW Daily Update, your source for Apple news in a convenient audio format. You'll get all the top Apple stories of the day in three to five minutes for a quick review of what's happening in the Apple world. You can listen to today's Apple stories by clicking the inline player (requires Flash) or the non-Flash link below. To subscribe to the podcast for daily listening through iTunes, click here. No Flash? Click here to listen.
Apple to improve Notification Center with fresh talent
Apple is looking outside its ranks and hiring a college student to help revise its iOS notification system. This isn't any college student. The new hire is Jan-Michael Cart, the whizkid who created a clever mocked up Notification Center redesign and then posted it to YouTube. Cart will join Apple as a UI/UXDesign intern for the next seven months. According to Ars Technica, he, and two other recent hires, may work on notifications for a future version of iOS. Apple rolled out its current notification center in iOS 5. Earlier versions of iOS included pop-up notifications and badges, but little else. This latest iteration includes a drop-down window shade with alerts, pop-up alerts and lock screen alerts. Though it's a likeable update, the iOS 5 notification center needs improvement. There are no alert icons in the menu bar, which means you have to pull down the Window shade to determine which alerts need your attention. The alerts are also difficult to manage. You can't delete individual alerts without opening the item, and the "x" button to clear all the alerts is difficult to tap. You can check out Cart's concept video below and tell us what you think of his suggestions in the comments. [Via Ars Technica]
iOS 5 features: Notification Center
One of the most welcomed features in iOS 5 is the addition of a notification center. It's one of the things I found myself jailbreaking older iPhones in order to have. The notification center finally makes push notifications worth utilizing. There are three flavors of notifications: Banner-style messages strip across any app you're using, including the phone's lock screen. You can also make a downward swipe from the menu bar to reveal full list of notifications. Finally, alerts are the familiar, large blue screens that pop up and demand action before being dismissed. The banner-style notification is the one that I used the most in my testing. It was set up to push new mail messages, texts and BeeJive messages to me. If you tap the notification in the banner, it'll switch you to the app that sent it. They go away after about five seconds or so. Sometimes, you'll see several notifications at once if you're reconnecting to the Internet after being away for a while. The notification center itself contains all these notifications and more, including widgets for stocks and weather. There are no third-party widgets supported at this time, and I hope that Apple opens up the Notification Center's API in the future to foster development. You can customize a good deal of your apps to appear in the notification center as well as the style of notification each app uses. You also can get rid of the stocks or weather widget if you don't care to see then. Go into Settings, then Notifications and turn them off. This is where you can customize notifications for other apps and the style of notification that is received. You can also set sounds and whether or not the notification appears on the phone's lock screen. Notifications are among the best of the new features in iOS 5, and it's worth taking about 15 minutes to fiddle with the settings to get them to your liking. %Gallery-136453%
iOS 5 and OS X 10.7.2 available for download: get your iCloud and iMessage on
Even if you were one of those Apple fans who was less than impressed by the iPhone 4S, there is still reason for excitement -- and that reason's name is iOS 5. If you've got an iPhone 3GS, 4, third- or fourth-gen iPod touch, or either of the iPads you can download Apple's latest and greatest mobile OS right now. That's right, all the fun new features like pull-down notifications, iCloud, iMessage, Find my Friends, Twitter integration and lock screen access to your camera will be at your disposal. Sadly you will not be getting a taste of Siri, which appears to a 4S only feature for now. Still, there's more than enough here to make it a worthy upgrade to your device. So, what are you waiting for? Go hit that update button now. Update: Just so you're aware, you'll need iTunes 10.5 installed to get the latest iOS. There's also an update to OS X coming down the pipes -- version 10.7.2 -- which officially delivers iCloud to your Mac. Huzzah! [Thanks to everyone who sent this in]
5 iOS features that OS X needs
iOS 5 is set to launch this Wednesday and the beta testers I've talked to say it's a monumental leap forward. iOS 5 adds over 200 features to an already polished mobile operating system, which is arguably the best on the planet. As many Mac users know, Mac OS X Lion is no slouch either. Features like Mission Control, Launchpad, and full-screen apps make Lion the most powerful, intuitive OS Apple has ever released. However, that's not to say that Lion can't be improved. Apple only needs to look to iOS for further inspiration. Below is my list of five iOS features that I hope will migrate to OS X. Feel free to leave your requests in the comments. 5. iBooks I actually just added this one in because I know a lot of people have asked for it. Even paperback fans can't deny that ebooks are the future. Though they may not be quite up in Kindle territory, iBooks and the iBookstore are growing more popular by the day. While users can access their iBooks on the iPad, iPhone, and iPod touch, there's no way to get them on the Mac...yet. This is one area where Apple needs to take a play from Amazon. Kindle owners can read their books on the Kindle, the iPhone, iPad and Android phones, as well as with Mac and Windows apps and a web browser. While reading an iBook on a desktop might not be the platform of choice, it would be nice if iBooks users had the option. This is especially true for people who buy research or school books through iBooks and want to reference the book on the same screen as an assignment in progress. 4. Notification Center The Notification Center is one of the big new features of iOS 5. It allows users to see all their texts, emails, news alerts -- nearly every kind of notification -- all in one place. Currently OS X relies on numbered icon badges to show users notifications on a per-app basis. And while there are third-party apps like Growl that do a good job at alerting users to notifications, a dedicated Notification Center would further solidify the link between iOS and OS X and make it easier for users to see the things they need to attend to all in one place. 3. Reminders The great thing about OS X's and iOS's Mail and Notes app is that a user's email messages and notes sync between iPhone and Mac. However, iOS 5 offers a dedicated Reminders app that allows users to set reminders with an impressive array of notification options. While a dedicated Reminders app makes infinitely more sense on a mobile device, OS X Reminders integration would be a welcome feature. After all, many of us will use the app to set reminders for tasks to be completed at our desks. Why not be reminded by the computer we are working on? I'm not suggesting a dedicated Reminders OS X app. But what I would like to see is the Reminders app features and UI built into OS X's Mail app, much like Notes is today. [Note: Many readers have rightly pointed out that Reminders.app reminders are synced with iCal on your Mac. However, my take on it is that the array of ways to set reminders in the iOS app and the app's UI should be integrated better with OS X.] 2. iMessage FaceTime was perhaps the coolest feature of iOS 4. When it first came out it allowed iPhone 4 users to video chat with each other. Then Apple added iPod touch support and iPad 2 support. But, for me, FaceTime didn't become really useful until Apple released the FaceTime app for OS X. When they did, FaceTime brought unity to the entire Apple ecosystem (which, incidentally, is the common theme of all my feature suggestions in this article). iMessage in iOS 5 is arguably cooler than FaceTime because many people text a heck of a lot more than video chat. iMessage is great because it allows free texting among iPhone owners. But what's even more impressive is that it also allows iOS users to text people on Wi-Fi-only iPod touches and iPads. Like FaceTime before it, the last piece of the puzzle is adding iMessages to OS X. It's a lot easier for me to reply to a text from my iMac while I'm working on it than to stop and pick up my iPhone. Of course, the arrival of iMessage and FaceTime presents somewhat of a problem. I've had a lot of people who aren't the most Mac-savvy users say they are confused about the differences between FaceTime and iChat's video conferencing. If Apple would add an OS X iMessage app, that would probably only broaden the confusion ("Is an iMessage the same thing as an AOL IM?"). While I think Apple needs to absolutely add iMessage functionality to OS X, it needs to do so without adding more clutter and confusion to its messaging (be it IM, video, or texting) apps. Do they scrap iChat in favor of an iMessage app? Or do they add iMessage support to iChat? Dedicated apps are simpler, but all-in-one apps are more convenient. It's a tough call. 1. Siri Siri, iOS 5's AI personal assistant, is the start of the future for smart phones. It takes dictation, and lets you do dozens of other things using only your voice. But it's not just voice recognition software. It's powerful AI that knows what you want based on syntax, history, and context. There are no rigid voice commands needed. You can talk to it like you do to a human being and it figures out what you want it to do. Right now Siri is only available on the iPhone 4S. That's because it requires quite a bit of horsepower under the hood to accomplish its tasks. Or, quite a bit of horsepower for a phone. Every Mac sold today has more than enough memory and processing power to support Siri integration. And when Apple adds Siri to OS X it will be the start of a revolution in personal computing. Indeed it may one day even lead to the elimination of (or drastic reduction of) the keyboard and mouse. And don't get me started (yet) on a Siri-integrated Apple television set. Goodbye remote control. But first, let's get Siri into OS X. Imagine being able to talk to your Mac like you do a person, saying things like: "Pull up the Keynote for my April meeting." "Take me to Apple's website." "Revert to the Version that I was working on last week." "Show me all the photos from my trip to Berlin." "Organize all my Word files into a folder and then sort them into sub-folders based on month created." The possibilities are almost endless. Hello OS X 10.8.
Growl 1.3 now available on the Mac App Store
Growl, perhaps the most well-known and popular notification system for OS X, has just released version 1.3 as a Mac App Store exclusive. The previously free notification system has become a paid app with Growl 1.3. As Macstories points out, the reason the Growl team decided to make what was previously a free System Preferences pane into a US$1.99 app was so users would be provided with an up-to-date app utilizing the latest Apple technologies. So what's new with Growl 1.3? Almost everything. Growl has been rewritten from the ground up using a new architecture, sporting a new UI, and adding lots of features previous iterations of Growl never had. But not to worry, Growl 1.3 still retains everything you loved about Growl 1.2, they've just added a lot of cool new features to it. Among the coolest new features is a Notification Center-like Rollup window. The window, which is accessed from the Finder's menu bar (where you find Growl now), keeps a history of all your notifications that you've received from various apps that use Growl. This is especially handy when you're away from your computer and want to see what notifications you missed. Growl 1.3 is $1.99 in the Mac App Store. Users also can still download the free System Preference pane version 1.2.2 here.
iOS 5 turns Japanese iPhones into earthquake alarms
Following the devastation wrought by the recent Japanese earthquake, Apple has hooked the country's early warning system into iOS 5. The tectonically-volatile nation has the most sophisticated alarm in the world, delivering life-saving warnings seconds or minutes before disaster strikes. iOS users already had access to this functionality via apps like Yurekuru, but iOS 5 will bring it directly into the operating system. The service can be activated in the Notification Center settings pane, accompanied by a warning that the constant connection will deplete your battery faster -- a fair exchange if it saves your life.
