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Mac turns 30, iWork updates return missing features, and other news from Jan 19-25
Mac turns 30 The biggest news this week was the 30th anniversary of the Mac. This brought out a rare retrospective by Apple including a video and a timeline highlighting important events of the past three decades. Macworld's Jason Snell wrote Apple executives on the Mac at 30: 'The Mac keeps going forever.' and Dan Moren looks ahead with The Mac at 30: The next 30 years. Several TUAW writers offered their first Mac and favorite Mac thoughts, and Steve Sande & Doc Rock looked back at the The best and worst Macs of the last 30 years on TUAW TV. iWork restores missing features This week also marked the return of some of the missing features from iWork since it was updated a few months ago, including some AppleScript support. LogMeIn removes free option LogMeIn is removing its free option despite assurances less than a year ago that "LogMeIn Free is and will remain free." This followed the news that SugarSync recently ended their free level and Droplr ended free accounts too. Probably too soon to say if this is the beginning of a trend, but since Google stopped offering Google Apps Free Edition a little over a year ago, we've seen several others discontinue their free offering in the hopes of moving users to paid options. Want More? See TUAW.com for more news round-ups and new and notable apps.
Adobe's Lightroom for iPad makes a brief appearance, Google acquires a Nest, and other news from Jan. 12-18
With so much news and so many stories flying around every day, we here at TUAW thought it might be good to offer a quick "executive summary" of some of the most important news events from the past week. How do we measure the criteria for this round-up? Well, it's a work in progress, but the basic formula goes like this: "No rumors, no speculation, just news. If someone had been cut off from the Internet all week and came back today, what would be the stories you'd want to make sure they knew about? Or, to put it another way: what are the news stories from this past week that I'm likely to still care about in another week?" Obviously there's a certain amount of subjectivity in picking any kind of list like this, so we'll leave the comments open for awhile, in case you would like to suggest some bit of news we left off. Adobe's Lightroom for iPad briefly surfaces It looks like Adobe's Lightroom is making the leap to the iPad. 9to5Mac briefly spotted a listing for the software, with a subscription price of $99 a year, briefly on Adobe's site. When they inquired about it, Adobe pulled the link. With the release on the horizon, maybe there's hope that Apple will eventually do the same thing with Aperture. Adobe demonstrated a prototype for it in 2013. 9to5Mac says the software will sync with the desktop version of Lightroom. Apple's Anti-Trust Ebookcase The saga of Apple's anti-trust ruling in the eBook case continues to make the news. Apple sought the removal of court-appointed antitrust monitor claiming a litany of unnecessary expenses and inconveniences, but this week the judge ordered Apple and antitrust monitor to play nice. The whole thing still smells funny to many of us. Salon described it as Amazon's bogus anti-Apple crusade which didn't have the negative consequences anti-trust suits are meant to avoid. Dropbox down, but not hacked Dropbox experienced a rare bit of out downtime this week. Some well-timed pranksters tried to claim they had hacked the site, but Dropbox explains they had brought it on themselves. They outlined the problems in a post-mortem. Your Dropbox data was never at risk, but if it had been, the fine folks at Agile remind you that your Master Password is your defense from Dropbox breaches, real and imagined. Google bought Nest to the disappointment of the entire Internet Google bought Nest this week, which seemingly disappointed the entire Internet, and flooded Twitter with thousands of variations of approximately three jokes about a future update requiring a Google+ account to change your temperature. The Verge explained Why is everyone disappointed by Google buying Nest? in case you need someone to explain it to you. But my favorite response of the week was Joy Of Tech showing how Google/Nest had finally "disrupted" the market. Software Updates of Note The OmniGroup released OmniOutliner for Mac version 4. It requires OS X 10.9, and can be purchased either from the Mac App Store or directly from OmniGroup. You can download a demo from OmniGroup's website. (As always, I recommend purchasing directly from developers unless you must have iCloud. Developers can give you upgrade pricing, which Apple seems not to want to offer.) The Pro version is $100 ($50 upgrade) and the standard version is $50 ($25 upgrade). They also offer educational pricing. If you have any interest in making eBooks, you should check out Vellum which tackles the difficult process of making eBooks which are compatible with the Kindle, Nook, and iBooks. You can download and try the app for free. You only pay when you want to generate the actual files. This week they announced unlimited eBooks can be made for $300, or you can make 10 for $150, or 1 for $50. The unlimited version includes all future updates to the app. Some deals you don't want to miss There are no shortages of deals around. You can find them at http://deals.tuaw.com/ or by following our daily deals, but I did want to make sure that I made special mention of two: Save 50% in Take Control's Post-Holiday Ebook Sale: "Through 25 January 2014, you can add any number of our ebooks to your Take Control library for 50 percent off. All books are DRM-free and available in PDF, EPUB, and Mobipocket (Kindle) formats, so you can read wherever, whenever, and on whatever device you like." Get the all new Box for iPhone and iPad + 50GB free (Active Jan 15 - Feb 15, 2014). See the support page for nuts and bolts.
