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Maniacally cuckoo for Mountain Lion: App Store checker shell script
In the spirit of Tim Cook's maniacal excitement about upcoming Apple products, I bring to you the shell script you can run repeatedly from the command line to check the App Store to see if Mountain Lion is ready for purchase. This is what I used last year to check for Lion; it worked. This year, I update the search string to "Mountain Lion" instead. As presented, it employs a 10-minute time-out, so you can run a repeat command with it. #! /bin/csh curl -silent -A "iMacAppStore/1.0.1 (Macintosh; U; Intel Mac OS X 10.6.7; en) AppleWebKit/533.20.25" 'http://itunes.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewMultiRoom?fcId=489264329&mt=12' | grep -i "mountain lion" > /dev/null if ($? == 0) then echo "Available" say "MOUNTAIN LION MAY BE AVAILABLE" else echo "Nada" endif sleep 600 Ready to improve the script? Have at it, campers! Update: Looks like the URL changed from last year. Updated via Mark (mcackay).
Erica Sadun07.24.2012
Apple to release OS X 10.8 Mountain Lion tomorrow
Apple just confirmed in its Q3 2012 earnings report that Mountain Lion is coming tomorrow. The hotly anticipated 10.8 version of OS X brings with it a host of new features, as we've expounded upon in the past. The upgrade will be just $19.99 (unless you've recently bought a new Mac -- in which case it'll be free) and will be available via download on the Mac App Store in 24 hours or less. Better start finding some disk space.
Tim Stevens07.24.2012
Apple announces Q3 2012 earnings: $35 billion revenue, $8.8 billion in net profits
It's hard to believe its been just three months since we were here last, but it's true. It's already earnings season again and, in the feast of financial conference calls, Apple is an entree. Not surprisingly, Cupertino was raking in the big bucks yet again, but it wasn't quite the windfall of revenue the company has seen in the past. All told the company pulled in $35 billion in revenue, pocketing $8.8 billion of that as pure profit, a record for both in Q3. But, just cause it wasn't quite as lucrative a quarter doesn't mean the boys in Cupertino aren't happy with the results. Profits were up $1.5 billion from Q3 of 2011, allowing the company to carry forward with its plan to issue a cash dividend to its share holders. During the last three months the company shipped 17 million iPads, an 84 percent increase over the same quarter last year -- a simply staggering number. And don't think that its other premier gadget has plateaued. 26 million iPhones were also sold, representing a 28 percent increase year-over-year. Interestingly, Mac sales slowed, increasing just two percent over last year, largely thanks to a 13 percent drop off in desktop sales. The biggest money maker for the company continues to be the iPhone and its related products and services, however. More than $16 billion of the total revenue is directly attributable to the smaller member of the iOS family. The iPad is quickly closing the gap, netting Apple over $9 billion in this quarter alone. As a percentage of revenue, the iPod continued to decline, marking the slow death of the once flagship product line. While revenues were down sequentially, it's the year-over-year numbers that tell the real story. Revenue was up $9.5 billion from Q3 of 2011 and net income by $1.5 billion, as the company has continued to increase its market share and open up to niches to itself. For the next quarter Apple actually expects a small drop in both revenue and earnings per-share, but not enough that we expect Wall Street types to start yelling, "sell, sell, sell!"
Terrence O'Brien07.24.2012
Apple briefly releases Mountain Lion Up-to-Date program, pulls it back
For those folks who purchased Macs after June 11 (myself included), Apple said that OS X Mountain Lion would be available as a free download. Ahead of this week's expected launch, Apple briefly unveiled its Up-to-Date program, which gets those buyers ready for their Mountain Lion upgrade, then pulled it back minutes later. As shown on MacRumors, the form showed the information needed to redeem a license, including the user's Mac serial number. Apple gives the user a reference number, then sends a redemption code to be used to download Mountain Lion. The code comes in two emails: a password-encrypted PDF with the code and the password itself. Those who were quick enough to get the redemption code before Apple rolled back the site weren't able to use them in the Mac App Store to download Mountain Lion yet, MacRumors says. Those eligible for the Up-to-Date program will have 30 days from the day that Mountain Lion is available to make the request. #next_pages_container { width: 5px; hight: 5px; position: absolute; top: -100px; left: -100px; z-index: 2147483647 !important; }
Megan Lavey-Heaton07.23.2012
Daily Update for July 23, 2012
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. Subscribe via RSS
Steve Sande07.23.2012AppleCare support reps getting Mountain Lion this weekend
If they're going to answer user questions, they probably need to be running it: AppleCare support representatives have been issued redemption codes to download OS X Mountain Lion, according to a report on 9to5Mac tonight. This amplifies the anticipation for the new OS release, which many suspect could show up by midweek. In 2011, the release of OS X Lion followed on the heels of Apple's quarterly earnings call by one day; the Q3 FY2012 call will be Tuesday July 24th at 2pm PT. The build number on the version of Mountain Lion that the support reps are downloading is reportedly 12A269, which matches the developer GM build. Keep up with all TUAW's Mountain Lion coverage here.
Michael Rose07.23.2012
TUAW Talkcast: Mountain Lion preview show, 10pm ET
Tonight on the Talkcast, we're getting ready for the new top cat in town. The calendar is flipping past and the end of July is in sight, which means the release of OS X Mountain Lion is imminent. Our intrepid team has been helping you prepare your Mac for the new operating system via our ongoing Getting Ready for Mountain Lion series -- now it's your chance to call in and discuss, dissect, etcetera. We'll be welcoming a few special guests tonight, including Rene Ritchie of iMore and tech journalist Julio Ojeda-Zapata of the St. Paul (MN) Pioneer-Press. Bring your Mountain Lion musings -- and also your predictions for Apple's earnings call later this week. To participate in the call, you can use the browser-only Talkshoe client, the embedded Facebook app, or download the classic TalkShoe Pro Java client; however, for +5 Interactivity, you should call in. For the web UI, just click the Talkshoe Web button on our profile page at 4 HI/7 PDT/10 pm EDT Sunday. To call in on regular phone or VoIP lines (Viva free weekend minutes!): dial (724) 444-7444 and enter our talkcast ID, 45077 -- during the call, you can request to talk by keying in *8. If you've got a headset or microphone handy on your Mac, you can connect via the free X-Lite or other SIP clients -- basic instructions are here. Skype users with dial-out credit can call in via the service, or use those free iPhone minutes. Talk to you tonight! #next_pages_container { width: 5px; hight: 5px; position: absolute; top: -100px; left: -100px; z-index: 2147483647 !important; } #next_pages_container { width: 5px; hight: 5px; position: absolute; top: -100px; left: -100px; z-index: 2147483647 !important; }
Michael Rose07.22.2012
iOS 6 beta 3 available to developers
The third beta version of iOS 6 has been handed out to developers running the new mobile OS as an over-the-air update this morning. The new versions of Xcode haven't quite made their way out into the world yet, but they should soon, giving iOS and Mac developers the option to test and build their apps on the upcoming operating system. Unfortunately, for those of us not using the latest and greatest developer builds, this only means that iOS 6 is still in progress, and there's still some work to do on it before the release to the public later on this fall. We're going to have to be satisfied with the upcoming version of Mac OS X instead -- Mountain Lion's gold master was just handed out to devs recently, which means it's closer than ever for us. Update: The Xcode updates have just dropped, and should be available in Software Update right now. The Xcode 4.5 developer preview will allow developers to put apps together for the latest beta of iOS 6, so they can be ready to go on release day.
Mike Schramm07.16.2012
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.
Jon Fingas07.11.2012Apple sunsets a few 64-bit Macs with Mountain Lion, video drivers likely the culprit
Apple is well-known for wanting a close spread in hardware requirements with OS X upgrades, having dropped PowerPC like a hot potato when Snow Leopard arrived just three years after the Intel switch. Whether or not you're a fan of that policy, it's certainly carrying forward with Mountain Lion. When the newly-finished OS hits the Mac App Store, it will rule out the very first wave of 64-bit Macs: certain MacBook Pros, Mac Pros and other early systems will be denied a taste of 10.8. Some sleuthing from Ars Technica suggests that it's a matter of graphics drivers rather than capriciousness on Apple's part, as the Macs excluded from the mix are using 32-bit drivers that won't play nicely with Mountain Lion's 64-bit Utopia short of a wide-scale conversion effort. It's little consolation to those who dropped a pretty penny on certain Macs just a few years ago. That said, Apple is still going the extra mile to support some systems -- if you're reading this on an original aluminum iMac, you're sitting pretty.
Jon Fingas07.11.2012
Apple Mountain Lion Gold Master is up for the download
Last month at WWDC, Apple promised that consumers would be able to get their grubby paws on Mountain Lion come July. It looks like the latest version of OS X is one step closer to being fully-baked, with seeds of the Gold Master hitting the company's developer download site today. The operating system upgrade will run you $20 when it's ready for us non-developers. In the meantime, here's a hands-on with the beta version of the OS.
Brian Heater07.09.2012Apple releases Mountain Lion gold master to developers
The gold master build of OS X 10.8 Mountain Lion has been released and is available through the Apple Developer's Site now. The gold master release means that Apple is on target to release Mountain Lion to the general public this month, as was announced at WWDC in June.
Megan Lavey-Heaton07.09.2012
Apple Q3 earnings call on July 24 -- will Mountain Lion follow on July 25?
Apple has announced that the Q3 earnings call (April - June, 2012) will be held on July 24. This is important for two reasons: first, the world will get to hear how well the company did over the past three months and second, last year Apple released Lion the day after the Q3 earnings call. While the company can pretty well call the shots on when it releases the next version of Mac OS X, if Apple follows last year's lead, we might see Mountain Lion in general release on July 25. This, of course, meets the "end of July" deadline for the release of the latest cat. As always, TUAW will hold a metaliveblog during the event for commentary and analysis.
Steve Sande07.02.2012Getting Ready for Mountain Lion: Preview
Preview, the app that lets you view pictures and read PDFs in OS X, is one of Apple's unsung heroes. There's so much you can do with this app. It goes far beyond simply looking at images. It's a minimal image editor. You can crop your pictures, reorient them, and export them to new formats. It's a multi-format viewer. You can use Preview to read Word, Excel, and Powerpoint files. It's a PDF masterpiece. You can annotate PDFs, reorder pages, and add bookmarks. And that's all pre-10.8 behavior! You can do all that now, today, in Lion. Mountain Lion brings a bunch of new enhancements to Preview, taking a valuable little app and putting it on steroids. To start, you get all the standard ML built-in sharing, so you can share your images and PDFs to Messages, AirDrop, Mail, Facebook, Twitter, and Flickr. This greatly simplifies the path from importing and previewing images to sharing them directly with family, friends, and colleagues. Next, Preview for Mountain Lion adds in iCloud support. You'll be able to load and save images directly into the cloud for access from any of your Apple devices, mobile or desktop. But it's the PDF updates that really make the new Preview shine. Continuing to roll in Acrobat-style PDF editing, Preview will soon allow you to fill out PDF forms by auto-detecting those areas that are intended for text entry. Preview will find underlining and boxes, and will let you click and type to add your text. It also supports checkboxes. Once you've filled out your form, you should be able to to use Preview's existing signature support feature to sign your PDFs. But that's not all. Preview will let you search through notes and highlights, either by author or by content. That's a huge win for anyone who collaborates with others, and may need to find annotations in large documents on a per-person basis. Apple promises that adding inline notes will be much easier as well; "Click the area where you want to add the comment and start typing. When you're done, the text is hidden. Click to read the comment." Finally, the updated version of Preview will allow you to scan images and forms directly into existing PDF documents, so you can group pages and related material together, as you scan them. I spend a lot of time during my work-week using Preview. I can't wait to get started using these features. For many new Mac owners, your move to Mountain Lion represents your first major upgrade. To help users prepare to make the jump, Steve Sande and Erica Sadun wrote Getting Ready for Mountain Lion, an Amazon/iBooks eBook. It's aimed at first-time upgraders and people looking for hints and tips about smoothing the transition. We're sharing some of our tips on TUAW in a series of posts about the 10.8 upgrade. OS X Mountain Lion will be offered for sale in July 2012 for $19.99.
Erica Sadun06.28.2012
Apple adds new security feature to Mountain Lion preview
An update to the OS X 10.8 Mountain Lion Developer Preview 4 was released yesterday afternoon, and the Twittersphere was immediately filled with missives about the features people were finding. A tweet by @Lhunar pointed out a new "Mountain Lion Security Updates" system. The system apparently does daily checks looking for security updates, downloading and installing them automatically or upon restarting your Mac. This shows Apple's growing concern about malware attacks on the Mac platform, particularly after the Flashback attack earlier this year. The system also includes a more secure connection to Apple's update servers. For developers who have downloaded and installed Mountain Lion Developer Preview 4, the update is a 1.16 GB download. Apple requests that those developers "[i]nstall this update as soon as possible." Mountain Lion will be available next month via the Mac App Store for US$19.99.
Steve Sande06.26.2012Getting Ready for Mountain Lion: Dictation
Mountain Lion is about to debut one of my favorite features ever: Dictation. With built-in support for speech-to-text, OS X Mountain Lion allows you to talk instead of type in nearly every app on the system. You'll be able to access dictation using a simple keyboard shortcut, a double click on the Function (fn) key. And if your keyboard doesn't have one available, or if you prefer another choice, System Preferences allows you to customize that shortcut. Dictation will be integrated with many system features, including Contacts, so it will more accurately recognize your colleagues' names. You don't have to worry that "Victor Agreda" will transform into "Vic tore a gray dar". (Although, truth be told, I'm still struggling to make my iPhone 4S realize that "call Mike Rose's phone" isn't "call microphone", and it uses the same speech-and-contacts integration as Mountain Lion.) If you're using Mountain Lion on a Mac without a built-in microphone (like my 2009 Mac mini), you'll need to hook up one in order to use the dictation features. You can use headsets as well as stand-alone mics. Mountain Lion dictation follows the same rules as Siri. You can dictate punctuation and capitalization as you talk. For example, you can say "hello world exclamation point" and Mountain Lion will type "Hello world!" Other handy meta-items include new line, period, comma, and question mark. Dictation is smart. Say, "Twenty two dollars and 32 cents" and it's automatically transformed into "$22.32." It handles dates, too. Say, "Thursday July Fourth Seventeen Seventy Six at Three P M" and it types "Thursday, July 4, 1776 at 3 PM." You can even say "smiley" and "frowny face" to add emoticons, namely, :-) and :-(, which may or may not please you as the hyphen noses are not exactly standard. Once you start working with dictation, you'll find that it can solve a problem you didn't know you had. Unfortunately, Mountain Lion offers dictation and only dictation. You can't ask a virtual voice assistant to shoot off an email or send a message ... at least not yet! Dictation supports English (U.S., UK, and Australia), French, German, and Japanese. For many new Mac owners, your move to Mountain Lion represents your first major upgrade. To help users prepare to make the jump, Steve Sande and Erica Sadun wrote Getting Ready for Mountain Lion, an Amazon/iBooks eBook. It's aimed at first-time upgraders and people looking for hints and tips about smoothing the transition. We're sharing some of our tips on TUAW in a series of posts about the 10.8 upgrade. OS X Mountain Lion will be offered for sale in July 2012 for $19.99. #next_pages_container { width: 5px; hight: 5px; position: absolute; top: -100px; left: -100px; z-index: 2147483647 !important; } #next_pages_container { width: 5px; hight: 5px; position: absolute; top: -100px; left: -100px; z-index: 2147483647 !important; }
Erica Sadun06.25.2012
Google announces iOS Notification Center support for Gmail
Google has announced some good news for prospective Mountain Lion users on its official blog: The company will tie Gmail notifications into Apple's Notification Center, which means you'll be able to know at a moment's notice when you've got emails to read. The integration will support banners, full alerts, and options for the lock screen, and Google says its notifications will be up to five times faster as well, so you'll know right away when that important message comes in. Google's also offering a few other improvements (including sending from multiple addresses, as well as longer login periods), but that Mountain Lion notification note is the most pertinent for us. Mountain Lion comes out in July of this year. In other news, can it be July yet? [via The Loop]
Mike Schramm06.25.2012Getting Ready for Mountain Lion: Share sheets
One of Mountain Lion's most exciting features comes straight from iOS. If you're a mobile user, you're probably familiar with the "Share" button with its curved arrow shape. In iOS, you use this to redirect data to other apps. For example, you can tweet things, mail them, and so forth. In iOS 6, you'll be able to post them to your Facebook wall as well later this year. Now this sharing capability has come to Mountain Lion. You'll be able to send links, documents, photos, and videos with just a click without having to drag your files around the way you used to. Click on the Share button and choose how you want to send a file. The share menu automatically presents those services that make sense in the context of the app you're using. Each app is allowed to add its own services as well, so the menu you see is always application-appropriate. For example, in Safari, you'll be able to add bookmarks and save the current page to your reading list. If you're worried about authentication, don't be. Once you've signed into your standard services (these include Twitter, Facebook, Vimeo, and Flickr), you can tweet, post, and upload with the sharing menu without having to worry about re-entering credentials. Mountain Lion provides system wide access to your account. For many new Mac owners, your move to Mountain Lion represents your first major upgrade. To help users prepare to make the jump, Steve Sande and Erica Sadun wrote Getting Ready for Mountain Lion, an Amazon/iBooks eBook. It's aimed at first-time upgraders and people looking for hints and tips about smoothing the transition. We're sharing some of our tips on TUAW in a series of posts about the 10.8 upgrade. OS X Mountain Lion will be offered for sale in July 2012 for $19.99. #next_pages_container { width: 5px; hight: 5px; position: absolute; top: -100px; left: -100px; z-index: 2147483647 !important; } #next_pages_container { width: 5px; hight: 5px; position: absolute; top: -100px; left: -100px; z-index: 2147483647 !important; }
Erica Sadun06.21.2012
MacTech and TUAW talk WWDC
Neil Ticktin and I sat down last week to talk about the announcements coming out of WWDC, and take a look at MacTech's iPad app that intelligently allows you to read their content with ease.
Victor Agreda Jr06.18.2012
Getting ready for Mountain Lion: Backups
Although most Mac OS X upgrades go smoothly, there's always a chance that something can go wrong. Hundreds of thousands of files are changed during an upgrade, so there's a possibility that one or more of those changes can cause your Mac to decide to not boot up properly. Without a backup, your data might be gone forever. Before you purchase Mountain Lion from the Mac App Store in July and begin the process of upgrading, make sure you back up your Mac! To begin with, you'll need an external disk drive that is at least twice the capacity of the drive that's built into your Mac. USB drives are surprisingly affordable; a glance at Amazon.com today showed a number of 2 TB drives for US$120 or less. Backups don't have to be difficult, thanks to Apple's Time Machine utility. Just plug your external drive into your Mac and OS X will ask if you wish to use that drive for Time Machine backups. Answer in the affirmative, and backups begin immediately. I'm personally a fan of bootable backups, meaning that if the primary hard drive in your Mac fails, you can boot right off of the backup copy. To create these backups, I use SuperDuper! ($27.95). Every night, the app performs some file maintenance, then adds changed or new files to a full backup (SuperDuper! includes a scheduling tool for setting up backups at regular intervals). To make sure that the backup is indeed bootable, I test it once a month. Another amazing app for bootable backups is Carbon Copy Cloner (Free, but $20 recommended). To test your bootable backup, go to System Preferences and click on "Startup Disk". Click on the backup drive icon to select it, and then click the Restart button. If all is well, your Mac should boot from the backup drive. Daily backups should be part of your Mac OS X routine already, but if they aren't, then the move to Mountain Lion should provide your impetus to start backing up now. For many new Mac owners, your move to Mountain Lion represents your first major upgrade. To help users prepare to make the jump, Steve Sande and Erica Sadun wrote Getting Ready for Mountain Lion, an Amazon/iBooks eBook. It's aimed at first-time upgraders and people looking for hints and tips about smoothing the transition. We're sharing some of our tips on TUAW in a series of posts about the 10.8 upgrade. OS X Mountain Lion will be offered for sale in July 2012 for $19.99. #next_pages_container { width: 5px; hight: 5px; position: absolute; top: -100px; left: -100px; z-index: 2147483647 !important; } #next_pages_container { width: 5px; hight: 5px; position: absolute; top: -100px; left: -100px; z-index: 2147483647 !important; }
Steve Sande06.15.2012