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Posts Tagged ‘Mac Users’

Mac Owners: Chrome Bookmarks Now Usable

Google Chrome is probably the best browser available, if speed and extensions are both important to you, and one major problem experienced by Mac users was just solved. The developer version of Chrome for Mac just released an update that allows users to manage bookmarks better than ever before. (If you’re reading this, you should use the developer version.)

Before today, bookmarks in Chrome for Mac were unbearable. Now they are a joy to click, drag around, delete and rename. The only remaining problem I see? Major issues with Adobe Flash. Is there anything else you wish was fixed in Chrome?

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Valve on Mac piques interest from other game developers

Filed under: Gaming, Multimedia, Rumors

Now that Valve has committed to offering full support for the Mac for both its in-house games and Steam, its digital game delivery system, other developers are expressing interest in the Mac as a gaming platform, too.

Gas Powered Games, creator of Supreme Commander 2, Kings and Castles, and Dungeon Siege, has said of the Mac: “We, as a developer, will include a Mac platform option in all of our proposals moving forward. We’re in 100 percent support of it, absolutely.” Chris Taylor, founder of Gas Powered Games, says that porting games over to the Mac is relatively easy since Macs and PCs now have largely identical internal architectures. Intel processors and ATI or NVIDIA graphics cards are common to both platforms, making game porting far easier than it was back in the PowerPC days. Taylor also says that recent rises in Mac sales are another contributing factor making the Mac a more attractive target for game developers.

Swedish gamemaker DICE, best known for the Battlefield series of games, may also be throwing more support behind the Mac — one of the company’s lead developers has said that “We’re currently investigating the possibility of making [Battlefield: Bad Company 2] available on Mac.” That’s not as big or flashy a commitment as Valve or Gas Powered Games, but considering the popularity of the Battlefield series, it still goes a long way toward improving the state of gaming on the Mac.

Over the next year or so, many other developers are likely to be watching Valve’s success (or lack thereof) on the Mac with a very keen eye. If Valve manages to make a healthy amount of money by selling games to Mac users, it may only be a matter of time before many more gaming outfits follow suit.

TUAWValve on Mac piques interest from other game developers originally appeared on The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW) on Wed, 10 Mar 2010 19:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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EyeTV Hybrid shrinks down, gains Win7 compatibility

Filed under: Hardware

Same price, same features (mostly) but a sleek and slender new look: yesterday Elgato introduced the latest revamp of its EyeTV Hybrid USB tuner for high-definition digital television. The US$150 widget gives you the option of watching over-the-air digital television in full HD glory, and can also tune in unencrypted (Clear QAM) and analog cable TV signals. If you’ve got an analog source like a VCR or videogame console, you can also route those signals through the EyeTV Hybrid to watch or play on your Mac (for those who don’t need the analog option, Elgato also sells the HD tuner-only EyeTV One for $120).

The tuner ships with the EyeTV 3 software, enabling live TV, DVR functionality and shared recordings for your iPhone and iPod touch. With every new EyeTV Hybrid you get a one-year subscription to the TV Guide data feed, which provides full listings and enables the Smart Series recording feature; the software also can detect and display the embedded ATSC schedule information for broadcast shows. After the first year, re-upping with TV Guide will cost you $20.

Other than the slimmer profile, the major new feature on this model is the addition of driver support for Windows 7’s Windows Media Center. Mac users may not care much, but this does let you use the same tuner if you’re using Boot Camp, or you can loan it out to Windows-centric friends — if you trust them to give it back.

You can check out our previous coverage and reviews of the EyeTV Hybrid for more.

TUAWEyeTV Hybrid shrinks down, gains Win7 compatibility originally appeared on The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW) on Wed, 10 Mar 2010 14:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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TUAW Exclusive: Aaron Patzer on the future of mobile finance, Mint.com, and Quicken on the Mac

Filed under: Software, Internet Tools, TUAW Interview

At the age of twenty-six, Aaron Patzer founded the financial website Mint.com. In many ways Mint was much like an Apple product: it had a simple interface, it was easy to understand and use, and many of Mint’s early adopters became very loyal evangelists. Word of mouth spread, and just 18 months after its launch (Mint officially went public in 2007), Mint had added its one millionth user.

To the dismay of many, Mint sold to Intuit in September 2009 for $170 million. I say dismay because many users of Quicken products had been less than thrilled with Intuit’s offerings for some time, and some people were concerned what a twenty-year-old company that seemed stuck in its ways would do with a popular user-friendly Web 2.0 startup.

Out of all the negative press, perhaps Mac users could be forgiven for having the most anxiety over the acquisition. Many had abandoned Quicken Mac 2007 in favor of Mint.com. Mac users wanted to move on from the stale Quicken ecosystem and go with something simple and easy. Now, that simple and easy solution had moved to where the users had escaped from.

Luckily, Intuit wasn’t like other companies who buy smaller start-ups just to eliminate a competitor. Intuit recognized that Patzer and his team possessed the much-needed original financial software ideas and UI design mojo to put a spark in their aging products. In November 2009, Intuit made Aaron Patzer VP/GM of Intuit’s Personal Finance Group — which left him in charge of Intuit’s personal finance offerings, including Quicken for Mac.
It was January 2008. At Macworld Expo, Steve Jobs had just unveiled the MacBook Air. Over at Intuit’s booth, the company was previewing an anticipated update to Quicken Mac 2007 – one that didn’t require Rosetta to run and didn’t have an un-Mac-like UI. Unfortunately, the UI that Quicken ended up with consisted of a Cover Flow-esque interface. It was 2008 after all, and Cover Flow was the hot new UI element, but this was a finance app. We didn’t need glitz when we just wanted to see how much cash we had in the bank. That aside, the single-window interface was a welcome change. Intuit announced that Quicken Mac 2007’s sequel, Quicken Financial Life for Mac, would ship in the Fall of 2008.

Fall 2008 came and went. At Macworld Expo 2009, Intuit previewed a new beta of Quicken Financial Life for Mac and delayed its release again until Fall 2009. I was an early tester of the new beta, and it was buggy; the user interface looked friendlier than it actually was – in other words, the beta was everything you had come to expect from an Intuit product for the Mac. July 2009 came around and, no surprise, Intuit announced it was delaying Quicken Financial Life again, this time until 2010. 2010 – four years after the last version of Quicken for Mac came out (2007 was released in 2006). This time Intuit released a statement all but admitting that the company had failed at providing the Mac with usable financial software:

Feedback from Mac customers led us to rethink our approach to developing Quicken for Mac. We went back to the drawing board and are making changes to everything from what the program does to how it looks. We spent extra time building a reconcile mode for the new register, a robust Windows-to-Mac transfer function for new Mac users (and existing customers running Quicken on a Windows virtual machine), and redesigned the experience to make it look and feel like a native Mac application should.

At the same time, Intuit announced Quicken Financial Life for Mac would be available for pre-order from Intuit’s site on October 12, 2009. Guess what happened? That’s right. But at least this delay was only two months. By the time the product actually did go live with pre-orders many, including myself, thought it was too little, too late.

Luckily though, something happened at Intuit between the pre-order delay in October and the December pre-order release: Aaron Patzer was put in charge of Quicken Essentials for Mac (they scrapped the Quicken Financial Life name for a reason I’ll get to in a moment).

I interviewed Aaron by phone yesterday and he had a lot of things to say about the frustration Mac users have with Intuit. Perhaps that’s because he experienced the same frustration with Quicken – and that frustration led him to found Mint.com. Speaking with Aaron, I could hear the passion in his voice for simple products that allow users to easily access their data in a straightforward way.

Those original ideas and UI design mojo I mentioned earlier? Aaron put them to work right away. “When I first saw Quicken Financial Life, it had Cover Flow for no reason,” he laughed. Cover Flow? No reason? Gone. “Quicken for Mac 2006 and 2007 were C/C++ programs that looked like bastardized versions of the Windows product. Little things matter,” he told me. “In the old apps you would think you were supposed to press Command-A to select all of the entries in your registry, because that’s what Command-A does on a Mac – it selects all. But in Quicken Mac 2007 it would actually bring up your accounts list. It’s little things like that, that you could tell the people [writing the program] weren’t real Mac aficionados.”

Aaron himself uses a 15″ MacBook Pro. The team that he spearheads for Quicken Essentials is a group of “Mac guys who live and breathe this stuff.” The team consists of “five or six developers and three guys on QA with product managers coming on and off and the graphics guys switching between the Windows and Mac versions.”

Speaking of Quicken on Windows, Aaron himself wrote the spec for the next version of Quicken for Windows (2011, due out later this year). Why is that important? Because Aaron has a clearly defined vision of what the future of financial software will look like. “You’ll start to see the mess of all the [Intuit] products merged together. Longer term it shouldn’t matter where you use your financial application, whether it’s on the Mac, Windows, or Linux. I want to get everything to parity [on] the features and actually do the back-end so it’s all a consistent single data model – probably based on Mint – and then just skin the front ends (applications) to look like a Mac product, to look like a Windows product, to look like an iPhone or an Android app – to take advantage of the unique advantages of those platforms. But the back-end would be the same so you can just migrate any time you want to from Mint.com to Quicken Essentials for Mac to your Android phone or iPhone.”

Well, that sounds awesome, but what about people that have years worth of old Quicken data? “Eventually we will make it so you can just one-flip click your 20 years of data into the cloud and pull it down on any of these devices – that’s the holy grail and it’ll take over a year to do that,’ he says. “But you can see that already in using the new QEM – it’s using a lot of the same user experience paradigm (the way you budget on the Mac, the way you click through the pie charts) and that makes the back-end easier.”

That’s the larger picture, and after listening to Aaron’s enthusiasm, if anyone can make it happen, it’ll be him. Let’s get back to Quicken Essentials for Mac, though.

“It’s called Quicken Essentials for Mac because it’s what we consider to be essential for most users – about 80% of users.” It’s not just what Aaron and his team think is essential; it’s what people tell them they want. “We do a lot of usability studies, that’s why Mint turned out the way it did. We applied the same to QEM. We went to people’s homes and watched them use it. The majority of them just want to know: How much do I have? How much do I owe? How much do I spend on gas and food? How many times do I go to this restaurant? How many times do I go to Starbucks? What investments do I have? Let me set a budget to control my spending.” Yeah, but what about the thing many arm-chair reviewers talk about? “Only 6% of users across all platforms use bill pay,” Aaron says. “Most people still go to their bank’s website to pay a bill.”

What about other requested features, like deeper investment tools? That’s where the future of Quicken on the Mac comes in. Intuit isn’t abandoning the Mac platform anytime soon; in fact, they’re embracing it: “For the next version of Quicken for the Mac we are planning two SKUs: Quicken Essentials and a Deluxe version which adds the deeper investment tools – history of investments, stock lots (buying shares of one stock at different times), etc.”

You may rightly point out that Quicken for Windows and even the old Quicken for Mac supported these investment tools and that Quicken for Windows supports bill pay (for the paltry 6% who actually use it), but give it time. Aaron has only been on QEM for four months now, but has already helped completely reinvent Quicken on the Mac in that short timespan (yes, it’s finally a Cocoa app). Though many may complain of the lack of investing/bill pay features, I can only liken Quicken Essentials for Mac to QuickTime X. Both apps have been rewritten from the ground up to replace clunky legacy code that would have slowed their scalability in the future. Just as QuickTime X is missing some of the features of QuickTime 7, Quicken Essentials for Mac is missing some of the features of Quicken Mac 2007 – for now. But because of the clean-sweep rewrites, these new applications are just the launching point for the programs into a better, more feature-rich future.

I’ve been playing with Quicken Essentials for Mac for a few days now (I’ll have a full review of it on February 25) and I can already tell you, I’m a convert. I abandoned Quicken for Mint, but QEM has brought me back into the fold. It’s worth it for the Cocoa rewrite alone.

What else does Intuit have in store for the Apple community? Aaron told me that after Mint releases its Android app, the team will be adding features to the next iPhone version. Some of those features include adding manual transactions – the ability to enter checks that haven’t cleared yet, and an easier way to enter cash. “Doing that on the iPhone is probably the most useful way to do it because you are usually paying cash in a cab or buying a quick coffee with it.” Another thing under consideration is an ATM locator. “We know which bank accounts you have so we can tell you which ATMs in your area are not gonna charge you a fee.”

Also expect to see an iPad app. “Yes, it’s something we’ve been looking into. Ideal implementation would be Mint’s pie chart that you can click through and dive into to see Food-Dining-McDonald’s, etc. Where you could use pinch to expand and contract.” But the iPad app won’t be available at launch and probably not before late summer at the earliest.

What about Aaron’s brainchild? I use Mint for all my US accounts, but what about my UK bank accounts? Will the rest of the globe soon be able to utilize Mint.com? “Mint is working with the Global Division at Intuit, planning how to internationalize our code base.” As Aaron points out, that’s one of the advantages of such a large company taking over a Web 2.0 startup – the startup can use the company’s resources to go further than it could have on its own. As for that large company? Well, something tells me that acquiring Mint and Aaron Patzer is the best thing that could ever have happened to Intuit – and you can take that to the bank.

TUAWTUAW Exclusive: Aaron Patzer on the future of mobile finance, Mint.com, and Quicken on the Mac originally appeared on The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW) on Wed, 17 Feb 2010 20:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Upcoming Outlook for Mac remains shrouded in mystery

SAN FRANCISCO—Microsoft’s Mac Business Unit (Mac BU) announced during the 2010 Macworld Expo more information about the upcoming Office 2011 for Mac, and users are excited despite the lack of details. Scheduled to be released before the holiday season this year, the revamped Office suite is bringing more parity than ever to the Mac version while still being as Mac-like as it can be.

The bit of news that generated the most questions—at least to those of us in the Ars Orbiting HQ—is related to Outlook for Mac. Old is new again, at least for Mac users who have been begging Microsoft for years to introduce an e-mail client comparable to its Windows offerings. The company announced the arrival of Outlook to the Mac back in August of 2009, but revealed this week that Outlook 2011 would have support for .PST files. The good news, as we discovered by sitting down with the Mac BU, is that Outlook for Mac will support bringing them in from Outlook for Windows. The bad news is that the company has “nothing to announce” (at least not at this point) regarding auto-archiving to PST.

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All about EPUB, the ebook standard for Apple’s iBookstore

Filed under: Odds and ends, Books

Overlooked in much of the hype about the iPad announcement earlier in the week was a comment by Steve Jobs in the Keynote presentation where he mentioned that the iBooks app for iPad would take advantage of the popular EPUB format for electronic books. Since we’re all going to get a lot more familiar with this format in the near future, we felt it would be a good time to provide our readers with more information about EPUB.

EPUB is the same format used by the popular Stanza [free, iTunes link] app for iPhone and iPod touch. It’s a free and open standard format created by the International Digital Publishing Forum (IDPF), and it’s designed for reflowable content that can be optimized to whatever device is being used to read a book file. The IDPF has championed EPUB as a single format that can be used by publishers and conversion houses, as well as for distribution and sale of electronic books.

The format is meant to function as a single format that publishers and conversion houses can use in-house, as well as for distribution and sale. It supports digital rights management, something that’s sure to warm the cockles of the hearts of publishers, but there’s no DRM scheme that is currently specified as part of the format.

Other ebook readers that currently use the format include the Barnes & Noble Nook, the Sony Reader, iRex Digital Reader, and the iRiver Story.

If you’re a budding publisher and want to get your ebook into the iBookstore, you’ll need a tool to help you create your document in the EPUB format. Of course, we don’t know if just anyone will be able to self-publish for the iBookstore, but Apple does note that they will have books from both “major and independent” publishers available.

For Mac users, the choice of tools is small, but good. First, there’s the free Calibre ebook management tool. Calibre converts a number of different file formats to EPUB, so it’s a good tool for doing an initial conversion. However, to do a lot of formatting, you’ll need a full-powered EPUB editor like Sigil. Sigil is a free open-source editor that runs on a number of platforms including Mac OS X.

Next, there’s the inexpensive (US$49.99 for a single license) iStudio Publisher. iStudio Publisher is a full-fledged desktop publishing application that can export text flows in EPUB format — while that’s good to hear, it’s unclear if iStudio Publisher EPUB files can include photographs or diagrams.

If you happen to be an Adobe InDesign CS4 (US$699) user, you’re in luck. The top-of-the-line tool for design and publishing supports EPUB, and it is possible to create files that will work on Amazon’s Kindle as well. Lexcycle, the company that created Stanza, has a complete list of the tools for production and conversion of files here. It wouldn’t be surprising to see a future version of Pages develop into a way to create EPUB documents.

While EPUB is a popular format, it’s not without criticism. The format is great for text-centric books, but is considered unsuitable for publications that require advanced formatting or detailed layout, such as comic books and technical tomes. That could result in some issues for textbook publishers. The lack of a standard DRM scheme could cause the format to splinter into different factions unless Apple forces the issue by adopting an open scheme.

There are also issues with the lack of detail on links within EPUB books. This makes it impossible or difficult to link ebooks, or even provide links within an EPUB book. It appears from the keynote demonstration that Apple has come up with their own “standard” for linking, as there were very active examples of linking from a table of contents to individual pages within an ebook. The standards for annotating EPUB are also lacking, which means that each company using EPUB is coming up with their own way of handling this.

There’s a very good possibility that Apple has created their own in-house standards for DRM, linking, and annotation. If the iPad and iBookstore are the successful products that they can be, Apple could finally force the industry to adopt a more robust EPUB standard.

So, that’s it for our roundup of all things EPUB. As TUAW receives more information about how iBook and the iBookstore are going to work, we’ll be sure to pass it along.

TUAWAll about EPUB, the ebook standard for Apple’s iBookstore originally appeared on The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW) on Sun, 31 Jan 2010 08:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Rumor: Bing to be default search engine in iPhone OS 4.0?

Filed under: Rumors, iPhone

One of the most surprising things about the next iPhone OS could be the default search engine. BusinessWeek is reporting that Apple is in talks with Microsoft to have Bing replace Google as the default search engine.

It’s becoming increasingly clear that Apple’s main rival is not Microsoft, but Google. The Nexus One competes directly with the iPhone; Apple is allowing Google to use Lala, for now; and with Apple’s purchase of Quattro Wireless and Google’s acquisition of AdMob it seems each company is gearing to directly compete with the other in the mobile ad market. “Apple and Google know the other is their primary enemy. Microsoft is now a pawn in that battle,” says one of BusinessWeek’s sources who is familiar with the matter.

But this isn’t just about Apple and Google. As the BusinessWeek article points out, clinching the coveted default spot on the iPhone would also help Bing gain market share in the quickly growing area of mobile search. 86% of mobile searches belonged to Google in November, according to the Nielsen Co. Only 11% belonged to Bing.

For myself, I really like Bing. It took me a while to get used to it, but I think it has many advantages over Google, particularly the was it displays image search results. Microsoft also has a great Bing iPhone app [iTunes] that I find myself using more and more.

While the Bing discussions have been going on for weeks, the source notes that the search switch may never materialize. Interestingly, the article also states that Microsoft may also be lobbying to make Bing an alternative on Apple’s Safari browser for Mac users. Despite this, even if the Bing deal goes through, it may not last long. BusinessWeek’s source says Apple has a “skunk works” looking at a search offering of its own, and believes that “if Apple does do a search deal with Microsoft, it’s about buying itself time.” In other words, Apple sees search in its future.

TUAWRumor: Bing to be default search engine in iPhone OS 4.0? originally appeared on The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW) on Wed, 20 Jan 2010 08:30:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Become the master of many monitors with NewerTech’s USB 2.0 Display Adapter

Filed under: Hardware, Peripherals, Developer, Graphic Design

Some Mac users just don’t want to be limited to one monitor, but would like two… or three… or more.

Having only one display port on your Mac can put a real crimp in your plans to be the master of the monitor universe, so NewerTech has launched the USB 2.0 Display Adapter. The adapter, with a suggested retail price of US$96.00, lets users add an extra HDMI, DVI, or VGA display to their Mac. Up to four of the bus-powered adapters can be hosted on each Mac, and each adapter can support a maximum resolution of 2048 x 1152. The device also supports Windows, and can be used with Boot Camp.

Cloning and extended desktop modes are supported by the USB 2.0 Display Adapter. A secondary adapter (VGA and HDMI adapters are supplied) must be attached to connect VGA or HDMI displays. Unfortunately, the adapter doesn’t allow OpenGL acceleration, so applications that use Quartz Extreme, Quartz Composer, and other related frameworks are not full supported. This means that Keynote, iPhoto, and iMovie will not see the benefit of OpenGL acceleration.

To use the adapter, your Mac must have an Intel processor and be running Mac OS X 10.4.11 or better.

TUAWBecome the master of many monitors with NewerTech’s USB 2.0 Display Adapter originally appeared on The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW) on Sat, 19 Dec 2009 18:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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