mac Archives - Page 4 of 5

July 31, 2011

Instagram on the Desktop

Playing around with Instagram today I found out about two desktop applications for the Mac that allow you to interact with your Instagram feed from your Mac desktop.

Neither allow you to post from the Mac (which is a pity) but both do allow you to “like” and “comment” on the images from your feed.

Uploading images is forbidden by Instagram which allows only uploads from mobile devices.

Instadesk

InstaDesk lets you not only browse your or your friends Instagram pictures, but easily explore the social graph and find new people to follow.

Instead, with InstaDesk you can browse beautiful pictures, newest uploads of your friends, or interesting people to follow. Furthermore, you can comment on pictures, like them, download them, or watch them in slideshows.

Download Instadesk from the Mac App Store – £1.49

Carousel

Carousel is a simple, beautiful way to explore Instagram on your Mac in a minimal footprint. View your feed, popular photos, your photos, comment, like, save photos and much, much more. We’ve also implemented a full set of keyboard commands to make operation flawless and four wonderful themes to personalize Carousel to your liking.

Download Carousel from the Mac App Store – £2.99

Of course there are a few web based services out there that allow you to view your Instagram feed in a browser. However the couple I have tried are either not very reliable or are limited in how you can share feeds with non-Instagram users (not that you can do that with a desktop app).

Though Twitter is available in the browser, lots of people use Desktop Apps to access Twitter, these apps for Instagram may work for you allowing you to access your Instagram feed from your Mac rather than your iPhone.

January 6, 2011

Mac App Store goes live!

After the announcement last year, today saw Apple’s OS X App Store for Macs go live.

This is an obvious move for Apple following the success of the App Store for iOS devices.

For me this is a great way of buying Apps, not having to worry about creating accounts on multiple websites and an easy way of installing Apps. I don’t think this will stop me buying Apps from websites, but if an App is available on the App Store I think this might tempt me more to make that purchase.

Impressed that some of the Apple Apps are “cheaper” than their boxed counterparts, Aperture for example is £173 in the main Apple online Store for the boxed edition and just £44.99 in the App Store.

It wouldn’t surprise me to see Microsoft doing something very similar for Windows and Google making Android and Chome a more coherent experience.

April 7, 2010

Coherence Mode

Do you use Parallels (or other VM software)?

Do you prefer “hiding” Windows in a window, or do you hide Windows by integrating with OS X and use Coherence Mode?

In this mode the virtual machine’s desktop is invisible so that you can see the virtual machine’s application windows in Mac OS X and work with them side by side with your Mac OS X applications.

Personally I do not like Coherence Mode and will either use Windows in a Window or in Full Screen Mode.

How do you use Windows on a Mac?

December 18, 2008

BBC iPlayer now available on Mac and Linux

Well I know you are thinking that you could access BBC iPlayer already on your Mac or Linux PC!

Well what we’re talking about here is not the Flash based web BBC iPlayer, but the iPlayer which allows you to download BBC programmes and watch them while offline.

Not tried it yet, but thinking it could be useful for train journeys.

No more .Mac bookmarks

Though I do use .Mac to sync my bookmarks over several computers (with differing levels of success) I do also use the web version quite often on computers that don’t have .Mac support (eg PCs) or that I don’t own.

So you can imagine my disappointment when I received the following e-mail from Apple.

Dear .Mac member:

As you may know, your .Mac subscription is being upgraded to MobileMe, Apple’s new Internet service for your Mac, iPhone, iPod touch, and PC. This includes a new way to manage bookmarks across your computers and even push them over the air to your iPhone and iPod touch.

As part of the transition to MobileMe, web access to your .Mac Bookmarks will end in July 2008 and you will no longer be able to access or update your bookmarks at mac.com. Mac-to-Mac sync will not be affected.

To avoid losing bookmarks saved on .Mac, please sync them with your Mac before June 30. This will ensure that MobileMe can keep your bookmarks in sync going forward. Here’s how.

For more information on the transition, please visit the MobileMe FAQ.

We apologize for any inconvenience.

Sincerely,

The .Mac Team

I can see that it may make things better, but for me losing the web bookmarks will be inconvenient.

June 5, 2008

Now this looks interesting…

If you want to run Windows on your Mac, you have had up until now four main choices.

Now there is a fifth choice, Virtualbox from Sun.

VirtualBox is a family of powerful x86 virtualization products for enterprise as well as home use. Not only is VirtualBox an extremely feature rich, high performance product for enterprise customers, it is also the only professional solution that is freely available as Open Source Software under the terms of the GNU General Public License (GPL). See “About VirtualBox” for an introduction.

Presently, VirtualBox runs on Windows, Linux, Macintosh and OpenSolaris hosts and supports a large number of guest operating systems including but not limited to Windows (NT 4.0, 2000, XP, Server 2003, Vista), DOS/Windows 3.x, Linux (2.4 and 2.6), and OpenBSD.

I have downloaded it, but not yet installed it or tried to run Windows on it. Certainly looks like it could be useful for a whole range of virtualization solutions.

Continue reading “Now this looks interesting…”

May 24, 2008

Can I use OEM versions of Windows on my Mac?

Generally the answer is yes. Though if you purchased a computer with an OEM version of Windows then the license only covers that hardware and according to the terms of use can not be transferred to another computer.

These OEM versions will work with Boot Camp and/or Parallels or VMFusion. Though as OEM versions you won’t get any support from Microsoft, for that you will need to purchase the full retail versions.

Windows XP Home

Windows XP Professional

Windows Vista Ultimate

Note that Windows Vista Home can not be used with Parallels or VMFusion due it licensing restrictions.

Windows Vista Home Premium

May 5, 2008

Slow

I maybe getting spoiled.

I am feeling that my G4 PowerBook is somewhat on the slow side.

Now it could be that I have been using way too many Intel Macs recently and as a result, the G4 is not slow, just slow compared to them!

Or it could be the wealth of Web 2.0 services out there and Ajax is playing havoc with my browsers and memory. If I surf simple sites such as the BBC News, then no real problems; problems arise if I use Jaiku, Twitter or WordPress (ie this blog).

The thing is it doesn’t really matter which browser I use either, whether it be Flock or Firefox or Safari.

I think I am getting spoiled, now the question is, if I upgrade the PowerBook to Leopard 10.5, will that make any difference, make it worse or make it better.

January 14, 2008