Software

Windows 8 bloatware

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Bloatware is a result of companies not giving a shit about their users. It’s alive and well in Windows 8.

10 Mac apps for $49.99

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Here’s a new Mac app bundle that went on sale today. If you use this link, I’ll get a little kickback from the people, which will help The Loop. Thanks people.

Pissed with iCloud

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iOS developer Justin Williams is not happy with iCloud and the services Apple offers that rely on it. While I’ve heard other people pick iCloud apart, I haven’t had any problems. iTunes Match is fantastic, downloading apps works great and syncing is very fast.

AC/DC comes to iTunes

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One of the last major iTunes holdouts is now available for download. AC/DC is finally on the iTunes Store. […]

Messages Beta for Lion ends Dec. 14

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Apple plans to shut down the Messages beta for Lion on December 14th, at which point users will have to downgrade to iChat or upgrade to Mountain Lion.

The new Twitter

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Matt Buchanan:

The message from Twitter over the last year has been consistent about one thing: Change is coming. It’s building a new Twitter. We sort of joked it would look like this — essentially, more like Facebook — but the new features Twitter rolled out last night show just how true that will be.

The other consistent message is that they’ll screw their developers.

Microsoft has failed

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Charlie Demerjian:

In the end, the death spiral for Microsoft is in full effect, and management is expending a lot of effort to speed it up. Anyone who dares point out that the entire system is collapsing, or worse yet suggests an alternative, gets Sinofsky’d. Or was it Guggenheimer’d? In any case, Microsoft is unwilling to change, and that is very clear. Even if they wanted to, they are culturally far beyond the point of being able to. What was a slow bleed of marketshare is now gushing, and management is clueless, intransigent, and myopic. Game over, the thrashing will continue for a bit, but it won’t change the outcome.

You may think that this is kind of harsh or maybe even an improbable outcome, but as you read through the story, you see that he is exactly right.

Ballmer is batshit crazy

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Ballmer last night during an interview with Reid Hoffman: Ballmer called the Android ecosystem “wild,” “uncontrolled” and susceptible to malware. This coming from the man that’s in charge of the most virus- and malware-infected operating system in the world. Perhaps … Continued

Windows 8 released, one-third of users consider Apple

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Most Windows users in the U.S. know about Windows 8 but few have immediate plans to upgrade to Microsoft’s newest operating system.

What’s more, about one-third of Windows 7, Windows Vista and Windows XP users who are ready to buy a new personal computer say they intend to switch to an Apple product.

Fascinating numbers for me, but they must be frightening for Microsoft. Imagine that one-third of your customers — 350,000 people in this survey — decide that your product is so bad, they are switching to the competition. Microsoft has run out of goodwill from its users.

Windows chief Sinofsky steps down

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Microsoft said the head of its flagship Windows division and the driving force behind Windows 8, Steven Sinofsky, will be leaving the company with immediate effect, shortly after the software giant launched the Surface tablet.

This seems odd to me. It doesn’t have the feel of a planned departure.

50,000 hours training Best Buy employees on Windows 8

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This week I spoke to Jason Bonfig, merchant vice president for computing at Best Buy. Bonfig told me that Best Buy has invested 50,000 hours worth of training to bring employees up to speed.

Very smart move by Microsoft and Best Buy. Microsoft must have known that people would be confused by the new interface, so to combat that they have experts on hand to make it all seem very simple.

Color Perfect Pixelmator

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A big update was released for Pixelmator today that adds Soft Proofing, a feature that allows users to preview and work in CMYK colors.

Reeder

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Absolutely one of my favorite and most used apps on iOS and Mac.

ScreenFlow 4

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This has always been my favorite app for screen recording. I haven’t used the new version yet, but I’ll take a look in the next little while.

Majority of people have never heard of Windows 8

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The phone survey of nearly 1,200 adults in the U.S. found 52 percent hadn’t even heard of Windows 8 leading up to Friday’s release of the redesigned software.Among the people who knew something about the new operating system, 61 percent had little or no interest in buying a new laptop or desktop computer running on Windows 8, according to the poll. And only about a third of people who’ve heard about the new system believe it will be an improvement (35 percent).

So most people have never heard of it and the ones that did don’t want it. This is a firecracker release for sure.

Divvy

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Divvy is an entirely new way of managing your workspace. It allows you to quickly and efficiently “divvy up” your screen into exact portions.

This looks cool. Watch the video to see how it can be used.

Pocket launches Mac app

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Pocket, the popular “save for later” service for iOS and the Web, now has its own official Mac client.

Echofon for Mac will be no more

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Echofon maker Naan Studio says it will discontinue its Mac, Windows and Firefox versions of its Twitter client.

PDFpen to the rescue

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This afternoon my daughter came to me with a problem. She had a PDF file that she needed to search but it wouldn’t find any of the keywords. It looked to me like the file was actually an image that was converted to a PDF, so there were no recognized words in the document, just image data.

After confirming this on Twitter and listening to the many recommendations, I downloaded PDFpen and ran OCR on the document. In under a minute (it was a large document), I was able to search and select all text I wanted.

Thanks Smile Software.

Anvil for Mac

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Anvil takes your site folder, gives it a .dev URL and makes it run for you. Works for any static HTML sites and Rack apps.

I thought this was pretty cool.

[Via Big Week]

Committed for GitHub

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Committed is a great way to be alerted when someone pushes new code to the GitHub repositories you care about. Committed notifies you using OS X’s new Notification Center feature when someone pushes code.

Great new app from Justin Williams. I love that he’s using the Notification Center too — great detail.

Sidekick

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Geo-intelligent laptop settings.

Great app.