Software

Apple loophole gives access to photos

Written by

New York Times:

Developers of applications for Apple’s mobile devices, and Apple itself, came under scrutiny this month after reports that some apps were taking people’s address book information without their knowledge.As it turns out, address books are not the only things up for grabs. Photos are also vulnerable. After a user allows an application on an iPhone, iPad or iPod Touch to have access to location information, the app can copy the user’s entire photo library, without any further notification or warning, according to app developers.

Twitter ads head to your phone

Written by

AllThingsD:

Twitter is expanding its ad program to iPhone and Android handsets, as the company gets more aggressive about ramping up revenue. Twitter has already been showing some limited advertising on its mobile apps.Just like the Promoted Tweets that Twitter shows on its primary Twitter.com site, these ads will show up in users’ “timelines.” At first Twitter will only allow advertisers to place the ads in front of users who already following their accounts. But within months it will expand the program to allow marketers to reach people who don’t follow them — just as it does on the Web.

Thumbtack gives easy access to Pinboard bookmarks

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Thumbtack is a menu bar utility that provides quick and easy access to the most recently saved bookmarks in your Pinboard account. It was developed around one core feature allowing it be polished, reliable, and extremely efficient.

Photoshop Touch iPad app for creative photo editing

Written by

Adobe:

Photoshop Touch app lets you quickly combine images, apply professional effects, share the results with friends and family through social networking sites like Facebook, and more — all from the convenience of your tablet.

A first review is available at MacStories.

Privacy, Safari and Google

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John Gruber takes on John Battelle’s defense of Google and its practice to track users through cookies, even if they don’t want to be tracked.

Create custom brushes in Photoshop

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Brushes are one of the fundamental features in Photoshop. With brushes, you can blend masks, create effects, add textures, and create lighting. There are thousands of brushes available online that you can download for your projects, but sometimes it can … Continued

How audio engineers tweak music for the iPod age

Written by

Ars Technica:

To highlight work done to improve the sound of compressed music files, Apple recently launched a “Mastered for iTunes” section on the iTunes Store.How does this work? Ars spoke with Masterdisk Chief Engineer Andy VanDette, who recently completed a project remastering the bulk of Rush’s back catalogue. As part of the process, VanDette created special versions of each song specifically for uploading to the iTunes Store.

I bet you didn’t realize the effort that goes into creating music for the iTunes store.

MarsEdit update

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Daniel Jalkut released an update for his great blog editing software, MarsEdit. Fixes improves how the app works with Safari 5.2 and it prevents a possible hang while parsing Lightroom libraries.

Flickr getting a major makeover

Written by

Betabeat:

Markus Spiering, senior product manager for Flickr, is very happy to be making extensive changes to the Flickr interface, the first of which will roll out next week, as he explained in a meeting with Betabeat, Yahoo’s Jason Khoury, and Flickr.com, looking pretty on Mr. Spiering’s Macbook Air.The new photo view will hit on Feb. 28, Mr. Spiering said, and with it comes a new upload interface. Flickr’s uploading page now looks more like an app than a website. Goodbye, retro blue links. Hello, swoopy drag-and-drop.

I’ve used Flickr for years and am looking forward to the revamp. The interface is definitely long in the tooth.

The curious case of (cr)apps that make money

Written by

PandoDaily:

Apple has a serious problem on their hands, and it is one they need to fix it as soon as possible. This is an issue that Apple’s biggest ally – iOS developers – are complaining about, one that hurts the user, and one that could end up damaging the iOS ecosystem more than any set of labor issues ever could.The issue we are facing, is the proliferation of scamming apps. Apple needs to take better care of its walled garden.

Top 10 downloads to enhance Mac OS X

Written by

Lifehacker:

Mac OS X has a ton of great features, but there’s always room for improvement. Many developers have felt the same and created a bunch of great apps to enhance OS X’s capabilities. Here are our top 10 apps that can power up your Mac to the next level.

Auto-pairing MarsEdit and TextEdit using TextExpander

Written by

Brett Terpstra:

It’s designed to add auto-pairing for bracket and quote characters to MarsEdit, and it’s based on a bit of information that I hadn’t been aware of before.

Smart people doing smart things.

The Piracy Threshold

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Matt Gemmell: Let me make this perfectly clear: piracy is your own fault. You’ve got the whole situation almost exactly backwards. There’s so many great quotes that I could have used from Matt’s story, but this sums it up nicely … Continued

Apple posts guide to “Start Developing iOS Apps”

Written by

The Next Web:

If there is one aspect of Apple’s iDevice ecosystem that deserves a ton of credit for both growing and cementing its user base, it has to be the way developers flock to it. Apple wants developers on that line, Apple needs developers on that line.That’s why it’s not surprising, but still pleasant, to see Apple making an effort to onboard new developers with a beautiful and simple new introductory document called “Start Developing iOS Apps Today“.

Mac OS X 10.8 requirements omit more Intel Macs

Written by

CNET’s MacFixIt:

If you’ve taken a look at Apple’s sneak peek of its upcoming revision to OS X, you might wonder if your system will be able to run the operating system. In recent versions of OS X, some requirements have resulted in older hardware no longer working properly, including the drop of PowerPC support in Snow Leopard, and Lion not installing on some of the earliest Intel-based Mac systems.Unfortunately Apple has not yet officially released the system requirements for the new OS, but the developer release that is being issued to members of its Mac development community does contain a list of supported devices.

About Gatekeeper

Written by

Panic Software:

As Mac users, we’ve mostly enjoyed a life free of the worry that has followed Windows users for years. Mac OS X is pretty damn secure. But it could be more secure. As Macs enjoy increased popularity, they become a more attractive target to identity thieves and other criminals. Sooner or later, bad people ruin every nice thing. It’s an immutable law of humanity.

So, what to do about this? Code-signing, although it can’t single-handedly fix the problem forever, is a vital weapon in the fight against malware. But many folks are unclear on how it works, or how it helps. Let me try to explain in as close to plain English as I can.

You can read and get more details on Gatekeeper from security expert Rich Mogull on TidBITS and Securosis.

Adobe shows off Photoshop CS6’s content-aware move

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Photoshop Content Aware Sneak Peak:

Adobe is previewing CS6 features prior to release. In a video posted to its YouTube channel, Adobe demonstrated an update to the CS5 content-aware fill tool but the cool comes with “content-aware move”. It adds the ability to move any piece of a photo with little disturbance to the pixels around it and replaces the background in a very natural way.

iOS apps and the address book: who has your data, and how they’re getting it

Written by

The Verge:

Over the course of the past week, a firestorm has erupted in the world of iOS apps, thanks to the discovery that Path was uploading data from your iPhone’s address book without asking for explicit permission.Stated simply: any iOS app has complete access to a large amount of data stored on your iPhone, including your address book and calendar.Over the course of the past day, we have been using the method explained by Arun Thampi (who discovered Path’s privacy violation) to investigate several dozen popular iOS apps. Our findings should bring both comfort and concern to any iPhone user.

VLC 2.0 coming this week

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The design obviously boasts a fairly sizable departure from previous iterations of VLC, most obviously with 2.0 consolidating much of the UI into one window.

“Do Not Track” tool promises faster page loads

Written by

PC World:

A free new tool released on Thursday was built specifically to address many of the concerns raised in that study and to go well beyond what standard private browsing modes can do. It’s called Do Not Track Plus, and it works seamlessly with Internet Explorer, Firefox, Chrome, and Safari; not only that, but it can increase page load speeds by up to four times, its maker says.Users can decide at the individual website level whether they want to block or allow tracking. When they do want their activities to remain private, DNT+ blocks a growing list of 580 different tracking technologies and more than 200 tracking companies.

I’ve been using it for a while and it’s a bit scary to see how often and in how many different ways we are being tracked.

Greed and Entitlements

Written by

Federico Viticci, MacStories:

Today’s Tweetbot releases are just another example of a subset of users that think developers should keep on updating their apps, even adding completely new iPad versions, for free, forever. This kind of controversy seems to take place every time a major iPhone app is released as standalone on the iPad, or vice versa. So I’d like to formulate a quick thought on the subject.

As I said on Twitter when the tempest in a teapot over the $3 cost of TweetBot for the iPad started – it’s three dollars…you have an iPad. See the disconnect?