Tag Archives: Mac

[MacOS] MacUpdate Launched Holiday App Bundle for $49

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Yeah, it was overdue already. The guys over at MacUpdate just launched their  pre-chrismas holiday app bundle. For US$49 you will get:

  • Data Rescue 3 (instead of US$99)
    One of the best data recovery tool for the Mac
  • Espresso 2 (instead of US$75)
    One of the best CSS, HTML, XML, JavsScript editing tools around
  • TotalFinder (instead of US$18)
    The Must-have tool, since Apple’s finder is really still total crap
  • TotalSpaces (instead of US$15)
    brings eventually back the grid-style spaces to OS X 10.7 and 10.8
  • Snapz Pro X 2.5 (instead of US$69)
    Screenshots and video capturing made as easy as possible
  • Mac DVDRipper Pro 4 (instead of US$25)
    Copying, Ripping and Converting DVDs made easy, in times of MacBookAirs this tool looks vintage to me ;-)
  • PopChar X 6 (instead of US$38)
    Accessing special font characters made easy, usable scenarios really unknown to me
  • MoneyWell 2 (instead of US$50)
    some finance manager, I would never use ;-)
  • Swift Publisher 3 (instead of US$30)
    never heard of that one, but sounds interesting
  • RollerCoaster Tycoon 3 (instead of US$30)
    Sim Game in Theme Park style. For those of you who have enuff time for games ;-)
  • Company of Heroes (instead of US$30)
    never heard of that one, sounds like the typical military strategy game

Anyway: the bundle makes sense at least for the TotalFinder, DataRescue, TotalSpaces and Snapz Pro. Means you can’t do anything wrong by buying it. And who knows, probably PopChar, MoneyWell and Swift Publisher might turn out to be useful aswell. The first 12,000 buyers will get Live Interior 3D for free on top (saves you another US$129)…

Get the bundle here: https://www.mupromo.com

 

[MacOS] Codeweavers To Give Away CrossOver For Free On Oct, 31st

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crossoverlogo
Codeweavers do it again. The company behind the commercial version of Wine named CrossOver will be giving away free copies of it again.

On Wednesday October, 31st, everybody can get a free copy of CrossOver with 12mths support.

CrossOver is an emulation layer for MacOS X and Linux. In contrast to virtualization solutions like VMWare, Parallels or VirtualBox, it allows running thousands of Windows applications, tools and games without having to install a legit Windows operating system.

crossover

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[iOS] iPhone Enterprise Configuration Links

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Do you wanna configure large numbers of iOS devices at once? Apple made some tools available for enterprise customers. Find them here:
» iOS Enterprise Deployment: https://www.apple.com/support/iphone/enterprise/
» iPhone Configuration Utility (Mac OS X): http://support.apple.com/kb/DL1465
» iPhone Configuration Utility (MS Windows): http://support.apple.com/kb/DL1466

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[Muzaq] Workaround for Audacity Crashing

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audacity-logo-r_50pct

Abstract

At least on a Mac Audacity seems to have issues when it comes to using third party plugins (i.e. AU or VSTs). To pinpoint which type of plugin is responsible for poor Audacity to crash, you can do the following.

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I. Locate Audacity Config File

On a Crapple Mac the audacity.cfg file should be located here:
/Users/<your-username>/Library/Application Support/audacity

screen-shot-2012-09-25-at-11-46-51-pm

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[Muzaq] Bitwig Prepping To Launch Beta of Bitwig Studio Soon

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The Berlin based company Bitwig has eventually presented some details about their upcoming music software BitwigStudio. Bitwig Studio is targeting at professional and semi-professional musicians for producing and using live.

Features in Version 1.0

In addition to what people would expect like VST support, there seem to be some groundbreaking new features to be coming already in version 1.0:

  • dual heading for the use of several displays
  • Microsoft Windows, Mac OS X and LINUX support (!!)
  • working on multiple documents
  • multiple automizations

Upcoming Features After  Version 1.0

Bitwig also announced features to be upcoming after version 1.0:

  • LAN multi-user jamming
  • multi-user music production via Internet
  • Native modular synthesizer/effects system

Background

The Bitwig company has been founded by former Ableton developers in 2008. They are located in Berlin/Germany.

Closed Beta Test

Although there is no reliable information at the moment about release dates, you can apply here for a beta test starting soon.

More Information

» Bitwig on the net

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7V_t8GfH-v4

Update [Jan 28, 2012]

Forum threads indicate there is a tiny chance that Ableton might sue Bitwig for cloning parts of Live’s GUI, in legal terms for violating the protection of registered designs.

[iPhone] Adobe’s CEO Fires Back at Steve Jobs

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On Wall Street Journal Adobe’s CEO Shantanu Narayen yesterday nite answered to Steve Jobs latest attack. Jobs had released an open letter yesterday morning. The bottom line of Jobs’ letter is:

  • Adobe Flash is something from the past, as it is not open,
  • it is not energy efficient and
  • it does not unleash the full powers the individual platforms (meaning: the full power of Apple’s iPhone or iPad).

Narayan responded in the WSJ.com interview, that

  • It’s got nothing to do with technology, but with control.
  • Apple wants to maintain control on the iPhone, iPad and iPod Touch platforms.
  • he wonders if Flash is one of the most reasons for crashing a Mac, it’s also got much to do with the operating system
  • if hardware acceleration is provided from the operating system, playing Flash takes a lot lesser energy than on a Mac.
  • Flash is an open specification

Well, well, that love is not over. We wonder how far we’re away from the point when Adobe decides to stop developing for the Apple platform? Would Apple even care? Or would they just tell thousands of designers to switch to GIMP?

We hope you don’t mind, we embed the whole WSJ.com interview as Adobe Flash ;-)

[MacOS] Parallels Desktop 5 Released

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The virtualizing software Parallels Desktop has been updated to version 5. Besides performance optimization and 3d performance boost, the integration of a Microsoft Windows operating system into the Mac environment has been significantly improved.

Parallels Desktop 5 features:

  • integration of Apple trackpad gestures (like horizontal scrolling) into the Windows guest operating system
  • copy and paste of texts and layouts between the operating systems
  • Mac look for Windows guest programs

Parallels Desktop 5 is available in German, English, French and Spanish. With more languages like Chinese, Japanese and Russian to come soon.

It will come bundled with

  • 1-year free Parallels Internet Security 2009 by Kasperky
  • Acronis Disk Director Suite 10 and
  • Acronis True Image Home 11

The full version costs about €80, an update is available for €50. And customers who bought Parallels Desktop after October 1st, 2009 are entitled for a free upgrade.

parallels_pd5_maclook

[MacOS] BluRay eventually coming to the Mac?

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Together with the newly seeded iPhone OS 3.0 a new iTunes 8.2 has been seeded to developers aswell. MacRumors now posted a screenshot that includes reference to BluRay support.

As Apple currently does not support BluRay this step is overdue anyway as Microsoft Windows user can play BluRay movies on their computers for the last three years.

If this is true this is good news. We dual booters won’t need to start Windows when willing to play an HD movie.

The picture is courtesy of MacRumors…

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[MacOS] EPOS I. – EFI Post Install for White-Box PCs

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We were working quite some time on this. Now here is EPOS I. – the “EFI Post Install” Script for white-box PCs that are almost hardware compatible with Apple’s devices

“EPOS I.” is an “EFI Post Install” Script

What does it do?

EPOS helps installing retail DVD’s of Apple’s Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard on white-box PC’s. EPOS is SlimBuild-Preboot compliant. And as such it makes installation very easy. Grab a copy of a SlimBuilt-Preboot CD image that matches your hardware (motherboard and graphics), then install Leopard and after installation run EPOS.

Technically EPOS I. automates the necessary steps of preparing MacOS’ native EFI partition and the installation of (legacy-) kexts to this EFI partition. The whole shebang was first discovered and described by Munky (all shouts fly out to him!). You may find his article here on the InsanelyMac forums.

Installation and Usage:

  • unplug ethernet cable from your white-box PC
  • copy EPOS I.zip to USB drive for instance
  • install Leopard from retail DVD using a SlimBuild-Preboot standard compatible CD (find links to tested disks below
  • boot installed Leopard using the SlimBuild-Preboot CD again
  • on first boot provide all the registration information required from Apple
  • see desktop for the first time
  • unpack EPOS I. and run it as ROOT from a terminal (have your SlimBuild-Preboot CD mounted)
  • EPOS takes about a minute to install everything
  • remove SlimBuild-Preboot CD from drive, reboot and let Apple’s autoinstaller grab the newest updates
  • enjoy a white-box Mek

Habit:

  • EPOS must be executed from the disk that will hold the EFI bootloaders.
  • If you are unsure what this means: better make sure you only have your DVD drive and your OS X harddrive connected.
  • I recommend using this script on a clean and fresh installed system, no other operating systems on the same disk!
  • prefers mounted SlimBuild-Preboot CD’s for getting kexts and the com.apple.Boot.plist
    (looks for /Volumes/SlimBuild-Preboot/initrd.img and /Volumes/SlimBuild-Preboot/com.apple.Boot.plist)
    if no SlimBuild-Preboot CD is found, EPOS tries to find Extensions in EPOS’ own Extensions folder

Supports:

  • autoextraction kexts from SlimBuild-Preboot CD
  • kexts in own Extensions folder
  • autoextraction com.apple.Boot.plist from SlimBuild-Preboot CD
  • com.apple.Boot.plist in own Plist folder
  • internally pretested with Leopard retail DVD’s 10.5.0, 10.5.1, 10.5.4 and 10.5.5

Notes:

  • Munky’s EFI Boot 6.1 included (found here)
  • compatible to Galaxy’s SlimBuild-Preboot creator 2.0 (Kudos!) found here
  • Tested with ximekon’s (Kudos, aswell) Gigabyte GA-EP35-DS3 SlimBuild-Preboot CDs found here

Error handling:

  • integrated for a bunch of common errors, anyway it remains an ugly script

Todo:

  • code cleanup / rewrite ;-)
  • autoinstallation of custom kernels
  • GUI is in the works, but don’t ask for timelines, we all got jobs to feed our families

License & restrictions:

  • This script is freeware but may NOT be used for commercial purposes!
  • It may NOT be included in SlimBuild-Preboot Disks that contain original / modded Apple kexts.
  • that means until not everything is self enabled via homebrew or legacy kexts you may only include it in your private SlimBuilds but don’t distribute them, please.
EPOS 0.95 running on a sample system :


Feedback

You are welcome to leave a note here in the comment’s section or on the insanelymac forums.

Download EPOS

Please download from the version history overview below. Did you know our sponsors yet? No we neither. Because it’s just Google adds. Anyway these premium sponsors really got the coolest offers and moreover by considering them you help us in return maintaining this site free… :-)

Version history:

  • 0.5 semi automatic really much too ugly one day rapid prototype (not released)
  • 0.6 rewrote using functions (not released)
  • 0.7 autodetermining of EFI partition (not released)
  • 0.8 improved error handling for common errors we experienced (not released)
  • 0.9 included autoextraction for SlimBuild-Preboot images (not released)
  • 0.95 included com.apple.Boot.plist extraction (released) –
    » Download EPOS 0.95 here…
  • 0.95.1 (cosmetic) bugfixes (not released)
  • 0.97 com.apple.Boot.plist bugfix (released) –
    » Download EPOS 0.97 here…
  • 10.0 “the got rich as bill from writing even uglier code” version (will definitly be released) ;-)