10.8: New Notes App Service
I put together a simple Automator action that takes the selected text from any application and creates a new Note. This sort of thing should have been in the Services menu to begin with, but this powerful feature of OS X is often unsung and underused. Hope it helps. Open Automator and create a new Service. Set the Service to receive selected text in any application from the drop down menus. Drag Copy to Clipboard from the Utilities library into the workflow. Drag Run AppleScript from the Utilities library into the workflow. Paste the below text in place of (* Your script goes here *): tell application "Notes" to activate tell application "System Events" click menu item "Notes" of ((process "Notes")'s (menu bar 1)'s ¬ (menu bar item "Window")'s (me ...
published on Friday, the 12. April 2013, macosxhints
Workaround to use Emoji fonts in Pages
You can use Emoji fonts in Mail and TextEdit, but the Apple color Emoji font has never worked in Pages. For some reason Apple has not yet updated the app so that Pages can use these characters. Until Apple fixes this problem in a future Pages update, here's a workaround for using Emoji fonts in Pages. First make sure your toolbar shows the keyboard icon on the right side of your toolbar. If not, go to System Preferences and then click on Keyboard > Keyboard Shortcuts; and check “Show Keyboard & Character Viewers in menu bar.” Open your Character Viewer and select the Emoji font. Then select the Emoji image you want to use. An enlarged version will appear in the Emoji icon box. Press Command-Control-Shift-4, and your cursor will now be a crosshair. Click and drag the crosshair around the large Emoji icon into a box frame and release your mouse or trackpad. You have now captured the Emoji icon as a screen shot on your clipboard. Click in your ...
published on Monday, the 14. January 2013, macosxhints
Apple Announces 40 Billion App Store Downloads, Nearly 20 Billion in 2012
Apple today announced that the App Store has reached another milestone, passing 40 billion downloads since its launch in 2008. The pace of downloads continues to accelerate, with nearly half of those downloads coming in 2012. Apple now has 500 million user accounts for the App Store, and set a record with over two billion downloads during the month of December.?It has been an incredible year for the iOS developer community,? said Eddy Cue, Apple?s senior vice president of Internet Software and Services. ?Developers have made over seven billion dollars on the App Store, and we continue to invest in providing them with the best ecosystem so they can create the most innovative apps in the world.?Apple notes that there are now over 775,000 apps available in the App Store and highlights the success of a number of developers including Temple Run's Imangi Studios, Autodesk, and others.In 2012, the husband and wife team at Imangi Studios saw their game Temple Run downloaded more than 75 million times; Backflip Studios and Supercell, two emerging game development studios, brought in over $100 million combined for their leading freemium titles DragonVale and Clash of Clans; and emerging services including Uber, Flipboard, HotelTonight, and AirBnB attracted millions of users on iOS. Companies including Electronic Arts, Ubisoft, Autodesk, Marvel and Major League Baseball continued to expand their iOS offerings, while developers like JJ Abrams? Bad Robot Interactive and Bottle Rocket Apps continued to push the boundaries of what iOS apps can do. Recent Mac and iOS Blog Stories • IDEO Founder David Kelley Talks to 60 Minutes About Steve Jobs, First Apple Mouse and More • CES 2013: HAPIfork is a Digital Fork that Tracks Your Eating Habits • CES 2013: Parrot 'Flower Power' Monitors Plant Health over Bluetooth • CES 2013: Withings Debuts New Smart Activity Tracker • CES 2013: Griffin Updates StudioConnect MIDI Dock with Lightning Connector
published on Monday, the 7. January 2013, macrumors
New Flipboard Books category ties into iBookstore
News reading app Flipboard has added a new Books category, integrated with Apple's iBookstore. The feature includes 25 sections of the most popular books at the iBookstore, letting users browse titles there without switching apps. If a person decides to buy a book, the title is fetched from the iBookstore and read in the iBooks app....
published on Thursday, the 15. November 2012, macintosh-news-network
Steve Jobs' Yacht 'Venus' Launched in the Netherlands
Earlier this year, it was revealed that French designer Philippe Starck was working with Dutch shipbuilder Feadship on a new yacht for the family of Steve Jobs. The yacht had been mentioned in Walter Isaacson's biography of Jobs as a project he had been working on since 2009, but the ship was not completed before his death last year. Dutch site One More Thing now reports [Google translation] that the ship, christened "Venus", has officially launched, with Jobs' widow Laurene Powell Jobs and their three children participating in the event. Photo from @basvanderploeg The aluminum-hulled ship is said to be 70-80 meters in length and features seven 27-inch iMacs lined up in the wheelhouse to help run the controls. Recent Mac and iOS Blog Stories • 'Which?' Tests Phil Schiller's iPad Mini Weight Comparison Claims • 13-Inch Retina MacBook Pro Benchmarks Confirm Late June Result Posting • Sprint Once Again Sells 1.5 Million iPhones in 3Q 2012 • 'Letterpress' Combines Boggle and Go in One Simple Word Game • Skype 6 for Mac Now Supports Facebook Logins and the Retina Display
published on Sunday, the 28. October 2012, macrumors
AppleScript to get Google search URL
In Safari 6, with the new combined URL and search field, if you type search terms into the field, then press return, you'll get a Google page with the results, but you won't get a search URL in the address field. Some people want to save searches at times. Macworld's Dan Frakes tweeted an AppleScript which does just that and Many Tricks developer Peter Maurer improved on it. Run the script and it will get the URL for the frontmost tab then send it to the clipboard, from which you can paste it where you want. tell application "Safari" set the clipboard to URL of current tab of window 1 as string end tell As Dan Frakes later pointed out on Twitter, you can also drag the favicon to a finder window. You can double-click the resulting file to redo the search, or you can press the Spacebar to Quick Look it and see a live search with clickable links. For a search, the favicon is the magnifying glass icon at the left of the search field. ...
published on Thursday, the 2. August 2012, macosxhints
Flipboard 1.9 brings Audio category, SoundCloud support
The latest version of Flipboard, 1.9, now includes an Audio category, its developer has announced. The content is available through the Content Guide, and includes clips from NPR and PRI shows, as well as recommendations from SoundCloud. This includes access to lists and followed users, as well as highlighted content. Once audio is playing a person can continue reading other sections of Flipboard without it being interrupted; a menu option lets users control playback....
published on Wednesday, the 16. May 2012, macintosh-news-network
Flipboard CEO: Apple's iPad 'created a revolution' for beautiful Internet content
Mike McCue, founder and CEO of Flipboard, credited Apple on Friday with creating a "revolution" with its iPad tablet and said the impact of that revolution is still being understood more than two years after the device reached the market.
published on Thursday, the 10. May 2012, appleinsider
Feature: Exclusive: building native iOS apps with RubyMotion
In 2007, software developer Laurent Sansonetti launched an open source software project called MacRuby. It aimed to build a Ruby interpreter on top of the Objective-C runtime, providing a seamless bridge between Ruby and OS X "Cocoa" ecosystem—and it succeeded. Now Sansonetti hopes to do something similar for iOS. Sansonetti recently left his job at Apple-where he has worked for the past seven years-to found his own startup, dubbed HipByte. He announced his first product today, a new software development kit called RubyMotion that will open the door for developers to build native iOS applications with the Ruby programming language. Read the comments on this post
published on Thursday, the 3. May 2012, ars-technica