Reviewer Edward Mendelson (pcmag.com) calls Snow Leopard “Apple’s fastest, most functional, and feature-rich operating system yet,” awarding it 4.5/5 stars and a “Very Good” editor’s rating.
Archive > August 2009
App Store Rejection of the Week
Convertbot 1.4 rejected for using a clock icon to represent “time”, even though the exact same icon was used for versions 1.0 through 1.3.
★
Mac OS X Automation
My single favorite improvement in Snow Leopard is the overhaul to system-wide Services. Services were one of the best features of the NeXTStep OS, and while they made the transition to Mac OS X, they never seemed well integrated into the user interface. From 10.0 through 10.5, the Services menu was hidden away in a [...]
Playgrounder
New “buyers guide for kids and parents” from my friends Dan Benjamin and Larry Angell. Looks like a great resource for finding new toys.
★
Om Malik on the Size of the App Store Economy
Interesting survey numbers from mobile ad network AdMob regarding the iPhone, Android, and BlackBerry app economies. The takeaway: people are happy to buy a lot of low-price apps for their smartphones, especially iPhone users. Free apps are the gateway to paid apps, and (no surprise here) the bestseller lists are the most popular way for [...]
Jesse Grosjean’s App Store Economics Experiment
Grosjean reduced the price of his nifty WriteRoom iPhone notes app from $5 to free over the weekend, and has now raised it to $1, and he’s publishing the sales numbers.
★
Macworld’s Complete Coverage of Snow Leopard
Lots of coverage, including Jason Snell’s review and Dan Moren’s look at the new built-in malware detector.
★
Nokia’s New Maemo Site
They’re billing it as a full computer in a handheld. It’s hard not to see Symbian as implicitly deprecated.
★
iPhone Meets Genome
Illumina, a San Diego, CA-based biotechnology company that designs breakthrough tools for genetic analysis, uses iPhone to track customers and manage employees across five continents. And soon it will make it possible for consumers to carry their personal genomes with them on iPhone.
Joe Hewitt on the App Store
Joe Hewitt, advocating for Apple to open the App Store to all technically compliant apps:
Oh, but you say that iPhone apps are different, because they run native code and can do scary things that web pages can’t? Again, you’re wrong, because iPhone apps are sandboxed and have scarcely any more privileges than a web app. [...]
