MacRumors' Mac Blog: Mac Apps, News and Rumors

For this week's giveaway, we've teamed up with Duluth Pack to give one lucky MacRumors reader a chance to win one of the company's Deluxe Laptop Daypacks. Made of a rugged canvas, the Deluxe Laptop Daypack includes leather accents for better durability and resistance to wear, and it has adjustable leather shoulder straps for comfort. There's a big pocket on the outside for holding things like...

Smile Software has released TextExpander 5.1.2 with a fix for OS X El Capitan-related crashing on launch and other minor bug fixes and improvements. The update is free for all users running TextExpander 5 or later. TextExpander is a popular typing utility for Mac that can expand custom keystroke shortcuts into frequently-used text and pictures. The tool can insert text ranging from email...

The PC market continues to slide, according to the latest estimates, and while Apple is seeing only a small gain or loss in shipments year-over-year depending on who is doing the counting, the Mac maker continues to outpace the overall market. Gartner's Preliminary Worldwide PC Vendor Unit Shipment Estimates for 3Q15 (Thousands of Units) Gartner's numbers show Apple shipping 5.6 million Macs...

Early on in production, Aaron Sorkin's Steve Jobs movie struggled to find a lead actor to play Steve Jobs, with both Christian Bale and Leonardo DiCaprio turning down the role after having been previously attached to the film. At the time, DiCaprio gave no official reason for pulling out of negotiations, while Christian Bale reportedly felt he was not right for the role. A new report from The...

Twelve South today unveiled an all new design for its popular BookArc, introducing a revamped version that's compatible with all current Apple MacBook models, including the 12-inch Retina MacBook, the Retina MacBook Pro, the non-Retina MacBook, and the MacBook Air. The BookArc, for those unfamiliar with the product, is designed to hold a MacBook while it's being used in clamshell mode when...

Microsoft today released an update for Microsoft Office for Mac 2011, which fixes a significant Outlook bug that Office users ran into after upgrading to OS X El Capitan. After installing the new Apple operating system, many Outlook 2011 users found themselves unable to access their mail due to a syncing issue that caused the app to hang whenever it attempted to access the server. Users were...

Just days before Steve Jobs opens in New York and Los Angeles on October 9, former Apple CEO John Sculley, who is portrayed in the movie by Jeff Daniels, spoke to The Wall Street Journal about his thoughts on the movie. Sculley liked the movie, calling it "extraordinary entertainment" and predicting it'll be as successful as The Social Network. Jeff Daniels as John Sculley in Steve Jobs ...

A video obtained exclusively by ABC News today aims to showcase the "softer side" of Steve Jobs, with the former Apple CEO addressing an assembly of Apple employees the day before the release of the original iPhone in 2007. During the brief clips shared by ABC News, Jobs urges the company's employees to go in to an Apple Store and "just give one of the Apple retail store employees a hug,"...

At WWDC 2015, Adobe director of engineering David McGavran demonstrated After Effects and Illustrator on Mac integrated with Metal, Apple's new high-performance graphical acceleration API on OS X El Capitan. At the end of the demo, he said that Adobe is committed to bringing Metal to multiple Creative Cloud apps on Mac."Adobe is committed to bringing Metal to all of its Mac OS Creative Cloud...

With the release of Danny Boyle's Steve Jobs starting in just a few days, a new report from The Wall Street Journal states that a handful of Steve Jobs' "allies," centering on his widow Laurene Powell Jobs, attempted to shut down the movie before its release. Going so far back as to when it was in the hands of Sony, she lobbied the various production companies the script passed through -- ending...

In a new interview with The Daily Beast, Steve Jobs director Danny Boyle spoke about many aspects of the movie, from why he casted Michael Fassbender to Apple's lack of involvement with the film and whether it's accurate to the life of Steve Jobs. After Christian Bale dropped out of the role and Sony Pictures courted the likes of Leonardo DiCaprio and Bradley Cooper, the production chose...

Apple has acquired additional land in the Bay Area, inking a deal with Landbank Investments for an upcoming 770,000 square-foot campus at Central and Wolfe in Sunnyvale, California. According to the Silicon Valley Business Journal, Apple has leased the property for an undisclosed amount of money. The upcoming campus is notable because current plans call for an amorphous design that eschews the ...

In a new interview with Wired, screenwriter Aaron Sorkin spoke freely on his job of being hired to pen the new Steve Jobs movie and all of the issues he had to face in writing about a person he didn't know much about. Sorkin's initial fear of tackling the film -- hesitant to use the term "biopic" -- was in adapting Walter Isaacson's comprehensive biography of Jobs into a traditional, three act...

Apple today announced that former Boeing chief financial officer and corporate president James Bell has joined Apple's board of directors. Calling himself an "avid user of Apple products" with "tremendous respect" for Apple's ability to innovate, Bell brings nearly four decades of experience at Boeing to Apple's board.“James brings a wealth of global, financial and industrial experience from...

Macphun, the company that makes several popular photo editing apps for Mac and iOS, today updated some of its Mac apps with support for OS X El Capitan and the new Photos extension. In OS X El Capitan, third-party photo editing apps from the Mac App Store are able to share their tools with Photos, making it possible to edit images with these apps without ever leaving the Photos app. ...

With OS X El Capitan available today to the public, some have begun discovering interesting tidbits and changes the new operating system has to offer. Twocanoes (via The Loop) has discovered that Boot Camp has gained the ability to install a Windows partition without a USB drive. Image via Twocanoes Boot Camp comes with a modified interface that places the ISO image selector and partitioning...

Ahead of the official launch of OS X El Capitan, Apple's newest operating system, Apple today released Safari 9.0 for OS X Yosemite users. According to Apple, today's update is recommended for all people running OS X Yosemite and includes improvements to privacy, compatibility, and security. The update adds El Capitan-centric features including a new mute audio feature for Safari tabs and...

Apple today announced that it would be bringing three of its entertainment services -- Apple Music, iTunes Movies and iBooks -- to customers in China today. This marks the first time customers in China will have access to Apple's entertainment ecosystem. “Customers in China love the App Store and have made it our largest market in the world for app downloads,” said Eddy Cue, Apple’s...