MacRumors' Mac Blog: Mac Apps, News and Rumors

EA plans to release the next version of SimCity -- the classic city-building game -- on the Mac simultaneously with the PC release this February. Mac users will be able to connect to the new multiplayer component in SimCity and appears to be feature-complete with the PC-version. Development of the game has moved along far enough that EA feels comfortable showing off some gameplay videos, includ...

Feral Interactive plans to release Batman: Arkham City on the Mac in November. The open-world action-adventure game was first released in October 2011 on consoles, and a month later on Windows.Feral is bringing the "Game of the Year" edition to the Mac, bundling all released downloadable content for the game into the release.Batman: Arkham City builds upon the intense, atmospheric foundation...

Apple has released an update to iPhoto that fixes a number of issues. The update weighs in at more than 757MB and is available for download through Apple's online support website. It should be available through the Mac App store soon.What's New in Version 9.4.1- Improves the reliability of syncing to iOS devices via iTunes - Fixes an issue that could cause iPhoto to quit unexpectedly when...

Screen shot sharing app Skitch was recently updated to version 2.0, but without a number of features that were frequently used by a number of its users.It received a lot of criticism from for removing features like the ability to minimize the app to the menu bar or to resize images by grabbing the corner of a window. Also, users were no longer able to choose the file format of their...

LaCie has released a new entry in its Rugged series of portable storage drives. This time, it's a Thunderbolt/USB3 offering that comes equipped with a 1TB 5400rpm hard drive or either a 120GB or 256GB 6Gb/s solid state drive. LaCie says the SSD runs at speeds of up to 380MB/s.The LaCie Rugged brings two industry leading technologies, USB 3.0 and Thunderbolt together so users can experience the ...

Among its slew of software updates released today, Apple has also pushed out MacBook Pro Retina EFI Update 1.0, which brings several fixes for Apple's new professional notebook released in June.This update is recommended to MacBook Pro with Retina display (mid 2012) models. This update resolves an issue which can cause the system to hang during heavy processor loads, and resolves an issue where...

With Apple having released both iOS 6 and OS X 10.8.2 today, the company is also taking care of OS X Lion users with the release of OS X 10.7.5. The update includes a number of enhancements, including the activation of the Gatekeeper feature from OS X Mountain Lion that allows users to limit for security reasons what types of apps can be installed on the user's computer. The feature has...

Guild Wars 2 has arrived on the Mac for the first time, with a new beta client that marks the first non-Windows client for the popular MMORPG.The Mac beta client will be available for anyone who has purchased Guild Wars 2 on the PC.Today we’re happy to announce another major milestone in the development of Guild Wars 2: going forward, ArenaNet will also be supporting the game on Apple’s...

Just about 24 hours ago, we began receiving the first reports of users having difficulties accessing their iCloud mail. Apple acknowledged the outage on its iCloud system status page relatively soon afterward, but noted that the issue only affected about 1% of customers. Unfortunately for that small fraction of users, the issue has become a relatively major one, as their outage is now...

We've been following the story of Sony's work to bring its Sound Forge audio recording and editing software to OS X for some time now, beginning with the initial teaser site that our investigation suggested was indeed a Sony project and continuing through to Sony's confirmation late last month. Sony has now officially announced Sound Forge Pro Mac, noting that it will launch this month at a...

As noted by Engadget, NVIDIA has announced that the Quadro K5000 will be available for the Mac Pro later this year. The Kepler-based design offers a professional-class GPU for the Mac. Features listed by NVIDIA include: - Cinema 4K display support (4096x2160 resolution) - A new display engine that can drive up to four displays simultaneously - 4 GB graphics memory that provides...

Apple's Promenade Temecula retail store in Temecula, California was reportedly hit by smash-and-grab robbers last night. According to reports, the robbers used a car to obliterate the entire front glass and security grating of the store before making off with an undetermined amount of merchandise. As photos of the store show, the car penetrated far enough into the store that several product ...

Last week, we noted that Apple was preparing to open its first retail stores in Sweden, with a store in the Täby Centrum shopping mall outside of Stockholm being rumored to be the first to open with a September 15 debut. Apple has now officially confirmed that opening date by posting a dedicated page for the store advertising the 10:00 AM opening on Saturday, September 15. Sweden will...

Nuance -- the company behind Siri's speech recognition -- has unveiled version 3 of its Dragon Dictate speech recognition software. The software will be available via Digital Download on September 13 with the physical box shipping on September 24.Dragon Dictate 3 increases accuracy, speed, control of third-party applications, and support for transcription from digital voice recordings -- a...

Apple has released an update to iMovie, fixing a minor bug and bringing the app to version 9.0.8. The update weighs in at 1.08GB and is available via Apple's support website. About iMovie 9.0.8 Addresses an issue related to third-party QuickTime components that could prevent iMovie from openingThe Mac App Store version of iMovie has yet to be updated, but presumably will soon be bumped to...

Apple has released an update to Java, bringing the standard OS X Java installation to parity with Oracle's latest release of Java SE 6.About Java for OS X 2012-005Java for OS X 2012-005 delivers improved security, reliability, and compatibility by updating Java SE 6 to 1.6.0_35.Java for OS X 2012-005 is available for OS X Lion and Mountain Lion.Java for Mac OS X 10.6 Update 10 is available...

Following their appointments to Apple's senior executive team, Craig Federighi and Dan Riccio have each been granted 75,000 restricted stock units by Apple. The grants, which were revealed in filings with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission covering Federighi and Riccio, are worth roughly $50 million apiece at today's stock price, although they do not convert into actual shares for some...

Last week, we noted that Apogee was apparently preparing to launch a new desktop audio interface for Mac known as "Quartet", expanding upon its popular Duet 2 portable device for professional audio recording. The report included an image of the Quartet that had been prematurely posted by Apogee, but further details on the device remained unknown. Apogee has now officially introduced the...