MacRumors' Mac Blog: Mac Apps, News and Rumors

Alfred is a beloved launcher program for Mac OS X that allows users to quickly launch Google searches, launch applications, make quick calculations and more. Now, the developers behind Alfred have revealed in a blog post one of the new features for version 2.0. The feature is called Workflows and allows users to create advanced functions to make Alfred even more useful. Some examples are the ...

Alongside the Best of 2012 for the iOS App Store, Apple also released its nominations for the best app and game of the year in the Mac App Store yesterday. Journaling app Day One was named App of the Year, while Deus Ex: Human Revolution Ultimate Edition took the Game of the Year award. Photography app CameraBag 2 was named runner-up for app of the year, and Splice: Tree of Life was the...

Steve Jobs famously purchased Pixar from Lucasfilm for $10 million in 1986, selling the company to Disney 20 years later for $7.4 billion. In 1995, Pixar was ready to unveil its first feature film, Toy Story, which was also the first feature film composed entirely of computer-animated graphics. Before the film was released, Steve Jobs spoke at SIGGRAPH 95, a conference for those in the computer...

Two hit games arrived for Mac today in Batman: Arkham City Game of the Year Edition and The Witcher 2: Assassins of Kings Enhanced Edition and are now available in the Mac App Store. After being announced for Mac in October, Feral Interactive has brought Arkham City to Mac a year after its release on consoles and a year after the predecessor Arkham Asylum was released in the Mac App Store. A...

Adobe has updated Photoshop Lightroom, its prosumer image editor, with retina display support. Photoshop and Illustrator CS6 were upgraded with similar support earlier this week.What's new• HiDPI support within the Library and Develop Modules. HiDPI provides support for Retina-enabled Macs.• Additional raw file support for 20 cameras including the Canon EOS 6D, Nikon D600 and Olympus PEN ...

GOG.com, the classic PC game store, is giving away Duke Nukem 3D free for a limited time. Duke Nukem 3D was one of the most revolutionary games of its time, pushing boundaries of tastefulness, obscenity and nudity within a video game.This particular version is the Atomic Edition of the game includes bonus episodes, new weapons and enemies. It also supports a number of fan made mods.Duke Nukem, ...

Patently Apple reports that the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office has officially granted Apple a registered trademark for the sound that its Mac computers make after booting up. The original chiming sound was created by Apple programmer Jim Reekes, who designed many of the system sounds for the Mac OS, including that iconic startup chime roughly 20 years ago. Apple has used several different...

Apple has updated OS X Server, the application that runs on top of OS X Mountain Lion to expand the system's server feature set.The most notable change in this update appears to be a new caching server for Mac App Store updates. Presumably, the server now downloads updates for things like iPhoto and OS X itself to prevent an organization from needing to download large updates multiple times for ...

The team behind Pixelmator has posted a lengthy apology on their blog following the discovery of a bug that would sometimes cause Macs to restart or the app to crash when intensively using the popular image editor.It turns out, the newest Nvidia Geforce graphics card drivers in OS X 10.8.2 are causing the issue, and Pixelmator is working with Apple to resolve the issue.Everything we do at...

Apple today updated Final Cut Pro [Mac App Store] to version 10.0.7, bringing a number of bug fixes and other improvements.This update improves overall stability, performance and compatibility including: - The Letterbox effect "Offset" slider has been restored - Fixes an issue when creating a single layer DVD - Fixes an issue where some third-party effects could cause Final Cut Pro to hang...

A few times a year, MacRumors partners with MacUpdate to promote their Mac application bundle deal. Their latest bundle delivers 12 Mac applications for $49.99 (a $609 value if all purchased separately). Notably, it includes Data Rescue 3, a data recovery tool, as well as two popular games, Company of Heroes and Roller Coaster Tycoon 3.The full bundle includes (retail value in...

Apple Senior Vice President of Internet Software and Services Eddy Cue has decided to sell off 15,000 shares of his stock for about $8.8 million, according to a recent regulatory filing. He sold off his Apple stock for about $583.99 a share. The stock that Cue cashed in is not part of the 100,000 restricted stock units (RSUs) he received in September 2011 as a promotion bonus. Half of those...

LaCie's popular d2 series of hard drives have been upgraded with Thunderbolt, in addition to the existing USB 3.0 ports. There is a 3TB model for $299 and a 4TB unit for $399, both coming with 3-year warranties.LaCie promises top performance from the drives, though they are hampered a bit by the legacy hard drives inside. Solid state drives are needed to achieve the highest transfer speeds....

Back in March, the State of Texas announced that Apple would be pursuing a major expansion of its facilities in Austin, investing over $300 million to add 3,600 workers to its existing campus dedicated to customer support, sales, and accounting for the Americas. With various government approvals coming over the following months, Apple was then able to purchase the land in July, paving the way...

AllThingsD is reporting that Apple has responded to Samsung's claim that jury foreman Velvin Hogan conducted himself improperly during jury selection for the Samsung v. Apple trial. Hogan is under examination for his failure to disclose a previous legal dispute with Seagate, his former employer and one of Samsung's partners. In November, Judge Lucy Koh said she would "consider the questions" of...

TechCrunch reports that Apple is holding a small media event in Moscow tomorrow, presumably to announced the launch of the iTunes Music Store in Russia.A tipster has forwarded us an email, in Russian, inviting a small group of people to an iTunes event in Moscow on the evening of December 4. The email does not give much away, simply noting that team iTunes will be holding a musical evening, and...

There are multiple reports that some of the new 21.5-inch iMacs are shipping with an "Assembled in USA" label. Fortune is reporting that one of their readers walked into a San Jose, California Apple Store and purchased an off-the-shelf iMac that was assembled in the United States. During their teardown, iFixIt also found that their iMac was assembled in the USA, as shown in the photo below. ...

Just hours after Apple began taking orders for the new iMac, shipping estimates in the company's online store for the stock 27-inch models have slipped from the original 2-3 weeks to 3-4 weeks. Estimates for the stock 21.5-inch models remain at 1-3 days. Supplies of the new iMac are expected to be constrained into 2013 as Apple's suppliers deal with the challenges of producing thinner...