MacRumors' Mac Blog: Mac Apps, News and Rumors

At an event packed with several hardware announcements, Apple's iBooks Author application for Mac also got an update today adding new templates and the ability for authors to use their own fonts and add mathematical expressions and multi-touch widgets. Authors can also publish updates to their ebooks through iBooks Author. Users will be notified of available book updates through the iBooks iOS ...

The Korea Times reports that Apple has fired the head of its Korean unit, Dominique Oh, with sources indicating that the move was related to sluggish sales in the country."Apple terminated the contract with Oh last week," Apple spokesman Steve Park said by telephone, late Tuesday. "We acknowledge that there are many speculations surrounding Oh's contract termination. But we can't do more,...

Last week, we noted that Apple had expanded its iMac 1TB Seagate Hard Drive Replacement Program to include iMac models sold between October 2009 and July 2011. The program provides for free replacement of the defective Seagate drives or reimbursement for repairs already paid for out of pocket by machine owners. Apple has now begun emailing customers for whom it has contact information...

GOG.com -- short for Good Old Games -- has brought 50 older PC gaming titles to OS X, many on the modern Mac OS for the first time.The games include Sim City 2000 (for only $2.99), Syndicate ($5.99), Wing Commander ($5.99) and the Ultima series ($5.99).GOG.com is probably not a name familiar to many Mac users, but it's been around for years selling classic and out-of-date games on Windows. The...

After several months in public and then private alpha and beta testing, Tweetbot for Mac has been released for $20 [App Store].The app includes support for the Retina MacBook Pro, iCloud syncing with the iOS versions of Tweetbot, and more. There are also a number of excellent reviews out today to help users decide if the app is worth $20, including from The Verge, The Next Web, and MacStories....

MacHeist has launched their fourth application bundle, combining fifteen apps with a retail value of $539 (if certain sales targets are reached), for $29. MacHeist typically assembles these bundles with a wide variety of apps, including both games and productivity programs.This year's bundle includes:- Bejeweled 3- Scrivener- Courier- PDF Signer- Artboard- Jurassic Park- Sam and Max- S...

While Apple added dedicated Notes and Reminders web apps to iCloud.com last month, the web-based implementation of Reminders left out at least one important feature: shared reminders. OS X Mountain Lion users have been able to share reminders via the native Reminders app as of OS X 10.8.2, but Windows users and others needing to access iCloud via the service's website have been unable to set...

LaCie has announced a new addition to its Little Big Disk line with a pair of RAID'd SATA III solid state drives in either 512GB or 1TB total capacity. The company positions the drives towards "the creative pro on the go", supporting either RAID 1 for security, or RAID 0 for extra speed.Today, LaCie announced that the Little Big Disk Thunderbolt Series, design by Neil Poulton, now features SATA...

Last week, EA released the first gameplay video of the new SimCity. Today, the Maxis team is running a live webcast showing new gameplay and the first live demo of SimCity.The video will be available at origin.com/maxis-live after the event is completed as well.This virtual event will be packed full of announcements and will feature live software demos including the first live-streamed...

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...