MacRumors' Mac Blog: Mac Apps, News and Rumors

According to a number of readers and our own observations, it seems iCloud is in the midst of a somewhat widespread service outage that has been going on since roughly 4PM Eastern Time. Users are unable to access mail and other services either via standalone applications on the Mac or iOS, or via the iCloud website. Apple's iCloud service status website doesn't indicate any issues, which may ...

Apple has released AirPort Base Station and Time Capsule Firmware Update 7.6. The update is recommended for all 802.11n Airport Express, 802.11n AirPort Extreme, and all Time Capsule models. This update for all 802.11n AirPort Express, 802.11n AirPort Extreme and Time Capsule models provides fixes for the following: - An issue with performance on overlapping wireless networks - An issue...

Apple today released Digital Camera RAW Compatibility Update 3.9, bringing RAW image support to Aperture and iPhoto for a number of new cameras.This update adds RAW image compatibility for the following cameras to Aperture 3 and iPhoto '11: - Canon PowerShot S100 - Nikon 1 J1 - Nikon 1 V1 - Nikon COOLPIX P7100 - Olympus PEN E-PL1s - Olympus PEN E-PL3 - Olympus PEN E-PM1 - Panasonic...

Nuance Communications, which provides the speech recognition technology included in Siri on the iPhone 4S, has announced the Mac App Store launch of Dragon Express, a new application that offers some of the same speech recognition and system control features found in the company's more expensive Dragon Dictate software.Dragon Express is an easy and fun speech recognition utility that introduces ...

Thomas Park has put together an interesting gallery of storefront photos from all 357 of Apple's retail stores around the world. While the photos are simply pulled from the individual retail store pages on Apple's site, the gallery format ordered by date of opening makes for easy browsing and examination of the evolution of Apple's store designs. Some of the stores have of course been renovated ...

Apple today released a pair of Java 6 updates for users of OS X Lion and Mac OS X Snow Leopard, patching vulnerabilities and increasing reliability and compatibility. - Java for OS X Lion Update 1 (62.53 MB)Java for Mac OS X 10.7 Update 1 delivers improved compatibility, security, and reliability by updating Java SE 6 to 1.6.0_29.- Java for Mac OS X 10.6 Update 6 (75.45 MB)Java for Mac OS X...

The Criterion Collection, film distribution company specializing in "gathering the greatest films from around the world" and releasing them in the highest quality, has debuted 46 of its 680 films on iTunes. Criterion is offering a very small selection of films from their collection... but it is a start. They seem to be beginning with 46 films, including such hallmarks of cinema as Ingmar...

Apple Retail Store managers are participating in "union awareness" training after a part-time San Francisco retail store employee attempted to start a union of Apple Store employees, according to CNET. This course is intended to provide managers with a practical understanding of how unions affect the workplace, how and why employees organize, and the legal do's and don'ts of dealing with...

In 1995, before Steve Jobs returned to Apple, he sat down with Bob Cringely for an hour-long interview during the making of the Triumph of the Nerds TV series. Roughly 10 minutes of the interview was used in the show, but the rest of the historic interview was lost during shipping. After Steve Jobs passed away in October, Triumph of the Nerds director Paul Sen decided to try and find a copy of ...

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As revealed in a new filing with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, Apple has awarded Eddy Cue an additional 100,000 shares of company stock in the form of restricted stock units. The stock units were issued on November 2nd and will vest in September 2014 (25,000 shares) and September 2016 (75,000 shares) if Cue remains employed by Apple at those milestone dates. At Apple's present...

Winamp by Nullsoft, now owned by AOL, was a major media player back in the MP3 sharing heyday -- and is still the preferred media player for a large number of Windows users. Last week, the Winamp team launched Winamp for Mac Sync Beta, the first Winamp application for the Mac. Winamp was rumored to be coming to Mac as far back as 2001, but the software was never released. The main focus...

Apple yesterday pushed out a pre-release version of Safari 5.1.2 to Mac developers. The update addresses several issues related to the viewing of PDFs located within frames on websites while also asking developers to test plug-in interaction and printing. From the seed notes:Inline PDF Support Safari 5.1.2 fixes issues where PDFs in frames were not displayed in the browser. Please test...

Batman: Arkham Asylum has arrived on the Mac, two years after it was released on consoles and the PC. Batman: Arkham Asylum exposes players to a unique, dark and atmospheric adventure that takes them to the depths of Arkham Asylum - Gotham's psychiatric hospital for the criminally insane. Gamers will move in the shadows, instigate fear amongst their enemies and confront The Joker and Gotham...

Back in June, Swedish retail news site Market.se reported that Apple was making plans to open its first retail stores in Sweden, with Stockholm understandably being the company's first target city. As noted by Allt om Mac [Google translation], Apple is now moving closer to opening its first Swedish stores with its registration of a new business by the name of "Apple Retail Sweden AB" to...

Last month, following the death of Steve Jobs, Computerworld published a transcript of a lengthy 1995 interview with Steve Jobs conducted as part of an oral history program for the Computerworld Information Technology Awards Foundation. The complete, unabridged video of that 75-minute interview has now been posted, offering an interesting look at Jobs before his return to Apple. In the...

Artist Rendition We've heard a couple of reports that Apple will finally unveiling their newly renovated 5th Avenue Apple NYC store on Friday, November 4th. Apple began work on the $6.6 million renovation back in June. Since then, the 5th Avenue Store has been surrounded by barriers and the store has remained open as the construction has continued. The redesign involves replacing the...

The New York Times publishes a touching eulogy written by Steve Jobs' sister Mona Simpson: None of us knows for certain how long we’ll be here. On Steve’s better days, even in the last year, he embarked upon projects and elicited promises from his friends at Apple to finish them. Some boat builders in the Netherlands have a gorgeous stainless steel hull ready to be covered with the finishing...