MacRumors' Mac Blog: Mac Apps, News and Rumors

Last month, Apple introduced a new hardbound photo book called "Designed by Apple in California," chronicling 20 years of Apple product designs. A video starring Jony Ive accompanied the book on Apple's website, and Apple has now shared that video on YouTube. In the video, Apple design chief Jony Ive talks about Apple's design team, the design studio, and Apple's work on prototyping products...

Apple today released a new iTunes 12.5.4 update, introducing support for the new TV app that was introduced in iOS 10.2 and tvOS 10.1 earlier this week. iTunes 12.5.4 introduces support for the new TV app, plus it adds Touch Bar support for the new MacBook Pro with Touch Bar. In iTunes, the Touch Bar can be used as a scrubber to quickly fast forward and rewind through songs, movies, TV shows,...

Adobe has released an updated version of Photoshop CC 2017 for Mac with support for the Touch Bar on the new MacBook Pro, providing users with access to controls based on three categories: Layer Properties, Brushes, and Favorites. Photoshop's implementation includes a History Scrubber to jump to any recent state of a document created during the current session. Each time a user applies a...

A new ranking by Bloomberg today has listed "The World's Best-Value CEOs" in order of how well their yearly salaries align with their performance at each company. In total, 100 CEOs of companies from around the world -- including Apple, Alphabet, Verizon, and China Mobile -- were placed in the ranking to determine which organizations "are getting the best value from their CEO." According to...

Google is reported to have shelved plans to develop its own self-driving vehicle in favor of nurturing partnerships with existing car makers to continue its work in the automotive space. According to The Information, the company's autonomous car unit, known internally as Chauffeur, is working with established car companies to develop vehicles that will include self-driving features, while...

Opera has added a built-in currency converter to its free web browser to make online international purchases a simpler experience for users (via TechCrunch). The new feature appears in the browser's Preferences under User Interface options, and can be enabled to automatically show conversions in the foreign currency of choice whenever the user highlights a price on a page. Conversions are...

Since the MacBook Pro with Touch Bar was released, developers have been finding increasingly clever, if impractical, things to do with the tiny LCD screen built into the MacBook Pro's keyboard. It's been turned into a piano and used to run Doom, and now two new games have been shown off on the Touch Bar -- Pac-Man and Lemmings. Pac-Bar, a version of Namco's popular Pac-Man game, was...

Apple has held talks with SoftBank about investing up to $1 billion in the Japanese telecommunication giant's global technology fund, according to The Wall Street Journal. A deal has not been finalized, while the current status of the talks could not be determined, according to the report. President-elect Donald Trump and Softbank CEO Masayoshi Son (Image: LA Times) The so-called "SoftBank...

Apple is one of a number of retailers looking at opening a store at Scottsdale Fashion Square, in a 100,000-square-foot wing formerly occupied by Barney's department store, according to the Phoenix Business Journal. Former Barney's store at Scottsdale Fashion Square (Photo: Phoenix New Times) Barney's department store closed its Fashion Square store earlier this year, providing Apple with an...

Amazon Prime Video's HTML5 video player now supports Safari on Mac, as spotted by Reddit user netmute over the weekend. Amazon Prime Video previously required downloading the Microsoft Silverlight plugin for playback in Safari, or switching to an alternative browser such as Chrome or Firefox, which already supported the HTML5 video player. Some users on Reddit reported that, while HTML5...

Most MacBook Pro apps that have implemented support for the new Touch Bar have focused on putting settings, editing tools, and other utilitarian features right at a user's fingertips, but a new app from developer Graham Parks aims to have a little more fun with it. The "Touch Bar Piano" app is designed to turn the Touch Bar on the MacBook Pro into a little tiny touch-based piano that can be...

Throughout the holiday season, B&H Photo is offering discounts on a range of Apple products, including Macs, iPads, and the Apple Watch. B&H Photo is discounting 2015 and 2016 MacBook Pro models by up to $200. B&H isn't offering discounts on the new Touch Bar models, but there are discounts on upgraded non-Touch Bar models. 2016: - 13-inch 2.0GHz/16GB RAM/256GB SSD (Space Gray) -...

Wall Street brokerage firm Drexel Hamilton today informed its clients it continues to believe Apple is "one of the most underappreciated stocks in the world," according to a research note seen by MacRumors. Apple analyst Brian White retained his "buy" rating for AAPL and $185 price target. Apple shares are currently trading at around $114, their highest level since late October, after rising...

Apple recently struck a deal with Xinjiang Goldwind Science & Technology, known as the world's largest wind turbine maker, which will bring clean energy into the production processes and manufacturing plants of Apple's partner facilities in China (via South China Morning Post). Specifically, Goldwind's wholly-owned subsidiary Beijing Tianrun New Energy Investment will transfer a 30 percent...

Apple today released a new update for Safari Technology Preview, the experimental browser Apple first introduced in March of 2016. Apple designed the Safari Technology Preview to test features that may be introduced into future release versions of Safari. Safari Technology Preview release 19 includes bug fixes and updates for HTML Form Validation, Pointer Lock API, Input Events, URL Parser,...

German developers The Soulmen today released a new version of popular writing app Ulysses, bringing Touch Bar support, Tabs in macOS Sierra, and a host of other new features and performance improvements. From Wednesday, users launching version 2.7 of the award-winning app on Touch Bar equipped MacBook Pros will see new contextual functions for Ulysses in the OLED strip, bringing the ability to ...

Setapp, a subscription app service from MacPaw, is entering a beta testing phase today to get ready for an upcoming public launch. Setapp plans to make more than 48 popular Mac apps available to Mac users for a flat monthly fee, with plans to add new apps as the service grows. Setapp will cost $9.99 per month, giving users access to Mac apps like RapidWeaver, Ulysses, iStat Menus, Blogo,...

Apple has updated the iCloud beta website with a new Photos section that includes improved navigation tools similar to the native Photos app on macOS Sierra. As discovered by MacMagazine [Google Translate], the Photos section in the beta site now includes a sidebar for navigation, which displays all of a user's albums so it's easier to jump between photo collections. In the current iteration ...