This was a significant week for Apple: It settled a lawsuit, met with shareholders, and bought a company. Oh, and let’s not forget it’s only been a week since the company unveiled Mountain Lion to the masses, and we’ve spent much of that time pondering the forthcoming OS update. So grab a pleasing beverage of your choice and get comfy—we have a lot of stories for you to catch up on.
How do you like them Apples?
Apple acquired a company called Chomp for a reported $50 million. (I’ll bet the company could have paid a lot less for Nibble Delicately.)
The company also settled a class-action lawsuit, agreeing to give customers unhappy with their iPhone 4’s antenna performance either 15 buckaroos or a free iPhone case. Which is way, way better than taking Apple up on its offer of a free case two years ago when people first started complaining about the issue—presuming you are a lawyer involved with the case.
Apple held its annual shareholder meeting; CEO Tim Cook basically spent a couple hours onstage screaming “We’re rich!” at the top of his lungs.
Also this week, Apple detailed the company’s carbon footprint—and yet still no public disclosures about the company’s Einsteinium footprint. For shame!
Developers worried about meeting Apple’s deadline for sandboxing their Mac App Store apps scored another reprieve, this time until June 1st. My best guess is that Apple wanted the sandboxing rule to go into effect on the anniversary of the date when, in 1974, the Heimlich maneuver was first published in the Emergency Medicine journal.
Mountin’ Mountain excitement
We haven’t stopped thinking about Mountain Lion, the next version of OS X due out this summer. We hope it better supports multiple displays, we hope it adds Siri integration, and we’re also busy drooling over ten features you ought to get especially excited about.
Drool-covered keyboards are no fun to type on, so we also podcasted about features we’d like to see make it into OS X 10.8.
Meanwhile, back on the Mac
If you’re a Versions virgin, don’t miss our tutorial on Versions and Auto Save. But don’t depend on those technologies and forego establishing a good backup regimen: Yet another Mac-centric Trojan horse variant is galloping on the loose, and you don’t want to get saddled with it.
If you rip DVDs with HandBrake and you’ve upgraded to the latest version of VLC, you need to know about an important trick to make ripping work properly. If you live in the universe, you ought to watch our video tutorial on Universal Access.
Mac software we looked at this week included WriteRoom and Scrawl, two apps focused on different kinds of writing. I’ll never understand our staff’s obsession with the written word.
Clear i’s, full hearts, can’t lose
On the iOS side of the fence, we reported that the most purchased smartphone of 2011 was the iPhone 4. We also explored how third-parties are enabling iOS developers to integrate new revenue streams by tying in sales of physical goods to their apps. If you’d like to keep your Mac and iOS calendars in sync—whether via iCloud or Google—we can help with that.
And unsurprisingly, we looked at a bunch of apps this week:
- Percolator—which you should get Perco-now;
- OnLive Desktop Plus—which has some minuses;
- Machinarium—a robot-focused game that probably won’t rise up and overtake humanity;
- Grand Theft Auto 3—a game that remains fun for the whole dysfunctional family; and
- Clear—a todo list app that failed to remind me to write a witty description of itself.
We also put together a roundup of tax filing apps for iOS. Also don’t miss our Week in iOS Apps feature, either, because that would probably make contributor Joel Mathis cry. And no one wants to see that.
That’s it for this week’s edition of the Wrap. We’ll see you again next Saturday, unless you see us first.