TidBITS

If you purchased a Mac on or after 11 June 2012 and it doesn’t come with Mountain Lion, you can get a free upgrade from Apple. But act soon, since the offer expires relatively quickly. Read the full article at TidBITS, the oldest continuously published technology publication on the Internet. To get a full-text RSS feed, help support our work and become a TidBITS member! Members also enjoy an ad-free version of our Web site, email delivery of individual articles, the ability to make long comments with live links, and discounts on Take Control orders and other Apple-related products.

With Mountain Lion, Apple removed the Web Sharing options from the Sharing preference pane, but left the underlying Apache software installed. You could buy Apple’s OS X Server to bring back Web serving capabilities, but if that’s overkill, you can instead control Mountain Lion’s Apache from the command line or use a free preference pane from developer Tyler Hall. Read the full article at TidBITS, the oldest continuously published technology publication on the Internet. To get a full-text RSS feed, help support our work and become a TidBITS member! Members also enjoy an ad-free version of our Web site, email delivery of individual articles, the ability to make long comments with live links, and discounts on Take Control orders and other Apple-related products.

Notable software releases this week include Fantastical 1.3.2, Firefox 14.0.1, Nisus Writer Pro 2.0.3 and Express 3.4.2, SuperDuper 2.7, Yojimbo 3.0.4, LaunchBar 5.3, Scrivener 2.3.1, MacBook Air SMC Updates 1.5 and 1.6, BusyCal 1.6.4, Aperture 3.3.2, iPhoto ’11 9.3.2, and iMovie ’11 9.0.7. Read the full article at TidBITS, the oldest continuously published technology publication on the Internet. To get a full-text RSS feed, help support our work and become a TidBITS member! Members also enjoy an ad-free version of our Web site, email delivery of individual articles, the ability to make long comments with live links, and discounts on Take Control orders and other Apple-related products.

The latest version of Safari offers some (but not enough) interface polishing and coordination with Mountain Lion features such as Notifications and the ubiquitous Share button, but it drops support for RSS feeds. When the most notable upgrade feature is a retooling of the address field, you suspect it doesn’t deserve its new version number. Read the full article at TidBITS, the oldest continuously published technology publication on the Internet. To get a full-text RSS feed, help support our work and become a TidBITS member! Members also enjoy an ad-free version of our Web site, email delivery of individual articles, the ability to make long comments with live links, and discounts on Take Control orders and other Apple-related products.

Apple updates Keynote, Numbers, and Pages to take advantage of Mountain Lion’s Documents in the Cloud and Dictation features, plus adds support for the new MacBook Pro with Retina Display. Read the full article at TidBITS, the oldest continuously published technology publication on the Internet. To get a full-text RSS feed, help support our work and become a TidBITS member! Members also enjoy an ad-free version of our Web site, email delivery of individual articles, the ability to make long comments with live links, and discounts on Take Control orders and other Apple-related products.

The crew that creates the Take Control ebook series has not been sitting idly by while Apple brushed the last tangles out of Mountain Lion’s fur; instead, we’ve been busy grooming three essential guides for taming Apple’s newly released feline. Read the full article at TidBITS, the oldest continuously published technology publication on the Internet. To get a full-text RSS feed, help support our work and become a TidBITS member! Members also enjoy an ad-free version of our Web site, email delivery of individual articles, the ability to make long comments with live links, and discounts on Take Control orders and other Apple-related products.

Mountain Lion changes the rules on AppleScript file formats in a subtle yet important way. It’s a potential trap for the unwary, even if they are not running Mountain Lion themselves. Read the full article at TidBITS, the oldest continuously published technology publication on the Internet. To get a full-text RSS feed, help support our work and become a TidBITS member! Members also enjoy an ad-free version of our Web site, email delivery of individual articles, the ability to make long comments with live links, and discounts on Take Control orders and other Apple-related products.

Apple is happy to tell you about the main features of OS X Mountain Lion, but you may not know about the details that TidBITS staff members have shared in this article of important (and fun!) Mountain Lion tips. Read the full article at TidBITS, the oldest continuously published technology publication on the Internet. To get a full-text RSS feed, help support our work and become a TidBITS member! Members also enjoy an ad-free version of our Web site, email delivery of individual articles, the ability to make long comments with live links, and discounts on Take Control orders and other Apple-related products.

Outstanding profitability is not quite outstanding enough as Apple doesn’t quite meet the rosiest of analyst expectations in its quarterly results. Still, $8.8 billion in profit on revenue of $35 billion is certainly acceptable, thanks to strong sales of iPads, iPhones, and Macs. Read the full article at TidBITS, the oldest continuously published technology publication on the Internet. To get a full-text RSS feed, help support our work and become a TidBITS member! Members also enjoy an ad-free version of our Web site, email delivery of individual articles, the ability to make long comments with live links, and discounts on Take Control orders and other Apple-related products.

Our always-chatty computers and mobile devices have an all-you-can-eat mentality that can be wildly inappropriate when we’re either in a low-bandwidth situation or when we’re trying to keep bandwidth usage in budget or under a cap. We detail strategies for restricting your bandwidth diet. Read the full article at TidBITS, the oldest continuously published technology publication on the Internet. To get a full-text RSS feed, help support our work and become a TidBITS member! Members also enjoy an ad-free version of our Web site, email delivery of individual articles, the ability to make long comments with live links, and discounts on Take Control orders and other Apple-related products.

We have a number of interesting ExtraBITS for you this week, including news of Tor Books going DRM-free, a sad farewell to Spell Catcher author Evan Michael Gross, the addition of a Cards pages to Trello, and word that Qantas Airways will be providing iPads for in-flight entertainment on some flights. Read the full article at TidBITS, the oldest continuously published technology publication on the Internet. To get a full-text RSS feed, help support our work and become a TidBITS member! Members also enjoy an ad-free version of our Web site, email delivery of individual articles, the ability to make long comments with live links, and discounts on Take Control orders and other Apple-related products.

Notable software releases this week include Quicksilver β69, GraphicConverter 8.2, Carbon Copy Cloner 3.5, ChronoSync 4.3.4 and ChronoAgent 1.3.4, SpamSieve 2.9.3, MacBook Air and MacBook Pro Update 1.0, Alfred 1.3, CloudPull 2.1.2, Mellel 3.0, and SOHO Organizer 9.2.8. Read the full article at TidBITS, the oldest continuously published technology publication on the Internet. To get a full-text RSS feed, help support our work and become a TidBITS member! Members also enjoy an ad-free version of our Web site, email delivery of individual articles, the ability to make long comments with live links, and discounts on Take Control orders and other Apple-related products.

The combination of services that Apple groups under the name iCloud are great when they work, but maddening when they flake out. Read the full article at TidBITS, the oldest continuously published technology publication on the Internet. To get a full-text RSS feed, help support our work and become a TidBITS member! Members also enjoy an ad-free version of our Web site, email delivery of individual articles, the ability to make long comments with live links, and discounts on Take Control orders and other Apple-related products.

Google has acquired Sparrow, the minimalist Mac and iPhone email client, presumably to bring the developers’ ideas and expertise to the Gmail team. Read the full article at TidBITS, the oldest continuously published technology publication on the Internet. To get a full-text RSS feed, help support our work and become a TidBITS member! Members also enjoy an ad-free version of our Web site, email delivery of individual articles, the ability to make long comments with live links, and discounts on Take Control orders and other Apple-related products.

After experiencing the speed offered by the new Retina MacBook Pro — but needing to return the review unit — Jeff Carlson decided to put a solid-state drive into his sluggish MacBook Pro. But because he couldn’t give up its existing storage, he tried something different: he replaced the optical drive with the SSD. Read the full article at TidBITS, the oldest continuously published technology publication on the Internet. To get a full-text RSS feed, help support our work and become a TidBITS member! Members also enjoy an ad-free version of our Web site, email delivery of individual articles, the ability to make long comments with live links, and discounts on Take Control orders and other Apple-related products.