Mac software

Apple's iOS isn't the only thing to get an update this morning. Alongside iOS 6, Apple quietly pushed out 10.8.2, the second minor update to Mountain Lion since it was released in July.

Chief among the additions is integration with Facebook, a feature that was promised for a fall release when Mountain Lion first debuted earlier this year. Facebook users can share items directly from share sheets now, as well as in Notification Center, and sync up contacts from the popular social network.

The update also adds the Power Nap feature to late-2010 MacBook Air machines, … Read more

Apple's Software Update is a convenient and easy way to keep your Mac up-to-date with the latest security fixes and feature enhancements. To make the service user-friendly, it's been available as a simple graphic-based tool in the Apple menu, but in recent versions of OS X Apple has integrated this service with its Mac App Store. Though it's convenient for most people, if you do not wish to open the Mac App Store for managing updates, there's a way you can avoid it.

Unfortunately there is no known way to revert the Software Update service from … Read more

Long known for its DVD/media playback (PowerDVD) and disc authoring (Power2Go) tools, CyberLink also publishes a full suite of consumer-level photo- and video-editing software that includes powerful technology. In an exclusive release for Download.com, CyberLink's two flagship editing programs -- PhotoDirector for photography editing and management; PowerDirector for video editing and effects -- update to versions 4 and 11, respectively, including a new version of PhotoDirector for Mac. The company is also introducing two new video-production tools for audio -- CyberLink AudioDirector -- and color -- CyberLink ColorDirector, as well as a Director Suite that packages them … Read more

Fourandsix Technologies, a startup founded by a former Photoshop bigwig and a image-analysis guru, has released its first product, the FourMatch software to detect changes to an image.

The most obvious use for the $890 Photoshop plug-in: ensuring that digital photos used as legal evidence are authentic.

The company lists other possibilities, too, though, such as checking that nobody's fiddled with digital images of insurance claims or contest entries, or ensuring the legitimacy of photos that might be published as the truth.

Company executives have good street cred in the area: the software came from Chief Technology Officer Hany … Read more

Apple is apparently having trouble getting its iMessage across.

IMessage is Apple's proprietary instant messaging services for iOS and Mac OS. Users have outlined their issues in several Apple support forum discussions (here and here), where they complain about being unable to send or receive messages. The problems appear to affect users across the globe, suggesting that the problem is on Apple's end as opposed to that of a service provider.

Apple introduced iMessage as part of iOS 5 last October, offering users on the iPhone, iPod, and iPad a way to communicate with one another for free … Read more

Apparently 11 years was long enough.

Microsoft released Windows XP in 2001, and Adobe said today that the current CS6 version of Photoshop will be the last one to support the operating system.

"The Photoshop team would like to provide advanced notice that Photoshop CS6 (13.0) will be the last major version of Photoshop to support Windows XP," Adobe Product Manager Tom Hogarty said in a blog post.

The reason, he said, is that modern performance-sensitive software requires modern hardware graphics interfaces that Windows XP lacks, in particular a way to tap into the power of graphics … Read more

Apple's iCloud services are now fully operational again according to the iCloud status page, but some problems may linger for users.

For the past few days, a large number of iCloud users had been hit with an outage that prevented them from using their e-mail accounts. In some cases the problem resulted in delayed e-mail messages that would arrive hours after being sent, but in other cases no mail would get through at all.

When the problem happened Apple did not offer much information on what was causing the outage, and only mentioned in a terse status update on … Read more

When you select a song in your iTunes library, a small drop-down menu appears that gives you access to the song, its album, and the artist in Apple's iTunes music store. For some this may help them complete albums and find music, but for others the direct commercial links may not be welcome and they might wish to remove the store links from their library.

To remove the menu you just need to open the Terminal application and run the following command:

defaults write com.apple.iTunes hide-ping-dropdown -bool TRUE

While doing this will remove the menu and its … Read more

Following yesterday's release of iTunes 10.7 and updates to iMovie, a number of people have been unable to install the updates. Upon selecting Software Update from the Apple menu, the Mac App Store will launch and begin the update process, but will give a warning that an error has occurred. Sometimes the warning says, "A server with the specified hostname cannot be found," and at other times it's "The operation couldn't be completed (NSURLErrorDomain error -1100).

This error is likely from a misconfiguration on Apple's part in how it has hosted its … Read more