Hasta La Gadget!

Mac users who love using Evernote will be happy to hear that Evernote 5 is here. Although it’s currently in beta for now, the Evernote team is obviously excited and decided to announce it anyway. Last week, Evernote Maketing Head, Andrew Sinkov, teased the new Evernote 5 for Mac, which is a completely redesigned version of the popular note-taking app. Evernote 5 for Mac is expected to be faster, better, smarter, and more accessible for its users.

The first thing that users will immediately notice is its improved interface and new left panel that makes things more accessible  There’s also a new top section called shortcuts for the notebooks that you access frequently. For many Evernote users, this is a dream come true. At the bottom of the shortcuts section is a recent notes section for your recently accessed stuff. Users will also love the redesigned card view on the notes section and yes, all the notes are now compiled in a single view. More after the jump. (more…)

By Ubergizmo. Related articles: Evernote for Mac updated with Account Switching, LinkedIn sharing, and new keyboard shortcuts, Evernote for Mac updated with Retina support and Activity Stream,

Mac fans not keen on picking up a new iMac to get that best-of-all-worlds Fusion Drive might not have to consider a full-on system swap if they’re brave enough. Knowing how Apple’s approach unites an SSD and a spinning hard drive in a single logical volume, developer Patrick Stein has used command line code to do just that inside his Mac Pro and prove that it works. His series of experiments with organized data shows the effect on storage speeds and that the pseudo-Fusion should even work with less common ZFS formatting. The publicly available instructions could well be tempting to Mac fans who want speed and storage all at once, although we might personally take a pass — there’s more than a fair share of risk in using an unofficial hack to recreate a storage technique that Apple hasn’t even shipped.

Filed under: Storage, Apple

Mac Pro owner crafts an example Fusion Drive, shows the fearless how it’s done originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 01 Nov 2012 05:48:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Permalink MacRumors, TechCrunch  |  Patrick Stein (1), (2), (3)  | Email this | Comments

For those smatterings of users who own a Mac computer and a Windows mobile, Microsoft has released the newest version of what was previously called Windows Phone 7 Connector for Mac. Now just called “Windows Phone,” this version 3.0 app allows users to sync their Windows Phone smartphone with their OS X machine for easy data transfer. The app has received a pretty extensive overhaul and gained many new features.

The new Windows Phone app is simplified to be minimalistic and easy to use. Changes include support for Windows Phone 8, iPhoto 9.3.2 and Aperture 3.3.2, support for Retina display Macs, and for battery charge state for Windows Phone 8 smartphones. Users can now drag and drop files from their Apple computer onto the device, and vice versa.

Using Windows Phone, users can sync movies, music, and other data from iTunes to a Windows Phone device. When transferring media files from iTunes, only DRM-free files are supported, however. Photos and videos can be synced using iPhoto and Aperture library, and can be imported from the phone into both the aforementioned apps.

Overall, this new version brings with it a sleek, uncluttered interface, which you can see in the gallery below. The host of features make using a Windows phone in a Mac world pretty easy, while the drag and drop feature for files saves time and can’t get any easier. You can pick up Windows Phone 3.0 for OS X at the App Store.

Microsoft launches Windows Phone 3.0 for OS X is written by Brittany Hillen & originally posted on SlashGear.
© 2005 – 2012, SlashGear. All right reserved.

This week Microsoft’s own CEO Steve Ballmer stepped on stage at Build 2012 and let it be known that they’d sold 4 million Windows 8 upgrades in the three days it’d been on the market. Compared to what Apple has asserted with their install base for their own desktop operating system OS X Mountain Lion, this number might not seem quite so impressive – by percentage of installed base, that is. If you consider how many installs of Mac there were compared to how many people upgraded to Mountain Lion against the number of installs of Windows there were compared to how many upgrades there were to Windows 8, the difference is staggering.

According to Microsoft back in December of 2011, they had an install base of 1.25 billion Windows PCs – that includes all versions of Windows. It was also asserted back then, according to business insider, that 500 million Windows 7 licenses had been sold in the last two years (again, this was reported in December of 2011). Interestingly enough, Ballmer also let it be known that 670 million machines are now running Windows 7, that falling relatively in-line with the idea that Windows 7 adoption has been slowing down since Windows 8 was announced.

Apple on the other hand has slightly different numbers as far as OS X installs and upgrades to Mountain Lion, their newest system. Back at WWDC 2012, Apple let it be known that there were 66 million installations of Mac on the market.

Ballmer announced that 4 million Windows 8 upgrades had been sold in the three days since it’d been launched. In the same amount of time, Apple announced more than 3 million OS X Mountain Lion upgrades. If you take the total amount of machines with Windows installed on them and compare it to the upgrade numbers for Windows 8, you get about 1/3 of one percent of the total. If you take the total amount of machines with a Mac OS on them and compare it to the Mountain Lion upgrade numbers, you get 4.5% of the total.

The rate of adoption between these two ecosystems is drastically different – which do you consider more successful? A better question might be: do you consider the adoption rate to be more important, or the total number of machines that now work with one system or the other?

Windows 8 adoption percentage clobbered by OS X Mountain Lion is written by Chris Burns & originally posted on SlashGear.
© 2005 – 2012, SlashGear. All right reserved.

Apple’s Mac mini may be a masterpiece of origami, but that hasn’t stopped the teardown merchants from unleashing their screwdriver sets on the compact desktop. The tinkerers at iFixit have pinned down the new late-2012 model, announced earlier this week, and yanked out its silicon guts to see how flexible it might me. Despite the small size, however, the score is pretty good: 8 out of 10 for repairability.

The Mac mini gets credit for not using proprietary screws, unlike the pentalobes found on the Retina-class MacBook Pro, and there’s no glue holding down anything inside. iFixit also likes the fact that the RAM and hard-drive aren’t soldered in, which means they’re easily replaced by the user, and you can also add in a second drive (as Apple does by default for the server version of the mini).

Of course, there are always going to be some compromises with a small-form-factor chassis, and the Mac mini is no different. The fact that the CPU is soldered to the logic board and so can’t be replaced by the user is probably the biggest drawback, though iFixit also mentions the trickiness of actually unpacking and replacing all of the components involved.

The updated mini kicks off at $599 for the 2.5GHz dualcore Core i5 model with 4GB of RAM and 500GB of storage; it has Intel HD Graphics 4000 as standard. The server version, with a pair of 1TB drives and a quadcore Core i7 chip is $999.

Mac mini late-2012 teardown: Well packed but repair friendly is written by Chris Davies & originally posted on SlashGear.
© 2005 – 2012, SlashGear. All right reserved.