Hasta La Gadget!

Seemingly anyone who’s used an iPhone (and often the iPad) knows Tweetbot — it’s often the go-to Twitter app for those who prefer not to go the official route. It’s to those users’ delight, then, that Tapbots just posted a free alpha version of Tweetbot for Mac. As you’d anticipate, it’s an attempt to bring much of the app’s power user mojo to the desktop world: you can check just retweets of your content, mute overly chatty people or hashtags, and otherwise get more control than just watching your stream drift by. It’s even (mostly) Retina-ready for that new MacBook Pro. Alpha does mean that there will be a fair amount of things missing; it won’t tap into iCloud or Mountain Lion’s Notification Center until it’s official, for example. But if you’re willing to deal with that and a few potential bugs, it may be time to brush other apps aside — just note that you’ll need Mountain Lion or newer when the app is ready to face the Mac App Store, even though it works with Lion today.

We’ve had a quick spin with the app, and it largely does what it says on the tin: it’s Tweetbot, on the Mac. The primary differences are changes that make sense when a mouse pointer and a larger screen area are available. You can reply, retweet, or view whole conversations from buttons that appear as you hover, rather than using the myriad taps and swipes of the iOS apps. It’s a wonderfully minimalist app, if that’s your thing, and you can open multiple windows (currently through a keyboard shortcut) to get some of that TweetDeck-style power user layout. Our main gripe? Tweetbot on the Mac always updates in a live stream, and there’s no option for intervals; if you follow a lot of people, there’s a chance you might miss something. Still, for an alpha, it’s a decidedly polished and useful effort that doesn’t leave us wanting like a few clients, including Twitter’s own.

Filed under: Internet, Software

Tweetbot for Mac arrives as free alpha, we give a quick hands-on originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 11 Jul 2012 13:33:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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With Mountain Lion reaching gold master status, it means Apple is nearly ready to ship OS X Mountain Lion to customers like you. But in order to use Mountain Lion, you have to have a certain type of Mac. Apple is cutting off older Macs from using Mountain Lion by making them ineligible for the upgrade. More »

This afternoon several benchmarks have appeared in the greater archives of Geekbench (a system we also use for computer reviews) which show a brand new Apple MacBook Pro with 13-inch Retina display. This is different from the current model 15-inch MacBook Pro with Retina display we’ve already reviewed in that, one, of course it has a different size display, and two, that it has a significantly lower score in Geekbench than we got – a total of 7806 compared to our 15-incher’s 12970. Of course it’s all relative, and the important part is the fact that this device may well exist.

This device is being displayed at MacBookPro10,2 in the benchmark. The new non-Retina 13-inch MacBook Pro (also released in the last few weeks) goes by MacBookPro9,2 while the 15-inch non-Retina model goes by MacBookPro9,1. The Retina model with a 15-inch screen is called MacBookPro10,1 – making this device, of course, a 13-inch Retina MacBook Pro.

This device appears to be running a 3rd Generation Intel Core i7 processor at 2.90 GHz and is working with 4GB of RAM. That’s a bit strange. The 2.9 GHz Core i7 processor should by all means be paired up with no less than 8GB of RAM, and certainly is on all other Macs on the market today – this is why the score is so low in Geekbench, too. Two possibilities exist (or more, of course), one being that this simply isn’t a real device, that it’s faked. The second is that this will be a low-cost model with a strange new configuration we’ve not yet seen.

Stay tuned for more info as this next model Retina MacBook Pro gets nearer and nearer reality – we’ll see if it ever reaches the public!

[via Mac Rumors]

Retina MacBook Pro 13-inch appears in Geekbench is written by Chris Burns & originally posted on SlashGear.
© 2005 – 2012, SlashGear. All right reserved.

Microsoft is still determined to explore every nook and cranny of Windows 8 on its way to the newly official October launch, and now it’s swinging its attention towards File History, its revamped approach to preserving our data. The new component supplements Windows Backup, which Microsoft admits is “not a very popular” app, and is more than a little transparent in bringing OS X’s set-it-and-forget-it Time Machine strategy to the Windows crowd. Not that we’re complaining: the same basic philosophy of getting an automatic, version-aware backup of all our personal files is convenient on any platform, especially when we can get a temporary internal safeguard while we’re on vacation. The differences in platforms have equal rewards and drawbacks, however. File History provides more control over backups than its Apple counterpart, including frequency (finally!) and backup age, but it can’t be used to backup whole apps like with a Time Machine drive. As always with these in-depth Windows 8 explorations, there’s much more to see at the source, so click on through if you’ve ever been worried about deleting a file by accident.

Filed under: Storage, Software

Microsoft details Windows 8 File History, takes us through a Time Machine originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 10 Jul 2012 13:29:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Last month at WWDC, Apple promised that consumers would be able to get their grubby paws on Mountain Lion come July. It looks like the latest version of OS X is one step closer to being fully-baked, with seeds of the Gold Master hitting the company’s developer download site today. The operating system upgrade will run you $20 when it’s ready for us non-developers. In the meantime, here’s a hands-on with the beta version of the OS.

Apple Mountain Lion Gold Master is up for the download originally appeared on Engadget on Mon, 09 Jul 2012 18:22:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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