The Mac – or “Macintosh” if we’re going back to 1984 – is the first computer to effectively market a graphical computer to the masses, all delivered by Apple (or, at the time, Apple Computer).
The Mac has gone through several stages of evolution and iteration since 1984, including the MacBook Air, MacBook Pro, Mac mini, iMac, iMac Pro, Mac Pro, Performa, Power Mac (including the G4 Cube!), iBook, and more. It remains one of the most popular computers you’ll see in business, schools, and homes today.
BBedit 14.0.1 builds on a new, major release foundation that presents more than 100 new features, changes and improvements. Most of these are designed to enhance the productivity of web developers, desktop and mobile software developers, data scientists, and anyone producing or editing markdown documents. BBedit 14 introduced a notes system; the ability to integrate anaconda environments; new built-in support for syntax coloring and function navigation for source files written in r, go, rust, toml, arduino, pixar universal scene description (usd) and lisp-family languages; plus enables significantly enhanced code completion, error checking, interactive help and code navigation when using new support for microsoft’s language server protocol (lsp).
We have four more great Mac menu bar add-ons to follow up from last week’s list. They’ll all help do even more with your Mac, so read on to see our list.
Quitting all the open apps on your Mac involves a lot of Command-Q typing or building your own Automator action, or now just installing Quit All from Amico Apps. This cool app lets you quit every running app on your Mac from the menu bar with a mouse click, and you can view and quit hidden processes, too. You can also force quit frozen apps, or quit just the one or two apps you don’t need running. Quit All costs US$5 and is available for download at the Amico Apps website.
A macOS public beta for the private messaging app WhatsApp is available now with features not yet available in the regular public release, and there’s also confirmation of an iPad-native app in the iPhone app code.
There are security features that Apple tells us about on stage at keynotes, and then there are hidden improvements it doesn’t mention.
macOS has gradually made the UNIX security model irrelevant. For example, even the superuser is only allowed to access the private documents of a regular user with the user’s permission—permission that is given on a per-application basis, through that protector of users and bane of developers known as the Transparency, Consent & Control (TCC) framework.
Blackmagic Design announced on Friday that its DaVinci Resolve video editor is now up to three times faster on M1 Macs. It also gives customers up to 30% longer battery life.
DaVinci Resolve 17.3 also supports a new option on Mac computers with M1 for H.265 hardware encoding. Customers can choose to prioritize speed vs quality when rendering, further improving render times up to 65%. Plus, DaVinci Resolve will now decode AVC Intra files using the media engine built into the Apple M1 chip, making decoding and playback faster when working with these file formats.
Players of Civilization and Crusader Kings will find this new game called Humankind very similar. The tagline is: “Create your own civilization by combining 60 historical cultures from the Ancient to the Modern Age. Each culture brings its special gameplay layer, leading to near-endless outcomes. Face historical events, take impactful moral decisions, and make scientific breakthroughs. Discover the natural wonders of the world or build the remarkable creations of humankind.“ It’s available for macOS and Windows through Steam, Epic Games, Microsoft Store, and Stadia. Unfortunately, it doesn’t support the latest versions of macOS, at least through Steam.
Bryan Chaffin and Jeff Butts talk about the current state of Mac gaming, with Jeff focusing on improved Mac support at Steam. They also dive deeper into crypto credit cards where you can either spend your crypto and/or earn cryptocurrency rewards like Bitcoin on your purchases. And, Jeff has been deep into iOS 15 betas, and he talks about some of his favorite new features.
Built on groundbreaking AMD RDNA 2 architecture, AMD Infinity Cache and other advanced technologies, the new workstation graphics line-up includes the AMD Radeon™ PRO W6900X and AMD Radeon™ PRO W6800X GPUs. Mac Pro users also have the option of choosing the AMD Radeon PRO W6800X Duo graphics card, a dual-GPU configuration that leverages high-speed AMD Infinity Fabric interconnect technology to deliver outstanding levels of compute performance.
