In a blog post announcing Preview Pane, associate product manager Maciek Nowakowski writes that the new feature affords “a very familiar layout to those of you who have used Gmail on a tablet device”—a phrase which is linked specifically to Google’s blog post about Gmail on the iPad. The comparison is apt: Much like Gmail’s iPad-optimized edition, Preview Pane adds a large box to the traditional Gmail interface that shows the content of the currently selected message, without navigating away from your inbox.
Wild patents are attacking Google; film at 11! The Magic Mouse is doomed... or is it? And when there’s no news, just reprint old rumors with a slight tweak. Plus, who gave a news mogul an unmanned drone? The remainders for Thursday, August 4, 2011 are cleared for takeoff.
Apparently we’ve moved on to the hair-pulling and name-calling portion of the patent war. Google senior vice president and chief legal officer David Drummond has taken aim at the company’s major smartphone rivals in a recent blog post, in which he alleges that Microsoft and Apple are buying up patents to use against Android.
Justice may be blind, but to compensate, she never sleeps. And so while it may seem as though it were just the other day that we were assembling the latest news in the realm of law, it was in fact five days ago. Still, a lot’s happened in the intervening time—enough to warrant (get it?) the latest edition of our irregular legal feature, Under the Gavel.
Developer Rogue Sheep unveiled its new Instaview app on Monday, jumping into an increasingly crowded marketplace of apps that let users view Instagram photos on their Mac desktops.
Instaview joins several other recent offerings—including Mobelux's $5 Carousel and Benedikt Terhechte's $2 InstaDesk apps—in displaying photos from the Instagram iPhone app directly on your computer. (The free Instagram app offers its own social network—as well as sharing to Facebook, Twitter, Flickr, and more—but doesn’t have any way to easily view Instagram feeds on the iPad or Mac without the aid of third-party applications.)
As one pundit threatens to leave the Mac, another one arrives. But this one has the Macalope wondering if it isn’t time for a border fence. Then, picking on the Mac mini? Why don’t you pick on someone your own size!
As with every Mac in recent memory, Apple’s latest hardware releases, the MacBook Air (Mid 2011) and Mac mini (Mid 2011), include the current versions of Mac OS X and iLife—in this case, Lion (OS X 10.7) and iLife ’11. (Interestingly, the new models include only iPhoto, iMovie, and GarageBand. iWeb and iDVD are nowhere to be seen.) But these new models don’t include a DVD or thumb drive for reinstalling that software.
If you ever have a problem that requires you to reinstall the OS on one of these models, you use the new Lion Recovery feature to boot from a hidden recovery partition of your hard drive and download Lion on demand. Unlike older Macs running Lion, these new models also feature a special version of Lion Recovery, Lion Internet Recovery, that works even if your entire hard drive went south and you had to replace it—you essentially boot your Mac over the Internet, download Lion, and reinstall. When you’re back up and running, you can launch the Mac App Store and reinstall the iLife apps, which will be listed on the Purchases screen.
When you reinstall Lion via Lion Recovery, it seems Apple uses information about your Mac's hardware to verify that it has a license for Lion. But what about iLife? When you first set up one of the new Macs, you’re prompted for your Apple ID and password. That information is sent to the Mac App Store, which adds licenses for the iLife ’11 apps to your Mac App Store account.
Microsoft Office for Mac 2011 will be adding Lion-specific features in a forthcoming update, according to Office for Mac team member Pat Fox on the company’s Office for Mac blog. There’s no date currently set for this release, but the waiting time will be measured in “months, not days.”
The Microsoft Mac team is working to include support for Lion’s Auto Save and Versions features, as well as supporting full-screen mode. In the meantime, you can use Office’s own auto-save features as a safety net against losing your work.
