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Apple's completely revamped Final Cut Pro X makes serious leaps and bounds past its predecessor in terms of usability and performance. The upgrade is a complete from-the-ground-up-rewrite that takes advantage of modern 64-bit multicore CPUs, and is a radical departure for the increasingly popular software suite.
In fact, it's changed so much that it may throw some professional users for a temporary loop; more on this later. But for the pro-sumer enthusiasts that make up the bulk of PCMag's readership—people moving up from iMovie or another consumer-level app, Final Cut Pro X is a huge leap forward in terms of usability and raw power. While its interface looks a lot more like iMovie's, with a free-form trackless "Magnetic Timeline" view, the program still packs vastly more editing power than the iLife video editor.
Read on for our thoughts!
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Apple releases Final Cut Pro X, now on Mac App Store
Posted by Andru Edwards Categories: Apple, Software,
Apple released Final Cut Pro X this morning, bringing a new redesign to the company's flagship video editing program. The app is now 64-bit and support multi-core processing, alongside a new editing timeline. taking design elements from iMovie, the new layout is supposed to allow both novices and seasoned video editors to work at much faster speeds. You can insert clips, move them around, and place everything just how you want, without worry of audio losing sync, for example. Final Cut Pro X also includes much improved audio and color handling, eliminating the need (and existence) of the Color and Soundtrack Pro apps. You can get Final Cut Pro X now for $299.99 in the Mac App Store. New versions of Motion 5 and Compressor 4 are also available at $49.99 each.
Gallery: Apple releases Final Cut Pro X, now on Mac App Store
OS X Lion Developer Preview 4 update now available
Posted by Andru Edwards Categories: Apple, PC / Laptop, Software,
Hot on the heels of the release of OS X Lion Developer Preview 4 at WWDC 2011, Apple has already released the next update to the Lion build. No details yet on the fixes/additions/improvements in this one, but if you are running the latest OS X 10.7 Preview, you can find this update waiting for you in Software Update. Go ahead and run it, and if you find anything interesting, do let us know, mmkay?
Gallery: OS X Lion Developer Preview 4 update now available
Tip: Use Dropbox to replace discontinued iDisk
Posted by Andru Edwards Categories: Apple, Internet, PC / Laptop, Software,
We've been hearing from quite a few disgruntled MobileMe subscribers who are wondering what the heck they're supposed to do now that Apple will seemingly be discontinuing the iDisk service with the launch of iCloud. As awesome as iCloud is, we do agree that iDisk is definitely a nice feature, and it's a shame to see it go away. However, Dropbox is a great alternative, and we've actually found that it often works better than iDisk does. You can sign up for free and you'll get 2 GB of space right off the bat. If you want more, you can upgrade...but it certainly doesn't hurt to try it out. Dropbox integrates right into your Finder, similar to iDisk, and gives you updates on syncing across all your devices, plus you can access your files from through the Dropbox mobile apps as well.
Read More 
| Dropbox
Gallery: Tip: Use Dropbox to replace discontinued iDisk
OS X Lion will allow you to boot right into Safari
Posted by Andru Edwards Categories: Apple, Internet, PC / Laptop, Software,
Borrowing a tiny page from Google's Chrome OS, Apple has snuck a feature into its upcoming OS X Lion release that allows users to reboot their systems into Safari.
Why would you bother doing that? In a word, security. When you elect to restart your system into Safari, you're effectively placing the Web browser into a sandbox. When it boots, your system will give any users with physical access to your machine the ability to surf the Web. But that's it. Users won't be able to access the system's files or applications.
And thanks to Lion's new auto-save and application restoration capabilities, users that slap their systems in Safari-only mode will be able to restore back to their full desktop exactly as they left it. Since Safari mode runs off of a system's recovery partition, you'll still be able to access the Web and research new methods for fixing your system should your primary partition suffer some catastrophic upset.
The comparison to Chrome OS stems from the fact that Google's operating system runs entirely Web-based: The browser is the primary method for interacting with the system. There's no underlying desktop layer to speak of.
Click to continue reading OS X Lion will allow you to boot right into Safari
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Jailbreak iOS 5 with Redsn0w 0.9.8b1
Posted by Andru Edwards Categories: Apple, Mods / Hacks, Software,
For anyone who decided to give up their jailbroken version of iOS in order to upgrade to the iOS 5 beta, you're about to get the best of both worlds again. Using Redsn0w 0.9.8b1 on the Mac, you can perform a tethered jailbreak that let's you bring Cydia and all the jailbreak apps into the iOS 5 fold. Of course, being a tethered solution, this means you'll need to plug in your device if you need it to be rebooted, which means we're personally gonna wait until the untethered option is available.
Read More | Dev Team
Gallery: Jailbreak iOS 5 with Redsn0w 0.9.8b1
Watch WWDC 2011 keynote, featuring Lion, iOS 5, and iCloud, right now
Posted by Andru Edwards Categories: Apple, Corporate News, Software, Videos,
Hey, we know you wanna get a look at all the goodness announced this morning at the WWDC 2011 keynote, right? I mean, OS X Lion, iOS 5, and iCloud are Apple's new triumverate of dominance, and it would be nice to see it all unfold in front of your eyes. Just hit the link below, and you can stream the entire thing from the cloud on pretty much any device.
Read More | WWDC 2011 Keynote video
Gallery: Watch WWDC 2011 keynote, featuring Lion, iOS 5, and iCloud, right now
Download iOS 5 beta 9A5220p now
Posted by Andru Edwards Categories: Apple, Smartphones, Handhelds, Software,
Apple has been busy updating their Dev Center with all of the hotness they talked about today during the WWDC 2011 keynote. They just added in all the iOS 5 beta versions for the various iPhone, iPad, iPod touch, and Apple TV devices that will support it, and if you're a Mac developer, don't forget to also pick up the latest Lion Developer Preview 4.
Gallery: Download iOS 5 beta 9A5220p now
OS X Lion Developer Preview 4 now available
Posted by Andru Edwards Categories: Apple, Corporate News, PC / Laptop, Software,
For all you peeps out there with Mac Developer accounts, you'll wanna grab the latest OS X Lion Developer Preview 4 build that Apple just released. This morning at its WWDC 2011 keynote, the company re-introduced us to many of the OS X 10.7 Lion features that we were already familiar with, but this time things have a lot more fit and finish on them. Lion will launch next month at $29.
Gallery: OS X Lion Developer Preview 4 now available
Notification Center gets rid of pop-up messages for good in iOS 5
Posted by Andru Edwards Categories: Apple, Smartphones, Corporate News, Handhelds, Software,
Notifications are about to get a much-needed facelift in iOS 5. We've complained many times about how, with the growth of apps using push notifications, unlimited text messaging packages, and local notifications, the pop-ups were simply getting out of control. With iOS 5, they're gone. Instead, as announced this morning during the Apple WWDC 2011 keynote, they're replaced by a simply notification at the top of the screen that doesn't interrupt you in the middle of whatever you are doing. You can also swipe down from the top of the screen to get to a list of all your recent notifications in one spot (they call this Notification Center.) Finally, you can also choose to have your recent notifications displayed right on your lock screen. Swipe an app icon to the right, and you are opened right into that app. This definitely takes a bunch of cues from MobileNotifier, a jailbreak-only notification app (that we use and love,) and improves upon it in many ways. In fact, Apple recently hired the developer of MobileNotifier, so this all makes perfect sense. iOS 5 launches this fall.
