Tag Archives: Apple

Macbook Retina Apps – Retina Ready Apps for the Retina Macbook

If you are looking for Macbook Retina Apps, then go to this website: Retina Mac Apps.

This excellent resource lists all the apps that are Macbook Retina ready. It is constantly updated with new apps. I wrote in my previous post about the lack of update of Adobe Creative Suite for Macbook Retina. Now, as I found out on Retina Mac Apps, an update is available for Dreamweaver CS6, Photoshop CS6, Lightroom CS6 and Illustrator CS6. Still no update for PDF Reader? Read the solution for a compatible Macbook Retina PDF Reader on OS X Mountain Lion.

Macbook Pro Retina PDF Reader / Viewer

If you just want to find out about the appropriate Macbook Pro Retina PDF Reader, jump straight to the recommendation, or read on for the rant.

The Apple Macbook Pro Retina laptop is, in my opinion, the best laptop that developers or designers can lay their hands on. And it’s undoubtedly the best laptop for anyone to lay their eyes on. The Retina Macbook Pro offers crisp, crystal clear on-screen text. But no matter how good the screen, if the software support for such hi-resoultion display is not good enough then the retina display can be more of a problem. And although its been a few months since Apple released their Macbook Pro Retina laptops, some major software vendors have still not offered upgrades to their software to support the hi-DPI display of the Retina laptop.

Microsoft Office, Adobe Creative Suite and Mozilla Firefox are the major software that lacked Retina support. Microsoft released an updated version of Office for Mac recently to support Retina resolution. Mozilla is building Retina support in Firefox version 18 – it has been released as beta, whereas the final version is planned for a January release. Adobe pledged Retina support late August for its Creative Suite 6 – Photoshop and Lightroom in particular, but there has been no further word on it since then. For now I am using Pixelmator, which supports Retina display and is serving very well as a Photoshop alternative for general designing tasks.

Finally, there is Adobe PDF Reader – a major problem as the text of PDFs gets pixelated, which puts a lot of strain on eyes. It’s also something major because Adobe PDF Reader is not only used by developers and designers, but also by regular folks. The doubling of text/pixelation puts strain on the reader’s eyes and one is unable to continue to read for long.

Macbook Pro Retina PDF Reader

The best software for reading PDFs on a Macbook Pro Retina comes pre-installed with OS X Mountain Lion. It’s Preview. Yes, it appears as if it’s only for images, but it works great with PDFs too, providing a crystal clear reading experience. So we can get rid of Adobe PDF Reader as it serves no purpose on Macbook Retina anymore, especially with the lack of hiDPI support.

Here is more on Preview.

Highly Compelling Reasons for Switching to an Apple Mac

Interesting experience of why Rob Christensen, from Adobe AIR product development/management team, decided to switch to Apple iMac in his post Six reasons why he made the switch. His reasons are quite compelling and I agree fully with what he has to say against Microsoft Windows and in favor of Apple Mac. My most compelling reasons, from Rob’s post, for switching to an Apple Mac would be:

Apple. In the past year, I’ve purchased two iPod Shuffles: one for myself and one for my wife. When I thought I had lost my Shuffle recently (for the second time), I decided to upgrade to an iPod Nano. It’s an absolutely incredible piece of technology. … The allure of hooking up iPod hardware to a Mac is difficult to ignore. Also, Apple’s decision to extend the hardware capabilities of the iMac has really put it in direct competition with Dell’s flagship desktop products like their XPS line.

Apple, and Steve Jobs, is an inspiration. I had the first generation iPod Nano and it was awesome! I love Apple and what it is creating. Correction: Innovating!

Media Management. It’s truly shocking to me that Microsoft has not improved the user experience with Windows Media Player (WMP). Something about the design of WMP has always felt exceedingly video centric as opposed to library focused. Playing an .mp3 will force most of the screen to be taken over by an annoying visualization. … In addition, the lack of basic photo management in Windows has been the source of tremendous grief.

I have to agree with Rob’s WMP experience. Though I have been a Windows Media Player user since long (I was hooked to the ex-king Winamp before that, during its 1.x and 2.x versions reign, and Sonique too – ah what a super cool player that was!), but since my WMP music database has been wiped out (the database itself, and not the music files) after the Vista of my laptop’s pretty Windows was shot down by a vicious virus and I installed it anew, I am trying out a new media player: the open source Songbird. And it’s pretty good.

Most applications are now on the Mac. Nearly all of the applications I use are now available on the Mac such as Firefox, the Creative Suite (Dreamweaver, Flash, etc.), Office, Stellarium, AIM, Google Earth, etc. If the tools you use and depend on are portable, then it makes it even easier to make the switch.

That’s definitely a compelling reason. And on top of that, if a Windows application has not yet been ported to the Mac, one always has the option of Boot Camping to Windows. Tada! Nice one, Apple.

Now all these reasons make me crave for an Apple iMac/Macbook all over again! I hope I’ll be able to afford one soon.