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Essential Apple Podcast 165: Rampant speculation

This week would have been Steve Jobs’ 65th birthday, the product turned verb Photoshop passed 30, the StyleWriter is 29 and speculation about ARM Macs is running rife. Also the novelcoronavirus COVID-19 continues to wreak havoc. To talk about all this I am joined by Nick Riley for a lot of speculation as to what it all means!

GIVEAWAYS & OFFERS

  • Get Donny Yankellow’s 2FunDads iMessage stickers for FREE

Why not come and join the Slack community? You can now just click on this Slackroom Link to sign up and join in the chatter!

Slacker @MacJim has a family friendly Flickr group for listeners to share photos because the Darkroom channel in the Slack has become so popular – if you’re interested head over to to the Essential Apple Flickr and request an invitation.

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Essential Apple Podcast 102: It goes through a LOT of cheese!

This week I am joined once again by Mark. We do our best to avoid all the rumours and speculation about the upcoming (yet to be officially announced) Apple autumn event and exactly what hardware etc will be released to focus on “actual stories” but somehow we end up at Business Insider and Mark loses his cool over one of their stories…
Why not come and join the Slack community? You can now just click on this Slackroom Link to sign up and join in the chatter! We can now also be found on Spotify, Soundcloud and even YouTube.

Continue reading → Essential Apple Podcast 102: It goes through a LOT of cheese!

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Essential Apple Podcast 100: Alex France of FontBundles/DesignBundles

This week on the 100th Essential Apple: Doug Field returns to Apple, Siri Shortcuts beta introduces limited HomeKit integration, researchers developed a biodegradable paper battery, Mark makes an appearance and we have Alex France of the wonderful Font and Design Bundles to tell us all about their service and what inspires them to run such a community focussed online business. Plus to prove just how simple it is Donny actually signs up and opens a store to sell his artworks via DesignBundles.net during the show!
Why not come and join the Slack community? You can now just click on this Slackroom Link to sign up and join in the chatter!
We can now also be found on Spotify, Soundcloud and YouTube (Special thanks to Allister Jenks for helping me out on that one, wouldn’t have managed it without him)

Continue reading → Essential Apple Podcast 100: Alex France of FontBundles/DesignBundles

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Nuance Dragon Express, an attempt to bring Siri to the Mac?

It seems that the age of speech recognition has been set alight by Siri.  Vlingo might have been getting all the attention recently as an alternative but Dragon Apps have been around a lot longer but with reduced functionality.  Dragon Dictation for Mac is a favourite app on the Mac for me right now so my ears pricked up when I came across Dragon Express.

Dragon Express Header Nuance Dragon Express, an attempt to bring Siri to the Mac?

Not having a chance to play with the app just yet it’s certainly shaping up to be an almost Siri like experience for the mac.  Command’s such as

Continue reading → Nuance Dragon Express, an attempt to bring Siri to the Mac?

Onlive Service Full
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Online Game Service Currently Full. Struggling to cope at launch?

Just days after its launch it seems that the OnLive gaming service is showing signs of struggling to cope with demand.

Online Service Full Online Game Service Currently Full. Struggling to cope at launch?

We’ve been testing this service over the last few days and so far have been remarkably impressed with what is on offer even if our bandwidth allowance is being thrashed to it within an inch of its life.

If you have the bandwidth capability then it seems that Mac gaming with decent high resolution graphics is finally on the horizon. During our testing on a mid-2009 MacBook Pro our CPU usage barely went above 50% whilst playing an intensive game such as Tom Clancy’s splinter cell.

The issue of the service being unavailable could just be down to peak demand for the initial launch period so we’re going to keep testing this and report back shortly in the next coming weeks.

Feel free to post any comments below.