Prototypes is a new Mac app that lets anyone quickly create functional iOS application prototypes and share them with other people, no coding is required.

The prototypes can be created from any Photoshop, Illustrator, Fireworks, PSD, JPG, or any image file at all, just drag a few images into the app, define hotspots (touch locations), setup some transitions, and quickly preview or publish a prototype. These touch-responsive prototypes will run directly from Safari on an iPhone, iPod touch, or iPad, making it very easy to test a functional iOS interface.

You can buy Prototypes from the Mac App Store for $39.99 (App Store link)

How well do these published prototypes function? The developers provide a sample working prototype that has been exported from the app, here is how you can try it out yourself:
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Distracted by your menu bar? If you want a stylish iOS-like black menu bar in Mac OS X but don’t want to go all out with an iOS / Mac desktop, you should grab Nocturne, it’s free and adds some pizazz to your Mac desktop.

Nocturne actually serves several other purposes intended to make the Mac display more usable at night, but we’re going to skip those features and just use it to turn the menu bar black so it looks like iOS. This should take you about 2 minutes total, so here’s how to do it:

How to Turn the Menu Bar Black in Mac OS X

• Download Nocturne 2.0 from Google Code (it’s free and open source)
• Launch Nocturne, ignore “Switch to night” and everything else. From the apps preferences, disable every option except for “Invert menu bar” near the bottom of the preferences
• Optional if you use a very colorful background: Disable the “Translucent menu bar” in System Preferences > Desktop & Screensaver, this keeps the menu bar text white on black, and the menu bar black without any funky inverted coloration

You probably noticed by now that the black menu bar is achieved just by inverting the screen. Depending on what your background wallpaper is you may want to tweak some of the other settings to maintain a true black menu bar rather than just having an inverted version of whatever colors are shown through the transparency.

When it’s all said and done, this is what it looks like:

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If you’ve been looking for a case for your MacBook Air, the newly released BookBook for MacBook Air may stop your search. The BookBook is lightweight, made of leather, fits snuggly on both the 13″ and 11″ MacBook Air models, and also provides a very unique anti-theft deterrent by making your fancy laptop look like a beautiful but boring old novel.

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Not sure if you have unsaved changes when editing a file in Mac OS X? Just look at the window titlebars close button, if the red close button has a darker red dot inside of it then you have unsaved changes.

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Don’t want to wait for the full screen Terminal in Mac OS X Lion? Me neither, and we don’t have to thanks to iTerm2.

The latest build of iTerm2 features the ability to enter into a true full screen terminal mode. Just launch iTerm2 and hit Command+Return to enter into full screen. One of our readers pointed this out in the comments of the Lion Terminal post, so thanks to nlo for that tip.

Get iTerm2 now from Google Code, it’s a free download

I would recommend grabbing the latest nightly build, I’ve been using it nonstop now without incident and it seems very stable.

Full screen mode is made even better with the ability to set a system wide hot-key to activate the app, this lets you run in full screen but switch between any apps and back into iTerm2 with ease instantly from anywhere. It’s also visually appealing, outside of the TermKit project it is easily the most customizable and attractive command line app for Mac OS X. This is partially because the latest iTerm2 includes some of the exact same eye-candy features that also come in Lion’s Terminal.app, most notably the transparent background blur.

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Apple is going to release an anti-malware software update “in the coming days” according to a newly released Apple Knowledge Base article. The update will address the MacDefender phishing malware that we showed you how to get rid of recently.

The update will address all existing versions of MacDefender, which also has several variants called “MacProtector” and “MacSecurity”. here is the quote from Apple’s support page (emphasis mine):

In the coming days, Apple will deliver a Mac OS X software update that will automatically find and remove Mac Defender malware and its known variants. The update will also help protect users by providing an explicit warning if they download this malware.

The knowledge base article on Apple.com describes MacDefender as:

A recent phishing scam has targeted Mac users by redirecting them from legitimate websites to fake websites which tell them that their computer is infected with a virus. The user is then offered Mac Defender “anti-virus” software to solve the issue.

This “anti-virus” software is malware (i.e. malicious software). Its ultimate goal is to get the user’s credit card information which may be used for fraudulent purposes.

MacDefender has garnered a fair amount of publicity lately, creating an artificial scare that malware was somehow a problem on the Mac OS X platform (it’s not). While Apple was initially silent about the issue it looks like they are going to squash the problem directly, so maybe we can finally stop hearing about it.

Hat tip to MacStories for finding this.

If you use Google Chrome as a web browser you have probably noticed that the Adobe Flash plugin is contained within the app by default, even if you have uninstalled Flash on your Mac.

Disabling Flash in Google Chrome is easy, this should be the same on any platform:

• Open Chrome and enter “about:plugins” into the URL bar and hit return
• Find Flash in the plug-ins list and click on “Disable”

You don’t need to restart Chrome, Flash will be disabled from all future browsing sessions. Re-enabling the Flash plugin is obviously just a matter of going back to the about:plugins menu and choosing so.

A few alternatives to completely disabling or uninstalling Flash are to use a Flash Block plugin like ClickToFlash, to use an ad blocker plugin since most of the annoying Flash comes in the form of advertising.

This great tip came from FingerThingsIn via somewhere on Twitter.

The iOS App Store is not even three years old yet but Apple has already approved 500,000 apps in the USA’s App Store alone. That’s a whole lot of iOS apps for your iPhone and iPad. This is according to 148apps, who created a giant infographic to show off the accomplishment.

Some interesting stats about the App Store from the infographic include:

• Average number of apps per developer: 4.6
• Average price for paid apps: $3.64
• Total number of free apps: 147,966
• Total number of paid apps: 244,720
• Projected total number of app sales for 2011: 15,000,000,000 (that’s 15 billion)

This next part isn’t included in the infographic, but I think it’s worth mentioning here for comparative purposes. These are the major mobile app stores and their respective app counts, as you can see Apple dominates here too:

1. Apple iOS App Store: 500,000
2. Google Android App Store: 200,000
3. Nokia Ovi App Store: 54,000
4. RIM Blackberry App Store: 30,000
5. Microsoft Windows Phone Mobile Market: 18,000
6. Palm & HP App Store: 6,405

Impressive numbers, aren’t they?

You can get more details of the iOS App Store milestone achievement in the massive 600×4350 infographic, embedded below:

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If you or someone you know is coming to the Mac from the world of Windows and are accustomed to the concept of right-clicking, as in literally clicking on the right hand side of a trackpad or mouse, you’ll be relieved to find out this feature can be enabled in Mac OS X. This will work on any trackpad or touch mouse, including the MacBook, MacBook Pro, and MacBook Air

First, a reminder that a two fingered click functions as a right-click in Mac OS X. This is much faster and intuitive once you get the hang of it, but many recent Windows to Mac switchers seem to prefer the literal right-click method.

Enable a Literal Right-Click in Mac OS X

This is recommended to enable particularly for those new to the Mac platform:

• Open System Preferences
• Click on Trackpad
• Under the ‘One Finger’ section, select the checkbox next to “Secondary Click” and select “Bottom Right Corner”
• Adjust the standard Mac OS X secondary click behavior with a two fingered click as you see fit

I would suggest keeping things foolproof and having both options enabled.

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Terminal.app is getting a subtle facelift in Mac OS X Lion with a couple nice interface changes.

First up is the ability to adjust blur on opaque (transparent) terminal windows, the effect is done on the fly and anything behind the transparent terminal window gets blurred. The image above shows this with a blurred terminal window placed over the default Mt Fuji wallpaper. There are several of these theme choices available in the Terminal Inspector and appearance settings.

Second, is the ability to finally run Terminal in true full screen mode. This is actually the result of a system-wide Lion feature that lets you run any app as full screen, but the effect in Terminal.app is great for anyone who likes to work undistracted at the command line.
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