Amazon has just launched an official Amazon Mac Downloads Store where you can instantly buy and download a variety of Mac software and games directly from Amazon servers. The purchased Mac software is then stored on your Amazon account and you can then download as many copies for your own personal use as you want.

This is an interesting move since Amazon is obviously competing directly against Apple here. While Apple may offer more titles in all, the Amazon Mac Download Store is carrying some software products that the Apple App Store doesn’t, like Microsoft Office 2011 and Adobe Photoshop Elements, both sold as heavily discounted downloads from Amazon.

Free $5 Off Coupon Code for Any Mac Game & Software

To celebrate the launch the the Amazon Mac Downloads Store, Amazon is including a free $5 off coupon code that can be used on any Mac game or software until June 1, 2011. To make use of the $5 off coupon, enter the code SAVE5MAC in the “Gift Cards and Promotions” box when you go to check out.

You can check out Amazon’s Mac Download Store and redeem the coupon at purchase.

Free $5 off and more Mac apps to choose from? No complaints here!

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The popular tower defense game TowerMadness is free to download today for iPhone, as well as the high-def iPad version TowerMadness HD. I’ve had TowerDefense for iPhone for well over a year and I can confirm it’s one of the most fun tower defense games on the iOS platform, so the chance to download this game for free is great.

• TowerMadness for iPhone (App Store link) – Free, regularly $2.99
• TowerMadness HD for iPad (App Store link) – Free, regularly $7.99

Get it while it lasts, TowerDefense is expected to be a free download for today only. Even if you’re still waiting to get a new iPhone or iPad 2, you can download it for free now to reserve it on your account, because each additional download will be free from the iOS App Store too.
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Instead of disabling the screen shot shadow completely you can take a one-time screen capture minus the shadow by using either the Grab app or by using the command line screencapture utility.

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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. This is good because the plugin is sandboxed, but some users may wish to disable the Flash Player plugin within Chrome anyway.

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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, a Magic Trackpad, or a Magic Mouse.

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, and you can learn more options for right-clicking on Mac if interested. Nonetheless, many recent Windows to Mac switchers seem to prefer the literal right-click method, thus we’ll show how to enable that in this walkthrough.

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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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We’ve seen a few interesting and cheap ways to manage cables and keep MagSafe cables out of the way, but if those aren’t enough to organize your cable catastrophe, you can try out the Applecore.

The name has little reference to the Apple we know and love, it’s more a description of the way the product looks without any cables on it. Basically you just wrap your cables around the Applecore and clip the end, and your cables are less of a disaster.

They range from $2 to $5 and can be bought from Apple-cores.com

It’s a pretty simple idea but it sure beats some of the other half-arsed solutions out there. Found via MinimalMac.

Do you remember the goggle-free 3D graphics iPad 2 demo video? If you don’t, no worries the video is embedded below, but in short, a research team came up with a creative way to mimic 3D graphics on an iPad 2 and iPhone 4 display by utilizing the front facing camera to track the users face and then alter the images on screen to appear as if they’re 3D. Now that same research team has released the free i3D app, so you can see the 3D illusion effect yourself.

Download i3D for iPhone 4 and iPad 2 for free (iTunes App Store link)

i3D is clearly just experimental at this point and the app doesn’t do much beyond showing a few sample 3D screens, but from a conceptual standpoint you can see there is a lot of potential with this kind of 3D illusion technology for future apps and games. It’s harder to explain than it is to demonstrate, so watch the video and download the app yourself.

This is the apps official description:

i3D is an overview of Head-Coupled Perspective (HCP) on iOS devices. HCP uses the front camera of the device to track the face of the user in real time. This information tells the app how the user is looking at the display. The app updates the perspective of the 3D scene accordingly, giving the user the illusion that he looks at a small window.

i3D contains several 3D scenes that you can observe with HCP. It only relies on face tracking. It does not use the accelerometers or the gyroscopes.

The face tracking system does not detect and track the face in every lighting condition. Read the instructions in the app to get a good tracking.

Head-Coupled Perspective does not create a stereoscopic display! It provides a kind of monocular 3D display: the same picture is seen by both eyes. In the future, it might be combined with a stereoscopic display for a better 3D effect.

i3D has been developed by Jeremie Francone and Laurence Nigay at the Engineering Human-Computer Interaction (EHCI) Research Group of the Grenoble Informatics Laboratory (LIG), University Joseph Fourier (UJF).

If you’re confused, just watch the original video of the app in use on an iPad 2, it works just as this video shows:

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Have you ever noticed that there’s a shadow on every screen shot of a window you take in Mac OS X? If you don’t want those shadows to appear on your screen shots, you can disable the shadow effect by turning to defaults commands at the Terminal.

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Many people juggle multiple iTunes accounts for a variety of reasons, be it to access international app stores and their different content offerings, having another iTunes account without a credit card for their kids, or because you’re dodging country and timezone restrictions. We all know it’s a pain to manually log in and out of each account, which is why the iTunes Account Switcher menubar utility is so helpful.

iTunes Account Switcher is a free tool that sits in your menubar, organizes multiple iTunes logins by country, lets you add or create new accounts from within the app, and, most importantly, switch between your iTunes account simply just by selecting the new account from the menu.

You can get iTunes Account Switcher for free (direct download link)

Updated download links: Mirror 1 – Softpedia – Mirror 2 – MacPoint

This app is really helpful and addresses one of the core usability problems of iTunes; the inability to use multiple accounts without a hassle. There haven’t been many solutions to this until recently, when an Applescript showed up on that automated the account switching process, but a menubar item is even better.

This app comes courtesy of cocoa developer Joris Vervuurt, and thanks to MacStories for finding this app and the screenshot.

The always resourceful PatentlyApple has dug up an interesting patent that shows Apple is working on a platform independent word processor. While Pages isn’t specifically mentioned, it would be logical for the Pages app to be the focus of this patent considering it is Apple’s flagship word processor. Other than competing with web-based productivity offerings from Google and Microsoft, the patent shows some very practical uses of providing much needed cross-platform page layout consistency.

One of the most useful goals addressed in the patent is to remedy the font and character inconsistencies that appear when displaying documents on different platforms. Here’s how it would work, described by PatentlyApple:

Some embodiments presented in Apple’s patent application describe a system that typesets and renders a document in a platform-independent manner. During operation, the system first obtains the document, wherein the document includes text content and associated style information including one or more fonts. The system also generates platform-independent font metrics for the one or more fonts, wherein the platform-independent font metrics include information that could be used to determine the positions of individual characters in a rendering of the document. Next, the system uses the platform-independent font metrics to determine how the document is divided into line fragments and pages. Finally, the system uses the determined division while rendering the document, so that the division of the document into line fragments and pages is the same across different computing platforms.

Patently Apple suggests this could be a part of Apple’s Post-PC strategy, which seems very plausible. Nearly everyone has had the experience of a document looking vastly different across platforms, with font and formatting inconsistencies that can sometimes be severe enough for a document to be unusable without significant reformatting. Having the ability to create a document within Mac OS X or iOS and then sending it to a cloud word processor where the formatting would present exactly as intended on another platform would be extremely useful.

This is one of many newly discovered Apple patents that give an insight into the future of Apple products and computing in general.