Apple news blog

Toronto based Badia Software today announces the public beta release of Exportools Professional 3.0, its flagship software for high-end exporting and printing of multiple Adobe InDesign and QuarkXPress documents. Exportools Professional 3.0 has been entirely rewritten in Cocoa, and it’s the first add-on for InDesign and QuarkXPress built with 64-bit code, boosting overall performance and stability. Almost every aspect of Exportools Professional’s functionality has been refined and improved.

Valve Software today officially announced that it is bringing its Steam game distribution platform, as well as its own library of games, to Mac OS X next month.

Steam and Valve’s library of games including Left 4 Dead 2, Team …

Vienna based Eternal Storms Software today announced the immediate availability of flickery 1.8 for Mac OS X. flickery is a unique desktop flickr client which combines the flickr photo-community with the ease-of-use and elegance of Mac OS X. Easily upload photos and videos to your Flickr photostream, organize items in photosets and groups, browse Favorites, and more. flickery 1.8 adds Google Maps to the search functionality to bring more powerful searches to flickery users.

Pawn Software today released Elemental Dusk 1.2.2, their strategy card game for iPhone and iPod touch devices. Elemental Dusk is inpired by Triple Triad, a famous minigame of Final Fantasy VIII around which different communities were born on the web. Elemental Dusk offers simple rules, yet it can be very strategic and addictive in nature. It already has been covered by some online iPhone dedicated sites and received good reviews on the App Store.

Macgamestore.com today announces Murder, She Wrote on its web site. The game was developed by leading casual games developer and publisher, Legacy Interactive. Murder, She Wrote is an interactive seek and find who-dun-it mystery adventure with unique minigames in every scene. Play as the lovable murder novelist Jessica Fletcher and solve each of the five cases by carefully and methodically investigating murders using an innovative new style of hidden object and light adventure gameplay.

Miami-based GP Imports today introduces App Genie Lite 1.1, their new suite of applications and utilities for iPhone and iPod touch devices. Designed specifically to take advantage of the iPhone’s unique capabilities and touch interface, App Genie Lite allows its users to unlock up to 3 applications from a selection of more than 30. The application includes a Barcode Scanner, Facebook Tools, Currency Converter, GPS Locator, Sound Meter, Voice Compass, and others.

Indianapolis based Sunstorm Interactive Inc. today announces Real Trophy Hunting 1.0 for iPhone and iPod touch devices. iPhone and iPod touch users can now experience the thrill of hunting the most prized big game animals of North America. Real Trophy Hunting is an ultra-realistic hunting experience developed by the founders of the hunting game genre. Building on the knowledge of over 50+ value games and hunting simulations, Real Trophy Hunting takes big game hunting to a new level of realism.

TechCrunch discusses a picture that is being pieced together from reports from App Store developers suggesting that Apple is looking to crack down on “cookie cutter” iPhone applications that offer little…

Over the weekend, I plugged in my old-style 80GB iPod for the first time in, well, a long time — so long that the battery needed to be charged a bit before it would even sync. Once the sync started, things seemed to go well, but near the end of the photos section, iTunes displayed a message telling me there wasn’t enough room to copy all my photos.

This was a bit odd, because best as I could recall, my iPod had about 20GB of free space the last time I synched. And while it had been a while, there’s no way I took enough photos to fill 20GB — especially at the iPod’s resolution (I don’t sync full-sized copies).

I noticed that the Other (orange) section of the Capacity gauge in iTunes was huge — basically all the remaining space was used up by Other. Switching to the Finder, I quickly scanned through the various folders with the Inspector open (Command-Option-I), and they all looked normal in size … until I got to Photos » Thumbs. This one was over 20GB! G…

Most of us know that Quicktime X, included with Snow Leopard, can trim movie and audio files. However, this trim is less than precise, as you cannot specify an exact trim start and stop point. Worse yet, if you want to make 10 minute segments for YouTube, you have to write down the last trim end time, undo the previous trim after uploading, and hope the trim slider will let you select the same trim point to start your next clip. What a pain.

Enter AppleScript — trim is a scriptable function. Open your movie in Quicktime X, and open the AppleScript Editor in the Application » Utilities folder. In the AppleScript Editor enter this script:

tell application "QuickTime Player"
  activate
  trim document 1 from start_trim to end_trim
end tell

Replace start_trim and end_trim with the time, in seconds, at which you wish …