Apple’s done a deft job mitigating the disadvantages of true multitasking with iOS 4 by giving devs access to a few intelligently chosen APIs (like background audio) and universal state saving. That’ll be good enough for most people and most apps without causing a huge drain on battery life or processing power, but unfortunately,

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Instapaper Creator Proposes Elegant Solution for Background App Updating

It’s time for our weekly digest of tiny iPhone reviews, courtesy of iPhoneTiny.com, with some extra commentary exclusive to Cult of Mac. This time, we review 10 Pin Shuffle Lite, Air Video, Air Video Free, Cliffed, Dubble, Escape Board (iPad), Giana Sisters, Instapaper Pro, Iron Horse, Racecar (iPad), Sky Force, and Sky Force Reloaded. APPS OF

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iPhone and iPad Apps Weekly Digest: The Magic of Instapaper Pro and Air Video, and More Besides…

Section: iPhone / iPod touch / iPad , iPad , iPhone , iPod touch , iDevice Apps , Mac Software Macintosh and iPhone/iPod/iPad product updates and announcements for May 11, 2010: Macintosh iPod Macintosh publicspace.net has announced Vitamin-R 1.07 , an update to its productivity tool for creative professionals. Vitamin-R is a collection of tools and techniques designed to overcome the biggest productivity challenges facing today’s new caste of creative professionals: managing attention and maintaining motivation. This release delivers an integration with OmniGroup’s popular OmniFocus to-do list manager. Final Cut Pro Templates has announced the launch of Drop Zones Vol 2 . This new pack of Master Templates offers 48 new options for introducing and removing video clips with 3D animation. Video editors can use the Templates within Final Cut Pro to create transitions, animate logos and build slide-shows. Drop Zones Vol 2 is available in a 1080p resolution at 30fps, 25fps, and 24fps. It also comes in NTSC DV and PAL DV options. Sorenson Media has announced the launch of the company’s Sorenson 360 v2 online video platform (OVP) at the Streaming Media East 2010 conference. Coming to market exactly one year after the platform’s initial launch, Sorenson 360 v2 has been created specifically to address the needs of the enterprise online video marketplace and to compete aggressively in the space by offering customers a rich differentiated set of powerful features and the highest-quality video in the marketplace. Boxee has announced a partnership with Vindicia to drive the back-end of their payments platform. Content providers will be able to begin sell content on Boxee in late July/August. The Support Group has announced their online resource for everything FileMaker—news, discussions, downloads, just for fun, tips & tricks, and videos—is now open for questions. Get ( Answers ) is a new feature added to FileMaker: Explore , The Support Group’s popular free blog, providing a round table for the entire FileMaker community, from beginners to advanced developers at every level. User questions, comments, and suggested discussion topics are all encouraged

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Mac, iPhone, iPod and iPad product news – May 11, 2010

Besides just being a fun word to say, a bookmarklet is a snippet of JavaScript that you can store as a bookmark, just like a regular URL. Drag one to your browser’s bookmarks bar, and it’ll appear just like a bookmark, but when you click it, it’ll perform some kind of action on the page you’re viewing, instead of taking you to a new page. They’re fun, they’re free, and if you know some JavaScript, you can even program your own. Until then, we’ll get you started with some super-useful bookmarklets that’ll save you time and add some magic to your web surfing. And they’re all right here — to use one, just drag its bold link right to your bookmarks toolbar. We’ll also list where it lives on the Internet, for your reference.   PRO TIP #1: Shorten the names in your bookmarks bar to save space, and fit more bookmarklets. A bookmarklet called “Share on Facebook,” for example, can be shortened to ShareFB.   PRO TIP #2: To save even more space, right-click your bookmarks bar and select New Folder. Park your bookmarklets in that folder (using your browser’s Organize Bookmarks tool), and the list will drop down when you click the folder.   1. Share on Facebook When you find a thought-provoking article, amazing video, or hilarious photo of a cat, click the Share on Facebook bookmarklet for a pop-up window that lets you post a link to your Facebook profile, optionally tossing in your own two cents too. Use it judiciously—a handful of truly excellent links per week will make your friends think you’re King of the Internet. Where to find it: www.facebook.com/share_options.php Others like it: Flickr ( retro.xhtmled.com/miscellaneous/bookmarklets/ ) Twit This ( www.micropersuasion.com/2007/10/essential-bookm.html ) Delicious ( delicious.com/help/bookmarklets ) The Share on Facebook bookmarklet lets you post a link to your profile, or send it as a message.

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Uber-Handy Bookmarkets List!

Quix lets you create and manage bookmarklets for doing all sorts of cool things from within the browser. Want to find text within the current page, send the current page to services like Pinboard or Tumblr, search the current domain with Google, load Firebug lite to peek at a sites markup, shorten an URL with Bitly, or do anything else you can imagine? Quix is the answer. I first heard about Quix a few months back when Merlin Mann was talking about some clever stuff he was doing with it. I remember having a look, but at the time it didn’t make much sense to me. Partly because when I’m on my Mac I already have established systems for quickly activating the type of functions Quix would be useful for. Add to that the fact that my main use of mobile Safari on the iPhone was pretty much limited to sending pages to Instapaper for later use and the whole notion of Quix left me unimpressed. Now that I’ve got the iPad though, it’s making a lot more sense. At the moment it’s more iPhone than it is Mac, but that won’t stop folks from trying to push it towards the more fully functional Mac side of things. Quix is a good step in that direction, giving you access to the same type of in-browser functionality that you’re used to having on your desktop. More on iPad Apple Delays International iPad Release Date by One Month Mac Love Numbers on the iPad: Doesn’t Add Up Mac Love Evernote Revisited: Perfect DIY Companion Mac Love In Depth Look: Pages on the iPad Mac Love Quix works through the use of a “meta bookmarklet” which when activated launches a command prompt allowing you to initiate any other commands stored in the quix.txt file. The easiest way to get started is to just add the bookmarklet to the Safari Bookmarks bar on your Mac and then sync it to your iPad. Tweak the settings for mobile Safari to display the bookmarks bar, and now Quix will always just be a tap away

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Pimp Your iPad Safari With Quix

Well, when next we meet for our next round of In Case You Missed It, things will be different. It Will Have Happened. At least one of you, maybe more, just might be reading next week’s column on the fabled iPad. Now, we’re not saying that this is the very first place that you should check out on Mobile Safari once you get your iPad in your hot little hands. We’re just saying that this is the absolute very first place you should check out. And now, the end of an era, this week’s best pre-iPad viewed Mac|Life columns. Features: – Zinio on Maximizing Magazine Reading on iPad – Now while not every publisher is overjoyed and racing to prep content for the iPad, most publishers haven’t made smart decisions lately. Not so Zinio, who has a history of making the most of digital editions. While he was a little coy, wanting to leave some sizzle for their planned April launch, Zinio president and CEO Rich Maggiotto, did dish a little with us about where their head is at the sort of thinking that went into their upcoming iPad product launch. – Agile Web Solutions Talks About 1Password for the iPad – David Chartier, chief media producer at Agile Web Solutions, was entirely at the opposite end of the spectrum from Maggiotto. Not only did he want to talk plenty about the award-winner’s upcoming iPad app, Agile’s been posting mockups of their new redesign since mid-February

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In Case You Missed It: Mar. 15 – Mar. 27

“Read Later – ⌘4”. I live my life by it. I find an interesting article but have no time to read it – ⌘4. A crazy-long message in Gmail that’s just perfect for, um, ‘bathroom reading’ – ⌘4. Pretty much anything that demands attention but can wait until I’m curled up in bed at the end of the day? ⌘4. What’s all this ⌘4 stuff about? Why, that’s my browser shortcut to  Instapaper by Marco Arment. Instapaper strips the text out of almost any browser page and stores it for later reading; for me, that’s usually via the Instapaper Pro app on my iPhone. And now Arment brings us Instapaper for the iPad. I’ve never been more excited! On the Instapaper blog yesterday , Arment wrote; I’m probably supposed to keep this secret and build everyone’s anticipation to hype this up. Oh well. Maybe I’ll do that for the Instapaper edition for Apple’s next revolutionary computing platform

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Instapaper Coming to the iPad

We’ve got some good news and bad news for you: The good news is that Instapaper is coming to the iPad, possibly as early as the April 3rd in-store date! And really, we fibbed: There is no bad news. App Store developer Marco Arment posted a preview of Instapaper for the iPad on his blog late Tuesday, complete with a host of details. First and most important, yes, Instapaper is definitely coming to iPad — and very soon. “Possibly even on day one — yes, I’m going for it — but that’s optimistic,” Arment reveals. But the best news for owners of the iPhone version of Instapaper Pro is that Arment has created a universal application that will work great on both the iPhone or the iPad. “That means that you only have to buy Instapaper Pro once to have it on both devices,” the developer says, “and the iPad edition will be available to all Pro purchases at no additional charge when it’s released.” That’s great news for fans of the popular “save and read it later” service, which has found its way into numerous RSS feed apps in addition to the existing bookmarklet so you can save pages for later reading from any web browser. The new version isn’t significantly different than the current one for the iPhone, with the exception of a switch to dark toolbars. “The biggest visual changes were made to the landscape-orientation list screen,” Arment writes, which can be seen in the image above. The developer has taken a nod from Apple’s Mail app for iPad and used the left side of the screen to display Instapaper folders when in horizontal mode. “Instapaper Pro on the iPad is still the same app,” the developer explains. “You already know how to use it. It has just been modified in a few places to better fit the form factor and platform paradigms.” Arment also notes the challenges faced in preparing Instapaper for the iPad.

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Get a Peek at Instapaper for iPad

There are a few apps I find absolutely indispensable, and Instapaper Pro is at the top of the heap. When I find an interesting long article during the day (for example, this wonderful New York Times piece on the evolution of the science museum from wunderkammer to proslytizer) I just click Instapaper’s “Read Later” bookmark

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First Look at Instapaper Pro for the iPad

I don’t use any browser on my iPhone other than Mobile Safari. And, unless you have a jailbroken iPhone, neither do you. That’s because Apple’s webkit-powered Mobile Safari provides the browser engine for all the iPhone’s various windows onto the Interweb. So, whether you’re viewing a webpage from inside Tweetie 2, Instapaper or any one of the multitude of apps that allow for in-app web browsing, you’re using Mobile Safari. Back in early February at the Mobile World Congress, Opera showed off an iPhone version of their mobile browser, Opera Mini, to a select group of reporters and tech-pundits. That left me a little confused; how could they produce a real browser, built from the ground-up, using its own in-house rendering engine, without breaking the rules? You see, Apple has a strict rule that native applications are not permitted to reproduce the functionality offered by the iPhone out-of-the-box. That’s why you don’t see a third-party Camera app that doesn’t also offer some kind of additional “unique” functionality you wouldn’t get by simply using Apple’s own Camera software. The same goes for email applications, phone applications, iPod-like applications… you get the idea.

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Opera Submits Browser App…But Who Cares?