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Apple Watch repair guides walk you through screen, battery, NFC antenna, & adhesive replacements

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Following its usual teardown of the Apple Watch, iFixit today released its first repair guides for Apple’s new device covering screen, NFC antenna, and battery replacements, as well as the process of safely replacing adhesives during repair.

When it comes to the NFC antenna, iFixit warns that it’s easy to damage the component when opening the Apple Watch for any repair, meaning replacement or repair might be necessary:
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Tapbots, makers of Tweetbot, release major update to Calcbot for iOS w/ iCloud sync, Convertbot features, more

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Tapbots, the developers behind the popular third party Twitter app Tweetbot, is out today with a major new version of their advanced calculator app Calcbot. As the ‘bot’ theme implies, Calcbot approaches the stock calculator experience and applies character through animations and sounds while delivering more function than the out-of-the-box calculator from Apple.

The completely new version follows the debut of Calcbot for Mac last fall and includes support for quick iCloud sync between the Mac and iOS versions. While the new version of Calcbot is free, an in-app purchase unlocks additional features including what was previously a separate app called Convertbot.
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Paper by FiftyThree’s essential tools now free for all iPad users

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Paper by FiftyThree

Paper by FiftyThree, the popular illustrating app for iPad, is making a significant change to its app price today. While Paper for iPad has been free to download and use since its debut, the app has also had tools for drawing and illustrating available for unlocking through in-app purchases as well.

Starting today, FiftyThree is making the all tools offered in Paper free for everyone to use. FiftyThree is now including the Draw, Sketch, Outline, Write, and Color tools for every Paper user. Previously, the essential tools were $3.99 to unlock as a package while individual tools could be have for $0.99 each.
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Coda 2.5 won’t be coming to the Mac App Store, but there’s no need to panic

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Mac and iOS development team Panic announced today in a company blog post that the next major version of its Coda web development tool would not be coming to the Mac App Store. The reason? App Store apps need to be sandboxed (a security feature in OS X that doesn’t let apps modify data outside of their designated “sandboxes”), and Coda 2.5 simply doesn’t work as a sandboxed app.

According to Panic, Apple worked with the developers as much as possible to provide temporary exemptions and workarounds that could help alleviate some of the issues encoutered, but ultimately the decision was made to only release the update through the Panic website.


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Housecleaning: We’ve moved to WordPress comments

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Just a quick note that we’ve moved our comment system to WordPress. You can log in with your WordPress, Twitter or Facebook accounts and you will need manual approval by mods the first time you comment (so prepare to wait a few minutes/hours). Previous stories will continue to contain  previous comment archives.

Why didn’t we go to Disqus or Livefyre? If it was only comments, we probably would have. But we’re building something kind of cool behind the scenes with WordPress and this is just the start.

As always, we read and appreciate your feedback and look forward to hearing your thoughts.

Google’s Mac team releases internal Mac admin tools, scripts, and utilities

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Clay Caviness, systems administrator on Google’s internal Macintosh Operations team, just announced on Google+ that the team will begin releasing a selection of scripts, tools, and utilities used internally. The goal is to help other Mac administrators, and the team is releasing the first set of items today for “managing and tracking a fleet of Macintoshes in a corporate environment.”

The first tool is an application usage module for crankd – a Mac administration tool used to execute scripts and Python code related to network and system activity. Administrators can find the Application Usage tool here. Also announced today was a simple facter script that will allow administrators to “create facts from the database.”

Caviness promised to release more Mac specific tools, scripts, and utilities over time. (Simian?)


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