Wow! After 13 beta seeds and three and a half months in testing, Apple finally pulled the trigger on OS X Mountain Lion 10.8.3 on Thursday. What took so long? Hard to tell, but that wasn't all the company had on its plate overnight -- so read on and find out what you might have missed before packing it in for the weekend.
In the market for an iPad mini but really wishing you could shave a few bucks off the price? For the first time ever, refurbished models have landed in the Apple Online Store, with a 16GB Wi-Fi + Cellular for Verizon model in black and slate priced at $429 and a 32GB white model with Wi-Fi only for $389. As always, your mileage may vary -- Apple notes that there are limited supplies, but updated frequently, so grab 'em while they're hot, folks.
Two notable iPhone apps have finally been ported to the iPad this week. First up is PayPal Here, eBay's attempt to thwart the rise of Square by allowing pretty much anyone to accept credit card payments. When coupled with the free card reader, PayPal Here for iPad (a separate app from the iPhone/iPod touch) is ready-made for small business owners looking for a slick point-of-sale with their tablet. Google-owned YouTube is also hit the iPad on Thursday with a version 1.2 update to its YouTube Capture app, this time bringing native universal support for the iPad and iPad mini for shooting, enhancing and sharing videos with just about anyone. Both apps are available on the App Store now using the links above.
Still having drama with the graphics display on your 15-inch MacBook Pro with Retina Display? Apple released the aptly-named MacBook Pro Retina SMC Update v1.1 on Thursday, which promises to resolve "a rare issue where users may experience slow frame rates when playing graphics-intensive games on the 15-inch MacBook Pro with Retina Display" as well as bug fixes for Power Nap, wake from sleep and fan control. Hey, we just installed that sucker and whadda ya know? Our fan is quieter already.
With the somber news that Google Reader is heading to that great RSS feed in the sky come July, it's more important than ever to have other options for collecting news on iOS devices. Zite has been one of our favorites since its debut, and the company released an update to version 2.2 this week which adds the ability to like and follow topics from Reader Mode, slideshow-style image galleries, native Facebook sharing and the ability to share or thumb pages after following a link. Not a fan of the preinstalled "Popular on Zite" and "Headline News" modules? You can now turn them off, simply by going to settings and toggling the ones you're not interested in. The free, universal app update is available now from the App Store.
Looking for unique transitions for your next Final Cut Pro X video? Noise Industries has just added Stupid Raisins' Panel Pop Transitions to FxFactory, a collection of 26 different transitions which break video into panels and animate them while revealing the incoming clip. Available for $49, Panel Pop Transitions comes preinstalled with the latest version of FxFactory, with a free trial version available to try out before purchasing.
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