Sparrow 1.1 was released last week and the release notes state that it is a “major” update with lots of fixes and features, including:

• General IMAP support: Gmail, Mobile Me, Yahoo and any custom IMAP account can be used with Sparrow
• Priority Inbox: Gmail’s priority inbox is integrated
• Per Alias signature (very cool!): you can use a different signature for each of your avatars

Our techs give Sparrow an 8/10. They find the menu bar integration to be nice, but complete separation of mail accounts (you can’t move messages between accounts) is a minus.

More information can be found on the different features and bug fixes in Sparrow 1.1 can be found at the Sparrow website.

Sparrow 1.1 is available at the Mac App Store.

Snow Leopard update number 7 arrived this week and can be downloaded via Software Update.  As always, please please please make sure you are backed up before installing!

According to Apple’s security notes, among the many bug fixes and security updates to be had are those that:

• Improve the reliability of Back to My Mac.
• Resolve an issue when transferring files to certain SMB servers.
• Address various minor Mac App Store issues.

More information on the 10.6.7 update can be found on Apple’s site here.

An interesting post released today by MacRumors.com reveals that the 10.6.7 update for the 2011 MacBook Pro (a separate update from the general 10.6.7 update for the Thunderbolt-equipped MacBook Pros) has support for several AMD graphics cards that are not presently found in any Mac.  As MacRumors notes, this could be a glimpse of the kinds of graphics cards that will be found in future Macs.

So it looks like iOS 4.3 is a safe update.  The user who reported bricking his iPhone with the update seems to be an anomaly.

Improvements / updates include:

• Safari Performance – the new Nitro JavaScript engine powering Safari runs JavaScript up to twice as fast as in iOS 4.2.
• Personal Hotspot for iPhone 4 – when you enable Personal Hotspot on your iPhone 4, you are now able to share your cellular data connection with your Mac, PC, iPad, or other Wi-Fi-capable device.
• iPad Side Switch- you can now customize the switch on the side of your iPad to lock the screen rotation or mute the volume.
• AirPlay Enhancements – in addition to music, movies, and photos, AirPlay now streams video from your Photos app.
• iTunes home sharing – play anything (music, movies, podcast…) from your iTunes library from anywhere in your house on your iPhone, iPad or iPod over your shared Wi-Fi network.

Attention fellow Mac users!  We’ve already had a report of a user bricking his iPhone when he updated to iOS 4.3.  We caution all our clients and users out there to wait until we’ve had a chance to read through the reports being posted on the interwebs and test it out ourselves…

Everyone’s favorite open source FTP and SFTP, WebDAV, Cloud Files and Amazon S3 client for Mac OS X is now available for Windows, too.  Cyberduck is available from the developer’s site here.

Release notes show the following changes:

- [Localize] Ukrainian Localization
- [Feature] Version for Microsoft Windows XP, Windows Vista & Windows 7.
- [Feature] Replaced protocol implementation (FTP)
- [Feature] Connecting to Windows Azure Blob Storage (#3938)
- [Feature] Connecting to Dropbox
- [Feature] Copy and paste files using menu item to duplicate
- [Feature] Multipart Uploads with parallelism (S3) (#5487)
- [Feature] Support new 5TB Object Size Limit (S3)
- [Feature] Upload item in Finder context menu to upload selected file (Mac)
- [Feature] Upload item in Services menu of thirdparty programs main menu supporting files and folders (Mac)
- [Feature] Select bookmark to upload to when dragging files to application
- [Feature] Invalidation (Purge) of files in CDN (Cloudfiles/Akamai)
- [Feature] Skip option not available in transfer prompt (#1159)
- [Feature] User interface to create symbolic links (SFTP) (#1724)
- [Feature] Support for Asia Pacific (Tokyo) location (S3)
- [Feature] Website endpoint configuration option for buckets (S3)
- [Feature] CDN configuration for website endpoints as custom origin (CloudFront)
- [Feature] Open connection in PuTTY Terminal for current working directory (SFTP) (#5593)
- [Bugfix] Limit number of concurrent transfers (#5539, #5624)
- [Bugfix] Qeued transfers start in random order (#5632)
- [Bugfix] Dragging into topmost folder in browser (#1945)
- [Bugfix] ACLs getting dropped when updating metadata (S3) (#5571)
- [Bugfix] .CDN_ACCESS_LOGS folder listing is empty (Cloudfiles) (#5350)
- [Bugfix] Unicode normalization for filenames in upload (#5162)
- [Bugfix] Duplicate file breaks editing (#5524)
- [Bugfix] Large transfer history causes slowdown (#2889)
- [Bugfix] List all files regardless of document ownership (#5570) (Google Docs)
- [Bugfix] Images always converted to documents (#5601) (Google Docs)
- [Bugfix] Preserve symbolic links in transfers (#1860) (SFTP)
- [Bugfix] High CPU usage after transfer has completed (#5640)
- [Bugfix] Multiple distributions created (CloudFront) (#5675)
- [Bugfix] Passwords not saved when custom port set (#5623)
- [Bugfix] Switching application interface language (#5718)
- [Bugfix] Uploads with reduced redunandency fail (#5694) (S3)

Most of the rumors turned out to be true. The iPad 2 is thinner, faster AND lighter! It does indeed have TWO (2) cameras on the front and the back (FaceTime for iPad!). The new 1GHz dual-core A5 chip is supposed to be twice as fast as the original, with ultra fast graphics up to nine times (9x!) faster.

While we were a bit disappointed that there’s no Thunderbolt connectivity on the new iPad 2, we were pleasantly surprised to see HDMI output on the new tablet (it does require an Apple Digital AV Adapter).

The iPad 2 will be available for order on March 11!

As we mentioned in a previous post, Adobe released Flash Player 10.2 last week and users can download the update by going to Adobe’s website.  However, for users out there who would like to decrease the battery drain they experience when using Flash Player, an alternate path would be to uninstall Flash and use Google Chrome browser for Flash sites.  Google Chrome has Flash built into it, which eliminates the need for users to download, install and update it separately.  When Adobe released Flash Player 10.2 last week, Google Chrome users received the new version of Flash in an update to the browser the same day.

Click here to uninstall Flash Player Mac OS X 10.4-10.6.

Yesterday, the Iconfactory released a significant upgrade to its super popular Twitter client, Twitterific.

According to the press release from the Iconfactory, some of the new features of Twitterific 4.0 include:

• True multi-account/multi-window support

• View mentions, messages and favorites quickly and easily

• View Twitter trends, searches and lists

• Browse conversation threads between users

• Fully customizable toolbar

• Translate tweets to your native language

The ad-free version is $9.99 at the Mac App Store. If you already own Twitterific 3, you can upgrade at a discounted rate. There’s also the free (but not ad-free) trial version available.

Adobe launched Flash Player 10.2 yesterday for Mac, Windows, and Linux. Included in the release is Stage Video, which Adobe describes as “a full hardware accelerated video pipeline for best-in-class, beautiful video across platforms and browsers.”

According to the release notes, YouTube, Vimeo, Brightcove and Epix have been working on enabling support for Stage Video, but apparently are not quite there yet.

Additional new capabilities as reported from Adobe’s site:

• Video at its best is immersive, so Flash Player allows you jump to true full screen playback with one click. With multiple display full screen support in Flash Player 10.2, you can now easily watch your favorite videos  in true full screen on one display while you multitask on another and get some work done (or not).
• Added support for custom native mouse cursors lets designers and developers create their own static or animated cursors with silky smooth responsiveness, enabling richer game and application interfaces.
• New sub-pixel text rendering enhancements leverage Adobe typography research to further enhance text readability, especially for complex character-based languages.
• Support is included for the GPU rendering technology in Microsoft’s upcoming Internet Explorer 9 browser.

Adobe Flash Player 10.2 is available for download here.