Together 2.5 is now available for direct customers (the Mac App Store version is pending review).

Lion Changes

The focus of this version is to make Together work well on Mac OS X 10.7 Lion with full screen mode, overlay scrollbars, Quick Look previews for text attachments and the new find bar for search text within documents. If you were running Lion before its release, there are also many fixes and performance improvements specific to Lion.

New Requirements

One big change is that Together is now Intel-only and requires Mac OS X 10.6 and later. Apple is taking quite an aggressive approach to moving its developer tools forward to an Intel-only world and it was not possible to have Together both work on 10.5 and take advantage of the new features in 10.7.

Improvements

In addition to Lion-specific features, Together also adds some new features for 10.6 users, including Quick Look previews for text documents that are not RTF or plain text, such as Word documents, a text size preference for Quick Notes, cleaner looking tabs and group icon. Together has also been improved so that it now remembers the last viewed page in PDF documents, search results are updated when moving and removing items.

Finally, Together’s library file has changed into a file package containing both the library database and supporting files. While something of a technical change, this may affect backups and such. The change has been made necessary by the Mac App Store guidelines and forthcoming sandboxing feature of Lion. Together will migrate library files to the new version as they are opened.

Availability

Together 2.5 is a free upgrade for all paid Together 2.x users, the price remains unchanged at $39.95 and a 15-day trial is available for download from this site.

A full list of changes in this version is available in the release notes.

Feeder 2.2 is now available. This version adds support for new iTunes podcasting tags, improves announcements, adds FTP-SSL publishing and faster SFTP uploads.

Announcements

You can now edit manually posted announcements to Twitter and Facebook. For Twitter, Feeder will shorten the links with bit.ly if you have chosen to do so in Announcement settings. Manually posting to Facebook works similarly, and you can specify the message, link, and choose a specific thumbnail (or none at all).

iTunes Podcasting

Two tags previously only used by iTunesU feeds are now available for general iTunes podcasting feeds, these are itunes:order and itunes:isCloseCaptioned.

The itunes:order tag allows you to specify the order of the episodes as they will appear in iTunes, which will otherwise sort by publication date. In Feeder, this tag will be added automatically based on the ordering of the items in your feed when sorted by Item Number, which can be rearranged as required.

The itunes:complete tag appears in the iTunes Podcasting Info section in Feeder as “Is Complete”. Setting this to Yes will indicate that no more episodes will be added to the podcast, and in the case of iTunes U podcasts will allow all episodes to be downloaded at once.

Publishing

Along with FTP, SFTP, WebDAV, MobileMe and Amazon S3, Feeder can now publish with FTP-SSL. SFTP uploads are now faster and it’s now possible to skip publishing scheduled feeds at startup by holding on Command-Option.

Intel Only

As announced previously, Feeder is now an Intel only application, but still runs on Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard. If you are using a PowerPC Mac, do not upgrade to this version. Version 2.1.10 will always be available on the Feeder downloads page.

And More!

There are many more small changes in Feeder 2.2 covering most parts of the application, see the release notes for more details.

Feeder 2.2 costs $39.95 and is a free upgrade for all registered Feeder 2.x users. Upgrades from version 1.x cost $14.95.

Andy Kim has finally announced the release of the final version of The Hit List 1.0 for Mac, and The Hit List Sync Service, with The Hit List for iPhone awaiting Apple’s approval.

I’ve been helping to test all these of these for the last six months, and I can say that it’s truly worth the wait.

Too often with Mac apps that have iOS counterparts, something is released that turns out to be a disappointment. Not so with these two apps and the incredible sync service that ties them both together, providing seamless over-the-air syncing for THL between your Macs and iPhone no matter where you or they are.

What Andy has done is not only created an amazing Mac app, but a just-as-amazing phone app and an incredible sync service to tie them all together. This is a gargantuan task for a single developer, one that could not have been estimated, but the result is sweet because it just works so well.

Together was chosen as Leo Laporte’s pick on this week’s MacBreak Weekly, recorded at NAB, and you can hear about that towards the end of the podcast.

Link: MacBreak Weekly 242: The World’s Largest Dongle.

While talking about Together, Leo remarks about “forking”, where there are differences between the versions on the Mac App Store and developers’ sites, that I would like to address.

In the case of Together (and just about all other examples I’ve seen of this), it’s the Mac App Store guidelines forcing the differences or limitations. If it were up to me, I would have the versions as close to identical as possible.

With Together, Apple rejected it because for the “Save PDF to Together” feature to work, Together has to put a file in your Library/PDF Services folder, which is prohibited by the guidelines. It’s a stupid limitation, because putting files in the PDF Services folders is a completely supported Mac OS X thing otherwise.

In this case, there is a workaround in the form of an installer that you can get from the Together downloads page. I hope to come up with a smarter workaround in the future.

We are currently reviewing Poster and will post that review shortly, in the meantime though, we have interviewed the developer of the app to find out more information about the development of this brand new Mac App.

Link: Exclusive Interview With Poster Mac App Developer, Steve Harris