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

Support in my apps for PowerPC Macs will be dropped as of Feeder 2.2 and Together 2.5, which will be released as the year progresses. Poster only runs on Mac OS X 10.6 and later and is therefore already Intel-only.

The reason, quite simply, is that Apple is transitioning their developer tools and has dropped PowerPC support from the new versions, which will make it impossible to both build apps for PowerPC and take advantage of the new features in Mac OS X 10.7 Lion, out later this year.

Personally, while I can understand why Apple is doing this, I think the move is a tad premature. I would rather wait until such a time that I choose to drop support for Mac OS X 10.5, the last version of Mac OS X to run on PowerPC.

The final versions of the apps to run on PowerPC will always be available to download from this site.

After an enchanting journey through US bureaucracy that started with a question in the Mac App Store submission process and ended in the US National Security Agency’s headquarters at Ft. Meade, Together’s encryption feature is now approved for export by the US Department of Commerce’s Bureau of Industry and Security, and has been reviewed and approved by Apple for the Mac App Store.

The result is that as of Together 2.4.3, the Mac App Store version now includes the encryption feature and the only difference between that and the regular version available on the Reinvented Software website is the omission of the “Save PDF to Together” feature, a workaround for which is available to download from the Together downloads page.

As this change only affects the Mac App Store version, it will not appear in the direct version’s Software Update, but an identical version of 2.4.2 with a 2.4.3 version number is on the Downloads page too.