Category: Mac

Our featured sponsor this week is FaceTab Pro for Facebook, an easy and amazing way to access Facebook from your menu bar.

I know what you’re thinking, you’ve seen menu bar Facebook apps before right? Well this one is the best. FaceTab Pro is simply packed with awesome functionality that gives you the full Facebook experience right from your menu bar, no compromises.

This app has everything: customizable notifications and audio alerts, growl support, window opacity control (including a stealth mode), mobile and desktop Facebook views, Facebook chat; even a fullscreen mode! If you want the best Mac Facebook experience around, it’s time to download FaceTab Pro.

Go Get It!

FaceTab Pro for Facebook is currently on sale for $1.99 (50% off), so be sure to grab your copy from the Mac App Store before this deal is over!

There is no shortage of screenshot apps for Macs. Whether you want something with a ton of functionality like LittleSnapper, something sweet and simple like Screeny or something free and fun like Skitch, Mac developers have you covered and have for years.

However, every screenshot app that I’ve ever used shares one attribute: the ultimate result of the screenshot is a flat image. With Page Layers, developer Ralf Ebert decided to take things a step further by allowing you to take layered screenshots of websites. Intrigued? Read on to see it in action.

What Is Page Layers?

The key to understanding Page Layers lies in understanding how websites are built. It’s tricky to explain in a few sentences but basically they’re a combination of elements that are created by code and images that are created in a graphics application like Photoshop and simply dropped into the site with code. Both types of elements are added one at a time via HTML, CSS, JavaScript, etc.

Using any web browser, you can actually look into any website to see all of these little pieces individually and look at the code that puts them all into the site together in the right order and scoots them into place.

Page layers is essentially a website screenshot application that knows how to dig into this hierarchy and grab each individual element to then reassemble the entire site into a single layered Photoshop document. This means that you can take almost any website you can think of and turn it into a fully layered PSD. That’s a big promise isn’t it? Let’s see how it works.

How It Works

To see how Page Layers performs its magic, let’s run through the workflow. When you open the app, here’s what you see:

As you can see, at this point it looks like a web browser and indeed there is a URL navigation bar at the top. However, don’t mistake this as a fully functional browser because it’s not. There are no back and forth buttons, bookmarks, Google search bars or any of the other things you’d expect to find in a browser. The preview is live and clickable, but for the most part the browser is simply meant for you to paste or type in the URL of the page you want to snap.

Using the little control in the top left of the interface, you can adjust the resulting screenshot size. This number intelligently updates as you resize the browser window, or you can choose a size manually. Note that the ellipsis implies that the height will automatically be ascertained based on the height of the entire web page.

Snapping a Page

To test this app out, I navigated to the nicely design website for CleanMyMac, mostly because it looks great and seems like it would have quite a few layers to it.

When reviewing an app, I always initially skip the directions so I can accurately assess the usability from a common sense perspective. I must admit that I was at a loss for a minute with this one. No matter which button I clicked, nothing seemed to happen! Eventually though I figured out that the little PSD and PNG icons aren’t really buttons. Instead of simply a click, you have to drag them to somewhere in the Finder to initiate the snap and save the file.

I appreciate that this was done in an attempt to be user-friendly, but I think it’s having the opposite effect. For slow users like me, I’d definitely recommend creating a save event that happens when one of these icons is clicked.

Once I figured out the process, I grabbed the PSD (only this option produces a layered file) and threw it to my desktop. This launched the snap, which confirmed my suspicion that this page has quite a bit to it.

The impressive part is, even with hundreds of elements, capturing this page only took a few seconds! Thus far Page Layers is starting to make me think that it lives up to its promise, but can it really deliver a solid PSD?

The Moment of Truth: The PSD

I’m a stickler for organization in Photoshop, so I have really high standards in this area. Once again, Page Layers impressed me. The snap worked perfectly and the document was neatly organized into multiple layers and folders.

The brilliantly simple organization structure for the Photoshop document simply mirrors the HTML of the web page. If the website is nicely structured with clearly named elements (all good web developers practice this), so too will your PSD come out nice and clean. Even though there were hundreds of layers, I found the hierarchy to be quite easy to sort through. Keep in mind though that this is largely due to the fact that I’m a web developer, it might just look like gibberish to normal folk.

True to its promise, each element on the site is on a separate layer, making it super easy to grab out specific elements and shuffle everything around (sorry for trashing your site MacPaw).

Understandably, this functionality is limited to traditionally built sites. Technology like Flash is a whole different ball game where the individual pieces are much more tightly wrapped and protected.

Conclusion: Worth a Download?

As you can tell repeatedly throughout this review, I was quite skeptical about this app. It seemed like an awesome idea, but it was also something that could easily be poorly and sloppily put together. However, Page Layers surprised me at every turn by functioning perfectly with everything I threw at it.

It’s a fantastic piece of software and I highly recommend it. I would imagine that most Mac users would have zero need for a layered PSD of a website but designers and web developers won’t ever want to take a boring screenshot again. The result is so much more useful and versatile this way. I can tell that this is an app that I’ll be using for some time.

My only real complaint is that this functionality is limited to web pages. After a little research I found a similar app, simply titled Layers, which produces both web and Mac OS X layered screenshots, and it does it for about five bucks cheaper. I’d really like to see this functionality included in Page Layers as well.

Otherwise, it’s a great app and I definitely think that you should give it a shot. Leave a comment below and let us know what you think of this and other similar apps.

Haven’t you ever dreamed about one day just out of nowhere pointing your finger at the globe and taking the next plane to the location that is selected? It’s a crazy idea, but we all have that adventurous side deep down that tells us to just go out and do it.

The app that we are reviewing today does that, sort of. It’s called KAYAK Explore and it uses the Kayak.com engine to help you find and book your next destination for a vacation. Let’s try it out!

What Is It?

I could try to write some interesting clever way of describing this app, but the good people at KAYAK have already done such a great job at it that I’m not even going to try. Instead, here it is: “KAYAK Explore for Mac takes the popular “Explore” feature from our web site, gives it a personal trainer, pumps it full of steroids, reads it a number of self help books, bites it with a radioactive spider, exposes it to an accidental overdose of gamma radiation (intentionally), and makes it way more fun and useful.”

So basically, Kayak Explore is a desktop application for Kayak’s Explore web feature, which gives you the option to explore all the destinations available from your location, with certain filters like price and type of destination at your disposal. But the Mac app is quite a bit more than that. Let’s take a deeper look.

Interface

Instead of using the plain interface of the Kayak Explore page, the Mac app has its own very unique and entertaining interface that provides you with all the information you need to decide your next vacation. In the center of the main window, there’s a world map that is used to mark where the selected destination is located. Around the map, there will be four circles, each outlining a different location decided by your selection of filters.

Inside each circle, you have a picture of the place, and right behind there will be a text box with its name and the estimated price (again, dependent on the filters that you have active). Below the map there’s a slider where you can adjust the price ranges you’d like to be shown and a toolbar where you can adjust the filters, which we’ll get to next.

Using the Filters

The gimmick of the app is based on “exploration” and finding new places to visit. But you also need some control over the options that are shown to you, and that’s what the filter toolbar is for. There, you can adjust things like the type of place you want to go to (beaches, urban, romantic, etc.), the airport you are departing from or arriving at, the number of persons you are traveling with and the month you’d like to travel in.

You can leave most of this empty or at their default selection, but if you do, the results will not be very accurate, as the app uses each one of them to estimate the selections that you are shown. For example, if you tell the app that you’ll be traveling with three persons, the prices for each place will be calculated for all 3 of them instead of just one.

Selecting a Destination

Once you find a destination that interests you, if you click inside the circle you’ll be taken to a new window where you can review the flight times and prices from different websites and you can immediately go and book them. Unfortunately you can’t really tweak the dates or anything like that, those will automatically be chosen for you based on the month that you selected in the filters.

Here you can also view a few other things about the hotel that has been picked for you, like the description, location, address, photos and reviews. The booking is also done externally through different sites, and you can compare the rates between them (if more than one is available).

Conclusion

In the Mac App Store reviews, I read a few that complained about how there’s really much less stuff in the Mac app than in the web version of the Explore feature. From what I’ve seen, I think if you have a Mac and you like the web version, you have no reason not to try the Mac app. It really does a great job at bringing “exploration” to the feature.

But then, there’s the question of who would use this app for anything but to just discover new locations? I can’t imagine anyone actually booking a flight through this app, as it doesn’t really let you select anything other than the place you’d like to go to and the estimated timeline when you’d like to travel. This makes it quite purely an “exploration” app, and as such, it works to give you ideas of where you could go next, and even giving you an idea of how much it could cost; but as a flight booking app it doesn’t work.

I also feel like most of these apps are more useful if applied in a mobile setting. I recently got to review an iPad app called Highlights that has the same discovery sense for new places, and I feel that the mobility of that app was what made it stand out from the rest, as it made it more readily available for situations where you might be more likely to use it. What do you think?

The Mac text editor market is rapidly heating up. Hot off the heels of an awesome Espresso update, we’re all anxiously awaiting the arrival of the next Coda, Textmate and even a new Mac-friendly Sublime Text. With such important and revered players each on the verge of their next great achievement, it’s going to be difficult for any newcomers to make a name for themselves.

Despite this high barrier to entry, Chocolat is a new text editor currently in alpha that’s definitely making a solid statement. Read on to see why it may be just what you’ve been waiting for.

User Interface

Chocolat has a simple UI that feels nice and modern and fits right into the Lion ecosystem (fullscreen mode and all). Open the app, drag a folder to the icon and this is what you see:

As you can see, the setup here is very familiar and closely mirrors that of Espresso and other editors. The app automatically recognizes the file hierarchy and gives you an overview of your project on the left. Moving right you have the line numbers and your code area.

As you can see, syntax highlighting seems to be perfectly functional in this early release. The previous image showcases an HTML file but Chocolat can handle a lot more than that, there’s a huge list of supported languages that you can choose from that includes everything from PHP and JavaScript to AppleScript and C++.

Themes

One of the things that immediately impressed me about Chocolat is its theming system, which is quite extensive. You can quickly choose between a bunch of pre-built but customizable themes or build your own on the fly using a simple color chooser.

I’ve always been partial to a nice dark theme and Chocolat has a few good ones to choose from. The one shown above is called “Sidetracked.”

Split Screen Editing

One really nice feature that Chocolat shares with editors like Sublime Text is a split screen view that divides the code area evenly between two or more files. I absolutely love this view as it makes it super easy to work hit HTML and CSS at the same time.

To activate a split, you simply select two or more files in the sidebar with the Command key held down.

Live Web Previews

The split screen also works for the live preview mode, which lets you get a peek at how your site will look in the browser (it uses a Webkit rendering engine).

A Powerful Feature Set

Despite the fact that Chocolat is currently in alpha, it’s overflowing with great features. For instance, you can validate your HTML and CSS right in the app. There’s also an autocomplete function and a bunch of built-in code snippets along with an awesome clipboard history function.

Each language comes with its own set of actions as well. For instance, in HTML you’ll find a way to look up the documentation individual tags and refresh running browsers and in JavaScript there’s an option for copying the selection as a bookmarklet.

An Awesome Start

It’s so early in the development of Chocolat, that a review really isn’t fair. However, I’m excited about the potential here and really wanted to share how it’s coming coming along.

There are definitely some shortcomings at the moment. For instance, the autocomplete is pretty weak in CSS and doesn’t seem to work at all in HTML. Also, some parts of the UX are quirky and take some getting used to (how do you take web preview out of split screen mode?). However, on the whole, this really doesn’t feel like an alpha release at all. It’s pretty stable and has lots of goodies to play with.

A Price Point to Beat

As I mentioned in the opening statement, this is a tough market to jump into. There are already a lot of really powerful players that users are pretty dedicated to using.

Among these, Chocolat doesn’t really stand out as something that will draw you away from your current editor (for now). One need only spend a few minutes with Sublime Text 2 to see a million different features that you won’t find in Chocolat.

However, I think Chocolat has a fundamentally different audience and personality. It’s setting itself up to be an awesome simple and approachable solution that has everything you need without overwhelming you with functionality. The key place that it is currently differentiating itself is on price. Sublime Text is $59, Espresso is $79 and Coda is a whopping $99. By comparison, Chocolat is available for preorder for only $34.

I just received an email the other day from a reader asking where one could find a good editor that is better than the free options and yet more affordable than the apps I just mentioned. I’m not sure how much the Chocolat developers will jack up the price after the preorder window is closed, but there’s definitely an opportunity here to occupy and even own the lower price niche in the web editor market.

What Do You Think?

Now that you’ve seen what Chocolat can do and browsed through my thoughts on the app, head over the the website and download the free alpha release.

Once you’ve given Chocolat a test-drive, leave a comment below and let us know what you think. Will Chocolat become another major player in this market or is it an unremarkable attempt to take on a few unbeatable giants?

Earlier this month we posted a review of PopClip, an awesome little app that brings iOS style copy copying and pasting to the Mac. It’s simple, attractive and you’ll love using it.

We’re super excited to announce that we have 10 PopClip codes to give away!

Tweet to Enter

Entering is simple, all you have to do is click the link below and send out the resulting tweet (or just copy and paste), then leave a comment below with a link to your tweet. That’s it!

We’ll announce the winners on Wednesday, December 21st. Good luck to everyone who enters and thanks for reading Mac.AppStorm!

We’ve all experienced the frustration of collaborating with someone or trying to communicate over the Internet without any sort of visual support. To better explain your visual ideas, you can take screenshots and add indicators so that other people know exactly what you are talking about, but this process can get time consuming and annoying if you do it a lot.

The app that we are reviewing today is called Clarify, and it can help you create documents by capturing and modifying screenshots. Let’s take a look!

Getting Started

Clarify is an app designed to help you quickly take screenshots and edit them with visual or text elements that can help you explain your ideas better for someone else over the Internet. This could be useful, for example, when you need to communicate with a co-worker that is in another place, or to make a small tutorial for a family member (because we’ve all been there).

The first time you run the app you’ll be greeted with a welcome screen that will also show you some links to a very useful short video that sums up what the app does, and gives you a link to the app’s Help site. After that you can get right into creating your documents.

Capturing Screenshots

The app is pretty much based around you taking screenshots, and that’s why the “Screenshots” button is one of the most visible elements in the UI. Taking a screenshot with it is a pretty easy task, once you activate the button, the Clarify window will disappear and you’ll enter a “capture” mode with an instruction box on the top of your screen.

Here you can customize how your screenshot will look by selecting a part of your screen or just taking a full screenshot. You also have a few settings like hiding the cursor and showing the areas you have previously captured.

 

Unfortunately, the “capture” mode is a little buggy and it doesn’t work too well with Lion’s spaces, so you need to have the Clarify window in the desired space once you access the capture mode if you want to capture an app that is in a specific space. Once you have your screenshots, it’s time to modify them.

Modifying Screenshots

When you take your screenshots, they will be added to this document that looks very much like if you were making a new email. You have a title for the whole document, but you can also add a specific title and description to each screenshot if you wish. You can also add images from your hard drive if you wish, and then there are also the image editing tools.

 

If you select any image, a small toolbar on top of it will appear. From there you can add things to your images like arrows, boxes, circles, sequences (boxes with numbers in them), text boxes, and even highlights (which are basically semi-transparent color lines that simulate the effect of highlighting text). Before adding any of these, you can change the size and color of the element that you are about to add. Once you are done taking your screenshots and modifying them, you are ready to export them or send them to someone.

I should also mention that there are tons of ways for you to format the documents that you create: you can resize the images, select their alignment and positions, borders, and more.

Sharing Documents and Other Features

Clarify has its own webservice where you can upload and share all of your documents with the click of a button. You have to make an account for that, but it’s completely free and you even get a custom URL for quickly accessing all of your stuff. Anyone can access these files, they don’t need an account and they don’t need to download anything (example).

There are other ways of sending your Clarify documents to someone as well. For instance, you can export them as PDFs. You can export each image individually or send them through the Mail.app.

Conclusion

Clarify is a pretty unique app, as I haven’t seen anything done like it before. You could argue that its functionality is easily covered by other image-editing apps, but the reality is that this one does a very specific task and it does it with much ease for an audience that might not have the resources or knowledge to use a high-end image editing app.

Its price is hard to justify, when it does something that many free apps do. Sure, it takes some steps away from the process of taking, modifying and grouping screenshots, but is it worth the price tag? I guess it comes down to the usage that you give to it. The idea behind the app is great; the pricing, not so much. What do you think?

Just like email, the file transfer protocol (FTP) has been around for a long time, making it indispensable for those dabbling with web servers. Now that the entire World is swearing by the cloud, the significance of FTP has gone up exponentially. Tons of FTP clients – free, open source and premium ones – are available in the market, making it tough to choose which is right for your needs.

For almost two decades now, Interarchy has been a reliable, innovative file transfer application for Mac OS X. Interarchy is both easy to use and incredibly powerful. Every aspect of your file transfer operations – from listing a remote directory to deploying a full blown website – can be performed elegantly. Let’s go take it for a spin.

Overview

Interarchy is a comprehensive file transfer client and can be used to maintain your website, upload photos, perform backups and share files. The app supports almost all protocols known to mankind right from the basics FTP, SFTP, SCP, WebDAV to Amazon S3, Google Storage and Rackspace Cloud Files. You can download a free trial or buy it for $29.99 from their online store.

User Interface

Interarchy is designed to be simple and intuitive. It looks a whole lot like a web browser with the bookmarks pane open. There is an address bar at the top to add to the effect too! Getting started is real simple – just enter the FTP server credentials and off you go. The default List view isn’t really awe inspiring and is in fact a bit dull looking. But there are three more views for you to pick from.

I tried to get a view where I can have the local and remote files side by side, but couldn’t figure it out. That would have made my life a lot easier. Instead,  I settled with the multi-column view, which at least helps me see the folder structure of the web server precisely.

Accessing the Web Server

Interachy was incredibly fast in both connecting and transferring files to the web server. The developers promise that with their turbo charged file transfer engine the app can transfer your files at over 80 MB/second. This might not be a big deal if you are using it from your home or office, but for those working on FTPS (server to server transfer), things should be done in a heartbeat.

The Sidepane

The Places section of the side pane allows for one click access to the file system in your Mac. However, there is no way to get that side by side view of remote folders from here too. After connecting to your server if you try to access any other option, you won’t be able to access the server view anymore. To avoid this, try using multiple tabs and switch between them. Else use the History section which lists all the connections you have made so far and take it from there.

For those who have a bunch of connections in the History section, Bookmarks option and the Bookmarks bar should be a welcome addition. After connecting to the server, use the + sign near the address bar to add it to the list. And if everything else fails, start typing in the address bar and the app will list all previous connections for you.

Advanced Features

Taking advantage of the advanced scripting support, you can integrate your own custom workflows too. Extend Interarchy and execute commands directly on the server via the plugin architecture. You can find a bunch of ready to use plugins from the menu bar, but you can write your own plug-ins, file templates, and file converters too.

Still not convinced that the app is advanced enough to your tastes? Install and try the command line tool from the Preferences screen and that should clear all your doubts!

Final Thoughts

After discovering the FireFTP plugin for Mozilla Firefox, I haven’t bothered to use a desktop app for transferring files. Price wasn’t a problem, but the absence of intuitiveness was. I’m not sure how many of us will be using all the ninja features that are more suited for a network admin. Standard FTP operations, the ability to remember the addresses for quick access and easy access to popular cloud storage services are what I look for in a FTP client.

Keeping those factors as benchmark, I would say Interachy looks like a file transfer client that will fit the bill perfectly. That doesn’t mean it’s a stripped down version that is anaemic in features. On the contrary, it is incredibly powerful and comes with a ton of features, but a simple and intuitive user interface makes it far less intimidating to use.

Interarchy provides everything you need to transfer files across the Internet. To be frank, I have not looked past Transmit all this time, but after trying out Interachy, it won’t be as easy to make decision before opening my wallet for a future upgrade.

It’s time for another “Ask the Editor” post. A big thank you to everyone who sent in their questions, it’s always a pleasure to help out the awesome community of Mac users.

Today I’ll be offering some advice about providing remote tech support to your friends and syncing your contacts across machines. Read on and see if you learn anything new!

What is the best way to help friends with their Mac problems from a remote mac?

– Peter

This is a great question Peter. As a means to convince my friends and family to see the light and leave their Windows loving ways behind, I always tell them that if they buy a Mac, I’ll provide free tech support for any questions that they have.

Inevitably, this leads to lots of phone calls. The problem of course with helping people over the phone is that you can’t really see what they’re seeing, and most people aren’t very good at explaining it. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve been on the phone with my mother, trying to walk her through some technical process that ultimately ends up in her clicking on the wrong thing and ending up who knows where.

These days when someone calls me about a Mac problem, I immediately tell them to open one application: iChat. This amazing little app has been completely neglected by Apple in recent years but it’s still an awesome utility that’s just perfect for helping someone out with a problem.

Why iChat?
There are several reasons that I use iChat for this. First of all, it’s a default application that every Mac user has whether they know it or not. This is far easier than talking someone through a download. You do have to sign up for an account, but it really only takes a few seconds and the instructions are clear enough that almost no one will screw it up.

Also, it’s easier than other solutions. Taking over someone’s screen through the Finder involves several steps with usernames, passwords, etc. It can be a nightmare if the person on the other end doesn’t know how anything works.

Finally, iChat automatically ties an audio chat in with the screensharing functionality so you can hang up the phone and use both hands to take over the other person’s computer as they sit in wonder at your magical computer voodoo. Whenever I take over a computer for my dad, the inevitable response is, “far out!”

How It Works:
Once you open up iChat and have the other person do the same, ask them for their user name (at the top of the buddy list). Once the person shows up in your buddy list, click on them in the list and hit the screensharing button shown below.

Once you hit that button, a window will pop up on the other person’s screen asking if they’re willing to accept your hostile takeover of their computer. Once they accept, you’ll have free reign. You can use your keyboard and mouse to troubleshoot their problems or simply walk them through possible solutions as you watch.

How do I sync my address book between my lap top and desktop using Dropbox?

– Alex

Interesting question Alex, I don’t think I’ll answer it quite like you want me too! The first thing that comes to mind is that you really don’t have much of a reason to use Dropbox for Address Book. Don’t get me wrong, I’m a huge fan of Dropbox, but there’s simply no need for it here.

The main reason for this is iCloud. It’s a free service directly from Apple and though some have reported issues, I haven’t had a single problem keeping my contacts synced with this method.

Setting this up is super easy. Just go into System Preferences and sign into your iCloud account using the same Apple ID that you use in the App Store.

Perform this action on multiple Macs and your Address Book Contacts will automatically stay synced. If you end up with duplicates, simply go to the menu bar in Address Book and click on Card>Look for Duplicates. This will help you merge any duplicate contacts.

If you’re not an iCloud fan, you could use Google or Yahoo instead. Go to Preferences inside of Address Book and click on accounts. Here you’ll be able to connect your contacts with these services.

But I Want to Use Dropbox!
If after all that, you’ve decided to stick with your decision to use Dropbox to sync your contacts, then I suppose I should tell you how to do it. The problem with this method is that Dropbox only syncs the contents of your specified Dropbox folder and Address Book must pull its information from the Application Support folder. As you can see, these two principles are at odds with each other. Some Apple apps easily allow you to switch databases upon launch simply by holding down the Option key, Address Book isn’t one of them.

To make this work, you have to do some serious computer cartwheels. For starters, go into Address Book and export your Address Book archive (under the file menu) to your Dropbox folder. From here, you have to go into Terminal and create a symbolic link between this archive and Address Book. Sound complicated? Check out this tutorial to see this process step by step.

Didn’t See Your Question?

If you asked a question but didn’t have it answered today, don’t worry! I’ll do my best to get to it in a future week. I love a challenge, so feel free to ask some weird and wonderful questions…

If you’d like to submit your query, you can do so here:Online Form – AppStorm > Ask The Editor

Thanks for reading, and let me know if you agree or disagree with anything I mentioned today!

Earlier today we published an article containing over thirty great apps that you won’t find in the Mac App Store. This impressive selection of must-have software proves that despite the App Store’s wild success (100 million downloads), there are in fact several developers who either can’t get in due to the nature of their app or simply don’t want to distribute their apps through the App Store.

In today’s poll we want to know whether or not you’re completely sold out on the App Store as a user. Do you still find yourself downloading non-App-Store applications from the web or have you decide to stick to the official offerings filtered through Apple’s infamous review process?

Once you’ve voted in the poll, leave a comment explaining your answer. If you only download App Store apps, is it because it’s simply more convenient or do you like the fact that the apps are filtered through a review process? If you still download non-App-Store apps, do you think indie developers with great projects deserve more support? Are they being overshadowed by the App Store?

Do you love Mac apps? Are you always on the look-out for the latest and greatest software to work faster, be more productive, and enjoy your free time? Are you an awesome writer who can wield prose like a pro? You sound like the type of Mac expert that we’d love to have on our team!

We’re always on the look out for fantastic new writers across the AppStorm network, but we’re particularly wanting to find a few new contributors to Mac.AppStorm over the next few days. All our writing positions are paid, and we’ll work with you to choose apps to review and suggest article ideas.

If you’re interested, we’d love to hear from you. Read our page on writing for us and register your interest here, and we’ll be in touch!

Should You Apply?

Before you shoot us an email, keep in mind that this is a writing position. We will only consider applicants who show experience in communicating their thoughts in clear, understandable language. If you don’t know the difference between a complete sentence and an incomplete one, this isn’t the job for you.

Apple recently announced that the Mac App Store has led to over 100 million app downloads, cementing it as the indisputable one stop shop for just about everything Mac users need or want. Today I want to place emphasis on the “just about” part, because despite these impressive numbers, there are still plenty of great Mac applications that you can’t get through this route.

Back in June, we posted an article containing 10 Must-Have Apps You Won’t Find in the Mac App Store, which included great options like the Alfred Power Pack and TotalFinder. This time we really dug deep and come up with thirty more! Some of the developers behind these great apps have simply decided not to pursue the App Store, others aren’t even allowed in due to the nature of the app. All of these apps though are definitely worth downloading and together make up a wealth of functionality and even fun that your Mac may be missing out on.

The best part? Almost all of them are free! Let’s take a look.

Internet

Adium

Adium has been around for ages and it is still one of the most popular iChat alternatives you’ll find. It’s a free, open source chat client that supports a mess of different networks including AIM, MSN, Jabber, Yahoo, and more.

It has all the standard features that you need like tabbed windows and file transfer as well as some cool features you won’t find in iChat such as the ability to theme the interface.

Price: Free

Skype

Skype needs no introduction, it’s the app that took casual video chat out of the geek realm and into something that everyday people use on a regular basis to communicate with family and friends.

Skype is loaded with features for text, voice and video chat and can even make phone calls if you’re a paid subscriber. Given that Skype has an iOS app on the iTunes App Store, I’m surprised they haven’t gotten anything up on the Mac App Store yet!

Price: Free (paid plans available)

Transmission

Transmission is a really slick open source BitTorrent client. Some BitTorrent apps tend to be pretty clunky and not at all what you’d expect to see on a Mac, but not Transmission. It’s super easy to use and features a simple interface that’s pure Mac.

The nice thing here is that you don’t get any funny business. There are no ads or features that you have to pay to unlock, just an awesome free BitTorrent client with a dedicated team of volunteer developers providing regular updates. You see far too few projects like this these days.

Price: Free

Google Earth

You can never be too sure about how Google will handle new developments in the Apple world. The two companies have an interesting symbiotic but competitive relationship that is constantly a point of discussion. Google Earth is one of the first apps that comes to mind when I think of great Google products that should be on the App Store but aren’t. The app is beginning to age a bit but it’s still an amazingly fun way to travel the world from your desk. It’s definitely worth a download.

Since Google hasn’t made any real entrance into the Mac App Store yet, add to this great products like Google Sketchup and Notifier as well.

Price: Free

Dropbox

Dropbox is perhaps the single most important Mac application not on the Mac App Store. It’s one of the most used and most treasured applications on my Mac and I sincerely believe that every Mac owner should install it.

Dropbox makes it super easy to backup and share files. It creates a plain old folder in your Finder, and anything you put in that folder is instantly synced to your online Dropbox account where you can access it via any web browser. You can use Dropbox as a secure backup for anything you can’t afford to lose, as a way to make your files more accessible, and you can even share folders with friends for easy file transfer. I simply can’t say it enough, you need this app.

Price: Free (paid plans available)

Fluid

Fluid is an app that essentially creates dedicated instances of web apps on your machine that look and act like native applications. So let’s say you want a Facebook app, simply open up Fluid and enter the URL, it will then spit out an application that can sit in your dock that takes you right to Facebook.

Fluid is extremely handy for anyone that regularly works with certain sites. For instance, I use Google Docs constantly for work and used Fluid to separate this app out from my browser. Fluid is free but you can unlock fullscreen mode and other features if you buy the full version at $4.99.

Price: Free ($4.99 for more features)

Droplr

Droplr is a web service that supports apps for Mac, iPhone and even Windows. It’s very similar to Cloud.app, which is in the Mac App Store. Both apps allow you to drag items to your menu bar to instantly upload them and generate a sharing link. However, there are a few key differences. For instance, Droplr generates much shorter, prettier URLs and gives you the ability to share code snippets with syntax highlighting. However, Cloud has a cool extension system that makes it work seamlessly with many other apps.

Whether or not you think you’ll ever be lured away from the admittedly awesome Cloud.app, you should definitely give Droplr a download and see what you think.

Price: Free

Paparazzi

Paparazzi is one of those utilities that you’ll either have zero use for or will absolutely love. Given that I’m a blogger who takes tons of screenshots, I fall in the latter camp.

What does Paparazzi do you ask? It takes screenshots of webpages. That alone sounds pretty unremarkable but the awesome part is that it allows you to automate this task. I can set up a list of 100 web pages that I’m using in a roundup, set the width and height of the snaps that I want, and have Paparazzi automatically generate my screenshots. It’s a huge timesaver.

Price: Free

Spotify

Spotify recently hit the U.S. and has gained a ton of attention. It’s an awesome service that lets you listen to whatever music you want whenever you want. Unlike services like Pandora that automatically decide what to play, Spotify gives you complete control to choose the songs that you want to hear. The Spotify app’s interface is a lot like iTunes so you’ll feel right at home.

The Spotify free plan is pretty amazing and (for now at least) offers unlimited ad-supported streaming. You can also pay a monthly fee to eliminate the ads and add mobile streaming.

Price: Free (paid plans available)

Rdio

Rdio is conceptually almost just like Spotify. It uses the same model of music streaming that allows you to choose from a huge library of songs, artists and albums. The Rdio Mac app is basically a native frame for the web-based service, but it’s still pretty slick and provides an even richer experience than the Spotify app.

Rdio has an unbelievable deal right now where you can sign up and listen to ad-free music without paying a cent. The app gives you a meter that shows you how much free music you have left in a given month (the number of streams is very generous).

Price: Free (paid plans available)

System Utilities

Handbrake

Handbrake is an open source video transcoder. It’s popularly used for some questionable activities, but at heart it’s a simple converter. Here’s what the Handbrake developers have to say about the project:

“HandBrake is not a ripper. It converts video, it does not rip it byte by byte. It does not crack the latest DVD copy protection schemes hatched by the studios. It converts video from nearly any format to a handful of modern ones—that’s it.”

Price: Free

Quicksilver

Quicksilver is the paterfamilias of the app launcher industry. It’s been around for years, was abandoned by its original developer and eventually picked up by a hardworking team of volunteers who loved the project too much to let it die.

The project has seen renewed vigor lately with a major Lion update. Despite Quicksilver’s rough history, it’s still one of the most powerful, fully featured and useful apps you’ll find for the Mac.

Price: Free

AppCleaner

When you install an application on your Mac, it doesn’t just put a .app file in the Application folder, it spreads various support files all over your system. This means that simply dragging an application to your trash can isn’t the best way to uninstall it as this method generally leaves lots of stranded pieces.

There are lots of utilities that help you uninstall apps the right way, but AppCleaner is the best free one that I’ve found and my personal choice for deleting apps from my hard drive.

Price: Free

CandyBar

CandyBar is an application from Panic, the renowned developers of Transmit, so you know it’s a quality app. The reason that it’s not in the App Store is likely that it simply digs too far into your system for Apple’s liking.

Simply put, CandyBar allows you to easily customize the look of your system. With just a few clicks you can replace your system icons and even your dock design with something that’s a little more to your liking. The best part, you can always return to the default system settings in a jiffy.

Price: $29

CoconutBattery

If you own a MacBook, you should download CoconutBattery. It keeps an eye on your laptop’s battery and gives you important information such as its overall health, the number of charge cycles that it’s gone through and more.

I really like that it gives you an easy to read visual representation of what your original battery capacity was versus where it currently stands. If you’re wondering if it’s time to pick up a new battery for that aging MacBook, CoconutBattery has your answer.

Price: Free

Cocktail

Cocktail is another one of those apps that Apple probably thinks that its best for you to go without due to the depth of its reach, but seasoned Apple veterans who know what they’re doing don’t really care!

Cocktail is a Swiss army knife of system utilities aimed at keeping your Mac in tip top shape. The functions that it performs are simply too numerous to list, chief among them being routine maintenance scripts, Spotlight index management, inactive memory purge, cache/log clearing, and IP configuration.

Price: $19

Sidekick

Sidekick is a really unique app that offers “geo-intelligent laptop settings,” which is a really fancy way to say that the app changes your computer’s settings and performs actions based on your location. Why would you need this? Imagine the following scenario.

Let’s say that you have your MacBook sitting on your desk at home. It’s set up to use your home network’s default printer and has the applications open that you regularly use at home: Safari, Twitter, and Spotify. Then you pack up your computer and head off to work. Once you’re there, Sidekick will automatically make your work printer the default, close Twitter and Spotify and open Photoshop and Espresso. Pretty cool eh?

Price: $29

Hazel

Hazel is an awesome personal file assistant that performs automated tasks based on a set of user defined criteria. You set it to watch certain folders and when something happens with that folder, it triggers an event like copying the files to a network drive or applying a colored label.

Hazel performs lots of great other functions as well. For instance, you can use it to properly delete apps just like with AppCleaner or automatically empty your Mac’s trash every few days.

Price: $21.95

Launchbar

Though I’ve always been partial to free launchers like Quicksilver and Alfred, Launchbar has been the favorite of many a Mac user for years. It’s extremely powerful and has all the features you could want including clipboard history, file search, file browsing, iCal event creation, calculator functions and a whole lot more.

Price: $35.00

MacPilot

Macpilot is in a strange place right now. The app is in the Mac App Store, but where you’d normally find the description, you now get this message: “Apple will not be approving the latest version of MacPilot for the App Store as MacPilot requires access to advanced and hidden features in Mac OS X. Please contact us directly with proof of purchase and we’ll issue you a free copy directly from us.”

Fortunately, you can still buy the current version in all its glory right from the MacPilot website. It’s a lot like a visual interface to the Terminal and enables you to really dig into your system and find lots of hidden functionality.

Price: $19.99

Default Folder X

When the developers of Default Folder X approached me a few weeks ago and asked if I could take a look at their app, I admittedly had never even heard of this longstanding and respected utility. However, I now can’t live without it (full review here).

Default Folder X extends your Mac’s default open and save dialog with a range of helpful features that help you quickly find the folder you’re looking for: utilize keyboard shortcuts, favorites, recently used, open Finder windows and more.

Price: $34.95

Teleport

If you ever find yourself sitting in front of multiple computers, say a MacBook and an iMac, Teleport is an invaluable little utility that saves you from switching back and forth between two mice or trackpads.

Simply drag your cursor off the side of the screen of one computer to see it magically appear on the other! You can even drag files back and forth between the two and share clipboards.

Price: Free

Carbon Copy Cloner

Carbon Copy Cloner is the way to clone a hard drive. I’ve used it several times and it makes an otherwise technical task very user friendly. It requires very little setup and works like a dream.

When do you need this? Let’s say you buy a new, larger hard drive for your Mac, but you want all your apps, files, etc. from the old drive. Carbon Copy Cloner allows you to clone the old drive onto the new one so that when you fire up your Mac, the only difference you notice is more free space!

Price: Free

Bodega

Bodega was the Mac app store before the Mac App Store existed. I’m not sure if the Bodega developers choose not to be on the official Mac App Store or if it represents such a conflict that Apple wouldn’t allow it (perhaps both).

I’m not a huge fan of the quirky Bodega interface and to be honest I usually experience quite a few bugs when using the app. However, it is still a great place to find interesting Mac applications, many of which aren’t present in the Mac App Store.

Price: Free

nvALT

nvALT is a popular fork of Notational Velocity, a beautifully simple note taking application for Mac. It has a ton of great features that you won’t find in the original Notational Velocity such as Simplenote syncing (with tags), a customizable color scheme, word count, Markdown support and more.

Price: Free

AppFresh

With the Mac App Store, you can manage all of your app updates in one convenient location. However, this only applies to apps that were downloaded through the App Store. Odds are, there are quite a few applications on your machine that don’t fit that description.

AppFresh was solving the problem of app updates long before the Mac App Store. It keeps an eye on your Application folder and lets you know if there are any newer versions of the non-App-Store-apps that you’ve installed. You can view and download all your updates in one convenient spot.

Price: Free

Design and Development

TextMate

TextMate falls into the category of “oldie but goodie.” Web developers have been using this simple but powerful text editor since 2004. It contains many awesome features such as snippets, bundles, custom commands, and even custom syntax highlighting.

It’s still a great app, but it’s in serious need of a major update. In 2009, development started on the long-rumored Textmate 2, but it has yet to be released. In the mean time, you can still download the awesome original version.

Price: $54

Espresso

Espresso is my personal IDE of choice. It’s a gorgeous, easy to use coding environment with support for tons of languages. Custom theming, syntax highlighting, lightning fast auto-complete, code folding, line numbers, reusable snippets, auto-updating live page previews; these are just a few of the reasons I absolutely love this app.

I recently reviewed Espresso 2, which incorporates the awesome features of CSSEdit and gives you an easy way to write CSS using simple visually-driven controls.

Price: $79

GIMP

The GNU Image Manipulation Program (GIMP) is the go-to free alternative to Photoshop. Though not quite as powerful as Photoshop, it packs a mean punch for a free image editor. It contains a familiar tool set and palette style capable of performing many of the complex functions that you normally turn to Photoshop to achieve.

Here’s the catch: the GIMP developers don’t actually provide an OS X version. For this, you have to hit up GIMP on OS X, which provides “easy to install application bundles of The GIMP for Mac OS X.” It’s a bit of a runaround, but you can’t beat the price.

Price: Free

Media and Gaming

Steam

Steam isn’t a Mac app in the traditional sense. Rather, it’s an online gaming platform that can be installed on both Mac and Windows. With it, you get access to the impressive and wildly popular steam game library and community of users.

Head over to this article to get the lowdown on what Steam is and how it works. Also, if you want a quick look at what’s available on Steam, check out our roundup of 14 Awesome Steam Games Available for Mac.

Price: Free

Boxer

Fans of old school gaming will love this one. Boxer is a DOS game emulator that gives you the ability to play your favorite games from years past on your Mac.

“Boxer takes your CDs, floppies and bootleg game copies and wraps them into app-style gameboxes you just click to play.” It even allows you to assign cover artwork and places your games onto an iBooks-like wooden shelf. Warning: downloading this will increase your perceived level of nerd by at least ten fold. Ignore the naysayers though, it’s pure fun.

Price: Free

Plex

Now that FrontRow is officially dead, many Mac users are on the lookout for a good replacement app that provides users with an all in one media center. This is where Plex comes in.

Plex has a beautiful, fullscreen interface that allows you to easily browse and play your media library. With it you can take control of your music, movies and even online shows. Full Apple Remote support means that Plex is all you need to turn a Mac into the perfect media hub for your living room.

Price: Free

What Did We Miss?

Now that you’ve read our huge collection of thirty Mac apps that you won’t find in the Mac App Store, it’s time for you to chime in. Which of your favorite apps hasn’t made it to the App Store? Do you use any of the apps above? We want to know!

Macs have, traditionally anyway, not really found a true home in the business world owing to their lack of support and the limited range of compatible programs available for them. But now, that’s all changing. More and more developers are either releasing dual-versions of their programs (compatible with Windows or Mac) or releasing Mac-only business programs, making Macs much more attractive for use in the workplace.

Checkout is a great example of this. It is a POS (Point-Of-Sale) software package designed exclusively for OS X and allows you to run your retail store quickly and more efficiently. The ease-of-use of the program along with its wealth of features make Checkout a very viable solution to anyone who runs a retail store, whether in the flesh or online. Let’s take a look!

First Thoughts

Checkout is a fully fledged point-of-sale system and can be run on OS X 10.5.8 and above. You can download a free 30-day no obligation trial to test out its features before you get started from their website and pricing plans start from $499 for a single-user license (up to 20 computers can be used on one network). If your retail store is just getting off the ground, then you can buy a hardware bundle which includes a single-user license for Checkout, a barcode scanner, receipt printer and cash drawer for $1,199.

Once you’ve got Checkout up and installed, you are greeted by the splash screen, which gives you the option to start creating your new store or use an example store which has existing customers and products. I’ll take a quick look at how to create a store in Checkout, but to demonstrate the features of the program, I will use the example store for simplicity’s sake.

Creating Your First Store

To create your first store in Checkout, click on Create New Store. A new screen will pop up asking you to state the name of your store, its currency (as my computer has British regional settings on, the default currency is GBP however this can be changed in OS X’s system preferences) and its tax system.

Once the database for your new store has been created (this can take a long time depending on the speed of your computer) you will be prompted to log-in to your store using the username and password you just created. The main screen for Checkout then pops up, where you can configure your store further and start adding some products.

So we can have a look at Checkout’s features in a bit more detail, let’s switch to the example store with some in-built customers, products and suppliers.

Checkout’s “Manager”

Checkout features a handy database manager called (no points for originality here) Manager which allows you to administer your ledger, products, suppliers, shipping options, employees and so on. When adding a product, you can define its retail price and its default cost (i.e., what you buy the product for – this can help when it comes to calculating margins).

You can also define more precise options such as what tax rate the product is liable to (useful if, for example, you sell a range of products which are taxed differently) and its weight. To help with your inventory, you can also add tags to the product and assign a picture to it.

Your First Transaction

Now that your store is up and running, you’ll (hopefully, anyway) want to start making some sales! To start your first sale, click on New Sale. Checkout automatically assigns the sale an order number based on the year plus a running counter which helps you keep track of yearly sales.

To add products to the sale, simply click on them or, if you have a barcode scanner set up, scan them in. The products are listed on the screen along with the total and tax rate.

Once the transaction is completed, you simply have to hit the Checkout button which gives you a choice of payment options. You can accept payment by cash, debit card, cheque, bank transfer or credit card. The system then marks the sale as completed and gives you the option to print off the invoice or start a new transaction.

Invoice Tracking

If you send out a lot of invoices which need tracking (i.e. whether you get paid for them or not) then Checkout can help you keep control of these easily. If you click on the drawer icon above Invoices then the app produces a list of all the invoices you have created using the system and the remaining balance on each one. Any invoices which are unpaid are marked with a little hazard symbol.

You can reissue any invoice (with the remaining balance) by simply clicking on the invoice and printing it out again (or issuing it as a PDF). You can also record any payment (or part-payment) towards it as well.

Stock Room

Checkout also features a simple inventory management system and allows you to check what you physically have in stock as well as order new products via purchase orders. Clicking on the Stock Room icon brings up a list of your purchase orders (both open ones and completed ones) and a list of the products you stock.

To create a new purchase order, simply click on the icon. A new purchase order comes up which, like a sales transaction, is assigned a number based on the current business year as well as a running number. You can select the products you require from the products view on the right and Checkout automatically inserts them into the purchase order along with the price and any tax due.

Once the goods have been received, you simply click on Receive and record the amount of products delivered. Checkout automatically books these products into the stock, ensuring that they are ready for sale. Unfortunately, Checkout does not (yet) have any way of managing invoices you receive from suppliers.

Reports

One of the most important features of a POS system is the ability to report on sales figures in order to help with fiscal and inventory planning. Checkout will help you do this, and features a wide range of built-in reports which allow to see exactly how your retail business is performing. You can call up inventory reports, end of day sales reports, pending invoices lists, tax and turnover reports and a whole lot more.

Reports can be customized by their timeframe and exported into Excel or Numbers format or they can be printed for future reference.

Closing Thoughts

Checkout is a fantastic POS solution for anyone with a small retail business and can really help with inventory, transactions and invoices. Its simple and easy-to-use interface is perfectly suited to the Mac platform and it doesn’t baffle users with a steep learning curve or an information overload.

Although it is certainly not the cheapest offering on the market, you’ll soon find that after using Checkout how indispensable it actually is and how it can do wonders for your retail business. The developers generously offer a 30-day no obligation free trial so go ahead and try it out. You surely won’t be disappointed.

Keeping up with a calendar app is one of those things that I need to do, but am too lazy to do. I could maybe keep it up for a few days, but after that I would feel burnt out and just tired of the whole process of opening an app to write down something that I need to do later.

That’s why I felt that I clearly identified with the slogan of Quickcal, which says, “Don’t let creating an event be an event.” Does that catch your attention as much as it did mine? Then read on!

Getting Started

To get you to know the app, once you start it up for the first time you’ll get a small welcome window describing how to create new events (Cmd+Shift+C) and a brief explanation on how to use the menu bar component of the app. QuickCal will reside in your menu bar and it will by default sync with iCal, although it also has support for Google Calendar as well.

Quickcal isn’t exactly a fully-fledged calendar app; in fact it’s barely even a calendar app at all. Instead, it will help you optimize how you add appointments to whatever calendar app or service that you already use. Let’s see how this works.

How It Works

To create a new event, you can go into the menu bar and click on the “New Event” button, or you can use the keyboard shortcut that I described earlier. Be careful with that shortcut though, as it is already used by some apps like Google Chrome. The command should bring up a small window with a text box where you can write your event in a natural language (say, “Dinner at 6 pm tomorrow”).

As you type this, below the text box an event will show up with the arranged information that you’ve given to the app. This will show the start and end time (the end time will be calculated automatically, usually one hour later) of your event, and once you finish typing up your information you have the option to just schedule it, open it in iCal, or add another one. That’s it, your event will be added.

Smart Recognition and To-dos

One of the main features of this app is the intelligent recognition of dates, places and set times. You can quickly type in something like “Meeting on Tuesday at 7 pm at my office”, and without having to move anything else it will schedule that meeting from 7 to 8 PM with the said subject, date and place. It’s an easy feature to break, but if you are giving it everyday use it will work just fine, for the most part.

The app is also smart in other ways. For example, it will automatically recognize if you already have an appointment scheduled for the same time that you are trying to create an even. Instead of events, you can also create to-dos, which are handled completely different. You can add them by using the word “by” in your description of the task, and you can prioritize them by adding exclamation marks at the end of them.

Other Features

The menu bar component does more than you might think. Other than letting you add new tasks, it also works as a quick view of your upcoming events and pending to-dos. They are even displayed with the color of the calendar folder that they belong to.

You can also tweak the usual features, like the calendar folder you want your events to be sent to and what features you’d like to activate for each calendar folder. Perhaps the most interesting of the settings is the one that lets you set the reminders by the time at which the event was added. For example, if you add an event more than a week away, you can by default set the reminder for one day before instead of the usual 5 minutes. This also works for events that are a month away.

Conclusion

Calendar apps are a dime a dozen, but Quickcal excels at removing the entry barrier that most calendar apps (in fact, most apps in general) have. You could go into this app knowing nothing about it and having to set up nothing inside it, and it would work wonderfully in more than one sense. It’s a prime example of how you can make an intuitive, automated and very simple app. It reminds me of how the Wunderlist app has been updated, by adding keyboard shortcuts to maximize time and also by making the app sort out stuff by itself, automatically recognizing things like dates.

This app has even made me consider using iCal again. I stopped using it ever since to-do apps like Wunderlist replaced my need for them. But Quickcal makes it very easy and simple to use a calendar again. Some of you might prefer it if it had its own calendar system and if it didn’t rely on iCal or Google Calendars to function, but I think the fact that it integrates with them makes it so much better.

What about you? Do you use calendar apps, and if so, which ones? How do you keep them all in sync, and how do you make them work with your GTD/to-do apps (if you use any)? Let us know in the comments!

Fed up with the nasty sound of your traditional alarm clock? That annoying beeping that rouses you in the middle of the night and does not really help to start a day in a good fashion?

Why not use what you’ve already got? The music in your iTunes library, Spotify or other music services combined with your Mac? Sleepytime lets you set exactly the song you want to hear when you go to sleep or wake up.

Pick Your Favorite Service With Sleepytime

Before we go into all the possible settings of the app, let’s first take a look at the sources Sleepytime can draw music from.

By default, it’s set to iTunes since that’s what is available on every Mac, naturally.

But Sleepytime communicates with far more services than just this one. If you’re not an iTunes fan, you can chose to have your music played from

• Ecoute http://www.pixiapps.com/ecoute/
• Pulsar http://www.rogueamoeba.com/pulsar/
• Rdio http://www.rdio.com/
• Spotify http://www.spotify.com/int/

In order to use any of those, you need to have the service’s app installed on your Mac. Sleepytime will automatically recognize it when you pick it from the dropdown menu.

As you can see in the app’s interface, you can control the music playback right from within Sleepytime – skipping ahead, shuffling, repeating songs and adjusting the volume.

The app also comes with a beautiful animation of the currently playing song – the song name and the artist juggling gently in the upper part of the app window.

If you choose to use Sleepytime in full screen mode, you can select other compositions from the settings menu and enjoy the gentle animations until the sleep timer runs down. Or after the alarm clock woke you up.

Since Sleepytime has just been released in version 2, there are no user contributed compositions available yet, but you can create you own (this is described in a tutorial on the developer’s website).

Set Up The Sleep Timer

One of Sleepytime’s interesting features is to lull you to sleep listening to your music. You can set a duration for the music to play and thereby set a countdown after which Sleepytime will stop the playback.

More than that, you can even chose to have the music fade out slowly so the transition is gradual and won’t rouse you again.

You can’t set a specific song or playlist from the app’s window, but only because Sleepytime assumes that as long as you’re awake, you’ll pick the music you want to listen to within the app of your choice.

Depending if you just want to nap or hibernate you can have Sleepytime put your Mac to sleep, shut down or perform other functions.

Be aware that once you put your Mac to sleep, you can’t use the alarm clock function anymore. Due to limitations to apps distributed through the Mac App Store, Sleepytime cannot access the information needed to wake your Mac.

Set Up The Alarm Clock

Sleepytime can not only lull you to sleep but also wake you up gently (or roughly, if that’s more up your alley).

Setting up a waking time is as easy as simply typing in your preferred time. As with the sleep timer, you can set a fading effect, only this time the music will gradually fade in (become louder). Again, you can set any length you like for the fading effect.

Then you can choose if Sleepytime should play any music from iTunes (or any of the above mentioned services) or from a specific playlist which you can select in a dropdown.

To make matters easier, Sleepytime even lets you set up a waking schedule. If you don’t get up at the same time every day, you can set a separate time for each day of the week.

Weather, Remote and Snooze

Next to the basic functions expected of a sleep timer and alarm clock, Sleepytime brings some other nice features.

It works with your Apple Remote, which lets you snooze the alarm (isn’t it nice to just turn around at least once after the alarm sounded and get some additional zzzzzzzz’s?).

Sleepytime also lets you utilize the many old and new voices which come with OSX Lion. When you snooze the alarm, you can have the time announced to you (to make sure you don’t loose track of time) and/or a sentence of your choosing (maybe something inspirational to get you out of bed eventually?).

What I like most though is the app’s ability to display my local weather after I finally stopped the alarm. So, when I creep out of bed, I know immediately if I should start searching for my umbrella or sun screen.

Verdict

Sleepytime’s ease of use is impressive. There’s no need to read documentation or even the help, you can just start using it right away (even though I always recommend at least skimming through a help text to discover not-so-obvious features of an app).

The integration with different music services will appeal to many users, especially those who are not so keen on iTunes and have suffered from the lack of support for their favorite player from other alarm apps. Sleepytime continuously expands its support for other services and the developer encourages users to send their wishes and suggestions to him.

The only “downside,” if you can call it that, is the need to keep your Mac running the entire time of your sleep if you want to use the alarm clock feature. I know that there are many, many users who never shut down their Mac simply because you don’t have to. But having it run the entire length of time will draw on the battery or consume power (electricity), which isn’t very environmental friendly. I know this is not the app’s fault but rather a limitation imposed by Apple and I hope that in the future there will be a way around that.

Independently of that, Sleepytime is a very thought-through, user friendly sleep timer and alarm clock with which just might help you fall asleep faster and get up more easily. Give it a try, you family and coworkers might just praise on your more relaxed attitude in the morning.

Earlier this week we posted a review of Gradient, an amazing app that helps web developers create CSS gradients with a super easy to use interface. You simply choose your start color, your stop color and your direction and then you’re ready to go.

We’re super excited to announce that we have 5 Gradient codes to give away!

Tweet to Enter

Entering is simple, all you have to do is click the link below and send out the resulting tweet (or just copy and paste), then leave a comment below with a link to your tweet. That’s it!

We’ll announce the winners one week from today on Thursday, December 15th. Good luck to everyone who enters and thanks for reading Mac.AppStorm!