Category: Mac

Who doesn’t love a good world domination game? I mean, a good game is one thing. And a good fighting game is another. But a good fighting game where the goal is to take over the world? And with robots, no less!

Independent game studio Hexage fills this precise opening with a game called Robotek. Robotek is a turn based combat game in which you aim to reclaim the world from the evil robot uprising that caused the fall of humanity. Intrigued yet? Hit the jump to find out more!

Aesthetics

Have you ever played a psychedelically-colored space domination game like Galcon Fusion or Geometry Wars? Robotek achieves a similar art style, with constantly-shifting backgrounds consisting of neon polygons, and imposing silhouetted characters (robots) dueling in front of you. The game is visually pleasing, to say the least.

In addition to the gorgeous art style, the game is set in a post-human world where a machine uprising has left the planet volatile–essentially a war zone for robots. Now seems like a good time to mention that I’m a firm believer in the make-or-break capabilities of the “little things” in apps, and in games in particular. Robotek isn’t notably story-heavy, but there are a few blips of background information that effectively set the mood for the game.

I’ll discuss the specifics of gameplay a bit further down, but as you’ll see, the interface during combat and on the map screen is bold and bright. The game is turn-based, so you’ll have plenty of time to decide what you’re doing, making touch-pad control a completely viable way to play the game.

Gameplay

Robotek is essentially played on two fronts: there’s the combat part of the game (which I’ll discuss in detail later) and the metagame.

Metagame and World Domination

When you begin playing Robotek, you assume the role of a robot in the post-human world, attempting to reclaim the fallen world from the Empire of Machine. To achieve this, you’ll fight your way through a series of “nodes” located on the world map. Each node is rated with a difficulty rating (in stars) and a Power value (noted with a lightning bolt symbol). Power is the resource that you’ll be trying to accumulate by fighting and defeating your enemy robots. Alternatively, you can support the developers and the free app by giving yourself a boost and in-app purchasing additional Power with your dollars.

The map screen provides a view of the world map and all of the nodes that you have/have not conquered. When beginning the game, the map gives you a brief pointer for getting started that was simply too good not to share here:

The view itself is relatively simple: there is a large display showing your overall Power, which goes up and down according to your wins and losses. Winning gives you the number of Power points on the node’s tooltip, while losing takes that amount of Power away. Also on the map screen is an experience bar, which goes up with each fight, regardless of whether or not you win or lose.

Combat

Clicking on a node on the world map and then on the flashing green arrow will take you into a fight.

Combat in Robotek is turn-based, which is a simple enough concept to grasp. However, the way a fight plays out is determined by a roulette system, which I found to be the most challenging part of the game to figure out. Each turn you’ll spin the slots in the corner of the screen (by clicking the green button), and then try to stop the first slot on your desired move (by clicking the green button a second time). The number of slots that match after the roulette has stopped spinning determines the power of that outcome. The window in the screenshot above is just one example showing how the strength of an outcome is determined.

When you take your turn, you may spin the roulette in one of three categories. You can try to summon companion robots, you can go on the offensive, or you can take defensive measures (such as summoning shields). What confused me the most was the fact that no matter what you spin, you’ll get whatever shows up. If you’re attempting to summon a Drone, for example, and you roll 2 Drones and a Tankbot, you’ll receive an advanced Drone and a normal Tankbot. If you roll 3 of anything, you’ll not only get the most powerful version of it, but you’ll also get a bonus turn.

The main goal of combat is to use these abilities to drain the enemy’s HP, denoted by the the bars at the bottom of the screen, before he drains yours. I won’t go into detail about all of the abilities you can use, but let it be known that I was surprised by the level of complexity a given battle can reach.

Last Words

Let me level with you: When I downloaded this free app from the Mac App Store, I wasn’t expecting a game that was this fun. I wasn’t expecting as much depth and complexity, and I certainly wasn’t expecting the level of visual polish that Hexage lacquered on. It certainly isn’t the most innovative or complex game I’ve ever played, but it still provides a great deal of fun. And, of course, my motto is “you can’t go wrong with the low, low price of free.”

Have you bested the robots of the world and rescued the planet? What do you think about Robotek?

Gaming on the Mac has always been a sore topic for most gamer and users of the platform, as there hasn’t always been support from game studios and developers, and the topic of gaming on the Mac has always been taken as sort of a joke by most serious gamers.

However, lately a few things have changed with the Mac, like the launch of Steam for Mac and the Mac App Store, which have made things a bit different. Has it changed things much or is Mac gaming still stuck in the past? Let’s take a look.

The Elephant in the Room

So, why did this happen? Several reasons, and the answer may vary depending on who you ask. First off, the user base for Mac OS users didn’t used to be considered a relevant enough number to dedicate the resources to make a game specifically for it. There were already enough platforms out there that developers need to adapt and port their games to.

But there’s also the resource issue: Macs have always been powerful machines, but they didn’t use to come with video cards suitable for high-profile gaming. With newer Macs this hasn’t really been an issue as they tend to come better equipped out of the box. You could argue that both of these problems aren’t valid arguments anymore, as the Mac user base has grown in recent years and the specifications of most Macs nowadays make them suited for gaming; so what’s holding us from getting our hands on new big-profile games to play on our Macs?

The New Ways of Gaming

Now, gaming on the Mac (and even on consoles and other platforms) seems to be going the mobile way, which is based on small games that you can easily pick up and leave after a few minutes, but that urge you to come back and continue playing them time after time. You can go on the Mac App Store and find in the most sold apps a handful of games that you might recognize from the iOS Store, such as Angry Birds and Flight Control.

This goes to prove that “casual” games have found a home in the Mac App Store, much like they did in the iOS App Store before that. They don’t require as much time or resources to be developed and developers profit not by pricing their games highly, but by making small enough games that go by the dollar but continue to sell thousands of copies months after they are released. I think we’ve all learned from Rovio, the Angry Birds developers, that there really is an opportunity to make big money on mobile (now even adapted to other platforms) gaming.

Retro Gaming

So far I’ve told you nothing that you didn’t already know. Let me get to the point: the other day as I was browsing the Mac App Store, I realized that, outside of the casual games, a lot of the “Most Popular Games” and also the most sold apps are old games that have just found their way into the Mac App Store.

Games as old as Bioshock, Call of Duty 4, and the first 3D Grand Theft Auto tiles; which range from 3 to almost 10 years old. Don’t get me wrong, I love most of these games and when I saw them at the App Store my first reaction was “I would love playing Vice City all over again”, but it also made me reflect on the kind of gaming market that Apple and the developers putting these games out are aiming for, especially within the App Store.

Let’s not forget that these are all games that have sequels already out, which can’t be played on the Mac yet (but probably will in another 3 years, if we’re lucky). So, yes, there are a handful of newer games out there like Civilization V, but the most sold games remain the older ones. Why is that? Who is buying them? Is it gamers like me who want to revisit old great games for nostalgic reasons? Or is it actual new customers that haven’t tried these old games out, perhaps because they didn’t even know they existed?

Steam

There has been a lot of talk this year that the future looks bright for Mac gaming, especially with platforms like Steam taking the Mac as a more serious market for business. But even with Steam, the catalogue looks pretty much the same: very few truly new games with a lot of casual cheap games and a handful of old classics thrown in. And that’s not even counting the fact that the number of available games for Mac in Steam is much smaller than those available for the PC.

Conclusion

Perhaps it’s too late for Apple to make a move within this market, perhaps the ship has already sailed for them when it comes to gaming. They didn’t embrace it as a serious thing in the past, and now that they’re trying to catch up with it, things are looking pretty slow.

It seems like it may take a lot of time for games to really start coming out for the Mac platform at the same time as they do for each other relevant platform. In the meantime, I’ll stick with my consoles and revisiting good old Vice City.

So far in our series of making music with GarageBand, we’ve taken a look at getting started with GarageBand, and have then moved on to creating a simple song in GarageBand using virtual instruments. We’re going to continue to step up the complexity to make more unique, nuanced songs but I felt that before getting more advanced with virtual instruments and editing MIDI, it’s high time that we took a moment’s pause to look at the basics of recording electric guitar.

Though this article is catered toward beginners looking to use their computer to record electric guitar, electric bass works just the same and it will mostly be applicable to other instruments, like keyboards and drum machines.

The Principles Of Recording Electric Guitar

Recording electric guitar is one of those areas with a long history of experience and expertise for beginners to draw from, but the problem is that new musicians often fall into a trap of spending a lot of money in order to play a few chords and get a demo onto CD, when the same could be achieved far cheaper. I’m not going to suggest that spending money on fancy microphones, interfaces or even an entire home studio is a waste of money by any means; rather, it’s unnecessary for beginners to worry about unless they decide to pursue music more seriously. With all this in mind, let’s outline how guitars are generally captured in a professional studio and then how to do so on a realistic budget.

In a professional studio situation, we could record electric guitar by plugging our guitar into an amplifier of reasonable volume and setting up at least three microphones. One close to the amplifier, right up against the speaker grill, the other a little further back and in the middle, with a final microphone placed yet further still to pick up the room’s natural acoustics as the sound waves interact with the environment – each microphone then needs a powered pre-amp and to be mixed. Even while simplifying it, that sounds like a lot of equipment and expertise for a demo and to be frank, I believe it would be overkill for a beginner.

The Solo Guitarists Choice: Apogee Jam

Apogee is a company with an excellent reputation in professional audio equipment so it was a welcome surprise when they decided to produce a product catering toward the beginner and at a price of just $99. One of the great plus points when considering the Jam is that it works with Mac, iPhone and iPad so if you’ve already got an iOS product then it can be used as a very portable sketchpad too.

Using the Jam is easy, just plug your guitar into it with a guitar lead and then plug the Jam into your Mac, iPhone or iPad – it’s powered off the USB so there’s no need for batteries and the interface comes with adaptors for both Mac and iPad/iPhone.

The Jam is great but it is limited to recording guitar or bass directly and while this is often perfect for a solo musician, if you’re recording a band environment, you’ll want to hook up some other instruments to your Mac and maybe a microphone too – this will all mean more interfaces and more money spent.

The Bandmate’s Choice: Apogee Duet

I haven’t got some kind of secret sponsorship deal with Apogee, I promise. I just think that they best represent both sides of the home recordists’ choice. If you are willing and able to make the additional monetary commitment, the Apogee Jam is a fine choice of interface which comes with four inputs, able to handle microphones, guitar or other sources such as a drum machine. I know several musicians and one mastering engineer who use the Jam as their go-to recording interface and it’s a popular choice for ‘serious’ musicians.

The big step up in flexibility does come with significant cost: the Apogee Duet 2 retails at $595.

The Middle Ground: M-Audio Fast Track Pro

If you want more flexibility than the Apogee Jam but don’t want to shell out for a Duet then M-Audio’s Fast Track Pro may be best for you. It’s a fairly simple interface which can accept four inputs, so you can run a guitar and microphone at the same time. The on-board pre-amps don’t blow away the listener like the Duet but I’ve owned one for some time and am happy with it overall, especially for the retail price of approximately $250.

A Brief Look At GarageBand’s Guitar Features

We’ll need to explore what GarageBand can offer guitarists in more detail but for now I’d like to quickly cover some of the more notable features below.

Effect Pedals

GarageBand’s effect pedal selection is impressive and contains all the staples for any guitarists collection, such as Fuzz, Overdrive, Phaser, Delay, Wah, Echo, Chorus and more. Each can be combined and, just like real life, where you place the pedals in the effect chain alters the eventual sound.

Remember that you don’t only have to use GarageBand for recording, the effects pedals and amplifier are great for normal jamming and songwriting.

Amp

Though they are not identified as such, GarageBand contains several amps which bear a strong resemblance to Marshall, Fender and Vox amplifiers. There are a lot of options for adjusting EQ levels but helpfully there’s also many presets to guide the user in achieving a desired sound.

Conclusion

Recording guitar into a DAW and making it actually sound halfway decent used to be a real challenge for the novice user but recent technology has enabled us to simplify the process a great deal. Hopefully this brief overview will give you something of an idea where to start with recording guitar on GarageBand and when we look at incorporating guitar into a complex song, you’ll have an idea of the basics.

If you’ve never had the opportunity to experiment with many pedals or amps then GarageBand can be a lot of fun, just grab an interface and plug in your guitar to begin making some great sounds!

Apple released their large overhaul to their Mac operating system with Mac OS X Snow Leopard in June of 2009. This update seemed fairly basic to the naked eye as there weren’t many end-user feature updates, but under the hood the OS took strides in performance, efficiency and memory consumption. It was essentially laying the groundwork for the future. While I think Mac OS X users were happy with this update, I can say from personal experience that there was certainly some anticipation for what was next.

Mac OS X Lion launched barely two months ago and I was quick to give this new operating system a try. Developers had been working with versions of the operating system for some time prior and were talking about some of the features that were being played with by the Apple team. It appeared that this would be that major update that we’d been waiting for, bringing along with it many new end-user features.

I’m the type of person that is always looking for ways to be more efficient with my work. This is essentially a never ending journey, but the quest always continues on nonetheless. I grabbed a copy of Lion soon after it was released, anxious to see how the new features I had read about could possibly improve my productivity and efficiency.

I’ve been using the operating system now for about three months and decided to make a conscious effort from the beginning to try to utilize the new features of Lion. There are some substantial changes and new features that I was anxious try to work into my workflow.

Mission Control

The introduction of Mission Control in OS X Lion was quite substantial. While the features of Mission Control have more or less been available in one way or another through multiple applications for a while, this re-thinking of the problem that utilities like Exposé and Spaces had been trying to solve has proven to be extremely useful for me.

While I did grow quite attached to Exposé, there were times when its usefulness was questionable. If my workspace got to the point of having many application windows open it was still very difficult to keep everything straight and I’d end up with, quite literally, a pile of windows in no particular order. You could argue that I should have been using Spaces to group my applications or job functions, but I just could never get myself used to Spaces. It always seemed more cumbersome than helpful to deal with multiple Spaces.

In a sense, Mission Control both combines the functionality of Exposé and Spaces yet also completely rethinks the problem those applications were trying to solve. Being able to easily see groups of application windows, intelligently grouped based on the application, helps greatly in staying organized making it much easier to find that one stray window you’re looking for.

Desktops would be the closest equivalent to Spaces and I would argue makes the concept much more usable. Adding a new Desktop is insanely simple and managing applications on multiple Desktops is very simple as well.

I’ve set a few applications that I use regularly to only open on certain Desktops. So for example, I have dedicated a Desktop to iTunes and other music applications. While I use these applications everyday, they can be a little distracting. Having those applications segmented off on their own has limited my wandering time in those apps greatly. A trackpad gesture (we’ll talk a bit more about this soon) allows me to quickly switch between Desktops should I need deal with my music.

I do a fair amount of writing and also some coding. Both of these functions typically require a little bit of browser viewing as well. When I’m working on website code I’ll have my code editor open on one Desktop and Safari in the next. It’s not as nice as having multiple monitors to work from by it does present that feeling, at least partially, making you more efficient while using just one display. On my 13” Macbook this is a killer feature and one I’ve become completely dependent upon.

Gestures

When the glass trackpad was introduced ,along with it came the possibility for gesture functionality. While some gestures have been available in the past Lion, has expanded their function and I personally have made more of an effort with Lion to better utilize them.

First of all, these gestures can all be customized to your specific needs. That alone is a huge feature. I’ve actually become quite used to the default gestures and there are a few that feel second nature already.

With my adoption of using multiple Desktops, the ability to quickly switch between them could potentially be a deal breaking. By default a three finger swipe in either direction will allow Desktop flipping. I can’t tell you how much I use this gesture and in conjunction with using multiple Desktops, it has made my Macbook mobile work environment much more useful. A three finger up swipe will display Mission Control. I mostly use this for a quick re-organize of applications or to find a particular application window. It’s easy to move an application from one desktop to another if you feel the need to bring that window into your current workflow.

I’ll make a quick note on the natural scrolling, which by the way I refused to turn off and go “back to normal” as was suggested by some people. This is a major rethinking and one that after a little bit of use has become second nature to me as well. In fact, it seems strange to back to that “normal” direction.

Full Screen Mode

I’m a 13 inch Macbook user and I don’t feel as limited by the available screen real estate like I used to. A big part of this is utilizing multiple desktops as I just discussed but also the ability to use an application in full screen mode I’ve found quite nice.

I was a bit skeptical that this would provide me any benefit, but after working with some applications in full screen mode I have to say I completely love it. You wouldn’t think you would gain that much real estate, but the additional application space is noticeable.

Conclusion

The new features I’ve talked about have individually made me more efficient on my 13” Macbook. But the real and most substantial value comes when they are used in conjunction with each other. As I was thinking about this article that quickly became evident. I use these three features a lot and leaving one or there other out just wouldn’t yield the same results.

This is a perfect example of why I love Apple and have become so attached to what they produce. Mac OS X Lion is a substantial revision on an already wonderful operating system that was essentially picked apart to make better. Some of the changes seem subtle, but their effects when combined, can have a big impact on how you use your Mac.

With Lion, I’m able to accomplish tasks more quickly and with less effort. Apple products always have that feeling of being more of something you work with rather that work on. Lion has taken a big step towards becoming more of a human extension and less of a tool.

Most of us find ourselves writing at least once a day on a computer. And surely you have found yourself more than once annoyed at having to type out the same phrase over and over again. Or maybe you’d like a way to quickly insert an image, date or signature?

Here’s where Typinator comes in. The tiny tool helps you to set up abbreviations, which it will expand to whatever text you define. How exactly that works we’ll have a look at after the break.

So What Does a Text Expander Do Again?

To explain what a text-expander is, I will borrow from one of my previous articles in which I compared different text-expansion apps.

The basic principle is that you create a short abbreviation for the content you use regularly, and the app expands it for you as you type the abbreviation. For example, if you answer the same type of emails with a “thankyou” note, you could come up with “tty” and the expander would turn that into something like:

Dear Person X,
Thank you very much for your inquiry. We will get back to you as soon as possible.
Sincerely,
Julia

And if you like, you could have your signature inserted as an image or even the logo of your company added. Similarly, when you code, you can set up some shorthand code for the basic structure of a website (DOCTYPE declaration, head, body, basic css stylesheet links and so on).

With maybe three or four keystrokes, you could have the framework of the website set up; something that would normally take you up to two or three minutes. Now, that’s what I call a time saver!

Getting to Know Typinator

Now that we know what Typinator does, let’s take a look at how it does it. Don’t be fooled by the rather spartan interface; the app is quite powerful.

To ease you into working with Typinator, the app comes with a default set of abbreviations, which showcase the different usage scenarios quite nicely.

As you can see, the window – which is usually hidden – is divided into different sections. On the very top is an overview of the different sets of abbreviations. You might have one for work related terms and one for private terms; especially once a set fills up, dividing phrases into separate sets makes it much easier to find and manage them. I only wish Ergonis would make that tiny window larger.

Apart from the default set, Typinator has some hidden goodies. Clicking the “Predefined Sets” icon on the top of the app window you’ll be presented with even more sets that you can activate. Non-Lion users will appreciate the auto-correction sets (and those Lion users, who have deactivated the build-in auto-correction might like this as well) and developers will rejoice over the HTML snippets.

In the lower part of the app window you can see a field where you enter a new abbreviation and below that you define your expanded text, which can be plain or formatted.

Creating a New Abbreviation

New abbreviations can be created in two different ways. No matter how you do it, you should think about something before you proceed: what makes an abbreviation useful?

The more abbreviations you create, the more you have to remember. So, you want to go for something that will come to you naturally and not result in a learning-marathon that can compete with learning vocabulary. For example, try “tthanks” for “Thank you so much. We really appreciate…”. Doubling the first letter is easy to type and you just have to remember to double the “t” in a word you’d use anyway.

Also, you want to stay away from words that you use normally (for obvious reasons) and long abbreviations (which will just frustrate you) and instead go for short, easy phrases which are easy to type.

Once you have thought of something smart, hit the plus button and type your abbreviation. In the window below, enter the text you want to see expanded.

That’s actually all you real need, you can go ahead and use the abbreviation straight away. Of course, you can always fine tune it. For example, you can check “whole word”.

This setting is useful when your abbreviation might include parts of other abbreviations and to make sure the text is not expanded prematurely. You can take it even further and define whether or not the case matters.

The expanded text itself can be adjusted as well. You have the choice between plain text, formatted text and images. If you’d like to enter formatted text, you can either use the “Format” button (kind of tedious) or just write it in TextEdit and paste it into the app.

Also, you can insert variables, which will expand to dynamic content and not static text. Examples are the current date and time, the content of the clipboard or, really awesome, the cursor position. The latter lets you insert a predefined text with a set spot where your cursor will be after the text-expansion – so instead of it being after the expanded text, you could have it right within it. (Say to enter the name of a mail recipient, with the rest of the message being predefined.)

But this is just one way to create a new abbreviation. You can also set a keyboard shortcut to create new abbreviations from selection or the keyboard. This speeds up the entire process incredibly.

Working with Typinator

Now that you’ve set up everything, how do you use Typinator? Actually, you don’t have to do anything except to type your abbreviation whenever you need a certain phrase that you’ve set up in Typinator. The expansion works in a web browser the same as in your text-editing app or in your mail app.

But what happens if you’ve forgotten an abbreviation? You know you made one, but what was it? Easy. Just use the keyboard shortcut CTRL+ENTER to bring up a search window at the very top of your screen. Type what you want to expand (obviously, you don’t need to search by abbreviation) and Typinator will present you all search results. Everything can be done from the keyboard.

What if you don’t want certain abbreviations to work in certain apps? For example, if you use the HTML snippets, but don’t want them to work with Espresso or Coda, because those apps have excellent code completion already? There’s a setting for that. Simply define which apps to exclude from a set.

I’ve had some mixed success with that setting. For some apps it worked, for others not so well so you’ll need to experiment a little.

Verdict

At first, I thought: Who in the world needs this kind of app? I mean, it’s not expensive, but I though that people were just being lazy. Fast forward a couple of months to when I was writing a 90-page documentation full of repeating, long technical terms. It drove me crazy to have to type all of them over and over again.

That’s when I finally realized the value of Typinator. That was a couple of years ago. By now, I use it for all sorts of tasks. For example quickly answering or writing emails that only differ by the name of the addressee or recipient.

Just imagine your daily workflow speeding up and freeing you to concentrate on the really important stuff instead of being stuck doing the same thing over and over again. Then you will understand the value of Typinator.

When I’m not writing Appstorm reviews or doing schoolwork, I’m a freelance web developer. A lot of what I know about web development I owe to the in-depth tutorials and screencasts over at Nettuts+, which is, in my opinion, one of the most reliable and richest resources for all levels of learning. You may or may not know that Nettuts+ is owned by Envato, who also happens to run AppStorm. We’re an ever growing family of sites aimed at providing you with all your digital needs, from education and app reviews to online marketplaces for designers and developers.

In addition to providing quality educational materials, Nettuts+ has recently entered into the world of Mac app development with a duo of helpful web development tools: Nettuts Builder and Structurer Pro.

Read on to find out how to use these great utilities to speed up your web development workflow!

Structurer Pro

Structurer Pro was the original Nettuts+ app, built to help web developers quickly create project templates without having to manually create each file and folder.

In this demo, I’m going to be creating a very simple one-page site directory containing HTML, CSS, and Javascript files, as well as an images directory. In the Finder, our directory structure will look like this:

Using Structurer Pro

When you open up Structurer Pro, you’re greeted with a fairly spartan interface with a couple of text boxes. The first step is to choose a base path for your project’s folder. Next, you start defining the files and directories you want to create using a very straightforward set of rules.

To create a file, just type in the name of the file you want to create with the appropriate extension. To create a folder, type in the name you want to use, then a forward-slash. If you’d like to populate the folder, you can either add a file name on the same line as the folder name after the slash, or start a new line and precede the file name with a forwad-slash. To create our project, the Structurer text box would look like this:

You can create nested directories as well, just make sure you always put a forward-slash after the name of each folder.

Creating Tempates

To those of you familiar with using the command line to create files and directories, Structurer Pro may look like little more than a glorified Terminal shell. After all, the same result could be achieved with a few mkdir and touch commands. That being said, the real benefit of using Structurer Pro is the ability to save templates of commonly used project structures.

To create a template, simply select “Save Template…” from the Structurer Pro dropdown menu and give your template a memorable name. Now when you access the dropdown menu, your template is just a click away. You can add and manage as many templates as you like through the “Manage Templates” option.

Structurer Menu

Once we’ve created some reusable templates, we’re still a few clicks away from being able to create a project from scratch. To speed up your project creation even further, Structurer Pro comes bundled with Structurer Menu, a small menu bar application that gives you one-click access to your project templates. Simply pick a template and choose a location for it, and you’re ready to go.

Though our example demonstrated the creation of a very simple HTML site, Structurer Pro would be even more of a time-saver for the creation of large scale projects and web applications involving many classes and directories. I find that using Structurer Pro not only speeds up my workflow, but also encourages me to plan ahead and think about what resources I’m going to need for a project, which saves me even more time later on.

Nettuts+ Builder

If Structurer Pro helps you to get started on a project, then Nettuts+ Builder helps you to finish it. Nettuts+ Builder’s main feature is drag-and-drop FTP uploading, but it also features an easy file compressor for minifying your Javascript and CSS files.

Using Nettuts+ Builder

Nettuts+ Builder is a menu bar application with some very simple and easily configurable features. When you first open it up, you’ll just see a little construction hat in your menu bar with just a “preferences” menu item. From Preferences, you can select your compression engine (YUI, JSMin, Closure Compiler) and add an FTP server to upload your project to.

Once you’re ready to publish a project, simply drag it to the menu bar item, and it will be automatically compressed and uploaded to your server. Nettuts+ builder also creates a new “publish” directory for your project within the original folder containing the compressed files.

When you make changes to your project, you can simply drag the folder back to the menu bar, and the changes will be uploaded.

When you’re specifying an FTP server to upload to, make sure you add a new URL path for your project, as the “Project finished folder name” refers to the local copy of your project, and you probably don’t want all your files to upload to your root directory.

Nettuts+ Builder is a great utility and time saver, but probably wouldn’t appeal to web developers that use advanced IDEs or editors with these features built in. Personally, I do a lot of my devleopment in Coda, which has a built in FTP client, but coders using more single-function text editors like TextMate and BBEdit would likely appreciate the simplicity of drag-and-drop uploading without having to open an FTP client.

It’s also useful to have an easy way to compress javascript files, which though not essential for smaller projects, can really save space when you’re dealing with larger websites that use multiple libraries or plugins. I also like the way Nettuts+ Builder allows you to keep your publish and working directories seperate, so that you can still work with the uncompressed versions of your code as you make changes.

Conclusion

The Nettuts+ duo of apps can definitely streamline the web development workflow, and enforce good practices like planning and script compression.

I’m sure some readers will prefer to accomplish tasks like uploading, compression, and directory creation through the command line, but Terminal isn’t an environment everyone is comfortable in, and user interfaces were invented for a reason.

These apps don’t introduce any breakthrough new features, but they fit the needs felt by many web developers for easy ways to speed up what is often a repetitive and tedious process. The way I see it, most web developers either accomplish the mundane tasks of web development by opening up the Terminal, or by taking advantage of more fully-featured development environments. The Nettuts+ apps offer a middle ground, an inexpensive, easy option to expedite repetitive tasks.

After at least a year of rumors about an Apple cloud service and months of anticipation after the official announcement was made, we’ve finally gotten our hands on iCloud. It’s the perfect example of how Apple doesn’t always get things right from the start. They started with .Mac, evolved that into the train wreck that was MobileMe and have hopefully finally gotten things right this time around with iCloud.

Now that you’ve had a little while to kick the tires, it’s time to weigh in. What do you think of iCloud? Is it everything you hoped it would be or did all that hype lead to a disappointing reality? We want to know!

After you vote in the poll, leave a comment below telling us about your iCloud experience. Tell us your horror stories and your raving praise, let’s hear it all.

Our sponsor this week is Disk Drill by Cleverfiles, a powerful Mac utility that enables you to undelete and recover your lost data with ease.

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As you may have gathered from my recent posts, I have yet to upgrade to Lion on my personal MacBook Pro. But that doesn’t mean I don’t have my ways of playing with the new operating system (and the apps and utilities that are released for it). And let me just say… developers are taking the changes in stride and coming up with some really great apps.

File management is a big deal for people who use their Mac every day, especially if it’s how you make your living. Some of you are command-line ninjas, and moving files about your hard drive with just a few keystrokes is second nature. But for the rest of us who rely on the GUI to drag files between folders, documents, emails, and various other drop locations, OS X Lion’s full-screen apps are less than conducive to streamlining this process.

It’s entirely likely that, if you have not yet discovered Yoink, you’ve used workarounds for moving files that you weren’t even aware were inconvenient. You create temporary folders, or drag files to the desktop, and then have to clean up extraneous copies after the move is complete. The new app from Eternal Storms Software (creators of flickery and ScreenFloat) is intended to remedy that. Yoink puts a contextual shelf on the side of your screen that appears only when you need it to aide you in cross-space file movement.

Interface

Allow me first to call attention to that gorgeous icon up there. Icons rarely make or break an app’s usability, but they can certainly catch your eye in the App Store and make you consider buying it. This is how I first notice Yoink: patrolling the App Store for new apps.

Yoink is an unbelievably lightweight app that sits on the left or right side of the screen. It acts as a temporary shelf to put files while you switch spaces or figure out where you want to move them. To begin using Yoink, simply click and begin dragging a file. A black translucent shelf fades in on the left (by default) with a graphic that shows you that you can drop a file there. If you drop your file on the shelf, the shelf will stay visible until you drag it back off the shelf to its final destination.

As you can see in the screenshot above, Yoink essentially creates an alias of the file you want to move and places it on the shelf. The file itself remains in its original location until you drag it off the shelf to its final destination. That destination can be anywhere: a Finder window on another Space, an email, or any other full-screened apps that will accept a drag-and-dropped file.

Features

Yoink can function quite a bit like an advanced clipboard manager, even with it’s nimble interface. While a file is sitting on the shelf, a pair of contextual buttons appear next to the thumbnail. The top button is simply a delete command, click it to remove the file from the shelf. The second button, however, is a great deal of help when moving multiple files at once with more than one destination. It’s a Quick Look command, which pops a pane out to the side of the shelf that shows you a preview of the file.

The behavior of Yoink is somewhat customizable through the Preferences window, accessed by clicking the button that looks like tools in the bottom of the shelf.

The optional menu bar icon gives you access to the options menu, the same menu that you get when you click on the tools button on the shelf. You can set the shelf to appear on the left or right side of the screen, or for an even more deft workflow, right where your mouse pointer begins dragging a file. You can set how long you want the shelf to linger on the screen after dropping a file from it, and set how the file behaves once the move is complete.

One Tiny Improvement

One of the first things that hit me as I began working with Yoink is that the shelf doesn’t support file creation. What I mean is that while you can drag files to and from it between folders or emails, you can’t drag, say, an image off of a Safari webpage onto it. I save images from the web quite a bit, and in Snow Leopard (or non-full screen mode in Lion) I can simply click and drag an image from a web page and drop it on the desktop to create a file. If I could drag it to my Yoink shelf, I could keep Safari in full screen and worry about putting that image where I need it later.

From the brief glance I took at some community feedback on the app, I’m not alone in this sentiment. This is by no means a deal breaker, but instead might be just what the app needs to turn it into the utility that a truly must-have utility.

Conclusion

Even though I only use Lion on occasion, Yoink was a savior for the high volume of files that I move around regularly. It’s a great app, and I feel like it sits in a delicate spot of development where there is room for new features without having to worry about the ever-threatening feature-bloat that often plagues lightweight apps like it.

Let us know what you think. Have you had success with Yoink? Or is dragging and dropping files in Lion a non-issue?

Since its inception, the Grand Theft Auto series has gained both controversy and phenomenal success for Rockstar Games and now GTA III, GTA: Vice City and GTA: San Andreas have all been made available to Mac users via the Mac App Store.

Grand Theft Auto San Andreas is the most recent title currently available and is arguably the greatest chapter in the entire GTA series, but is still over eight years old itself. How well does this aging game hold up in 2011? Let’s take a look!

Parental Discretion Is Advised

GTA: San Andreas is most definitely not for children or those who may be offended by the glorification of violence and criminality. The storyline shows petty criminal Carl Johnson’s return to his family home after a five year absence following the murder of his mother. Carl soon becomes embroiled in the gang-underworld, with guns, cars and the level of obscenity turned up to ten.

Gameplay begins with our protagonist at his mother’s house and there are several cut scenes setting out the various characters and intertwined sub-plots, with multiple missions soon available. But, and this is probably the single biggest reason for the Grand Theft Auto series’ success, the user is not limited to following the usual style linear gameplay which one expects from a video game, with a genuinely mind-boggling choice of mini-games, towns and countryside all open to explore.

Big Wide World

For those of us who would never dream of doing such a thing in real life, there is a catharsis felt when stealing a car and driving it recklessly in an across town cop chase and many hours can be spent playing aimlessly like this, just enjoying the expansive scenery available to the curious gamer. It’s the little touches which make the user experience so special. For instance, Carl can ride his bicycle, steal a car or walk to the nearby gym where a series of exercises are available. He can go to get some fast food, have a haircut or visit a tattoo parlor.

Potential girlfriends can be taken out on dates, drug dealers can be robbed and killed, police can be targeted at whim (though with violent repercussions), in addition to a plethora of shops, clubs and interactive characters. To be frank, if Rockstar Games had seen fit to provide the user with this wide world of open play alone and not added a compelling storyline, GTA: San Andreas would still be a win, the fact that they have will place it into many users’ top ten.

Upon delving into the storyline proper and moving past the opening series of missions designed to introduce the playing style, CJ is pitted against rival gang members, petty criminals and police, all out to further their own aims. The mini-games can occasionally frustrate or become repetitive, but this minor point cannot detract from the entertainment brought by the full package. Without wanting to ruin the point of the storyline, if CJ manages to avoid police attention and move up the ranks to become a prominent gangster, the user is rewarded with the opportunity to drive new vehicles, visit new locations and interact with new characters, adding to the vastness felt when playing for the first time.

Soundtrack

It may be a mistake to discuss GTA: San Andreas without at least touching upon the great accompanying soundtrack. Each vehicle contains a choice of radio station and each subsequent radio station has a depth of content and style, with hilarious advertisements and cynical parodies directed toward modern consumer culture, mainstream media and politicians. Each genre is catered to and it is possible to move from Guns N Roses to NWA, the Stone Roses to classic Country and Western.

Graphics Glitch Issues

While GTA: San Andreas seems to be an overwhelming success for most Mac owners, there are a significant number of users complaining of slowdown, graphical glitches and stuttering. I also experienced these issues when reviewing the game on a recent model MacBook Pro with 8GB RAM. However, though Rockstar’s support neglected to respond to my queries and Internet searches proved fruitless, after some time spent tinkering with OS X and game settings, I found a way of fixing this issue on my machines. Please be aware that this is only tested on two Mac’s, one running Snow Leopard and one with OS X Lion, so your results may vary:

Simply navigate to your Mac’s Energy Saver settings pane located within System Preferences and untick the option for ‘put hard disk to sleep when possible’. Fingers crossed, this should do the trick for you too.

One assumes that Rockstar Games will soon patch an update to address this matter and I have read unconfirmed reports that a patch is indeed in the works. Regardless, once the above steps were taken, the game ran very well indeed on both the aforementioned MacBook Pro and an early Core 2 Duo White MacBook and I was able to increase my graphics quality significantly without slowdown, even when leaving a few applications open in the background.

Conclusion

Some games are hyped beyond belief and when revisiting them at a later date, prove to be unworthy of such high praise; GTA: San Andreas is not one of these games. Though the graphics are not at the cutting edge anymore, GTA: San Andreas still bests many titles currently on the Mac App Store. Without the troublesome graphical glitches, this game would warrant an even higher score but with those still not officially resolved on date of writing, they are enough to warrant caution, at least for now.

Bugs aside, users who enjoyed the game on its release can revisit and have some fun causing carnage, while those who missed out the first time can find out what all the fuss was about. Providing you are not offended by the occasionally extreme (but often tounge-in-cheek) violence, cursing and misogyny and can take the game on its many merits, Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas should prove to be a title which will keep you playing for many hours to come.

Hey folks! I’m Jordan McNamara, the Community Manager for Envato and I wanted to share some exciting news with you about the Envato Marketplaces.

The 12th of September was an exciting day for me as a member of our thriving Marketplace community. I along with everyone here at Envato HQ watched eagerly as the global Marketplace member count steadily grew higher and higher and higher… We were close, very close to the 1,000,000 member milestone. With every page refresh the count grew higher and I began to reflect on just how staggering having 1,000,000 members really is and on just what a fantastic community everyone has helped to build here.

I remember starting at Envato in 2009 and being blown away by the 250,000 or so accounts that were registered at the time. I bragged to all of my friends “Can you believe there’s a QUARTER OF A MILLION MEMBERS!?”. Little did I know in just under 2 and a half years I would be writing this post!

To celebrate this exciting occasion we wanted to do something interesting and fun that celebrates the Marketplace community and the sites themselves. So with that in mind, we are proud to present the 1,000,000 Members Infographic! We’ve packed it full of fascinating facts and data about our members and our nine Marketplaces.

Every day we continue to be amazed at the astonishing speed our community of creative members grows. We’ve enjoyed every minute of the journey and are proud and thankful of the achievements our members have made. Here’s to the next million!

View the Infographic!

If you spend a significant duration of time on your Mac for work or play, there’s a reasonable chance that you’ve experienced some degree of discomfort directly caused by that activity. If not, the chances are that you will eventually. The human race did not evolve for countless generations towards enabling mankind to sit at a desk for hours at a time and the effects of this lifestyle on our bodies can range from annoying discomfort to severe pain, or even an early death, as recently highlighted by the somewhat alarming infographic Sitting Is Killing You.

Below we’ll take a more detailed look at RSI and touch upon the larger health issues which also come with living an office-based lifestyle to see what can be done to prevent, alleviate or even cure these problems.

What Is Repetitive Strain Injury?

Repetitive Strain Injury (RSI) is also known by several other terms, such as Repetitive Motion Injury (RMI) and Repetitive Motion Disorder (RMD) and is an injury of the muscles and nerves, caused by repetitive working practices, too much vibration while handling machines, heavy computer use and various other reasons. Though we’re focusing on RSI caused by office and computer use in this article, it can occur in many situations, stresses and environments.

While it’s not correct to state that if you spend your workday in a chair, you will definitely experience health issues, the majority of studies and doctors agree that sitting down all day is bad for your health. But then, standing in one spot all day can also be bad for your health too and let’s not fall into the trap of glamorizing manual labour, which can have sometimes devastating results on the human body. So what’s the answer? Moderation, exercise and following the correct working habits.

Correct Posture And Working Habits

The single most significant way to avoid or alleviate RSI and other related health issues is to adopt the correct posture when sat at your desk and ensure that you get regular breaks and exercise. Apple have their own guidelines which offer some great tips for staying healthy and you can read them here.

There are countless articles on the web that detail how to sit properly at a desk, but for an easy to understand guide, I like this piece on WikiHow and for more detail, this NHS health guide is worth a read too. In brief, some main points to remember are:

• Push your hips as far back in the chair as possible and make sure your back and shoulders are supported
• Ensure feet are flat on the floor.
• Sit quite close to (and directly in front of) your keyboard and mouse, avoiding overreaching.
• Wrists should only be rested on desk when not typing.
• Adjust monitor to a position and level which prevents glare and enables focusing without effort.

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Recommended Software

While a good posture, frequent breaks and an active lifestyle are all more important than software, there are also some great applications which can be used to help minimize RSI. Some of these are:

Dragon Dictate

If like me, you write thousands of words every week and find your hands spending long hours hovering over the keyboard, Dragon Dictate could be for you. Speech recognition software has come a long way in recent years and what was once clumsy and hit-and-miss, is getting closer to perfection. Once you’ve taken the time to familiarize yourself with the software and train it to recognize your voice, Dragon Dictate can be a very useful tool indeed for transcribing long passages of text and, for myself at least, requires a small number of human corrections.

Time Out

It’s important to take regular breaks from your computer but even the most disciplined among us will find it difficult to keep track of time and ensure a break is taken. This is where Time Out comes in.

A free download available on the Mac App Store, Time Out has a dual approach to encouraging you to move away from the computer, with regular ‘mini-breaks’ which occur approximately each fifteen minutes and ‘regular breaks’ at fifty minute intervals. At each scheduled break, the Time Out graphic slowly fades in and takes over your screen for either fifteen seconds (mini-breaks) or ten minutes (regular breaks) and at this time the screen is inaccessible.

Time Out’s breaks can be postponed or skipped with the click of a button

In practice, Time Out is a lot less invasive than it perhaps sounds and after some time adjusting, I even found that Time Out encouraged productivity by allowing both body and mind a brief respite before focusing at 100% again.

TextExpander

TextExpander is a useful application that enables you to create a kind of shorthand for your Mac, so, for example, typing “MAS” can result with “Mac AppStorm”. It can be a somewhat laborious process to get all your keywords set up and to adjust to the new working method, but once you do, you’ll be more productive with less effort!

Desktop Tweaks

There are lots of options open to you when wanting to make your desktop more comfortable, here’s a few in brief:

Convert Your Portable Mac Into A Desktop

Though there’s nothing stopping you from simply placing your MacBook onto a desk and using it as normal, adding a keyboard, mouse and external display will transform it into a fully fledged desktop, with the ergonomic benefits which a desktop Mac offers. For a relatively small price one can purchase Apple’s keyboard and mouse, while using your MacBook in clamshell mode and hooking it up to an external display can complete the transformation.

Alternative Input Devices

Multi-touch trackpads and mice are awesome and can increase productivity while enriching your computing experience significantly. For a minority of people however, such peripherals can exacerbate existing RSI issues and there exists an entire market of alternative input devices, such as trackballs, ergonomic mice and keyboards.

If you can’t take a break, it can help somewhat to switch devices. If performing some light task like writing emails try briefly moving from your Mac to an iPad or iPhone, the alternative method of input will require you to use your muscles in a slightly different way .

Standing Desks

Standing desks are increasingly popular as of late and while they don’t single-handedly cure all health issues related to office work (and can cause some unique issues of their own), a standing desk is likely to be an improvement over sitting down all day. There seems to be mixed opinions on the health benefits of using a standing desk, but for a personal account, I would recommend reading this article by influential blogger Gina Trapani, Why and How I Switched to a Standing Desk.

Sitting On An Exercise Ball

Personally I’ve had no success with this method and was even told that it could do more damage than good by a physiotherapist. Still, some people maintain that switching their office chair to an exercise ball helps their posture and back/neck issues, as blogger Wendy Bumgardner details here.

Conclusion

I hope that this article does not appear too alarmist as it’s perfectly possible to live a healthy life while working with a computer. Different approaches to the problems of RSI and general office based health will suit different people, depending on circumstance and each person’s workplace’s policies.

However, if there is one thing that can probably be applied across the board, it’s that maintaining one position (especially a seated position), can damage your health significantly, but understanding the risks and making sure you’re minimizing the danger will go a long way to ensuring you stay healthy.

StackSocial has just launched a Mac Photo Effects Bundle, and I’m pleased to announce that we have 3 bundles to give away to our readers!

The bundle includes FX Photo Studio Pro, Colour Splash Studio, and InstaDesk – the first 500 people to buy also get four extra licenses of the first two to share with their friends and family. It’s a great chance to get your hands on some quality, and versatile, photo editing apps!

You can take a look at the details of the bundle over on StackSocial, and then enter by following the instructions below…

How to Enter

Entering the competition is really easy. All you need to do is:

1. Post a link to this competition on Twitter mentioning @macappstorm and @stacksocial.
2. Leave a comment, letting me know your Twitter username!

Best of luck, and I’ll be picking the winners in just over a week.

If you’d like to buy the bundle then just enter ‘appstorm10′ in the promo code box when you check out and the first 100 buyers get 10% off! Anyone who buys the bundle now but then wins the competition will be reimbursed.

There is no doubt that the iPhone made push notifications cool and took that idea mainstream for Apple fans. But like most things Apple, at first push notifications weren’t open to all third party apps at launch. When users were clamoring for a way to get notified of things as and when they happen, Boxcar jumped in and filled the void effectively.

Boxcar was an elegant solution and alerted users with instant push notifications for all your social networks, email accounts, RSS feeds and more. As Apple opened up push notifications to third party developers, the influence of Boxcar dropped down a bit, but with 1.2 billion messages delivered to date, it’s an app with no match.

To make the lives of information junkies everywhere easy, Boxcar has released a beta version for Mac making it a breeze to receive super fast notifications when someone comments, updates or messages you. Join me after the break to check out if the app is as good as its iOS counterpart.

Overview

As I mentioned earlier, Boxcar notifies you of any updates from the services you have subscribed to. Like all the other versions of the app, the Mac version is available for free.

In addition to top free services like Twitter and Facebook, the app supports notifications from popular paid services. 27 different services are available for you to choose from. To add and keep track of all of them will require you to sign up for a Boxcar account.

Installation and Setting Up

You will have to download the app at present from their homepage and once they are out of the beta phase of development, the app will be available on the Mac App Store. After a simple drag and drop installation, the Settings screen of the app is displayed. To start using the app, a Boxcar account is essential and there are options to sign in or sign up in the same screen.

Clicking the sign up now button opens up in a new browser window, but it would be great to have the form built right into the app. Except for the hassle of moving your attention to a browser window, the sign up was painless and didn’t even require email validation. After signing up I noticed that a major chunk of app management can be done only via the web interface.

Adding Services

The Add Services button can be found in two different places in the desktop version of the app and neither of them function as they should be. Just like in the case of the sign up, whenever you hit Add Services, the web app will open up in a new window. But since there aren’t many hoops to jump to get a service added to your account, except for this process of back and forth, we can overlook this inconvenience.

Managing the Desktop App

So, when you are all done, wait for a few minutes (or less, depending on how frequent the services you have subscribed to are) for the notifications to come in. Assigning custom sound effects to each service you are tracking is a brilliant feature and means you don’t have to pay attention every time an insignificant notification shows up.

Speaking of sounds, Boxcar offers you two unique options to quiet the app when you don’t want to be interrupted. First, you can use the Mute button to temporarily silence the app for a short duration. Otherwise, you can turn them off altogether from the Preferences screen without having to visit the web app.

Notifications are properly labeled, timestamped and displayed in a chronological order. The badger number helps you stay on top of all the unread notifications since your last visit.  If you plan to read the links, they will all be opened in new browser windows. Sadly, you can only read the notifications. Options to at least retweet or share the notifications will help make the app multifunctional to an extent.

Final Thoughts

I wasn’t thrilled to sign up from a web browser, configure subscriptions and then use the desktop app just for the sake of getting notifications. But it keeps the app free of bloat and makes a huge difference if you are using the mobile version of the app. A major downside I noted was after adding all the services, it took a long time for the notifications to start showing up.

It was weird because all the services I subscribed to earlier have added a bunch updates since then. But once the notifications finally started showing up, they came in regularly. And there were those occasional crashes too. Boxcar for Mac is a welcome new addition to the toolkit of information junkies. You should go for it if you are one!

If you are a professional or at least enthusiastic user of Photoshop or Photoshop Elements, you will have worked with brushes. And the beauty of brushes is that there are millions of them out there and that they can be loaded into PS fairly easily.

But how often has it happened to you that you’ve downloaded some brushes and then later forgot what they looked like? Or maybe you have a huge collection already in PS, but finding the right one requires clicking on every one of the sets. That’s where Brush Pilot comes in – it previews your brushes and saves you oodles of time. We’ll take a look at the helper app after the break.

Preview Any Local Brushes

Whether your brushes are installed in Photoshop or you’ve just downloaded them to a folder of your choice, Brush Pilot finds them immediately. You don’t even have to restart the application, everything happens live.

As you can see, Brush Pilot automatically detected my regular Presets folder that holds all brushes already installed into Photoshop. In addition to that, it shows brushes I downloaded from the web into my Downloads folder.

Simply clicking on a brush brings up the preview in the right pane. And that happens fast. Fast as in immediate! There is no delay or slow build-up of the previews, you can really just go through a large number of sets really quickly in search of something.

The control on the bottom right allows you to scale the previews. That’s especially handy when you want to look at details of high resolution brushes. In the small preview mode, you can look at the entire set; in the large preview mode you can see everything of just one brush.

Manage Brushes Easily

Brush Pilot is more than just a pretty face. Apart from giving you instant previews, you can also install brushes right from within the app and have them available in Photoshop.

All that’s needed is one click on the Install icon on the upper left and it’s done. The brush will be copied to your presets folder, but not removed from the original location.

In case you try to install the same brush twice (which can happen, since there is no feedback for a successful installation), Brush Pilot will warn you that the brush is already there.

Use Brushes Everywhere – Export PNGs

So, what if you have this one awesome brush, but you want to use it as an image, maybe in your Pages document? Brush Pilot does’t fail you. Via the PNG-export button you can export any brush to a PNG file and even set a transparent background.

If your brush set contains more than just one brush, all of them will be exported as separate files. Extremely convenient and much faster than doing it yourself via Photoshop.

Verdict

Granted, Brush Pilot is a niche-product, but those of use working regularly with Photoshop and making use of brushes can optimize their workflow with this little helper app.

The features mentioned above are just the core functions; there are many more aspects like file-path-view, deleting brushes or printing brush overviews which can come in handy.

So, for all heavy brush users out there: take a look at Brush Pilot. The trial version is limited to show only 5 brushes per set, but you can see for yourself how fast it is and how useful. But be careful: once you’re hooked, there’s no going back.