Category: Mac

It’s hard to believe that we’re coming up on a year since the Mac App Store was first announced. It seems like only yesterday we were itching to get our hands on a marketplace full of great utilities, games and other goodies all custom tailored to the Mac platform.

While categories like Games took off dramatically right from the start, the offerings for designers and developers got off to a much slower start and are just now starting to really take off. Below is a collection of over thirty useful Mac App Store apps for designers. I’ve intentionally left out obvious favorites like Pixelmator and tried to keep the list more towards hidden gems that you may not have tried yet. Take a look!

Measuring

Sizewise

Sizewise helps you quickly test your designs on a number of resolutions. You can enter in your own size or use one of the built-in presets. Sizewise can simulate a menubar, Dock, and desktop to provide a realistic replica of what users will see.

Price: $4.99

xScope

There are lots of tools that allow you to measure things on your screen but xScope easily stands out as one of the best. The on screen rulers can measure items, grab the distance between two items, span multiple monitors and even measure rotation. It’s a little pricey but justifiably so as it provides a lot more functionality than many of its competitors.

Price: $29.99

Guideliner

In addition to measuring objects on the screen, this app allows you to drag guides out over any content similar to how you would in Photoshop. There are some nice customization features as well.

Price: $19.99

Pixelstick

Pixelstick is much cheaper than the two previous options and has a pretty unique interface that helps you quickly grab distances and angles or copy colors to your clipboard.

Price: $6.99

Art Director’s Toolkit

Art Director’s Toolkit took the idea of a standard screen ruler and expanded it with a number of other utilities such as character palettes, fractions/decimal converters, color tools, and scaling calculators. Art Director’s Toolkit has been around for a number of years and is definitely a top-notch tool for designers of all kinds.

Price: $19.99

Design

Aurora 3D Maker

If you’re not into 3D modeling, it can be difficult to successfully generate accurate three dimensional graphics. Anyone can use Aurora 3D Maker to easily create extruded text, logos and more, rotate them in 3D space and apply different colors, textures and lighting setups.

Price: $29.99

ExportTools Professional

ExportTools Professional is a super powerful exporting tool for InDesign and QuarkXPress that allows you to quickly transform multiple documents into multi-page PDFs. You can also have Exportools Professional periodically scan a watched folder where you move or copy files. Every time a scan is performed, new files will be automatically added to the queue ready for processing.

Price: $99.99

Templates for Pages

This isn’t so much an app as it is a collection of 250 extra templates for Pages. If you’re not quite at the level of designing from scratch in Photoshop, Illustrator or InDesign, Pages provides a great entry-level alternative. This set of templates will expand your options and provide great starting points for posters, brochures and more.

Price: $16.99

Scopeworks

This one is a silly and fun utility for generating kaleidoscope images and animations. However, the results are often fairly interesting patterns that any designer could definitely find some legitimate uses for!

Price: $7.99

Icon Slate

Creating icon files can be a pain, this tool lets you easily compose, import or export icons in many formats : Apple icns, Microsoft ico, CandyBar iContainer, image (png or tiff). You can drag in multiple images, customize your background color, even view a quick preview in the dock!

Price: $4.99

Branch Designer

Every designer loves some good organic graphics, but they can be a little tricky and time consuming to pull off, especially if you’re a beginner. Branch Designer gives you the tools you need to generate custom branch graphics. The user defines the main trunk using a vector path, the offshoots and the leaves are then generated according to a set of parameters, that can easily be changed.

Price: $19.99

Prototypes

This is a really great little tool for anyone designing for iOS. You can turn your still mockup images from Photoshop, Illustrator or Fireworks into a tappable prototype that runs on iPhone or iPod Touch. There’s no coding required, just drag and drop to build your test app workflows.

Price: $39.99

Page Layers

This is a fantastic little tool that allows you to enter a URL, the contents of which will then be converted to a full-layered Photoshop file. Page Layers renders every element on the whole page to a separate, transparent layer. It’s sort of like a PSD to HTML tool in reverse!

Price: $11.99

VectorPro Color

VectorPro Color is an affordable autotracing tool that transforms bitmap images into high quality, scaleable vector files. This version allows you to trace black and white, grayscale and even color images, adjusting the number of colors used along the way.

Price: $19.99

PSD Localizer

If you’ve ever worked with designers from other countries then you know that localizing a Photoshop file can be quite the process. This app claims to automatically convert the file so that any text automatically appears in the language indicated.

Price: $4.99

Patterno

Patterno helps you create attractive patterns that tile seamlessly and therefore make perfect backgrounds for websites and other projects. The simple but effective toolset makes it easy for anyone to create tiling backgrounds by compiling multiple graphics files. Just choose your resources, adjust the parameters and you’re ready to go.

Price: $19.99

iArt Pro

iArt Pro is a sharp looking, super simple graphics editor for Mac. It’s a good starter app for anyone looking to do extremely basic photo editing, drawing or painting. The toolset is pretty standard and will provide a decent stepping stone to work your way up to something much larger like Photoshop.

Price: $7.99

Griddle

Griddle is a custom grid generator that can be used for all types of design work. You can adjust all kinds of settings including the size, origin, number of lines, line color and more. The resulting file has a transparent background so you can easily toss it on top of whatever you’re working on.

Price: $1.99

Artboard

Artboard is an impressive vector editing application with all kinds of powerful features: layers, built-in styles and clipart, bezier drawing and editing, pen tablet support, text to outlines conversion, masking and a lot more.

Price: $25.99

Layers

This app is just like Page Layers above but instead of capturing the items from a web page, it captures every item on your screen and outputs a layered PSD. This is extremely useful for designing custom screen mockups.

Price: $24.99

Developer

Sprite Monkey

When creating a web design, many designers and developers prefer to combine multiple images into a single document, which can then be essentially cropped via CSS to be placed as all the various individual images. This little tool will help you quickly compile your images into a single sprite sheet. Just select a folder of png images and then select what you want to save it as.

Price: $2.99

Hype

With the recent popularity of CSS3 and HTML5, web animation has reached an entirely new era. With Hype you can create complex, beautiful HTML5 animations in a user friendly WYSIWYG environment that saves you hours of coding time and frustration.

Price: $29.99

Fonts & Typography

Fontographer

Fontographer is a serious professional application for font designers. With it you’ll have access to a full suite of tools that will help you create new fonts from scratch, customize and add to existing fonts or even fix issues with poorly constructed fonts. If you’re looking to get into custom typeface design, this is an awesome place to start.

Price: $399.99

Fontcase

In the world of font managers, OS X’s built-in Font Book utility ranks pretty low and leaves many professional designers feeling less than impressed. Fontcase is one attractive and functional alternative that has become quite popular in recent years. The strength here is in the interface, which provides beautiful font previews and even tagging so you can quickly and easily find the font you want and move on. I’ve heard that some Lion users are experiencing some issues, but I’m sure the developers will have it patched up in no time.

Price: $29.99

Glyphs

Glyphs is a slightly more affordable alternative to Fontagrapher above. It has many of the same features, including the ability to create custom fonts or edit existing fonts. The interface looks pretty slick and definitely packs a major punch of functionality.

Price: $299.99

Font Catalog Creator

If you’ve got a million different fonts, and every designer does, it can be difficult to sort through them, keep them organized, or offer your clients a few choice selections. With this handy utility you can create awesome printable catalogs of your entire font library. You’ll love the ability to physically browse through your fonts and see them in a new light.

Price: $19.99

Art Text 2

Art Text 2 is a tool that helps you convert plain boring text into impressive logos, banners and the like. The interface is based on preset styles and shapes so you’ll be creating awesome pieces of art in only a few clicks. The results vary from super cheesy to fairly stunning, it’s all in who is using it!

Price: $19.99

Color

Colors

A simple but effective little color loupe that helps you capture any color on your screen and copy it to your clipboard.

Price: $2.99

ColorChooser

ColorChooser is a menu bar utility that helps you create and grab colors. You can select colors using the standard built-in Mac OS X color pickers, or use the magnifying glass tool to pick up a color from your screen. You can then copy and paste the color using a number of different supported formats.

Price: $3.99

ColorPalette

Rather than grabbing individual colors from your screen, ColorPalette helps you build attractive color schemes by using a popular designer’s trick that involves sampling colors from a photograph (which tend to have very nature palettes). Simply drop in a photo, tweak the settings and it will be reduced to a basic grid of colors.

Price: $1.99

ColorSnapper

ColorSnapper is another menu bar color grabber app, this time with a few cool tricks like a global keyboard shortcut and the ability to see recently grabbed colors.

Price: $4.99

Pochade

One last menu bar color utility, this one with a unique UI and some powerful features like building custom collections of colors for quick access. If you’re a serious color fan, this may be your best bet.

Price: $9.99

Image Compression/Conversion

JPEG4Web

Need to optimize a big batch of JPGs for web use? JPEG4Web has you covered. It allows you to compress, resize, crop and add watermarks to your images. It also includes live preview and final file size information.

Price: $9.99

ConvertIt

This little utility makes for lightning fast conversion of images into one of eight formats: PNG, JPEG, TIFF, PDF, GIF, ICNS, BMP, ICO. Just drag a group of images to the ConvertIt icon, choose the file type and you’re done.

Price: $0.99

Imagexy Batch Photo Resizer

Imagexy Batch Photo Resizer handles really large image sizing batches with ease. Throw thousands of images at it and just watch it work. You can even resize psd’s in addition to the typical jpg, gif, png and pdf.

Price: $9.99

Snap Converter

A super simple drag and drop file converter. Convert bitmap graphics, Mac and Windows icons, Camera RAW images, Photoshop documents, and many other formats. You can even create multi-image Mac icon files from a single image.

Price: $4.99

PNGPress

To be honest, I don’t usually give much thought to my file size for web projects if I’m using JPGs, but as soon as I start bringing PNGs into the picture then I definitely seek to keep things as small as possible. This app will help you make your PNGs as tiny as possible for web use.

Price: $0.99

RightClickImages

This one is a unique spin on image conversion. You simply right click on an image or folder of images and choose between the popular format choices, the app then jumps into action and performs its task. Quick, easy and intuitive!

Price: $4.99

Tell Us Your Favorites!

Now that you’ve seen our list of awesomely useful Mac apps for designers, leave a comment below and tell us about your favorites that aren’t listed. Are there any apps that you’re surprised haven’t made it to the Mac App Store yet?

While you’re at it, let us know which of the apps above you’ve tried and what you thought of them. I’d love to hear about your experiences with each.

Last week we published an article that got a lot of meaningful discussion going about menu bar apps. In it we outlined the all too common problem of the overflowing menu bar for MacBook users and discussed whether or not the best solution to the problem was to tell users that they are being overzealous or present developers with the request to give us more control over whether a given app appears in the menu or dock.

Today we’re following that up with a poll that simply asks how many third party menu bar apps you typically run at any given time. Are you picky about what earns a spot in your menu bar or are you a menu bar app addict who simply can’t get enough? We want to know!

After you vote, leave a comment below and let us know which menu bar apps you currently have open. Don’t cheat and take the time to open or close any, just take a gander at the top of your screen and give an honest account of what’s currently up there. Which are your favorites? Which do you think you could live without?

Last week we published an article that got a lot of meaningful discussion going about menu bar apps. In it we outlined the all too common problem of the overflowing menu bar for MacBook users and discussed whether or not the best solution to the problem was to tell users that they are being overzealous or present developers with the request to give us more control over whether a given app appears in the menu or dock.

Today we’re following that up with a poll that simply asks how many third party menu bar apps you typically run at any given time. Are you picky about what earns a spot in your menu bar or are you a menu bar app addict who simply can’t get enough? We want to know!

After you vote, leave a comment below and let us know which menu bar apps you currently have open. Don’t cheat and take the time to open or close any, just take a gander at the top of your screen and give an honest account of what’s currently up there. Which are your favorites? Which do you think you could live without?

Last week we published an article that got a lot of meaningful discussion going about menu bar apps. In it we outlined the all too common problem of the overflowing menu bar for MacBook users and discussed whether or not the best solution to the problem was to tell users that they are being overzealous or present developers with the request to give us more control over whether a given app appears in the menu or dock.

Today we’re following that up with a poll that simply asks how many third party menu bar apps you typically run at any given time. Are you picky about what earns a spot in your menu bar or are you a menu bar app addict who simply can’t get enough? We want to know!

After you vote, leave a comment below and let us know which menu bar apps you currently have open. Don’t cheat and take the time to open or close any, just take a gander at the top of your screen and give an honest account of what’s currently up there. Which are your favorites? Which do you think you could live without?

These days, it sometimes feels like I sign up for a new social network every single week. So many people I know work on a daily basis with Twitter, Facebook, Google+, Tumblr, Flickr, LinkedIn, Foursquare, YouTube…the list goes on. Often, managing those networks is as big of a task as the actual work you have to get done. As a result, we’ve seen growth in an obvious market for apps and services that consolidate those networks and let you manage what gets shared and where.

Life Stream is a (very) young contender in this space, developed by Bloop. It attempts to integrate all of your social networks into one stream of social media information. How well does it execute this premise? Hit that “more” link to find out.

Accounts

Naturally, the first thing you’ll need to do after running Life Stream is connect it with some (or all, support allowing) of your social networks. The app connects using each networks public API, which is both comforting as well as indicative of the exclusion of certain networks.

Presently, Life Stream supports Facebook, Twitter, Myspace, YouTube, Google Buzz, Instagram, Flickr, Gowalla, Foursquare, LinkedIn, and Gmail, but Bloop has promised integration of more networks as development continues.

It’s important to note here that Life Stream does not support posting to your accounts (though it will let you comment on certain things like YouTube videos and Facebook posts)–it is solely for monitoring the activity on your social networks. While I appreciate what this could do for productivity, this would need to change if Life Stream is to become my main social media hub application.

Interface/Usability

There are a lot of places that Life Stream falls short of becoming my go-to social media aggregator, but the interface really isn’t one of them. It is bold, clean, and looks really good.

A list of all supported accounts is displayed on the left side of the window (the blue icons are the ones that I have connected). Additionally, each icon will display a red indicator if there is a problem connecting, or a yellow indicator if that account is in the process of syncing.

Next to the accounts bar is the stream. This is where the main functionality of Life Stream is located. All of your connected accounts funnel into one consolidated stream of information. The Life Stream window can be adjusted to three different layouts with the buttons on the bottom, the first of these only showing the stream pane. I found this to be the most useful view, as it would let me keep an eye on all of my social media accounts while working. The inability to post actually came in handy here, as I was able to keep tabs on my networks without getting too off-task from my work.

The second window view shows the content pane, which will display the content of which ever item from the stream you click on. This is where comment boxes are displayed if the networks supports it. Also, YouTube videos will display in this pane, as well as videos posted to Facebook. For some reason, content that includes links (such as tweets) won’t display the link, but rather an icon (literally displayed as “Link”) that will open the link in a new browser window, or in the third pane, if enabled.

The third pane is for in-app web browsing. As far as I can tell, it does a decent job supporting browsing, but the inability of content in the content pane to resize itself makes viewing Life Stream in three-pane mode absurdly wide. This may not be an issue on some of the larger iMacs, but I certainly couldn’t fit the full width of Life Stream on my 15” MacBook screen.

While you can search your stream with the search bar at the top, the one major interface change I would like to see added to Life Stream is the ability to view your incoming information by account. Currently, there is no way to separate the posts coming in from each of your networks–they can only be viewed in the consolidated stream.

Conclusion

We’ve seen developers try to tackle this obvious app/service niche before. Admittedly, I had really high hopes for Life Stream, and while I can forgive it for being such a young project, it has a long way to go before it lands a permanent spot on my dock. The main thing I see in this app is potential.

Life Stream, as I mentioned, is still a relatively new application, and as more networks get integrated, it could definitely get better. The concept for the app is brilliant, and while we’ve seen it in both app and web-service form, I still await a suitable desktop application. The two most important things in such an application, in my opinion, would be overwhelming support for all of my social networks, as well as an interface that gives me easy access to all of the information I want to see and the ability to contribute to those networks.

What would you look for in a social media management app?

Our sponsor this week is Studiometry, an amazing professional project management tool from Oranged Software.

Studiometry is a powerhouse of professional organization tools. Whether you’re managing contacts, generating estimates, tracking work, or billing clients, this one app has you covered in a single beautifully cohesive workflow.

Small businesses, freelancers, large organizations, all types of professionals from every industry can relate to the incredibly practical suite of tools in Studiometry. Unlike simple todo apps, which are a dime a dozen, this is a genuinely useful and fully featured productivity tool that can help you manage almost every aspect of your company.

I particularly like the invoicing capabilities with Studiometry and the fact that the whole suite of tools syncs seamlessly with Studiometery Touch so you can take your work everywhere you go and aren’t necessarily tethered to a laptop.

Go Get It!

Studiometry is available on the Oranged Software’s website for $199.95 (multi-user packs also available). If you’re interested in giving it a shot, check out the Free Trial.

These days, it sometimes feels like I sign up for a new social network every single week. So many people I know work on a daily basis with Twitter, Facebook, Google+, Tumblr, Flickr, LinkedIn, Foursquare, YouTube…the list goes on. Often, managing those networks is as big of a task as the actual work you have to get done. As a result, we’ve seen growth in an obvious market for apps and services that consolidate those networks and let you manage what gets shared and where.

Life Stream is a (very) young contender in this space, developed by Bloop. It attempts to integrate all of your social networks into one stream of social media information. How well does it execute this premise? Hit that “more” link to find out.

Accounts

Naturally, the first thing you’ll need to do after running Life Stream is connect it with some (or all, support allowing) of your social networks. The app connects using each networks public API, which is both comforting as well as indicative of the exclusion of certain networks.

Presently, Life Stream supports Facebook, Twitter, Myspace, YouTube, Google Buzz, Instagram, Flickr, Gowalla, Foursquare, LinkedIn, and Gmail, but Bloop has promised integration of more networks as development continues.

It’s important to note here that Life Stream does not support posting to your accounts (though it will let you comment on certain things like YouTube videos and Facebook posts)–it is solely for monitoring the activity on your social networks. While I appreciate what this could do for productivity, this would need to change if Life Stream is to become my main social media hub application.

Interface/Usability

There are a lot of places that Life Stream falls short of becoming my go-to social media aggregator, but the interface really isn’t one of them. It is bold, clean, and looks really good.

A list of all supported accounts is displayed on the left side of the window (the blue icons are the ones that I have connected). Additionally, each icon will display a red indicator if there is a problem connecting, or a yellow indicator if that account is in the process of syncing.

Next to the accounts bar is the stream. This is where the main functionality of Life Stream is located. All of your connected accounts funnel into one consolidated stream of information. The Life Stream window can be adjusted to three different layouts with the buttons on the bottom, the first of these only showing the stream pane. I found this to be the most useful view, as it would let me keep an eye on all of my social media accounts while working. The inability to post actually came in handy here, as I was able to keep tabs on my networks without getting too off-task from my work.

The second window view shows the content pane, which will display the content of which ever item from the stream you click on. This is where comment boxes are displayed if the networks supports it. Also, YouTube videos will display in this pane, as well as videos posted to Facebook. For some reason, content that includes links (such as tweets) won’t display the link, but rather an icon (literally displayed as “Link”) that will open the link in a new browser window, or in the third pane, if enabled.

The third pane is for in-app web browsing. As far as I can tell, it does a decent job supporting browsing, but the inability of content in the content pane to resize itself makes viewing Life Stream in three-pane mode absurdly wide. This may not be an issue on some of the larger iMacs, but I certainly couldn’t fit the full width of Life Stream on my 15” MacBook screen.

While you can search your stream with the search bar at the top, the one major interface change I would like to see added to Life Stream is the ability to view your incoming information by account. Currently, there is no way to separate the posts coming in from each of your networks–they can only be viewed in the consolidated stream.

Conclusion

We’ve seen developers try to tackle this obvious app/service niche before. Admittedly, I had really high hopes for Life Stream, and while I can forgive it for being such a young project, it has a long way to go before it lands a permanent spot on my dock. The main thing I see in this app is potential.

Life Stream, as I mentioned, is still a relatively new application, and as more networks get integrated, it could definitely get better. The concept for the app is brilliant, and while we’ve seen it in both app and web-service form, I still await a suitable desktop application. The two most important things in such an application, in my opinion, would be overwhelming support for all of my social networks, as well as an interface that gives me easy access to all of the information I want to see and the ability to contribute to those networks.

What would you look for in a social media management app?

Our sponsor this week is Studiometry, an amazing professional project management tool from Oranged Software.

Studiometry is a powerhouse of professional organization tools. Whether you’re managing contacts, generating estimates, tracking work, or billing clients, this one app has you covered in a single beautifully cohesive workflow.

Small businesses, freelancers, large organizations, all types of professionals from every industry can relate to the incredibly practical suite of tools in Studiometry. Unlike simple todo apps, which are a dime a dozen, this is a genuinely useful and fully featured productivity tool that can help you manage almost every aspect of your company.

I particularly like the invoicing capabilities with Studiometry and the fact that the whole suite of tools syncs seamlessly with Studiometery Touch so you can take your work everywhere you go and aren’t necessarily tethered to a laptop.

Go Get It!

Studiometry is available on the Oranged Software’s website for $199.95 (multi-user packs also available). If you’re interested in giving it a shot, check out the Free Trial.

The basic concept behind SwitRing isn’t exactly new, mouse-activated gestures have been around for ages. In fact, I used to be quite fond of using the gestures feature in Quicksilver. It’s nice to be able to whirl your mouse around as if it were a magic wand and have that interpreted as a command to carry out a specific action.

Typically though, gesture apps work basically the same way: you draw a basic shape with your mouse, then associate that with an action. The problem of course with this method is that three weeks later you can never remember all those silly shapes that made so much sense when you set them up. The alternative is something like BetterTouchTool, which adds more multitouch features to your Magic Mouse or trackpad.

SwiftRing is an app still in its infancy stages that seeks to rethink how mouse gestures work. Instead of forcing you to memorize various acrobatic cursor actions, all you do is press a hotkey and move your mouse in a given direction. Let’s take a closer look and see how this works.

Launching an Action

By default, the “Option” key is the trigger for SwiftRing. Holding down “Option” for 0.8 seconds (a customizable duration) will bring up the following menu:

As you can see, each direction is associated with an action such as closing or minimizing a window. You might be tempted to think that you have to click on one of the areas shown to enforce the action, but all you really have to do is move your mouse in that direction and the action will fire.

You’ll notice that the top and bottom direction have two commands associated with them. This is confusing at first, but as it turns out, those furthest from the center of the ring are accessed via a scroll action. Here’s that graphic again with some helpful labels applied.

No Waiting Required

One really great feature of SwiftRing is that you don’t really need to wait for the ring to appear. Its visibility is delayed and really only serves as a reminder in case you forgot something. As soon as you hold down your hotkey, you can pull off a gesture whether the ring has popped into view or not. This dramatically increases the speed with which you can use the app.

Customizing Actions

The real power and draw of SwiftRing obviously doesn’t lie in this simple default setup but in the wealth of customization options that it offers. Let’s take a look inside the Preferences to see what else this handy tool can do.

This is your control center where you can define just about everything you could want to change. You can start off by deciding what your custom hotkey is and how long the delay on the ring preview is, then proceed on to setting up your own rings.

Creating Your Own Rings

Instead of giving you one ring to rule them all (meaning every app), SwiftRing allows you to set up a number of custom-built rings (in addition to a few pre-built defaults) that work only with specified applications. For instance, you’ll likely want different actions for Safari and iTunes.

To see how this all worked, I set up a custom ring for Photoshop. First, I added a new ring to the “Saved Rings” panel and then selected Photoshop from the “Applications” menu on the bottom left.

Next, I selected each segment in the bottom right and recorded the actions that I wanted associated with that segment. Basically, each action is really just a keyboard shortcut that you’re choosing to run with the mouse instead.

By default there are only four segments to a ring, but you can add up to six segments, each assigned to a custom action.

Subrings

SwiftRing has one more interesting feature worth noting: subrings. These allow you to set a given segment to launch a whole other ring (subring segments appear darker than the others around them). These are really helpful if you’ve covered your maximum number of actions for one ring but would like to add even more functionality.

Worth a Download?

I have a lot of good things to say about SwiftRing, but let’s get the critiques out of the way first. For starters, it should definitely be noted that the app is still in beta and hasn’t officially hit 1.0 yet so it’s not fair to treat it as a completed utility.

With that said, it does have some minor kinks to be worked out. For example, I’m not sure that it’s been overhauled to be fully compatible with Lion. Some actions like launching Mission Control (which it still calls “Spaces” from Snow Leopard) are fairly glitchy. Further, sometimes the proper apps don’t show up as options when creating a custom ring. For instance, Finder and Photoshop are frequently missing from my options, despite being open and active.

Aside from some small bugs that will no doubt be smoothed over soon, SwiftRing is incredibly useful and is an awesome utility considering that it’s currently free (no guarantee of it staying that way). The only feature I’d really like to see added is support for launching things that aren’t based on keyboard shortcuts: apps, scripts, etc.

My biggest issue with SwiftRing is trying to decide where to use it. For most actions, it seems like combining keyboard and mouse input is unnecessarily complex when I could simply hit a keyboard shortcut. There is an “Other Mouse Button” option but I haven’t been able to get that working yet so I’m not quite sure what it does.

The places where I find SwiftRing to be most useful are keyboard shortcuts that are either difficult to remember or real finger twisters. For example, in Photoshop, “Command-Shift-Option-S” launches “Save for Web,” a command I use regularly. In this case, holding “Option” and moving my mouse is clearly an easier action that genuinely improves my workflow.

Conclusion

SwiftRing is a utility in the early stages of development that seeks to rethink how mouse-powered gestures are approached in OS X. Rather than drawing complex shapes with your cursor or performing a multitouch gesture with your hand, SwiftRing lets you activate custom actions with little more than a flick of your cursor.

It’s currently a little fidgety but I really enjoyed using it and definitely encourage you to check out the free download.

Despite the rise in popularity of TV on demand, Internet and Twitter, I still like listening to the radio. It offers such a wide variety of songs and different kinds of programs that, for example TV, doesn’t offer. Call me a dinosaur if you will, but I would much rather listen to the radio for a couple of hours than wind it away in front of some lifeless, cheap TV program.

Believe it or not, I don’t actually own a radio – I tune in via the Internet. I am currently based in Germany, and from time to time, I need a good, solid dose of British culture to remind me of my roots. I can get all my British radio stations (such as BBC Radio 1) via the Internet, without having to pay any kind of license fees (unlike television).

When you look at the figures, the popularity of Internet radio is on the rise. In 2007, 11% of the U.S. population listened to the radio via the Internet; in 2008 this figure had crept up to 13% (and is presumably still on the rise). It’s certainly cheaper than buying an actual radio, and you can listen to stations from different parts of the country.

There are, of course, a number of ways to listen to Internet radio. You can do it “the old-fashioned way” and listen to it streaming via the radio station’s website. You can also listen to it on the move using, for example, a program like TuneIn Radio, one of the most popular choices. But what about on your Mac? It is a real pain having to search around the Net for that station you want to listen to.

Well, luckily there is a solution for us Mac users. Radioline is a lightweight, yet functional program which streams Internet radio for you right onto your desktop (conceptually very similar to Radium). Say goodbye to Google searches and Flash-based streamers which either crash or take 30 minutes to stream. With Radioline you can simply click on the radio station you want to listen to, sit back and immerse yourself.

Sounds great, doesn’t it? Let’s take a closer peek…

Features

Radioline is a relatively new application to the App Store, so don’t be expecting loads of flashy features. The developer is, however, welcome to all feedback and comments regarding the program, so if you like it (or see some room for improvement), drop them a quick post on their forums.

On opening up Radioline, a list of stations that are near to you pops up based on your Mac’s location settings. You can, of course, scroll through these and to start playing a station, simply double-click or hit the play button in the toolbar.

RadioLine has stations from over 100 countries in its database, so you’ll never be short of something to listen to. Searching for new stations is extremely simple – simply enter the station you want to listen to into the search bar and RadioLine will find any radio station that matches your search query. You can request any missing radio stations by clicking here and sending an e-mail to the developers.

You can also star your favorite radio stations so you don’t lose track of them or have to search for them continuously!

Icing on the Cake

Radioline has a couple of handy little features built in to make your Internet radio listening experience a far more enjoyable (and easier) one. The application integrates with Growl and you can set up a number of handy keyboard shortcuts, for example to notify you via Growl which station you are listening to. You can also set up keyboard shortcuts so that you can switch stations easily in the background, without disturbing what you are doing.

Radioline also supports album art and logos and can also notify you if something you like is playing on another favorite station, so you don’t miss your favorite song! If you don’t want the app intruding on your workflow, then you can turn on the mini-player view, which shrinks Radioline down into a tidy widget.

Practicality

Radioline is a nice, simple Mac application and it does its job well. Unfortunately, this practicality comes at a slight price. For such a basic application, the standard price of $9.99 seems quite high. Other programs offer the same functionality for less or even for nothing, and unfortunately as of yet there is no trial version of Radioline available.

Having said that, is a lot more convenient than having to search around the Internet to find those stations that you want. It’s obviously up to you if this is worth ten of your hard-earned American dollars.

Conclusion

As I mentioned above, Radioline is a newcomer to the Mac App Store, and all applications start out small. I can see great potential in it, and since the developers are up for hearing new ideas (or improvements on existing ones), it’s worth letting them know what you think of the app.

Radioline has earned a decent score of 8 out of 10 and I hope that the developers carry on with its development as it is a very useful little program that can save you some serious leeway. But for an app that costs nearly $10, I was expecting a little more oomph. Here’s hoping for more features in future updates!

There’s a lot to like about both of Apple’s most recent operating systems: Snow Leopard is stable, fast and mature enough to ensure that any significant bugs are probably fixed by now, while Lion brings new trackpad gestures, additional eye candy, new ways of managing and launching apps, along with a slick iOS-influenced user interface.

If you have a recent model Mac and don’t rely on Snow Leopard’s Rosetta support, it’s probably going to be relatively easy to make up your mind to upgrade or not. However, if your Mac is older, this is a more complex question. Let’s explore it further…

Some Background

As I suspect is the case with many Mac.AppStorm readers, I’ve long been an early adopter when it comes to OS X. I’ve rushed out to get my hands on each iteration of Apple’s Mac operating system since Tiger and was dual-booting my MacBook Pro with OS X Lion from the early developers builds onwards.

To be frank, I was pretty much blown away with the early builds and right away decided that Lion may well be a game-changer. I still feel the same way but have a couple of older Intel Macs which I have to decide whether to upgrade or not, as they currently do not make the grade.

Here’s some points to consider both in favor of staying on Snow Leopard and upgrading to Lion.

Reasons To Stay On Snow Leopard

Multitouch

If your Mac doesn’t have the new style multitouch trackpad, you will need to purchase either Apple’s Magic Trackpad or Magic Mouse in order to make full use of Lion’s great gestures. This is not such a big deal for desktop users but more so for notebook owners.

Airdrop

Airdrop may not be compatible with your Mac. To check if it is, take a look at the system requirements for Airdrop listed here.

Rosetta

Lion does not support Rosetta, so PowerPC applications are now unusable. This may not be a big deal to you, but it’s a deal breaker to some and you may even be surprised to find that you’re running such software without realizing it.

A simple way to check if you’re running any PowerPC apps is to navigate to your System Profiler and then look under ‘Software’. Here you should see a list of applications and if you choose to sort by ‘Kind’, it should be easy to spot any applications which are based on PowerPC architecture. A visit to the relevant developer’s website will usually be enough to uncover whether there is an updated version in the works.

RAM

Lion’s minimum requirements freezes out all owners of the original 32bit Core Duo (not Core 2 Duo) Macs and Apple specifies that you need a minimum of 2GB RAM to run the OS. Though 2GB RAM is fine for normal daily computer use, some may find their Mac lagging when doing anything intensive with this baseline amount.

Stability and Compatibility

As I mentioned in the opening paragraph, Snow Leopard is now mature and stable, so your Mac should be able to run it with very few bugs or issues, providing you are fully updated. In addition, there’s a lot of software out there that’s already working on Snow Leopard, while some developers still have to catch up to Lion.

Upgrade To Lion

Upgrades Are Relatively Inexpensive

If you’re willing to spend just a small amount of money on maxing out your RAM, your Mac will offer excellent performance for some time to come. Further, if you’re willing to install an SSD drive in there, it’ll really fly!

Your Mac Will Probably Be Supported For Some Time

Though Apple have shown themselves to be not at all shy about suddenly dropping support for older computers, Intel Core 2 Duo processors were the standard engine powering for most new Macs until very recently so it’s reasonable to assume that they will be supported for a while yet.

The ‘Magic’ Of Lion

The Lion experience is really quite something to behold on a Mac running the required specifications and multitouch interface in place, it’s an exciting feeling to be on the cutting edge of Apple’s innovation.

So Much More Yet To Come

Though in the past operating system upgrades have resulted in long periods of broken software, it seems that developers have really gotten on board with Lion and many applications are already updated to support it, with cool new features like Versions being utilized. In the coming months we are likely to see a whole new level of innovation, making full use of Lion’s new abilities.

250 New Features

Finally, there are those 250 new features, many of which you may be familiar with to a lesser or greater degree.

Further Reading

If you are thinking of making some upgrades to your Mac, our editor Joshua Johnson wrote two great guides last year which are still relevant and should provide some more food for thought. The RAM guide is here, while you should click here for the hard drive article.

In addition, here’s a few links to some other great Mac.AppStorm articles on OS X Lion, which also contain valuable insights and experiences from our readers in the comments:

• Versions, Autosave and Resume: The Unsung Heroes of Lion
• Weekly Poll: How Often Do You Use Mission Control?
• Weekly Poll: How Would You Rate Lion in Terms of Bugs?
• Making The Most Of Mission Control

Should You Stay Or Should You Go?

Admittedly I have given no definite answers to this question, but it’s such a personal choice that there’s no hard and fast rule to recommend which path you should take. Ask yourself if you’re happy to continue using your computer for the near future and if you’d like to check out Lion’s new features. If the answer is no to either, perhaps you can stay a while longer on Snow Leopard.

Personally, I’ve done both. My new Mac has been upgraded to Lion and will remain so, while I don’t want to spend even a small amount of money upgrading my older computers, since they work so well with Snow Leopard already.

Translate Tab is a super slick menu bar implementation of the popular Google Translate service. You can translate words, phrases, paragraphs or even entire sites into 57 different languages without leaving your desktop.

We’re super excited to announce that we have a whopping 30 TranslateTab licenses to give away this week!

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, September 29th. Good luck to everyone who enters and thanks for reading Mac.AppStorm!

Platformers are perhaps one of the most popular, the oldest and overdone genres in gaming. They have been re-thought a bunch of times over the years by adding a few new gimmicks to them, but most of them seem to have lost their touch and are no longer fun the way they used to be.

Today we’re reviewing a platformer that brings back to form the retro style of gaming, eight-bit and all. Everything from the graphics to the music is done in a fantastic way that combines old-school gaming with the kind of deeper gameplay found in newer games. It’s called Bit.Trip.Runner.

Getting Started

Bit.Trip Runner is a very interesting and unique platformer. As I mentioned before, it’s made in a very 8-bit fashion: everything from the graphics to the music, which will bring you way back to older times in gaming. You play the part of this weird-looking black thing called CommanderVideo who falls somewhere in an asteroid, and for some reason he must rush through a bunch of levels collecting coins that are spread all over the levels that you encounter.

You have no control over where your character goes, he (or it, I guess) will always run straight forward and the only things that you can control is when he performs actions like jump, kick and slide down. You must use all these and other actions to avoid obstacles and get to the finish line of each level. You really have to time your jumps perfectly, which is pretty much what the game is based around: timing. That and trial-and-error!

The coins you’re collecting are floating red cross signs scattered across the level that will give your character more color and change your performance to things like “Hiper”, “Extra”, “Mega”, “Super”, etc. Each one of these levels will make the music more intense and increase your score. On the top of the screen you have your score for the level and the header that indicates which level of performance you are currently on.

Levels

The game is based in 3 “Zones,” each of which contains about 10 levels and a boss at the end. But it doesn’t stop there: if you collect all coins in a level, you’ll get access to a bonus level where you only get one try, and the points that you get there will count towards your overall score. You can replay these from the menu, which also guarantees replay-ability as you can come back to the game after you finish it just to collect all the coins and unlock all the secret levels.

Music

I was very curious and confused when I saw that the developer called this a “rhythm” game under the description on the App Store. But it became pretty evident once I started playing. Whenever you start a level, the music will consist of a basic beat and some cool synth sounds will be played each time you jump, slide or do any other action.

When you grab your first upgrade (those red cross things we talked about earlier), the music will become more and more upbeat, and new exciting instruments will be added. If you grab all the upgrades, by the end of the level you will be hearing an amazing soundtrack that becomes interactive every time you do anything. Now, this may sound like just another gimmick, but it really makes the game a lot more interesting and fun.

Gameplay

This game is both easy and highly addictive. It’s very simple. Basically all you do in the game is run around, trying to avoid obstacles by jumping. But it’s genius because of the mechanic of the game: if you fail any level you’ll just be brought back to the beginning, doomed to restart again immediately without having a chance for a second thought. This can create frustrating (read: addicting) loops where you’ll just keep playing the same level for quite some time, while failing most of the time.

But it’s amusing, it doesn’t really get annoying since you know what you are doing wrong, and you know that it isn’t anything in the game. It’s nobody’s fault but your own, and this pushes you to keep trying until you prove yourself that you are better than the game.

This game brings you back to a simpler time for video games. One where they didn’t base their popularity in the complexity of their logic, but in the pure entertainment and ease with which you picked it up and were drawn to it time after time. That’s the beauty of platformers, they’re easy to understand, and very entertaining to play. And it’s a genre that has been built upon endlessly with gimmicks like the time-manipulation of Braid, the “play-and-create” of Little Big Planet, and the bizarre world of puzzles of Limbo.

It’s just that with all these additions to the genre, you kind of forget what we used to love about it: that it’s as simple as it is addicting. Bit.Trip.Runner brings back that feeling, at least for me. The first time that I tried it for this review, I couldn’t put it down. Now, that’s not to say that it doesn’t have its own gimmick. Of course, the crazy colors, the retro feel and the music are all part of its unique angle to pull you in, but they work quite well to that end.

Conclusion

I’m not going to lie; I wasn’t very excited to do this review. I felt Bit.Trip Runner was going to be just another generic platformer, but I was very wrong. It may sound like a simple game, but it’s definitely challenging. The timing and the trial-and-error aspect of it make it highly entertaining; and while those may not be new mechanics to gaming, they will surely keep you playing over and over again each level until you can complete it.

I have a hard time not recommending this game to everyone. If anything, it will steal a lot of your time as you try to beat a level over and over again. Try it for yourself and tell me if you don’t think it’s just some good old-fashioned fun.

I am a very fussy person when it comes to my iTunes library. I like to have it completely organized and I can’t stand it when there are gaps in the song information or when cover art is missing – it’s one of my pet peeves. A tidy iTunes library leads to a clearer mind and, in my opinion, a far better listening experience.

There are a number of ways to tidy up an iTunes library on a mac. The first (and the most long-winded way) is to sit down with a beer and trawl through all your songs, filling in any missing information by using good old Wikipedia! This is not a problem if you’ve only got a few songs, but if you’re like most of us, you’ve got a large music library and you’ll want something a little more sophisticated to help you organize it. Read on to see if SongGenie is the answer you’re looking for.

Doesn’t Already iTunes Do This?

iTunes will of course download cover art for you, but for this to happen you need to have the album and artist filled in correctly. If you do not, it will spit back an error. Inserting all of that data can be long a long and tedious process. What you need is a program that fills in all of your missing information. This is where SongGenie comes in! It may very well be one of the easiest (and sleekest) ways to tidy up your iTunes library once and for all.

Let’s have a look at it in a bit more detail.

Introduction

SongGenie is a useful utility available for Macs running Mac OS X 10.5 and above (and yes, it’s compatible with Lion) which analyzes your iTunes library, downloads any missing song information and/or lyrics from the Net, and embeds this information into the ID3 meta tags.

When you open up SongGenie, you are greeted with a decidedly Time Machine-like interface, with all of your songs stacked behind one another. The program automatically syncs with your iTunes library and downloads all of the songs as well as the meta tags. Once everything is up and running, you’re ready to start using the program!

Features

On SongGenie’s first run, the program will analyze your entire iTunes library and give each song a ranking out of 3 guitars. If the meta tags for a particular song are 100% correct and accurate, then SongGenie skips this song.

SongGenie uses a smart analysis system to determine the exact song. This can come in really handy if you’ve got a whole bunch of songs with no information at all, as it saves you from haphazardly guessing which song is playing! If a song is unknown, SongGenie uses an acoustic footprint to identify the song which, according to Equinux’s website, is accurate in over 80% of cases.

I tested this and got even better results than the developer claims. Out of 1,709 songs, SongGenie failed to correctly identify only 88 of them, meaning that it was 95% accurate. It even worked with my slightly eccentric music collection and identified some pretty obscure songs. Once SongGenie has correctly identified the song, you are presented with the complete information, which you then have to “accept”.

You can, of course, configure SongGenie to apply any changes automatically, meaning you don’t have to trawl through the list of checked songs. Unfortunately, SongGenie won’t download album art for you – you’ll need to purchase CoverScout for this which costs an extra €16 ($23) when purchased as part of a bundle with SongGenie.

Practicality

SongGenie is a very useful program as it saves you the time it takes to rummage through the Internet and find all of your missing album information. However, this convenience does come at a price. At around $35, it is not a cheap program, and it is a program that I at least didn’t get daily use out of. I used it a couple of times to clean up my iTunes library and afterwards it lay forgotten on my MacBook for quite some time.

Still, if you’ve got a large, untidy music collection, it certainly does pay to pay (no pun intended) for SongGenie. A tidy music collection gives you a far better listening experience, and it has even helped me to discover new songs by artists I already had in my music collection!

I’d also like to mention the friendliness and helpfulness of the customer service team, namely David and Yvonne. When I first installed the program, I had a problem with my licensing information, basically rendering the program unusable (as you cannot analyze songs in the program’s demo mode).

After a few e-mails with customer support (who are based in the U.S.), they actually called me on my German mobile. No waiting in telephone queues, no irritating classical music and no robotic voice every 30 seconds, “All of our customer service agents are currently busy at the moment reading the paper and drinking coffee. Your call is extremely important to us and we will endeavor to answer it shortly. And yes, we know this call is costing you $1 a minute.”

Conclusion

SongGenie is a shining example of a niche Mac program and is only of use to people with untidy iTunes libraries. You are paying for the convenience of not having to search through the Internet for missing song information and I can foresee that this won’t appeal to many people.

But money-aside, the program works extremely well and, as we know with most Mac applications, the developers have paid attention to aesthetics. I love the Time Machine-like interface and the simplicity of analyzing songs. Other programs, such as beaTunes, don’t look half as good and are sometimes quite complicated to use.

In my opinion, €24 is a small price to pay for having a nice, tidy iTunes library.

I used to absolutely love menu bar apps. Years ago, it was a fairly tiny niche of the Mac app market that contained only a few really solid gems. These utilities provided a quick and easy way to control iTunes, run a quick maintenance script and get back to what you were doing.

At heart, menu bar apps were essentially thought to be little things that perhaps didn’t quite merit a full on application but still merited a permanent, always-on spot on your Mac. Things have changed though and I find myself becoming annoyed when I download an app and find that it has no alternative to the menu bar mode.

Should developers move past the trend of offering menu-bar-only apps in favor of giving users the power to decide? Let’s discuss.

Pros and Cons

In recent years, the menu bar app market has exploded. What was once a handful of utilities is now an impressively large secondary app market. As a Mac user, I see both pros and cons to this rapid expansion. Let’s take a quick look at both sides.

Why Menu Bar Apps Rock

The positive side of having more menu bar apps available is simple: there’s more to choose from! If Apple’s App Store experiments have proven anything it’s that, in the minds of most users, more is better.

Whether you’re looking for a todo app, a fully featured email client, somewhere to store notes or quick access to a web service, there are likely a handful of menu bar apps to get you there. Here at AppStorm, we love them so much that we recently posted a roundup of 25 such utilities.

Interestingly enough, in my opinion, menu bar apps have almost entirely stolen the thunder from Dashboard widgets. If you think about it, conceptually the two types of apps are very similar and almost redundant. In the short term, Dashboard widgets came with a lot of hype and grabbed a lot of attention but with time we’ve come to see that they have a fatal flaw: out of sight, out of mind.

Menu bar apps are always visible, no matter where you are in OS X. This makes it very easy to remember to take advantage of them. Dashboard on the other hand is relegated to a side screen that we can easily go weeks or even months without seeing.

Further, it seems that developers jumped ship on Dashboard widgets initially in favor of the iPhone App Store and more recently in favor of the Mac App Store. The distinction here is important: Dashboard apps are traditionally distributed free and can’t currently be sold on the Mac App Store while menu bar apps can easily fetch a few bucks at the least and are quite popular on the Mac App Store.

From these arguments we can see that menu bar apps have a clear advantage over Dashboard widgets both in the eyes of users and developers.

Why Menu Bar Apps Suck

Now, for all their amazing benefits and convenience, it’s easy to see some downsides as well. The most obvious and frustrating of these comes from having too many menu bar apps and too little screen space.

The example above first shows all the various apps running in my menu bar if I’m looking at the Finder app. However, if I switch to Safari, some of these become inaccessible. This problem completely defeats the usefulness of menu bar apps. Rather than being handy utilities accessible from anywhere, they’re actually harder to get at than traditional apps because you can’t activate many of these either from the dock or application switcher. In this situation you have to bounce around until you find an app with few enough menu options that you can actually click on the menu bar app you’re hunting for.

Don’t Run So Many!

The solution here is quite simple right? Don’t run so many menu bar apps! It’s a valid argument, however, I think pointing the finger solely at users fails to look at the whole issue.

For starters, MacBooks are more popular than ever, meaning that a huge chunk of Mac users are using computers with screen sizes as small as eleven to thirteen inches, this doesn’t leave much room for menu bar apps.

To illustrate this fact, let’s take another look at my menu bar. Is it really that overrun with third party utilities? Have I gone menu bar crazy? To get some perspective, I highlighted the apps that aren’t built-in OS X features (there might be a little iStat voodoo happening with my time and date).

Notice that, before adding a single third party app, MacBooks already have a lot going on in the menu bar. In my screenshot there’s Spotlight, the date and time section, battery level indicator, wifi status, sound, iChat bubble, Time Machine and Bluetooth menu. There are also plenty of other default options that I don’t have turned on such as the International menu.

With all the menu bar functionality OS X has to offer right out of the box, MacBook users are left with a large number of utilities to compete for a very small space.

How Can We Fix This Problem?

Users who don’t run a lot of apps will likely think that this is a non-issue: simply don’t run menu bar apps! Easy right? I can see you typing your comments already!

However, for me, this is simply not an option as many of these apps (like Dropbox) are invaluable to my workflow. I’ll wager that plenty of other users will respond similarly about their own apps. Further, if I ask these developers what the solution to this problem is, I doubt that they would say to run fewer menu bar apps since that would cut into their own user base.

Ultimately, I think “Don’t run so many” is a copout answer that sidesteps the problem by shaking a finger at users rather than truly attempting to find a useful solution. So what, if anything can be done?

The Real Issue

As the market for menu bar apps continues to expand, the real heart of this problem lies in the fact that menu bar apps are becoming too difficult to avoid.

The Mac AppStore is chock full of great tools that use this format and there’s no easy way to filter them out. Despite the fact that there are two fundamentally different types of applications in the MAS (dock apps and menu bar apps), Apple has lumped them together.

One reason for this is likely that, while the two categories can be mutually exclusive, the reality is that they often overlap, meaning a single app has both options. And herein lies the solution!

Dear Developers, Give Me Options

Almost by accident, we’ve stumbled onto the simple answer that makes all of this trouble go away. Perhaps menu bar apps that solely occupy a space in the menu bar shouldn’t exist. I know, that’s a radical statement and menu bar app fans will quickly take offense. However, I think the alternative is a better OS X experience that puts more power in the hands of the users.

So what am I suggesting? The perfect model for the ideal app behavior can be found in TextExpander. Open up the TextExpander preferences and this is what you see:

It’s a beautiful thing is it not? TextExpander gives me complete freedom over how I want the app to work. I can make it a menu bar only app, a dock only app or choose to have both the menu bar and dock functionality.

To be fair, many apps have indeed adopted this functionality, not just TextExpander. That being said, it’s definitely not a standard behavior and the apps that aren’t playing along are those that eat up your menu bar unnecessarily. They’re awesome utilities that serve a very useful purpose, but they choose to tell users that certain functionality should only be found in the menu bar when ultimately, that’s a decision best left up to each individual.

Conclusion

If you’ve only skimmed up to this point you’re probably wondering what this article is all about. Am I calling for the death of menu bar apps? The answer to that question is simple: absolutely not. I love menu bar apps and find them to be an awesome part of the OS X experience.

However, with such a large portion of the Mac user base experiencing OS X on a small screen, I think it’s time for menu bar app developers to rethink their strategy and consider offering a non-menu bar mode for users who would prefer to have the app running in their dock. This isn’t a rule that Apple should impose on developers but simply something that developers should be courteous and thoughtful enough to offer of their own volition.

Apps like TextExpander set a clear precedence for a better system that allows each individual user to choose how the app will be accessed. It’s a superior, more versatile way to build apps and I think that developers should be eagerly hopping on board.

What do you think? Is this one long pointless rant or is there really a menu bar app problem for users with small screens? Do you agree with my suggestions or do you have a better solution? I want to hear it!