Category: Mac

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

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

Bonus Level

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

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

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?

SongGenie cleans up iTunes libraries like this one

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.

SongGenie does just this…and does it well

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.

The main interface of SongGenie, showing the song analysis in progress

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”.

A postively identified song with all the relevant information

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.

When your songs are identified, they are ticked off and the rating (top-right) is 100% green

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.

Menu bar apps are cut off by menu options

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).

Third party tools are highlighted

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:

Choose between a menu bar app, a dock app or both!

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!

While I’ve used iTunes for the longest time, and it works pretty much as my media center; I have to come to terms with the fact that it isn’t as great as it could be. It’s heavy, slow, glitchy and at times I find it very annoying.

Ditching iTunes is especially enticing when you now have all these new options available: apps that go from streaming free music, to playing you a personalised radio with music that suit your musical tastes. iTunes is still my main music app, but it’s being quickly overtaken by some of these other options.

Radio Services

Smart radio services that use information from your library, have become the best way to find new music as you are guaranteed to find something that you like. Last.fm and Pandora are the most popular, although there are also some options for your regular internet radio listening.

 

Last.fm

Last.fm is a web app that lets you do a lot of things: store a history of everything you listen to, friend people and compare music tastes, comment on new music, join groups, check info on events, and many more things. It makes music a social experience, but one of the things that makes it so great is the radio service, which lets you listen to “stations” that are related to your music library. You can’t really choose one song and play it, you just pick a station and listen or skip whatever comes on.

The Mac app for Last.fm isn’t that complete, but it does a good job at keeping up with your “scrobbles” and it also lets you listen to the radio service of the web app. It won’t sustitute your music player, but it’s a good companion to it.

Price: Free
Requires: Mac OS X 10.4 or later

 

Pandora

I like to think of Pandora as a more serious version of Last.fm, without many of the community pieces that make Last.fm so great. I’ve never been a user of Pandora, since it is only supported in a few countries, but I’ve always felt that it is a more professional version of its main competitor. Pandora gives you access to a bigger library, and easier accessibility to it. For example, unlike Last.fm, you can play the station of an artist and hear music from the artist as well as related music to him; while Last.fm will play you anything but music from the selected artist.

Obviously, Pandora is a web service but with apps like Pandoras Box, you can listen right from your Mac menu bar. To use third party apps, Pandora requires you to be a paid subscriber.

Price: Free/$36 per year
Requires: Mac OS X 10.5 or later

Other Radio Apps

A few months back I did a roundup on radio apps, which includes a number of apps that let you listen to regular internet radio stations, and not just recommendations. Apps like Radium for example, that sit in your menu bar and let you choose a genre of music or a specific radio station as fast as you can think about it.

Streaming Services

 

Spotify

This newcomer in the U.S. had made quite a good impression for our UK fellows since it came out there a couple of years ago. Spotify U.S. lets you stream almost any kind of music that you could imagine, and it’s free (well, “freemium”). Unless you buy a subscription you’ll get a few short ads every now and then, but the amount of music available in the app is unbelievable and unrivaled by any other streaming service.

The Spotify app for Mac is surprisingly great. It has support for scrobbling, playlists, queues, and it can even play music from your iTunes library, so you can altogether stop using iTunes (which is what I have been doing since Spotify US came out).

Price: Free, $4.99/mo, or $9.99/mo
Requires: Mac OS X 10.6 or later

 

Rdio

Spotify’s most capable competitor promises you can “listen to anything, anytime, without ads”. I have not used it myself as it’s only available in the US and Canada, but from what I’ve heard the library is great and the service is even better than Spotify. The downside here is that there is no “free” plan like the one Spotify has. There are two kinds of subscription, but they are priced at $5 and $10 per month.

While Rdio is mostly web-based, you can download a Mac or Windows app that lets you stream music directly to your desktop, and it even gives you mobile streaming access (and offline storage) at its most expensive subscription, much like Spotify does.

Price: $5/mo or $10/mo
Requires: Mac OS X 10.6 or later

iTunes Alternatives

iTunes is a tool that you almost can’t avoid these days. You have to use it to sync your iOS devices, buy apps or other kinds of media, store books, etc. But as iTunes’ functionality has grown, it has become a heavy and slow app, filled with stuff everywhere. Sometimes you just want to play a few tunes from your library without having to deal with iTunes, and that’s what these apps are for. They may not sync with your iPod or let you buy and rent movies, but they will play your music just fine!.

 

Vox

Vox is a lightweight iTunes alternative. It can access your whole library, but without slowing down your computer or the app itself. Unlike iTunes, it has support for a bunch of formats other than the usual MP4 and AAC; and also unlike iTunes, Vox lets you tweak sound and mess around with a number of settings.

Price: Free
Requires: Mac OS X 10.5 or later
Developer: AleNofx

 

Miro

Miro is perhaps the most complete competitor for iTunes. Not only can it play your music: it also has built-in support for Amazon’s MP3 store, video support (with way more formats than iTunes), support for Hulu and YouTube and many, many other things. Although the music part of it isn’t that great, it is certainly worth it to check it out just because of all the features that it has to offer.

Price: Free
Requires: Mac OS X 10.5 or later
Developer: Participatory Culture Foundation

Conclusion

The music industry is, probably more than any other industry, in constant evolution. Personalized radio services (like Pandora) used to be seen as the newest and coolest way of listening to music, but with new streaming services like Spotify and Rdio, this is now debatable. These services make the concept of buying music a thing from the past, and they offer such accessible prices that you just can’t help but feel attracted to what they offer.

However, there’s also the need of keeping up with music libraries not only on your desktop, but also in your mobile devices. In my opinion, that’s what’s keeping music stores like the iTunes one afloat. Streaming services may be the future, but they still have some shortcomings to resolve.

Which service or app do you use? Are you still buying music from the iTunes or some other store? My music listening process is really divided nowadays: I keep up with everything I listen to on Last.fm, I listen to a lot of new music on Spotify and I keep the music that I really like on iTunes or by buying the vinyls. I should say though, I barely even open the iTunes app anymore, since Spotify lets me access my library from the app. What about you?

Ten years ago, the single most used argument I heard against Macs was the lack of available games. It used to be the case that PC gaming was almost entirely dominated by Windows machines with Mac users being much more likely to be found running Photoshop than Half Life.

These days it’s quite a different story. Between browser-based games, the now Mac-friendly Steam network, the Mac App Store and the widespread acceptance of Macs among college aged individuals, the world of Mac users is quickly becoming positively full of gamers of all types: from casual pig smashing bird throwers to hardcore RPG addicts.

Today we want to know if you’re riding the Mac gamer revolution. Vote in the poll on the right and tell us how often you play games on your Mac. Afterwards, leave a comment below and let us know your favorite games. Also, if you answered “never” tell us why not!

Essentials is an interesting and useful app that takes almost every type of information you could want and makes it only a keyboard shortcut away. It doesn’t impose structure on you but instead gives you a broad use utility that you can use however you want.

What can you do with Essentials? Read on to find out!

Getting Started

When you launch Essentials, you’ll see the icon pop up in your menu bar to let you know the app is active. From here, you simply hit your defined shortcut, Command-Space by default, to bring up a resizable black box.

Essentials

If this is starting to look familiar, you’re probably thinking of Jumper, a similar Mac launcher that’s been around for a few years. This isn’t a mindless clone though, it’s a different take on a similar idea. Both apps have their own unique strengths and weaknesses.

As you can see in the image above, the interface is divided into two main areas: the groups on the left and the content within the groups on the right. The Default group just has a few basic folders and works about like you’d expect: double click a folder to launch it in Finder.

There’s only one group to start and I was initially quite confused as to how to add a new one as there are no visible controls in the interface. It turns out, a double click in the sidebar does the trick.

Now that we know how to make groups, let’s see what we can put inside them.

Applications

The first folder I made was one for Applications. Once again I wondered how to get stuff into here, especially since this time a double click didn’t work. It turns out there are two ways, the first is the most obvious: simply drag items into the group. Alternatively, you can right click in the empty area to bring up the following options:

Add items with a right-click

I chose to go the dragging route and before long I had a nice little group of applications that I could quickly access from anywhere in OS X just by bringing up Essentials.

Apps are just one of many things you can keep in Essentials

Not a One Trick Pony

At this point, you’re likely rolling your eyes at yet another run of the mill launcher. After all, how many utilities do we need just to launch an application? Fortunately, Essentials can handle a lot more than apps and folders, let’s look at some of the other things it can do.

Snippets

The next thing we’ll do is create a folder for snippets. By taking advantage of that right click trick from before, we can then make a new text snippet inside of our Snippets folder.

Adding a text snippet

In here you can place any sort of text that you want and it will be saved as a little snippet icon in your folder. You can then either drag it somewhere or right click on it to copy it to the clipboard.

Colors

Here’s a weird one that I thought was pretty cool. Essentials lets you save colors. Using the default Apple Color Picker, you simply choose a color that you want to remember and title it to save it in your group.

Adding a text snippet

As a web designer, I find this to be a very useful feature. For instance, I could save groups of color schemes for different projects that I’m working on, then quickly copy the hex values to my clipboard for quick insertion into my code.

Other Functionality

The functionality doesn’t stop there, Essentials can hold pretty much whatever you want: your favorite files and images, Terminal commands that act as droplets (quite handy), scripts, URLs, etc. You can even Quick Look files right inside of Essentials.

A Good Start

For less than ten bucks, Essentials is a really hand app that could conceivably change the way you use OS X and speed up your workflow in a number of ways.

In its current state, I found it to be quite useful, but I have to admit that I would change a lot about it if I could. For instance, the biggest problem is the overall UI, which is pretty much driven by right click contextual menus. We’re all used to these being an option for navigating an app’s various settings and actions, but it seems bizarre and unintuitive as the primary way to accomplish anything. Some minimal icons for basic functions would go a long way.

Further, some of the default actions seem a bit off. One example is that I have to double click an application to launch it. The problem is, the app feels so much like the dock that you expect a single click to get the job done.

Finally the workflow to add items could use rethinking. Currently adding a new text snippet inserts a blank snippet, which you then have to right click on and choose to edit. What should happen is that creating a new snippet brings up this edit dialog by default.

Basically, I think the app is great, but I recommend that the developer hire a UX expert to come in and rethink a lot about how it functions.

Conclusion

If you’re looking for an affordable way to dramatically increase the speed at which you can access files, folders, text snippets, URLs or even colors, Essentials is definitely a great place to start.

It’s a solid little utility that’s not quite to that “refined” Mac app stage but is definitely still well worth the modest price. The key to this app, as I mentioned in the introduction, is that it’s quite versatile. Find ten of its users and you’ll likely find ten different ways to use the app!

Our sponsor this week is Translate Tab, an awesome way to access Google Translate right from your menu bar.

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.

If you frequently work with or communicate in several languages, you simply can’t beat the speed and convenience of having one of the most popular translation services right in your menu bar. It’s really nice to be able to open Translate Tab quickly from any other app, grab your translation and get back to what you were doing without even messing with a browser.

Go Get It!

This great utility is available on the Mac App Store for a mere $1.99. If you’ve been looking for a faster and more convenient way to get translations on the fly, download Translate Tab today.

Desktop clutter is a popular discussion topic for many computer users, and our AppStorm community here is no different. We’ve had a lot of discussion on the merits of keeping an organized digital workspace, as well as tools that will help you do it. OS X has built-in functionality to help you hide desktop files that you don’t need to see all the time, but that can lead to some confusing organization, since you’ll need to constantly be aware of the files you have hidden. So what’s a Mac lover to do?

Skedaddle is an app exclusively for hiding desktop content, and it is one of the most lightweight and efficient apps that does so.

Interface

The hideout interface. Rockin' that Tiger wallpaper.

This is possibly the simplest app interface I’ve ever examined. Skedaddle’s Preferences make it possible to hide the dock icon, and with the optional menu bar icon disabled, you’ll hardly even notice that the app is running at all. Once activated by the global shortcut key, a portion of your desktop background slides out of view with a nifty animation, revealing Apple’s standard “behind the app” fabric-like backdrop similar to what is found in iOS’s Folders.

The Preferences window (accessible via a button in the hideout) also allows users to move the hideout to the left, right, or bottom of the screen. If, like me, you have your dock’s hiding functionality turned off, I wouldn’t recommend placing the hideout on the bottom edge of your screen, because of where Skedaddle moves the “Close” and “Preferences” buttons.

The Preferences window lets you choose hideout positioning.

The hideout can be resized by grabbing the handle in the corner, as you would expect. Shrinking the hideout may cover up some files, but it behaves much like a Finder window, in that if items are located beyond the boundaries of the hideout, you can scroll over to find them.

What It Is

Skedaddle is a bit like having a shoebox under your bed for your Mac desktop. It isn’t necessarily the best way to keep your belongings safe, nor is it the best way to organize your files, but it is a good way to keep your things out of sight when you don’t need them, while remedying the “out of sight, out of mind” effect that might come with using OS X’s hide functionality.

With a global hotkey-activated hideout behind your desktop, it’s as easy as opening up the drawer, throwing in some desktop items, and closing the drawer. Say you have a handful of files that you need quick access to. As a freelancer, this is common for me–I always have PDFs, text files, folders, notes, and rough drafts floating about on my desktop. I would prefer not to have to dig through my typical file hierarchy to find them, but they do cause an unsightly amount of clutter. Skedaddle is a perfect solution in this scenario.

What It Isn’t

Skedaddle isn’t a file vault. The hideout can be password protected, making it effective against prying eyes. Or, say you’re working on a family computer, and you want easy access to your files but don’t want to have to worry about a youngster getting into them. Simply drop them into the hideout and password protect it. However, there’s no file encryption taking place. Skedaddle is not a substitution for any encryption software you might use on sensitive information.

The hideout in motion. You can not appreciate how tricky this was to capture.

Skedaddle also isn’t just a fancy folder. The app does a great job of hiding things, but presently isn’t capable of opening files from within the hideout. You can Quick Look, however, which can be useful for determining which file you might want without needing to drag everything out, locate a file, and then drag everything back in.

Last Words

One thing I would caution against is uninstalling Skedaddle while files are still hidden in the hideout. I know, it’s strange to mention the uninstallation process in a review that endorses an app (I do endorse it, by the way), but if, for whatever reason, you decide you don’t want to use Skedaddle anymore, this is important information to note.

I became curious about this, so I created some dummy files to place in my hideout before uninstalling. As I discovered, removing the application from your computer will disable your ability to open the hideout, exiling your files to forever float in the aether behind your desktop.

That being said, Skedaddle is a lightweight and efficient way of hiding desktop clutter, or perhaps stashing some files on a multiuser machine, as long as you’re aware of it’s capabilities–and incapabilities. I rarely give an app a ten out of ten, but with the simplicity and elegance in execution, MuffinStory didn’t miss one single mark with Skedaddle.

If you have any tried-and-true methods of dealing with desktop clutter, we’d love to hear about them in the comments below.

As a student, I know exactly how boring studying is. You spend all day locked in your room, poring over a textbook thick enough to stop a bullet at 30 yards, and trying to concentrate on those printed words while resisting the temptation to let your mind wander.

Sound familiar? I’m sure every student has been in this situation at least once and I can tell you now, it isn’t a fun one to be in. But studying doesn’t have to be a daily slog through endless sheets of notes and lifeless, black-and-white textbooks. There are plenty of ways to rekindle the ever so slight spark of fun in your studies.

Everyone has their own different study techniques, but I find that flash cards are a useful way of memorizing information quickly and easily. However, going down to Staples and buying a pack of note cards is a bit too 20th-century. In this digital age, we want something more modern and “flashy”.

This is where Smartr comes in. It is a small, lightweight flash card application for Mac OS X that helps you easily compile flash cards and test yourself on the computer. This avoids the need for hundreds of note cards lying around everywhere and saves you the time it takes to write them all out by hand.

Let’s take a look at Smartr in a bit more detail to see if it can really make studying less of a chore.

Introduction

Smartr, from the Swedish developers Barefoot Hackers and Ocean Observations is a small, lightweight application available for the tidy price of £1.99 (around $3.40) in the Mac App Store. Installation takes no time at all, and once the program is up and installed, you are greeted by the nice, uncluttered home screen.

The home screen of Smartr

Features

Smartr has plenty of features packed into its simple interface.

You can mix the different kinds of flash cards described below in one stack.

Question & Answer Stacks

Stacks are your lists of flash cards. To create one, you simply click on New Stack and type in your question and answer.

Creating a flash card in the Question/Answer mode

You can create as many question and answer flash cards as you please, entering any extra information you may require in the Notes box.

Pictures

If you have to learn something about pictures during your study session, Smartr can help you with this as well. You simply drag a picture into the box and add the relevant description as well as any important notes.

You can create flash cards with pictures as well

Vocabulary

Trying to nail that enormous list of French vocabulary? Why not put all your vocabulary lists into Smartr and make it a bit more varied? You can add the word, the relevant translation, a description of the word (e.g. its type or gender), and a sample sentence to make remembering your vocabulary words a little bit easier.

A vocabulary flash card in Smartr

Kanji/Hanzi

If you find yourself studying Chinese or Japanese, Smartr can help you as you prepare to learn all of those tricky characters, thanks to its built-in Kanji/Hanzi mode. You can add the Roman version of each word or character along with the meaning, the type, and a short sample sentence.

The Kanji/Hanzi mode in Smartr

Study Mode

Once you’ve created all your flash cards, you’ll want to start studying of course! To do this, you simply click on Study in the top-right hand corner. The app goes into full-screen mode (to avoid any distractions) and your created flash cards pop up. You then have to enter the correct answer using the keyboard.

The full-screen study mode of Smartr

If you are not sure of the answer (or you simply want to cheat) you can click on Show Answer which reveals the answer and asks you whether you got it right or not.

Be honest now…

Unfortunately there is no way of tallying up how many you got right or wrong (you’ll have to do this on a piece of paper) but the app does recognize which cards you have already looked at and revised, which is especially useful if you are constantly adding new ones.

If you have already looked at all your cards, then the app will give you an option to either Cram or take a well-earned break and carry on with your review later (I think I know what most people would say to this).

The agony of choice

Conclusion

Smartr is a lovely, well-designed program that exhibits absolutely pure functionality in a simple and cheap application. It will prove itself a valuable tool for many students due to its wide range of features, low price tag, and overall design, which can help bring a bit of enjoyment to a normally mundane chore.

Now stop reading this review and get back to studying! Just remember to buy Smartr first.

9to5Mac recently posted an article titled, “Does Apple have to kill the iPod?” that has a lot of people talking. Though I definitely don’t agree with all of the logic presented, the overall topic is one that I’ve been considering myself for quite a while.

The entire line of iPods seems to be in a state of uncertainty. Read on too see why I think that iPods aren’t going away anytime soon but are indeed ready for some major changes.

Why Apple Won’t Kill the iPod

The term “iPod” is synonymous with digital music. When we think of one, we think of the other. Sure, there are plenty of other personal digital music players but, all Apple fanboy biased aside, the world bulks these players into two categories: iPods and everything else.

As the first (and perhaps only) digital music player most of us ever owned, the iPod changed the way we listen to music. I’m not saying this so we can all hold hands and sing songs to the wonder of Apple, I’m merely pointing out that there is in fact a serious legacy associated with this device, one that is still profitable enough that Apple won’t be killing it any time soon.

People love iPods, and as long as that statement holds true, Apple will keep the assembly plants churning them out. They’re simply not about to killing this long-running cash cow, but that doesn’t mean that some serious thought isn’t being given to just what the future of the iPod will be.

The official iPod Family Shot, note the exclusion of the iPod Classic

The iPods: A Family Stranger Than Yours

One this is for sure, the iPod is definitely undergoing a major identity crisis at the moment. This isn’t localized to one device but is spread across the entire line of iPods.

There are currently four iPods: Shuffle, Nano, Classic and Touch. Let’s start with the Nano, which has perhaps gone through more identity troubles than any other Apple device. The form factor of the Nano has fundamentally changed so many times that I’ve lost count. It’s been tall and thin, short and squat, square and everything in between.

The Nano’s identity used to be wrapped up in its tiny size, but the Shuffle came along and challenged that idea. Then it was a great device for watching widescreen video. Next, this idea was taken even further and Apple decided that the Nano should be a device for actually recording video, so they threw a video camera in it, which interestingly enough wasn’t even capable of snapping a still photo.

This idea apparently failed because it was immediately scrapped in the next iteration in favor of the non-widescreen, no camera, square touchscreen device we now know as a Nano. Will Apple stay in this form factor for a few years or continue to completely rethink what the Nano should be?

In its current form, it’s an awful lot like the Shuffle, only with a screen, which leaves us wondering why the Shuffle even needs to exist since the Nano is so small. Fortunately though, perhaps more than any other iPod, the Shuffle has a pretty clear identity. The size and shape keeps changing, but ultimately it’s the cheapest, simplest and tiniest way to own an iPod. At $49, it’s an iPod you can afford to break and lose, which lots of people definitely need. If the Nano gets any cheaper though, the two will butt heads. It’s easy to imagine Apple merging these two lines if they can’t come up with a way to differentiate them more.

Next up is the Classic, the closest thing we have to that big white brick that Apple gave us in 2001. Fundamentally, it’s the truest “iPod” and yet Apple seems to be subtly abandoning it. As Weintraub pointed out in his article, when Jobs said that “the entire line” of iPods got an update, the Classic was left out completely.

The Classic’s biggest problem is of course that 40,000 songs in your pocket for $249 is becoming somewhat of a niche market. Why go overboard with storage you don’t need when you could go after the much more impressive, App Store compatible iPod Touch? Which brings us to the best iPod on the market, which ironically seems headed the way of the iPod Mini.

The iPod Touch: A Doomed Product?

The iPod Touch has the most interesting story of any iPod. The fact is, it’s a fantastic product that’s well-loved by consumers. Getting an iPod Touch for Christmas is hitting the motherlode, it’s a music player, gaming device, camera, computer, and television all rolled into one.

The major problem with this of course is that the iPhone is also all of these things. The iPod Touch was once a way to get most of the benefits of the iPhone in a cheaper form that wasn’t tethered to a carrier. I myself bought a first-gen Touch in favor of dropping Verizon to go for an iPhone.

However, economies of scale have paid off. iPhones are not only better than ever, they’re cheaper than ever. Further, the proverbial nail in the Touch’s coffin seems to be the fact that the iPhone is on the precipice of being carrier-independent.

When the iPhone costs a couple hundred dollars, does more than the iPod Touch and doesn’t require a cell contract, where does this leave the iPod Touch? What advantage is there to buying an iPod when you could simply get the phone?

Many are suggesting that the iPod Touch will soon have 3G capabilities, but this only compounds the problem! If Apple takes this move, then it’s simply one step closer to turning the iPod Touch into the iPhone.

For this reason, ever since day one of the iPod Touch, many of us have been wondering how long the product could hold up in the years to come as a truly independent product that isn’t just an iPhone in a different box. The simple fact is, Apple needs to either find a new way to seriously set the iPod Touch apart or drop it completely in favor of one device that is capable of being an iPhone, an iPod Touch or both. Again, it’s a successful product so don’t be surprised if Apple has a few new tricks in its long-term plan before giving up on the iPod Touch.

What Is an iPod?

This article holds only problems, not answers. The point is simply that iPods as we know them are in an incredibly interesting state of flux. None of us knows how many products will be in the iPod line this time next year, what they will look like, or even what they will do!

The term “iPod” has become so fuzzy that none of us really know it means. Is it a music player? An all-in one entertainment device for everything from photography to gaming? Something to slap a watch band on and wear on your wrist?

That magical time of year is here when Apple once again tells us what “iPod” will mean for the next 360 days or so. I can’t guarantee what Apple will give us, but I do know one thing: no matter how much we love or hate it on announcement day, the crazy things will be on the top of all our holiday shopping lists within a month.

I don’t think that I’m alone in the annoyance I feel when I’m asked to sign something over the Internet. This usually means having to to print PDFs so that I can sign them, after which I have to then re-scan them. Even though it’s a situation that we don’t encounter too often, it still happens from time to time, which means from time to time, we want to pull all of our hair out. For example, as a freelancer, I sometimes have clients who ask me to sign contracts in order to begin work for certain old-fashioned websites.

Today we are reviewing an app called Signature. The makers behind this app want to help you sign these documents without having to print or scan anything. How does it do it? Let’s see.

Getting Started

Getting Started

If you can get past the unfortunate icon and pay the reasonable price of $2.99 for the app, the first time that you run it you’ll see a small window pointing you in the direction of your menu bar, which is where Signature will live. Unfortunately, there are no real instructions on how to use the app, nor is there any information about the different features that it has. It’s not that the app is complicated, but a few hints on how to use it would be useful initially. The only useful information I found on how to use the app is buried deep in the “Help” menu. This information should point you in the right direction so that you can get those documents signed.

Signing documents

Alright, so let’s say you get emailed a PDF that you need to sign. How would you go about using Signature to help you with this? Clicking the menu bar icon will show you a menu with a handful of options such as, “Sign It” and “Sign It – Advanced”. The first of these will let you simply sign something and that’s it. However, the advanced option gives you a lot more choices, like picking out colors and sizes for the brushes.

Whether you choose the advanced or normal mode, the processes will be essentially the same. You will be able to digitally make a resemblance of your written signature by clicking and dragging inside the Signature window. If you’ve ever tried doing this -with a mouse or a trackpad- you will be familiar with the final results: stiff hieroglyphics that look nothing like handwriting at all. Still, and that’s not really the app’s fault. The description of the app on the Mac App Store says that you can use “pens” as well as the mouse/trackpad. Obviously, users with drawing tablets will fare much better.

After you are happy with your signature, you can press “Enter” to save the current image on the window to your clipboard. You can then paste the image and even resize it to fit any document you would like. You also have the option of saving it as a .png file.

“Active” Mode

There is one very useful (although it is very hard to get used to) feature that is not advertised under the “Help” menu or on the description of the app. It is called “Active” and you can activate it by double clicking the window in which you sign. A sign saying “Active” will pop-up, and if you click it your cursor will disappear. After that, any gesture that you make will be counted as if you were signing. So, it’s basically a way of signing without having to keep the trackpad/mouse clicked while you move your finger or mouse around. While it may not sound very impressive, this feature is very useful, especially if you are using a trackpad.

The Shortcomings

As far as shortcomings go, the first thing that must be mentioned is the unsightliness of this app. From the icons, to the fonts and backgrounds, everything looks fairly unprofessional. It’s not that attractiveness is the most important part of an app, but beauty is a standard in most Mac apps. In addition, the few instructions that you find within the app tend to be written in poor English. Again, this is a drawback that is not relevant to the functionality of the app, but it does throw off a little bit.

Now, outside of the aesthetic flaws, there are some small, yet important, details that are missing from this app. If added, I believe these details would help the app become more useful and efficient. For example, some sort of line-smoothing feature would be very beneficial. Lots of iPad drawing and handwriting apps do this and it helps immensely with readability accuracy. Support for formats other than .png would also be useful for some people. Other than these few small details, I can’t imagine a way to improve this app.

Conclusion

Overall, it’s important for you to know what you are getting into when you buy this app. It isn’t a new amazing way of creating “real” signatures on your computer. It does nothing that simple image editors like Gimp or Paint can’t do.

What it does do is give you easy and quick access to creating a “drawing” that resembles your signature and copying it somewhere else with ease and speed. Whether you are comfortable paying $3 dollars for that is entirely up to you. Personally, I think the app is a great concept, but it could have used better execution.

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Twitter. 5 years ago that was a word that described the sound a songbird makes. And while that’s still the first definition in almost every dictionary you check, in the public mind it means something else entirely. It’s a social network, one composed of short little messages intended for public consumption. Like any good ecosystem, Twitter has changed the definitions of more words than just its name. Now we have “tweet,” “retweet,” “follow,” and of course “hashtags”. More than vocabulary, the sphere of influence Twitter has created has its clients buying into the ornithological metaphor as well. You’d be hard pressed to find a Twitter client that doesn’t have a bird or something bird-related in its icon.

It’s true of the Twitter client we’re going to talk about today. It’s called Wren, and has an adorable yellow bird as its icon. However, the similarities with its Twitter client brethren ends there. Wren is something different. By some people’s definition, it shouldn’t even be called a Twitter client. It has no timeline, no “river of information” to wade through. And yet I contest it is a Twitter client, one that every Twitter user should take a long, hard look at and see if it’s the missing piece in their Twitter workflow. Let me show you what I mean.

Have Your Day and Tweet It Too

Wren’s premise is simple: Twitter is inherently a distraction from whatever you might be doing. If what you’re trying to do is important work, then Twitter becomes a liability. So lets say you’d like to maintain your productivity during the workday, but contributing to Twitter has become a habit for you, one you’d rather not break. In theory you can’t have it both ways. If you want to Tweet, you need a Twitter client, right?

That’s where Wren comes in. It’s a Twitter client that leaves out one important thing: the timeline. Here’s what it looks like.

Wren’s Main UI

Conceptually, it’s a fascinating direction. And in a realm glutted with Twitter clients, I think Wren carves out a unique niche for itself. It’s an app that its creators wanted and use themselves. That has to be the start of every great product, and I’m glad to see it’s true of Wren.

Information Density

So, just what does Wren show? How informative is the UI? And just how feature rich is it?

Let’s start with the first bit, what does Wren show? Well, the UI is basic enough, how about a walkthrough?

Walking through Wren’s Interface

Beautifully compact, isn’t it? First (1), we’re greeted with the main Tweet area. Subtly skeuomorphic, with its notebook-inspired background, Wren doesn’t handicap itself trying to digitize analog metaphors. It takes advantage of the medium with the Drafts (2) area on the right. A nice feature right at home in a Twitter client that’s strictly about tweeting. Across the bottom is the closest thing to a timeline, (3) your most recent tweet. Not the most recent tweet in your timeline, not your most recent @mention. The last thing you said on Twitter.

A Little Egocentric?

Ok, I can hear you. Yes you in the back. You’re saying that this app seems little egocentric! After all, it’s just about tweeting what you have to say, not caring about what others say back. What happened to conversation? Isn’t that what Twitter’s so famous for?

Well, I’d like to kindly say, “I think you’re looking at this all wrong”. No where did I, or the creators of Wren for that matter, say that this should be your one-and-only Twitter client or that this is “the best way” to use Twitter. It’s not. It’s inherently lopsided, but that’s also the point.

Wren is a utility. It’s meant for select scenarios and certain circumstances. The workflow that I’ve been using is this: when I sit down at my computer with the goal of working, I quit Twitter for Mac and launch Wren. Then, if I feel the need to tweet, I can, in quiet and solitude. Once I’m done “working” I relaunch Twitter for Mac, and see what I missed.

Wren really does allow me to have the best of both worlds.

Now Go Get Wren, Then Get Back to Work

So, why are you still here? For a measly $4.99, Wren can be yours today. Go visit the Mac App Store, pick up your copy of Wren. And then get back to work!

It’s definitely no secret that Alfred is one of AppStorm’s all-time favorite apps. Several of us use it daily and thoroughly enjoy the extended capabilities it brings to OS X.

One of these awesome features is the ability to set up custom searches. These allow you to quickly launch a search on almost any website straight from Alfred. Today I’ll show you some of the custom searches that I’ve personally set up and use daily.

Built-In Searches

Before we launch on a mission to create our own custom Alfred search queries, we should look under the hood to see what’s already provided to prevent from unnecessarily duplicating functionality.

To see what’s included, launch Alfred and click the little gear icon in the top right to bring up the preferences window. Once you’re in the preferences, click on “Features” in the top navigation and “Web Searches” on the left under the “Web & URL” heading.

The built-in web searches

This should give you a big list of options for all kinds of web searches: Google, Yahoo, IMDB, Ask, Twitter, Facebook, Wikipedia, eBay, YouTube and more. With all these built-in options, you’re likely to have trouble thinking of anything that needs to be added! Fear not though, we’ll get to that later. For now, let’s make sure you know who to use these.

To get started, check out the extensive list of options. There are two columns here: Keyword and Website. The latter obviously shows you the search you’ll be running, and in a sense so does the keyword, except that the keyword is more importantly telling you how you can tell Alfred to run this specific search.

For instance, let’s say we want to run a quick search on IMDB. To make sure we know how this is accomplished, we look at the list, find IMDB and check out the keyword. Conveniently, this is simply “IMDB”.

Finding the right keyword

Now that we know how to communicate with Alfred, close the preferences window and hit your shortcut to bring up Alfred. Next, type in the keyword for the search you’re looking for. It’ll likely pop up at the top before you even finish typing it, just hit enter to have Alfred autofill the rest.

First type in the keyword

Once you’ve got the keyword entered and ready to go, it’s time to enter your search query just as if you were on the site itself. You don’t need quotes or anything, just type what you’re looking for and hit Return. This will launch the indicated website with the results for the query you entered.

Then type in your query

Make Your Own

Under the “Custom Web Searches” heading, you can add to the list of built-in web searches by building your own. Don’t worry if this sounds complicated, it’s super easy. The first thing you’ll want to do is go to the site you want to add and manually run a search.

For example, let’s say hypothetically that Flickr wasn’t included (it is) and we wanted to add it. We’d hit up Flickr.com and type any old search query. As a general rule of thumb, short, easy to spot queries work the best, so I used “appstorm”.

Once you’ve run the search, ignore the results and instead take a look at the url that resulted. In our case it should be http://www.flickr.com/search/?q=appstorm. All we have to do from here is find the search string that we used and replace it with {query}. This will tell Alfred where to insert whatever you decide to type in.

Creating a custom search

Once you’ve got that URL figured out, you can go to the “Custom Searches” section and create a new custom search. Paste the URL in the top field and fill out the rest however you want. Note again that the keyword you enter here will be what you enter into Alfred to bring up this custom search.

Creating a custom search

Five Must-Have Custom Searches

Now that you know how to find the built-in searches and how to add in your own, here are some custom searches that I’ve built and find useful. If you like them, copy and paste them into your own version of Alfred! I’ve already inserted the appropriate tags so you can use them as they appear below.

Flickr Creative Commons

Flickr Creative Commons

As I mentioned above, Flickr is one of the default choices built right into Alfred. However, when I’m searching Flickr, I’m typically looking for an image to use in a post, and the most of the results in the default search aren’t licensed for that type of use.

The solution is of course to go into the advanced search options and make sure that you’re checking only in the Creative Commons material. This takes a few steps though so it’s much faster to just run a quick search for Alfred. The snippet below will search only Creative Commons-licensed content for commercial use, adaptation, modification or building upon, meaning you can use the image almost anywhere as long as you show proper attribution to the author.

Website: Flickr Creative Commons
URL: http://www.flickr.com/search/?q={query}&l=commderiv&ss=0&ct=0&mt=all&w=all&adv=1
Shortcut: fcc

Time.is

Time.is

Time.is is a fantastic website that helps you find the current time for any place on the planet in a gorgeously simple and attractive interface. I work closely with people from Australia, the UK, all over the U.S., and various other places on the globe so I’m always in a state of confusion about what time it is for the person I’m trying to communicate with. My simple and effective solution was an Alfred custom search!

With this custom search, all you have to do is type in “time” and then the location that you want to check. For instance, if I want to check on my friends in Melbourne, I just type “time Melbourne” and hit Return, which instantly brings up the exact time in Melbourne, the difference in time between Melbourne and my current location, and even the sunrise and sunset times!

Website: Time.is
URL: http://time.is/{query}
Shortcut: time

Zootool

Zootool

Zootool is my favorite bookmarking service. Much better than Delicious, it stores all your bookmarks with convenient little thumbnails. You can use Zootool to store sites, images, videos; whatever you want!

It’s often the case that I’m writing an article or designing something and recall a resource that I bookmarked that can help me out. With a Zootool custom web search in Alfred, I’m never more than a few keystrokes away from my Zoo.

Website: Zootool
URL (Your Zoo): http://zootool.com/zoo/search:{query}
URL (Public Search): http://zootool.com/search/{query}/
Shortcut: zt

Pinterest

Pinterest

Pinterest is a lot like Zootool, it allows you to store various bits and pieces of the web into personalized collections. However, Pinterest definitely has a strong leaning towards the trendy and chic. The personality of the site’s users is remarkably consistent and the type of content that you find is almost always incredibly stylish and interesting.

Any time I’m looking for some inspiration for design, photography, furniture or even if I just want something fun to make for dinner, I hit up Pinterest and run a public search. With this custom search, Alfred becomes a fantastic instant gateway to what is sure to become your newest addiction.

Website: Pinterest
URL: http://pinterest.com/search/?q={query}
Shortcut: pin

Grooveshark

Grooveshark

Grooveshark is one of the best things to ever hit the Internet. Pulling content from all over the web, Grooveshark allows you to enter a song, artist or album and instantly hear the music you want, completely free.

Several times throughout the week a friend or colleague will suggest that check out a song or artist, or I get a song stuck in my head and I just have to hear it, or I suddenly have to know the artist behind a specific piece; all of these require a trip to Grooveshark and Alfred makes it that much closer. Just type a quick “gs” and the song you’re after and you’re off to Internet music bliss.

Website: Grooveshark
URL: http://grooveshark.com/#/search?q={query}
Shortcut: gs

Share Your Favorite Custom Searches!

By now you should know all about Alfred Custom Searches: what they are, how to use the built-in options, how to create your own and even five great searches to get you started. So get out there and start building your own!

Leave a comment below and let us know what custom searches you’ve built or are going to build. Be sure to paste the syntax into your comment so we others can grab it quickly.

This year, with the launch of Lion, Apple has been all about “Back to the Mac” – Taking great features from iOS, and porting them over to OS X. For the most part, this has been fairly successful. For this reason, it makes sense that many iOS developers would do the same.

In this roundup, we’ll have a look at the biggest success stories in this field. The developers featured here didn’t just rebuild the interface for OS X, they enhanced the app to rival (and often surpass) their iOS counterparts.

Conclusion

The apps I’ve featured are just ten of the best apps out there that started on iOS; there are plenty more out there. OS X Lion’s iOS-like features have been criticized by many (myself included), but these apps show that the transition can work, and it can work well. Take note, Apple!