Category: Mac

It’s been a busy week for Apple, with the iPhone 5c and 5s hitting the streets today, only days after iOS 7 was finally released. Apple’s never released two new iPhones at once before, opting instead to simply discount the older model, so it’ll be interesting to see how the new strategy fares in the market.

Macs have to wait a bit longer to get Mavericks, but there’s been a ton of interesting stuff written about Apple this week — from AnandTech’s detailed analysis of the new iPhones to USA Today and Businessweek’s interviews with Apple’s leadership. Here’s the best articles from this week to fill up your weekend reading queue.

Apple in the Spotlight

The word on the street is that Apple cannot innovate anymore, new iOS and 64bit A7 CPU and simple fingerprint reading aside. Ive and Federighi would like to have a word with everyone on the street about that. That’d be too difficult, so instead they set down with reporters from both Businessweek and the USA Today this week to talk about what drives Apple and why, among other things, Apple made the iPhone 5c.

You’ll get a bit of the same info from both interviews, but the USA Today one overall feels the most informative. Entitled “Jony Ive: The man behind Apple's magic curtain”, it focuses on how design drives Apple’s culture — and how Ive would like to design cups if he was no longer at Apple. Businessweek’s interview article, “Apple Chiefs Discuss Strategy, Market Share—and the New iPhones”, focused more on the iPhone’s price, Ive and Frederighi’s collaborations at Apple, and includes insight from Cook about Apple’s stock price, among other things. They’re both a great read, though there’s little new you’ll discover about Apple if you already devour anything said by the firm.

The New iPhones

For the geekier reading tastes, there’s a ton of great stuff to read as well — but you’re going to need to set aside a lot more time. You can start off with iFixit’s brand-new teardown of the iPhone 5s, where you’ll find, among other things, that the newest iPhone sports a 3.8V – 5.92Wh – 1560mAh battery and a CMOS-based fingerprint reader.

Then, you can dive into what the phones themselves have to offer, with AnandTech’s extensive overview and testing of everything possible in the iPhone 5s. It’s a mammoth review, but a fascinating one for anyone interested in where Apple’s taking their mobile hardware. For a lighter read, you can check out AnandTech’s iPhone 5c review — far less exhaustive since this phone is practically the same as last year’s iPhone 5. Then, be sure to check out our own Kevin Whipps’ article on the M7 sensor chip and what it might mean for new Apple devices going forward.

That leaves us with software. There’s AnandTech’s extensive iOS 7 review that goes through the geeky parts of the OS, and our own iPhone.AppStorm roundup of the very best new apps for iOS 7. All that power can come at a cost, though, and Ars Technica brought us a detailed look at how iOS 7 performs on the iPhone 4 so you can decide whether you want to upgrade or not.

Back on the Mac, there’s not been much action this week, but we do have a review of the new iTunes 11.1 and iTunes Radio, which gives you something to try out over the weekend. Oh, and there’s the new iCloud Web Apps, which are a beautiful way to get a taste of iOS 7’s style on your Mac or PC. There’s also the new Simplenote for Mac, which has a touch of iOS 7 style combined with old-fashioned Mac goodness.

Have a Great Weekend!

So there you go: that should give you plenty to read this weekend. Enjoy — and we sure can’t wait until there’s this much awesome new stuff to read about the Mac (perhaps in a couple weeks?).

Evernote’s a great notebook app. It makes it simple to write notes down, record audio or drag in images to remember everything, and then find it all again quickly with a click.

But then, what makes Evernote so nice — something so many people rely on — is far more than just being a notes app. There’s plenty of places you can jot down notes, from the built-in Notes app to services like Simplenote. Evernote, though, ends up being far more than just that since there’s so many ways to add info to it. You can clip web pages with the brilliant new Evernote Web Clipper, snap pictures and add notes on the go with the new iPhone app, or use IFTTT to save stuff to Evernote on the go. If only you could do something with all that info.

Well, now you can. That’s where Evernote’s new Presentation Mode comes in.

A Notes App Taking on PowerPoint

Evernote: Your New Presentation Tool

Evernote’s Presentation Mode is the latest addition to the notes app that does it all. Added with the v5.3 update for Macs this week, Presentation Mode is a new premium feature that automatically turns your notes into something that looks good enough to present on the big screen. Everyone will be able to try out the new feature for free for the first 30 days, but after that, you’ll need an Evernote Premium subscription to take advantage of the tool. And if you give on-the-fly presentations very often, you’ll have a very good reason to subscribe just for this.

PowerPoints are mostly about you data, and Evernote’s got plenty of that. All it needed to do was make that data look good, and put it on the big screen. So, with a light and dark mode you can choose between, Evernote will turn a notebook of notes, snippets, files, and anything else you’ve thrown in Evernote into a presentation. You’ll have a faint fade transition between each slide, and an on-screen laser pointer of sorts to highlight what you’re talking about. It’s basic, but just might be all you need for basic presentations.

A fake laser pointer that acts more like a disappearing marker.

Now, everything we’ve all learned about “good” presentations in recent years would tell you that Evernote notes are absolutely not ideal for presentations. There’s too much information density, more words in an average note than anyone would reasonably read in a PowerPoint slide. But an Evernote presentation doesn’t have to be bad. Instead, just treat each note as an individual slide, and throw them all in one notebook — or tag them with the same tag — to it’s easy to pull them up in Evernote together. It’s just about your data and perhaps images you want to show off — and for once, you don’t need to worry about how anything looks. Just tap the present button, and tap through your notes, and everything should work fine.

You’re not going to win an award for the world’s most stunning presentation ever, but you’ll likely spend far less time making your presentation than you would in any other app. And really, for absolutely zero effort, I can’t think of a nicer looking presentation tool. It just made making decent looking presentations an absolute no-brainer.

It’s All About Data

Evernote 5 makes it easy to find the data you want

See, the important thing is just your data. That’s what Evernote’s good with: data. It’s the place to throw all of your info instead of putting it in countless Word documents and random PDF stored who knows where. It’s taught us to not worry about formatting, and just slap our info in the app to easily retrieve it. It’s got great search — and a smart tool to link related notes if you’re a premium user — so you’ll always be able to find anything, ugly or not.

And now, Evernote’s going back to the drawing board to help us do more with the mountains of data we’ve saved in it. It’s added annotation tools through Skitch to help you make the most out of your screenshots and PDFs, and recently added a reminders tool to let Evernote help you remember what you need to do. And if formatting is still important, there’s the basic rich text formatting options you need, enough even to make a half-decent document for print if you’re living without Word. Or just share a digital copy of your notes through Evernote, since your coworkers likely don’t want another piece of paper laying around.

Evernote’s not a one-app replacement for Office, but bit by bit it’s making itself the irreplaceable Office tool that Microsoft Office is ceasing to be. It’s the data tool for the data centric world we’re living in. I would have never, ever thought of adding a presentation tool to the app, but they’ve done a brilliant job of taking your raw notes and turning them into a half-decent looking presentation. It makes you wander what they’ll add next: perhaps throw some form of spreadsheet and charting options to take on Excel at the most basic level, or built-in data analysis tools that manage to do the heavy lifting for you from your notes?

What more could they help you do with your mountains of data? The answer to that question will spell the future the notes giant.

I’ve been slowly putting together a website and a brand for the creative firm that I’m starting (it hasn’t launched, but if you’re curious, feel free to check it out). Branding is not an easy thing. It’s a large, multifaceted process that requires a lot of time, effort and yes, Photoshop skills.

That’s why I admire any company or app that tries to make certain parts of the task easier. I love playing around with text, but I don’t have weeks and weeks to make a great logo. And sometimes, I just need an easy way to experiment. That’s where Logoist comes in. The app makes it as easy as possible to put together a logo by eliminating a lot of the cumbersome heavy lifting Photoshop mandates. Let’s take a look and see if it’s worth your time and money.

What Logoist Is

Logoist is, more or less, a really easy way to put together some text or images, or even clipart, and manipulate it until you’ve arrived at the logo you want. In fact, it’s surprisingly complex software that looks deceivingly simple. If that confuses you, don’t worry — it’s a good thing!

I love the way Logoist greets you when you open it. The best Mac software always does this.

Logoist comes complete with everything that makes a Mac app. For example, there are keyboard shortcuts galore. I find a lot of apps with both Windows and Mac apps skimp on keyboard shortcuts in the Mac version. Since Logoist is Mac exclusive, it’s good to go.

Those keyboard shortcuts come in handy when you’re customizing a logo. The app is extremely comprehensive in its abilities. In fact, I’d go so far as to say most people are going to be very covered. The app comes with a huge PDF to walk you through some of what it’s capable of, which is recommended reading if you need a little inspiration and don’t know where to start.

It’s a decently sized PDF and well worth reading.

But a lot of the joy in Logoist comes from exploring and trying things out. This is software that begs to be used. Some of its brushed aluminum looks a little out of date, but it still supports full screen mode in the recent versions of OS X, and full screen is really the way to go here. It puts the focus on you and the logo, which is really what Logoist attempts to do.

My Own Logo Creation

I’m a perfectionist. It’s worth pointing out that I’m still not done with my logo. I’ve been working at this for ages. But in all honesty, thank God for Logoist. It helps me quickly go through all my ideas and decide what doesn’t work very quickly.

This is what I started with… Oh boy.

Most of what I’ve been doing has involved text. My company’s name is Wildfire Studios. Because I’m interested in diversity, I want a different font for each part of the logo. I’ve been experimenting with the brand identity a lot, because I’m not sure if I want to be overly serious and professional or playful.

So first, I started experimenting with fonts. I’m aware this is hardly a novel thing to do, but it’s a great way to introduce you to what makes Logoist different. Instead of simply scrolling through a list of fonts like I would in Photoshop or Pixelmator or their ilk, you’re seeing a live display of what your word will look like with any given font. Each font is lovingly rendered by the app, whether you’re using a pre-installed font or a font you’ve acquired and installed yourself.

I love the clear amount of effort that went into just picking a font.

This is the sort of thing that makes me really happy, because it’s an attention to detail that I wish other apps had. This is clearly built for just for insane logo customizers like myself.

There’s a million things you can do with colours and gradients. They’re all just a few clicks away, and they render very quickly upon selection. There are also a ton of presets you can set up and use for any given option in the app, which come in handy but often look gimmicky. In fact, on a Retina display, some of those layers really seem to fall apart.

You can see how much functionality is included in the app by taking a look at the toolbar.

With that in mind, though, there might just be one part of a preset you want to remove. You can do that with the layered functionality in the app. All you have to do is select the elements that you want to remove and delete them. So you end up with customized presets.

What You Can’t Do

Logoist can handle almost anything you can throw at it. That being said, it can’t do everything. If you want to adjust some fonts by hand (please make sure you have the license to do so beforehand), that’s something Logoist won’t be able to do. I don’t think that it’s something everybody’s going to want or need, but because many view it as an essential part of logo creation, it needs to be mentioned.

I wish you could get a larger live preview of these options instead of these small ones, since there are so many and they can be difficult to differentiate.

There are also some elements that I wish would improve. Although I like changing fonts, I wish that the same level of care was taken to display live changes to your logo as you looked through many other options. I’d love to see a live example of how a drop shadow might look or how a Gaussian blur might affect my logo before actually selecting it.

But that’s a minor quibble, because a live rendering of my logo wouldn’t look anywhere near as good as I can make it look with the options they give. Every single tweak has a million customization options. I think it’s fantastic, and I’m not sure I could ever call it overkill. It’s exactly what the product needs to be.

Final Thoughts

I’m barely scratching the surface here. You could probably write a book about Logoist, and judging by the manual, you could say somebody already has. I’m not complaining. It’s refreshing to see such a comprehensive, focused app that wants to do one thing really well.

It’s that focus that separates Logoist from its competition. Of course I could do most of this in Photoshop, but why would I waste my time trying when Logoist is letting me do almost everything much more easily and for a much cheaper price? With that in mind, I’d nearly say that Logoist is an indispensable tool for almost any amateur designer.

Editor’s Note: With an app like this — especially with its dated 3D text logos in the launch screen — I know many of you will immediately assume the app is both old and junky. Yes, it’d be very easy to turn out, say, the new Yahoo! logo or the trademark monstrous logos on Geocities sites with this app. But, with a bit of care, you can also use it to make a thoroughly modern and thoughtful design with less effort than you’d spend in an app like Photoshop. It definitely has its place in the market, even if it’s not going to help you design an award-winning logo.

In the rush of new apps and upgrades on iOS 7’s launch day, the app that started it all got updated, too, with some features you won’t want to miss. In the 13 years since Apple bought out SoundJam and turned it into their music library app, iTunes has grown beyond anyone’s wildest dreams from 2001. It’s where we manage our Post PC devices, or — increasingly — just that old app we forget about in the age of streaming music services.

So Apple decided to make it about music again. iTunes 11 streamlined the aging music app’s interface, hid much of the complexity, and added a rather nice mini-player in last year’s upgrade. That still doesn’t help much if you don’t buy music or rip CDs these days.

Enter iTunes 11.1. It’s the iTunes — on your Mac, PC, and iOS — that finally makes sense in the post-download age. It’ll get you listening to — and likely buying — new music more than any iTunes before.

“You’re Listening to iTunes Radio”

The new iTunes, with a reinvented Radio.

The big news of this year’s iTunes refresh is the long-rumored iTunes Radio. After years of guesses, we’ve finally got streaming music in iTunes — and it was worth the wait. Much more like traditional radio than the subscription streaming services that let you pick the songs you want to listen to, iTunes Radio includes a catalog of curated stations and lets you create your own from your favorite artists. All that’s left to do is listen (and, yes, there’s the very occasional voiceover saying “You’re listening to iTunes Radio”. I didn’t mind that at all). iTunes will stream the same high quality tracks you’d expect from the iTunes store, complete with track info and album art. And, it works in every market that iTunes sales music — a far larger swath of the globe than is covered by the likes of Spotify.

iTunes Radio lets you pause music anytime, though you can’t backtrack or fast-forward through a song. It also lets you skip up to 6 songs per hour on each station, a decently generous limit unless your station serves you an unusually bad selection — and if so, just switch stations.

Training iTunes.

For the most part, you can just play pre-made stations and forget about anything else. It just works. But you can customize it to your tastes as well. You can have iTunes create a station from any song or artist in your library, or search for an artist name or music genre in the station listings. Then, once you’re playing a station, you can tell iTunes which songs you like and which you’d rather not hear again, set the channel to your preference of hits, variety, or discovery, or add/remove artists from a station.

The curated iTunes stations have mixes that are at least as good as most terrestrial radio stations, ranging from pop hits to playlists from stars to ambient background sounds to help you work. But once you train the stations a bit, you’ll find that they can really do quite the good job at finding music you’ll enjoy — at least, that’s the case for many. Apple’s Genius algorithm has watched our music tastes for years, and it’s obviously learned what music works together. It’s not perfect, though: I’ve found that, say, a station with today’s top hits will veer into hits from a decade ago if you listen long enough.

But really, it’s pretty good. It’s become my default way to listening to music beyond my iTunes library, and I’ve really enjoyed it since it’s one of the few licensed ways to listen to streaming music right now in Asia. And I happen to think it’ll become the default way for most iOS and Mac users to listen to music, especially as so few people sync their devices with iTunes these days.

Note: If you still like traditional internet radio, don’t worry. You’ll still find the iTunes catalog of internet radio stations in the new Internet tab, and they still work the exact same as before.

The best kind of ads: ones for iTunes media.

Now, there’s no such thing as a free lunch, and iTunes Radio has its ways of making money, too. There’s the very most obvious monetization option of letting you purchase tracks you’re listening to on the radio directly from iTunes, either while you’re listening or later from the list of recently played songs. I happen to think that’ll get a new generation buying iTunes tracks the way Apple intended back a decade ago, as radio is the perfect discovery mechanism. And, for what it’s worth, buying a half-dozne or so tracks a month with a free streaming service sounds a lot more appealing to me than paying $10/month for unlimited music.

But then, there’s also ads in iTunes Radio unless you’re an iTunes Match subscriber (which, yes, now just gained the extra perk of removing ads from iTunes Radio). The good news is, they’re far from annoying, at least at this stage. I’ve heard 1-2 per hour in my weeks of listening to iTunes Radio so far, if not less than that. The majority of those ads have been for stuff in iTunes — new albums, or the iTunes Festival songs — with only one ad so far for another product: the Nissan Versa. Either way, you’ll have an unskippable 15-30 second audio add, accompanied by a square picture ad inside the iTunes app (one that won’t show on your screen if you have iTunes minimized, thankfully). Again, it’s been far from annoying so far, though we’ll have to see if they ramp up the ads going forward.

UPDATE: Turns out, iTunes Radio only works if you have a US account — but a US account can play iTunes Radio streams from anywhere on earth (something other streaming services don’t allow directly, sans-proxy). International rollout should be soon, but we don’t know when just yet.

There’s More than Radio

Genius got a bit smarter (well, depending on your library’s quality. Mine’s lacking.)

iTunes Radio is the only headline new feature in iTunes 11.1. For the most part, it’s the same old iTunes 11 as before, just one with a streaming music service baked in. But the new genius smarts can make your local music library a bit nicer, too. There’s brand-new Genius Shuffle that’ll make a playlist of songs in your library from anything you’re currently playing. It’s much like the old Genius Mix, but one that works nicer and on the fly. You’ll find that option in the right-click menu or in the small right-arrow menu beside your Now Playing song, right alongside the new options to make a station from your song. You’ll also find new Podcast features that’ll let you make your own “station” of podcasts, in the order you’d like, that’ll sync to the iOS Podcasts app.

It’s still the (rather dated) place to manage your iOS devices.

Throw in sync support for iOS 7 devices — and an updated tool to organize apps on your device home screen — and that rounds out this iTunes update. There’s not tons to it, but it’s really what iTunes 11 should have been when it shipped. Because, face it: iTunes 11 isn’t too bad of an app, with most of the cruft at least hidden from view and nice new menus for getting the songs you want playing. With the addition of streaming radio, it’s the iTunes update we needed to make everyone rediscover the original Mac music app.

You can install iTunes 11.1 from your App Store updates on a Mac or via Apple updater on a PC, or hold out a few weeks to see it in Mavericks. But really, there’s no reason to wait. Go ahead and enjoy iTunes Radio this week. You just might consider dropping your other streaming service subscription.

Apple’s Notes app is fine if you’re quickly jotting things down, but after a while you may start to want something more powerful. That’s when services like Evernote and Simplenote. The former has had a native Mac app for a while now, but the latter has relied on third-party solutions like the newer Justnotes and Brett Terpstra’s fantastic nvALT.

But now there’s something new on the market. It’s an official app developed by Automattic, the team behind WordPress which now owns Simplenote itself as well. The free Simplenote for Mac promises to bring the whole experience to your computer without a Web browser, and kicks off an entire new wave of Simplenote apps across all their supported platforms. Is the long-awaited client everything we’ve dreamed of?

Flat and Simple

The sign in screen.

The folks at Simplenote didn’t spend any time messing around with a complicated user interface. Rather, they went with a look similar to the new Rdio: plain, flat, beautiful. Some might say this is too minimal for a note-taking app, but I disagree. I think nvALT is too OS X-esque for notes, just as the iCloud Notes app is too skeuomorphic. Simplenote has arrived in the prime of minimal design — a time when apps lose their ornate icons and such to become not just flat, but simple — and delivered its own solution.

If you’re not an advocate for minimal (or “flat”) design, it’s important to remember that this app is Simplenote for a reason. It’s not Evernote with a library of different functions, nor is it iCloud Notes with its lack of tagging and overall basic approach. Simplenote finds the balance, and that’s why it’s always been such an appealing service.

Overall, this app’s design couldn’t be more fitting. It’s very reminiscent of Rdio, yes, but that’s not a problem.

Three Panes: Sidebar, Notes, Editor

The welcome note.

As with the Web app, Simplenote for Mac makes use of the service’s three panes: a sidebar, list of notes, and note editor. The sidebar, which is collapsible, shows the tags you’ve used, as well as the trash. There’s no way to add a new tag here because you have to do it in the note itself. However, you can rename or delete tags, which is helpful for organizing things.

Simplenote in fullscreen.

Next is the notes list. Everything here is identical to the Web app with the exception of the search field, which for some reason is at the bottom of the window. After using nvALT and Simplenote on the Web, having a search field at the bottom of the screen doesn’t feel as natural and takes a while to get used to. The developers probably put it there because they wanted to keep the minimal design at the top with just the + button in the center.

Lastly, the editor. Again, just like with the Web app, the first line of notes becomes the title. It’s nice to see this app give it priority, too. Some Simplenote clients keep all the text the same size, which gets confusing and makes me want to add a ## (header 2 in Markdown) for organization purposes.

The font geeks among us will be interested to know that Simplenote app uses Adobe’s Source Sans Pro font for your notes.

No Markdown Preview or Export Options

After using the app to edit a few of my notes, I noticed that it didn’t have a button to preview Markdown. To be fair, most Simplenote clients don’t support this. It’d sure be nice to have a Markdown syntax highlighting feature, though. Even a way to export the note as a .md would be helpful. None of this is supported, though, and that’s a bit disappointing.

The closest thing to export options.

While I’m on the subject of exporting, this app only supports one type of saving a note: printing it. You can then print the note as a PDF, but it doesn’t use any of the Markdown formatting you’ve put added. Other than that, there’s no plain text export option, just the usual “Collaborate” and “Publish to Web” functions in the … menu. It stores your notes in an internal database, and the only way to get the Simplenote app to save text files to your Mac would be to upgrade to a Pro account online and set it to sync to Dropbox. Otherwise, if export support is very important to you, you may want to stick with nvALT — indeed, the Simplenote team itself says “The official Simplenote for Mac isn’t geared towards power users”, and still recommends nvALT for those wanting more.

Instant Syncing

Unlike nvALT, Simplenote for Mac syncs instantly. There’s no wait for it to finish syncing when quitting the app, nor is there an option for how often you want it to connect to the server. This app automatically starts sending data once you’ve changed something, as it should. I didn’t have any issues with the app’s syncing abilities and it was faster than anything I’ve used. It’s so fast, in fact, that if you have Simplenote.com’s web app open in your browser, you can see your changes from the Simplenote app appear within 1-2 seconds in the web app. It’s incredibly fast, and all but real-time — which almost makes us wonder if they won’t add a co-editing option like Google Docs in the future.

Fantastic Design and Solid Functionality

Editing a Markdown-formatted note.

I tested this app for a few hours straight and didn’t experience any crashing, syncing issues, or issues of any kind. Simplenote for Mac is a beautiful alternative to the Web app. In fact, it’s easily the best notes app available on the Mac today. With the minimal design and perfect feature set, this app is perfect for people who need to quickly jot down something. Evernote is more powerful, yes, but Simplenote does everything it’s supposed to without a single problem. It’s the official app, too, and that means support should be guaranteed for a while. That’s all Mac users of Simplenote have ever wanted.

Apple may have its hands full with iOS 7′s redesign (and the almost forgotten OS X Mavericks upgrade and new Macs like the brand-new Mac Pro), but it still found time in its schedule to give their stable of iCloud web apps a solid upgrade. They’ve been beta testing a new version of iCloud’s web apps for some time now, and today, the new apps are ready for you to try out.

There’s the iWork for iCloud apps that we’ve already looked at, but there’s also fully redesigned Mail, Contacts, Calendar, Reminders, and Notes apps as well — plus a new launchpad that includes the iOS 7 animated blue background. And the apps don’t just look nice, but they also work very nice.

If you’ve never gotten into using the iCloud apps online, here’s why you should start using them today — if for no other reason than to give your Mac some of the update love before Mavericks comes out.

Native-Class Apps in the Browser

From the first time Apple unveiled the iCloud web apps (in early August 2011, though it was a bit longer before they opened the gates to the public), I’ve always been impressed at how much the web apps felt exactly like their iPad counterparts. Graphics heavy though they were, with their skeuomorphic leather designs that matched the iOS 5 and 6 native apps, they still felt slick and responsive in the browser. Every single part of the apps is custom, and if you could just take away the browser chrome, you could convince anyone that the apps weren’t web apps.

The old iCloud web apps look nice and dated right now.

Then iOS 7 happened, and everything we knew about Apple’s design strategy was wrong. Rich leather and ripped paper were out, replaced not by a so-called “flat design”, but rather with a layered design that emphasized content, reduced UI to the minimum, and crisp, light typography. “Natural” elements like paper still crop up in the new designs, contrary to the popular notion — you’ll find a faint paper background in both Notes and Reminders, accompanied by letterpress-styled text. The difference is, this time, the UI is designed to fade to be background and emphasize your content, textured background aside. It’s supposed to be fluid, fast, and content first.

That sounds like the move web apps have made for years, except they’ve never made that content-first and UI-lite strategy look very nice. You’ve got heavily graphical web apps that look beautiful but can be sluggish, or the spartan plainness of Google’s apps. Microsoft’s Office Web Apps practically mirror their desktop app design on the web, but that’s far too heavy for something in a browser anyhow, especially with as few features as Microsoft included.

Hello, iOS 7 in a browser tab.

Then you have Apple. They’ve rebooted their web apps with the exact same design you’ll see in on your iPad as soon as you upgrade to iOS 7. It’s the same iCloud.com as before, with a launchpad of app icons and the normal bundled Apple apps you’d expect to see — Mail, Calendar, Contacts, Reminders, Notes, and Find my iPhone — combined with the beta icons for Apple’s new iWork for iCloud apps. The latter are absolutely great, and have almost everything you’d find in iWork on iPad — it’s definitely the nicest designed office suite on the web today.

Also, spoiler: I think the web apps show that Apple’s not redesigning iWork for iOS just yet, or they would have made the brand new web apps with the new UI — otherwise, Apple’s holding their cards on said UI overhaul so incredibly close that they duplicated effort on the iWork apps. I’d tend not think so.

The Nicest Designed Suite of Web Apps

The new iCloud Mail, in which you may see a sneak peak of another Apple update coming soon.

If you actively use the iCloud web apps daily already, you’ll noticed that most of the features are exactly the same as before in the updated apps. Nothing’s really new there, by and large. What is totally new is the UI. You’ll find the iOS 7 trademark thin typography, silhouette icons, and light colors accented with transparent layers. They look really, really sharp – at least if you’re a fan of iOS 7′s redesign, which I happen to be. And, comically enough, they make the rest of your Mac’s UI look dated by comparison, even if you’re already running Mavericks, since OS X still generally looks the same as it has for the past few years.

The new Reminders, where you should note that skeuomorphism isn’t dead yet.

For the geeky among us, you’ll be interested to know that the iCloud web apps include web fonts for all of the main fonts used in the apps — most notably Helvetica Neue Light, of course. That’s nice to see, since it means the apps will look just as nice on, say, a Windows PC or a Chromebook, both much more likely places to see the iCloud web apps used on a regular basis than a Mac (which already has its own native iCloud-synced apps). It’s an especially nice feature in the iWork apps, which boast a far larger catalog of high quality fonts than other online office apps.

Something else interesting: many of the files that make up the iCloud web apps are stored in iCloud.com/system/cloudos/ — could Apple have more plans for the web interface going forward? Because it sure would be awesome if they opened up an iCloud powered web app platform for 3rd party developers. Imagine all of your apps on iOS, available in any browser at iCloud.com.

The new Notes in iCloud.

But I digress: the important thing is how the apps work. And on that front, you’ve got nothing to fear. The web apps load essentially as fast as Gmail, in my experience, but then, once they’re loaded, you can switch between them instantly. Seriously: visit the Mail app, then open Contacts. Now click the drop-down menu in the top left, and select Mail again — and it’ll just fade into view instantly. Nifty, no?

You’ll find the same responsiveness in syncing, where emails are pushed in faster than they’ll show up in Mail.app, and reminders and note edits are synced with their Mac counterparts in nearly real-time. The apps simply don’t feel like web apps — they just run like great apps on their own. It’s really impressive, something you’ll need to try out and experience for yourself if you’ve been burn by slow and clunky web apps over the years. You’ll find most of the features you’d expect – yup, keyboard shortcuts in Notes work fine, as does dragging-and-dropping appointments in Calendar to reschedule them – in what’s at the very least the most unique UI for web apps online today.

Honestly, if Apple would just let you use your own domain with iCloud email, I’d switch to iCloud from Google Apps in a heartbeat, if just for the web apps and speed. If the native apps on your Mac and iOS devices weren’t a strong enough sale, the web apps should make the case.

Why Web Apps?

The nicest spreadsheet that came free on the web and your iPad. Hmm, why pay for Office?

Now here’s the million dollar question: why on earth would Apple spend the time and money to make best-in-class web apps? They own two of the most popular computing platforms today – OS X and iOS – and bundling native apps with them makes perfect sense, as does supplying those apps with top-notch syncing services. But the iCloud web apps only duplicate that effort at best, and at worst make it easier for an iPad user to stick with their PC.

Steve Jobs once quipped that iTunes on Windows was like giving a glass of ice water to someone in hell, and I happen to think that iCloud.com is supposed to be exactly that. It’s a trojan horse of sorts that shows off Apple’s design prowess with beautiful apps that work great, and subtilely remind you that on a PC, the web is about the only place with exciting new apps. Just look at the promo page for iWork for iCloud beta — the only image of the web apps is on a Windows 8 laptop, since the Mac and iPhone both are running native versions of the demoed apps.

Then, they provide a bit of security for users. I’ve heard far too many people tell me they didn’t want to switch to iWork since they needed to use “real Office” on their PC. Now, that argument is moot. The same year that Microsoft decided to charge $10/month for Office, Apple gives you most of the features of Office that regular home users need for free in a browser on any computer — and then threw the same apps in for free on your iPad and iPhone. It’s not like you’ll have to stick with the likes of OpenOffice if don’t pay for Office; now, you can get the nicest designed office suite for free, and it works everywhere even if you don’t have a Mac. Suddenly, having .pages files laying around doesn’t sound so scary, since you can open them anywhere.

I think it’s a smart marketing move on both sides: showing PC users Apple’s design prowess, and helping everyone feel more confident in relying on iWork and the other iCloud apps.

Oh, another iOS UI sample, this time thanks to iCloud’s online help.

But Will Anyone Really Use Them?

There’s more reason than ever to use iCloud’s web apps — but then, I have to wonder just how much they really get used. As much as I love the iCloud web apps, I’ll always opt for my Mac or iOS devices’ native apps first. Perhaps if I was on a PC more often, I’d use them — I know I’ll be recommending them to PC+iPad using relatives. So I’d love to know if you’ve ever relied on the iCloud web apps, and if the redesigns will make you more likely to do so. Or, do they just represent one of Apple’s most puzzling projects, that of porting their apps to the web?

One thing’s for sure: they’re sure good at porting apps to the web. If these apps were from a indie web app startup, they’d be getting some serious attention about now.

Some keys get used more just because they’re more common, but for keyboard fiends, there’s a whole different set of keys that get worn out. If you’ve ever worn out the ?, Ctrl, or alt keys on your keyboard, chances are you couldn’t get by with just a mouse.

If anything, keyboard shortcuts are one of the best things in OS X. There’s the usual suspects, like ?+C and ?+V for copy and paste, or ?+tab for switching between apps, but you get those everywhere. Then there’s the ones that make OS X especially nice for writing: Alt+left/right to jump between words and ?+left/right to jump to the beginning/end of a line, with the addition of holding shift down to select text. There’s even more obscure text editing shortcuts, like Ctrl+T to swap the two letters your curser’s currently between.

Then, there’s the even more powerful keyboard shortcuts: those like ?+space to open Spotlight search or the default Alt+space to start Alfred. Those — combined with app specific shortcuts, and those you can setup yourself from your Keyboard’s system preferences — are the most powerful tools to keep you from having to revert to your mouse or touchpad all day. They’ll get so ingrained in your muscle memory, a computer without them feels broken.

For me, Alt+space is that killer shortcut that I invoke over a hundred times a day to use Alfred. What’s your favorite keyboard shortcut?

Phillips Hue lights are awesome. You can turn them off from your phone from the airport, have IFTTT change their color based on the weather automatically, or use the timer to have the lights gradually turn on when it’s time to wake up. It’s how all lightbulbs should work in the 21st century.

And yet, on your Mac, you’ll have to go online to control your Hue bulbs. Seems like it should be easier — and now it can be, thanks to Hue Menu for Mac. For $2.99, this little app will let you rename your lights, change your lights’ color and brightness, or turn them on or off from your menubar. It’s a simple way to make Hue work just like you want while you’re working from your Mac.

And now, you’ve got the chance to control your Phillips Hue lights for free from your Mac menubar, since we’ve got 10 copies of Hue Menu to giveaway! Just leave a comment below and let us know how many Hue lights you have, and how you’re currently controlling them to enter the giveaway. Then, share the giveaway on your favorite social network and add a second comment with a link to your post for an extra entry.

Hurry and get your entry in — we’re closing our giveaway on Tuesday, September 24th!

Envato staff or those who have written more than two articles or tutorials for AppStorm are ineligible to enter.

When Apple brought iCloud Tabs, Photo Stream, and AirDrop to the Mac and iOS, users could finally stop emailing things to themselves or plugging in their iOS devices to transfer a photo. Still, AirDrop and these other services don’t do everything. What if you wanted to send your clipboard to your mobile phone or tablet? Or maybe you have a text document that you need to take with you to a lecture. Either of these scenarios can be solved with Dropbox, but what if there was something faster?

DeskConnect boasts “seamless” transfer of text, audio, driving directions, etc. from your mobile device to your computer and vice versa. Over the years, there have been a lot of these services, from Clipboard to Bump, but none of them have truly brought desktop and mobile together for a unified experience. Does DeskConnect?

Setup

Signing up for an account.

Configuring DeskConnect took a little longer than I would have hoped. Rather than using iCloud for sync, DeskConnect has its own servers to transfer files through. This means that you have to sign up for an account, which requires an email and password. That part didn’t take very long since there’s no activation email, but afterward I had trouble getting the Mac app to recognize my iPhone.

I was able to send a photo from my iPhone to my Mac, but not the other way around since the desktop app didn’t display my device. After reopening the app and doing a few other routine things, I decided to contact support. One of the developer’s reps told me that the problem was caused by not enabling push notifications on my phone. (Also, might I note that he responded very quickly.) I enabled them an all was well. They should probably mention in the setup prompts that it’s essential to have push enabled.

Speed and Reliability

Sending a link.

The first thing I tried to send with DeskConnect was a link to an article on my blog. I opened it in Safari and the app sensed the URL, giving me the option to send it to my iPhone. I clicked the phone and the menu bar icon spun around in a little animation of blue, then my phone alerted me that there was a new transfer from my computer. I opened it and after about ten seconds, the app took me to the link in my browser of choice (Chrome). It was nice to see that it gives you the option to use either Chrome or Safari for opening links.

A DeskConnect notification on iPhone.

Next I tried the clipboard feature. This worked even better than the link and was almost instantaneous. On the iPhone, the clipboard was displayed in a .txt file using the courier font. Now, of course, neither of these transfers should take too long since they’re strings of text. I decided to send a photo from Finder by dragging and dropping it on the DeskConnect icon. Boy, that was fast.

You can share files from inside apps if you give DeskConnect hard drive access.

To put some strain on things, I headed to iTunes and selected a hefty 9.4 MB song — AWOLNATION’s “Sail”. This crashed the app, so I tried it again. While the notification popped up instantly, the file wasn’t actually available for a few minutes (likely due to my inadequate upload speed). While the menu bar icon was animating, I decided to check on the speed of things in Activity Monitor. I found that DeskConnect was indeed peaking my connection’s upload speed at 1 Mbps. Back on my iPhone, the file loaded up in a few seconds and was ready to play.

This is not a local area network transfer service. Rather, it uploads the file to a server and then downloads it again on the recipient device.

Unlike AirDrop, you don’t have to wait for DeskConnect to scan for devices, authenticate the one you want to connect to, send the file, and then accept it on the other end (this last step only happens sometimes). I was surprised by how fast DeskConnect took a file from one device to another. I love Dropbox, but this service is far faster than uploading anything there.

Why Is It Free?

With the many privacy concerns of “free” services nowadays, it’s only fair that we ask, “Why is DeskConnect free?” After all, the mobile and desktop apps are free to download and there are no in-app purchases to be seen. I asked a spokesperson from DeskConnect. “Our goal right now is to build the best experience possible for our users, and in due time figure out a way to create a revenue stream that is fair and uninterruptive for users”, he said. “For the moment, though, we are funding DeskConnect out of pocket.”

Like AirDrop, Sans-LAN

The welcome screen.

AirDrop works great if you’re on the same network. Likewise, Photo Stream is a nice way to make all the photos you take on your iPhone accessible anywhere, but it’s slow and iPhoto often takes a while to refresh the Stream. DeskConnect is the bridge between these, offering lightning-fast transfer of any file, clipboard, or link from device to device. The price? Free.

I did encounter a few little problems here and there, the worst being transfers from an iPhone to Mac are hard to save. Most of them are opened in a Quick Look window and the actual file location isn’t revealed, which struck me as a bit strange. Overall, though, I enjoy using DeskConnect. It’s far superior to (and more modern than) emailing a file to yourself, as well as being faster than Dropbox, AirDrop, and Photo Stream. If you move little things from Mac to iPhone daily, give this a try.

Doo is an all-new document management app that promises to provide access to all your important files and documents within a single app, keeping everything organised. Think of it as Evernote just for your documents, allowing you to keep everything in sync across multiple devices with little to no effort required.

It’s latest version was recently released for the Mac, so we wanted to dive in and see how it holds up in today’s world filled with a mixture of computers and mobile devices. Here’s what we found.

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What is Doo?

Doo tries to achieve what Evernote has with note taking and clipping by providing a central location to keep all of your documents centralised for easy finding. It’s very similar to iDocument, an app we’ve previously reviewed, which is also a document management app to provide a central location for finding and organising your documents.

If you’ve been attempting to go paperless and have been scanning in many items in order to reduce desktop clutter, apps like Doo are ever more important as the Finder is only able to organise your documents so far. If you have a tax receipt, does that go in the Tax or Receipts folder?

Doo’s interface is familiar to those using Evernote and, indeed, it could be considered the “Evernote of documents”.

Document Organisation

When first using Doo, a new folder is created where documents that are imported are stored. Alternatively, you can connect Doo to services such as Dropbox and Google Drive whereby the app will display any documents stored within the relevant folder that the service creates. Should you have all of your documents in a sub-folder, it makes much more sense to specify that instead.

Working with a number of services, Doo can automatically import all of your documents. For heavy Dropbox or Google Drive users, this is a mixed blessing.

Unfortunately, Doo doesn’t preserve any form of folder hierarchy and all of your documents are displayed together. If you’re just starting your document organisation then this won’t present a problem but for anyone with hundreds of documents, this can be a huge amount of work to re-organise. You can, instead, specify sub-folders but if your folder structure is quite deep then this can be rather time consuming.

Doo doesn’t preserve folder hierarchy if you’ve already been organising your documents, so be prepared to spend some time reorganising them.

Doo does scan all of your documents, performing OCR where necessary and reading all of the relevant information within documents like PDFs so that it can be searched and it does so rather well. Documents of varying quality were scanned without issue and were easily searchable. Doo performs this OCR on any new document it detects and attempt to automatically gather and complete any information it can so you don’t have to.

I was hoping that, despite it lacking any retention of folder hierarchy, it would at least attempt to tag items with the folder name but unfortunately that wasn’t the case.

Interface

Doo’s interface is somewhat reminiscent of Evernote with its eschewing of OS X’s more traditional interface stylings in favour of a flatter and more custom design. A permanent search bar sits atop which provides a global search of many different criteria.

A useful feature of Doo is that you can assign company names to documents so keeping track of receipts or banking information is that little bit easier. Doo even attempts to autocomplete with many popular business names, though it is rather hit and miss due to the sheer amount of names there are.

The document inspector, where you can assign labels and notes, is clearly laid out and easy to navigate. Doo also has an option to specify what type of document you’re working with, assigning document types such as Insurance Policy or Statement. It’s a rather redundant feature since adding a label would not only do exactly the same but the list of document types is actually not that many. Just like organising a tax receipt, what would we classify it as? Labels make much more sense.

The document inspector allows for labels and notes to be assigned to documents.

The left-column provides us with access to our document library as well as storage locations (where Doo is accessing files from) as well as something called Workspaces. It’s another level of organisation and lets you split documents into specific areas, such as home and office. There’s even a Quick Access section that provides, rather self-explanatory, quick access to searches you’ve saved from the search bar.

Timeline

A very useful feature that Doo includes is Timeline, providing quick access to documents created at a certain time. You can bring up the timeline at any time and select a specific month and year, allowing you to view documents created at that time. The timeline also provides feedback in terms of how many documents there are so the higher the bars, the more documents were created at that time.

A timeline function makes it really useful to find documents created at a certain time.

Doo Sync

Doo offers a syncing service that will securely sync specific storage locations that you choose between devices. It’s nice to see a service that is opt-in rather than just being on automatically and you have to specify you want to sync specific locations within the app’s preferences, ensuring any confidential sensitive documents aren’t automatically synced.

Rules

A very useful feature that will have those who love structure and organisation is Doo’s Rules function, providing an automated way of categorising and label items based upon criteria as it’s imported. It works just like Mail’s rules and were very easy to use and configure, adding a level of power to Doo that other apps certainly lack.

Rules add a great way of organising data as it’s imported, ensuring many repetitive tasks can be automated.

Quirks

Unfortunately, there are some issues with Doo. A particular cause of frustration for me was it’s method of autocomplete. For example, when entering a company within a document, I would begin typing the name and expect that, when done, to press enter. If the company wasn’t listed, pressing enter would create it automatically or, if a number of possibilities existed, I could then select one. Instead, Doo would default to the first company in the list which caused a number car-related documents being assigned to the Buenaventura Mining Company when I wanted to use MINI.

My experience of Doo Sync was not a good one, unfortunately. I have been testing Doo for Mac and iPad concurrently for AppStorm and found the syncing service still has far to go. Syncing documents worked perfectly and I was able to specify a folder of documents to sync between my Doo devices. However, when I deactivated the folder’s syncing on my Mac, all of the documents remained on my iPad. Even removing the app and re-adding it still showed that Doo’s servers were retaining the data and, without any way of deleting it from my iOS device and my Mac not even displaying the information, my only way of removing it was to delete my Doo account complete.

Conclusion

Doo is an interesting document management app and one I really wanted to get behind. Unfortunately, it’s interface quirks and worryingly confused syncing service prevented me from having anything but a mediocre experience. For anyone just starting out managing documents then your experience will likely be much more favourable, though if you’re already organising documents within the Finder or other similar app, it would mean spending a lot of time reorganising your data.

I’ll certainly be keeping an eye on Doo as I can see what they’re trying to achieve which is something that no other app is as close to as they are, so perhaps sometime soon Doo may resolve those issues and at that time, I’ll be the first to try it again.

Delicious. No, I haven’t just finished a meal. I’m recalling a time, not so very long ago, when we all used bookmarking services to keep track of our favourite parts of the web. It seems strange, then, that most of us have moved on. It is undoubtedly the case that we still save plenty of bookmarks. Equally, the link capturing tools at our disposal have barely changed in the nine years since Delicious stepped onto Yahoo’s slippery, corporately-greased slope.

Of course, Delicious wasn’t the only option back then — there were native bookmark library apps available, too. With the advent of modern-day cloud syncing, the concept of keeping bookmarks somewhere other than in your browser seems weird. For folks who make a lot of bookmarks, however, the abysmal bookmark organization tools with which browsers are still lumbered is a problem which a third party app can solve.

So, it would appear that there’s still a place for apps like Pins — a native OS X bookmark manager priced at $14.99 in the App Store. It offers to attach tags and notes to your links, it provides cloud syncing, and it even captures page previews, but can Pins really provide a compelling, Utopian alternative to your browser’s in-built bookmarks manager?

Getting Started

For those of us who’ve been using OS X since the days of Tiger, Pins is like a nostalgic trip back in time. It isn’t actually a legacy product, but your eyes will probably disagree. The interface is in no way ugly, cluttered, or dysfunctional, but it has the same look as other productivity apps which were peaking in popularity circa 2006 — I’m thinking of Yojimbo and Delicious Library. I suppose that there just isn’t a feeling of visual freshness here. However, as Pinboard clearly illustrates, à la mode beauty is hardly the most important facet of a high quality link-keeper.

Pins‘ UI — uncluttered, practical, but a little stale.

Critically, Pins is pretty simple to navigate. There is a list of folders to your left, the bookmark inspector to your right, and your links are down the middle, with a few simple controls scattered around the edges. Install the Pins browser extension (Safari, Chrome and Firefox versions are available), and a single click is all that is required to start pushing links in the direction of your Pins library.

Capture and Storage

Links captured in this way — or, indeed, via the manual addition option which Pins offers — are automatically provided with a headline and a preview thumbnail, and they initially arrive in the Inbox (I’m getting Yojimbo flashbacks again…). This is, essentially, a temporary holding area for links you’ve yet to sort.

When you do come to sort these capture links, you’ll find that several types of data can be attached to each bookmark for filing purposes: an out-of-five star rating, some tags, a note and any relevant login details. It’s not a comprehensive list, but it’s good enough, although the inability to add this data via the extension is an irritating oversight.

The range of data which can be attached to bookmarks isn’t comprehensive, but it’s enough.

It’s also worth noting that Pins is quite happy to accept the exports of Safari and Delicious (among others) if you want to take your old bookmarks with you. Thankfully, you can make all the data edits, as mentioned above, in batches.

Organization

All that input is only useful if it actually aids the subsequent retrieval of your saved links, and whilst Pins doesn’t provide anything particularly innovative, it does do a respectable job of keeping your bookmarks at hand.

The easiest way of finding links in Pins is simply to use the search bar. It’s not clever enough to spot misspellings, but it does take notice of both link titles and tags, and it provides results at speed.

For a more manual approach to rediscovery, you can create your own folders of bookmarks, and these reside in the left-hand sidebar. Further down the sidebar are the smart folders that Pins includes by default, offering swift access to links which meet certain criteria, such as those you’ve visited most often, duplicates, broken links, and the bookmarks to which you’ve assigned a five-star rating. Inexplicably, however, you can’t create your own smart folders. Clever, automatic sorting should be one major advantage that a native app has over an online service. In this case, it’s not to be.

The tags view is one clear advantage Pins holds over its browser competition.

Flicking the relevant switch at the base of the sidebar changes its contents completely. Now, you’ve got access to an alphabetical list of tags, making it a great deal easier to locate bookmarks relating to certain subjects.

The sorting options look insignificant, but they’re actually amount to a key feature.

Bizarrely, I think the most useful feature of Pins is the in-folder sorting options it provides. A-Z and date of addition aren’t anything new, but the ability to sort links based on rating, or on the regularity with which you’ve visited them, is actually a feature with which no major browser can currently compete. Pins also provides two distinct flavours of list display — headlines only, or complete with thumbnail and any attached notes.

Cloud Syncing

Pins is not integrated with any third party bookmark storage services, but it does offer free cloud syncing. Sign-up can be effected from within the app, and the process is swift, requiring nothing more than an email and a password. At present, the service simply allows you to sync your bookmarks between any Macs on which you have a copy of Pins installed. Looking to the future, I’m told that an iOS version of Pins is in early development; presumably, the mobile app will be integrated with the current cloud backup service.

Conclusion

I approached the reviewing of Pins with optimism. I still believe that a great app, particularly when linked to an established web service for syncing, can provide a better bookmarking experience than is available in the four major browsers. Here’s a new kid on the block, ready to show how it can be done.

Pins isn’t a dynamic new offering, though. It’s certainly competent — it keep bookmarks in order, it provides better organization tools than any browser, and it backs up your bookmarks to the cloud — but it’s not going to wow anyone. Can I recommend it over and above online-only services such as Pinboard? Probably not. Equally, however, I can’t recommend services such as Pinboard over and above Pins.

Overall, then, I’m not going to suggest that you rush to purchase Pins, but if you’re looking for a bookmark manager, it’s worth adding it to your list of options.

Want to make beautiful vector graphics from your Mac without having to spend a fortune — and without having to use an app that’s confusing and cluttered? Then you should give iDraw, our sponsor this week, a try.

iDraw is a feature-packed vector illustrations app that’s been on the Mac for years, but with its latest 2.3 upgrade it’s better than ever. In addition to its already great vector drawing tools, grid and alignment options, vector brushes, stylized text, and more, it now lets you import and export complete Photoshop files, including shape layers and layer styles. You’ll also find all new blend modes to use iDraw with your photos as well, and smart image masking to help you extract just what you want from an image. There’s even dimensioning tools to help you create scale diagrams in iDraw.

If you work from your Mac and iPad, iDraw is the graphics companion you’ve been waiting for. Your files will sync via iCloud between your devices automatically, so you can pick up what you’re working on wherever you are. Then, it’ll be easy to get started with iDraw thanks to their catalogue of detailed iDraw Tutorials for free. No more buying expensive books to learn how to use your graphics app — iDraw is easy to use, and has the tutorials you need included.

Switch to iDraw Today!

There’s a lot more to vector drawing than Adobe Illustrator in iDraw, all for less than the price of 1 month of Creative Cloud. So why not pick up a copy of iDraw for Mac from the App Store for just $24.99, and get a companion copy of iDraw for iPad for just $8.99. iDraw gives you the power of amazing desktop vector graphics with the portability of iPad creativity for an insanely powerful duo.

Email’s a tough thing to innovate, because — regardless of how much we complain about it — email is still the simplest way to send messages of any size to anyone on earth. It works. And so, we continue to use it with the apps we have, hoping that favorite apps like Sparrow will live to see another day.

Regardless of how the rest of our digital lives change, email seems destined to mostly stay the same. The best we can hope for, it seems, is tricks that make Mail.app a better email tool, and newer apps like Airmail that attempt to recapture Sparrow’s magic.

There’s one app, though, that’s trying a new approach to email: Unibox. Instead of being about your messages and reaching inbox zero, it’s about the people behind your messages. And now, it’s in public beta so everyone can try it out.

It’s All About Your Conversations

Unibox boasts a polished interface

Nearly a decade ago when Gmail was launched with 1Gb of storage space and tags instead of the traditional folders, it was rather apparent that the search giant didn’t intend for us to delete emails. Indeed, with that much storage, why not just let your account fill up with messages, and rely on search to find what you need so you’ll never wish you had saved an email again? But then, if you’re saving everything, surely it should be easy to find all of your conversations with all of your contacts. That, sadly, never has been the case in Gmail’s interface. Regardless of tags and a deep archive of messages, you’ll never get the conversational feel from email that you do from chat.

It’s taken this long, but we finally have a native email app that makes conversations make sense in email: Unibox. Unlike most new email apps today that are designed solely to help you achieve Inbox Zero, Unibox shows all of your recent conversations right in your main view. It takes it even further, stripping everything away except for the name of the other person in the conversation and their contact or Gravatar photo, organized by date sent or received. Select a name, and you’ll see all of the emails in conversation view, one that’s reminiscent what Sparrow and iMessages would look like merged together, complete with keyboard shortcuts for everything important to keep you working fast.

Composing or replying to emails is simpler than in Sparrow

It’s radically different enough that I personally didn’t like it at first, but I’ve finally warmed to the concept thanks to the app’s nice UI and the fact that — as crazy as it sounds — it makes it easier to remember what happened over the past few days in your email.

Hope for a more customizable Unibox to come

Now, right now, the default Unibox view only shows messages in your Inbox and Sent folders, which means any conversations you’ve archived or moved to a folder won’t show up by default. You can dive into any of your folders or tags and see the messages there, but — once I got over my initial shock at the lack of Inbox Zero — I happen to think I’d like to have the Unibox view show messages from my entire email accounts, perhaps with a small Sparrow-style colored tag/folder indicator to know where the messages were archived. The settings look like we perhaps might be able to add extra folders (and hopefully archives) to the default Unibox view.

At any rate, I personally think that Unibox is one of the more promising new email apps on the Mac so far this year, especially for anyone wanting a new way to approach email. It’s beautifully minimalist, and unique enough that you won’t find yourself constantly comparing it to other apps. It’s one beta app you should try.

So go sign up for the Unibox open beta, take it for a spin, and let us know what you think. I happen to bet many of you will like it.

I’m seldom an impulsive shopper, especially when it comes to real products – though apps often get me to drop a dollar or five without nearly as much thought. At $35, though, the Chromecast seemed tempting enough to be worth a shot. I write about web apps for a living, but have never owned a Chrome device, so this seemed like the perfect chance to give the Chrome device ecosystem a shot.

There’s a tiny twist, though: I’m an American living in Thailand, and the Chromecast was solidly a product aimed at the American market. But surely it could be the perfect cheap dongle to turn any TV into a smart TV with your smartphone as the controller, no?

After doubling my initial investment in postage and waiting several weeks, I finally had a Chromecast in the back of my LG 42″ LED non-smart TV in my living room in Bangkok. It was both magical and frustrating. Here’s why.

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Wireless HDMI on the Cheap

A real smart TV has been incredibly elusive, despite the efforts of everyone from Microsoft in the ‘90s (and in this century with the Xbox) to Google’s infamous Nexus Q and Google TV efforts. Apple TV was classified as a hobby by none other than Jobs himself, but of all things it’s one of the best ways to add smarts to your TV thanks to iTunes’ rich library of media, the ton of streaming services it works with, and its iOS and OS X integration with AirPlay.

With almost every TV company offering various “smart” TVs, and a proliferation of devices — from Bluray players to the Apple TV and the Roku in the $100 price range to every modern game console — offering Netflix and other video service integration, it’d seem there’s little more to offer without radically reinventing TV or drastically cutting the price. Google chose the latter this time around.

The $35 Chromecast — initially offered with a complimentary 3 month Netflix subscription, a $24 value itself — is the cheapest way to make a normal TV “smart”, at least within today’s definition of smart TV. It’s basically like a normal USB flash drive, albeit with an HDMI port and a micro-USB power port on the back that you’ll need to connect to your TV’s USB or plug in directly to power it. Internally, it’s basically a stripped-down Android device that can stream YouTube and Netflix videos on its own, or display your mirrored Mac or PC screen. The former basically makes it a limited smart TV that uses your other devices as a remote, while the latter makes it essentially the cheapest wireless HDMI setup.

Insanely simple setup

Perhaps setup is too strong a term, thought: to get the Chromecast running, you really just run a little app that lets you type in your Wifi password from another device, and give your Chromecast a name. Then, you’ll need to install a Chrome extension to stream content to your Chromecast — or make sure you have the latest YouTube or Netflix apps on your mobile device — and you’re done.

Chromecast in Action

The Chromecast, ready for action

There’s two ways of sending video to the Chromecast, as mentioned before: by using an app or site that directly supports it (limited to YouTube and Netflix for now) or by mirroring a tab in Chrome or your whole computer screen. The former works the very best — you pick a video on your computer or mobile device, start it playing, and send it to the Chromecast. You can then close your computer or do something else — the Chromecast will stream the media on its own in full HD. You can also stream Google Play videos, from the Android app or the Purchases tab in YouTube, with the same beautiful results. It’s nice enough to make you wonder why every other streaming device isn’t this easy to use.

YouTube on the big screen

Streaming a browser tab, though, isn’t nearly as nice right now. I’d harbored a hope that the Chrome name in the Chromecast meant that it would actually render webpages you send to it itself, but no. Instead, it’s just mirroring anything that’s in your browser tab to the TV, complete with audio. That doesn’t work so nice, say, for reading the news on the TV (something that doesn’t really make sense in the first place), but it does work fairly well for watching online videos or pushing slideshows or presentations to the TV.

There’s a noticeable delay, but it’s a consistent delay that doesn’t mess up watching media on the big screen. The quality is far from perfect, but it’s at least SD quality most of the time. And, surprisingly, if you’re watching a Flash video in a webpage you’re casting to the Chromecast, and then take the video full-screen, it’ll go full-screen on the Chromecast without any issues. It won’t work with everything — Silverlight won’t cast audio, for example — but it’s a surprisingly nice way to show anything at random on your TV. There’s an experimental full-screen casting mode, too, but don’t expect to be able to push iTunes Movies to your TV that way, as I couldn’t get full-screen casting to push audio to the TV.

Hello, Ulysses III and Tweetbot. You’re now TV apps.

But, there’s a little-known easter egg built-in to Chrome: it can playback most media types on its own, including just about any video format you’ll have around — and even .mkv Bluray rips. Cast the tab with that media playing, and you’ll have nearly perfect quality streaming from your Mac — far better than internet-based tab casting since 100% of your Wifi bandwidth is going to your Mac to Chromecast stream instead of having to download media as well. You won’t be able to play back, say, iTunes Movies since they’re locked down with DRM, but anything you have ripped on your Mac can be sent to the Chromecast rather easily.

The Streaming Conundrum

In the US or other markets where Netflix is supported, you’ve got quite the selection of high-quality media that the Chromecast can play back on its own. You can play anything from YouTube, Netflix, or Google Play with a tap from any device you already have, and it just works. It’s like an AirPrint printer, for video.

Outside the US, there’s a number of workarounds to get Netflix to work, from the Chrome extension Hola Unblocker and simple DNS workarounds to more bandwidth-intensive (and expensive) options such as a VPN. The former, though, work 99% of the time — but don’t expect it to be that simple with the Chromecast. The Chromecast has Google DNS built-in, and no way to change its DNS servers — and casting a tab with Netflix playing thanks to Hola Unblocker won’t work, since Silverlight audio doesn’t work with Chrome’s tab casting. Thus, unless you have a router that lets you setup a VPN in the router, there’s no way to get Netflix to play in the Chromecast abroad.

YouTube’s player, ready for Chromecast action.

That leaves you with YouTube streaming and casting tabs — and the lure of ripped media you can play back in a tab or the numerous illegitimate sites that let you playback pirated TV shows, sports, and movies with a simple Flash player. And if you’re ripping disks already and want a cheap way to play them on your TV, it’d really make more sense to put them on an external HDD and connect it to your TV.

For streaming media, then, the Chromecast today makes sense in any market that has Netflix, but otherwise, you’re limited to YouTube and casting tabs. Odds are, more sites will directly support the Chromecast going forward, giving you more media that the Chromecast can play on its own, but for now you’re pretty limited.

The Casting Potential

Anything in your browser — or, experimentally, your full screen — is TV ready

But then, it’s a $35 device that’s directly linked to your browser. Surely there’s more one could do with it than simply use it like a rather lossy wireless HDMI cable.

That’s where the browser — and your imagination — comes in. See, think about it: you can push any tab to the Chromecast, and whether it’s your active tab or not it’ll keep pushing it to your TV. So, there’s an easy way to send Geckoboard to your TV to keep tabs on your business stats without needing a dedicated computer or running a long cable from your desk. Want to give a presentation using an online presentation app like the one in Google Drive? Stick a Chromecast in the projector, and you’re ready to roll. Or, perhaps, you could use it to stream music from your TV — there’s an audio-only mode that sends an even lossier video stream to save bandwidth that works very nicely.

If only the Chromecast could actually render webpages itself, I’d be more inclined to recommend it. It’d have way more possibilities that way. But perhaps, there’s hope. Perhaps Google could update it in the future and make it have more of Chrome and less of the casting. Imagine if you could send a tab to Chromecast, have it render live on the TV, but then control it from your MacBook and have Chrome send the clicks on your computer to the same element in the TV-rendered webpage. That would be very cool.

Our hope: updates.

For today, it’s a cheap Apple TV alternate if you’re mostly wanting to stream online videos to your TV. If you use iTunes media at all, though, the extra $65 for an Apple TV is well worth the cost, and AirPlay streaming by all accounts is far better than Chromecast streaming.

One thing’s for sure: it’s software and services that both make and break the Chromecast. Hardware, on its own, is nothing. It’s software that makes software worth buying, no matter how expensive or cheap the device. That’s another reminder why Apple hasn’t done more with the TV yet: they’re likely trying to nail content and services — the software side — before they try to innovate on the hardware.

We reviewed iDocument earlier this year and whilst it was a very capable app, some of our readers weren’t able to get on with it, whether it was due to the way it handed their documents or ongoing performance issues.

The developers, Icyblaze, seem to have been taking all the feedback on-board and have recently released iDocument 2 — a complete reworking of the original app. I’ve been taking it for a spin to see just how different iDocument 2 really is from its predecessor.

Out With The Old…

iDocument 2 shares almost no resemblance to the original iDocument, using a muted grey and blue colour scheme that wouldn’t look out of place within one of Apple’s Pro apps.

iDocument 2 has had a substantial redesign, both on the surface and under the hood.

Whilst the aesthetics of the app are radically different, the layout itself remains the same, with folders and collections located in the left-column whilst documents are presented in the iPhoto-like main view. The search bar has now located to a more traditional top-right and gone is the toolbar from the bottom, opting instead for an Inspector that can be toggled into view.

In With The New

iDocument 2′s biggest change from its predecessor is perhaps the way it handles your documents. While you can still import many types of documents into the app’s own library, you don’t have to anymore. A common complaint was that iDocument insisted on importing and handling documents itself, and if iDocument were to go wrong, you’d have to spend time moving data out of its own library folder.

iDocument 2 no longer requires documents to be imported and can simply reference them, keeping them untouched.

iDocument 2 does away with this process completely and instead of importing documents automatically like the app used to do, the app leaves the documents where they are, merely indexing them and handling any metadata and information itself whilst keeping your documents well and truly separate. In this respect, iDocument 2 is less like iPhoto and more like Aperture — allowing you to reference files instead of simply having to import them.

This allows iDocument 2 to work with any existing folder hierarchy you might already have and, just because you’re not importing into its own library, you’re not missing out on any of the app’s other features. You can still link documents into collections, similar to iPhoto’s Events, as well as add tags, descriptions and flag them as needed — but none of your files are moved.

Changes to any folders are noticed instantly and iDocument 2 instantly updates its library as soon as it detects another compatible document within a folder. Support for video and audio is also now much improved and iDocument 2 will display any media files you may want to include and preset searches for author, recency and file type are all available under the new Focus menu.

iDocument 2 still has its own library function if you’d like to import files and this can be done simply by drag and dropping items onto its window.

Cloud Support

iDocument 2 handles online storage services in a similar way. You can point the app to a folder within your respective cloud storage service, such as Dropbox or Google Drive. The app detects which service you have automatically and asks if you’d like to use it with it, an option that you can decline.

There are a wide number of services it can provide automatic support for, with the ability to manually specify any services not listed here simply by selecting its folder.

As iDocument no longer requires documents to be imported, it means you can still keep them on these types of services and access them from other devices, such as an iPhone or iPad. Changes you make outside iDocument 2 are automatically reflected.

Any services set up in this way are displayed with their relevant service name and any folder hierarchy is retained.

Specify a folder within Dropbox and iDocument 2 will retain its hierarchy, keeping that carefully developed folder structure intact.

iCloud

One of the many criticisms of iCloud is the way in which it handles documents that you store on it. Save a document to iCloud in TextEdit and only that app can view it.

iCloud support is able to display many of your iCloud documents all in one place, allowing you to edit them in other apps as well.

A novel feature of iDocument 2 is that it provides a way of accessing all the documents you have stored on iCloud and displays them within the app. Instead of browsing app by app, iDocument will show you all of your iCloud documents in a central location, all without moving or copying.

What’s more, you can then edit the documents in any app you’d like and the changes are then synced back to iCloud. Power users will already know how to do this through the Finder but iDocument 2 provides a great front-end to doing this. I was able to edit a document I originally created in TextEdit using Textastic and as soon as I saved the changes and checked the document in TextEdit, the changes were there.

Encryption MIA

You can purchase iDocument 2 from either the Mac App Store or directly from the developer. Unfortunately, due to sandboxing restrictions imposed by Apple, the ability to encrypt documents (now called SafeBox) is not currently available if you purchase the app through the Mac App Store.

Whilst I can understand that there is little the developer can do to resolve this, it’s a feature I spent a good 10 minutes trying to find after reading about it on the website, only to discover the reason it was missing within a blog post rather than a support article. As it’s a main feature that the developer focuses on, I’d be a little annoyed if I had bought the app in the hopes of using encryption, only to find out it’s missing.

Conclusion

Make no mistake, iDocument 2 is a completely different app from its predecessor and, in fact, it’s less of an upgrade and more of a reinvention. By doing away with the import requirements, it should resolve many people’s past criticisms and now provide the best of both worlds, letting you retain any existing document organisation you might have yet still be able to use all of the features that make iDocument 2 so useful.

Whether you have a meticulously planned folder hierarchy or simply drop everything in your Documents folder, iDocument 2 will help you manage of your documents — without taking the control away from you.