Category: Mac

Once upon a time, the Apple Mouse was just another reason for Windows PC users to hate Macs. Putting aside bizarre physical designs like the hockey puck, Macs seemed stubborn in their insistence on a primitively simple input device. When PC users were enjoying multiple buttons and even scroll wheels, we were still rolling our eyes and wondering why they needed anything more than one universal button.

When the Mighty Mouse came, many Mac users, including myself, realized that the PC folks might have been right about fancy mice. Having multiple clickable controls and a dedicated input for scrolling turned out to be a significant improvement!

Unfortunately, the scroll ball turned out to be the most frequently failing thing Apple had designed since the G4 Cube. Some users suggested rolling it on paper, others literally gave weekly toothbrush treatments to the cursed thing, just about everyone was forced to admit that it was a lousy piece of hardware.

After decades, it seems Apple has finally gotten in right. The Magic Mouse is, hands down, the best mouse I’ve ever used. Though some still complain about the shape being not ergonomic enough, I’ve used it extensively since it was first released with zero issues. Multi-touch scrolling is a dream (no ball!) and the bonus of gestures is far beyond what I could’ve hoped for in a mouse.

However, some still insist that third party tools are the way to go. Still others are content to use a trackpad 100% of the time and have absolutely no need for a mouse. The Magic Trackpad is certainly a fantastic input device and offers desktop Mac owners even more versatility and functionality than the Magic Mouse.

Today we want to know what you use for input on your Mac. Are you a purist, bent on only using Apple products or do you have a third party input device? Do you mostly use a mouse or a trackpad?

For my part, I use my Magic Mouse most of the time and my MacBook’s trackpad when I’m not at my desk. After you vote, leave a comment below telling us about your setup! Which products do you own and use?

Back when I first started writing for AppStorm, I got to review a very pretty GTD app that had just come out called Wunderlist. Back then, it was just getting started and it barely even had a Mac and a Windows app.

A little more than 6 months later, Wunderlist now stands as one of the most popular “Getting Things Done” app, not just in the Mac, but on several other platforms like Android and iOS. What has changed since then? Let’s take a look at how Wunderlist has evolved.

Getting Started with Wunderlist

Wunderlist

Althought the GTD market is filled with options, none of them are really like Wunderlist. Just simple, down to earth and most importantly: free. It’s impressive to think that for such a banal task like having a list of duties (which we used to do with a simple physical notebook), we now purchase apps with prices that can go above $50 dollars.

Back when I first reviewed this app last December, it had only come out a few days before, and while it did a good job at keeping up with your tasks, it seemed like it had a long road ahead of it, one that seemed very promising. In my first review of Wunderlist, we gave the app a rating of 7, saying that it had a lot of potential given the time it had since it had been released. Well, I think that potential has been reached now.

Some Small Changes

Update

Today, Wunderlist will come out with yet another update for their Mac app that promises to be quite big. We got our hands on it early so that we can tell you what’s new in the app. This update focuses on making it faster to add and organize tasks as you write them down, through simple shortcuts that arrange your tasks as you create them, for example:

• If you type an asterisk before the text of a task, it will be added as a “bookmarked” or “prioritized” task.
• You can use hashtags to mark tasks by simpler dates, like “#today”
• It also recognizes dates in a simpler, more human format, like “in a month”
• Note management has improved with auto-save and support for multiple windows
• If you create a task by pressing Alt+Return, it will be created at the top of the other tasks (and below the bookmarked tasks)
• While you are creating a task, you can use the “Up” and “Down” buttons to switch between lists in which to create the task

These are all handy shortcuts, but are they really a big deal? You might update the app and never even notice any of these changes. This update by itself probably isn’t worth a new review, it’s the accumulation of everything that has happened to Wunderlist since we last reviewed it that makes it worthy of a revised review.

A Unified Platform

Wunderlist for iPhone

A few days after my first review was published (actually the same day it was published, as you can see in the comments), the iPhone app for Wunderlist came out, giving the app a whole other level of functionality. The guys at 6wunderkinder got working hard, and soon an Android app, an iPad app and several updates for the Mac and Windows apps were on their way.

Now, the “Sync” button actually makes sense, and you can use it to keep track of your tasks wherever you are. There’s even now a web app, so that you can quickly check stuff while you are on the go and don’t have any mobile device available. The functionality that Wunderlist has now when it comes to platforms, reminds me very much of another favorite of mine, Evernote; whose support for numerous platforms has saved me a bunch of times.

The Big Picture

Notes

A few weeks ago, I started getting emails every morning from Wunderlist. At first I thought they were annoying, but then I realized what they did: they informed me of all the tasks I’d created that were overdue This may not seem like a big deal, but I’ve found it to be very helpful. Now, I don’t even have to open Wunderlist to see the tasks that I need to complete that day, I just check my email in the morning (which I always do) to see what needs to be done. It’s also inspiring that each one of them has a different cheesy tagline saying something like “You can do it, tiger!”.

This, coupled with a few other updates that the app has gotten like Note support in the tasks, sharing lists with colleagues, and especially the platform support mentioned before have made me a big fan of Wunderlist.

Conclusion

I never seriously used a GTD app before Wunderlist. Most of them seemed too expensive and complex; I always thought they were made for people who had thousands of things to do in a day and needed to keep everything organized. It wasn’t until I got to review this app that I realized how useful these things can be, even if you don’t really need to be reminded of dozens of tasks.

I continued using Wunderlist after that review I did, and I gladly watched it grow into a fully featured app that continues to improve with each update. I couldn’t compare it to any other GTD app, but the fact that it made me continue to use an app from a category that I had no interest in, should speak pretty well about it.

Our sponsor this week is Radium, our favorite way to listen to the radio on a Mac!

Radium is a fantastic, Lion-ready Internet radio player that nestles right into your menu bar. Don’t let that fool you though, just because it’s small doesn’t mean it isn’t packed with features. Radium allows you to listen to thousands of radio stations from around the world and gives you a song history, album art, keyboard shortcuts, social media integration and more! There’s even an equalizer so you can custom tailor your audio experience.

Go Get It!

Here at AppStorm, we’re huge fans of Radium and gave it high marks in our review. If you’re a radio fan, you simply shouldn’t be without this application. To learn more, check out the Radium Website or download it right from the Mac App Store.

At any given time, there’s a lot going on in your computer’s brain. You may be focusing on writing an important email or watching a video, but that doesn’t mean your CPU is likewise focusing its attention. It’s still assigning valuable resources to that open web page you have in the background and that Twitter client chirping away on your desktop.

App Tamer is an incredibly handy little app that finds all these processes and helps you pause those that aren’t important until you need them again. This helps cut down on CPU time, battery usage and even heat! Follow along as we take a closer look.

Meet App Tamer

I wasn’t quite sure what to expect the first time I fired up App Tamer. I’m fairly cautious about apps that seem like they mess with my system and loathe anything that requires lots of setup. An app in this category has potential to go wrong in both of these areas.

As soon as I fired it up though, App Tamer just went to work finding processes that I wasn’t using and pausing them. I didn’t do a single thing! A quick look at the menu bar utility revealed the basic system for how the app works. Here I could see my active processes along with how much CPU they were using in addition to the processes the app saw fit to pause.

App Tamer

As you can see from the screenshot, I wasn’t really saving much out of the gate. This was a combination of the fact that the app had only just started and that I hadn’t really dug around to see where I could give it a boost. It’s obvious though right away that Twitter is being somewhat of a beast, sitting at the top of my CPU sucking processes.

To solve this problem, I jumped into the “Application Manager”, a window where you can examine your processes further.

The Application Manager

The Application Manager shows you a list of your currently stopped applications and a graph depicting your estimated CPU savings. As you can see, after tossing in Twitter (we’ll see how to do that later), I was up to saving 35%.

Application Manager

After using the app for a few hours, I found that my typical results were even better, hovering just under 60%! When you’re running on an aging MacBook like I was at the time, that’s a pretty decent chunk of recovered CPU.

Notice the “Gaming Mode” setting, which stops everything but the currently active window.

The Details Drawer

Hitting the “Details” button momentarily stops some of its monitoring (I’m not sure why) and slides out a drawer showing a filterable list of all the relevant processes on your machine.

App Details Drawer

From here you can organize the processes by the amount of CPU they eat and in doing so easily find good candidates for taming. When you click on an app, the preview on the right updates to give you more relevant information and allow you to set the app’s priority. If you locate an app that you don’t mind pausing when it’s not in the foreground, check the “AutoStop” box to have App Tamer tell that app to chill out.

Preferences

If there’s anything you don’t like about the way that the app works, check out the Preferences section and you’ll likely find a fix. For instance, I hated the little message that kept reminding me to close the Details Drawer, so I turned it off. I also like that you can tell the app to hide or dim apps that are paused and customize the length of time before a pause.

Preferences

Thoughts About Use

I’m a total nut when it comes to managing my processes. I tend to have a million things going on at once and never look away from my iStat menu bar app for more than a few minutes so I can keep track of how my Mac is handling the tasks that I’m throwing at it.

Because of this, App Tamer really thrilled me as soon as I started using it. I was able to see clear, significant performance benefits from using the app, and that’s something that I highly value in a utility like this.

With all that being said, there is a lot to keep in mind with an app like this. Your computer isn’t doing a ton of stuff just to annoy you, active processes are often either vital or something that you’ve personally chosen to spend resources on. Many of these processes simply aren’t ideal for pausing.

For instance, as a manager, I’m in constant communication with colleagues so pausing my email client would definitely be something that would negatively affect the way I work because it would simply stop receiving email until I switched to my email app. You might have noticed that I did in fact stop my Twitter app, this obviously kills the benefits of how the app downloads tweets live as they happen. I no longer received Growl notifications when someone replied to me or sent me a private message. To be honest, in the case of Twitter, this isn’t exactly a bad thing as it can definitely be a distraction!

Also, keep in mind that paused apps take about a second to pop back to life, which sounds small but is definitely a noticeable delay when compared to the typically smooth transition from on app to another. In some circumstances I even encountered a few app crashes upon attempted wakings. These were quite rare though and not repeatable.

Conclusion: Should You Buy It?

I really enjoy App Tamer and am thrilled to find an app that seems to be so incredibly effective at resource allotment with so little effort. I definitely plan on using this app regularly and strongly encourage you to take a look.

Keep in mind, an inexperienced user looking for a quick way to make their Mac go faster has plenty of room to screw things up with this app. To me, it seems better suited to be a utility for those users at least proficient enough to open Activity Monitor and understand what’s going on.

So should you buy it? First, stop by the site and try out the 30 day trial. Open up the app and take a look at what’s eating your CPU up the most and whether or not it’s something that you mind being turned off when you’re not looking at it. If the answer is “yes”, then App Tamer is fifteen bucks well spent.

GarageBand is an awesome beginner-friendly music application which can be used for capturing and manipulating audio, making music with virtual instruments and recording your own professional sounding podcasts, plus more. All that’s required is the desire and patience to learn!

To get started with GarageBand, we shall begin by first discussing the basics behind computer music software and virtual instruments, in addition to looking at recommended hardware to help you on your way. All this will provide a foundation for future guides, in which we will record a whole song and more.

GarageBand

GarageBand is referred to as a Digital Audio Workstation or DAW. If you’ve never considered using a computer for music before then you’ve lucked out by buying a Mac, because though you can debate which professional application is the best or most well-rounded, I think it’s fair to say that GarageBand beats them all in ease of use and simplicity.

Broadly speaking and ignoring the more advanced niche coding software, there are two main ways to make music with a computer – using the computer in place of a tape deck with microphones plugged in, to capture ‘real’ sounds like vocals, or making the audio within the computer itself, with virtual instruments. Today we’ll be focusing on the latter.

In order to ensure we’re all on the same page, let’s first grab GarageBand and fully update it. If you haven’t yet got a copy of GarageBand, head over to the App Store and grab it now for a very reasonable $14.99. This guide was written with GarageBand ’11 in mind, but GarageBand ’09 should work with some minor changes.

Though beginner-friendly, GarageBand is far from limited and there’s a long list of artists who have used it to great effect, such as Rihanna on her hit “Umbrella”

What Are ‘Virtual Instruments’?

First off let’s run through what a virtual instrument (also known as soft-synth or software synth) actually is:

In the past, if you were in a standard four piece rock band with a singer, drums and guitars, but decided you wanted a short Saxophone solo to complement your song, another musician with the required skills would be needed. In the wake of home computer music software however, both budding and established songwriters are able to make use of computer-made simulations of real-life instruments.

When virtual instruments first appeared they were rather rudimentary and unlikely to fool anybody into thinking they were hearing a real instrument being performed, but over time the software has matured and reached the point that the average person’s ears won’t know the difference between sampled or synthesized virtual instruments and the real thing, if used correctly. Many movie scores, TV shows and albums are based around virtual instruments, in addition to the more obvious application such as within the electronic music genre.

A MIDI Interface Makes All The Difference

Virtual instruments reside within GarageBand but it is neither intuitive nor inspiring to play with these via trackpad or with your Mac’s own Qwerty keyboard. Though I am reluctant to encourage spending your hard-earned money when only just embarking upon making music, a MIDI interface really does make a huge difference when creating music on a computer and I recommend you purchase an inexpensive interface if possible in order to get the most from your Mac.

Korg's Nano Series offers much value for money

A keyboard MIDI interface looks much like a standard beginner’s Casio electronic keyboard, the type which we’ve probably all seen at some point when growing up. Rather than containing its own speakers or connecting to an amp however, the MIDI interface plugs directly into a computer (usually via USB) and sends data to the Digital Audio Workstation, in this case GarageBand, which then produces the desired sound.

Should you indeed wish to purchase a MIDI interface, a great place to start is the Korg NanoKey. It’s a small, lightweight portable interface about the length of a standard white MacBook and can be bought online from major retailers for approximately $30-$40 if you keep an eye out for a bargain. As with most interfaces of its kind, the NanoKey is designed to work with GarageBand without fuss, so all that is needed is to plug in and play.

MIDI is a complex subject in itself and I’m barely skimming the surface of it here in order to give a basic view of how MIDI is applied.

Launching GarageBand

Okay, now that we’ve covered some of the basics, launch GarageBand and let’s begin playing some music!

GarageBand's splash screen

Upon launching GarageBand you should see the above splash screen which lets us choose between various options. We’re going to cover most of these in subsequent tutorials but for now let’s keep it simple and click on ‘Piano’ then the ‘Choose’ button on the lower right hand side of the window.

Following the splash screen, you should now be presented with the window titled ‘New Project From Template’ shown below. You can leave all the settings as they are for now, though it may be a good idea to name your Song something memorable, such as ‘GarageBand Draft 1′.

New Project window

Using GarageBand

GarageBand's main window

Once GarageBand has launched, you should see something very similar to the above screenshot, with a Grand Piano track already loaded.

If you do not have an interface and wish to use the Virtual Keyboard also visible above, navigate to GarageBand > Window > Keyboard and click your pointer to ‘press’ the keys. Alternatively, should you want to give Musical Typing a try, go to GarageBand > Window > Musical Typing and use your Mac’s keys. If you do have an interface like the Korg NanoKey, then simply play the keys and have some fun!

Take some time to play around with the Grand Piano and get a feel for how it sounds.

Instrument Setup and Selection

Downloading all of GarageBand's instruments & loops takes up approx 1.2GB

Though the Grand Piano is fine in itself, let’s make things a little more interesting by having a browse through GarageBand’s other instruments. The ‘Software Instruments’ pane should already be visible to the left of your GarageBand’s screen but if it isn’t, hit the track info button, which is located in the bottom right hand corner of your screen.

Depending on the method by which you installed GarageBand (e.g. iLife or App Store), you may not have all the instruments and loops downloaded. To bring up the instrument download screen as shown above, click on an instrument which has a small arrow to the right of it.

Browsing instruments is fairly self-explanatory, simply choose the category of instrument from the left hand pane (such as Organs or Horns) and then select the instrument within that category (Pop Organ or Trumpet Section). You need not move on from this step for now at least, just keep testing out the different sounds. This is not time wasted, as in future tutorials it’ll come in very handy to build up a mental image of what the instruments sound like.

Conclusion

I hope this first in a series of tutorials has given you some grounding in the very basics of GarageBand in preparation for recording some tracks. Though those who are more advanced may find little to stimulate them here, I hope that the next tutorial should offer more knowledge or at least a different perspective on existing recording methods.

If you have any questions or problems, please let me know in the comments and I’ll do my best to talk you through it.

As you would expect from the editor of a Mac blog, I’m a complete app addict. I have random applications for everything from cataloguing recipes to counting characters in a TextEdit document. Some of these I use on a daily basis, but many of them admittedly sit and collect dust in my Applications folder.

This article is an attempt to narrow down my absolute bare essentials. What three things do I think are fundamentally lacking in OS X and would need to be installed on any machine that I use for more than a few hours, regardless of what I’m doing? Which apps genuinely save me a considerable amount of time in my daily routine? Let’s take a look!

Clipboard Managers

Clipboard managers are an absolutely vital tool to have if you spend a considerable amount of time at a computer. Let’s face it, your default OS X clipboard functionality is fairly limited: you copy something, you paste it, you copy something else, the first thing is gone. If you’re a real pro, you can access a secondary clipboard-like feature with Kill (Control-K) and Yank (Control Y), but no one really even knows that feature exists and fewer remember long enough to use it.

Copying and pasting is a pretty fundamental activity that nearly all computer users are familiar with and engage in regularly. It makes sense to beef up this functionality with a tool that provides a full clipboard history, which gives you access to multiple past clippings.

What I Use

There are quite a few really powerful clipboard managers on the market, but the one that seems to fit my workflow best is a completely free utility called ClipMenu.

ClipMenu

ClipMenu represents the best combination of simplicity and power that I’ve found in a clipboard manager. It has all the features I need: a completely customizable history, support for text and image clips and a keyboard activated pop up window. It even has some really powerful options that I now couldn’t live without such as a snippets manager and a robust actions system that allows you to manipulate strings of text (change the case, wrap with tags, etc.).

The thing that really makes me love ClipMenu is that it doesn’t even really feel like an app. Instead it feels like a natural extension of OS X. I’ve tried some really expensive and fancy options that I didn’t like half as much. If you’re in the market for a clipboard manager, start here.

Alternatives

ClipMenu is definitely not for everyone. If you try it and decide that you want something else, check out the options below.

• Stuf: $24.99
• iCopy: $0.99
• iClipboard: $29.99
• Jumpcut: Free
• Clips: $4.99
• Clipboard Evolved: $4.99
• Clyppan: $3.99

Launchers

I hesitated to include launchers in this article because the idea that they’re an essential add-on is arguable. For starters, Launchpad on Lion is a new and quick way to launch your apps. However, to me, Launchpad is really no better than hitting “??A” to bring up the applications folder. You still have to manually sort through all of your apps to find what you want, which is a real pain!

A more appropriate argument would be that Spotlight functions as a launcher: hit a keyboard shortcut, start typing and applications will appear at the top of the list of results. You can even perform some basic functions like simple math.

For whatever reason though, Spotlight still feels like a search tool that has some launcher functionality rather than a tool created for launching apps. For this reason, I definitely recommend that all OS X users check out third party application launchers. They can save you tons of time and tend to have some really advanced functionality.

What I Use

To be honest, I never thought I would give up Quicksilver. It was the first launcher that I ever used and still has more features, plugins and crazily random functionality than almost anything else you can find (mouse gestures, pie-shaped file menus, custom global triggers, Quicksilver has it all).

However, there’s something to be said for using software that is actively being developed and improved. I honestly can’t imagine why the developers lost interest in Quicksilver but it happened, and that left many of us looking around for alternatives. I tried to no avail to switch and always came back, that was until I tried Alfred.

Alfred

Alfred is a true gem of an app. The interface is simple and friendly but still quite attractive and the already impressive feature set is constantly growing by leaps and bounds. Much more than an app launcher, Alfred can perform complex math with parentheses (these confuse Spotlight), define words, search for files, act as a file browser, control iTunes, launch websites, search websites, access your clipboard history and a heck of a lot more. And these are just the built-in features, the new third party extension system is really starting to give Alfred the endless possibilities that I enjoyed in Quicksilver.

Alfred is a free utility but many of the advanced features require the £12 PowerPack. Alfred is so great that I tell every Mac user I know to download it right away. As far as I’m concerned, it should be the first thing you install on a new Mac!

Alternatives

Among the high-powered launcher contenders, the most popular competitor that can stand toe to toe with Quicksilver and Alfred is Launchbar, which has a similar goal of providing you with a single interface for performing a stunning number of different tasks. Check out Launchbar and other popular launchers below.

• Launchbar: $35
• Butler: $20
• Overflow: $14.99
• Sapiens: $4.99
• Launch It: $2.99
• Jumper: $0.99
• Launcher: Free
• Chuck: Free
• MoAppsLauncher: Free
• Google Quick Search Box: Free

Text Expanders

Because I’m a writer, the final category of apps that I couldn’t go without is text expansion utilities. You don’t need to write full time to appreciate these though, the concept is universal enough that almost every user can find a way to save time with a text expansion app.

If you’re not familiar with the concept, text expanders allow you to type shortcuts which then “expand” into larger snippets. For instance, if I type “email#” on my Mac, it automatically inserts my email address.

If you’re a developer, you can create abbreviations that expand into large snippets of code (perfect for those pesky CSS3 browser prefixes). If you write a lot of email, you can store standard responses that pop into place with only a few keystrokes. The possibilities go on and on: usernames, passwords, addresses, phone numbers, websites, words that you commonly misspell; anything you want! The bottom line is, what used to take 1-2 minutes to type or find elsewhere and copy over now takes two seconds to insert!

What I Use

TextExpander is probably the most popular text expansion solution currently available, and for good reason. It’s an extremely powerful and versatile tool that supports every app that I’ve ever tried to use it with. This app alone saves me hours and hours every single month. I know because it conveniently tracks this information!

TextExpander

TextExpander ($34.95) makes it easy to create different groups of custom snippets that can be expanded via a user-defined abbreviation. You can even insert smart snippets like today’s date, the contents of the clipboard or even another snippet!

There’s also an iOS app that can sync with the desktop version via Dropbox. This is great for working on my iPad, all the snippets that I’m used to using are right there and even work in several other third party apps.

Alternatives

Want to see a head-to-head comparison of popular text expansion utilities? We just happen to have one here. In the mean time, check out the options below.

• Typinator €19.99
• Presto: $0.99
• TypeIt4Me: $19.99
• yType: $14.99

Conclusion

I wear many hats as an OS X user: writer, editor, designer, photographer and musician. These three app categories serve as basic extensions of OS X that I personally would never like to be without, regardless of the task that I happen to be doing.

Leave a comment below and let us know what categories you find absolutely essential to your daily activities. Which apps save you the most time?

FADE IN on a young writer seated at his desk, his face alight with the joy of inspiration. He scribbles furiously on a notepad, trying to capture the magic of his movie idea. Outside his office window, a full moon prods him on.

Later, with his idea captured in handwritten notes, he decides it’s time to start typing. “If I’m going do this right,” he thinks, “I better buy some screenwriting software.” Research reveals that the leading software, Final Draft, costs a whopping $239. Our hero is not a professional writer though, so there’s no way he can justify dropping $239 to support an inspirational whim. He searches for something else, something reasonable, and — dare he think it? — something better.

His search takes him to The Mac App Store, where he finds, for $29.99, a brand new product called Movie Draft SE, and as he presses the buy button, he wonders to himself, “Will this reasonably priced app help take my script from inspiration to completion or will it frustrate me to the point where I abandon my award-winning idea before it can reach the second act?”

Write Out of Time

Movie Draft SE bills itself as the industry’s only non-linear script editor, and while the claim to uniqueness might be a bit overblown, the fact that it’s a non-linear editor can’t be denied.

What’s a non-linear editor? Well, it’s an editor that recognizes that writing isn’t reading, that constructing a story isn’t the same as experiencing one, and that while audiences love beginnings that lead to middles that lead to ends, writers love being able to work on the scene that has their attention now, regardless of whether that scene comes next.

A non-linear editor will let you work on your last scene first.

Establish The Setting

When our hero opens up Movie Draft SE, he finds a window made up of a resizable column on the left and a familiar blank page on the right. The left column is where he creates, notates, and organizes his scenes; the blank page is where he does the hard work of actually writing his script.

But strangely enough, our aspiring young writer also sees something else. Sitting there, at the top of his window, is a status display that seems to have been taken straight out of an old version of iTunes. What the heck is that all about?

A display that feels out of place…but not in a bad way.

After reading through the help file, our hero learns that the information in the toolbar display is actually quite helpful, and it gives him information he might have to search for in other screenwriting apps.

Because scripts have unforgiving formatting rules, all screenwriting apps have built in actions for determining how a given script element will be formatted. For example, if you’re describing an action that takes place during your scene, the formatting should be appropriate to an ACTION element.

Now, in most instances, a description of ACTION will usually be followed by more ACTION, so hitting the Return key on your keyboard will create a new paragraph automatically formatted for ACTION, but a good portion of the time, instead of more ACTION, you’ll want the next section in the script to contain a bit of dialogue, which means in this case, the section after the ACTION should be formatted for a CHARACTER element (i.e., the name of the character who’s about to speak).

Because it gets very annoying very quickly to have to manually set the element every time you need it to change (avoiding this annoyance is the primary reason for using a screenwriting app instead of a traditional text-editor), screenwriting apps assign keyboard shortcuts to the Return and Tab keys that try to predict what element you want next. You can think of them as built-in keyboard shortcuts that automatically change based on whatever element you’re currently on.

Sounds confusing, right? Well, in practice, all it means is that when you get to the end of a line and hit the Return key, the next line of your script will automatically be formatted for the script element you most likely want, but if you hit the Tab key, then the next line will automatically be formatted for the next-most-likely element. The problem is that it’s sometimes difficult to remember what key does what in relation to the current element.

Which brings us back to the display bar in Movie Draft SE.

On the left side of the status display, the app tells you which elements you’ll create when you hit the Return or Tab keys. In addition, beneath the title of the screenplay (which sits in bold in the middle of the display) there’s a customizable note about your project’s current status, followed by the script element you’re currently working on. The information on the right side of the window displays what page you’re on out of how many pages total, as well as what scene number you’re on out of how many scenes total.

Armed with this information, our hero feels ready to type.

Introduce the Supporting Cast

There are two ways to write a screenplay. The first is to type the words “FADE IN:,” make a lot of stuff happen, and then type “FADE OUT.” The other way is to develop a rough outline of the scenes you’ll need, add a bunch of notes to them so you’ll remember what they’re about and what you need to accomplish, and then get to work on the scene that most inspires you right now.

With his handwritten notes next to his keyboard, our hero decides to opt for the latter method, which means inputting a bunch of scenes at a rapid pace. He double-clicks on the “1. New Scene” scene in his blank project, and the app brings up a window asking him to name his scene and write down some notes.

The scene editor

After he gets through his first scene, he just keeps going until he has each scene in the movie outlined, with headings to remind him of what the scene is (these headings are not necessarily the SCENE HEADINGS that will appear in his script) and notes to remind him of what he wants to do in each one.

Movie Draft SE then gives him the option of rearranging these scenes right in the scene list.

Arrange, rearrange, and annotate scenes in the scene list

When he gets around to actually typing out his scenes, he won’t have to worry about cutting text from one part of the script and moving it to another, because when he rearranges scenes in the scene list, all the text that belongs to that scene will move around with it, which will prevent all kinds of headaches from ever occurring.

With his scenes finished, he decides its time to input some info on his characters and locations. After wondering why there’s no button for these things in his toolbar (and cursing the developers for not letting him customize the toolbar), he uses the Project menu to open the Characters window, which is where he creates his list of characters and adds their names, ages, any notes about them he wishes, the actors or actresses he wants to play them, and a spot where he can drop in a photo.

Maybe Jonathan Lipnicki will be interested in this role.

There’s a similar window for locations, where along with dropping in photos of locations he has in mind, he can also add the addresses of each, addresses that could be fictional (helpful for remembering trivia) or real (helpful for scene scouting).

Presenting the Star of the Show

With his scenes outlined, his characters sketched, and his locations spotted, our budding screenwriter itches to work on the script itself. He clicks on the Full View icon in his toolbar and Movie Draft hides his scene list and expands to take over the full height and width of his monitor. His eyebrows go up and he starts to get excited about tackling the blank page.

But wait a second. There is no blank page in Movie Draft SE. Instead, there’s a blank page with a big red arrow in the left margin, an arrow that tells him what line his cursor is on. That’s kind of strange, he thinks, but hey, maybe it’ll come in handy later on.

He shakes his head, trying to get his focus back. Because he’s already familiar with the idea of script elements, he knows he wants to start off with a SCENE HEADING to tell his audience where the scene takes place and what time of day or night it is.

He types an “E,” preparing to type “EXT” (which stands for “exterior”) but next thing he knows, Movie Draft ghosts in the rest of the abbreviation for him. He stops typing for a moment, then decides to hit the Return key to see what happens, and sure enough, boom, the abbreviation goes from gray to black and his cursor is bumped ahead, ready for him to type the next word. He types in the location of the scene, hits return, and…what’s this now? Movie Draft has inserted a hyphen and popped up a context window with a bunch of times of day in it (morning, afternoon, day, dawn, dusk, magic hour, etc.). Ain’t that sweet of them?, he thinks.

When he gets to the end of his SCENE HEADING, he hits the return key and Movie Draft automatically formats the element for ACTION. “This is gonna be easy,” he say to himself. Then he types the first real word of his movie, only to find that instead of a typical black-colored font, Movie Draft has turned it blue!

The colors! The colors!

What our hero doesn’t know is that Movie Draft’s editor uses a color-coding system by default, and while he can turn it off by clicking the “Highlight” button in the toolbar, leaving it on will actually help him later in the writing process, when he just wants to scan a batch of DIALOGUE without having his eyes get bogged down in the ACTION.

He takes a deep breath, accepts the strange red arrow, the color-coded formatting, and continues on his way. Next stop, the red carpet.

Uncredited Roles

There’s more to MovieDraft SE than just the items experienced by our young screenwriter. Items such as:

• SceneTime^TM, which is a neat feature that shows up in two places: a tiny display at the bottom of the scene list that tells you the approximate length of the movie that will result from your script, and notations in each Act heading in the scene list that tell you how long each act will last in minutes and seconds
• An index card view that transforms the scene list into a bunch of index cards that you can manipulate
• Single scene mode, which changes the editor so you only see the scene you’re working on and not all the scenes you’re not
• A large collection of icons that can be assigned to scenes in the scene list, which will give a visual cue as to the purpose or status of a scene
• Installed templates for stage plays and screenplays
• A cover page designer where you can add agent and contact details, as well as the title, writer(s), adaptation information, etc.

Cut to the Chase

Years later, sitting in his mansion in the hills of LA, our award-winning screenwriter will happily recall the day he ponied up $30 to buy a much-better-than-servicable screenwriting app. He’ll tell listeners that Movie Draft SE could have been improved by making its features more accessible via the toolbar (rather than hiding them in the menus), and he’ll also say that while the information in the display window was useful, the design of it seemed a bit out of place.

But those are just quibbles, just quibbles! Because when you get down to it, Movie Draft SE offered our hero non-linear scene editing, automated script formatting, and unsought-but-later-appreciated color coding, and all for $30. A heck of a bargain, he’ll say. Then he’ll smile, turn to the camera, and smile at us until we FADE OUT.

Day One is the most stylish Mac journaling application around. In addition to being gorgeous, it also has tons of great features including menu bar entry, iOS sync, reminders, a calendar view and password protection.

Day One

Win Day One for Both Mac & iOS!

This giveaway has an awesome bonus. Each winner will receive both the Mac and iOS versions of Day One so you can keep up your daily entries from anywhere!

Tweet to Enter

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

We’ll announce the winners one week from today on Thursday, September 14th. Good luck to everyone who enters and thanks for reading Mac.AppStorm!

Instagram is a great mobile app for sharing pictures with other people. It has grown quite a lot recently, and since it lacks a first-party desktop app, developers have had their hands full designing apps that bring the Instagram experience to the Mac.

We’ve talked about plenty of these apps, but let’s see if this one differentiates itself from the competition in any way.

Instadesk was a cheap and useful solution, while Carousel was a more fashionable and simpler, but more expensive solution. What makes Instaview great? Let’s see!

Getting Started

Getting Started

After you buy and download the app, you’ll be greeted with a screen to sign in to your Instagram account through the app. There’s no welcome screen with instructions or anything, which would be helpful. As we’ll later see, this app has a lot of hidden gems that you might find useful, and wouldn’t find out if you didn’t look into every submenu.

The Interface

Interface

Once you login you might be a bit confused as to what to do. You’ll see a single frame, with not much else than the most recent picture from your feed, and a few details like the uploader, time stamp and title of the picture. If you hover over the image, you’ll see more stuff, but we’ll get to that later.

It’s clear from the start that the “gimmick”, or what makes this app different from the others is the interface in which it lets you view your feed. It consists of a simple small square window with few select details in it, like a thin black and gold frame that gives the impression of looking at a fancy painting. You can have more than one frame, each one with different feeds.

Browsing pictures

Viewing pictures

There are a couple ways to browse pictures. One of the features that is pretty well implemented (unlike the other Instagram desktop clients), is a slideshow for your feed. Just hover over a picture and click the “Slideshow” button. The slideshows are by default randomized, but you can change that and the time spent on each picture by going into the “Stream” menu.

If you want to see your feed manually, simply go back one by one by using the left/right buttons. You’ll start at the most recent picture and go back to the older ones by clicking on the left button. If you want to view a picture in a bigger window, you can double click it and it will pop up in full size.

Working with different frames

Frames

One of the most unique things about this app is that you can have different windows, each one with a different feed or picture. The thing about bringing these up is that they are pretty hidden and they aren’t as easy to figure out how to use.

By clicking on any user, you are shown a button that says, “View,” and if you click it a new window will come up showing the feed of that user, picture by picture. By going into the “Stream” menu on the status bar, you can also select to open new windows in which you can select which feed to view in it (favorites, popular, by location, by user, etc.).

Other Stuff

Other Stuff

Of course, there is also support for stuff like bookmarking (“loving”) and commenting, and it’s all pretty well implemented. When you hover over a picture, among the many buttons and things you’ll see, on the left bottom corner you’ll have the number of comments and likes the picture has received. You can double click any of these to show who commented on it and leave your own feedback or love the picture. The windows will appear as small dialogue windows with the same vintage feel of the app.

You can also view profiles from any user by double clicking them and do many more things from there, like view their stats and start following them. The app also has its own feature to track viewed and unviewed photos, but I can’t really see how it works as it marks most of my pics as seen. There are also some very hidden themes under the “Window” submenu, that can change the way each frame looks.

Competition

Carousel

As we said earlier, there are plenty of these apps in this market, as Instagram has proved to be a very successful mobile photo sharing service. I don’t think there’s one app for the Mac that has a clear advantage over the other ones, although each one has its strengths. Instadesk is a cheap solution and it’s very complete, but it isn’t the most original or enjoyable to use. Carousel is very simple, pretty and mobile-looking, but it’s also lacking in some features and the price definitely can’t be overseen.

Instaview has potential to be the best desktop client, but it still has some ways to go. The frames, the unread count and the whole interface are all great ideas, but the various features could be implemented better, instead of hidden within submenus.

Conclusion

At first this app may seem too simple, but it actually goes very deep if you look more into every feature and every menu. The thing is, if you never look into it you’ll never find features like being able to set the slideshow timer or being able to change the stream being viewed.

This app tries to be so simple that it ends up hiding most of its features under the hood and never telling you that they exist. It’s not quite the conventional Instagram desktop app, but it works quite well.

AppleScript is an incredibly natural and intuitive scripting language that helps you automate tasks in OS X. I’m quite fond of the syntax and how easy it is to learn and write, but there are definitely some areas that are harder to pick up than others. For instance, I always have difficulty remembering all of the options and specific syntax involved in creating dialog windows such as those that allow the user to input some text or make a selection from a number of options.

Today we’re going to take a quick look at how you can streamline this process with an incredibly handy tool from the Mac App Store called Dialog Maker.

Learn AppleScript

Don’t know AppleScript? This article may not be much good to you. However, you can learn almost everything you need to know from just two other articles here on AppStorm!

• The Ultimate Beginner’s Guide To AppleScript
• Advanced AppleScript Techniques

Dialogs: The Hard Way

To see how this process normally works, let’s try a test case. Let’s say we want to create a dialog that allows the user to choose one or more of the days of the week. You might start with code something like this:

1

choose from list {"Sunday", "Monday", "Tuesday", "Wednesday", "Thursday", "Friday", "Saturday"}

Simple enough right? This dialog will work, but it takes advantage of many of the default settings that we may or may not want to use. For instance, by default, the user can only select one option. At this point, I usually hit up Google to see what options accompany a typical dialog. It turns out that we can add in a ton of different things, here are a few examples.

A Title:

1

with title "Calendar Picker"

A Prompt (instructions):

1

with prompt "Choose one or more days"

Custom Buttons:

1

OK button name "These Days" cancel button name "No Days"

A Default Selection:

1

default items {"Monday"}

Enable Multiple Selections:

1

with multiple selections allowed

Once we figure out all these various options, we can then combine them into one super long line of code:

1

choose from list {"Sunday", "Monday", "Tuesday", "Wednesday", "Thursday", "Friday", "Saturday"} with title "Calendar Picker" with prompt "Choose one or more days" OK button name "These Days" cancel button name "No Days" default items {"Monday"} with multiple selections allowed

Granted, as far as high level programming goes, this isn’t exactly complicated stuff. However, for new coders this can be a pretty cumbersome chunk of code to work with. Further, as I already mentioned, sometimes the most difficult part is simply remembering all of the options that you have with each type of dialog and how to implement them correctly.

AppleScript Dictionaries help immensely but an even easier option is to use an app called Dialog Maker, which provides you with a simple, form-like interface for building complex dialogs in AppleScript. Let’s take a look at the three different types of dialogs that it helps you build.

Display Dialog

The first of the three options in Dialog Maker is “Display Dialog”. This is the simplest of the three and provides the user with a message and up to three possible responses in the form of buttons or text entry.

Let’s say we want to create a titled dialog with simple instructions and three possible responses in the form of buttons. First, we open up Dialog Maker and select the “Display Dialog” option along the top. From here we can use a series of basic controls instead of writing code by hand:

Dialog Maker

As you can see, the first thing we’re asked to do is provide an optional title for the dialog. I chose the “text” option and typed in a title. Next up are the text entry options, since I just wanted to go with a simple button-driven dialog, I skipped these.

Finishing the Dialog

From here, we simply go along and fill out the rest of the options. First, you can choose whether or not you want an icon (select your own or a default option). Next, you choose how many buttons you want (up to three), what each says and what the default behaviors and selections will be.

My favorite option here is the ability to have Dialog Maker set up your “if” statement for you. Most of the time you’re going to want certain actions to happen when a certain button is clicked, which is accomplished through “if” and “then” commands.

Finishing the Dialog

Previewing and Inserting

Once you’re all finished filling out the forms, you can click the “Preview” button to see your dialog in action. A live, interactive version of the window will then appear.

Previewing the Dialog

Once you’re satisfied with the results, you can either copy the code to your clipboard or click the “Insert” button have it automatically appear in the active AppleScript Editor window.

Inserting the Dialog

Choose From List

With the “Choose From List” section, we can create the dialog that we started the article with in seconds with no fuss. Just as with the previous section, we have instant access to all of the pertinent options such as title, prompt, etc.

One of the things that I really like here is the system for adding items to the list: each item appears as a little unit that can be easily rearranged, deleted, etc. As you add items in this section, the one below it automatically updates so you can choose the default option.

Adding List Options

As you can see in the preview below, we were able to build the exact same dialog with all the options that we used before, only this time instead of typing the code manually we simply manipulated a few controls and pasted in the text.

Choose From List Dialog

Choose File

The final option is one that you’re definitely familiar with and no doubt encounter several times an hour on your Mac: a file dialog. Here you get a lot of great options for filtering the content that appears in the window, an option that I had never really even explored until using this app!

Choose File Dialog

Conclusion

Coding dialogs by hand in AppleScript can be a bit of a pain. Not only do you have to remember lots of various snippets of code that are required to achieve the effect that you want, you also have to remember what all the default settings are for each dialog and how to change them.

Using an app like Dialog Maker can really speed up your coding process and help you through one of the trickier portions of AppleScript. Also, since the app generates code for you to insert, you’ll learn so much every time you use it that you’ll find yourself needing the app less and less!

As a full-time professional writer, I’m always on the lookout for utilities that will improve my workflow and help provide a much needed boost in efficiency.

Today we’ll take a look at thirty of the best utilities around to help serious writers in their work. Whether you want a better way to work with Markdown or need something to help you plot out the scenes in your next novel, this roundup has just what you’re looking for.

Advanced Writing Tools

The writing market is quickly becoming over-saturated with extremely basic utilities that are easy on the eyes but so light on features that professional writers often miss the good old days when developers did all they could to provide you with the powerful tools that you need to get the job done. If this description matches you, check out the apps in this category, each of which is specifically tailored to give you power and flexibility, not eye candy.

Ulysses

Ulysses is truly an app for professional writing assignments. Based around the concept of non-linear, semantic text editing, Ulysses provides all the tools you need to get the job done effectively and efficiently: tabs, separation of presentation and content, multiple document and project notes, filters, groups and document collections and whole lot more. If you’re looking for a new tool to completely change your writing workflow, start here.

Price: $29.99

Ulysses

Mellel

Mellel is a word processor specially designed to handle long and complicated documents, books, manuscripts, dissertations, etc. Most word processors get pretty cumbersome when you’re working with hundreds of pages but Mellel stays reliable and gives you plenty of professional tools to help you along the way.

Price: $28.99

Mellel

Scrivener

Scrivener is a powerhouse of writing tools and is a popular favorite among Mac users. One of Scrivener’s strongpoints is that it gives you the freedom to compose the way you think, using various components and pieces that you can easily combine into a cohesive whole. Scrivener is perfect for anyone writing a novel, screenplay, essay, script or any other major project.

Price: $44.99

Scrivener

StoryMill

StoryMill is built specifically to help you develop complicated stories such as those for novels and plays. It has tons of special features that are geared toward helping you build and keep track of your characters, locations, timelines and all the other elements related to storytelling. It also lets you write in sections that you can combine and reorder instantly.

Price: $49.99

StoryMill

Script It!

Script It! is specifically designed for stage and screen screen writing, but is flexible enough to tackle any writing project. With Script It! you can plan out and order each individual scene, develop and organize characters, and manage your various snippets and thoughts. There’s even a handy name generator for those long character lists!

Price: $69.99

Script It!

Storyist

Storyist is a powerful word processor with all of the features you need in addition to built-in templates for manuscripts and screenplays so you can get a jumpstart on your next writing project. Storyist lets you sketch out a story using index cards and photographs and then refine it with customizable plot, character, and setting sheets.

Price: $79.00

Storyist

Nisus Writer Pro

Nisus Writer Pro is another really powerful word processor with more features than you’ll know what to do with: styles, multilingual support, tables, comments, track changes, drawing tools, footnotes & endnotes, bookmarks, cross-references, table of contents, full screen mode, and more.

Price: $79.99

Nisus Writer Pro

Mariner Write

A decent alternative to Microsoft Word, Mariner Write is a word processor just powerful enough to do everything you need without overwhelming you with tons of features that you’ll never use. Write opens Word files and will save your document as an RTF-Word file, so you can still collaborate with the Word crowd.

Price: $39.95

Mariner Write

Final Draft

Final Draft is specifically designed for writing movie scripts, television episodics, and stageplays. Its strength lies in its professional script formatting, which works in conjunction with all the word processing features you would expect.

Price: $199

Final Draft

Celtx

Want a powerful, professional writing app but don’t like the high price tags attached to the options above? Worry not, Celtx is a completely free app that helps you organize, write and outline your film, video, documentary, theatre, novels, machinima, comics, advertising, video games, music video, and radio projects. It has tons of features and utilizes a non-linear workflow that conforms to the way you want to work.

Price: Free (Plus version: $14.99)

Celtx

Basic Text Editors

If you don’t need all the power of the apps in the previous section but aren’t quite ready to go the featureless full-screen route, here’s the middle ground: a selection of basic but useful text editors for writers. Think of this section as a list of alternatives to TextEdit or perhaps even Pages and Word in some cases.

Pagehand

Pagehand is dedicated to staying simple and avoiding feature bloat while also providing a fast a nimble writing experience. Pagehand uses PDF as its file format; anyone can read your documents perfectly, fonts and all.

Price: $49.95

Pagehand

MoAppsWrite

Almost everything MoApps creates has the same DNA: simple, useful and just powerful enough to be exactly the tool you’ve been looking for. This holds true of MoAppsWrite as well, which gives you basic but extremely effective rich text editing complete with styles, templates, page layout, headers and footers functionality and a variety of file formats.

Price: $5.99

MoAppsWrite

iText Pro

For only $11.99, iText Pro packs an impressive punch. Enjoy access to multiple clipboards, hierarchical bookmarks, fast file search with the file browser, customizable keyboard shortcuts and more.

Price: $11.99

iText Pro

World Book Notepad

TextEdit is great, but there are a few key features missing such as word and character count and basic page layout. If you’re looking for a sharp upgrade for the unbeatable price of less than a buck, check out World Book Notepad.

Price: $0.99

World Book Notepad

Compositions

Have you noticed that the iPhone has a bunch of really neat, simple and attractive text editing apps that automatically sync your notes with Dropbox? Don’t you wish there was a free app like that on the Mac? Well you’re in luck, Compositions is exactly that!

Price: Free

Compositions

Bean

Bean is a really solid little text editor that mixes a lot of the charm and simplicity of fullscreen apps with the fundamental features you require. As a free app, it’s definitely hard to beat!

Price: Free

Bean

Made for Markdown

Markdown is a syntax by John Gruber that was specifically created for web writers as a way to write HTML in a simple, easily readable fashion. Markdown is becoming more popular all the time and has quite the following. If you like to write in Markdown, these text editors can dramatically improve your workflow.

MarkMyWords

Most of the Markdown apps currently available are intentionally extremely simple, some without a preference panel in sight. MarkMyWords is not one of these apps, in fact, it’s easily the most powerful Markdown app I’ve ever seen. It has a ton of great features, including a live preview, templates, a full-screen mode, syntax highlighting and more.

Price: $24.99

MarkMyWords

Byword

Byword is definitely one of the most popular Markdown-powered text editors to date, making its way into several of our articles lately. The full-screen mode is gorgeous (quite reminiscent of IA Writer) and your Markdown text is transformed before your eyes as you type. Byword also supports auto-save and versions in Lion.

Price: $9.99

Byword

Marked

Marked is an unique and affordable alternative to Markdown text editors. With this app, you can get a live preview of your Markdown file as you work in your favorite editor. This is perfect for anyone who wants to use Markdown in conjunction with an editor that doesn’t have built-in support.

Price: $2.99

Marked

Macchiato

Like Byword, Macchiato is a plain text editor that automatically formats your Markdown syntax as you type. The visual style is quite unique, may make you love it or hate it.

Price: $19.99

Macchiato

MarkdownNote

Markdown note is a simple Markdown editor without the high price tag. For less than four bucks, you get an app with a two-window workflow: editing in one, HTML preview in the other. There’s also an accompanying iPhone app so you can enjoy MarkdownNote from anywhere.

Price: $3.99

Markdown Note

Minimal Writing Apps

Minimal, full-screen writing apps have officially reached the point of being a fad. As cliche as they are, I can’t help but appreciate their simplicity. In fact, I myself use Writeroom for a large majority of my work and as I start to become more familiar with Markdown, I’ve been eyeing IA Writer as a possible alternative. If you’re in the market for a fullscreen editor and didn’t find what you were looking for in the Markdown section above, have a look at these apps.

IA Writer

IA Writer is everyone’s current favorite full-screen text editor. The interface is gorgeous and the Markdown support is good enough to put it in the previous section. However, it’s flexible enough that any writer can use it regardless of whether or not they’re a Markdown fan. IA Writer is all about the visual experience, it blocks out any and all distractions, including any preferences and formatting options. Just open it and start writing.

Price: $9.99

IA Writer

Writeroom

As far as I know, most of the credit to the current fascination with fullscreen writing can be attributed to Writeroom, which was definitely an early leader in this area. This app still holds my interest above the others because it provides a beautifully simple and distraction-free interface without sacrificing powerful text editing features like font choice, rich text formatting, customizable color schemes, and more.

Price: $24.99

Writeroom

OmmWriter D?na II

OmmWriter takes fullscreen writing out of the realm of a simple productivity-inducing experiment and into a zen-like content creation experience. Soothing sights and even sounds accompany your writing session and help you drown out the busy world so you can lose yourself in the joy of pure, uninterrupted thought.

Price: $4.99

OmmWriter D?na II

Clean Writer

Minimalist, full screen writing is great, but it tends to come at a high price, despite the fact that it also tends to strip out functionality. For less that $3, you can grab Clean Writer and test drive the full-screen writing experience to see if it’s for you.

Price: $2.99

Clean Writer

Writer

Just like Clean Writer, this app lets you into the fullscreen writing game for only $2.99. As a bonus, Writer has support for both auto-save and versions. If you’re in the market for cheap, cheerful and distraction-free writing, this could be the one to beat.

Price: $2.99

Writer

Brainstorming & Research

Writing isn’t all about, well, writing. Sometimes before you can start putting words on a page you need to organize both your thoughts and your facts. Use these tools to brainstorm and hold your research.

OmniGraffle

OmniGraffle is the last outlining tool you’ll ever need. It is simply packed with features and modes to help you brainstorm and lay out your thoughts and ideas regardless of how you like to work. The price tag is pretty hefty though so only serious professional users should take a look.

Price: $99.99

OmniGraffle

SimpleMind

Want a powerful brainstorming and mindmapping utility without dropping a hundred bucks on OmniGraffle? Check out SimpleMind, it’s perfect for plotting out all those ideas in your head and has plenty of customization features.

Price: $30.99

SimpleMind

Tree

Mindmapping utilities are great, but not all of us are so visually minded. If you tend to think in bulleted lists instead of complicated charts, check out Tree. We gave it a full review a while back and found it to be a great utility.

Price: $24.99

Tree

Papers

Whether you’re writing a blog post or a doctoral thesis, keeping track of your research and sources is a vital component of the process. Papers is the best app around for this task, providing you with both a repository and a search utility so you can keep your facts straight.

Price: $79

Papers

Conclusion

I hope you enjoyed our collection of professional writing apps for Mac users. The selection above provides options for every budget, writing style and profession, so grab one or two new tools and see how much it improves your workflow.

Leave a comment below and let us know what you think of the apps above. Which of these have you tried and what did you think of them? Are there any that we missed that you think should be on the list?

As new technologies like HTML5 and CSS3 become more prevalent, your choice of browser is becoming more important than ever. Browsers differ not only on their overall UI experience and feature base, but also in their support of newer standards and practices in web development.

Today we want to know which side you stand on in the browser wars. Vote in the poll on the right and let us know which option you use most frequently. If your browser isn’t listed, write it in!

After you vote, leave a comment below defending your answer. Do you prefer Webkit or Mozilla browsers? Or perhaps you like the unique offerings of another system like Opera. We want to know!

As for me, I’ve been a Safari fan since the early days of the browser. I’ve done my fair share of skipping around though, I spent six months as a Camino user a few years ago and recently had extended experiences with Chrome and Rockmelt, in the end I’m not entirely sure why I end up back in Safari but I always do!

Almost all of our favorite to-do list apps these days have cloud components, either in the form of a free or pay-to-use browser-access service, or Mac/iOS apps that sync over the air with a pay-per-year plan (not to mention the future implications of iCloud). But what about a free-to-use system with Mac, iOS, and web browser access?

Enter NotifyMe, a cloud based to-do app for Mac and iOS from the folks over at PoweryBase. Once the apps for each device are purchased, the syncing service is free to use, and data is stored in the cloud for easy access from any computer via a browser portal. So how does NotifyMe stack up?

Interface

NotifyMe has a clean and easy to understand interface, with unique and colorful icons for quick visual cues. In fact, its bold simplicity and use of uncluttered space reminds me a bit of the interface of the journaling app Day One. While the interface is simplistic, most of the power of NotifyMe is under the hood, which we’ll discuss later.

The main window in NotifyMe makes effective use of uncluttered space.

The toolbar contains a precious few buttons, mostly for task (referred to as “reminders”) input. The Quick Entry can be mapped to a global hotkey for on-the-fly input, while the remaining buttons located in the middle of the toolbar create, edit, and remove tasks respectively. The toolbar also contains easy access to a Sync button, as well as the Preferences Menu (more on that later).

The sidebar contains two tiers of organization: chronologically and categorically. The first three options organize your reminders chronologically. You can view your upcoming reminders, as well as recently completed entries. Below that is a breakdown of your reminders by category, with a series of default categories and the option of creating new ones. The icons denoting these categories, while distinctively different from the native OS X style iconage, are still pretty cool looking. Located at the bottom of the sidebar is an activity monitor, letting you know when the app is syncing with the server.

The body of the window–where your reminders are displayed–use wide bars with clear information regarding chronology, task, and category. A task will appear red if it is overdue, black if it is “upcoming” and may require swift attention, and grayed out if its content won’t be relevant until a future date.

I’ll come right out and say it:  NotifyMe’s Mac client leaves a little to be desired in the interface department. The caveat, though, is that this is only the case on OS X because the iOS versions of the app are both absolutely spot-on beautiful. As a last note on interface, the saving grace here is that PoweryBase designed the web-app in a similar fashion to the iOS apps, so you can still experience that well-crafted and unique user interface

The web-access page is designed with all of the attractiveness of the iOS app.

Usability

As I mentioned previously, the power behind NotifyMe’s organization is well hidden behind the scenes. A global hotkey can launch the Quick Entry pane, which presents you simply with a field to input the main content of a task.

The Quick Entry window limits the amount of information you see.

While a lot of quick entry features in other to-do list apps might leave you with an inbox full of tasks that need attributes, the Preferences window can be used to define preset parameters for your Quick Entry tasks, allowing you to input a reminder that will integrate into your workflow, rather than making a note of a task that you’ll have to flesh out later.

You can set default parameters for Quick Entry in the Preferences window.

The depth doesn’t stop there, though. Clicking the down arrow below the text field on the Quick Entry window will reveal a series of fields outlining the details of your task. This is also accessible by clicking the New Entry button on the toolbar of the main window.

Beef up your task details in the New/Edit Entry window.

As you can see, each item gets a due date, repeating parameters, a pre-alert, a category, snooze commands, and even its own melody for reminder alerts. You thought you were organized with tags and color codes, how about aural organization? All of these parameters can be edited after the creation of the task.

The account management tab of the Preferences window allows you to set options for Growl notifications, push notifications for iOS versions, iCal syncing, password protection, and even the sharing of tasks among other users, making NotifyMe a useful tool for collaborative productivity.

Account Management allows you to configure the way NotifyMe behaves.

Conclusion

Most of my favorite productivity apps were first created a long time ago (in Internet years, of course), and as a result, have had to adopt cloud storage/syncing into their original architecture. NotifyMe has the advantage here, being so relatively young, of being built from the ground up to be a cloud-based app. The integration with iCal, Growl, and it’s collaborative features serve to make NotifyMe a strong contender in the productivity game.

What are your thoughts on cloud-based productivity?

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Think fast, how many web app accounts do you have? Now, how many software licenses? What about bank accounts or email addresses? I’d wager at least several dozen. That’s a lot of user names, passwords and numbers to remember. To help Mac users keep track of their myriad digital profiles, a number of apps have been developed to store and organize all your personal and private information.

I’ve been an avid 1Password user for almost a year now, and I’d be useless without it. However, at $40, it’s not the most affordable option available, and major competitor Wallet is still a bit steep at $20. MyWallet is a newer app offering the basic functionality of a password manager at the much more palatable price of $2.99. Read on to find out if you can still enjoy the benefits of password management without shelling out the cash.

Getting Started

When you first open up MyWallet, you’re asked if you want to encrypt your data and add a master password. Seems like a bit of a no-brainer to me, but then again, my sister keeps all her passwords in Dashboard sticky notes.

The MyWallet lock screen

Adding Accounts

There are five templates for account info: credit card, bank account, web login, passport/ID, and software license, in addition to secure contacts or notes. Each account type offers a different set of default form fields. Though you can’t edit the default fields, you can add custom fields to an account, which is especially useful for bank information, since you might want to add important information like a routing or transit number.

Adding account info

You can also create different types of fields, such as “secure” which only display when you click “show.” Custom fields are actually better supported in MyWallet than in 1Password, which only lets you add custom fields to certain account types.

Adding a custom field

Viewing and Browsing Accounts

Unlike more expensive competitors, MyWallet doesn’t offer many organization options. You can choose how to sort your accounts, but you can’t organize them into folders or tags, and there isn’t a search option.

One long list of logins

Viewing account information is much like in other password managers, where you click on a field to copy it to your clipboard. A bit of an annoyance with MyWallet is that empty fields are displayed, and you can’t re-order fields, so that any custom fields you added will appear at the bottom.

Different field types also offer different actions: click the envelope icon beside an email address to open in your mail client, or the one beside a phone number to call with Skype or FaceTime

Phone number actions

Interface and Design

Unlike some of the other free or cheap password management apps out there, MyWallet boasts a simple yet attractive design and friendly interface. MyWallet offers customizable backgrounds (reminiscent of Wunderlist), and non-standard but inoffensive form fields (and yes, you can get rid of the handwritten font). One seemingly random and annoying feature is that the window is not resizable, which is especially irritating when you have accounts with many fields.

You can always add your own backgrounds by replacing the files in the application package

Encryption

MyWallet offers similar encryption technology to the more expensive applications, using the same 256-bit AES encryption as Wallet (though some might argue that 256-bit is overkill). Your data is stored locally on your computer in an encrypted SQLite file in the documents folder.

iPhone App

MyWallet offers a similar iPhone and iPad App, which doesn’t sync with the desktop version, but can import data from it through basic iTunes document sharing. The developers promise eventual WiFi syncing via Bonjour.

What You’re Missing

At only a fraction of the price of more fully-featured password managers, you’re bound to be missing some key features. If you’re looking for the following features, you’ll find MyWallet insufficient:

• Browser integration (1Password integrates with all major browsers, Wallet integrates with Chrome and Safari)
• Folders, smart folders, tags, and search
• Easy device syncing
• Strong password generation

Other Options

If you’re looking for a free or affordable password manager, MyWallet isn’t your only option:

LastPass

LastPass is probably the most popular password manager out there, it’s multi-platform, browser-based, and, best of all, free. If you’re looking for a free solution to integrate with your browser, LastPass is probably the way to go.

However, some people don’t feel comfortable storing their sensitive data online, and LastPass was hacked in May, though the company claims to have made significant security improvements since.

KeePassX

KeePassX is an open-source, multi-platform password manager that received a lot of support from Appstorm readers in a previous password manager roundup. It doesn’t feature browser integration, but does offer much better management options than MyWallet, like search and groups.

Conclusion

I was pleasantly surprised by MyWallet’s functionality and interface. Though missing some of the key features of more expensive apps (especially browser integration), it’s still a solid password manager that performs its function well. If you usually stick to one browser, MyWallet would be a nice complement to your browser’s built-in autofill for when you’re using a different browser or computer.

Though I’d never switch from 1Password, I would absolutely recommend MyWallet to anyone that struggles to remember passwords (or stores them in unencrypted sticky notes), and doesn’t want to spend $20+ for a more fully-featured application. I’m hoping the application continues to develop, some better organization and browsing options would be welcome additions.

I’m guessing that a lot of Appstorm readers are devoted 1Password or LastPass users, but I’d be curious to hear what other applications or methods are being used. How do you keep your online life secure?