Category: Mac

To-do apps have such a big market, with new ones coming out almost every week. But what about a to-do app made specifically for students? Keeping up with assignments from all the different courses that you have as a student can be pretty difficult.

The app that we are reviewing today is called iHomework, and, as can likely be guessed by its name, its purpose is to help you keep up with your assignments.

Interface

Interface

The interface of the app is very simple and it goes along well with the Mac theme. There is a main panel and two sidebars on the right and left sides. The right sidebar lists courses, teachers, reminders, and reading assignments. The left sidebar is where you see your tasks for the day and check them as they are completed, or pull them up to view them in detail.

The main panel is where you can see your tasks in detail, as well as the area in which you add notes, files, or information to your tasks. The bar on top of the app includes a search bar, the sync button, and buttons to change between the detail and list views, which we’ll get to later. The bar on the bottom reminds you how long it has been since you last synched the app, and it also lets you add tasks, remove tasks, or remove the courses sidebar.

Detail & List Views

List Mode

As we mentioned, you can switch between the two view modes on the app by clicking either of the buttons on the bar on top. The detail view mode is the default mode, and in it you can see the two sidebars and the main panel. This panel will show you details of the currently selected task, such as the title, course, type, deadline, and notes or files associated with it.

The list view mode changes the interface quite a bit; it removes the sidebars and just leaves the main panel and another small panel below it. While using list view, the main panel displays the tasks in a “list”, and has some filters on top of it, like “Complete” and “In Process”, or you could also filter by courses. The small panel will display details of the selected tasks.

Tasks

You can add a new task by clicking the “+” button on the bottom sidebar. Depending on the view mode that you are using, you’ll see the new task displayed in the main panel, where you can fill in all the information that you require from the task. You can simply add in basic information, or you could go deep into it and add files that are related to the task, partners that you are working with, or notes describing the nature of the assignment.

On the other fields you have the title, type, deadline, grade, and course. The title is pretty self-explanatory; it’s the name of the task. The course is one that you can select from the courses you have already created in the courses menu, and it can be used to filter your tasks. The type includes homework, quiz, test, or project. In the deadline field you can put in the due date of the assignment, and in the grade field you can put in what grade you got in the assignment after you get it back.

Once you complete an assignment, you can just check it, which will mark it as done. This does not remove the assignment from your task list for the day, it will just be marked as done so that you know it is complete.

Courses, Reminders and Other Features

Other features

On the right sidebar you have a few buttons called Courses, Teachers, Reminders, and Reading. Under courses, you can add a new one by clicking the plus button on the bottom. From there you can add all the information that you need, such as the name, course number, teacher information, schedule, websites, etc. These aren’t really used within the app, it’s just a nice way to keep things organized.

The other features on the right sidebar work in pretty much the same way. The teacher button allows you to add all of your professors and any important information about them. Another cool feature is the “mini” mode of the app. By clicking a small button on the bottom bar, you can get rid of everything other than the tasks sidebar. This is useful to avoid distractions and help you focus on what’s really relevant: your assignments. There’s also a cool calendar view mode that can help you get an overview of all your due dates.

Syncing and the iOS app

iOS

The syncing process is a bit more confusing than it is in other apps, but it works. You have to put in a login name and password on your Mac, and then go into your iOS device and start syncing so that you can pair both devices.

From then on, every time you want to sync up, you have to put both devices into syncing mode at the same time, and they will automatically sync up. It’s not very convenient and it might work better if it were to complete this process through Dropbox, like Day One does.

You do need to spend another $1.99 to get the iOS app, though.

Conclusion

iHomework doesn’t seem to lack anything; it has support for everything that you might need if you are student. The real problem with these types of apps is having the time and the will to update it continuously with all of your course information and assignments.

Do you think these type of apps are beneficial for students or just another burden for them to deal with? If you are a student, do you use any similar types of apps?

Like most Mac users, I have mixed feelings about the Mac App store. For app users, the App Store makes it easier to find and manage apps all in one place, but largely eliminates the flexibility of free trials. New developers probably enjoy the increased visibility of being in the App Store, but likely lament about the slow acceptance process and numerous restrictions.

Though it seems like most Mac app developers are following the crowd to the App Store, there are still some real gems out there that haven’t made the switch. In this round-up, I’ll go through an incomplete list of fantastic apps missing from the App Store that are worth straying to the browser for. (I’m not including free apps or popular, well-known software like the Microsoft Office or Adobe Creative Suites.)

iStat Menus

iStat Menus is a powerful system monitoring app, which makes realtime status information about your Mac easily accessible from your menu bar. iStat menus is highly customizable, letting you control exactly what information you want displayed, and how the information will look in your menu bar. iStat Menus can monitor CPU usage, battery, memory, disk usage, network activity, hardware temperatures and more. Personally, I use it to keep track of CPU usage from the menu bar, so I can quickly find out which processes are slowing down my computer and how demanding my apps are on my computer’s resources.

various iStat menus

Bjango has decided not to offer their apps for download from the Mac App until it overcomes what they perceive to be significant shortcomings. Their position is cleverly outlined in their timeline of a hypothetical app released through the app store. It’s an interesting, well-argued article, check it out!

Ian Tromp’s Review of iStat Menus

Price: $16
Developer: Bjango

1Password

1Password can keep track of all your login information for the myriad websites and services you sign up for, and makes them all accessible through one master password. I’ve been using 1Password to keep track of web logins, software licenses, bank information and more for the past six months or so, and couldn’t be happier with it. In addition to the copy-and-paste interface, 1Password integrates with your browser (it plays better with some browsers than others, but it’s pretty seamless in Chrome and Safari) so that you can fill out forms and passwords with a few clicks of the mouse, without having to rely on your browser’s own less-than-secure password storage. Agile Bits also created an iPhone version of 1Password that syncs with your Mac, but I personally haven’t found myself using it much.

1Password app interface & Chrome extension

I got my mother a 1Password license for Christmas, and she never stops telling me how much time and frustration it saves her!

In its current form, 1Password can’t be accepted into the App Store because of they way it integrates with browsers.

Quintin Carlson’s comparison of 1Password and Wallet

Price: $39
Developer: Agile Bits

CleanMyMac

CleanMyMac is a handy utility that scans your Mac for any unnecessary files and data, and makes it easy to delete anything you don’t need. CleanMyMac eliminates unnecessary language files, universal binaries, caches, logs, and more. You can pick and choose what you want to keep and delete, and it makes sure you delete files permanently and securely.

CleanMyMac scanning my computer

One of my favourite features of CleanMyMac is the uninstaller: when you drag an application to the trash, CleanMyMac pops up and asks if you want to delete all the extra files that accompany it, so you don’t have any leftover junk from your unwanted apps.

CleanMyMac might not ever show up on the App Store because they offer a 6-month license option for half the price of the lifetime version, and I don’t see Apple supporting that kind of pricing plan at the App Store.

David Appleyard’s review of CleanMyMac

Price: $29.95
Developer: MacPaw

Alfred Powerpack

Here at Mac Appstorm, we frequently extol the many virtues of Alfred, the powerful Spotlight replacement that lets you search your computer and the internet, launch applications, do calculations, and (way) more. The Powerpack extends Alfred with additional, powerful features that take Alfred one big step further. The Alfred Powerpack lets you perform actions on the files you find, like copying, moving, emailing or opening, in addition to it acting as a mini iTunes controller, allowing you to search recent documents and clipboard snippets, launching terminal controls and commands, and more.

Performing actions on a file in Alfred

The Alfred Powerpack lets you do many of the common tasks you perform on your Mac without lifting your fingers from the keyboard or navigating through the Finder. The basic version of Alfred is an indispensable tool for casual and power users alike, but the Powerpack adds a whole extra level of geeky productivity that makes Spotlight look archaic.

Alfred is available for free in the App Store, but so far the Powerpack is only available for download through the website, and the App Store version can’t be upgraded to Powerpack. Alfred’s developers have promised to make the Powerpack available at the App Store in the future.

David Appleyard’s article about Alfred Powerpack Tips

Price: $20
Developer: Running with Crayons

TotalFinder

Since tabbed browsing has become the standard in web browsers, I can’t help but think tabs should be everywhere. In my opinion, any app in which you often have multiple windows open should have tabs (iWork and Microsoft Office, I’m looking at you). The Finder certainly falls under this category for me, and though a tabbed Finder seems like the next logical step to me, I was disappointed to see no Finder improvements at all in Lion.

TotalFinder main interface

TotalFinder is an attempt to correct this oversight, bringing Google Chrome-like tabs to the finder. The basic functionality is pretty much what you’d expect: the tabs work like they do in Chrome, and you can easily drag-and-drop between them.

In addition to the tabbed browsing, TotalFinder also offers a split-window mode, cut-and-paste, system-wide Finder access through keyboard shortcut, and finder organization.

Matt Longman’s review of TotalFinder

Price: $15
Developer: Binary Age

Path Finder

Like TotalFinder, Path Finder brings tabs to the Finder. However, Path Finder also packs in a heap of additional features and is marketed as a fully-featured Finder replacement. Path Finder adds pretty much any feature you wish the Finder had, like dual pane browsing, sorting and filtering, and breadcrumb navigation. My favourite feature of Path Finder is the “Drop Stack” which is like a temporary folder in the sidebar where you can place files as you relocate them.

A folder displayed in Path Finder

I used Path Finder for a long time, but recently switched to TotalFinder because Path Finder doesn’t support Dropbox, which is a total deal-breaker for me.

I don’t know if apps like TotalFinder or Path Finder will end up in the App Store, I’m guessing they probably tweak the OS a lot more than Apple is comfortable with.

Joshua Johnson’s round-up of Finder replacements

Price: $39.95
Developer: Cocoatech

HyperDock

HyperDock brings Windows 7-style window previews and snapping to OSX, showing you a preview of open windows when a dock icon is hovered over, and snapping windows to corners or sides of the screen. HyperDock’s window preview feature is handy, but personally I think it needs a bit more work.

Like I said before, I think tabbed interfaces are key, and HyperDock only shows you the different windows open in each app. I rarely have more than one window open at one time in an app, but usually have a fair number of tabs going in Chrome, Photoshop and Coda.

HyperDock displaying Safari tabs

HyperDock does support tab previews for Safari, and the developer says support for other browsers is on the “to-do list.” I switched from Safari to Chrome a couple months ago, but the HyperDock integration with Safari is really slick, and I could see myself using this app a lot more if it worked with more browsers.

HyperDock also features window snapping, similar to apps like Cinch or BetterSnapTool, which works intuitively and just as well as Cinch for basic window management, but doesn’t have quite as many customization options as BetterSnapTool.

HyperDock probably won’t ever make it to the App Store, since it’s not technically an “app” (it’s a prefpane file) and probably breaks many of Apple’s rules.

Conor O’Driscoll’s comparison of DockView and HyperDock

Price: $9.95
Developer: Christian Baumgart

Kaleidoscope

Kaleidoscope is a powerful application that allows you to compare documents and review changes easily and quickly. Kaleidoscope works with pictures and with text files, and uses different comparison methods for each. When reviewing a text file, the app highlights changes, deletions and insertions in different colours, allowing you to easily see how a file has changed. This feature seems aimed at developers, with support for version control through Git, Mercurial and Subversion.

I’m not much of a developer, but I found the text file comparison really useful for writing and editing purposes. Rather than using Word’s “track changes” feature, which shows changes all in one document, Kaleidoscope highlights changes in a much more understandable way, with both documents side-by-side.

Comparing images and text in Kaleidoscope

You can also compare images in a number of ways, but I found the most useful comparison method was the “split” view, which lets you control the angle the images are “split” at, allowing you to compare whichever portions of the image you wish.

Joshua Johnson’s review of Kaleidoscope

Price: $41
Developer: Sofa

Concentrate

Concentrate is an interesting little app: it helps you eliminate distractions by letting you set various actions to be excecuted while you’re “concentrating.” Actions include launching and quitting apps, blocking websites, opening documents, running scripts and setting off various reminders.

When I was in school I used Concentrate frequently, and my favourite features were the spoken or Growled reminders: I had it set up so that a Stephen Hawking voice would berate me every half hour or so, and a Growl message would remind me to save changes every few minutes.

Creating "rules" for yourself using Concentrate

Some of us need to be forced to concentrate, and can’t be trusted to stay away from distractions, and Concentrate really helps keep you on track. Though I’m not in school any more, I still launch Concentrate every once in a while when I really need to get something done without the constant temptation of the internet.

Henry Bennet’s review of Concentrate

Price: $29
Developer: Rocket

Papers

Another academic app, Papers helps you find and organize academic papers with ease. Papers is designed for anyone with an overflowing digital library of research papers, studies and the like, using automatic metadata detection or manually added information to organize your papers.

The Papers main interface

I used Papers in school to keep track of endless anthropology articles and assignments, and it was a lifesaver when it came to writing research papers. Mekentosj recently released Papers 2 with some fantastic new features that I haven’t really had a chance to delve into, like support for many different document types, unified search, coverflow interface, word processor integration and more. Papers is a brilliantly handy app for students, and I imagine it would be indispensable for researchers.

Ian Tromp’s review of Papers

Price: $79 (Student discounts available)
Developer: Mekentosj

Conclusion

Though this roundup is far from exhaustive, it shows how many great apps can be found outside of the App Store. Some of the developers of these apps have held back from releasing App Store versions because of their own negative opinions of the platform, others wouldn’t be able to get their apps approved, but they’re certainly still worthwhile apps, and their lack of inclusion in the App Store in no way reflects lesser quality.

What are your thoughts on App Store distribution? Do you think these developers have made mistakes by not taking the platform seriously? With the number of apps in the App Store increasing every day, can these developers still compete?

This week we’re focusing in on the Mac App Store quite heavily. Personally, I really love how easy it has become to find, download and update great new Mac Apps. However, I’m far from admitting that the system is perfect!

Later today we’ll have a roundup of awesome apps that you won’t find on the Mac App Store. Later this week we’ll take a deeper look into the general direction that Apple is guiding the software industry and whether or not its a good thing for users. For now, we want to know about your biggest beef with the Mac App Store. Are you frustrated with the pricing structure or unhappy with the current selection? Let us know in the poll!

After you vote, leave a comment below explaining your answers. Has your overall experience with the Mac App Store positive or negative? How often do you check in and see what new apps have arrived?

Over $330 of Value for Just $49!

I’m incredibly excited to let you know that we have just launched our first ever bundle! The Freelance Mac App Bundle is an unbeatable deal for freelancers, giving you eight awesome Mac apps, three bonus files from the marketplaces, and two inspiring eBooks – all for just $49!

Which Apps Are Included?

We’re featuring eight awesome applications that can make your life easier, and more enjoyable, as a freelancer. These are:

• Billings – Powerful time billing and invoicing for anyone (Usually $39.99)
• TextExpander – Save time and keystrokes with frequently used “snippet” abbreviations (Usually $34.95)
• WriteRoom – The best distraction-free writing environment (Usually $24.99)
• Radium – The easiest way to listen to internet radio on Mac (Usually $9.99)
• Arq – Online backup built especially for the Mac (Usually $29)
• LittleSnapper – Build up your own versatile design scrapbook (Usually $29)
• 1Password – Have you ever forgotten a password? Never again (Usually $39.99)
• Alarms – Prioritise and track your daily tasks (Usually $16.80)

Each of these is a piece of software that we wouldn’t hesitate to recommend, and every single one would be a great addition to a freelancer’s arsenal of apps. This week is your chance to get your hands on the whole package for a ridiculously low price!

But That’s Not All!

In addition to the above apps, we’re also throwing in a few fantastic Envato marketplace items that can help spruce up your personal website, manage clients more effectively, and craft a funky business card to promote yourself:

• Highlight WordPress Theme (Usually $35)
• Ultimate Client Manager (Usually $20)
• Translucent Business Card Template (Usually $6)
• Rockstar Freelancer eBook (Usually $29)

One More Thing…

Finally, we’re excited to let you know that anyone can grab a free copy of Smashing Magazine’s Successful Freelancing eBook, worth $9.95, just for sending out a tweet about the bundle! Head over to the bundle page to find out more, and grab your free eBook.

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This awesome offer will only be available for just over a week, so don’t miss your chance to bag your collection of fantastic apps and resources!

With the ever-increasing popularity of iPad apps such as Flipboard, and the impending decline of RSS, developers are becoming more and more aware that users want a new way to discover news online – Subscribing to feeds and trawling through thousands of stories is too time-consuming and isn’t a viable option in this modern world where time is everything. Users want to discover the news they want, and read it in an easy way.

This is where Mixtab comes in. Starting off as an iPad app, Mixtab has made the transition to Mac. Mixtab allows you to create tabs to browse news, based on what sort of news you’re looking for. There’s plenty of competition in this field, and I’m sure we’ll see even more in future years. So how does Mixtab compare? Read on to find out.

Getting Started

Mixtab is available only from the App Store, and, in a rare but much-appreciated move, it’s free. With the advent of the App Store, many small apps which we would normally find as a free download have gone commercial. Mixtab, however, is sticking to their guns and going free. If you’ve ever installed anything from the App Store before, you’ll know the drill – Hit that nice blue button, and it’ll pop into your dock.

Mixtab in the App Store

Upon first opening Mixtab, you’ll be greeted with a log in/sign up screen. This is all quite straightforward – Simply enter an email and password to sign up. If you’ve used the iPad app before, you’ll already have an account, so you can sign in and retain all your tabs.

The Sign Up/Sign In Page

Interface & Usability

As I’ve previously mentioned, Mixtab started off as an iPad app, and the interface shows – With big buttons and no hover effects. Whilst Apple themselves are trying to bring iOS to the desktop, this is the extreme – It simply feels like the developers ported the app straight from iPad to Mac, without any thought about the differences in the platforms. In fact, I’ve used the iPad app, and it is identical. There’s not a single difference, apart from a different window size. Even features like preferences can only be accessed inside the app, with no support for the ever popular Command-Comma shortcut.

The Mixtab Interface

In terms of visuals, it’s by no means a horrible-looking app, with some nice shiny buttons. But quite frankly, it doesn’t feel like a Mac app – Mac apps have a native feel which we have come to love, and this doesn’t have it. You might find this refreshing or out of place depending on your devotion to the general Apple design practices.

There are 8 visual themes you can choose from in Mixtab. When I say “themes”, I mean “backgrounds”. The backgrounds are quite nice, but there is no support for adding your own background, which might be nice for those of us who like to customize.

Mixtab Themes

Organizing Tabs

Tabs are separate feeds, or collections of feeds, from which Mixtab gathers data. When you first open up Mixtab, you’ll have some default feeds – Cooking, Technology, Photography, etc. If you hit the “Edit” button, you can delete any tabs you don’t want. I couldn’t, however, find any way to move tabs around, which is a bit odd. If I want all my Mac tabs in the same place, all my Photography tabs in the same place, there’s no easy way to do that.

The Tab Gallery

If you want a new tab, just hit the “Add Tab” button and you’ll be brought to the Tab Gallery, where there are a number of pre-made tabs you can use (the majority of them Apple-related). If you want your own tab, you can create tabs too. You can choose to create a tab based on a topic, where you enter a topic, or a number of topics, and it will locate stories about that topic. If you just want a single website’s feed, you can add a single RSS feed URL. If you’d rather quickly add a bunch of feeds, you can upload an OPML file, which can be exported from Google Reader.

Creating a Tab

Consuming Stories

You can browse through stories in their tabs, with 6 stories displayed stylishly per page. I’ve found that Mixtab will duplicate stories occasionally, however, and if you have a large tab, it will only gather 20 or 30 stories. This really isn’t great if you want to browse through lots of news.

Reading Stories

If you want to actually read an article, click the article and it’ll be brought up in Mixtab, free of formatting, ads, just text and pictures. I’m all for a simplified reading experience, but when Mixtab gets rid of your headers and all formatting, it actually makes it harder to read. Links are supported, but don’t look any different from normal text, so there’s no way of telling something is a link. At the end of the day, reading on Mixtab is a bit of a pain, and worse than reading in-browser. Considering that this is an app designed for reading, that is poor form indeed.

Conclusion

With Lion just around the corner, more and more developers are likely to bring elements of iOS to the Mac. I’m fine with that – I’m a fan of gestures and big buttons. But if developers are going to take an iPad app and put it in Mac, pixel-for-pixel, as Mixtab developers have done, I’m very worried for the future of OS X. Mixtab is a perfectly decent app on the iPad, but it doesn’t translate very well to the Mac.

Perhaps this is simply a platform issue – maybe innovative news aggregators like this just work better on the iPad. Hopefully the developers will soon take the time to work through the awkwardness of a straight up iPad interface in OS X. With both Pulp and Reeder running at just under $10, Mixtab could easily carve a large niche for itself if the team behind it can pull together and fix the problems.

In the mean time, it is a completely free download populated with free content, so there’s really no reason not to try it and see what you think. Go give it a download and a comment below with your thoughts.

We’d like to take a moment to say a big thank you to this week’s sponsor, Music Commander.

Music Commander is an awesome menu bar utility that allows you to control iTunes from anywhere. Music Commander isn’t just another basic iTunes controller mind you, it’s a full-featured iTunes access panel with social integration built right in.

With Music Commander you have access to all your typical controls like play, pause, shuffle and skip, and lots of advanced controls like playlists and ratings. Music Commander shows you the complete information for the current song, including the album art, all right in the menu bar.

Want to share the current song with others? Facebook and Twitter integration make it easy to tell all your friends what you’re listening to. Also, my favorite feature is the Last.fm integration, which automatically scrobbles the songs you hear to your Last.fm account.

You can snag all this functionality for less than a buck on the Mac App Store. If you’re an avid iTunes user, this is one app you won’t want to pass up!

There are already many options available to those of us who’re after simple writing tools. These apps encourage their users to focus in on the evolving text, minimizing distractions by cutting back both on visual clutter (I’m looking at you Microsoft Office) and on informational overload in the form of too many options and tweakable settings. We’ve previously reviewed Byword and Writeroom, as well as running a round-up that added a few alternatives. We also published a discussion piece on whether such apps are necessary, which got some interesting debate going in its comments.

Such apps abound on the iPad too, and on that platform one of the most popular choices has been iA Writer. Now Information Architects, the design firm that developed iA Writer for iPad has turned it into a Mac app, available for purchase on the Mac Appstore.

I’m going to settle down for a while, open up iA Writer for Mac, and walk you through its features.

What it Does

Well, actually, this won’t take very long. That’s because iA Writer has been deliberately pared down to the essentials. It saves your writing in plain text, so there are no formatting controls or layout features to think about. So that means no agonizing over what font to use, no time-wasting about anything to do with how your text will look on the printed page. In fact, the app doesn’t even have a Preferences menu, so there’s absolutely nothing to adjust or fine-tune.

In fact, there’s really only one thing you can adjust in iA Writer: whether or not you’re in Focus Mode. With Focus off, your text fills the screen.

iA Writer in Action

In Focus Mode, the app switches to typewriter scrolling, placing your current sentence in the middle of the screen. You’ll also notice from the screenshot that all but that current sentence is greyed out.

Greying out Content

In Focus Mode you can use [CMD]+[arrow keys] to jump backwards and forwards between sentences and quickly jump through your document.

If you want to add some basic formatting – headers, italics, bold, lists – you can do so using the popular Markdown syntax. This is decidedly not WYSIWYG editing, but it does allow you to prepare texts that other apps can convert into formatted pages.

Nice touches

iA Writer is a very nicely designed app, full of thoughtful and effective little touches. Colours and fonts are well considered, so your text is easily legible onscreen. Rather than ordinary white, the background is eye-savingly slightly-off-white, with a subtle paper-like texture. And that blue cursor – well, I find it lovely.

The Blue Cursor

When you exit fullscreen mode, the windowed view includes some useful information: word and character counts and an approximate reading time.

Useful Information

The developers have said on Twitter that the next update will include fullscreen word count too.

How Does it Compare to Writeroom?

Of all the ‘distraction free’ writing apps I’ve tried, the one I’ve come back to again and again is Writeroom.

WriteRoom

I believe Writeroom was the first of the lot. It aims at the same end, but gives you a lot more control over how the app looks, and various other things – from adjusting text and background colours to changing the default document encoding.

All these things are useful, but the truth is that I set things as I wanted them a long time ago, and haven’t made any changes since then. And even with that fine-tuning, I far prefer the appearance of iA Writer. What I do miss, though, in switching from Writeroom is realtime spell-checking – I hope that iA Writer might add this feature in the future.

Conclusion

I think the difference between these apps points to an interesting observation about freedom and constraint. Writeroom gives you enough power and control to be able to set things up more-or-less exactly as you want them (though you can’t get a subtly textured background, sorry). iA Writer, by contrast, gives you no control – in fact, rather, it takes away options. In a sense, then, Writeroom offers freedom and choice (within the limitations of a full-screen, distraction-limiting writing app), where iA Writer imposes limitations. And yet, I for one will be choosing to use Writer from here on – and I expect many will agree and do the same. Well-considered constraints and limitations occasionally win out over power and freedom.

In a way, that truth is demonstrated over and over in the world of Apple hardware and software. In choosing a Mac over a PC, or just in choosing iPhoto to manage your photos and allowing it to arrange them in the opaque folder structure it uses, you make a choice to allow someone else’s solutions to govern your world. Some PC users find that a maddening fact about Macs. But when those solutions are as well thought through and carefully designed as iA Writer, the choice to accept limitation and embrace constraint seems easy.

It’s been quite a while since we’ve had any fun with AppleScript so today we’re going to build a super basic script that automatically reads a list of URLs and turns them into screenshots.

If you’re new to AppleScript, be sure to read our introduction and advanced articles! We’ll be explaining things as we go but everything will make a lot more sense once you do your homework.

The Workflow

As a full-time blogger, it’s quite often the case that I have to put together a list of well-designed websites or some other post that requires me to post screenshots of anywhere from fifty to one hundred web pages. This is an exhausting process!

Since I’m lazy and love to sit back and watch my computer do my work for me, I wrote a simple script to handle the process. Basically, we’ll be using a modified version of a TUAW script to take a screenshot and adding in some of our own code to progressively launch a list of links. Let’s get started!

Algorithm

An algorithm is just a fancy word for the general path of our script. Before you write a single line of code, you should always outline the steps that you’ll need to take to reach your goal. For this post, ours is quite simple:

• Create a list of URLs in Text Edit (manually)
• Count the URLs in TextEdit
• Grab the first URL
• Open the first URL in Safari
• Take a screenshot
• Repeat for the rest of the URLs

That’s not so bad is it? We should be able to knock this out in no time.

Step 1: Declare Some Variables

One of the first steps I like to take when coding is to think about the variables that I’ll need and declare them. For instance, here I know I’ll need one counter that will help me cycle through the URLs, a variable to hold the total number of URLs and a variable to hold a customizable file name for the resulting files.

To this end, we’ll declare our counter and filename first. I called the counter “whichUrl” because it will essentially be keeping track of which URL we’re on throughout the script. Notice that I’ll be using comments quite liberally throughout the script, this is a good practice to get into.

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--Variables
set whichUrl to 1
set fileNames to "webshot"

Next up, we need to create a tell block that grabs the number of URLs from TextEdit. If we put each URL on a line of its own, AppleScript will see each URL as a paragraph, so we simply tell it to set our variable equal to the number of paragraphs in the front document. This effectively counts our URLs for us.

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--Get Number of URLs
tell application "TextEdit"
	set theCount to the count of paragraphs of front document
end tell

Step 2: Create a Repeat Block

At this point of the script, we’ll have everything we need to start grabbing URLs and taking screenshots. What we need to do is create a loop of commands that will repeat for every URL. Since we took the number of URLs and put it into our “theCount” variable, we can tell AppleScript to repeat that many times.

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--Repeat this for every URL
repeat theCount times
	--some code here
end repeat

Step 3: Grabbing a URL

The first step we want to do within our repeat block is to grab the first URL and put it in a variable so we can open it in Safari later. To do this, we take advantage of our whichURL variable, which is initially set to one.

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--Repeat this for every URL
repeat theCount times
 
	--Get the next URL
	tell application "TextEdit"
		set currentUrl to paragraph whichUrl of front document as text
	end tell
 
end repeat

As you can see, we told TextEdit to grab the contents of the first paragraph and throw it into the variable “currentURL”. Admittedly, my variables are a bit confusing and could be named a bit better! Feel free to change them to something that makes more sense to you.

Step 4: Open the URL in Safari

Now that we have the URL set to a variable, it’s time to open a Safari window with the URL set to that value. Basically we just create a tell block and set the URL of document one to the variable we created in step three.

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--Repeat this for every URL
repeat theCount times
 
	--Get the next URL
	tell application "TextEdit"
		set currentUrl to paragraph whichUrl of front document as text
	end tell
 
	--Open the URL in Safari
	tell application "Safari"
		activate
		set the URL of document 1 to currentUrl
	end tell
end repeat

Step 5: Take the Screenshot

One of the struggles that I had with creating this script is that the page wasn’t always fully loaded when the screenshot was taken, so the resulting file was either a blank Safari window or a half-loaded web page.

The simple solution is to insert a slight delay. If your Internet connection is slow, you might want to increase this value. After that, we then take and save the screenshot. The saving is done by determining the path to your desktop, then applying the filename variable we set up before plus a number on the end to indicate which URL it was. So the third URL should come out as “webshot-3.jpg” on your desktop.

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--Repeat this for every URL
repeat theCount times
 
	--Get the next URL
	tell application "TextEdit"
		set currentUrl to paragraph whichUrl of front document as text
	end tell
 
	--Open the URL in Safari
	tell application "Safari"
		activate
		set the URL of document 1 to currentUrl
 
		--Wait until it loads, then take a screenshot
		delay 15
		set saveToPath to ((POSIX path of (path to desktop)) & fileNames & "-" & whichUrl & ".jpg") as string
		do shell script "screencapture -tjpg " & quoted form of saveToPath
	end tell
end repeat

Step 6: Increase the Counter

The last thing we need to do is increase the “whichURL” variable by one. This will cause the script to jump to URL #2 in your TextEdit Document and make sure the filename gets a “-2″ on the end of it.

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--Repeat this for every URL
repeat theCount times
 
	--Get the next URL
	tell application "TextEdit"
		set currentUrl to paragraph whichUrl of front document as text
	end tell
 
	--Open the URL in Safari
	tell application "Safari"
		activate
		set the URL of document 1 to currentUrl
 
		--Wait until it loads, then take a screenshot
		delay 5
		set picPath to ((POSIX path of (path to desktop)) & fileNames & "-" & whichUrl & ".jpg") as string
		do shell script "screencapture -tjpg " & quoted form of picPath
	end tell
 
	--Increase the counter for next time
	set whichUrl to whichUrl + 1
end repeat

Putting it All Together

That’s it! Our script is nice and short and will save you loads of time if you ever need to take a screenshot of a webpage. Here’s the full script, feel free to copy and paste it right into AppleScript Editor.

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--Variables
set whichUrl to 1
set fileNames to "webshot"
 
--Get Number of URLs
tell application "TextEdit"
	set theCount to the count of paragraphs of front document
end tell
 
--Repeat this for every URL
repeat theCount times
 
	--Get the next URL
	tell application "TextEdit"
		set currentUrl to paragraph whichUrl of front document as text
	end tell
 
	--Open the URL in Safari
	tell application "Safari"
		activate
		set the URL of document 1 to currentUrl
 
		--Wait until it loads, then take a screenshot
		delay 5
		set picPath to ((POSIX path of (path to desktop)) & fileNames & "-" & whichUrl & ".jpg") as string
		do shell script "screencapture -tjpg " & quoted form of picPath
	end tell
 
	--Increase the counter for next time
	set whichUrl to whichUrl + 1
end repeat

Running the Script

Before you test out the script, be sure to open TextEdit and copy in a list of links. You don’t need to save the document, just be sure that it’s the frontmost page in TextEdit and everything will work fine.

The Requisite TextEdit Document

Also, the script works best when you have maximized Safari windows, so before you begin, open a new window in Safari and stretch it as big as it’ll go. After that, you’re all set to hit play and watch the magic happen!

Room for Improvement

As I said, this script saves me loads of time and I love using it, but I fully admit that it could stand to be improved. For starters, it’s limited to the visual portion of the page and doesn’t take a screenshot of the entire website. LittleSnapper works great for this but last I checked there wasn’t any AppleScript support (get on that RealMac).

Further, I’m not sure how to snap only preset, specific coordinates of the screen, so this script just grabs your entire screen, browser chrome, menu bar and all (check below for an alternate version). This is definitely undesirable but I always just automate the cropping as well. You could automate the crop with AppleScript but I find that it’s easier just to use Photoshop and the following steps:

• Open one of the screenshots
• Create a new action and hit record
• Crop the image
• Close/save the image
• Stop recording
• Go to File>Automate>Batch and run the action on your entire folder of screenshots

This is definitely a little annoying but running the script and action setup are a one-time process that can just be quickly run every time you use them. I’d definitely love to see some talented scripters make suggestions for how to improve this to be a little less clunky!

Alternative Version: Manually Selection Grab Area

If you really hate the cropping process, you can actually change the script so that you manually select the portion of the screen to capture. Everything else will stay automated, you simply have to draw a box for each capture to take place.

To accomplish this, change the shell script line near the bottom to the one shown below. All I added was a “-i” after the “screencapture” command.

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do shell script "screencapture -i -tjpg " & quoted form of picPath

Conclusion

Taking screenshots of a huge list of websites for a roundup post can be time consuming and mind-numbing. Fortunately, with AppleScript and a little ingenuity, you can automate the entire process. Simply create your list of URLs then sit back and enjoy the show.

Leave a comment below if you have any suggestions for improving the script. Also, be sure to let me know what other tasks you find frustrating and wish you could automate, if I think it will help a lot of people, I’ll whip up a tutorial!

Do you work with JavaScript or CSS? If so, we’ve got a treat for you! Don’t miss out! You only have 48 hours, so read on now!

Smaller is a Graphical User Interface (GUI) for the YUI Compressor. It helps you to batch minify your CSS and JavaScript files (or folders) via a sleek and simple interface for Mac.

We’re giving away copies of Smaller, developed by Chen Luo for free over the next two days! Smaller usually sells for $20, but to reserve your very own free copy, simply sign up to the recently launched AppFanatix newsletter within the next 48 hours, and that’s all there is to it!

The AppFanatix newsletter goes out to subscribers every two weeks and contains all of the latest app news and deals from around the AppStorm network. If you use Apps, you’ll love AppFanatix!

By signing up to the newsletter, not only will you get Smaller for free, but you’ll also be the first to find out all of the details on our upcoming Mac App Bundle, which will feature many more great Mac apps at an amazing price.

How To Get Your Copy!

1. Subscribe to the AppFanatix newsletter in the following 48 hour period: Thursday 00:01am EST – Friday 11:59pm EST. If you subscribe after this period you are ineligible for the giveaway.
2. Wait for our email at the end of the giveaway period, with your very own free copy of Smaller!

Thanks to Chen Luo for being a part of this giveaway! If you like Smaller, be sure to check out Chen’s site and his other handy apps Resize and resizeMyBrowser.

Don’t risk missing out, sign up now and reserve your free copy of Smaller now!

We all struggle with procrastination from time to time, especially when overwhelmed with the size or scope of a project. There have been a number of studies and books written lately about the benefits of working for shorter periods of time, with regular short breaks in between. In combination with setting specific small goals to accomplish, this technique is supposed to help you stay focused on the task without getting overwhelmed, and makes you less likely to procrastinate.

The developers of Vitamin-R aimed to create an unobtrusive menu-bar app to help you manage your “time slices” and breaks, while encouraging you to stay focused on small tasks. Vitamin-R integrates many of the ideas described by these new productivity techniques into its functionality, but can it really help you stay focused?

The Philosophy

The Philosophy behind Vitamin-R is based on how the brain naturally functions. Most work environments lead us to focus on large tasks for long periods of time, while dealing with multiple interruptions and being forced to multi-task. The brain, however, works best when focusing on a single task without interruption, for shorter periods of time. Vitamin-R refers to these short periods of work as “time slices,” which should ideally be 15-25 minutes.

Large tasks can scare us into avoidance and procrastination, literally triggering the “fight or flight” response in our brains; if you instead divide large tasks into smaller sub-tasks, they goal becomes too small to scare us and we can get started.

Using Vitamin-R

Vitamin-R lives in your menu-bar, and pops out unobtrusively when clicked on. To start working, the first step is to define your objective, which is supposed to be a small chunk of the task, defined very specifically.

Next, decide how long you want your “time slice” to be, and decide what to do about other apps that may distract you. There is an option to either hide or quit a custom selection of apps that are open, which impressively managed to quit all my checked apps super fast.

Entering an objective

Once you start working, a countdown timer appears in your menu bar, and clicking on it will bring up the Vitamin-R interface displaying your objective, with the options to end or pause the time slice. There are many customization options to keep you on track, like a ticking noise every minute (which I found really irritating) or having a computer voice tell you how long you have left every so often.

Personally, I don’t like the audio reminders, I found them distracting and they often startled me. I’d much prefer to see a growl alert occasionally, with a custom message.

Working on a time slice

I used Concentrate when I was in school and loved being able to set custom Growl alert with a computer voice that would read out my messages (I set it so it sounded like Stephen Hawking was berating me). Another thing I liked about Concentrate was the ability to create numerous reminders or alerts, so I could have “motivational” messages play every 15 minutes, but a growl alert reminding me to save my document every 3 minutes.

You can also set Vitamin-R to play a constant noise throughout, like a ticking noise, or white noise. I can’t imagine anyone using this feature, but you never know.

When you finish a time slice, you’re prompted to rate your concentration level, then you can decide whether to take a timed break, open-ended break, or continue straight to the next time slice.

Now & Later Boards

The philosophy behind Vitmain-R recommends ”memory dumps,” sets of notes that you quickly jot down before they leave your mind. Because we can only keep a couple “chunks” of information in our working memory at a time, Vitamin-R allows you to write down notes or ideas on either the “Now” or “Later” boards.

The Now board is for items you’re going to need while working on this time slice, like something you’ll need to add to the next paragraph of text, or perhaps a phrase you’ll need to copy and paste. The Later board is for writing down important things that need attention after you’ve completed your time slice, and don’t want to forget. By writing it down, you get it out of your mind and are able to focus better on the task at hand.

The "now" pad

You can access the Now & Later pads (and a “Scratch pad” for what doesn’t fit in now or later) through system-wide keyboard shortcuts. I think a lot of us already have systems for keeping track of these kinds of notes, for example, I use Evernote to keep track of things that are important now, and add tasks to Wunderlist, so I don’t think I’d use this feature.

FastType

I found the most useful part of the Now & Later pads to be the FastType syntax, which allows you to create common formatting (like bulleted lists and horizontal lines) using easy to remember shortcuts, like typing * for a bulleted list, — for a horizontal line, etc. This is the one feature that had me tempted to switch from Evernote, but I’m hopeful Evernote picks up a similar feature soon.

Logs & Statistics

Each time you complete a time slice, Vitamin-R records information about length, objective, and concentration level. You can find this information under Tools>Logs or Tools>Statistics, and can view the information in RTF format or as a graph in the Statistics view.

RTF Vitamin-R log

Graph view

Customization

Vitamin-R features some pretty extensive customization options, allowing you to skip or customize dialogs, set defaults, set alarms and sounds, and keyboard shortcuts, allowing you to create your own custom workflow.

Customization options

Does It Work?

So, the philosophy sounds appealing and reasonable, but does Vitamin-R actually increase productivity? If you use it right, and it suits the way you work, then it probably will.

Working in “time-slices” is ideal for people who are easily overwhelmed by large tasks, or who constantly have too many things to do. Personally, I’m more of a “Hell yeah I’m gonna get this thing done in 8 hours straight so nobody talk to me until tomorrow!” type of worker, which suits me fine. I found that whenever a time-slice ended, I just wanted it to go away so I could get back to work.

However, the literature on this topic would tend to suggest that I’m the exception not the rule, and I can certainly see how this app could help a lot of people to overcome procrastination. The philosophy behind Vitamin-R is solid, and the functionality is very usable and customizable, despite a bit of a learning curve.

If you’re curious about the philosophy behind apps like Vitamin-R, check out the Pomodoro Technique.

Conclusion: Worth a Download?

Is it worth $20? Like I always say, that depends. Could you accomplish the same thing with a pencil, paper, and egg timer? Absolutely. But if you do most of your work on the computer, it’s certainly handy to be able to set everything up from your computer, and I doubt the patrons at your local cafe will appreciate your egg timer.

The developers of Vitamin-R frequently update the software, and released an update as recently as May 17, and a reliable update schedule is one of the main things I look for in a paid app. Vitamin-R is a well-designed app that accomplishes its goal, but its functionality may be superfluous to some people.

Puzzle style adventure games have never exactly been my “thing”. I’m not a hardcore gamer, but when I do play, I usually stay away from these types of games. After deciding to expand my horizons, I looked around in this genre and spotted Machinarium. The screenshots of the game immediately drew my attention. The visuals were absolutely stunning and enough to get me to venture off into the realm of puzzle/adventure gaming.

Machinarium is a point and click game that takes place in a magical industrial environment full of amazing sights and sounds. You must solve puzzles of varying complexity within the environment in order to move forward in the game. Does the gameplay measure up to the graphics? Read on to find out.

Design

Machinarium is a point and click adventure puzzle solving style game and the world in which this game takes place is completely amazing. I found myself just looking around the beautifully designed levels. The detail on the illustrations and animations is definitely something to pay attention to. I can see how this could hinder the gameplay, but overall I think there is a nice balance. We’ll talk more about the actual gameplay here in a bit, but first up let’s talk about the world that is Machinarium.

Environment

The world is interesting enough to keep you fully immersed, which certainly adds to the game. This isn’t a non-stop action game so you do have some time to “smell the roses” (or maybe oil in this case) so to speak. The hand-drawn, dark, industrial landscapes are beautiful to look at and fit with the concept of the game. The ambient, electronic soundtrack has an oddly peaceful yet industrial feel to it and adds a whole other level of immersion.

Opening landscape

Subtle animations pop up everywhere in this beautiful environment. Some are simply background animations and just flat out look cool while others are actually part of the game. Whether moving a crane, pulling a crank or pushing a dumpster, it is all done very well and fits seamlessly with the rest of this little world. I was wowed by what I saw on more than one occasion.

Another beautiful landscape

Something else that is a bit interesting about the environment Machinarium takes place in is that there is no spoken or written language anywhere. The storyline is conveyed through dreams and thoughts that you’ll see in comic style idea bubbles. It is an interesting way to let the story unfold, it adds some mysteriousness and even a bit of humor to the environment.

Really, the game is worth checking out just because of its beautiful landscapes. Each new screen feels like it could be a painting hanging on my wall. It is just flat out visually stunning.

Characters

The characters in this game are robots of all varying types and sizes. You’ll encounter many different types of robots on your quest that all do different things and have their own personalities. Though the game does have a somewhat dark feel about it, there is absolutely some underlying humor. The characters are quite funny not only in how they look but how they act.

In fact as I’m writing this I’m just watching a couple characters wait for me to return to the game play. They are making all sorts of entertaining movements and the main character has even been dreaming (line drawing style dreaming of course). The game designers did a wonderful job giving these characters personality and have used no words at all. You’re able to get a sense for what our main character is all about just by his mannerisms and thoughts. This makes you take a bit more ownership in the story.

The main character and the wine making robot

It’s worth mentioning the animation of the characters in Machinarium here as well. Like everything else you’ll see throughout the environment, the character animations fit well and are quite entertaining. Like I mentioned, the game does have a bit of a dark feel, but the personality and the humor really comes out with how the characters interact with the space around them and with each other. Honestly it’s a little difficult to explain a lot of the exact interactions, but let’s just say you will be cracking smiles frequently. Even the way the robots walk around is amusing. It’s just done really well, and adds a ton of personality to the game.

The main character dreaming about something

Gameplay

I think the easiest way to go about this is to just walk you through some typical gameplay and discuss what exactly is going on. The story begins in a mucky looking junk pile where the pieces of your robot are tossed about. You put yourself together and begin your journey. Right from the start, what exactly you’ll be doing on your journey isn’t apparent. The story will continue to unfold through your character’s thoughts and dreams. From the beginning you’ll get the feeling that your character has always been the peweny robot in the junkyard and has always gotten pushed around. It’s that classic “little guy can do it” sort of story. It’s easy to get on board with the plight of this little guy.

It is a point and click type of game so you’ll be doing doing a lot that as you work your way through. You click to where you want the little guy to walk and off he goes to that spot. You’ll be able to interact with various items as you move along. Hovering your mouse over the item will indicate if it is something you can interact with. Picking up items is also possible and is actually crucial part of the game. These items are needed to perform certain tasks and to solve certain puzzles. To add a level of complexity items may be combined and then used. So things get tricky pretty quickly. There is a lot to interact with.

Moving about in this world is pretty progressive, meaning you’ll mainly be moving forward from one screen to the next while sometimes jumping back a screen or two in an effort to solve a puzzle. You’ll spend the game attempting to move forward. There is always something blocking your way and you need to figure out what you can do to move past it.

The game is essentially one puzzle after another. There are even some smaller interwoven puzzles that you’ll need to solve along the way. For example, you may need to lower a crane and the controls to do so aren’t exactly straight forward. You need to figure out which buttons need to be lit up. That’s a pretty basic example, but you get the idea. They aren’t incredibly tough, but there were plenty tricky enough to hang my non-puzzle-tuned mind up pretty good.

In game mini-puzzle

Overall, solving the puzzles was challenging, but not impossible. I definitely got hung up and there were even some times of frustration. If you are struggling, you are able to use a couple hints in each space. Checking a hint will pop up an idea bubble for your robot illustrating a part of what needs to be done next.

You’re only able to view a certain amount of these in each area so you need to use them sparingly. Most of the time these are enough to give you that little kick forward but sometimes you may need a bit more. In those situations you can play a mini arcade game to unlock a book that will show you some sketches of the process to solve puzzle. The arcade games aren’t difficult, but it is a pain to go through that process every time you want to look at the cheat sheet.

The cheat book

I was a little skeptical that a game like this would grab my attention but Machinarium’s gameplay really did. The environment, combined with the animation and the way you interact with everything, is really very engaging. And there’s nothing like a good brain teaser to get a person mildly obsessed.

Conclusion

I’m not a huge gamer, and this is not the typical type of game that I go for when I’m looking for one. When I saw Machinarium by chance browsing the App Store the imagery caught my eye immediately. Admittedly that is what brought me in, but the actual world that has been created by the developers and the gameplay within it is what kept my attention.

I’ve always thought of the purpose of a video game as being something that can temporarily transport to you another world and take your thoughts and troubles out of your mind for a bit. I wasn’t expecting this quite as much from this type of game, but I was very wrong.

The ambient sounds and the overall feel of the environment does an absolutely amazing job of transporting you into that world. That combined with working through the puzzles is more than enough to keep your mind occupied and give you a bit of a break from the rigors of real life. It serves as a wonderful mind escape and also a sleep depriver as you may find yourself saying things like “I just want to get past this one thing before I go to bed” over and over.

Machinarium is in that wonderful space of being a beautifully designed game while also being very entertaining and engaging. You will lose yourself in the beautiful landscapes, be challenged by the puzzles, get a laugh from the characters and animation and have a great time each step of the way.

After months of speculation and rumors, Apple’s famed iCloud service has finally been revealed. Despite the fact that just about everyone in the industry, including myself, was pretty sure they knew what iCloud would be, Apple threw us a curveball and gave us something completely different.

Today we’ll discuss what iCloud is in terms of something almost equally important: what it isn’t. What was it that everyone expected and how does iCloud differ from that expectation?

iCloud: What We Thought Was Coming

There was plenty of mystery surrounding the launch of iCloud but we all knew one thing for certain: it would finally bring iTunes to the cloud. It’s very important to note what we meant by this particular phrase. The idea was simple, Apple was going to give me a way to access my entire music library from anywhere. This would obviously take a similar form to what we were already seeing from other major players looking to get a jump on Apple.

Amazon Cloud Player and Google Music

Amazon and Google have both recently made the leap into cloud-based music services. The general concept is that you upload all of your music into the cloud where it is stored and can be accessed via any web browser.

Google Music Beta

Amazon’s service is free for up to 1,000 songs and has yearly plans for anywhere from $20 (4,000 songs) to $1,000 (200,000). Google Music (invite only) is currently free for all users and gives you enough storage for 20,000 songs!

iTunes in the Cloud?

With this in mind, it was easy to see what “iTunes in the cloud” meant because these other services were offering essentially that very thing. A simple leap of logic suggested that Apple too would be launching a service to store and stream your music online.

Interestingly enough, iCloud does neither of these things! So here we have Google and Amazon each with a service that primarily offers two features, then Apple launches a service that has neither of those features. Despite the disjoint, everyone, including Apple, seems intent to compare the two business models as if they were the same service from different providers.

iCloud: What We Got

iCloud doesn’t stream, it syncs

While trying to predict what iCloud would be, we all forgot one crucial thing: Apple doesn’t care what everyone else does. Instead of looking around and mimicking the services that others were providing, the iCloud team decided to approach the same goal in a different way.

The goal is to have complete access to all of your music no matter where you are. Everyone else seems to think that the best way to go about that is to store and stream your music in the cloud. Apple, on the other hand, decided to give us a way to keep our music synced across all of our various devices.

Instead of accessing your music on the web, you access it where you do now: in iTunes and on the music players of your iOS devices. The content still resides on the hard drive of every device you use so the term “iTunes in the cloud” is a bit of a misnomer. Really, all iCloud does is facilitate downloading your music (technically it does other stuff too, we’ll get there).

This comes with both pros and cons. The upside is that streaming sucks when compared to natively hosted music, so here iCloud wins. The downside is that if you have 120GB of music, your iPhone isn’t going to hold it so no matter what, you’re not really going to have access to all of your music from everywhere. If you have a large library of music, you’re still stuck going through iTunes and decided what should and shouldn’t get synced.

More Than Music

It’s important to note that iCloud is way more than just a music service. It helps you stay synced with music, photos, documents, apps (already available in beta), contacts, calendars and email.

Instead of seeing iCloud as a competitor to Google Music, it’s a lot more like MobileMe on steroids. MobileMe was one of the few products that Apple has ever released that I actively told friends and family members to avoid. I’m personally thrilled that they’re killing it and instead offering services that are not only better, but free. That is unless you want to use iCloud with songs that you didn’t purchase from iTunes, in which case you’ll have to fork out $24.99 annually.

Is This Better Than We Hoped or Worse?

So now we know what everyone thought iCloud would be (online music storage and live streaming) and what it really is (synced music and more across all devices). Now we’re left with the decision as to whether Apple’s surprise is good or bad news.

On one hand, iCloud is undoubtedly an awesome set of features and services. It fills a big hole in functionality and will genuinely make our digital lives easier. On the other hand, if the goal is really to give everyone access to all of their music from any Mac or iOS device, the capacity of these devices presents a significant hurdle to that goal. A 32GB iPhone full of apps simply may not be enough to hold all that pirated music you have.

Personally, if Apple would’ve released a clone of Amazon’s cloud music service, I don’t think I would’ve ever used it. My music is always with me in one form or another so I don’t need a cloud player, especially at upwards of fifty bucks a year. iCloud on the other hand, is something that I will likely use and enjoy every single day. To that end, iCloud is much better than I thought it would be.

Tell Us Your Thoughts

What do you think? Are you happy with the direction that Apple chose to go with iCloud or do you wish they would’ve just released an online storage and music streaming service?

Your Mac comes prepared with its own widget for you to check the weather, and it works just fine, but sometimes you want something more accurate, with more features, or perhaps that works through your menu bar or your desktop instead of in your widgets.

Today we are presenting you some of the most popular weather apps available for your Mac. These will range from simple menu bar apps to real pieces of art with animations and other visual flair. Take a look!

Weather HD

Weather HD is similar to Weather+ in that it relies on animations and cool graphics to get your attention. I do, however, like this one more than Weather+ because the animations are just amazing. It allows you to have multiple cities in your configuration and it comes with a useful menu bar icon.

Of course, a beautiful design work comes with a price. If you are willing to pay $4 for a weather app, you won’t regret buying this one. It goes along with the Mac theme very well and it is a pleasure to use. Despite the price, this might be the most pretty option out there.

Price: $3.99
Requires: Mac OS X 10.6 or later
Developer: Vimov

Conclusion

The weather app market is a big one. Just go into the Mac App Store and search for the weather category and you’ll be shown about 50 of them. Today we showed the most popular options and tried to break them down into the best menu-bar options and the best full-screen animation options.

If you like the animation ones (I don’t), I would suggest that you spend the $4 dollars for Weather HD. It’s beautiful and it works well. If you are looking for a free alternative that just tells you the weather straight up, I would suggest you try the free Menu Weather and MachWeather.

Which weather app do you use? What are your favorite features from it?

At this point, you probably know all about the newest update to Apple’s legendary operating system: OS X Lion. It has over 250 new features, including new gestures, full-screen apps, Mission Control, Launchpad and all kinds of other goodies that I just can’t wait to get my hands on.

The demos at WWDC had us all drooling over this new toy and we learned that it will hit the Mac App Store in July for a mere $29.99! This marks a serious shift in the way that Apple does business. Never before have they released a major operating system update as a download-only product. At over 4GB, many are nervous about the logistics of this affair. It’s easy to imagine Apple forums filling up on launch day with stories from frustrated users.

Today we want to know whether or not you will purchase and download Lion right away. Will you hit the Mac App Store as soon as possible on launch day or wait a while to see how things work out for early adopters before jumping on the bandwagon? Vote in the poll and leave a comment below with your thoughts.

This review should, in hindsight, be more of an obituary. As you are probably aware, Apple is planning to ditch Front Row from its latest release of Mac OS X, Lion. Why is anyone’s guess, but the fact that the last update for it was released in November 2009, I think we could all see it coming.

In comparison to other applications, Front Row is very basic and only offers a limited number of functions. Apple may want people to switch to the Apple TV, a small digital media receiver which did borrow heavily from Front Row, or maybe it ditched Front Row because of the rise of other, third-party media applications.

Boxee is one of these. Although the whole app and its interface had larger TVs in mind, it can still be used on desktops without too much trouble. Boxee has been around for a little while now – the public beta was released in January 2010 – however the application is still in its beta stage of development. It does boast a neat interface and some handy in-built features so even if you don’t have a large TV, you can still gain some use out of it on your computer.

Boxee is, in my opinion, the final nail in the coffin for Front Row. Read on to find out why.

Introduction

Boxee is a free HTPC (Home Theater PC) application available for Mac, Windows and Linux. As mentioned above, the application is still in public beta, but don’t be put off by this; the application does have a wide range of features and is extremely stable. Before you can start using Boxee, you need to sign up for a free account via their website and download the program. Once you get everything up and running, you are greeted by the main screen.

The Boxee main screen

Here you have the option of viewing your photos, listening to your music, watching your movies or TV shows and running any apps that are installed via Boxee (more on these later). Boxee syncs with your Photos folder, so any photos in iPhoto or Aperture will show up, as well as your iTunes folder, meaning that you can play all your music from iTunes in Boxee as well.

Any songs on iTunes will automatically show up in Boxee

Features

Boxee has a number of features that rank it highly in terms of media centers and puts it years ahead of Front Row, where features were quite limited. Across the whole app, the interface is sleek and polished and does not look out of place, even though the app is still in beta. You can even download a remote for iOS, meaning that as long as both devices are on the same WiFi network, you can control it using your iPhone, iPad or iPod Touch. Third-party applications are also available for Android and Palm.

Movies and TV Shows

Boxee supports almost all known video formats and you can either watch movies via a number of Internet sources (such as Netflix) or any that are stored on your computer. Boxee will download the metadata for both movies and TV shows off the internet and categorize them by title or, in the case of TV shows, the series and season number.

A list of movies in Boxee from online sources

As with movies, there is a large built-in library of TV shows sourced from online streaming services, meaning you don’t need to search around the net to find what you want to watch. Bear in mind, though, that due to copyright restrictions certain TV shows might not be available to watch in other countries (e.g. programs from BBC iPlayer and 4oD will not play outside the United Kingdom due to licensing laws).

An episode of the TV show "The Inbetweeners" ready to be streamed from the Internet in Boxee

Boxee cannot play any DRM (Digital Rights Management) protected files (e.g. purchased songs or TV shows off iTunes). Also, in the case of a TV series, if you are missing any episodes, Boxee will attempt to find the missing episode from the Internet. This sounds great, but can be a bit hit-and-miss at times.

Applications

Boxee supports a wide range of plug-ins (called applications in the program) which can source multimedia from other sources. For example Vevo (music videos) or Mubi (foreign cinema) are a couple of the popular choices that help justify the need to never really have to leave the app if you want to watch something else.

The list of available apps for Boxee

Boxee Social

Boxee promises to be a social media center, and you can manage all your plug-ins (i.e. any applications you’ve downloaded) as well as your social networks through the account portal on the website.

You can manage all your social networks on Boxee via your account online

If you follow any friends on Boxee, you can see what they have been watching or listening to as well as publicly rate and recommend any content to your friends. The app also supports some third-party social networking sites such as Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr and FriendFeed.

Practicality

Although Boxee is a very useful application it is, in my opinion, more suited for larger screens and media servers (such as the Mac Mini) than notebooks and desktop computers. The interface that Boxee uses is known as a 10-foot UI, which is aimed at larger screens.

Boxee is, in my opinion, more suited to larger screens

Having said that, you can install Boxee onto your Apple TV (only first-generation though), offering far more features than the default Apple offering. If you’re got a spare $199 knocking about, you can also purchase a Boxee Box, which comes with Boxee installed, and use it as your main media center. On a laptop or desktop computer, though, all the hard work that has gone into this wonderful application is unfortunately wasted slightly.

Conclusion

Boxee adds a far greater dimension to your media and for the grand price of nothing is excellent value for money. The app is very customizable and supports a wide range of different media formats, so it will work with any type of media.

Boxee will certainly meet and exceed the needs of die-hard Front Row fans and is an example of a well-developed, intuitive and useful program. Bring on the full version!