Category: Mac

We were all expecting iWork news on Tuesday. Apple’s Roger Rosner had taken a considerable amount of time at this year’s WWDC to showcase their new iWork web apps and then briefly mentioned that new versions of the native iWork apps would be coming this fall.

What we got instead, though, was the surprising claim that iWork is the best selling suite of mobile productivity applications (which, I suppose, isn’t actually that surprising since “mobile” wouldn’t include Microsoft Office on laptops) followed by the announcement that iWork and iLife apps would all be free with new iOS devices going forward. Combine that with the free online iWork apps in iCloud, and Microsoft Office has the stiffest competition it’s faced in well over a decade.

Google can boast businesses that have gone Google, but Apple has its best shot ever at convincing the rest of us that its beautiful documents, spreadsheets, and presentations apps are more than enough to leave Office Home & Student behind.

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Mobile Decides the Winners

iWork shines on the iPad

Microsoft should have had the first-mover advantage with office apps when smartphones took over the world. Office was so thoroughly entrenched in the desktop market, even a semi-decent attempt at mobile Office could have been a huge success. And they have been at it for a long time: Office Mobile for Windows CE (later Windows Mobile, then Windows Phone) has been around since 1996.

And yet, the versions they make today have less formatting options than Evernote’s mobile apps. Office Mobile today literally has almost the exact same feature set on Windows Phone 8, iOS, and Android as it did on my Windows Mobile 5 phone in 2007. It’s almost laughable how basic Office Mobile is today compared to almost any other app.

If not Microsoft, then surely Google should have taken over mobile office work with their Google Docs. But they, too, were rather slow to the game, offering only extremely basic online editing for Google Docs until mid-last year’s introduction of Google Drive for iOS. It’s got most of the basic document/spreadsheet/presentation editing features you’d want, but it’s still not as full-featured as Microsoft Office.

Apple was the only company that decided to make a full-featured mobile-first office suite with its iWork for iOS apps. Introduced alongside the iPad, the iWork apps contained nearly all of the features of iWork for Mac and made it simple to create nicer looking documents, spreadsheets, and presentations than most of us could make with Microsoft Office. At $9.99/app, they were easily affordable, and still along with the iLife apps represent how much more powerful tablet (and phone) apps can be than most people think. iWork for iOS was the no-compromises option: you could get real work done on an iPad with Pages, Numbers, and Keynote, and nothing else.

Killing the King

iWork, now free

Moving on from the established default app for a task is difficult, though. Pixelmator could attest to the difficulty of usurping Photoshop, but Office is far more established in business and education than Adobe could ever hope its apps would be. OpenOffice only gained any traction — despite its dated interface and uninspiring feature-set — because of its low price of free. Google Docs gained traction — despite being online and having a limited feature-set — because it nailed collaboration (plus, it was free.).

Apple, as its wont to do, chose to compete on quality. It’s hard to get inspired about writing essays and making a budget, but Apple’s iWork demos almost make those tasks look fun. Every other presentation app in an office-type bundle had horrible results (seriously, try them out — it’s bad), but Keynote looked so nice that Microsoft all-but directly copied its templates and transitions in PowerPoint 2010. At the same time, iWork does good enough with importing and exporting Office files that most normal users would never have a problem using iWork in an Office-only environment (yes, in university I wrote essays in Pages, saved them in Word format, and submitted them to in classes that were strictly Word only with no issues). Now, throw in the iWork iCloud apps — web apps that, again, have no compromises and handle graphics and more far better than Google and Microsoft’s online apps — and you can feel secure that you’ll always be able to edit iWork files anywhere, something that was the final worry left for iWork users that needed to use PCs.

iWork sells really well.

iWork apps shouldn’t have been a hard sale at their price, especially after Microsoft took Office to a subscription model. Actually, they obviously weren’t that hard of a sale considering that they always stayed on the top of the paid lists for productivity apps on iOS and the Mac. But now, they’re essentially bundled with new iOS devices the same way iLife has been bundled with Macs for years now. The Mac wasn’t mentioned this week by Apple, but I’d be surprised if they don’t end up doing the same thing with iWork for Mac — making it free for new Mac with the next major version.

The presumed Microsoft Office 2014 for Mac hasn’t even been seen yet, but it’s suddenly become a much harder sale than any previous version was before. One can’t exactly declare iWork a winner in the office space yet, but Apple’s certainly given normal users a good reason to skip buying Office. Plus, they’ve just made their devices that much more valuable, with so many top-notch free apps included.

Don’t Stop Here

iWork for iCloud beta

But Apple can’t afford to stop here. iWork on the Mac today, after all, is actually iWork ’09, and we’re long overdue for an update. On the iPad, iWork has only seen minor changes since its initial release, and it still sports the now-dated skeuomorphic wooden boarders. We can easily assume what iWork for iPad will look like post-update, thanks to the iWork for iCloud beta. Every other iCloud.com app looks just like its iPad counterpart, so the slate color of iWork iCloud apps will likely show up in the iPad. It’d really seem like a more iOS 7 style upgrade would be in the cards — especially with the Helvetica Neue iWork icon used in the keynote — and I hope we’ll see a more drastic overhaul.

On the Mac, perhaps, a full redesign won’t be seen just yet since Mavericks itself hasn’t seen a full redesign, but a new version would definitely be more than appreciated. There’s a ton Apple could add to it, features that would make it even more competitive for business users, especially when combined with the mobile and web apps. One thing’s for sure: Apple’s taking iWork serious, using it as a headline feature for its devices, and it’s trying to take Microsoft on directly in their most successful business. And even today, iWork is the productivity suite you should consider — it’s free or cheap, works great, and should be getting even better. We can’t wait.

I don’t spend much time in coffee shops when at home, probably because until recently there really wasn’t a good coffee shop near my home. Whenever I’m away from home whether for the day or on a longer trip, however, I find a coffee shop a nice place to catch up on the world and get some work done between more enjoyable activities. I can work in a quiet hotel room for a while, but I often find a little time in the lobby a more productive environment than the traditional quiet hotel room or office.

I’ve always found working in complete silence to be more distracting than having sound in the background. Even just a television or radio turned on in the background can give me enough noise to feel more comfortable. Research also supports a moderate level of background noise prompts more creative thought. The problem with these is the chance of a movie, show, or song pulling you in and distracting you from what you’re working on. Luckily I’m not the only person that prefers something in the background at work and there are plenty of apps and websites built to provide nice background sound. Let’s look at a few.

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Do it Yourself

Depending on your preference and task, you might not need any app at all. If you enjoy working to music there is no need to find a new app since you already likely have a favorite player. I have a play list of songs in iTunes that I know so well they require no thought. There’s also the options of popular music apps like Pandora, Spotify, or Slacker that can build a play list for you.

Most of these apps function by playing recorded music, and nothing stops you from doing that yourself. If you like working to nature sounds, take a digital recorder into the woods with you and record the sounds you want. If you enjoy working to rain, put a microphone next to an open window and use an app like Piezo to record the sound, then play the resulting file in your favorite player.

But then, there’s an app for that — a number of really nice apps, at that. Here’s the best apps to help you be creative without having to go to a coffee shop.

Apps

Conclusion

There are no shortage of apps to provide background sound while working. I find these backgrounds sounds help me work better, but there are apps also to help block out distracting noise with sound. Many of the apps fit other targets, often sound to help a person fall asleep, but any can provide a nice distraction to help you get work done at your computer.

Do you like any of these apps, or do you have anything else you use to keep you focused while working? Our editor likes listening to movie soundtracks while writing — what’s your audio creativity kryptonite?

It’s Apple Special Announcement day, which likely means that you’re wanting to go buy some shiny new gadgets very soon. But hey, you’ve still got to have the apps you need to get your work done. So why not get the apps you need on the cheap with StackSocial’s Mac Bundle 3.0 — or perhaps win a free copy from AppStorm?

Just like with the popular Humble Bundles, the StackSocial Mac Bundle lets you pay what you want (starting at $1) for the first 3 apps in the bundle — Airy to download YouTube videos, My Living Desktop to bring your Mac’s background to life, and Compartments to catalogue everything in your house. Or, if you pay more than the average — or just over $13 right now — you can get all 10 of the apps in the bundle, including acclaimed apps like Camtasia 2, the $99 professional screencasting app, and CrossOver to run Windows apps on your Mac. That’s quite a steal.

But hey — you might be able to get the bundle 100% for free, since we’ve got 2 sets to giveaway. Just leave a comment below and let us know what app you want the most to enter the giveaway. Then, share the giveaway on your social networks and add a second comment below with a link to your shared post for an extra entry. If you’re one of our two lucky winners, you’ll get the full bundle for free — and if you go ahead and purchase the bundle today and still win, you’ll get your purchase refunded!

Hurry and get your entry in; we’re closing the giveaway on Friday, September 13.

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

Ever since Steve Jobs returned to Apple in the late ’90′s, Apple enthusiasts have anxiously waited for One More Thing announcements at the end of Apple’s keynotes. Jobs would save something special — sometimes something he really wanted to show off, and other times something small that couldn’t fit into the wider keynote — that he’d show off at the end, just as it would otherwise seem that the show was over.

It’s been several years now since we’ve seen a One More Thing announcement in an Apple keynote, since Steve Jobs passed on, but we can still hope against hope for something extra. The Mac Pro announcement at WWDC this summer felt like a One More Thing announcement, even though it was right in the middle of the presentation, because it was so unexpected. But what’s left to surprise us now?

After months without any solid Apple leaks, lately it seems that every possible thing Apple could have thought to announce has already been leaked. In a few hours, we’re expecting Apple to announce a new iPhone (or perhaps iPhones, if the rumors are right that we’ll see a 5S and a cheaper 5C released today). iOS 7 is also likely to be released, or at least have its launch date announced — and thanks to the long beta, most of us already know what it’s going to look and feel like. There’s OS X Mavericks and the Mac Pro, along with a much hoped for iWork refresh to release, but somehow it doesn’t seem that likely that they’ll be released today.

So what could be hidden in a One More Thing today? A TV? A Watch? A flying car? A clone of Steve Jobs? Let us know what you’ll be anxiously looking for in the comments below!

Have you ever set and thought that your iPhone apps are simpler and quicker to use than their Mac counterparts? The same task that’d take 15 seconds on your phone often seems to take a half-dozen clicks on the Mac, especially if you’re using a web app. There’s the counterpart problem, of course, that mobile native and web apps often have less features than their desktop counterparts, but if you’re just wanting to check your Twitter feed or Gmail, the mobile feature set is often perfect.

So why not bring all of that to the desktop? Actually, there’s a number of menubar apps on the Mac that are essentially a tiny window for the mobile web app of a particular service, such as Gmail. Then, there’s the just-launched GoodDay. From the team that brought us Moneybag, GoodDay is an interesting shot at making mobile-style apps makes sense on the Mac desktop.

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The Mobile Web, Appified

Getting started, webapp style

GoodDay, essentially, is a wrapper for the most popular mobile web apps — including Gmail, Outlook.com, Facebook, Twitter, G+, Yahoo!, Wikipedia, Flickr, and Pinterest — as well as a few GoodDay specific tools for keeping track of notes, tasks, expenses, and a journal, all in one place. As such, after going through a quick intro before the app itself launches, the first thing you’ll see is a Gmail login screen. By default, Gmail’s the first “app” in GoodDay that will open when you launch the app, and while you can turn on or off the different services and apps in GoodDay from its settings, there’s no way to change the service order — something that I think they should change going forward. At any rate, you’ll likely want to check your email first thing each day anyhow, so signing in with Gmail off the bat and seeing it each time you launch GoodDay shouldn’t be too big of a deal.

Apps, neatly tucked away.

When you’re ready to move on from email, GoodDay has a unique take on the side-menu behind a button with 3 vertical bars — one you’ve surely seen a million times on your smartphone apps — to let you switch between each of the apps that GoodDay has to offer. Tap the menu, then select any service or built-in tool you want. The experience is surprisingly nice, actually, letting you browse through your social network accounts and even tap links and view their contents right inside the app. It works great, and other than its slightly high memory usage (~300Mb) there’s nothing to worry about here. In fact, I happened to like the mobile Twitter view in GoodDay better than Twitter’s own mac app (though I still prefer Tweetbot).

GoodDay’s own apps are a bit more lacking.

If you branch out beyond the mobile web apps, though, GoodDay’s own built-in apps for notes, journaling, tasks, and expense tracking are basic at best, buggy at worst. They’re fine for keeping up with basic stuff, but since they’re fully trapped inside GoodDay and can’t be exported or synced to any other service, you won’t want to rely on GoodDay for the notes and data you want to keep forever. They’re a nice extra, but definitely not worth buying the app over.

Conclusion

GoodDay’s a whole ton of apps in one (press image from GoodDay team)

If you like the idea of GoodDay but want another option, there’s obviously a number of apps in this category, ranging from SocialButterfly for the major social networks to the FIPLAB team’s many individual menubar apps for everything GoodDay does — notes, Gmail, and more. But if you want it all together, GoodDay is a great option. It’s not perfect, but it’s the best shot at moving mobile web apps to the menubar we’ve seen yet. And, it’s a pretty simple tool that makes it easy to check in on a number of services — and reply to emails what I’d say is Gmail’s nicer interface — without having a dozen apps or browser tabs open. Mobile web apps are surprisingly nice alternates to heavier Mac apps, and you’re likely to find that you like GoodDay for that if nothing else.

GoodDay is on sale for just $0.99 to celebrate its launch, but it’ll be back up to it’s normal price of $9.99 very soon. There’s a free trial you can take for a spin to see if you want to use it, too, which is very nice to see. So try it out, and let us know what you think — and what you think of mobile web apps in the menubar.

Or, How About a Free Copy?

We’ve also got 5 copies to giveaway to our readers — just share this post on Facebook or Twitter and leave a comment with the link to your shared post to enter the giveaway! We’ll close the giveaway on Friday, September 13, so hurry and get your entries in!

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

Back in July, we wrote an extensive overview of the fully revamped DaisyDisk 3, and found it a very welcome update to the most original way to clean up your Mac’s HDD. It took a bit longer for the new version to get released, but it’s finally here and better than ever.

The new DaisyDisk is faster than ever, taking only 22 seconds to scan my MacBook Air’s internal SSD, and works with the latest Mac tech including Thunderbolt drives and Retina displays. But it’s not just about a slicker UI; it also lets you dig deeper than before, so you can see the biggest files inside bundled files (such as apps), and is smart enough to warn you before letting you delete a file that is crucial to your Mac’s operation.

The Mac App Store version of DaisyDisk 3 is slightly less powerful than its stand-alone version this time, though, due to sandboxing restrictions. You’ll still be able to scan your whole disk and external disks with a Mac App Store copy of DaisyDisk 3, but won’t be able to scan as administrator or dig into hidden file space with it. For the latter, you’ll need a stand-alone copy of DaisyDisk from the DaisyDisk store.

If you already own a stand-alone or App Store version of DaisyDisk, v3.0 is a free update that you’ll want to install and take for a spin immediately. Otherwise, you can pickup your own copy from the Mac App Store or the DaisyDisk Store for $9.99 — definitely not bad for one of the most beautifully designed apps in the App Store that’ll help you save precious space on your internal SSD.

Continue Reading our Full Review of DaisyDisk 3

Most of us already keep own files synced in Dropbox, and use it to share folders with colleagues. So why not take advantage of your Dropbox space to share one-off files online, too? That’s exactly what ShareMate, our sponsor this week, lets you do.

ShareMate lets you upload any file to Dropbox for sharing in seconds by just right-clicking on the file and selecting the ShareMate option, or uploading it from the menubar app. Once it’s uploaded, you can copy a db.tt short URL to the file from ShareMate and share your file publicly or directly with a colleague.

ShareMate will keep a record of every file you’ve shared and will sync uploads between all of your Macs, so you can easily copy the share link from anywhere and share the file again. It’s the simplest way to keep up with the files you share from your Dropbox.

Try ShareMate Out This Week!

Best of all, you can try out ShareMate for free first to see if it’s the sharing tool you’ve been waiting for. The full-featured trial will let you share files up to 2Mb in size for as long as you want. Then, you can get your own copy from the Mac App Store or the ZipZapMac Store for just $2.99.

We’d like to say a special Thank you! to our weekly sponsors from August for sponsoring our site and for the great apps they make. If you would like to feature your app on our site with an advertisement, be sure to check out our available slots on BuySellAds or register for a weekly sponsorship for your app.

If you haven’t already checked out our the great apps that sponsored our site last month, be sure to check them out now!

And a special thanks to you, our Mac.AppStorm.net readers, for reading and sharing our articles. We couldn’t do it without you!

There’s Google Drive and Dropbox and iCloud for storing your personal files, and CloudApp and Droplr for drop-dead simple file sharing from your menubar. But just when those seemed like enough, Minbox took the world by storm several months ago by privately sending files of any size instantly to your colleagues.

It turns out that even that isn’t enough. The brand-new Cloudup — an online file-sharing service that our Web.Appstorm review called a slick and elegant file-sharing service — has raised the bar with its Mac app. It’s the best of Droplr’s menubar file sharing with Minbox’ approach of instantly sharing without waiting for the upload to finish, combined with an intuitive way to share multiple files at once. For a beta app, it’s giving the existing simple file sharing tools a run for their money.

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Simplifying the Simplest Thing

A faintly iOS 7-styled file sharing app

We’d be readily inclined to think that you couldn’t improve on CloudApp and Droplr’s model: drag a file to your menubar, and as soon as its uploaded the app will copy the link to said file so you can paste it in any app and share it however you want — in an email or on your social networks. Minbox, for all its hype, didn’t improve on that model, since it’s only for private file sharing over email.

Cloudup, on the other hand, takes the best of both ideas and makes it even better. You drag a file or a set of files to the menubar app (that thankfully doesn’t use a cloud icon), and it’ll instantly copy a link to your clipboard that you can go ahead and share while the files are still uploading. They’ll likely be uploaded by the time you’ve shared the link, but if not, your recipients will see a loading progress in their browsers and can see the files in full as soon as they’re uploaded. Since it allows uploads up to 200Mb each, you’ll save quite a bit of time by being able to instantly share the link to your file rather than waiting to share it when it’s finished uploading. Almost every file format will show as an online preview automatically in Cloudup, and you can add a + to the end of the URL to directly access the file itself, just as in Droplr.

Sharing a set of files in Cloudup

It really shines when you’re sharing multiple files together. You can drag-and-drop multiple files to the Cloudup menubar app to upload them as a set, and the link it’ll copy to your clipboard will be to that set of files. Or, you can upload one file, then open it in your browser and drag-and-drop other files into the page — or click Edit and add URLs to the set, that’ll be added as a screenshot or a text-only article, depending on the link — to add them to the set. Then, you can share the whole set with your colleagues, and they can view the files online, download them individually, or download the whole set.

Tweaking Some Settings

Just give me some settings

By default, Cloudup will upload all of your screenshots automatically, and will open your freshly uploaded files in your browser as soon as they’re uploaded. If you take a lot of screenshots, you might want to turn the first off, and if you only want the URL in your clipboard to share, then you’ll want to turn the second off. Either way, you can get Cloudup to work the way you want through its very simple interface. It’s every bit as simple as CloudApp or Droplr, but with the added advantage of instant sharing and the option to share multiple files together.

Cloudup is currently in private beta, and lets you share 1000 individual files for free (you can delete older shares to free up shares, if needed). In the near future, they’re planning to add paid accounts so you can share as many files as you want.

Conclusion

A beautiful web app rounds out one of the nicest file sharing tools we’ve seen

If you want a quicker way to share files, you should give Cloudup a try. And, instead of having to wait in line for an invite, you can signup with our special Mac.AppStorm invite code by signing up at https://cloudup.com/s/macappstorm or entering our invite code “macappstorm” through the normal signup form.

Give it a try, and let us know what you think. We happen to think it just might be the file sharing tool that jumpstarts innovation in the über-simple file sharing tool sphere.

Apple started out OS X with annual releases of new versions, but then settled into an upgrade every two years up until the release of Mountain Lion almost exactly one year after Lion came out. Here we stand, a bit over a year later, expectantly waiting for OS X Mavericks to come out. Everyone’s not waiting, though, and both the VMware Fusion and Parallels teams have just released their latest virtualization offerings for the Mac that both feature Mavericks support among other new features.

Parallels has released an annual upgrade ever year since it was released, but VMware tended more towards the 2 year mark between major releases. Now, though, both companies are releasing new versions in lockstep with new versions of OS X, and if you are serious about running Linux or Windows on your Mac, you’ll be upgrading both OS X and your virtualization tool of choice each year. And this year, you’ve got more choices than ever as both apps are trying harder to appeal to casual users and the more advanced needs of IT teams.

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All For the Sake of Windows

Some of us use virtualization just to try out other operating systems and have a sandboxed place to beta test new apps. But for most people, virtualization is really just there to run their Windows apps on a Mac. For that, both Parallels Desktop and VMware Fusion are great tools. They both make installing Windows simple and each have their own features to make Windows apps feel native on the Mac.

The new Parallels makes Windows apps feel more like Mac apps.

Parallels Desktop seems to be pulling ahead in the making-Windows-apps-feel-native field, adding PowerNap support to Windows apps and letting you use the OS X dictionary gesture inside Windows apps. It also adds a start menu back to Windows 8, and a cloud storage tool that lets you sync Dropbox, iCloud, Google Drive, and Skydrive with your Mac and your virtual machines at once without duplicating files on both OS installs. It’ll even let Windows apps print to your OS X PDF printer and use OS X gestures in apps, and makes settings screens in Windows apps skip the ubiquitous OK and Cancel buttons. It’s the tool designed to make Windows apps feel 100% at home on a Mac.

VMware keeps its focus on IT features while still making it simple to run Windows apps on the Mac.

VMware Fusion, on the other hand, focuses more on core tech features, adding support for Mavericks’ multiple displays and AirPlay and support for up to 16 virtual CPUs and 64Gb of ram in virtual machines. It also adds support for Mavericks’ dictation in Windows apps, something Parallels already supported in Mountain Lion. And, if you go up to Fusion Pro, you’ll find support for restricted virtual machines, virtual network tools, linked clones, and more features aimed at IT departments. It’s more aimed at letting you maintain a fleet of virtual OSes, whether you’re a casual user or an IT pro that rolls out virtual machines with apps for your team.

The free alternate still keeps ticking.

Parallels Desktop 9 is $79.99 or $49.99 to upgrade, while VMware Fusion is $59.99 or $49.99 to upgrade or $69.99 to upgrade to Pro. If you’re feeling cheap, though, there’s still Oracle’s free VirtualBox, which hasn’t received a major new version in over a year but did see bug fixes added in July that made it work better with Windows 8. There’s also a beta of the next version out right now, which includes support for video capturing, touch devices, keyboard shortcut management, and more. It still lags far behind its commercial competitors in Windows integration, but works great for basic virtualization without the bells and whistles — and if it was already working for you, neither VMware nor Parallels added anything this year that’ll push you to switch.

Going Beyond Virtualization

Parallels’ take on Remote Desktop with some touch enhancements

Parallels has been recently hyping their newest offering, Parallels Access, that aims to make your Mac and PC apps feel at home on your iPad. It’s not exactly a virtualization offering, though, since you’ll still have to have a real Mac or PC (or perhaps virtualized Windows in Parallels Desktop on your Mac) running to access the apps through your iPad. The Parallels team is simply taking their expertise at making Windows apps feel native on the Mac and applying it to the iPad with a free app and a $79/year subscription. It’s not what you’ll want to look into if you want to run Windows apps on your Mac, and it’s not bringing honest-to-goodness virtualization to the Mac, but rather trying to blur the lines between Mac and Windows apps and the iPad’s touch interface.

To Upgrade or Not?

Now, actually, if you already have a version of VMware Fusion or Parallels that work for you, you don’t have to upgrade. I’m running Fusion 5 and Parallels 8 in Mavericks, and they’re both running fine — and I have Windows 8 as a guest OS in each of them, and Mavericks as a guest OS in Fusion 5 as well. The new versions will bring you extra integration with OS X, potentially faster performance, and support in Mavericks, but you don’t absolutely have to upgrade. If you do choose to, though, both VMware Fusion 6 and Parallels Desktop 9 are great ways to run any OS you want on your Mac. They’re very similar — and honestly, the best choice is likely sticking with the one you’re already used to, and upgrading it if you want.

We’ll be looking at them both in greater depth in the coming weeks, but would love to hear which one you prefer if you’re already using them for virtualization. I’ve always preferred VMware Fusion, and keep most of my virtual machines in it, but am looking forward to seeing if Parallels can win me over this time around.

I do some professional photography work when it’s called for (engagements, product shoots and sometimes event work), but I feel the need to clear the air even before it starts. I am as absolutely sick of terrible photo apps as you are. I hate all the photography apps that claim to be “the next big thing.” There’s a special place of disdain in my heart for photography apps that don’t do what they claim to do, or are, in effect, more time-consuming than doing similar work in Photoshop.

It is with this negative attitude that I apprehensively downloaded Beautune, a photography app meant to make cleaning up portrait shots as simple as possible. I expected to hate it. At the end of the day, I ended up falling in love with this app. Beautune is singlehandedly one of the best options I’ve ever seen for professional portrait retouching. Read on to find out what makes Beautune so, so good.

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The Interface

First of all, Beautune’s interface isn’t perfect. I want to make it exceeding clear, after my gushing, that although I love this app, it’s not perfect. For the most part, though, this is an app that’s a piece of cake to use. The interface is a big part of it.

The adjustments pane is always present, and divided into easy-to-understand sections: Face, Eyes, Mouth and Advanced. The Face section lets you tweak things like foundation colour, reshape jaw structure, adjust weight loss, fix blemishes, etc. The eyes include everything from the basics (red-eye removal) to eye shadow and eyebrow pencils. Admittedly, it’s geared towards women, but that’s because we men rarely wear much eye makeup. The Mouth pane lets you adjust lip tint and whiten teeth, and the Advanced pane lets you deal with image attributes like cropping, detail, defocus, clone, filter-like effects and even frames.

The interface is super simple.

All of this is accessible without any pop-up or slide-in menus. There’s no full-screen mode, which is unusual but arguably sensible. And frankly, I didn’t miss it. It meant everything is contained. I love Aperture’s full-screen mode, but the pop-up Adjustments pane can be frustrating. With Beautune, because it’s focused only on taking care of portrait work, it doesn’t need all that screen real estate and the adjustments pane can remain stationery.

What doesn’t work with the interface? Simply put, there are no keyboard shortcuts. I can’t even hit Command and the Plus symbol at the same time to zoom in. (Also: When I zoom in, I can’t navigate the image with two fingers on my trackpad like I can in other apps. That’s a shame.) There’s no way to make this app work faster if you’re a keyboard hog like I am. That’s my largest niggle.

This is a friend of mine. He said this was okay to share.

I also wish there was a way to open multiple photos at once and keep a small library of your current project, that you could compare and contrast relevant photos and quickly get rid of them. It doesn’t need to be as capable as Lightroom or Aperture, but it’d be nice if the option to add ten images at a time or so was at least available for those of us with larger workflow needs.

Editing a Photo

I don’t do many portrait shots, and asked a friend to stand in front of my office wall so I could snap a couple quick photos for the review. (He agreed on the condition that I explain in this review that he’s hoping his head shot gets him a management position job, or a few dates. Ideally, he’s hoping for a management position that involves going on dates.) I didn’t use a professional setup at all, so I apologize for the shadows on the wall and the poor lighting.

This is how my friend’s photo looked when I got started.

With that in mind, importing the photo was as easy as clicking and dragging or selecting a file, not unlike any other Mac app. Thankfully, the app could handle my RAW Nikon file (.NEF). Upon export, it turned the file into a high-quality JPEG. I don’t think RAW exporting is necessary in this case, since it’s unlikely you’ll be doing any further edits.

I was able to whiten his teeth in seconds.

Editing a photo really impressed me, and I wanted to take a little time to go over how easy some of this was. The first thing I wanted to do was whiten my friend’s teeth. I zoomed in on his mouth and resized the brush. From that point on, it literally took just a couple sweeps of his mouth to get a half-decent job done. I wasn’t aiming for perfection, but even if I was, it wouldn’t have taken long. This thing is precise. It even kept the highlights intact, so his teeth still look completely natural.

Even advanced effects like the clone tool were easy to use. I just had to navigate the element around, and within seconds, the blemishes were gone. Quick clicks let me adjust the blush in his cheeks (not that he was wearing any), and I was even able to straighten his crooked nose in all of two seconds flat.

Literally, with two clicks, his nose was completely straightened without damaging the eye to the right.

Some of the advanced tools, particularly the eye adjustments, felt like they needed a little tweaking. I wasn’t able to make his eyes pop — not easily, anyway — without having it become overwhelming. It seemed like a minor quibble to me, especially since his pupil was so large. I’d imagine smaller pupils make it easier for the app to work its magic.

The final result is on the right. I’m completely thrilled with how easy this was to do and can’t wait to share the image with my friend.
He asked me to add: “Ladies, your move.”

Overall, the reason I’m impressed with the editing capabilities of Beautune isn’t because it’s out-doing Photoshop. I’m well aware that all of this can be done in Photoshop and other editors still. That being said, what does blow me away is the speed with which it can be done. With just a click here and a click there, I was able to get done all the work necessary for my friend’s portrait in a matter of a minute. I was even able to quickly smooth over acne scars and any other blemishes (mate, if you’re reading this, don’t take offence).

Final Thoughts

If you’re a professional, you might already have a really quick workflow. Maybe you’ve customized Photoshop to a point where an app like Beautune just doesn’t flow with the rest of your groove. But if you find that you’re spending way too long in Photoshop and you just want a quick and simple way to make your photos beautiful and presentable for your clients, Beautune is the answer.

I opened this review by saying that Beautune had set the lofty goal of being simple software that made editing portraits a very simple task. I think the succeeded. The app doesn’t take up much of my time and the interface makes it a piece of cake to use. I do wish the app allowed you to even compare a couple photos side by side if you need to choose from your portraits, and I wish that there were some keyboard and trackpad shortcuts, but in all other areas I feel Beautune excels and is worth every penny.

After making an app just to help their App Store customers move away from the App Store, the Omni Group has just removed their OmniKeyMaster app and stated that they can no longer offer upgrade pricing to their Mac App Store customers. It’s a surprising turnaround for a team that has offered their own workarounds for App Store policies already, such as extending a 30 day money-back guarantee even when Apple itself doesn’t, and even more surprising since apps like TextExpander have made workarounds to help App Store customers move back to non-App Store versions of their apps.

This time, though, it seems Apple itself didn’t want Omni’s App Store customers moving away.

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The Point of no Return

You can’t pay for promotion this nice — that, yes, includes the Omni Group’s OmniFocus.

It’s quite obvious that Apple wants the App Store to the one place we all get our Mac apps. It’s moved all of its apps and OS updates to the App Store, and its newest services such as iCloud are reserved exclusively for App Store apps.

You’d think that Apple would try its hardest to make developers want to switch to the App Store — and in some ways, they have. They’ve made it relatively simple today for anyone to sell apps on the Mac without having to worry about license keys and payment providers, and regularly give incredibly valuable promotion to apps the App Store team loves. But, at the same time, their policies like sandboxing requirements have made some apps impossible to sell on the App Store, such as the aforementioned TextExpander, and their insistence on either offering upgrades to apps as free updates or full new products have frustrated any number of developers.

And now, they’re apparently trying to keep developers from getting their App Store customers to switch back to buying apps directly from the developers. It’s not entirely surprising that Apple wouldn’t want people to quit buying apps on the App Store, but it is surprising that they’d (apparently, anyhow, even though the Omni team isn’t directly saying it) ask/tell an App Store developer to take down a tool like OmniKeyMaster. Once you’re in the App Store, Apple wants you to stay there.

So where does that leave us?

There’s Life Outside of the App Store

Our glimmer of hope that 2014 — or 2024 — won’t be like 1984.

Apple conspiracy theorists would be quick to point out that the Mac’s likely to be as locked down as the iPad in the near future, with the App Store being the only place to get apps for your Mac without jailbreaking. I personally don’t think there’s any chance that’ll happen in the foreseeable future, and it absolutely has not happened yet. Today, developers can simply sign their apps with their free developer ID and distribute apps through their site that work the same as App Store apps for customers. In Mountain Lion and the upcoming Mavericks alike, the default security settings allow both App Store and signed apps without any additional warnings.

It seems quite impossible to think of the Apple of today forcing a switch to the App Store, not at least without finding a way to make the largest players like Microsoft and Adobe happy. Despite Steve Jobs’ adamant stance against Adobe’s Flash Player, and the plethora of alternates to Adobe’s apps on the Mac, I cannot imagine Apple wholesale leaving them behind through its App Store policy or Adobe switching to selling apps App Store style to stay on the Mac. Either directly would be an incredibly surprising move. So that, in my opinion, makes a switch to App Store only something we don’t have to worry about yet.

But then, perhaps that’s not what we should worry about. If they never force us to move to the App Store, most people will continue to buy software from the likes of Microsoft and Adobe since they know of them, and will stick with the App Store for discovering new stuff. Where does that leave the average indie developer? It leaves them having to deal with the App Store’s limitations, like it or not.

The Omni Group is right in the middle. They’re big enough to make waves, small enough that a new Mac user likely wouldn’t know of them. So it’s great that they’ve brought the issue to surface yet again. Apple needs to focus on developers’ needs to make sure they keep making the best apps on the Mac, and it needs to keep the Mac secure for users while still guaranteeing we can get apps from anywhere we want.

Perhaps, as commenters on our original OmniKeyMaster article mentioned, normal paid upgrades aren’t the answer and cheaper initial purchases and full-priced upgrades are the answer as Apple itself seems to be leading by example right now. Perhaps subscriptions are the answer as Adobe and Microsoft — and crowd-favorite indies like Evernote and Dropbox — think. Or perhaps in-app purchases to unlock new features as Byword did is the way. Just so the future means we get the great apps we need, and don’t have to pay a coin every time we click any button in our pro apps, I’ll be happy.

For now, I’ll keep buying apps from developers when I can, and from the App Store for everything else. And I’ll keep my Creative Cloud subscription, and keep neglecting my aging Office 2011 install in lieu of iWork. And I’ll hope we have better things to worry about going forward than Apple strangling developers and forcing them onto the App Store. That’s not the future we’re wanting at all.

Black Hole image from Wikimedia.

Browsing through back issues of PopSci in the early 2000’s in a musty garage, I spotted the first cellphone I really wanted to own: a Nokia 3600. With its crazy circular keypad and a rudimentary smartphone OS, it for whatever reason captured my imagination like no tech gadget had yet. I never managed to get one, instead relying on the seemingly indestructible Nokia dumbphones that made their way through our family before getting my first quasi-smartphone: an HTC Windows Phone with a BlackBerry-style keyboard.

Once Apple launched the iPhone, it was only a matter of time before I got one — opting first for a cheaper iPod Touch to compliment my rapidly aging Windows Phone, and finally buying my own off-contract iPhone. There was never any question in my mind about which phone to get; I’d never even consider anything other than an iPhone since the App Store opened.

Only one other line of phones has caught my attention in recent years: Nokia’s Lumia phones. I’d stop by Nokia stores in the mall to try them out and see how they felt and worked, and jumped on the opportunity a couple months to get press loaner Lumia 520 to review.

But then, I never had the heart to write the review.

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The Death of a Centenarian

The Nokia we all remember (via Wikimedia).

We’re accustomed to the Silicon Valley success stories: a kid drops out of college, starts a company in his parents garage, and leads it through an IPO (and subsequently becomes a billionaire) before his 30th birthday. It’s clichéd, yet expected, and more-or-less sums up the history of Apple, Google, Microsoft, Facebook, and far more if you take out the IPO part.

Yet Nokia shares a legacy with the likes of Nintendo, with its roots spanning back over a century through a mirage of business endeavors. Finland’s most well-known company, Nokia started off as a paper mill, later adding rubber and then cable manufacture to its portfolio. Cables led to consumer electronics, which led to telecommunications equipment. The final expansion eventually took over the company, leading it to become the company that’d make the first cellphones millions of us would own.

When it came to making cellphones, Nokia wasn’t just good: it was great. It made ridiculously durable phones that’d last a night in rainstorm and numerous falls down a flight of stairs. Sure, the faceplate and battery would come off, but snap them back in and you were back in business. And for every time your smartphone’s dropped your connection or clipped your voice, Nokia’s phones often sounded better than aging landline handsets.

Nokia’s phones were great, but iOS and Android relegated the phone to just another app among thousands on modern smartphones. Nokia’s Symbian platform had apps long before there was an iPhone, but the diverse number of devices and OS versions made Symbian too fragmented to have the same app traction as its younger competitors. At the end of the day, Nokia made phones, when everyone else was making the traditional phone obsolete through software.

Thus came Nokia’s infamous Hail Mary pass in 2011: switching to Windows Phone 7 and leaving Symbian and their newer MeeGo OS behind. That’d sound like a good strategy, considering that Microsoft’s only business is software — but on mobile, Microsoft has struggled as much as Nokia. Their Windows Phone 6 was nearly as fragmented as Symbian and had only a small sampling of decent apps, so they scrapped their decade of mobile OS development and started over with the Zune HD-inspired Windows Phone 7. Its flat design inspired a wave of design changes across the whole world of software — a rare achievement for Microsoft, whose design work is typically disregarded — but the OS itself struggled to gain traction. But surely, surely things would get better with Windows Phone 8.

The Lumia Problem: Great Hardware, Insanely Limited Software

You’re doing something right when you can make a cheap device with a removable battery feel this nice.

When I first pulled out my loaner Lumia 520, it was quickly apparent that Nokia hadn’t lost its touch for making great hardware. For a phone with a plastic shell and a removable body — and one that was nearly the lowest priced of its generation — it was remarkably nicely made, with a far more solid feel than any Samsung device I’ve ever touched. Its screen was bright, with curved glass that felt delightful to use, and the audio was crystal-clear as you’d expect from Nokia. It felt durable enough that I’m rather certain it could handle a fall better than most smartphones these days. The only thing hardware-wise that was truly lacking was the camera, something that’s decidedly only an issue for the lowest-priced Lumia.

But the software. Oh, the software. The hardware was beautiful and worked great, but the OS and the apps (or the lack thereof) killed the whole experience.

I love how Windows Phone 8 looks in many ways. The unlock screen won me over instantly, as did the dialer, call answer screen, settings screens, and many other parts of the OS. It really does look nice. The animations, even, look nice the first few times, but they quickly become grating and even made my eyes feel like I’d watched a bad 3D movie after an hour of use. Even still, switching to a white background helped a bit, and the faster Lumias do handle the animations better in my experience at the Nokia store. If that was the only issue, it wouldn’t be worth worrying about.

But it was far from the only issue. The main issue was apps and the lack thereof. Nokia itself has done a splendid job trying to help out, shipping its own maps and photos apps that are excellent on their own, and even includes an alternate App Store that highlights the best Windows Marketplace apps for your device. You would assume that Microsoft’s own apps would try just as hard to overachieve so at least the built-in stuff would be great, but unfortunately that’s far from the case. Instead, the built-in apps from Microsoft were so limited, you’d hardly think they were worth including. The Office apps only let you make the very most basic of edits, with the exact same features you could have found in Windows Mobile 5’s Office apps — seriously. You could say almost the same about every other built in app. They were really, really limited — the lightest, most featureless apps I’ve ever come across.

The Windows Marketplace helps out some, with a growing number of 3rd party apps including some that are really good, but by and large there’s a dearth of apps you’d really want to use. When name-brand apps like Facebook and Evernote and Line are available, their apps are again more limited than their iOS and Android counterparts, and most popular apps are simply not there. There’s alternates for many, such as Instagram compatible apps that let you add filters to photos and upload them to the popular photo sharing service, but there’s also a ton of junk, such as the “Google Maps” app that was simply a reskinned Bing Maps app made by a 3rd party developer with a name that sounded suspiciously like a Microsoft division.

It’s All About the Apps

The only Windows Phone 8 app that felt halfway powerful: Excel Mobile

We buy devices for the software they can run. You don’t have to be an app junkie that keeps up with AppStorm and other review blogs to know that. Software has truly, in Marc Andreessen’s words, eaten the world, a trend Microsoft of all people should understand. iOS and Android themselves are nice, but few if any of us would continue to use them if there wasn’t a ton of apps available for both platforms. The very same goes for Macs and PCs: we use them for the software that runs on both platforms far more than for the stuff that comes with the OS itself.

Windows Phone 8 has utterly failed in that department, crazily both with its built-in and first-party apps as well as with 3rd party development. It’s almost like Microsoft itself didn’t care to put its best foot forward with its own smartphones — scared, perhaps, that the free mobile Office could eat away at desktop Office sales — and developers didn’t want to commit to a platform that seemed to be neglected by its own maker. Apple, on the other hand, kickstarted iPad app development with best-in-class apps of its own like the iWork suite and GarageBand, apps that have almost not been beaten yet by 3rd party competitors. In Microsoft’s newest platforms, and especially its phone OS, there’s no obvious example of great apps for the platform even from Microsoft itself.

There’s not one app on Windows Phone 8 that anyone could point to and say “This is the reason to buy a Windows Phone over another phone”. Not one. Not Exchange-powered email, and not even Office, as much as Microsoft thinks it is, since its there in name only and has so few features as to make it nearly useless (aside, perhaps, from Excel for some nifty comparison shopping number crunching).

Microsoft+Nokia=?

Hardware’s great, but it’s hardware+software that wins.

We’ve seen the best Nokia hardware with the best of Microsoft’s software from 2013. The hardware is great, but the software holds it back so much that I took to referring to the Lumia as the “world’s best featurephone”. That’s why I never had the heart to write my Lumia review: Nokia had done such a good job on the devices that I hated to slam them for Microsoft’s shortcomings.

But now, the entire game is in Microsoft’s court since they’ve bought the phone part of Nokia’s business (but bizarrely haven’t bought the name “Nokia” itself — which would have been very valuable, in my opinion, since many of us still equate Nokia with durable hardware). Microsoft bought the best part of the Windows Phone 8 equation: Nokia’s hardware. Now, they’ve got to fix their part: the software.

Perhaps the OS itself is good enough; perhaps it could support better apps than it has today. I wouldn’t doubt that. But if so, Microsoft had better show us that it’s serious about making apps that make Windows Phone shine. Make the best, most innovative mobile Office apps we’ve never imagined could be made. Make a browser that blows Webkit out of the water. Reinvent mobile email enough that Mailbox looks quaint by comparison. Build apps that make the rest of us want to try out Windows Phone, apps that make iOS and Android look anemic. If that can’t be done today, then for goodness’ sake make an OS that can support the very best apps, and then make said apps to showcase the OS.

The hardware part of the Windows Phone equation isn’t in trouble, and it wasn’t before this week. What is in trouble is the software. While Apple is fixing to roll out its new iOS 7 and Google just announced the next version of Android, the earliest Windows Phone 8.1 (not even a full new release) is expected is next year. That’s not going to cut it, not at all, no matter how great of hardware you now own after purchasing Nokia. If you don’t want to be the next Blackberry, Microsoft, then you’ve got to step up your game, pronto.

We’re watching, anticipating. We actually want another OS that’ll put the fire under iOS and Android’s feet. We want competition that’s not so easy to make fun of. We, of all things, want you to succeed.

Can you, Microsoft?

I never knew that sorting and counting change could be so engaging. That is, at least, before I tried ChangeReaction and got hooked on its unique twist on the match-three formula. It’s an audio game — a video game without graphics — designed with blind people in mind, although sighted folks can certainly enjoy themselves too.

Unlike a regular video game, where you act on both visual and auditory stimuli, ChangeReaction is entirely predicated on what you can hear. You piece together the scene and gauge your progress, and do pretty much everything, solely by listening to sound effects and voice samples and pressing keys on your keyboard.

Volatile Currency

There are three game modes on offer. The main mode, ChangeReaction Classic, involves nine stacks of coins. Your goal is to get rid of all the coins on the board, which requires that you make them explode. Seriously, that’s how it works. Put three coins of the same denomination together, either stacked one atop the other or all in a row, and they explode. Who knew money sorting could be so fraught with peril?

Your eyes won’t help you here.

The challenge comes from the fact that you have to play by ear, tracking back and forth along the tops of the stacks in search of a coin that is the same as the one in your hand. A synthesized voice calls out the denomination atop each stack, with its pitch modulated according to the size of the stack (more coins means higher pitch). If your coin type is nowhere to be found, you can drop it down on whichever stack you choose. You can also throw away the coin in your hand, with its value deducted from your score, if things are taking too long.

Dwelling on where to place a coin is bad for an extra reason. Bombs appear randomly on the coin stacks. If you’re on top of a bomb when it explodes, you lose 10 seconds. On the flipside, if you manage to drop a coin on a bomb that is of the same denomination as the coin beneath said bomb, all coins of that value in the stack explode. This is ChangeReaction’s idea of a combo. The effect is that a thrilling game of cat and mouse gets piled on top of a quirky twist on match three.

Intensely Challenging

ChangeReaction is hard. You’ll find yourself concentrating far more intently than you normally would when playing a game. Time is limited, ticking away in the background and daring you to play faster — to listen and comprehend beyond your normal rate, and to remember the layout of the board. That’s just on Easy difficulty of the Classic game mode.

You can look at this fancy splash screen while you play.

If you’re really up for a mental workout, you can bump up the challenge to Hard or Insane — which reduce your time and pile on more bombs — or switch to one of the other game modes.

LooseChange changes the rules for how bombs behave. Bomb explosions stop being contained to a single stack, affecting only coins of a single denomination. Instead, they scatter the entirety of a stack across the board, continually reconfiguring the layout of coins.

PayDay turns Classic mode on its head, asking you to keep the board from being cleared as coins disappear beneath you. With just five stacks, one for each day of the work week, you’re constantly at the whim of stacks changing with people coming on and off the clock. It’s thoroughly confusing in practice, and in theory too — at least as it’s described in the Learn to Play section.

Fresh, But Underripe

ChangeReaction wins on its novelty value. For sighted people, it’s different because it has no graphics. For the blind and partially sighted, it’s notable because it’s an action-oriented puzzle game — something unusual as I understand the scene. In both cases, it’s competently executed, though hardly stunning, and lacking polish.

The rules are confusing — even after repeated listenings to the tutorial and a few dozen attempts at the game, I’m still not sure I understand everything. The sound design gets muddy at times, compromising your ability to localize audio in 3D space — especially if you leave the background music on. And player feedback seems inadequate — it’s hard to know how you’re going at any given moment.

But I had a great time playing Classic mode, and it’s hard not to recommend ChangeReaction purely on merit of its quirky audio-only twist on the likes of Bejeweled and Connect Four. This genre is ripe for the picking. Hopefully we’ll see more polished action-puzzle audio games soon.

Several weeks ago, tired of waiting for iBooks for the Mac, I put together a roundup of the best eBook apps for the Mac. I tested over a dozen apps, discovered more bugs and weird rendering than I ever had in one session, and came to the conclusion that Adobe Digital Editions was the best app for reading ePub eBooks on a Mac, non-native UI aside.

Then, in the comments, Igor let me know about Clearview, an eBook reading app I’d somehow missed. Clearview, it turned out, was the missing eBook reading app for the Mac that I’d managed to not discover. Here’s why it’s the best alternate to Apple’s iBooks on the Mac today.

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A Mac App Mashup

It’s Chrome. No, it’s Finder. No, it’s … an eBook app?

You’d be forgiven for thinking at first glance that Clearview was actually Chrome, since it looks exactly like Chrome for OS X, albeit one without an address bar and a settings button on the right. The similarities with Chrome aren’t accidental; quite the opposite, in fact, since Clearview is built in part on Chromium, the open source version of Google’s Chrome. A quick dig through Clearview’s About screen reveals that it’s about as much of a native app mashup as you could get, using Skim for annotations, ichm and Libepub for chm and ePub file reading, respectively, and a mix of web code libraries like jQuery to round out the mix. Throw in the Finder-style library view, and you’d almost expect it to be a frankenstein app of the worst sorts.

Instead, what you find is an app that works perfectly for organizing your eBook library with a mix of books in any format you want, one that lets you annotate any eBook and choose how you want to save the changes.

The Clearview Experience

Coverflow finally made functional

For all its browser looks, Clearview works more like an alternate Finder for your eBooks. You can drag-and-drop individual eBooks or folders of eBooks into your library (which doesn’t actually store the files, but rather links to them on your Mac), organize them into Reading Lists, and sort them with a Finder-style interface complete with a Coverflow view that shows the table of contents and a preview of your book’s contents. You can search through your library for book titles, but unfortunately can’t search across your whole library’s contents. Interestingly, you can actually drag .txt and other document formats into Clearview’s library, and when you open them it’ll launch their default app.

Clearview give you a great reading experience.

With eBook formats that it does support — including PDF, ePub, Mobi, and chm files — you’ll get the full Clearview reading and markup experience. You can choose a reading mode — one or two pages at a time, continuous, double continuous, or thumbnail — and color mode on any of the formats, and choose reading fonts on non-PDF eBooks (and yes, you got that right: you can use night mode or Sepia on your PDF eBooks). You can search through your book, jump to a page of your choice, and if the app’s chrome is too much for your tastes you can turn off the top toolbar and the status bar on the bottom or take the app full-screen.

It does a great job rendering all eBooks we threw at it, and simply looks great for reading. Plus, it’s rather handy to be able to open another book in a new tab with a simple CMD+T and switch between books with a CMD+tab, just like you would in a browser. That’s nice for research.

Annotations in all your books

The markup features are the most interesting, though. You’ll find Preview-style markup options on all of your eBooks, along with traditional highlighting and bookmarks. PDFs get a bit extra, with the option to add shapes, but for any of your books, you can highlight, underline, or strikethrough text, or add a note to any part of your text. I especially like the underlining option, since I find highlighting rather distracting when re-reading a book but still like to draw attention to passages I want to remember.

If you add an annotation you want to remove, don’t worry: just click the edge of the annotation (perhaps a bit to the right of the last character you underlined or highlighted) and tap your delete key. Additionally, annotations aren’t actually saved to your eBook files by default, but are instead kept in Clearview’s database. You can choose to have PDF annotations saved to the original file from Clearview’s settings, but I’d tend to think that the default option of not saving them to the PDF files is nice. That way, your original book files are still their originals, and you still get the benefit of being able to mark them up.

Just Enough Features

I’d seldom argue that an app needs more settings; if anything, I’m of the opinion that more apps should be like iA Writer and have zero settings. But in Clearview, for once, it’s nice to see enough settings to make the app powerful without making it too complicated — something that eBook reading apps seldom get right. They either have next-to-zero settings (hello, Kindle for Mac) or way too many (need I mention Calibre?).

Clearview hits a very nice middle, with a great UI that’s anything but cluttered combined with more annotation features than any other eBook app has and the settings to make your default reading experience exactly what you want. You can set it to open ebooks by default in the reading mode (separate for PDF and ePub/Mobi files), theme, and font you want, and can also set your library to have a modern, grey background, a Mountain Lion-style texture, or an older iBooks style wooden background.

Conclusion

A few weeks from now, everyone who’s updated their Mac to OS X Mavericks will have what’s arguably the very best desktop eBook reader on any platform: iBooks for Mac. It’ll be free and will give you the nicest reading experience both for iBooks-purchased eBooks and for DRM-free ePub books. Combine that with Preview’s already best-in-class PDF reading experience, and you’ve got an app that’s hard to beat.

And yet, I can’t help but think that there’s two eBook apps that have the best shot at staying relevant in the world of iBooks competition: Calibre and Clearview. The former will obviously live on for its geeky features that let you convert eBooks to and from a myriad number of formats and sync them with any devices you want. The latter, I think, has a decent shot at staying relevant simply due to its flexibility and annotation features combined with a very nice reading experience.

If you want a great eBook reading app for your Mac today — or for any Mac you won’t be upgrading to Mavericks, I’d definitely suggest getting a copy of Clearview. And if you don’t think iBooks’ basic highlighting features are enough for your needs, and you want support for more formats and customization, then Clearview’s the app you need too. After trying all of the best ones today, I can’t shake the feeling that Clearview’s #2 after iBooks for a great reading experience on the Mac today. At $6.99, you can’t go wrong with it.