Category: Mac

I’d like to take a moment to say a big thank you to this week’s sponsor, Jumsoft.

Jumsoft is comprised of an extremely talented team of people dedicated to bringing you stellar software products for the Mac. The apps that they’ve created are well known and solidly praised on this site and others: Money, Relationship, Operation, Home Business Trio and Process. Together these apps create an unbeatable collection of business utilities that cover everything from accounting to customer relations and beyond.

In addition to their prestigious line of apps, Jumsoft is also known for their line of add-ons for Keynote, Pages and Mail. If you want to make your documents, presentations and email messages look absolutely stunning, be sure to check out their site.

Because they’re just that great, Jumsoft even has a page full of free goodies for you to download and try today!

In recent years e-books have experienced a notable surge in popularity. Much of this can be attributed to devices such as Amazon’s Kindle and Apple’s iPad, which have seen a huge rise in popularity over recent years and seem to always be in those “top 10 gadget lists”. Amazon now sells more Kindle-format books than standard paper copies and the research and advisory firm mediaIDEAS forecasted that e-book readers are set to become a $25 billion market by the year 2020.

So with all these e-books floating around, you’ll need a way to manage them, right? Well, that’s where Calibre comes in. Think of it as iTunes for your e-books. Although e-book readers such as the Kindle provide their own software, it is a bit basic and you can only read books purchased from the Kindle store.

Calibre allows you to categorize all your books, convert them into different formats and upload them to your device. Although it won’t win any awards for its looks, the old adage is true, “Don’t judge a book by its cover” (or should that be e-book? Sorry, bad joke). Calibre is, to use the age-old comparison, iTunes for your e-books. Read on to find out why.

Introduction

Calibre is a free e-book manager available for both Mac and Windows. The Mac version requires an Intel processor (however a version for PowerPC is available) and can be downloaded via their website. Once you start up the app, you are greeted with the homescreen.

The main screen of Calibre, showing all your e-books categorized alphabetically by title

It may look a bit complicated and clunky, but the application is relatively simple to use. The app boasts 3.2 million users since it was released in August 2009 and due to this, the developer is very active and updates are released for it extremely regularly (in fact, every time I open the program there seems to be an update!). The app is also compatible with a large number of e-book readers (the full list is available here) so most people can use it as the default software for managing their e-books.

Features

Calibre has a number of useful features which really emphasize it as a must-have program for anyone with an e-book reader.

Library Management

Any books that you add to your library in Calibre are automatically saved to a separate location (not unlike iTunes) and organized by title and author, meaning that if you do have to hunt around for a particular e-book, you can rest assured that they are all in one location.

A look at the Calibre Library folder in Finder, showing the organization

In the actual app, your books can be sorted via their author, series, publisher and more. You can even add tags to your e-books to allow quick and easy searching. Upon adding an e-book, Calibre will automatically download the metadata from the Internet. This includes the blurb (description of the book’s storyline) as well as the cover and any other information relating to the book, useful if you are trying to sift through what to read next!

The metadata shown on the book "Freakonomics" in Calibre

And if you’re really stuck for what to read, Calibre’s website has over 2,000 DRM-free (Digital Rights Management) books available for purchase, or you can try Project Gutenberg, which has over 33,000 free books available for download (if you do not live in the United States, then check the copyright restrictions in your country first before downloading).

Conversion

Calibre is able to convert both to and from many popular e-book formats, including the major ones used by most e-book readers. You can even customize the export settings, such as the font size and layout on the page (depending on your e-book reader) and it can detect chapters and the table of contents, meaning you are not flicking back and forth to find your page.

Synchronization

As mentioned above, Calibre supports a wide range of e-book readers, including Amazon’s Kindle and Barnes & Noble’s Nook range of devices. When you plug in your device, Calibre will automatically detect it and inform you whether the book is synced on both devices or not.

The device view of Calibre, showing you which books are synced with your device

You can set up Calibre to automatically sync any books that aren’t on your device or you can sync them manually. Calibre can even convert books to your device’s respective format before copying them over, thereby saving the need for you to convert them yourself.

Built-in Reader

Calibre features a built-in e-book reader, allowing you to quickly scan through books before uploading them onto your device.

The in-built e-book reader in Calibre

The reader supports tables of contents, printing, referencing, searching and more. Although it is not ideal for reading long passages of text (Stanza is the best for this), it is good if you want to skim read a few pages or quickly read the introduction of a book.

Conclusion

Calibre is an shining example of a well-thought out, well-designed program bursting with features and functionality. For anyone with an e-book reader, I could not recommend this program enough.

Although it won’t win any awards for its interface, looks aren’t everything and you’ll soon discover that Calibre does pack a mighty punch when it comes to managing your e-books.

Instagram has become a very popular service and app on the iPhone, by allowing you to create and share vintage-looking pictures with your social networks and check the recent pictures from your friends. Unfortunately, though, there isn’t really a way of interacting with the service on your computer. Instagram’s developers know this and have made their API available to anyone who wants to create an app for their service.

The app that we are reviewing today is a beautifully designed companion for using Instagram on your Mac. It’s called Carousel and it looks very promising. Does it deliver?

Getting Started

Getting Started

Apps that aim to bring the Instagram experience to your Mac have become quite popular recently, and we’ve seen several released. We reviewed an app called Instadesk a while ago, that also brings Instagram to your Mac, but in a fairly different way to the app we’re reviewing today. Instadesk is very conventional- it sort of feels like an “old” app. Carousel is very different, you’ll see why.

The setup process is pretty simple. You can buy the app for $4.99 on the App Store, and the first time that you use it you’ll be asked to put in your login info for Instagram. After that you are set, and you can see your feed and interact with it.

Interface

Interface

The first thing that you’ll notice is that the app is very, very pretty. It looks clean and simple, and has sort of a vintage look to it. It also goes with the mobile theme of Instagram by keeping big and mostly graphical buttons instead of a bunch of text buttons. It feels like an app that you might have found on your iPad.

The window has a wood frame instead of the usual graphite color, and the background has an old-school grey wallpaper pattern. It gives the app a very elegant, unique feel.

On the bottom you have a toolbar with three buttons that allow you to switch between your feed, the popular pics and your profile. Also in this toolbar is a refresh button. That is pretty much it- the app does a great job at keeping things simple, and getting rid of features that just take up space and create a confusing environment.

Viewing Your Feed

Feed

Your feed is shown vertically. You can see small frames with the picture and a bar with useful info like the user who uploaded it (along with a small image of their icon) and the date, place and number of hearts and comments it has. Oddly, the title of the picture is not shown and is nowhere to be seen, not even in the sub-menus.

The pictures are shown fairly wide, and this makes for a great way to view them. If you want to see them even bigger, you can double click them and you’ll get a preview window where you can pull it up full-screen or send it to iPhoto. The comments are displayed on a different window when you click on the text box icon, and from there you can write your own or watch the old ones. The love button works the same.

Extra Features

Themes

The keyboard shortcuts seem to be very well-integrated to the app — there’s one for everything and they are easy to learn. You can, for example, love a photo by just typing “L”, or comment on it by typing “C”.

Also worth mentioning are the beautiful themes that come along with the app. While the default one that we described previously is very impressive, the other three ones don’t fall behind. There are also Growl notifications, which is a very nice touch.

Limitations

Of course, you can’t do things like post pictures, but that’s because the API won’t allow it and you can only do that through the iOS app. As far as lack of features, there doesn’t seem to be much to complain about. If anything, it’s a bit annoying that the title of the pictures isn’t displayed anywhere noticeable, while you can see things like the place where it was taken and the time it was uploaded.

There are also some things that apps like Instadesk have; but this one lacks; like albums, slideshows or a user finder, but those are features that I’m sure most of you won’t use – I know I don’t, at least not very often.

Conclusion

Carousel does a great job at keeping the most useful and primordial features, and getting rid of the ones that only make the app confusing and complicated. Unlike Instadesk, you’ll find your way around this app in just a few minutes.

We continue to see more and more of these amazing apps that mix the simplicity of mobile apps with the usefulness of desktop apps – much like we predicted back when Reeder for Mac came out. This is the way that desktop apps are heading, and developers need to embrace it and adapt to it because it’s getting annoying having to deal with conventional apps when you can have beautiful and simple apps.

So, which one do you prefer? The rather dull and old, but cheaper Instadesk; or the cooler looking and super simple, but expensive Carousel? I’d rather keep Carousel, to be honest. What about you? Do you like these new apps that feel like mobile versions, or would you rather keep the more conventional app style?

It’s time for another “Ask the Editor” post today. A big thank you to everyone who sent in their questions – it’s great to have the chance to help you out with your Mac-related queries and quibbles.

Today I’ll be offering some advice about what Thunderbolt means for Mac users, how you can store and organise your recipes on OS X, and a particularly reliable option for an external hard drive.

Read on for plenty of handy Mac knowledge, and I hope you’ll find most of it useful for your own situation as well!

What external hard drive would you recommend for best reliability?

– LP

Drobo is a pretty cool little robot…

Well, there’s certainly no shortage of choice! External hard drives come in all shapes and sizes, and your choice will depend on a number of different factors. If reliability is the key point that you have in mind, I’d recommend an option that might be a little bit pricy, but should last you for several years to come.

Drobo make a range of different external hard drive enclosures, in which you put your own 3.5″ internal drives. This gives you the option of expanding storage as you need to, and keeps everything very flexible. You’ll need to put at least two drives in to start with.

The beauty of a Drobo is that it automatically keeps a redundant backup of all your information. Any time you save a file to the device, it ensures that it’s automatically stored on at least two separate hard drives. This means that if any single drive fails within you Drobo device, you can simply replace it with another one with absolutely no data loss.

Although this isn’t a cheap option, it’s definitely one of the best ways to have an unbelievably reliable external hard drive system. The basic Drobo starts at $399, and doesn’t include any hard drives (though it takes standard 3.5″ internal drives that are relatively inexpensive). I’ve been using one for a couple of years, and can’t recommend it highly enough!

What’s the big deal about Thunderbolt on the new Macs, and what will it work with?

– Samuel Holdsworth

Apple have committed to this new technology in a big way, and are essentially pushing for it to become a standard (rather than USB3.0). This is what Apple has to say about it, in a more concise sentence than I could muster myself:

Thunderbolt is a revolutionary I/O technology that supports high-resolution displays and high-performance data devices through a single, compact port. It sets new standards for speed, flexibility, and simplicity.

Essentially, it’s a new port – like USB, or Firewire – that has a much higher capacity than anything that has come before. It’s capable of transmitting video and data at phenomenal speed – you can move data to and from peripherals up to 20 times faster than with USB 2.0 and up to 12 times faster than with FireWire 800.

It’s also possible to daisy-chain devices and have, say, a few high-speed drives, a display, and several other peripherals connected at the same time. All without any drop in speed or quality.

At present, Thunderbolt hardware is fairly limited. A few devices already available are:

• LaCie Little Big Disk
• Promise Pegasus R4/6
• Blackmagic UltraStudio 3D

All of these are fairly high-end devices, but you’ll see it trickling down into more mass-market products soon.

I’m a budding chef and want somewhere to store my recipes. What software would you recommend for collecting a bunch of recipes?

– Jake Sergey

Good question! There are a bunch of different recipe apps available for the Mac, some of which offer a big range of bells and whistles, others that are a little more simplistic. Here are a few that you might like to try:

• MacGourmet ($29) – MacGourmet helps you create and edit your recipes, wine notes and cooking notes, easily browse your entire collection and build your own custom lists for categories like appetizers or desserts. It has a really beautiful icon, and a simple interface design. We reviewed it a few weeks ago, so you might like to check out what we had to say.
• SousChef ($30) – Most cooking software stops at letting you organize your recipes. SousChef helps you cook, start to finish. Find a recipe, cook it, modify it and share it with friends & family—all in one application. They have over 200,000 recipes in their “recipe cloud”
• YummySoup! ($4.99) – YummySoup! allows you to easily create digital copies of all your favorite recipes and share them with friends and family with professional themed prints, email, and with Recipecasts.

Didn’t See Your Question?

If you asked a question but didn’t have it answered today, don’t worry! I’ll do my best to get to it in a future week. I love a challenge, so feel free to ask some weird and wonderful questions…

If you’d like to submit your query, you can do so here:Online Form – AppStorm > Ask The Editor

Thanks for reading, and let me know if you agree or disagree with anything I mentioned today!

In many ways it’s the holy grail of Mac apps. Apple has instilled an appreciation for the beautiful, the polished, and the carefully designed. And if there’s one part of our lives that screams out for an experience like that it’s money management.

I mean it makes sense, right? Computers are good with numbers, and people usually aren’t. Computers can be used to identify patterns and formulate projections, and people like to see patterns and projections. And on the Mac platform we should be able to get all of that lovely functionality wrapped up in an aesthetically pleasing package, right?

Well there’s a new contender that’s entered the fray: Koku. Making the rounds, Koku has attracted the attention of the Mac community. We’re all dying to know if someone new can build the type of financial monitoring app that we’ve all been looking for.

And so here we are. Let’s take a look at the areas that Koku excels in, and the spots where they need to do some work.

The Interface

An interface isn’t all about fashion. Just because there are polished pixels and fancy drop-shadows doesn’t mean the interface is well designed. It just means it’s stylish. The foundation that those styles are layered onto is even more important. Koku has chosen to forgo a personal “style” of user interface, sticking more to the subtlety that the default styling of OS X offers.

The Main Interface

I like the UI. As subjective as that comment is, I felt like it’s a good place to start. The right-hand side of the window is the main view of your account information and transactions. The left-hand side of the view offers you options to change what you see in the right-hand view. You can change the account that you’re viewing, or enter into various report views which we’ll touch on later.

Koku also supports, and quite heavily encourages, tags as a way of organizing your transactions. We’ll get into that a little more later on too, but suffice it to say that you can access a list of all of your tags by clicking in the titlebar of the left view.

Accounts and Transactions

The real core of Koku is in the experience of viewing your accounts and inputting your transactions. If your bank or credit union is one of the ones supported by Koku, then you’ve got the best user experience you could hope for: Koku takes care of that for you. For the rest of us though, we’ll need that experience to be as frictionless as possible.

In the bottom left hand corner is a “+” button which reveals a dropdown, the first option of which is “New Account”. Now we have a two step process, the first asking us to choose the type of account that we’d like to create, and the second offering us options we can configure for that account.

Adding an Account

I think this process could be streamlined a bit, perhaps merging the two steps into one slide-down window. Considering that the options can change depending on the type of account that’s being created, perhaps those options could be adjusted, with some nice animated effects, if it’s needed.

Transactions are initiated at the bottom of the page, in the main/right-hand view. The controls for working with them also live at the bottom of the window. Keyboard shortcuts are nicely implemented for adding transactions and such, for those who wish to get up to speed with Koku quickly.

Adding a Transaction

Tags

Koku is based upon tags for organizing your transactions. You can apply multiple tags to individual transactions. Adding tags is straightforward, and built into the UI for adding a transaction. In fact, it’s probably harder to add a transaction without a tag than to add one with a tag.

Adding a Tag

I think this mindset really works well. Often times, tags can be cumbersome and complicated. But I think Koku has implemented the well, and they really make it much easier to come to grips with your financials. In fact, Koku has some more tricks up it’s proverbial sleeve when it comes to getting a better look at your financials. And tags are a pivotal part of it.

Reports

An important part of any good money management app would be tools to help you better understand where your money was spent, where your income came from, and how all that might look in the near future. In this area Koku doesn’t disappoint. Koku comes with three reports built-in: spending distribution, spending history, and a summary of your accounts.

Koku's Built-in Reports

All of these reports have beautiful animations baked in, showing off the portion of the report that you’re focusing in on at the moment. But it doesn’t stop there. Koku also offers you the ability to generate your own custom reports, based on the ones provided, so you can target certain areas of your financials with more scrutiny.

Conclusion

If you’re new to the Mac, or just to the world of personal finance apps, I whole-heartedly suggest that you give Koku a try. Their website offers a free trial download, so you can see for yourself whether or not the app would work for you, and your lifestyle.

While it may not be the flashiest app out there, I think Koku brings a well-executed feature set to the table, especially considering it’s currently in its current version. Hopefully the app and its developers will continue to invest in Koku’s development, so the app can help all of us understand how to invest ourselves.

iTunes. You can’t live with it, and yet you can’t live without it. Sure, it does its job, but there are a whole lot of features which are unnecessary, and necessary features which haven’t been implemented. It has Ping, a social network used by about 7 people, but no support for AVI videos, a video format loved by millions. Unfortunately for us, there aren’t many decent alternatives.

Miro 4 was released recently, and although Miro was always an iTunes competitor, version 4 has really brought it into its own. The 100% free and open source media library does all of the things you want iTunes to do, and more. But is it worth abandoning iTunes for? Read on to find out.

Getting Started

Miro is not available from the App Store, so you’ll have to download the DMG from their website. At 40MB, half the size of iTunes, it won’t take hours to download. Installation is done by a process we’re all-too-familiar with – simply dragging the app into the Applications folder.

Installing Miro

When you first open the app, it’ll ask a few questions to help you make the most of Miro. The first is the language you want Miro to be in. There is a huge list of available languages, but not all of them are fully translated (just Spanish and German at the time of writing), however many more are well on their way. Anyone can volunteer to translate Miro and help make the software as accessible as possible.

You can also quickly import iTunes media and/or all media on your computer, or simply media in a certain folder. This is a handy way of quickly gathering media so you haven’t got to import everything from scratch. That said, the importing process will take a while, especially if you have a large library.

Interface

What instantly strikes you about Miro is its beautiful interface – Every button is pixel perfect and looks wonderful. Designed by Morgan Allan Knutson, it’s obvious that he put a whole lot of time and effort into its design.

Miro's Interface

Unfortunately, for me, whilst its aesthetics are amazing, the usability of the interface is a little lacking. It would appear that Miro has gone so far out of its way to not be an iTunes clone that it has ignored the good elements of iTunes. For example, in Miro, all of the controls are along the bottom. Users are used to toolbars and buttons being up the top of the window, so this decision doesn’t feel right.

Music

Miro handles your music relatively well – you can play it, and pause it, which is certainly a start. I’m afraid that I’ll have to compare Miro to iTunes most of the time, as that is what most people use. And, really, it just doesn’t compare. iTunes has been handling music all its life, so by now, it really is quite good at it. To me, it feels like Miro has added music functionality at the last minute, and it really hasn’t had time to think about what really makes a great music library.

Music in Miro

One major issue of mine is the lack of view options for your music. You can either see your music in a full list with all its details, or in a completely useless view where you see each song with artwork and a few details, with only 4 songs fitting into the window. What’s really missing is the ability to view thumbnails of albums, or at least artists, like iTunes. Until that happens, there is no way I can use the music feature.

Video

This is really where you feel Miro developers put all their effort into. It doesn’t really do anything iTunes doesn’t, except for the fact that it can handle most codecs you throw at it. And if it can’t, Miro Video Converter features are bundled in, so you can convert videos within Miro to make them playable.

Unfortunately, there is one feature which, for me, makes Miro defunct for video is a lack of external remote support. I like to watch movies from a bit of a distance, and using my Apple remote is a must when doing so. That said, you have the option to open a video in QuickTime directly from Miro, but to me, that’s not very different to using Finder.

If MPlayerX managed to incorporate remote functionality, it must be possible, and I hope Miro developers will introduce the feature soon. Until then, I’m sticking to Finder and QuickTime for video.

Video In Miro

Online

Sources

Miro has done what iTunes neglected to and brought in a lot of online functionality – It has a built-in torrent client (for legal torrents, of course), and links to sites with legal torrents such as YouTorrent and ClearBits. You can add any torrent source you wish to – It certainly is a nice feature to be able to download a file and have it straight in your library.

YouTube in Miro

Miro has also got built in browser functionality, with a few sections which essentially act as site-specific browsers – YouTube, Hulu, and PBS, along with the afore-mentioned YouTorrent and ClearBits.

You can add any URL you want as a source, so in that way, acts a little like Fluid, only that all the SSBs are kept under one app.

The only problem is that there isn’t an address bar, so if you find something and want to send someone a link, you’ll have to open it up in the browser first.

Stores

Just as iTunes has the much-loved iTunes store, and the App Store, Miro has incorporated support for Amazon’s MP3 store, the Amazon Android Store, and the Google Android Store. With Miro’s support for Android syncing, these are great features.

Personally, I haven’t found any way in which Amazon’s MP3 store betters the iTunes store (unless you count Lady Gaga’s Born This Way for $0.99), but it is certainly a feature which nowadays every media library should have.

Amazon MP3 Store

Conclusion

I want to love Miro. I really do. It is a wonderful idea in theory – developed by volunteers, designed by volunteers, translated by volunteers, and distributed completely for free. But do I love it? Not quite.

Despite its aesthetic goodness and excellent online functionality, it falls down in a few vital areas which make it unusable as a media library, for me at least. All it needs is a few more viewing options and support for the Apple remote and I’d rate it much higher. The devil really is in the details.

I’m pleased to let you know that we’re kicking off a competition to win five copies of The StackSocial Mac Essentials Bundle. This amazing bundle contains a whopping 11 Mac apps worth $333! If you’re counting, that means we’re giving away over $1,600 in software this week.

StackSocial Mac Essentials Bundle

StackSocial has partnered with rockstar developers like Ambrosia Software and Irradiated Software to bring you a bundle that’s perfect for just about anyone but especially created with designers and developers in mind. Here is a quick rundown of the incredibly useful apps included.

• Wallpaper Wizard: Manage your wallpaper like never before.
• Vitamin-R: A task management tool designed to overcome the biggest productivity challenges facing today’s creative professionals.
• Narrator: Narrator brings text to life by reading it to you using voice synthesis – your letter, an ebook, emails, online news – or any text.
• Mac Cleanse 2: A small yet powerful application geared towards purifying your system. In only seconds, it can perform over fifty tasks which would take nearly an hour to perform manually.
• Surface: Surface lets you work with your documents, links, and apps in the same way you would use the desktop.
• Iconbox 2: A full-featured icon library for your Mac. IconBox provides icon lovers new and old with a great toolset to manage the icons on your system.
• SizeUp: Quickly position a window to fill exactly half the screen (splitscreen), a quarter of the screen (quadrant), full screen, or centered via the menu bar or configurable system-wide hotkeys.
• MacJournal: The complete journaling application designed so that you never have to miss an opportunity to chronicle any life event, any special memory, even your own thoughts.
• Snaps Pro X: A quantum leap in video capture technology, adroitly capturing full motion video of anything on your screen at a blistering pace, complete with digital audio, and an optional microphone voiceover.
• WireTap Studio: Complete control of recording any audio on your Mac.
• iToner: Enables you to quickly create custom ringtones and transfer them to your iPhone with a single click – without modifying, hacking or having to reset your iPhone.

Tweet To Enter

Entering the competition is really simple – all you need to do is tweet the following snippet, then leave a comment below with a link to your tweet.

The competition will run for one week, and I’ll pick five winning comments at random on Wednesday June 15th. Best of luck, and be sure to check out StackSocial in the meantime!

In my mind, data is holds an equal level of importance to my physical possessions. In a recent post, we covered a perfect backup strategy for your Mac. In that, we discussed two off-site options: Dropbox and CrashPlan.

Today I’m going to take a closer look at some other options for off-site and online backup, to give you a full spectrum of solutions to choose from.

MobileMe & iDisk

MobileMe & iDisk

Many Mac owners use MobileMe’s online e-mail, calendar and contact syncing service. This $99 per year option does come with 20GB online storage space, known as your iDisk. While some of that might be taken up by your me.com e-mail account, the rest you can happily use to backup your files offsite.

To do this, you can use the old but still usable Backup 3, which is provided free with your MobileMe account (in fact anyone can download this piece of software, regardless of your current MobileMe subscription status. Backup 3 incorporates the ability to backup to CD/DVD as well as External Hard disk.

If you’re like most people, e-mail doesn’t take up that much storage space on MobileMe. This leaves a plenty space left over to backup to your iDisk. You can even upgrade your storage capacity and use your iDisk as a webDAV server. Unfortunately, iDisk is neither the fastest nor most reliable service to host your files. You might give iDisk a shot, especially if you have MobileMe – just don’t put everything into this one basket.

Price: $99/year
Storage: 20GB
Extras: 20GB-40GB more storage for $49-$99

Dropbox

Dropbox

Everyone’s favorite file syncing, sharing and storage service is back again, for about the 17th time on this site. As we all are familiar with by now, everything stored inside your Dropbox folder is automatically synchronized to your online Dropbox account.

Dropbox is amazingly fast and reliable. It also includes a built in time machine like feature for the past 30 days. Alternatively, you enable the Packrat pay-for add-on can save every revision of every file in your Dropbox, no matter if you changed or deleted the file. Forever.

If you’re think about using Dropbox as your main offsite backup service you might want to move the data from your Home folders (like Documents or Music) into Dropbox. This can be a bit of pain, so it might be worth setting up Symlinks or Aliases.

One of the best parts about Dropbox is the ability to then access everything inside your ‘box on any computer or mobile device with an internet connection. You can browse your files using your iPhone or your Windows machine at work.

This service gets a huge thumbs up in my book – except for the small problem of storage accounts. The biggest account is only 100GB in size, meaning you might not be able to fit your growing music, photo or movie collections. We can only hope they open up the storage limits to something a bit higher in the future.

Price: Free-$10-$20/month
Storage: 2GB-50GB-100GB
Extras: Packrat, $4/month

SpiderOak

SpiderOak

SpiderOak takes a similar approach to Dropbox, but instead of creating a folder you set folders that you want SpiderOak to synchronize to its server. Also similar to Dropbox, SpiderOak lets you access all of your files on it’s various mobile applications as well as on any computer with internet access.

Unlike Dropbox which uses Amazon’s S3 cloud storage service, SpiderOak keeps everything in house. They also promise that no employees have the ability to access any of your files at any time. This is somewhat of a heated discussion point for Dropbox at the present moment.

SpiderOak has the ability to sync files between computers. It supports versioning of files and the ability to un-delete documents you accidentally tossed out. You can also restore any version ever created as well as un-delete any file. No matter when you deleted it.

One of the downsides is the non-Mac User Interface that plagues SpiderOak a few other backup solutions we’ll take a look at. It uses a Java interface, which is fine, just not that slick on the Mac. One final note is the ability to use their iOS apps to view files you have stored with them.

Price: Free-$10+/month
Storage: 2GB-100GB+
Extras: Each 100GB package is $10/month

CrashPlan

CrashPlan

This popular off-site backup solution is a bit of a multi-tool. It supports backing up to their datacenter, CrashPlan+, a friends internet-connected computer, or an external hard disk.

The off-site backup service paired with CrashPlan is similar to other options online except it boasts one major feature: unlimited storage. The Mac application gives you an unbelievable level of control on when, where and how your computer backs up.

I really appreciate the fine grained control – but the user interface needs a bit of work. The application isn’t a native Mac app, instead is built using technologies that allow the program to be deployed on multiple operating systems, including Windows.

My biggest complaint is lack of any status applet that could sit in the menu bar. While I have never had CrashPlan not work, I’m often wondering when the program is backing up and how long it would take to get there.

How well does it work? Well I’ve used the program for a little over a month now, signed up with their CrashPlan+ Unlimited account. It works extremely well, backing up not only to local hard disks but also their datacenter. One of my favorite features is the ability to backup external hard drives as well as the built in version control.

My favorite part of using CrashPlan is the ability to “seed” your initial backup, which can be very slow. They will send you an external 1TB drive that you can use the software to back up to, then in a few days it will all appear inside our CrashPlan+ account. It’s a fairly expensive way to avoid spending a few weeks uploading your data to their servers, but it’s handy to have the option!

Plus, should something happen to your data, CrashPlan will send you DVDs or external hard disks to accelerate your restore.

Price: $1.50-$10/month
Storage: 10GB-Unlimited
Extras: Seeded backup/restore options are available

BackBlaze

Backblaze is similar in feature set, including unlimited backup, to CrashPlan. It even features the same external hard drive support, which is a huge plus in my book!

The Mac app is a native System Preferences preference pane and menu bar applet. It’s about as simple as it could be. The program installs itself and the small, flame-like menu bar applet lets you keep track of whether or not everything is being backed up properly.

Similar to CrashPlan, Backblaze will send your files back to you via a CD/DVD or an external drive if you would rather not download your multi-gigabyte backup set.

Price: $5/month
Storage: Unlimited
Extras: External drive restore options are available

Mozy

This entry has all but been wiped out of the running with their decision to limit the number of gigabytes their users can back up. It works nearly identically to BackBlaze, except with storage restrictions and a much more windowed user interface experience.

Mozy does offer the ability to have your files sent to you via a DVD or external hard drive. Their higher end plan also allows up to 3 computers to back up to your storage space, which is a nice added feature.

Most notably, they offer 2GB of backup completely free, forever. It’s a nice way to test out the service, and perfect for those looking to just double backup their most important documents.

Price: $5.99-$9.99
Storage: 50GB-125GB
Extras: External drive or DVD restore options are available

Arq

Most of the online storage options, like Dropbox and Jungledisk, utilize Amazon S3 (Simple Storage Service) for storing your files.

Instead of using a backup service you can actually back up directly to S3 using the native Mac app, Arq. Amazon charges you on a sliding per-gigabyte scale, but it’s basically $.10 per gigabyte per month (plus upload/download fees).

Arq does a good job of explaining this during your setup process, which is just a bit harder than setting up any of the other accounts. This is due to it leaving you to set up your Amazon S3 account plus finding the right authentication keys.

Amazon’s Basic Web Services account, which is free, does include 5GB of storage space, which is more than any other service’s trial or free storage option. If you want to control your own online backup service, I would give Arq a try, or take a look at our review of Arq from last year.

Price: $29, plus Amazon S3 storage fees
Storage: 5GB free, unlimited storage at a per-gigabyte basis

JungleDisk

Arq

This final offering is an interesting option for those looking for a pay-as-you-go offering. Based on the powerful Rackspace Cloud Files and Amazon S3, JungleDisk offers two plans to help keep your files backed up offsite. Their “Simply Backup” plan works just as you’d expect it. It will run automatic backups to your choice of Rackspace or Amazon, let you do Time Machine like restoration of older file versions, and cut down on backup time using de-duplication on the server side. They also have iPhone and iPad apps that let you access your files on the go.

Their other offering, “Desktop Edition” brings a ton of more features to the table. First off, it includes everything that you get with “Simply Backup.” Second, it acts as both a backup service as well as a networked attached hard drive that you could use the Finder to browse. Also, it’s like a Dropbox, syncing across multiple computers as well as their cloud offering.

The “Simply Backup” edition costs $2/month and the “Desktop Edition” costs $3/month – both include 5GB of storage. Every gigabyte after that costs $0.15 for either account type.

Price: $2/$3 + $0.15 per GB / month
Storage: 5GB included, unlimited storage

Pick One!

Phew! There’s a huge range of options out there! From powerful storage options like JungleDisk and Dropbox to simple backup utilities like BackBlaze and CrashPlan. My recommendations come in three parts:

1. The “I Don’t Need Much Space” Plan: Where I’d tell you to look at CrashPlan’s smaller, 10GB plans as they run just a few bucks each month. If you want access to those precious files everywhere chose JungleDisk, SpiderOak or a Dropbox paid plan. Throw everything in either of those and see which one costs more, because they provide nearly the same feature set.

2. The “Everything Must Go” Plan: Use CrashPlan’s unlimited plan or BackBlaze. Either one is perfect for backing everything up; CrashPlan even more so with their seeded backup program. In the end it basically comes down to whether or not you need a native Mac app with menu bar applet. If so, go with BackBlaze. Otherwise you might be better off with CrashPlan, as it is a more robust program.

3. The “I’m a Student” Plan: If you’re a student, I’m going to recommend either Dropbox, wither their 1GB per referral bump if you have a .edu address, or SpiderOak. SpiderOak acts a middle ground between something as integrated as Dropbox and something a bit more backup-ish like CrashPlan. Plus they give a 50% discount if you are a student. It’s a bit of steal! (Especially since you could get 200GB for the price of Dropbox’s 50GB)

Let me know what you use for offsite backup and if you have any other services or advice to share!

After my flatbed scanner died around a decade ago, I completely gave up with owning one. They were slow, clunky, and something that I only used half a dozen times a year. Besides, everything was going digital, and we’d soon stop receiving paper altogether, right?

Unfortunately, that never seemed to happen. And eight years later I had two filing cabinets and various files full of receipts, invoices, statements, and all manner of other correspondence. I decided that enough was enough, and picked up a ScanScap scanner to digitise all those documents.

Coupled with DevonThink Pro Office, everything has OCR performed on it (Evernote works just as well), and I’m now filing cabinet free! Scanning once again feels like a state of the art process to be doing, with a modern combination of hardware and software.

But is this something you do? I’m not sure whether a scanner is considered a necessary computer accessory any longer… Let me know your thoughts in the comments!

So the 2011 WWDC conference finished a mere hour or two ago, and there’s a great deal to talk about! Not least the launch of the wonderfully exciting, dare I say revolutionary, iCloud.

Do you spend precious time keeping all your devices in check? Synchronising calendars, contacts, apps, and documents, or simply backing up your invaluable photos, videos, and music?

Not anymore.

Read on as we delve into the vital information about iCloud, discover the potential it has to transform the way you use your computers!

A Revolution

With the announcement and implementation of iCloud, Apple is transforming the way we will interact with, and store, all the content that we value. iCloud is, simply, the new way to store and access your content.

With iCloud, your Mac surrenders its role as the centre of synchronisation and content, and is simply made another ‘device’ – on a par with your iPhone or iPad. iCloud then takes centre-stage as the hub for all the important information that you value.

Before I launch into the specific features of iCloud, it’s definitely worth mentioning that everything discussed below (except iTunes Match) comes for a very reasonable price…

Free.

Beautiful Synchronisation

iCloud is the culmination of years of work and development, including learning from the successes, and failures, of MobileMe. This is where Apple started with iCloud, effortless synchronisation of Mail, Contacts, and Calendars.

iTunes Music in the cloud – Keep reading!

They now work just as you would want them to, automatically pushing information to all of your devices. A brilliant start.

One particularly interesting feature of using your Calendar with iCloud is the ability to push shared calendars across iCloud accounts. Everyone sharing a calendar will be immediately updated with fresh events!

Here is another fantastic piece of information, when you sign up for iCloud, you get a free me.com account.

Mail

Apple then began to rebuild and transform the way its other services work, below I’m going to look at a few of the most interesting changes and features. Starting with…

Apps

iCloud will give you easy access to all the apps you have downloaded in the past, and what’s more, it will synchronise them wirelessly across all your devices!

iBooks

130 million books have now been downloaded from the iBookstore, a phenomenal number. iCloud allows you access to all your previous downloads, letting you pull them onto whichever devices you like, while also causing new books to be pushed to all your devices.

Even better, iCloud will store your place in a book and push that information across all your devices – never lose you position again!

Documents

Apple is in the process of drastically changing the way we see saving. iCloud allows all the apps from the iWork suite to save your documents, automatically, in the cloud. You can quit whenever you like, and resume anywhere on any connected device!

What’s even better is that iCloud’s integration with documents is being opened up to developers, you will now be able to seamlessly have your paintings, games, or stocks synchronised across all your devices.

Backup

Backup with iCloud works exactly how you would dream it would work. Like Time Machine, Backup saves time, and space, by only backing up information that’s changed.

Never lose anything, ever.

One of the greatest benefits here is the painless restoration of any device to its former glory. Connect your device to WiFi, enter your Apple ID and password, and watch everything come flooding back.

Photo Stream

Transferring photos from device to device, and backing them all up, is annoying. Full stop.

Photo Stream is based on the idea that having your photos always with you can just happen.

Photo Stream

Photo Stream synchronises any new photos across all of your devices, automatically – no messing about, no worries. You want to view a photo from your iPhone on your Mac, it’s there.

The interesting thing here is that, while all of the other services above allow unlimited storage in iCloud, Photo Stream does not. My first reaction was of disappointment, we’re almost there, but not quite yet.

While ultimately it would be fantastic to have every photo stored permanently in the cloud, I do understand Apple’s struggle in this area. There is only so much land left, they don’t make it anymore, we probably shouldn’t use it all for giant data centres…

Their solution is a careful, but pleasing one. iCloud will store a rolling collection of your last 1000 photos, and all new photos for 30 days (giving you plenty of time to get some wifi). Every one of your photos will be collected and stored, automatically, on your Mac, but only the last 1000 will be available in the cloud.

You can always drag photos from Photo Stream into albums and store specific photos on any given device permanently.

It Just Works

Apple themselves describe iCloud as:

The cloud the way it should be: automatic and effortless. iCloud is seamlessly integrated into your apps, so you can access your content on all your devices.

While it will be a little while before users can know for sure just how easy and effortless iCloud is, it certainly looks good in that department. On that point it’s worth noting that iCloud won’t be fully functional until the autumn and the release of iOS 5, although certain aspects will begin to work now!

Knowing the emphasis that Apple puts on user experience, it would certainly be surprising if iCloud was anything other than fluent.

iTunes in the Cloud

In addition to all of the above, iCloud completely overhauls the way iTunes works. You will now automatically have every song you purchase on all of you devices, and have the ability to download your entire history of iTunes purchases.

This is good. But not revolutionary, it simply streamlines the way you synchronise your new iTunes music. But, then came the final announcement, the One More Thing…

iTunes Match.

iTunes Match

iTunes Match brings you all the benefits of iTunes in the Cloud, but for music that you haven’t purchased through iTunes!

You can pay a minute fee, of $24.99 a year, to have iTunes match all of your collection against the database of 18 million songs, and allow you to stream them all from the cloud.

Not only that, but it will upgrade the quality of all of the songs it can match to 256-Kbps AAC. And, as if that weren’t enough, iCloud will upload and store all of the songs that it can’t match – for $24.99!

iCloud

This is an incredible, and somewhat unmatchable offer from Apple – a tidal shift in the way people access, and store, their music.

Final Thoughts

Even without any hardware announcements, WWDC was ridiculously packed with new features and interesting software developments. I’m really looking forward to getting my iOS devices onto iOS 5!

The biggest move of the night by Apple was, however, undoubtedly iCloud. It is a huge step towards transforming the way we use our computers, interact with and store our content, and share our lives.

Your Comments

As always, we’d love to hear your thoughts – simply post a comment below! Were you following along, what did you make of the iCloud announcement?

As a final note, if you’re concerned, or interested, in what is happening to the MobileMe service then simple check out the information from Apple here.

In today’s WWDC keynote, Apple shared the usual set of Mac statistics that we now almost take for granted. Notebook and desktop sales are up, the platform continues to outgrow the PC industry as a whole, and everything is going swimmingly. There’s still a major bias toward portable computers – 73% of Macs sold are notebooks.

One of the headline stories centred around what to expect in their next operating system — OS X Lion — due for release in July 2011. Not only did Apple announce that this will be a download-only release through the Mac App Store, but it’s also their lowest priced operating system to date, costing $29.99.

Let’s take a look at what you can expect from the big cat!

Multi-Touch Gestures

You’ll now find that scroll bars only appear when you scroll – they’re hidden the rest of the time. The argument for this is that they’re no longer needed, as scrolling is done using your multi-touch device rather than clicking and dragging the scrollbar.

I’m all for reducing clutter, and this seems like a good idea on the whole. That said, I can imagine my grandparents wanting to turn this back on, or it becoming a major problem if you don’t have a scroll mouse. I expect this will be a setting rather than a forced change.

Gestures such as pinch to zoom and double tap zoom in the browser now work just like Mobile Safari, and a two-finger swipe takes you back or forward through your browser history (something I’m particularly looking forward to).

Full-Screen Apps

Most of the default OS X apps are now ready for full-screen prime time, and this is a feature we’ve been expecting since the early information about Lion was released. This is now implemented better throughout the OS, and with this comes a few tweaks to various apps.

Mail in Full Screen

Photo Booth, for instance, now offers “face detection effects” to target particular facial features. You’ll also see the interface change in apps such as Safari and iLife to make the most of this extra screen real-estate when in full-screen mode.

Mission Control

A simple gesture takes you to Mission Control, giving you a bird’s-eye view of everything on your system. It’s like Exposé + Spaces combined, with a space reserved for your Dashboard widgets as well.

Mission Control

Spaces are integrated in a slick manner, and can easily be created and deleted on-the-fly. It’s much more versatile than the previous method employed which always felt a little clunky.

Mac App Store

We already know that the Mac App Store has been a huge success, and the scale is impressive. Pixelmator made $1m within the first twenty days of the store’s launch.

The Mac App Store is built right in to Lion, and comes bundled with new features like in-app purchase, push notifications, and faster updating. This is done using “delta updating”, which means you don’t need to re-download the entire app when updating, just the resources/files that have changed.

Launchpad

Launchpad, in a nutshell, is the iOS application launcher on your desktop. You have the same icons, folders, and screens. Incredibly useful for some people, but not likely to replace your keyboard-based application launcher any time soon…

Launchpad

Resume

Occasionally, you don’t notice that something was really a big problem until a solution is given to you. Resume is one of those solutions, and means that your Mac will save its current state whenever you log out or restart. It’ll save everything – open apps, documents, web pages – you name it.

Whenever you close an app, it remembers exactly what you were doing before – right down to the text you had selected!

Auto Save

Another computer niggle you might have is the compulsive feeling of wanting to click “Save” every thirty seconds. No more, say Apple! Lion will automatically save everything in the background as you work, taking away the need to manually hit Command-S (though you can manually “Lock” a file to prevent it being auto-saved).

Versions

In conjunction with the Auto Save feature, you’ll also find that automatic file versioning is built in to the operating system. The appropriately (but unfortunately for some) named “Versions” will automatically store each saved version of the file as you work on a document.

Autosave & Versions

It’s done with efficient storage (so only the variations of each file are changed, not the entire copy). Browsing through versions takes on a Time Machine-eque interface, and everything can be manipulated live – you can make any version the “current” one, and easily copy-and-paste between them.

AirDrop

Gone are the days of storing files on a USB flash drive to transfer them between computers. AirDrop is a new service that makes it simple to drag-and-drop a file to any other Mac on the same local network.

AirDrop appears in the sources panel within Finder, and you can see a display of yourself and the people around you running AirDrop at the same time. It uses a peer-to-peer Wi-Fi, requires no setup, and automatically encrypts the data you send.

If you never quite got to grips with your Mac’s public folder, this is a great addition to the OS.

Mail

Mail has received a major overhaul in OS X Lion, and it’s a welcome addition. You’ll find a heavily redesigned interface that’s notably simplified, with either a two or three column view (it, of course, works full-screen). The new Mail app borrows heavily from the iOS version.

Mail Redesigned

One of the most powerful features in Mail is new logic-based search suggestions. You can quickly search for people, subjects, dates, and more, with natural language. These can be combined and saved as multiple “search tokens” to quickly sift through and find the message you’re looking for.

Mail in Lion also has a brand new conversation view, that shows you the entire thread that you can just scroll through, with attachments and accompanying information. You can drag a whole conversation if you want to file it away in a folder or archive.

Pricing & Availability

As mentioned previously, Apple is making Lion available for the ridiculously low price of $29.99. This compares to pre-Snow Leopard releases priced at over $100, and is a clear sign that Apple hopes to get as many users as possible transitioned over to the new operating system.

Also, for the first time on any platform that I’m aware of, the OS upgrade is solely available as a download. You’ll need to follow Apple’s instructions to be ready to install on day one:

If anything is going to test the stability and capacity of Apple’s new data centre, millions of eager Mac users attempting to download Lion at precisely the time should do the trick. We’ll need to wait until July to see how it holds up!

Many people have bandwidth limits with their ISPs, and with the amount of tempting content on the web these days, it can be hard to stick within these limits. Enter this week’s sponsor — Rubbernet — a new app from Conceited Software which tracks what apps are accessing your network connection, and how much bandwidth they are using.

Not only is this useful for monitoring bandwidth usage, but it can be used to detect any software which might be secretly sending out personal data of yours. Rubbernet is a remarkably useful application, and sports a very pretty interface.

If you have a cap on your bandwidth – or regularly use mobile internet/tethering – this is a fantastic way to keep an eye on what’s going on. I’d definitely recommend giving it a try, and downloading the free trial that’s available from the Rubbernet website.

If you’re already a fan, let us know in the comments!

Desktop apps that aim to work along with popular web apps are a pretty common niche in the market, as they make it much faster and easier to use certain features of those websites by always remaining open in your desktop and allowing you to use features like drag-and-drop that might not be as easy to find on a web app.

The app that we are reviewing today is made for quickly publishing pictures and videos over popular social networks like Facebook and Flickr, from your desktop. It’s called Poster.

Getting Started

Poster

The first thing you’ll notice when you open the app is that you’ll be asked if you want to download plugins for Aperture and iPhoto. You’ll be taken to a webpage where you can download a package that makes it work with those two apps.

The interface is very simple. There is no introduction or setup process other than the aforementioned plugin. Once you get into the app the only thing you’ll see is a big screen with a camera, and a legend that reads “Drag photos and videos here”.

Once you try to upload something for the first time, you’ll be shown a few options that allow you to set up your accounts. With Poster you can connect to a Facebook, SmugMug or Flickr account. You have to authorize all of those in order to get Poster working correctly.

Verification will take you to the page of the service where you’ll have to authorize Poster. Once you are done with this, you are free to upload your pictures. It’s also good that you can add more than one Flickr account or one Facebook account, and you can even use Facebook as a fan page.

Posting

Posting

Now, whenever you open the app, you’ll see the same screen, but after you drag-and-drop a file, you’ll be asked to select which of your accounts you want to upload it to. After that, you’ll see a screen where you can add more pictures or enter a description and tags to the pictures that you already have.

It’s worth noting that you can enter the tags and description individually or just apply them to a whole group of pictures, which is very convenient. Also, the settings you can add to each picture change depending on where you want to upload them. For example, in Flickr you get tags, groups and description; while in Facebook you get to add it to a new or existing album and add titles, as well as change the privacy.

Other Extra Settings

It’s very nice to have other features that are pretty essential for apps like Facebook. For example, you can tag faces from Facebook friends by clicking on a picture to expand it and then going to the face-shaped button on the toolbar. You can also perform basic operations like rotating pictures and resizing them.

You don’t have to drag-and-drop pictures every time – you can open folders or sets of pictures by going into the file menu and browsing to your files.

Uploading

Uploading

Once you are done adding descriptions and so on, clicking the “Post” button on the right bottom corner will send them to the service of your preference. You’ll get a screen where you can see the progress of the upload.

The app isn’t super-fast at uploading, but it isn’t annoyingly slow either. I could see it getting complicated posting more than 100 pictures because of the speed. You’ll get a Growl notification once your pictures are uploaded, and you’ll also see a screen of the app that will notify you of the operation and give you a handy button to quickly access the service that you uploaded your pics to.

Everything seems to work just fine with Facebook and Flickr. The descriptions and tags translate very well from Poster to the web apps. I couldn’t find any compatibility problems, at least not any noticeable ones.

Limitations

Limitations

Of course, when an app is simple, it usually lacks functionality in some form. Poster isn’t an exception, and has a few niggles that I’d like to see fixed in a future version.

For example, you can’t add a picture to more than one account. If you want to add the same set of pics to both Facebook and Flickr, you have to upload them to one of them first with a set of information, and then upload them again with information to the other service. Also, you can’t upload videos larger than 150 MB, or longer than 1:30.

Other than that, the app is really impressive.

Conclusion

As you can see, this is a very simple app with all the necessary features for posting pictures. The truth is, it doesn’t really give you anything that the web apps don’t; it does exactly what they do and nothing else. It offers an easier and faster way to post pictures from your desktop, without having to go into every web service.

I guess if you’ve ever thought that you need a desktop app to upload pictures to the web, then you might find this useful. If you’ve never even thought about it, this app probably won’t rock your life. Would you be willing to pay $10 for an app like this?

Recently we toured the interface of iMovie ‘11 in a screencast. This provided an overview of how to create a project in iMovie, and how to get your videos into your project. Today we’re back with something a little more in-depth!

In this video, we’re going to look at slicing, trimming, and editing your videos. I’ll show you how to go over your movie with a fine-toothed comb, making sure that you make those cuts right where you want them. By the end of this short tutorial, you’ll be on your way to becoming a video surgeon.

Watch the Video

Using an iPhone/iPad? You can watch the video here.

Wrap Up

With some simple keyboard shortcuts like Shift + Command + S, you can become quite adept at slicing up your videos. And to select portions of a clip en masse, just click and drag from where you want to begin the selection, to where you want to stop.

The beauty of a well-designed application, is that it allows for power, yet remains simple. That’s the pinnacle of quality from an app developer, and Apple is always so adept at doing that. It’s especially evident in iMovie ‘11.

I hope you feel ready now, willing to start slicing and dicing your videos with confidence. Just remember, there’s always Command + Z if you make a mistake.

We’ve collected the top four reviews, roundups and how-to articles from across the AppStorm network in May. Whether you’re interested in Mac, iPhone, iPad, Web, or Android apps, there’s bound to be something you didn’t spot over the course of the month. Now would be a good time to explore a part of the AppStorm Network you’ve never seen before!

Thanks for reading AppStorm, and I hope you enjoy looking over some of our favourite posts from last month!

Best of iPad.AppStorm

Best of Android.AppStorm

Best of iPhone.AppStorm

Best of Web.AppStorm

Best of Mac.AppStorm

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Is there something in particular you’d like to see on the site next month? We’d absolutely love to hear your suggestions for articles, topics and giveaways. Just let us know in the comments. Thanks for reading AppStorm!