Category: Mac

Here at AppStorm, we’re huge fans of Dropbox. It’s fast, incredibly useful, and extremely easy to use. How can you go wrong with it?

That said, there are always ways to improve an app – and DropIn aims to do just that. Add some extra functionality to Dropbox in order to make your life even easier. You can get notified of changes made to your files, and quickly upload files by dropping them in the menu bar icon.

Is DropIn an incredible boost to an already awesome app, or just another unnecessary extension? Read on to find out.

Getting Started

DropIn is available exclusively to the Mac App Store, and costs just $1.99. Unfortunately, many people will run away as soon as they see any price tag at all, but think about it – you’d pay that much for a chocolate bar that would be gone in a few minutes, so why not pay that for an app that you’ll use on a daily basis?

Installation is, as you’d expect with the App Store, very easy – hit the purchase button and it’ll download straight away. When you first open it up, there isn’t any need to log in to DropBox. Simply tell DropIn where your Dropbox folder is located and it’ll do the rest – couldn’t be easier!

Notifications

Many people use Dropbox for collaborating on projects, using a shared folder. But how do you know when somebody has made a change to a document? Sure, they could contact you, or you could regularly check the files yourself, but that isn’t all that efficient.

DropIn allows you to be notified whenever a file is changed via Growl’s notification system. You can decide to be notified if a new file is created in DropBox, if a file is modified, if a file is removed, or all three. If you Dropbox for collaboration, this will be a crucial feature that you have to get.

If you’re constantly working in Dropbox altering, creating and deleting files, you certainly won’t want a notification every few seconds from DropIn. Luckily for you, the app developers have incorporated a feature which can save you from these woes – Filters.

You can quickly add rules which will narrow the number of files you get notified about. So if you wanted to only be notified when PDFs in your Public folder were edited, simply set up that rule.

Droplets

One of my most used apps is CloudApp – a simple file-sharing app which sits in your menu bar which you drag a file into, it’ll upload it and pop out a link to send to a friend. Whilst it’s a wonderful app, the free version has a few limitations – you can only upload 10 files a day, and file size is limited to 25MB.

These limitations are removed in the premium version of CloudApp, but it costs over €4/month (about $5.60/month). This is by no means a lot of money, but when DropIn can do the same job for a once off price of $1.99, it’s a no-brainer, really.

To turn DropIn into a CloudApp alternative, just direct DropIn to your Public folder, and enter your Dropbox user ID.

If you’re not sure what your user ID is, it’s not hard to find. In the public URL of a file, there should be a number after “/u/”. That’s your user ID.

Once you’ve entered that into DropIn, you’re ready to go. Drag a file into the DropIn menu bar icon, it’ll upload, and the icon will go blue. The public URL is automatically copied to your clipboard.

Unfortunately, there’s no easy way to copy a public URL later on, via DropIn. So if you want to share a file you uploaded a few days ago, you’ll have to go into your Dropbox folder in Finder and get the link. Aside from that feature, it’s generally better than CloudApp – It has unlimited uploads and file size – the only limitation is the amount of storage you have in Dropbox.

When you upload a file, or if it is altered, you can view a few details about it – its name, location, date of creation and file size, and there are links to view the file in Finder or open it in the default app for that file type. There is also a thumbnail of the file.

One particular use I can think of for it is if you are working with a freelancer, such as a graphic designer, and they are uploading revisions to a shared Dropbox folder. You can quickly see what has changed before opening the file to see it in full detail.

Of course, you don’t have to use the droplets feature to upload to the Public folder – It can upload to any directory you wish. In fact, it doesn’t even have to be a Dropbox directory – You could link it to your “Automatically Add to iTunes” folder, and add music to iTunes just by dragging it into your menu bar. The opportunities are limited only by your imagination.

Conclusion

DropIn hasn’t got a wealth of features, but it has enough to warrant a purchase, and the features it does have it excels at. If you’re looking to improve the functionality of Dropbox, DropIn is certainly a great place to start. Does it justify its price? With a price of $1.99, I think it has justified its price within a few hours of use.

Has it replaced CloudApp for me? Well, for everyday use, no – CloudApp is designed for that purpose, and it shows. However, for bigger files, DropIn is a great alternative.

With Apple’s WWDC (Worldwide Developer Conference) coming up on June 6th, forums and message boards across the internet are filling up with speculation about what is going to be announced. Apple are inviting us to “join us for a preview of the future of iOS and Mac OS X” and it’s set to be the most popular WWDC yet.

The event was sold out within 12 hours, faster than any other WWDC and tickets for the event were reportedly being sold on sites such as eBay and Craigslist for as high as $4,599, nearly triple the face value of $1,599. This popularity can only mean two things: Apple is planning to release a major new version of Mac OS X and, possibly, a new version of iOS, the sister version of OS X designed for the popular iPhone and iPad.

The new version of Mac OS X, Lion, is set to be a major overhaul of Apple’s default operating system and was announced in October 2010 in a keynote entitled, quite fittingly, “Back to the Mac”.

The last major rework of Mac OS X was seen back in 2007 with the release of Leopard (Snow Leopard, released in August 2009, simply optimized certain areas of the OS), so the OS was in need of some modernization to keep it competitive. Three previews of the new operating system have already been released to developers via private previews and some new features have already been noticed however, in true Apple-style, they will surely save the best bits for the official announcement.

Let’s take a look at what we can expect from Steve Jobs’s keynote on the latest version of Mac OS X.

Launchpad

As promised, Apple wanted to take some features from its popular line of tablet computers, the iPad, and integrate them into Mac OS X. Launchpad does just this. Instead of launching apps from the Finder, your apps appear in a grid (much like iOS) from which you launch them there.

Launchpad feels more like a bit of eye candy than anything practical and anyone using application launchers such as Alfred may not be amazed by this new feature, however it will be a nice change to simply launching your apps from the Finder or from Stacks.

Mission Control

Think of Mission Control as a mixture of the Dashboard and Expose with some extra bits thrown in. You can see all your apps running as well as allowing easy access to your Dashboard.

Mission Control was designed to bring together Dashboard, Exposé and Spaces and is easily accessible – simply move your mouse to a hot corner. I personally use Expose the most however I feel that with Mission Control, with everything in one place, I will find myself using Dashboard and Spaces much more.

AirDrop

Apple is hoping to rival DropCopy in releasing AirDrop, a service which allows you to send and receive files between Macs. According to Apple’s blurb, AirDrop will be integrated into the Finder and developers have already given positive feedback regarding the new feature, citing its practicality and endless possibilities.

The only problem is that the Macs all need to be on the same WiFi network (for the time being anyway), but we may see the service expand in the future, allowing you to send documents to any Mac (as long as you know the person’s Apple ID). It’ll certainly be a welcome feature to anyone who does a lot of document sharing over their local network.

Mail 5

There’s another nod towards the iPad here with an overhaul of Apple’s default e-mail program, Mail. Your e-mails are listed in a Conversation view and the interface borrows heavily from the iPad version of Mail (the two are almost carbon copies of each other).

This overhaul of Mail may be Apple’s way of trying to draw people back to using OS X’s default e-mail client, given the rise in popularity of alternative mail clients such as Postbox and Sparrow. Anyone who already uses Mail as their default mail program will definitely welcome the changes.

Versions

Versions, coupled along with Lion’s new Auto Save feature, saves a version of what you are working on every hour so if anything does happen to your computer, you don’t lose all your work.

Versions has an interface similar to Time Machine however only works with applications that are specifically designed to work with Lion. This also prompts possible speculation about an iWork update, possibly to iWork ’11 (seeing as the last update was in 2009) and updates to Microsoft Office in order to enable compatibility with Versions.

Server Capabilities

Instead of releasing separate versions for servers and workstations, Apple will release one version of Lion, which contains tools designed to turn your Mac easily into a server.

Other features include wireless file sharing with the iPad and Wiki Server 3, which makes it easier to share and exchange information over the local network. This will certainly be a plus to business users as server management is simplified and there is no need to purchase a separate version of the OS. It may also encourage home users to delve into the world of home networking!

Bye Front Row

Front Row, Apple’s media center software, will disappear from Lion. Why is anyone’s guess. Maybe because they wanted to force users to buy Apple TV (which has similar features) or maybe due to the rise of third-party media center software. If you’re a die-hard Front Row user, consider free alternatives such as Boxee or XBMC, which both have more features.

Full Screen Apps

iLife ’11, released in October 2010, gave us all a whiff of full-screen apps and Lion promises to integrate this fully into the new release. It will also allow third-party developers to develop full screen apps for the new release.

The support of full-screen apps in Lion is another nod towards to the iPad and will be a welcome addition to most users as it allows distraction-free work and takes advantage of the whole screen.

Find My Mac?

Developers who pulled apart the preview of Lion found a hidden feature in it, entitled com.apple.FindMyMac, hinting that Apple may well be planning a service which allows you to track your Mac wherever it is, handy if your Mac is stolen.

This service may use location services over WiFi to determine the exact location of your Mac (unlike the similar service in the iPhone, which uses the in-built GPS). There is also speculation of the possibility of remotely wiping your Mac if it does fall into the wrong hands, a service which will give peace of mind to many users.

iCloud?

Apple recently purchased the domain name icloud.com off the Swedish technology firm Xcerion AB for a cool $4.5 million, hinting that this feature may be announced at the WWDC. Rumours hovering around on the Net cite that iCloud is a complete synchronization service for all your computer, backing up your e-mails and other information to Apple servers.

The possible introduction of iCloud along with Lion may also be the final nail in the coffin for MobileMe, Apple’s current online service, touted mainly due to the high annual subscription fee of $99. Apple stopped selling MobileMe in its stores in late February, which may hint that the service is gradually being phased out.

Pricing?

Most people are thinking that all these fancy new features will come at a cost, however the official price of Lion has not yet been announced. It is most likely that Lion will be priced somewhere around the $99 mark, however Apple may offer a discounted version to anyone upgrading from Snow Leopard, as they did with the previous Leopard to Snow Leopard upgrade.

It is important to note, however, that Lion is a major overhaul of Mac OS X, unlike Snow Leopard, therefore Apple may be slightly inclined towards charging a higher price. Anyone who has recently bought a Mac (i.e. in the last three months), may benefit from a cheaper upgrade however this has yet to be announced.

Conclusion

Of course, all these changes are probably just the tip of the iceberg and Apple surely has a few tricks up their sleeve for the upcoming keynote at the WWDC. I am certainly very excited about the announcement – I’m sure the proposed changes will add to the functionality of OS X, and reiterate its position as a stable, functional and practical operating system.

With all these new features plus a promised overhaul of Aqua, the default interface of Mac OS X, Lion is set to be a landmark release and one that people will be talking about for a long time. One thing can be certain though: when Steve Jobs gets on the stage at the Moscone Center in San Francisco dressed in his trademark St Croix turtleneck in just over a week’s time, all eyes will be on him, waiting with baited breath to see what the staff at Apple HQ in Cupertino have been cooking up.

We’d like to say a big thank you to this month’s Mac.AppStorm sponsors, and the great software they create! If you’re interested in advertising, you can purchase a banner advertisement through BuySellAds, or sign up for a Weekly Sponsorship slot.

Thank you to the fantastic applications we had sponsoring each week during the month, all of which we personally recommend you download and try out!

• Forklift – Now in a seasoned version 2 release, Forklift offers everything you could need from an FTP client. It’s capable of connecting to more or less any type of server imaginable, can split/combine large files, synchronise browsing, and remotely edit files – all with full keyboard control.
• TextExpander Touch – TextExpander touch replicate the text-expanding magic on your iPhone or iPod touch, and it does so very well! You can store snippets, then quickly retrieve them to send to Mail and Twitter clients, or use them in any other app via copy-and-paste.
• SoftFacade – SoftFacade specialize in designing user interfaces for mobile apps, websites and the media – and their work is absolutely fantastic.
• Smoke – Not your usual graphics editor, Smoke is all about creating unique graphical effects. It offers a unique type of brush that renders stunning graphics with the simplest mouse movements.
• Radium – Radium allows you to listen to thousands of radio stations from around the world, right from your OS X menu bar. It’s simple, functional, and an absolutely fantastic way to listen to the radio on your Mac.

Finally, thanks to you for reading AppStorm this month, and for checking out the software that our sponsors create. I really appreciate it – you make the site what it is!

Graphic designers need to consider a number of crucial design elements when creating work – layout, colour, dimensions, typography – you name it, a designer will have to incorporate it into their designs. Although Photoshop can handle most of a designer’s needs, there are many parts of a design which you’ll need other software for.

Art Director’s Toolkit from Code Line tries to fulfill all of a designer’s needs. It has tools for layout, colour, dimensions, typography – a total of 11 tools.

In this review, we’ll discover if it’s a designer’s perfect companion, of whether they’ve made several good tools rather than one great one.

Getting Started

Art Directors Toolkit can be bought from the Mac App Store or the Code Line store for $19.99. If you’d rather try before you buy, a 15-launch trial is also available. 15 launches turns out to be quite generous, if you, like me, turn your computer off once a week at best.

If you download the app via the traditional DMG method, you can install it simply by dragging the icon into your Applications folder, a method we all know and love. Alternatively, buying via the App Store is even easier – purchase it, and it’ll jump right into your dock.

Interface

As an app focused towards designers, you would expect this app to have a beautiful interface full of aesthetic goodness. Unfortunately, that is far from the truth. The interface looks dated and uninspired, with icons that aren’t all that sharp. It also looks a little cluttered – it would be nice to see a little more negative space.

Usability-wise, it’s quite straightforward – Each icon in the toolbar represents a different tool. It’s quite easy to figure out what each icon represents, possible exceptions being the launcher and the “Number” utility.

Utilities

Number

This tool allows you to handle dimensions and units effectively. You can convert fractions to decimals, and vice versa. You can also convert between certain units (in this case, inches, cm, mm, points, picas and pixels), and get the dimensions for a large list of paper sizes (unfortunately the pixel dimensions are not at 300dpi, which is the printing standard). Whilst not a revolutionary tool, this can come in quite handy, and in a very quick Google search, I couldn’t find anything better.

RGB

Designers deal with RGB colours all the time, and this utility is essentially a colour picker. It has some swatches to choose from, although the selection is limited. To be perfectly honest, it’s nothing you can’t do in Photoshop, and at least Photoshop has a visual colour picker to fine tune your colour. Perhaps the only redeeming feature was the eyedropper, although it took me a while to find that, as the icon (a magnifying glass) was not the metaphor I was expecting whatsoever.

Blend

One colour picking feature which Photoshop does not have is the ability to blend colours. This tool allows you to choose two colours from either a list of Pantone colours, an RGB colour or a CMYK colour, and then blend them to find a colour in-between. It doesn’t necessarily have to be 50% of both, you can change the percentage to find the perfect mix. This is a very useful tool, and the only worthy alternative I could find was part of ColorSchemer Studio, but that app will set you back $49.99.

Swatch

With this utility, you can search 6 colour libraries, including 4 Pantone libraries, to find a colour swatch that works for you. You can then find the RGB, HSB, CMYK, Lab and Hex values for that certain colour. Access to Pantone libraries is certainly beneficial, and I couldn’t find them in other similar tools. Not a bad feature if you use Pantone libraries, but if you don’t, it probably won’t do much for you.

Symbol

This one is more for the web developers than the designers. It allows you to browse various glyphs, and find ASCII, Hex, Unicode, HTML and Glyph values for them, as well as the keyboard shortcut to type them. You can also view the glyphs in any font you wish, which means you can see how extensive a certain font is. It seems to handle fonts quite well, and doesn’t crack under the pressure of some of the heavier fonts.

Text

This utility lets you preview text in any of the fonts you own. Like the previous tool, it’ll handle fonts quite well, although can go awry with a bulky font at 300pt. Nevertheless, it works fine under normal circumstances, and you can flick through different fonts very quickly with the arrow keys. It certainly seems faster than Apple’s own FontBook. My only issue is that you can’t extend the window, so any large type you’ll have to observe by a bit of scrolling, which is far from ideal.

Scale

With this tool, you can find the dimensions of a document is scaled up/down by a certain percentage, or find the percentage change if it is scaled to a certain dimension. Whilst this may be useful, Photoshop does it automatically, so there really is no need for it, in my opinion.

Layout

This tool is used to create grids and layouts, and is quite straightforward to use – Set your canvas dimensions, the number of rows and/or columns, and their respective width/gutter width. The grid can then be copied to clipboard and pasted as a vector object in your image editor of choice. There are countless grid generators out there, and personally, this isn’t one of the best, but it does the job.

Ruler

No prizes for guessing what this tool does – It’s an onscreen ruler! It’ll stay on top of all windows and can be used to calculate dimensions in a number of units. There are a few free alternatives out there, but I personally prefer the look of this one, and since it comes with the app anyway, why not use it?

Palette

This is a little panel which you can drag colours you create in the RGB, Blend and Swatch tools into, which are then stored for later use. It’s not dissimilar to Photoshop’s Swatches panel, and it isn’t something I can see myself using an awful lot.

Launcher

This is another little panel which you can files, folders and applications to for quick access. Unfortunately, it is only accessible in the menu bar and the app itself, meaning you have to have the full app open, and there is also no way to access them via the keyboard. Personally, Alfred does the job just fine, and there doesn’t seem much need for this feature.

Conclusion

Some of the tools here serve very little purpose, some are very useful. I don’t feel there’s any need to have access to tools I don’t use, and it would make better sense for them to sell each tool as individual menu bar apps for a couple of dollars each. That way, we could pick which apps we wanted, rather than having 11 tools bundled together with no choice but to buy them all.

That said, in general, the app is quite useful, and with a redesign and a little tweaking, could be something great. Does it, in its current state, justify a price tag of $19.99? For me, no, due to the fact that I didn’t have any use for many of the tools. Ultimately, however, it’s your decision, and if the tools could benefit you, go for it!

Although we’re big proponents of the virtues of desktop software at Mac.AppStorm, there’s no denying that web apps are improving at a fantastic rate. They’re very much here to stay and, in some cases, offer a lot more functionality than anything that’s available on the desktop.

Our sister site, Web.AppStorm, yesterday posted a phenomenal roundup of web apps that provides a big overview of the wealth of fantastic software available online.

Whether you’re just getting started using web apps, or are a longtime fan and would like to find more exciting apps, you’ll be sure to find something interesting here. There’s no way to include every web app, but we’ve included the apps that we think are the very best in their categories.

Read 100 Web Apps to Rule Them All

I’m pleased to let you know that we’re kicking off a competition to win ten copies of SideFolders. This app aims to give you quick and easy access to your recent, and regularly used, files and folders through a useful sidebar panel that appears on your desktop. We recently reviewed the app, and this might be a good place to start if you’d like to find out more.

Entering the competition is really simple – all you need to do is leave a comment on the post. That’s it! Let us know why you’d like to win, tell us a funny story, or just have a short rant about your complex sidebar needs…

The competition will run for one week, and I’ll pick ten winning comments at random on Wednesday 8th June. Best of luck, and be sure to check out SideFolders in the meantime and download a trial copy!

No matter if you are attending school, college or self-teaching yourself, your Mac can be a valuable tool to help you accomplish your goals. We’ve rounded up 9 fantastic apps which will help you to teach and organize yourself better than ever, hopefully getting you on the road to improving your knowledge.

Whether you’re wanting to learn a language, improve your math, or structure an academic course, there’ll be something for you in today’s roundup.!

Find Something for Your Needs?

Now, while we know that this list is far from comprehensive, we hope we could at least point you in the right direction. There are many fantastic apps out there which can support you in your learning goals and – thanks to their diversity – the chances are you will find something that will be just right for you.

What kind of apps do you already use to help you with your assignments? Tell us about your experiences and share your workflow with our readers. There’s still a lot to learn.

WWDC 2011 is just around the corner, and both developers and users have high expectations. This is the annual conference for Apple developers and, since they no longer exhibit at Macworld, is the one “official” platform that Apple uses each year for announcing software and hardware upgrades.

Although Apple has strongly implied that we won’t see any updated iPhone hardware, it’s difficult to be completely sure of what to expect.

It’s likely that the two main areas of focus will be iOS 5, and OS X Lion – two major software updates that Apple will be releasing this year. Both of these hold lots of promise, and we’re still not sure of the exact features that either will offer.

Although Lion has been available as a developer beta for a while, it’s not unheard of for Apple to announce extra features and functionality nearer the launch date.

Speculation surrounding “iCloud” is also rife, with some people hoping for a cloud music service (this seems likely), and others wanting an official Apple file-synchronisation system akin to Dropbox. We’ll have to wait and see!

I’d be interested to know which of these you are particularly looking forward to, and what you’ll be hoping to see announced. Of course, another big question is whether we’ll see Steve Jobs presenting. I certainly hope so.

OS X comes with CD and DVD burning capabilities built-in, so you might have managed so far without needing to install a separate app. When I reinstalled Snow Leopard a few months back, I decided to keep my system as lean as possible, since my old Core Duo MacBook has been showing its age. I only installed applications as a real need for them arose.

As it happens, one of the very first apps I added was for burning discs, since I found the native OS X burning seemed to be slower, and certainly gave me less control of how discs are burned.

I had previously had an earlier version of Toast installed, but I decided not to return to that outdated software, and instead went with a free burner app that had good reviews on MacUpdate. Recently, Roxio released the newest version of Toast, and I’m very glad to have updated.

Though there are lightweight apps that can do some of the things Toast does, and there are many cheaper, and even free, programs available, I believe Toast remains best-in-class. And if you go for the Pro version, it’s actually very good value – but more on that later.

Getting Started

The first thing to say, of course, is that Toast 11 is capable of very much more than simple disc burning. That pretty icon gives it all away: notice that one slot on the toaster holds a silver shiny disc, and the other contains an iPhone 4. On the physical packaging, the slots also contain an iPad and a video camera.

Toast sets out to be an all around media suite, and to bridge your capture and viewing or listening devices. Increasingly, it seems to me, the burning capabilities are important, but almost an add-on to everything else Toast can do.

But let’s start with disc burning anyway… When you open Toast, you’re greeted by a Projects Assistant:

That simple list probably covers most users’ needs for CD and DVD authoring. Switching to ‘View Advanced Projects’ via the pulldown menu at the top right adds options to burn an ISO 9660 format disc and to burn UDF format DVD ROMs. From here on I’m going to stick with the Common Projects list, since it likely contains the types of task most people are going to want to do.

The five different tabs give easy access to most of the functions available, from burning MP3 CDs or music DVDs (with neat menu based navigation for use on your DVD player), DVD discs, including Blu-ray video (with Toast 11 Pro), copying unprotected discs, burning image files, and converting between various different file formats (including batch converting audio and video files, and converting audiobook CDs to chaptered audio files).

You can choose to switch off the assistant altogether by unticking that ‘Show this window when Toast opens’ box at the bottom left – that’s what I would usually do, but in this case, I actually find it quite useful, so I’m continuing with the Assistant.

Working With Files

Once you’ve selected your Project type, you come to the main Toast window:

From here you can opt to change your previous Project choice by switching to another of the tabs, or to tweak the settings for your Project by using the pull-down menu at top left.

You can add files either by dragging and dropping them into the main interface window, by clicking on the Add Files button and navigating to your source, or you can use the Media browser in the right hand panel to find files locally or across your network.

As you add files, the progress bar on the bottom line will fill up, showing how much space you have remaining on your target disc. This works the same way across the Data, Audio, Video, and Copy tabs:

Converting and Working With Video

Things are slightly different under the Convert section:

Here you get to specify your preferred output size, and the graph shows how close your file is getting to that limit. I have my system set up to convert to best quality Apple TV format, which is easily adjusted by clicking on the bottom bar and choosing your preferred settings from the panel that slides down:

Other choices include direct conversion for viewing on iPad or iPhone. If you have an Elgato Turbo.264 plugged in, Toast will automatically use that to speed up your video conversion. And if you have a newer Mac with a Nvidia graphics card, the app will use VideoBoost to convert more quickly.

There is tremendous power and flexibility hidden away in the Edit menus in this section. You can do basic video editing from within the app, and some quite detailed audio processing too.

These features are also available from the Video tab, which is focused on outputting video either to disc or to archives or folders. You can also share video to Facebook, Youtube, or Vimeo, so once you’ve transferred clips from your camera, you can quickly upload them – and even tweet the address of the uploaded videos from within Toast.

This is also where you get to select menu styles and personalisation of your finalised disc. Toast has a bunch of built in styles for you to choose from:

Web Video

A nice feature that’s included under the Video section is the ability to record online video. Simply open a site in your browser and then switch to the Video section of the media browser in Toast and select Web Video, and your video will be picked up by Toast and downloaded for conversion or burning to disc. You can also watch a Quick Look-style preview as it downloads…

This worked perfectly with Chrome and Safari, and even with a video embedded in a RSS feed viewed in Reeder. There are many different options available for downloading web video, but this is a particularly simple and elegant option.

Going Pro

Toast comes in two flavours: Toast 11 Titanium and Toast 11 Pro. In terms of core functions, there’s no difference between these two versions, but you get a whole lot more for your money for the Pro version. The extras come in the form of bundled apps.

So, along with the disc burning and media conversion we’ve already mentioned, you get the following: FotoMagico 3 to create slideshows of your photos and videos (our review here), SoundSoap for removing noise from audio and video files, SmartSound Sonicfire Pro 5 for making your own soundtracks, and a plugin that adds Blu-ray Disc burning to Toast. And last, but by no means least, Adobe Photoshop Elements 9. This last in some ways seems almost an arbitrary addition: you can burn images to disc, so why not add good photo editing software? Why not indeed. Opinions differ on Elements, but it’s a powerful and capable editor.

Conclusion

Now, for a disc burning app, $130 is a lot to pay. But when you consider that Photoshop Elements on its own sells for $80, and you take account of the value of all the different bundled apps, that price tag doesn’t seem too high at all. Of course, that’s assuming that you will make use of all the extra apps. I’m unlikely to use anything but Toast and Elements, but even so I consider it good value.

Though Toast and all its extras take up a whole lot of space, and between them have more options and more hitting power than most users will ever need, the range of things Toast Pro can do – and do well – could allow you to get rid of several other apps and centralise a number of different tasks. For instance, with Toast installed, do you really need a separate video encoding app? For most users, probably not.

As it happens, I quite rarely burn discs anymore, so though this review started with burning CDs and DVDs, I think it’ll be the video and media aspects of Toast that I use most of all. The MacBook Air – with no SuperDrive – is a bet on users making less use of discs now and in the future. And the Apple TV is a good demonstration of how we might in the future share the media we previously relied on discs for.

What do you think? Do you use discs much anymore? And do you have extra software installed or rely on OS X’s built-in abilities?

Our sponsor this week is Radium, a lightweight internet radio player with a wonderfully retro icon! Radium allows you to listen to thousands of radio stations from around the world, right from your OS X menu bar. It’s simple, functional, and an absolutely fantastic way to listen to the radio on your Mac.

In our recent review, we gave Radium a lofty 9/10 rating. For such a simple and understated application, it packs a real functionality punch.

If you like this app as much as we do, you might want to check out the brand new Radium Store with a big collection of fantastic Radium t-shirts! These are super-cool, in a range of different colours and sizes.

Be sure to spend a few minutes giving Radium a try today – you’ll be glad you did!

Have you ever been using a website, or one of your less-than-favourite Mac apps, and found yourself needing to write a long essay, letter or work with some text? Hated being constrained to writing e-mails on gmail.com, or typing your blog post into the cluttered WordPress panel?

It’s a common complaint, and there’s nothing worse than writing in an environment that doesn’t feel natural. I was there myself just a few days ago. That is, until I ran across QuickCursor.

What Is QuickCursor?

Made by the talented Jessie Grosjean at Hog Bay Software, QuickCursor is a minimalist menu bar applet that lets you use your favorite text editor – wherever you are on your Mac.

The best example is Gmail.com. Let’s say you have to write a long email, but don’t relish the idea of typing it in Gmail’s web interface. Simply hit the key command or use the Menu Bar applet and chose your favorite word processor to edit the text in.

So, you can use TextMate to formulate emails, or WriteRoom to edit your WordPress post. QuickCursor copies whatever you’re currently working on into your text editor of choice. When you save and quit, all the text is pasted back into the dialog box, email body, etc for you.

How It Works

It’s pretty simple. You can set up keyboard commands to launch specific programs. For instance, if I mash down all the modifier keys (command, option, control) and W, whatever I’m working on gets launched into WriteRoom. The same goes for TextMate and Byword, two of my favorite text editors on the Mac.

After I have finished writing and editing, I just Save and Quit/Close and my text is pasted right where I left it moments ago. It’s a simple solution for an annoying problem: editing text on the web, inside web apps or in ugly programs.

Supported Applications

At present, QuickCursor works with BBEdit, Espresso, MacVim, Smultron, SubEthaEdit, TextMate, TextWrangler, and WriteRoom.

QuickCursor won’t work with other text editors out there (OmmWriter, or even TextEdit for instance). According to Hog Bay Software, it must support the ODB Editor Suite. As a non-developer, I wouldn’t know how easy or hard this is to impliment across various text editing apps- but it would be great to see the list of supported apps grow over the coming months.

QuickCursor costs $5. I wasn’t able to find a direct competator to QuickCursor, other than copy-and-pasting your current text by hand.

For the number of times I’ve used it, I can already justify the $5. If you’re a regular web user or writer, and relish the idea of crafting your text somewhere a little more beautiful, QuickCursor is ideal.

I religiously use Gmail’s web app inside Mailplane for email, and it has been super awesome to be able to write my email within TextMate or WriteRoom. Give it a try, and experience it for yourself!

The internet has opened up a whole new world of recipes, available to anyone, anytime, without the need for piles of sauce-stained cookbooks. With so many amazing recipes out there, it can be hard to keep track of your favourites. Some people are content to use bookmarks, but what if you want to keep your recipes more organized, or want to add recipes of your own?

MacGourmet is designed as an “iTunes for your recipes”, allowing you to import, store, sort and update a huge library of recipes. Can an app take the place of a stack of recipe books and loose hand-writen recipes? Find out after the jump.

Using MacGourmet

There are two ways of getting recipes into MacGourmet: inputing them yourselves, or importing them from websites:

Importing Recipes

MacGourmet supports importing from many of the most popular recipe websites, including my two favourites, Allrecipes.com and Epicurious.com. I had some trouble importing recipes the way specified in the user guide, which involves selecting the url in the address bar, and selecting “add recipe to MacGourmet” from the browser’s “services” menu.

When I tried to import recipes from supported sites, I got an error message in MacGourmet saying that a valid web address was not found.

To get the import function to work, I had to drag the url directly into the recipes panel in MacGourmet. And yes, this was clumsy and a bit irritating.

Adding the recipe brings up the Recipe Import Assistant, which automatically fills in much of the information from the recipe. To change the information, you can click on the field or use useful keyboard shortcuts to select the field you want to edit (e.g. command + 5 for ingredients).

I found MacGourmet handled importing a recipe from Allrecipes perfectly, with all fields accurately filled out. A recipe imported from Vegetarian Times fared almost as well, filling in everything but the servings field.

Adding Your Own Recipes

If you’d like to keep your own recipes stored, MacGourmet offers a powerful interface for inputing all the details. My favourite part of the process was adding the ingredients, where previously used ingredients are auto-filled, and the fields are tab-able so you don’t have to leave the keyboard.

Unfortunately, adding the preparation steps was less convenient. It would be nice if a new step could be added by hitting “enter” for example. You can also add preparation details, notes, pictures (for the whole recipe and for individual steps), and nutrition.

Viewing Recipes

Once added to MacGourmet, your recipes are formatted according to one of many themes you can select under preferences. Design snob that I am, I didn’t really love any of the themes, but most of them are readable and usable.

You also have the option of viewing recipes in “Chef View” which is a simplified, full-screen mode useful for using in the kitchen when you want to keep your hands away from the computer as much as possible. This feature could be improved upon by making it easier to scroll through steps, perhaps even one at a time would be simpler.

Shopping Lists

MacGourmet allows you to create shopping lists from recipes by dragging-and-dropping, and by manual entry. It auto-fills common items, and you can add items to “favourites” to quickly drop them into new shopping lists.

The shopping lists feature is mainly for those who use the iPhone or iPad app as well, which syncs with MacGourmet’s recipes, notes, lists and wine notes.

Other Features

MacGourmet comes with a lot of features, some useful, some arguably superfluous, but here’s a run-dwon of the most notable ones:

Wine Notes

For people who like to keep meticulous records of their wine drinking experience, the Wine Notes feature allows you to enter all sorts of information about wines, including winery information, tasting notes, reviews, label image, and pretty much anything else you could possibly think of. It’s not so much wine “notes” as it is wine database.

Clippings

For websites not supported by MacGourmet, you can drag and drop the text from a recipe into the app and it will create a “clipping” which is basically just a plain-text version of the recipe. To add it to the recipe database, double click the clipping and copy-and-paste the information into the appropriate fields.

MacGourmet also includes printing themes to fit recipes to paper, and typical iTunes-like features like smart lists and folders. You can also relate items to each other, so a recipe will display “related items” such as a pairing wine or a side dish.

Plug-ins: They’re Not Free!

The MacGourmet website engages in a bit of trickery: some of the features listed on the website such as Meal Planner, Cookbooks, and Nutritional Analysis, are paid plug-ins that cost about $10.

You can use the trial versions of these plug-ins for a limited number of recipes, but I was pretty disappointed and irked that they advertised these features as part of the app itself.

Conclusion

I’m a big fan of online recipes, and I do get annoyed trying to organize them all and having to look at ads on websites. Accordingly, I thought MacGourmet would be an ideal application to solve my recipe woes.

Essentially, MacGourmet does what I need it to do: it keeps track of recipes, ingredients and shopping lists and keeps them organized. However, there are some interface and usability issues that left me disappointed.

The web importing feature was tricky to figure out and took me a while, and the solution I found is clumsy. Additionally, many of the drag-and-drop interfaces open in separate windows making it difficult to drag items between them.

MacGourmet tries to do too much in my opinion, I doubt many of the features will be used by most cooks, I think it’s a category that requires simplicity and ease of use, not advanced features and a steep learning curve. I’ve tried the much cheaper YummySoup and found it had all the functionality I needed with a more straightforward interface.

MacGourmet is one of a couple apps I’ve reviewed that attempt to be the “itunes for your x”, and apps like this have only made me wonder why we need an “iTunes for everything.” iTunes works great for music, iPhoto is handy for photos, but why not try to make the “Address Book for recipes”? What are your thoughts, do we need an iTunes for everything?

A couple weeks back, I reviewed an app called Yep, a scanning and tagging app for managing documents. I love the idea of tags and am just starting to harness their power in other apps like Things and Evernote, and nudge:nudge’s Punakea attempts to offer tagging support for documents and folders of any kind.

I purchased this app in a bundle a couple months ago, and I’m sure there are many other people out there who have this app sitting in their applications folder unused like I did, so perhaps it’s time to take a look at what it can do!

Using Punakea

Tagging Files

Using Punakea begins with tagging files, and Punakea offers a couple different ways to accomplish this. Either select the file and hit a custom keyboard shortcut (default is Command + 3), drag a file to the Punakea dock icon or menu bar icon, or drag a file to the tagger that hides at the side of your screen. I found the side-of-screen tagger too obtrusive, so I mostly used the keyboard shortcut.

The tagging window is like any other tagging interface – you can add tags that will be auto-completed if used before, and it lets you change the name of the file. By default, Punakea moves the file to a managed folder, but you can change the folder files are moved to or turn of this functionality in preferences.

By default, all filed documents will go into the Documents/Punakea/Files folder and will be rather disorganized. To access your files from the Finder more easily, Punakea also generates folders based on your tag structure that give you access to aliases of your files.

I didn’t trust myself to keep using Punakea religiously, so I opted not to have my documents moved. It would be nice to be able to specify where you wanted a document moved upon tagging.

Browsing Tags

The Punakea Browser displays a tag cloud with tag size correlating to tag popularity (in either clicks or number of tags). Clicking on a tag displays a list of all files with that tag in the browser window below. This browser acts like the Finder: you can use quick look, and drag files from Punakea to the Finder or other applications (e.g. as email attachments).

One glaring oversight is that you can’t change the browser from list to icon view. Since I’m often working with graphic files, I like to be able to see the icon previews, and I really missed this.

Clicking on a tag limits the tag cloud to display only related tags, which are tags shared by some of the files. You can filter files by file type or by related tags. I must admit I was a bit confused by this at first, I couldn’t figure out how to get back to the big tag cloud.

To get back to the main tag cloud, either hit the “return” icon, or click the “x” at the corner of each tag to un-filter your results.

The sidebar of the Punakea browser allows you to filter by file type. One of my favourite feature of Punakea is that I can tag folders too. When folders are double-clicked, they open in the finder.

You can change tag name through the “manage tag” panel, which also displays information about the tag’s popularity and use.

Spotlight Integration

Since Punakea uses the OpenMeta platform for tagging, Spotlight uses the tag information when performing its searches. Punakea doesn’t alter Spotlight in any way or integrate directly with it, it just adds information to your files in a format Spotlight recognises.

As such, this won’t always put your tagged results at the top. For a generic sounding tag like “ebook”, spotlight will come up with files with “ebook” in the name before files with the “ebook” tag.

Punakea in the Wild

I made an effort to use Punakea for about a week, and used it to clean up my mess of a downloads folder. At first I tried using the drag-to-side tagging option, but it quickly drove me crazy and appeared when I didn’t want it to.

Since then I’ve been using the keyboard shortcut and found it much more useful. Coming up with useful tags wasn’t as hard as I thought, and I appreciate the option to rename them.

The tagging dialog wasn’t quite as usable as it could be – I would prefer if it didn’t bring up the Punakea browser as well so I could more easily integrate it into my workflow.

One of the issues I have with tagging apps is that they’re only really useful for new files, it would be pretty impractical to go through all your folders and tag all the files you already have.

It would be a great improvement if you could add “smart tags” so that all files in a certain folder get a certain tag.

When I’m working on a design project, Punakea is really useful for managing graphic resources, which usually end up buried away in my poorly organized, overfilled “resources” folder, and I end up downloading the same resources repeatedly. I’m thinking of organizing all my icons this way, but the lack of an icon view makes it tricky.

Again, I wish I could be more specific about where my files are going. I don’t really like the idea of all my files just sitting around in one massive folder, though I don’t really have a good reason to be opposed to it. I could just leave my files where they are and find them with tags, but I like to keep my downloads folder relatively empty.

Conclusion

I love the idea of Punakea, and I really wanted to like it. As it is, I’m still using it because I did pay for it, but only time will tell if it becomes a long-term Finder replacement/companion. The lack of visual browsing via icon view might be a deal-breaker for me, because I deal with so many graphic files. However, if you’re going to be using Punakea for lots of pdfs, documents and folders that all look the same, it shouldn’t make a difference to you.

Ultimately, I find Punakea to be inelegant, but I’m a bit of a snob. It does what it says it does as well as it claims to, but nothing more, and not terribly gracefully.

Little things like the lack of an obvious way to return to the main tag cloud, or the Punakea browser showing up with the tagging window, and the lack of icon view add up to an imperfect user experience. That said, it really is a powerful tool for organization, and the possibilities are pretty extensive.

The development team seems to release small updates fairly frequently, which always gives me hope for improvement. As it is, I think I’ll keep using it despite its imperfections because it does what I need it to do: it keeps me organized. Anyone else have this sitting in their app folder from an old software bundle? Have you given it a try?

It’s difficult to overstate the importance of a tried-and-tested backup solution. One that ensures all your data will be safe – whether you suffer a simple hard drive failure, or your house burns down. This type of system gives you immense peace of mind, and removes that guilty feeling in your subconscious caused by not backing up.

Today I’m going to walk through a few options for creating what I would consider to be an “ideal” backup solution for the Mac. This is by no means the only way to handle the safety of your data, but one that’s particularly robust and cost-effective.

Three Key Ingredients

There are three things that you’ll want to consider in an effort to reach backup-nirvana, and each is equally important:

1. A redundant copy of all your data – You’ll want to be certain that every single piece of information on your computer is safely copied elsewhere. Not just your important documents and family photos – all the more cumbersome files such as music and video as well.
2. A bootable backup – To get back up-and-running quickly, having a bootable backup is something to strive for. One that you can plug in, and within a few minutes be back to work as normal.
3. An off-site backup – Storing files on an external drive is great, but what if the worst happens and someone steals everything in your house. Or something even worse. Storing files off-site, in more than one location, is important.

Security

Another consideration that should run through any solution you choose is the level of security. The whole point of backing up is to protect against data loss, but you also don’t want anyone stealing your information. The contents of your hard drive can tell someone a lot about you, and it’s information that is best kept to yourself…

With that in mind, a backup solution should protect the various copies of your data from physical or virtual theft, and ensure security is given high priority.

The Proposed Strategy

So here’s a solution that I’d propose. It might not be ideal for everyone, but it works for me!

1. Dropbox for Off-Site Storage of Critical Files

First up, I’m going to fall back on everyone’s favourite cloud utility – Dropbox. This is particularly useful for storing a remote, versioned backup of your critical files. Not only can you access them from any computer, but Dropbox stores a copy of each individual version you save (so you can revert back to a previous file state at any point).

Why not use Dropbox for backing up your whole machine, you ask? The nature of this service is that every file is updated in real-time, as they change. This is perfect for documents that you might save every five minutes, but turns out to be a nightmare for complex system files that change very regularly.

For most people, Dropbox’s free 2GB of storage probably won’t be enough. It’s a service well worth paying for, and $10/month is a bargain for 50GB of off-site, versioned storage.

2. SuperDuper! for a Bootable Backup

Next, we’re going to tackle the need for a bootable backup that can swapped out immediately if your main drive fails. There are plenty of utilities for doing this, but the one that comes highly recommended from myself is SuperDuper!. It’s a tried and tested app, that makes creating an exact copy of your computer’s hard drive a simple process.

The best way to use it involves buying a hard drive that’s identical to your internal storage, then plugging it into an external “caddy” (that essentially turns it into a USB drive). That way, if your internal drive fails in your desktop or notebook, you can just swap it out for the cloned drive.

This used to work across the board, but is more difficult nowadays as hard drives become more difficult to replace. For instance, this wouldn’t work in a MacBook Air or the new iMacs, neither of which have user-servicable drives.

Still, if your internal drive fails, you can still boot from a USB or Firewire drive attached to your Mac.

3. CrashPlan for Off-Site Storage of Everything

Finally, we’re going to tackle the most difficult issue – an off-site copy of your entire hard drive. The simplest solution to this would be to to keep two bootable clones of your drive – one locally that’s backed up nightly, and another that’s stored in another location. You’d then alternate these each week, so that the off-site drive is never more than one week out of date.

This might work perfectly for you, but I’d struggle with the general “faff” involved. Another option is to keep a remote copy of your hard drive that’s backed up over the web. For this, I’d recommend CrashPlan. It’s a unique service that intelligently handles remote backups. You can either use their own servers, or backup remotely to a drive stored somewhere else (maybe at a friend’s house) – everything is encrypted, so security isn’t an issue.

CrashPlan is definitely worth taking a look at, particularly if you’ve never considered an off-site backup due to the time and frustration involved. And their prices are pretty great, topping out at $120/year for a fully-fledged “family unlimited” plan.

What’s Your Strategy?

I’d be interested to hear what you think. Does the above sound like a fool-proof plan, or would you have a suggestion that could improve it? I’d be happy to update the guide based on suggestions from readers, so feel free to voice your opinion!

Happy backing-up, and I hope that this quick guide will spur you into action if you don’t already have a fail-safe backup strategy…

When Time Machine was released with Mac OS X 10.5 (Leopard) back in October 2007, it was one of the highlights of the new release. Apple was the first company to offer a fully-functioning, built in backup utility into their operating system and in true Mac-style, they pumped it full of eye candy. Well, only Apple could take a simple system utility and transform it into a work of art.

Although Time Machine is good for recovering files if anything does happen to your Mac, it is a bit basic in its functionality. You do not have the option to schedule backups depending on when you want them – when your external hard disk drive is plugged in (or the device you are backing up to), Time Machine will simply sync any changed files and folders hourly.

For the average user, this won’t cause too much of a problem, but for someone who uses their Mac for high-end software or gaming, the backup can slow down the performance of your Mac. Time Machine also isn’t a true backup option per se, as it does not create disk images (unlike other programs), where you can restore your Mac in the case of a drastic failure.

This is where ChronoSync comes in. At $40, it is quite a pricey alternative to Time Machine (which is bundled in with Mac OS X 10.5 and above) and some might question paying this amount for a piece of software which is pretty much identical to something they get for free anyway. I decided though to download the 30-day trial version of ChronoSync to give it a test run and to see whether it is really a viable (or better) alternative to Time Machine.

Introduction

ChronoSync is a complete data management solution for Mac OS X 10.4 onwards that allows you to backup both individual files and folders, and of course your entire hard disk drive.

The application interface is a little more complicated than Time Machine, and certainly isn’t as refined, however it is pretty easy to get used to. Unlike Time Machine, which backs up your entire hard disk drive, with ChronoSync you can choose which folders you would like to backup.

You can also select the destination of the backup, unlike with Time Machine where you have to select a certain disk drive and format it, thereby losing all the data you have on that drive already. This means that you can backup onto an external hard drive alongside all your other files – something that would certainly be useful to some people.

Features

ChronoSync has a wealth of different features not found in Time Machine, however the usefulness of these features for the standard Mac user may be brought into question.

One of the features is called relative state monitoring. This fancy term means that any deleted/moved/renamed files are handled and synchronized accordingly. Time Machine simply checks for any changes since the last backup and it does, of course, keep all your daily backups until you run out of disk space or after a month has elapsed. For people wanting to conserve disk space on their backup volume, this feature is certainly an advantage, as it only keeps the latest version of each file (unlike Time Machine, which maintains several versions as a file changes).

You can also tailor the backup schedule to your liking so as not to disturb you when working with your Mac. Time Machine is discrete, however I have noticed that it does compromise slightly on performance whilst backing up (especially when using programs which require a lot of resources, such as Parallels Desktop).

If you are away from your Mac, ChronoSync can send you an automatic e-mail with a progress report of the backup.

ChronoSync does offer the option of bootable backups, allowing an easy recovery in case of a serious system failure. Unfortunately, I didn’t have a spare disk drive to hand to test this feature out, so I’ll just have to take their word for it (creating a bootable backup requires completely formatting an external hard disk drive).

A tutorial of how to do this is provided here. If required, your Mac can be booted up and restored from the backup (like System Restore in Windows).

Another useful little feature (which is something you have to pay an extra $10 for) is a program called ChronoAgent. If you’re lucky enough to have two Macs, then ChronoAgent can sync them both much faster as well as provide root access to the destination Mac.

Syncing is carried out directly, as supposed to over the local network, meaning quicker backups as well as full access to the destination Mac.

Conclusion

Although ChronoSync is a very useful program with some features not found in Time Machine, most standard Mac users may not see the point of shelling out $40 for an alternative to a program that comes bundled with Mac OS X for free.

The bootable backup feature is without doubt something worth considering, in the unlikely event that your Mac does completely flip out. It is possible to restore your computer using Time Machine, however you will need the original Mac OS X system disks in order to wipe your Mac clean before restoring from the backup – ChronoSync makes this process more hassle-free.

Is ChronoSync 40 times better than Time Machine, seeing as it is 40 times the price? Unfortunately not. It does deserve the commendable 8 rating here, however it is a complicated program to use and most of the features would not be of much use to standard Mac users.

If you do want to be selective about which folders you back up (mostly to conserve disk space on your target volume) and have the liberty of restoring your Mac from a bootable backup then ChronoSync is certainly a good backup alternative.