Category: Mac

Although there are tens of different solutions you can appeal to for handling your day-to-day GTD routine, the one corner of the market that has seen less attention is the student subset. Although workarounds can be accomplished with all the major task management systems out there, it’s clearly preferable to have a solution that is dedicated to managing your education specifically.

This is the void that iStudiez Pro aims to fill. Available on the iPhone since April of 2009, this powerful app has recently made its way to the Mac App Store, and following the recent 1.01 update we wanted to take a look and see how well it’s made the transition to the desktop!

Overview

If you’re familiar with the portable versions for iPhone or especially iPad, you’ll feel right at home opening iStudiez Pro on the Mac.

The skeuomorphic interface looks like a planner sitting on a chalkboard, and it succeeds in presenting you with the information you need in a clear and attractive way.

Access to the features is quick and intuitive, and the fact that the whole system is course and assignment based (rather than event and to-do based like most GTD apps) will make setting up and preparing for a semester far less convoluted.

Features & Functionality

iStudiez Pro separates its functions into five basic areas: Overview, Assignments, Planner, Instructors, and Holidays. The labels are self-explanatory, but it’s worth delving into each section to highlight some of the functionality.

Overview

The Overview tab is what you see as soon as the app opens. Not entirely unlike the standard iCal interface, iStudiez deviates in that there is no separate month view; there is a standard weekly view, a day view, and the monthly overview is situated to the right of the main planner module at all times so you never have to flip back and forth — this is a very smart design choice.

The monthly view not only shows you the current date in large numbers, but it also features dots underneath the dates in the calendar representing the number of events on that day.

The Day view is designed like a two-page notebook, with your classes and iCal events appearing on the left “page”, and any upcoming assignments on the right. The items are laid out attractively, with your chosen icon and colour-coding intact to make the information easy to pick up at a glance.

Arrows near the top right of the interface above the monthly calendar let you flip back and forth between days, and the “Today” button ensures that you’re always only a click away from your current schedule.

Just like in the iPad interface, the weekly view features coloured blocks in the appropriate time slot for each class, showing the title of the class and whether it’s a lecture, lab, seminar, etc. based on what you’ve set it as.

iCal events also appear, though you cannot interact with them, which is aggravating since it forces you back into another app. There is also a handy red bar that moves down the page indicating the current time. This is nifty because it gives you a more visual way of appreciating how far along you are in your day.

In either of the two Overview views, you can double-click a class to flip open a quick edit window that allows you to make adjustments to its settings, but you cannot add a new class outright from the Overview tab. This is an annoying oversight since it means flipping back and forth between Overview and the Planner.

Planner

The Planner is the main tab for setting up and managing your class schedule. This area of iStudiez helps you manage your semesters, the courses within them, and the classes you have for each. The fact that the app is designed around this system makes it a breeze to get started, and once you’ve added courses and classes, you’ll get a great birds-eye view of your upcoming semester.

Adding a semester is as easy as hitting the plus button on the bottom left, and selecting “New Semester” from the menu that appears. Once you name it, you can start adding courses using the same button and begin populating your schedule.

Courses start out as empty shells, but after you’ve named them and (if you like) selected a colour using the button beside their title, you can begin adding classes.

“New Class” is where this process starts, and in the popup window (which is essentially what you see when you double-click a class in the Overview), you can set the start and end dates for the class, select whether it’s a class, lecture, lab, study group, etc., set the time and recurrence, location, and instructor.

If you click the icon, you can even choose from a wide selection of different visual representations to make recognizing this class in your Overview as easy as possible.

Once you’ve added your class(es) for the course, you can also add an exam if it has one. This is a useful feature since it saves you the hassle of creating an independent event — this way the exam is linked to the course immediately.

The left panel of the Planner shows you past semesters as well, in case you ever need to look back and remember the details of previous years.

Assignments

Probably everyone’s least favourite part of school is homework. Since it’s a necessary evil though, you’ll at least be happy to see that this iStudiez Pro gives it a dedicated section that helps you manage your assignments.

Adding an assignment via the plus button allows you to name it, add a description, select a class, indicate the due date, and assign it a priority. The description area is extremely useful for holding important websites, submission addresses, and other miscellaneous information regarding the assignment that you want to keep together.

The Assignments panel itself is organized several different ways. For starters, you can view Current or Completed assignments (useful if you need to look back over what you’ve already accomplished and when). In either view, you can use the buttons on the top left to arrange the assignments by Date, Course, or Priority as you see fit.

Instructors

Functioning exactly like an integrated address book for teachers, the Instructors section is actually a pop-up window that allows you to manage your professors, teachers, mentors, etc. and their contact information without having to make entries for them in your actual Address Book app.

For each instructor, you can specify a name, title, department, affiliation (school), email, phone number, web address, and office hours. In addition, once you set them as an instructor for a course in your Planner, the classes that they teach will also appear in this window so you never forget what you had them for.

Holidays

The final area of iStudiez Pro is the Holidays window. This floating panel allows you to create holidays that make it extremely easy to keep your calendar accurate without having to wrangle repeating events like you’d have to in a standard event-based app.

This way, a holiday will remove classes from your schedule during indicated holidays without upsetting the scheduling you’ve set up in the Planner. This also means that dealing with changing holiday dates is simple.

If you prefer to have your schedule shifted forward as a result of the holiday, you can activate the checkbox and iStudiez will push everything back by the appropriate number of days rather than just remove the classes for those days.

Grades

One of the trickiest aspects of managing education schedules is keeping track of grades. iStudiez Pro has a robust system for this, and you can do it using percents, letters, or points depending on what your educational institution makes use of.

While percents are self-explanatory, the points system lets you specify a range (from 1 to 10, for example) and the letters option allows you to set up the precise percentage range values for each letter to make sure the grading scale is accurate.

iStudiez will also attempt to calculate your overall GPA if you want it to (Preferences -> Grades), and you may find this is a useful way of staying aware of your performance during a semester. Previous versions provoked some issues with synchronizing grades for some users (I encountered no problems), but the 1.01 update has addressed them.

Cloud Sync

Having all these amazing features available between platforms is great, but only if you can keep everything in sync across all your devices (Things, I’m looking at you). Thankfully, iStudiez Pro offers a full cloud sync feature that helps keep all your data up to date no matter where you are.

While this is useful for, say, completing an assignment while on the go and having it cleared from your list when you get home, there’s also the added advantage during initial setup of being able to use a mouse and keyboard to quickly input all the semester’s data without resorting to touch-typing on a small iPhone screen.

Syncing is handled via an account, and once you create one (free) and log in on both your portable device and the Mac app, you’ll be able to sync seamlessly at will via the “Sync Now” button at the very top right of the desktop interface. On your iPhone, just shake the phone with the app open to initiate sync.

Back to School

Despite being a truly incredible solution for students, iStudiez Pro suffers from a few baffling drawbacks that hold it back from being an all-in-one solution.

For instance, the inability to add a new class right from the Overview is strange since you can already modify classes thoroughly. Similarly, while the 1.01 update added the ability to select different iCal calendars to display in the Overview, you still can’t interact with the iCal events — adding/removing/modifying them is impossible unless you switch back to iCal (or similar) to do it.

This defeats the purpose of trying to replace iCal with a student-centric alternative and means that, for all its streamlining and efficiency, you’re still adding a second app to your workflow.

Another odd oversight is the fact that you cannot add a new instructor when you’re adding a new class in the Planner. It doesn’t make a whole lot of sense to have to input your instructors first in order to be able to select them when you set up a class.

Finally, while the syncing works as advertised, I noticed that the accounts seemed to enjoy signing me out automatically without any apparent reason, forcing me to re-login several times. Seems like more of a glitch than a serious flaw, but it wastes time while dashing out the door with backpack in hand.

Conclusion

There is always room for improvement, and the developers are courteous and quick to respond to bug reports, so it’s only a matter of time before these inconsistencies are ironed out. Either way, they only really become bothersome for power users who are hoping to completely replace their existing scheduling app.

Complaints aside, iStudiez Pro is without a doubt the most robust system for managing a school schedule. Its longevity, slick design, and efficient workflow have made it truly peerless and earned it well deserved recommendations from critics everywhere — this one enthusiastically included.

Do you use iStudiez Pro? Have you found the desktop app to be a good complement to the mobile ones? Is there another system you prefer for managing school schedules? Let us know in the comments!

We’ve collected the top four reviews, roundups and how-to articles from across the AppStorm network in April. 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!

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When it comes to apps in the getting things done (GTD) realm, OmniFocus stands head and shoulders above the rest. It’s powerful, it’s flexible and it can sync with the iPad and iPhone versions as well. But as great as it is — and we’ve already told you that it’s pretty cool — it can still use a few tweaks here and there to make it a bit more workable.

So with that it mind, let’s take a few moments to share a few tips and tricks for OmniFocus. You may not need all of them, but if just one tip makes you more productive, then it’s worth it, right?

Creating Templates

I’m a writer and photographer for a few different custom car magazines, and I used to find myself forgetting to do one thing or another to complete each article. After digging around in OmniFocus for a bit, I thought that creating a standard template would make my life easier. Here’s how it works:

First, I made a folder named “Templates.” In there I made my first project, called “Feature Article Template.” In the project I put down every step to my process for a feature article, from getting the tech sheet to depositing the check and everywhere in between. The result looked like this:

I needed to add a new feature article to my projects list, so the first thing to do was highlight the Feature Article Template project and copy it to the clipboard. I then highlighted my “Magazine Work” folder, then pasted it in the folder. Since I wanted the template to sit in a specific project file for a magazine, I simply dragged the template into the new project — in this case, “Classic Trucks,” and I dropped it there.

Now I had to plug in the information for the feature, namely what the name was of the owner of the feature vehicle, and the name of the project. This could be tedious, and it wouldn’t save much time if I had to rewrite each line for each new owner, but don’t worry, that’s an easy fix.

I replaced “Feature Article Template” with the name of the owner and the vehicle, which in this case was “Dino’s Panel.” I then highlighted the title, and copied it to the clipboard. Here’s where it gets cool.

If you look at the screenshot, you’ll notice that each task for the project in the template has the word “feature” in it. In some cases, it doesn’t make grammatical sense either, but that doesn’t matter — it’s just a placeholder. To replace the placeholder, I double clicked on the word “feature” in each line, then hit command-v to paste “Dino’s Panel” over feature. I did this to each line, and this is the result:

So what’s the advantage? I had an entirely new project setup in under a minute with the help of the template. By making it as plug-and-play as possible, customizing it for each purpose is fast and easy. Plus, because the title of the project is in each task, if the task pops up on my “Due” menu, I know what project it’s for, and I don’t see a generic title.

Now this is just how I use the template system, but feel free to get creative. Make a template for any task that’s repeatable, but needs to be customized  and you’ll save yourself time and headaches.

Mailing It In

Here’s the scenario: You’re out on the road, with your computer sleeping comfortably at home. You need to make a new task in OmniFocus, but you don’t have the OmniFocus app on your iPhone. For this one, mail it in.

Pull up the Preferences pane for OmniFocus, then pull up Mail. It used to be that you’d just clip out text from Mail and send it your way, but now it’s a lot simpler.

There are two options for how to send your email, but for me, only one makes much sense. Send an email to yourself, or any account that’s linked with your computer’s Apple Mail system. Type your task in the subject line, but start it with any symbol or character you designate. For my purposes, I use two hyphens as a prefix.

That’s it. Nothing in the body, nothing fancy, just put whatever you need in the subject line. Send off the email, and the next time Mail is opened, it will check the mail, apply the OmniFocus rule, and away it goes to your Inbox.

Now some of you may think that this wouldn’t work for the way you use OmniFocus, and normally I’d agree with you. I mean, I have OmniFocus on my iPad and my iPhone, so why wouldn’t I just use the app when I’m mobile?

Easy answer: Syncing. My laptop stays powered on most of the time, but I don’t always sync OmniFocus to the server. If I put in a new task on the iPhone, I might overlap myself and cause a syncing issue. Instead, I send myself an email and I know that it’s always correct, because it’s working with the master program.

Putting Things Off

It’s a Tuesday, and you’ve prepared for a big meeting with the boss in an hour. He pops into your office and exclaims, “We can’t do this today, I’m much too busy. Let’s reschedule for a week from now.”

Now you could just type in the date into your OmniFocus system, but there’s a cooler way to do it as well.

Check out the image below, which shows three versions of the same line entry in OmniFocus. The first line is how it was originally entered. The second is with a shortcut phrase – 2w for 2 weeks – and the third is the new date, which OmniFocus automatically calculates out for you.

This trick works for all sorts of words and phrases. Type in “Thu” to put it off until next Thursday, or “1h” if you just need an extra hour from your scheduled time. This comes in handy when you just want to delay a task for week, month or just a few days, but don’t want to check a calendar to find the specific date. Plus, it saves you time in the process.

Further Reading & Viewing

There’s a wealth of other fantastic features in OmniFocus, and if you liked this version of Tips and Tricks, let us know in the comments and we’ll start working on a part two!

Want more info, tips and tricks? Check out some other resources to see what works for you:

• Screencasts Online: Walkthroughs of OmniFocus, showing some of the basics, as well as more advanced features.
• OmniFocus Ninja Tricks: A recent video highlighting some cool tips for OmniFocus junkies. It’s also the source for some of our tricks shown here.
• Omni Group’s Vimeo: More highlights from various OmniFocus talks.

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I have something of a clutter-free desktop compulsion, and can never bear to have more than a couple of icons on my desktop at any time. There’s something about having icons, folders and files stored away – rather than on display – that offers a simpler and more enjoyable working environment.

But not everyone thinks this way. Every time I log on to my parents’ Mac, I’m greeted to countless swathes of icons cluttering the desktop – from old application volumes, to family photos.

Although this occasionally gives me a nervous OCD twitch, it’s a helpful reminder that what works for me doesn’t necessarily work for everyone.

I’d be interested to hear what you think about desktop clutter. Is it something that you’ll go to great lengths to avoid, or are you perfectly happy with using the desktop as a place to store current files and projects?

Feel free to share your thoughts in the comments!

I used to think of the Mac clipboard as a mysterious, magical place that held all my copied information in some unknown place that I could never access, but that sometimes gave me exactly what I needed.

When I got into web development, I realized that I needed to find this enigmatic clipboard and put it to good use. Enter Clips, a newly released premium clipboard manager for Mac.

Clips’ developers claim that using Clips will increase your productivity while you work on your mac, find out if it really can make your computing more fruitful after the jump!

Clipboard Management

Clips sits in either your menu bar or dock, and runs as a background utility much like many other menu bar apps. When you open Clips, it starts to record everything you copy to the clipboard for later use.

To access your clips, click on the menu bar dropdown menu and select the clip you want either from the “All” menu or from the specific applications it was copied from (not copied to).

In addition to the menu bar options, you can also access your clips through three other interfaces: organizer, board and panel, which can be launched via keyboard shortcut or the menu bar.

Organizer

The organizer is the main interface for organizing and browsing your clips. Either all or part of each clip is displayed in thumbnail or list form, and you can filter the clips according to application.

Double-clicking on a clip brings up the inspector window for that clip, where you can flag it to make it easier to find, assign it to “clipboard” (which is like a folder) and add abbreviations or shortcuts (more on that later).

Smart Clipboards

Clips allows you to create powerful Smart Clipboards with defined rules by content, date or application. I found this very useful, as I could group similar clips together, even though they came from different applications, like grouping all code together by assigning clips from Coda, NetBeans and Terminal into a smart clipboard.

Board

The board is a dashboard-like interface for accessing your clips, with all the filtering options available in the organizer. It disperses your clips across your screen randomly, allowing you to browse visually for what you’re looking for.

I found this a somewhat helpful option for when I only had a few clips, but the interface quickly became crowded.

Panel

The panel interface is a semi-transparent window that floats over top other applications, allowing you quick access to your most recent clips. The panel becomes opaque on hover, and inserts whichever clip you click on into the application you’re using.

The panel would probably be intrusive on a small laptop while browsing the internet for example, but if you’re working with single applications that require a lot of copy and pasting, it could be a real time saver.

Abbreviations

In my opinion, abbreviations are Clips’ most powerful feature, and really separate it from the free alternatives. Like the more expensive apps TypeIt4Me and TextExpander, Clips allows you to select an abbreviation that, when typed, is replaced by a longer clip of text, in any application. Though not as powerful as dedicated text expansion apps, this feature is probably useful enough to be worth the $8 on its own.

When selecting abbreviations, I suggest selecting a lesser-used “trigger” character to add to the beginning or end of each abbreviation, so you don’t drive yourself crazy with unintentional expansions. For example, if I want to type out my whole address, I just type add\ and it expands, and it doesn’t interfere with normal typing because I almost never use backslashes.

Conclusion

I was very sceptical of Clips to start – I’ve been using the free app ClipMenu for ages and have always loved it. After really digging into the features, however, I found that it has a lot more to offer than simple clipboard access.

Though I found the “Board” and “Panel” interfaces a bit superfluous, the ability to organize my clips by application or smart clipboard, and access them from the menu bar, was really handy.

My favourite feature, however, is abbreviations. I’ve tried both TextExpander and TypeItForMe and found them useful, but overly complex and too expensive. I think Clips manages to balance being both powerful and unobtrusive quite well.

If you type a lot on your computer, and just need access to your copy and paste history, Clips might be overkill – and I can’t recommend ClipMenu highly enough. However, I think anyone who writes code, fills out a lot of forms, or types a lot of similar text will find Clips to be a big time saver.

Despite there being a wide range of FTP applications for the Mac, only one or two really stand head and shoulders above the crowd. One of these is undoubtedly Forklift, which I’m proud to thank as this week’s site sponsor.

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.

Two particularly handy features are Droplets, Synclets and Disklets – three unique ways to easily and quickly sync folders, upload files, or create virtual local drives of your remote connections. These alone may well be worth the purchase price of $29.95!

If you’re new to the Mac, haven’t yet settled on an FTP client, or just want to take advantage of the awesome features Forklift offers, you owe it to yourself to give it a try. You can download a free trial, or just go ahead and pick up a copy from the Mac App Store.

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!

• Flux – Billed as an advanced HTML5 Web design application, Flux is capable of creating stunning sites from scratch. Far from being a simple template based solution, it’s a creative design environment.
• Inspiration Set, and Clipart – The Pages Clipart package contains a total of 1,200 polished clipart pieces, and the Inspiration Set includes 150 Pages templates: 100 from the previous version and 50 brand-new additions.
• Hearts Cards – This is one of the first solid Hearts games on the Mac App Store, and it’s great fun to play. You can check out a video demonstration at the developer site.
• Patterno – This unique app is a tiled pattern and background image generator for Mac OS X, and can be a huge time-saver for graphic designers everywhere.

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!

It’s going to be the 800-pound gorilla in the room for the entirety of this article, so I’m just going to acknowledge it now: Photoshop. There. I said it.

Photoshop has been king of the computer graphics hill for a very long time. Even though other software exists, and other applications take more specialized approaches to creating digital graphics, in a professional environment it always comes back to Photoshop.

This article isn’t about Photoshop. And yet it kind of is. It’s about Acorn, the image editor for humans, from Flying Meat Software. Specifically it’s about version 3 of Acorn, and how this update brings Acorn so close to taking on Photoshop in the minds of so many people.

For a lot of those people, it’ll beat Photoshop. Let me show you why.

What Can It Do?

I really hate the idea of software being judged by a checklist. As if the way to decide the quality of something is the number of things it can do. That’s part of it, sure, but it isn’t the final word.

Acorn embodies this idea to me. Because in a checklist fight, Photoshop will win every time. But because of that, because of the unwieldy Swiss Army knife that Photoshop has become, it loses in the hearts and minds of a lot of Mac users. We appreciate thoughtful minimalism, skilled restraint, and subtle utility and power. That’s what Acorn is. This is what it can do.

Layer Styles

Layer styles are one of those things that Photoshop has that keep people coming back to it. To someone who hasn’t used them, they’re kind of hard to explain, but if you’re familiar with them, then you get why Acorn having them is so important.

Acorn’s implementation isn’t identical to Photoshops, but it’s similar in enough ways that you can understand how they work pretty quickly.

Vector Editing

Acorn’s vector editing capabilities are equally impressive. It’s something that’s frequently overlooked by simpler, more consumer-focused editors, but is a huge feature for anyone wanting to do user interface design or asset creation. Vector graphics in an app like Acorn, when coupled with something like layer styles, allow for something akin to resolution independence, but with the look and feel of traditional raster-based graphics.

Nestled within the Shape tool’s options, you can create vector paths with either freeform Bezier paths, or predefined rectangle and ellipse tools.

Custom Brush Engine

Another defining mark of a mature image editor is a custom brush engine. It was what put Photoshop on the map all those years ago, and its present in Acorn. All the essential controls are there. You can even use a custom image as the brush shape, there’s no real difference from Photoshop’s brush engine, just the learning curve associated with a different interface.

Layer Masks

You might be surprised this feature made my list. But layer masks were one of those things I didn’t realize I relied on so heavily, until I didn’t have them anymore. Layer masks are critical to so many artistic techniques, that having them really is a must. And I’m glad to see Acorn does. They aren’t fancy, but they aren’t supposed to be. They’re a tool, and an important one at that.

Filters

Filters get a bum wrap from most professional Photoshop users. I think many designers think of them as cheating. But filters are a big draw for the average consumer, and Acorn has them in spades. There are a lot of filters at your disposal, with some that even Photoshop doesn’t have – though I’m not going to get into a filter fight with Photoshop, because Acorn wouldn’t win that.

One thing I really like is the chained nature of how you apply filters. Acorn encourages you to experiment, watching the results in a live preview window, because the order that you apply filters changes the end result.

Selections, Screenshots, and Scripting

If you would pardon the alliteration, these are three other features of Acorn that I feel deserve attention. So much of skilled photo editing work relies on the ability of the artist to make selections with precision. Acorn provides a wide range of tools to do this, and I think the toolset would be adequate for most professionals.

Baked into Acorn is a screenshot feature that truly borders on magic. If you have Acorn open, you use a key command and Acorn will take a layered screenshot. That means you’ll get a file with each window separated into groups and layers which you can show and hide as you please. I love this feature, and for me it by itself makes Acorn worth the purchase price.

Another feature with a power user feel is the ability to script Acorn with AppleScript, Automator, or even JavaScript. Often times a repetitive task can be simplified in Photoshop by using Actions, and this puts Acorn on par with Photoshop when it comes to automation.

The Final Verdict

Ok, so if you’ve made it this far you’ve probably realized I really like Acorn. Now, while I did focus on the positive, that doesn’t mean there weren’t some things that bugged me. Selecting multiple layers is impossible, you have to create a group first. And I’d like the tools for editing pre-existing shapes to be a little more intuitive. As it stands now, they’re the same tools that are used for creating new shapes, and I’d like some kind of feedback to the user that they’re editing a shape rather than planning for a new one.

But I won’t end of the negative. Acorn is a stunning image editor, and I challenge any professional to go out a try it. Give it a fair shake though, don’t go running back to Photoshop after 20 minutes. Be prepared to learn something new, but be prepared to enjoy doing it. This is the kind of software that makes me proud to be a Mac user, and a shining example of what can be created by an indie software house. Go check it out. Right now.

Bonus: iPhone Wallpaper

In the course of me reviewing Acorn, I felt the best way to get a real feel for the app was to use it to create something. So I’m releasing the iPhone wallpaper I designed during my testing. The photograph is one of mine, and I hope you, dear readers, will enjoy it.

Tinderbox from Eastgate Systems, Inc. is an information management application notorious for its long, steep learning curve. Almost any review you read will hammer that fact to the point that many people are sure it’s beyond their ability to master. This is going to be a review for them, actually for us — because I was one of them.

I won’t deny that Tinderbox can be challenging. I’ve been using it for two years and still feel like a babe in the woods. But the message I want to convey with this review is that Tinderbox can be remarkably useful even if you never venture too far into its more advanced features. To shift metaphors, if Tinderbox is a swimming pool, this review is about the fun you can have even if you just splash around in the shallow end. So let’s jump in.

The “Tool for Notes”

Eastgate calls Tinderbox “the tool for notes.” This is simultaneously a completely accurate description, and one woefully inadequate, kind of like calling the Apollo Program a trip to the Moon. All personal information applications handle notes in one form or another. The power of Tinderbox comes from its ability to display those notes in a number of different and helpful ways, and its array of mechanisms for manipulating those notes.

We’ll explore these two aspects of Tinderbox more a little further along in this review, but first I need to define just what makes up a Tinderbox note.

A data file in Tinderbox is called a document. Documents are collections of notes and views of those notes. Notes are collections of attributes. Two of these are the note’s name (or title) and content. But there are many attributes, around 190 last count. Many of these you don’t have to concern yourself with: either you can’t alter them, such as the creation date, or they are updated automatically by the application as you manipulate the note, as when you set the color or change the position of the note. There are pre-defined attributes that remain inert until you want to put them to use, as with the event attributes of StartDate, EndDate and DueDate. All these pre-packaged attributes are called system attributes.

One of the powerful features of Tinderbox is that you can create custom attributes to handle information specific to your needs. Think of these as database fields. As with most databases, you can set the type of data a custom attribute can contain, choosing from string, date, boolean and list, among other options.You can set any attribute to be displayed in the note window, making them “key attributes.”

One other important point about notes before we move on. In the screenshot above, we are looking at the note text window. There is another dialog window that opens for editing the title, as well selecting other options and settings.

If the inline editing option is deselected in preferences, this dialog will open when you create a note in the map view. Otherwise, you will need to select the note and type the “enter” key (function-return) to open this window.

Tinderbox has two sets of preferences; a global preference for all Tinderbox documents, and a document-specific preference. The latter takes precidence, so if you change something in the global preference and it doesn’t seem to be working, check the document preference (reachable under the Edit menu).

As there are several things you can do to change the way a note looks and behaves, you would find it very tedious to have to adjust these features over and over again in dozens of notes. That’s why Tinderbox is equipped with a function called “prototypes.” Create a note, get it to look the way you want — color, shape, key attributes — then set it to be a prototype (check the box in the note dialog). Now you can instantly use those same features on any other note in your document.

Outline View

Now that we know that the building blocks for a Tinderbox document are notes, let’s begin to examine how Tinderbox allows us to view those notes. There are several Tinderbox “views,” but I’m going to focus on the two you are most often likely to use: outline and map.When you create a new document, Tinderbox opens a blank outline view, essentially an empty white window. Just start typing and a new note is created with your text as its name.

When you’re done typing the text, hit return and that note is set. Hit return again and a new note is created, ready for you to begin typing the title. In this way you can quickly create a series of notes. You don’t need to worry about structure at this stage, because all the notes are easy to move around via drag and drop, and hierarchy is simple to build just by tabbing or shift-tabbing. Note names can be long, so this is an effective way to take quick notes during a meeting or in class. While there is no actual limit on how long note names can be, the practical limit is probably no more than a sentence or so, as it will be more difficult to edit longer names.

To add more text to a note, simply select the note name and press the space key (or double-click on it). The note window pops up, and you can add detail in the content area.

Another nice feature of outline view is that you can add columns to view attribute data, such as DueDate or any custom attributes you may have added.

Map View

Map view is Tinderbox’s signature feature, one that sets it truly apart from any other application. It’s a space to tack your notes, and other items to help make sense of those notes, but don’t confuse it with a mind mapper. A mind mapper displays hierarchy; Tinderbox’s map view does not (or at least not practically so).

This is important for understanding the relationship between the map view and the outline view. The map view displays notes (and other items we will soon learn about) that are on the same level and under the same parent. I’ll illustrate by making a map view of the outline which appears in screenshot 4.

There are eight notes shown in the outline, three at the top level, one subordinate to the second note, and four subordinate to that one. When I make a map view from this outline the result is the image in the following screen shot:

Notice that there are only three notes displayed. These are the top level notes from the outline. The second note, the one with the subordinate notes, looks different than the other two. That’s because it is actually a container — any note that has subordinate notes is known as a container.

In that screenshot, I’ve expanded the container and zoomed in, so you can see the sub note. In fact, you can even see that the sub note is also a container.If you double-click on the interior of the container — that is, the space that looks like it contains the sub notes — you’ll drill down a level. If you have a sub note selected in an outline, then choose to open a new map view (using the View menu), the map that appears will be drilled down to that level.

You can drag the notes around the map view at will, grouping them in related clusters. But with several clusters, it might be helpful if you could somehow mark off the territory. That is where adornments come in.  These are colored blocks that reside in the background of the map, to help create “territories” for your information. More on adornments below.

Putting It Together

Let’s put what we’ve looked at so far to use in an example. For a newsletter I publish, I recently wrote a short article about George Washington and his response to a correspondent during the American Revolutionary War. I collected the text of several letters and documents that exchanged hands among Washington and his correspondents. There were also details about the Washington’s situation at the time. To help me make sense of these notes, I created a map view that displayed these notes in a quasi timeline.

Note that I used three adornments to help me organize my information. The top adornment functions just as a label. But the other two gave me space to separate the type of information into events and correspondence. After I put my notes in a rough chronological order, I had a much clearer picture of the circumstances surrounding Washington’s letter. But for further clarification, I was able to add relationship links.

Putting Prototypes to Use

Let’s look at another example. I am trying to do a better job tracking the films I watch. Tinderbox is a perfect helper. I can, for instance, go to IMDB.com, find the movie I want, then drag the URL onto the Tinderbox map view to create a new note, with the URL attached.

I have already created a prototype called “film.” Any note can be a prototype (set in the note dialog box), which then makes it fast and easy to assign its attributes to any other note. My film prototype has key attributes for Title, Director, Genre, Date Seen, Rating, and Viewing (i.e. In the theater or on DVD).

After I’d created a number of entries, I realized I wanted to add a key attribute for the actors. All I had to do was add that field to the key attributes of the prototype, and it was automatically added to all my other entries that had “film” as their prototype.

Get Yourself an Agent

Now I want to visually distinguish films based upon their rating. That’s easy to do with an agent. Agents in Tinderbox are special notes that continually look for other notes that match specified criteria and then perform some action on them, sometimes only collecting copies, known as aliases. Below is the dialog for creating an agent.

Note that you can either type in the code for the query or use the control provided by Tinderbox to build the code — the latter method is what I tend to use. After creating agents for each of the five ratings I use for my film reviews, my map now looks like this:

An Adornment is More than a Pretty Face

I want to clean this up. I could easily move the notes around manually — and sometimes I like to do that, as it helps me think about my notes — but in this case, I’ll create adornments to automate the cleanup. As mentioned above, an adornment is a background map feature that fences off sections of the map for clearer organization. But they are a little more than that, as we can add a query, just as we can to an agent, to gather notes to the adornment. Here’s what the dialog for that looks like:

Once I’ve created my adornments, my map has a much tidier appearance:

Notes Have Aliases

Agents find matching notes, can act on those notes — i.e. As in changing the color, which is one of the simpler actions — and also capture aliases of those notes, which makes the agent a container holding those copies. So I can use agents to help me visualize my movie information in a variety of ways. The screenshot 14 below shows the results of an agent capture of films I’ve classified as dramas. Note how the names are now in italic. This indicates they are aliases of the original notes.

Other Views

We’ve looked at the outline and map views of Tinderbox, which to me have always been the most useful. However, Tinderbox provides several other methods for finding new perspective on your notes.

If you like a more traditional two-pane layout for your outlines, one with the note content visible along side the tree-structure, select the explorer view.

The map view shows one level of information at a time, while the chart view gives you a diagram that reveals the hierarchical structure of your notes… a visual version of your outline.

The treemap view will display your entire document with the hierarchy depicted as boxes within boxes. I have yet to figure out what use this is, but I’m sure it has one or would not be included as an option.

Finally, one of the newest features of Tinderbox is the timeline view. This is a formal, chronological diagram based upon the StartDate and EndDate attributes of your notes. There are several aspects of the timeline view function that I do not have the space to write about here, so I’ll just let the screenshot do the talking:

The Challenges of Tinderbox

Tinderbox is an inspired application, one that provides functions I’ve never seen in any other information management software. But it can be frustrating at times, and not just because its advanced features sometimes feel a little out of reach for mortal man (or at for least me). It is frustrating because even simple tasks can result in some inconsistent behavior or it is not readily apparent how to do them.

As an example, when I was demonstrating my film review notes earlier, I mentioned that I dragged the URL from the IMDB web site onto my map to create a new note for any particular film. That sounds easy, but I stumbled two ways with this. First, about half the time the drop didn’t “take.” That is, a note wasn’t created in the map, and I’d have to try again. Usually, after a couple of tries I could get the note to appear. But there seems no rhyme nor reason to why it works sometimes and why it does not. I’m sure there is a reason, but I can’t figure it out and was unable to get any help on the user forum.

When I clicked to open one of the notes created with the URL drag and drop it would also automatically launch my browser and go to the linked page. This is annoying when, most often, I just wanted to view and edit the note itself, but it wasn’t obvious to me how to change it. I finally learned from the user forum that there is an attribute called ViewInBrowser that is automatically set to “true” on dragged in URLs and has to be changed to “false.” Using an agent I quickly flipped that setting on all my existing film notes, and all new film notes will change automatically when they are created. Now the web page only opens for a specific note when I tell it to.

Anyone using Tinderbox is going to run across issues like this continually. The key to Tinderbox happiness is to see them as challenges and not stumbling blocks. The more you use Tinderbox, the more you begin to understand how it works and the more quickly you can find solutions. The user forum is invaluable in this regard. Post a question and you get a response usually within an hour or so.

Buying In

Mark Bernstein is the driving force behind Tinderbox. He calls himself the chief scientist at Eastgate Systems. I mention this because I think it offers a glimpse of Bernstein’s aspirations for his software. In Tinderbox, Bernstein isn’t simply designing an information manger. He’s looking to create a new paradigm for how people interact with that information. Has he succeeded? I don’t know, but I love that he is trying.

Learning Tinderbox requires an investment in time. Owning Tinderbox is also an investment. It cost $249, which includes a year of free upgrades, although from time to time Eastgate runs a special, which will get the price tag under $200. After your first year, upgrades will cost you $98 a year. The software is updated frequently and significant new features are still being added — the timeline view was added in version 5.6.

Using Tinderbox can be exasperating at times, but it is also often exhilarating. I don’t use Tinderbox as my primary information manager, but when I need to play chess with my notes, it is the first place I turn. It has helped me solve many an information riddle, and has been more than worth my investment.

If you like some of Tinderbox’s features but not enough to pay the full price, you might want to look at Eastgate’s Twig. It has the outlining and mapping features of Tinderbox, along with a nifty note-taking interface somewhat reminiscent of Notational Velocity. It currently costs $78, but be warned that the export functions are severely limited.

Summing it Up

This has been a long review, and yet I have only skimmed the surface of what you can do with Tinderbox. I’ve tried to show you how Tinderbox can be extremely useful even if you don’t plunge all the way in. The techniques I’ve demonstrated are really very easy. And the active Tinderbox forum is a great resource when you get stuck.

Coming up with a rating for Tinderbox has been a challenge. On the one hand, many people will find its functions esoteric and difficult — at best — to master. For them a rating of six might seem high. But others who have mastered the arcane scripting will tell you no other tool matches Tinderbox for versatility and power for managing information and notes. But Tinderbox can be very valuable for those like me who eschew the more complex scripting features, but are willing to approach the software with patience and persistence.

Because I am impressed with the mission of Tinderbox, because I think it is genuinely inspired, I am giving it a rating of nine out of ten. But do not take my word for it. Download Tinderbox. Try it out. Read all you can about it. Then make the decision for yourself if it is worth your software dollars.

We’re all familiar with the Finder, but what if we could have access to our most used documents and personal folders at the ‘flick of a wrist’? Enter Sidefolders, an application that aims to give you quick and easy access to your recent, and regularly used, files and folders.

It’s a great concept, and one that has a lot of potential. But how well does SideFolders execute the idea? Read on for more information, along with a quick screencast overview of the app.

What is SideFolders?

Simply put, Sidefolders puts the Sidebar in the Finder withine easy reach. Move the mouse to the side of the screen and Sidefolders will jump out. This works exactly as you’d expect:

Within your Sidefolders, you can place your most accessed files, and by default it will show you your most recently opened and downloaded files. If you’d like, you can create your own folder and drag files inside Sidefolder to keep for easy access.

This gives you a manual way to “pin” a file to your sidebar, and easily access it with a single click – a useful alternative to putting a file or folder in your Dock.

See SideFolders in Action

This Seems Familiar

If this feels like deja-vu, it might be because there are already a handful of apps that let you store your most used and recently accessed files for quick access. For instance, remember Fresh from Ironic software or Blast, in one of my past reviews? Both of these are useful alternatives, and worth checking out in addition to SideFolders.

Whether you like SideFolders will depend upon whether it offers a solution to a problem you have. If you never find yourself wanting faster access to oft-used files, then this probably isn’t for you. On the other hand, it could be a great time-saver if this is a piece of functionality you’ve been yearning for.

The first version had a few bugs and niggles, but the latest release has gone some way toward ironing these out. You can now browse folders within SideFolders, and the popout delay can now be configured to a value that suits you best.

Conclusion

SideFolders definitely falls into the same boat as Fresh and Blast. Unfortunately it doesn’t quite have the same design aesthetic of these apps, and offers a slightly less “unique” feature set”.

That said, SideFolders is a cheaper alternative to both of these apps, and $5 might not be a particularly high price to pay for saving a few minutes each day.

Today’s interview is with Alykhan Jetha (“AJ”), the CEO of Marketcircle. Developers of popular applications Billings and Daylite, Marketcircle has a long-standing track record as a top-notch Mac software development company.

In today’s interview, we’ll be talking about the Marketcircle team, inspiration for their products, the Mac App Store, and some very interesting updates currently in the pipeline for Billings.

I hope you enjoy the interview!

Tell us a little bit about the Marketcircle team – where are you based, how many of you are there, and what motivates you as a company?

We’re based in Toronto, Canada and we are about 32 people with customers in over 100 countries. The thing that motivates us is helping small businesses (1-2 persons) grow into bigger companies (20-50 persons).

This is why we make software that helps you get new customers, get things done and then get paid. We feel that the small business market is where future growth is as opposed to large enterprises.

What does a typical day look like for you? Walk us through your usual schedule and activities!

Now that I have two young kids (7 & 3), my days are super busy and pretty “interrupted”. It used to be that my life was 90% work and 10% everything else. I could focus for large stretches of time. Now it’s 60% work and 40% family. I’m CEO and chauffeur at the same time!

I still code, but not as much as I would like and probably more than I should. My code days are Tuesdays, Thursdays and the odd weekend. My meeting/planning days are Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays. I’m not sure I like this combo, but I’m trying it for now.

As someone who uses your Mac all day, every day, do you feel the need to always be running the latest hardware?

I don’t feel that I have to have the very latest in regards to desktop stuff, but on the iOS front, I like to have the latest. I do have the excuse that I have to test stuff on the latest hardware…

What inspired you to originally create Billings and Daylite, and which came first?

This is the short version. Daylite came first, but it was an accident. We originally built Daylite as an internal app to help us grow our business and a technology showcase to get customers. We where looking to do development work for customers rather than actually sell our own applications.

Some people at Apple caught wind of what Daylite did and convinced us to sell it as a commercial app. So we did and here we are. It took a number of years and some really rough patches before we could give up our consulting business.

As someone who has been developing for the Mac for over a decade, how do you feel the industry has changed in recent years?

It has changed drastically. I actually started developing stuff in Objective-C back in 1991. I remember when you couldn’t even buy a book on Objective-C (unless you found some old NeXT book). Now you can find a ton of Objective-C and Cocoa books. 

How has the iPad and iPhone impacted the success of Marketcircle and your software?

Needless to say, the iOS devices have changed the landscape of business software. As you can imagine, most business people are on the road. The iOS versions of Daylite and Billings have been well received and has driven sales up.

The key thing to remember is that for our customers, the desktop and mobile apps have to be integrated, collaborative and continue to work whether there is a network connection or not. It took quite a bit of effort to get our backend and sync technology to make this happen.

Thankfully it has worked well and, in some situations, we are seeing customers buying more iOS licenses than desktop licenses.

What type of sales and customer response have you seen after launching your apps on the Mac App Store?

We’ve seen sales increase. Initially the Mac App Store and our online store where selling equally. Now we are seeing our online store sales diminish and App Store sales increasing.

Having dealt with physical box distribution, I can tell you that we were looking forward to the Mac App Store. We knew it would be a success. What we didn’t know is how soon that success would be achieved. So far, it is doing really well. Let’s see what happens when a bunch of apps have major upgrades.

Which websites, Twitter users, and magazines do you follow in an effort to stay up-to-date with the activities of other developers, and the Apple eco-system in general? 

I used to follow many people, go to many sites and be diligent with RSS. Then at some point, I just snapped. It was too much info from all over the place. I was reading more than I was working or getting things done.

Now I go to a few sites and follow a few people on Flipboard. Techmeme, Daring Fireball, GigaOM, Asymco and few others are high on my list, others are “compile time” fillers.

Do you have any interesting updates or apps in the pipeline that you can give us a sneak peak at?

Just a few days ago, we announced our new cloud based service and we are pretty excited about it because it will make the lives of our customers easier.

They won’t need to worry about servers and networking, yet will have collaborative, multi-user mac/iOS apps. We had all the server infrastructure in Objective-C (v2 no less) and had to find a way to leverage that in the cloud.

As you may know, there aren’t any Objective-C 2 based cloud services out there. We explored rewriting our backend stuff in languages such as Python, Ruby, Java etc. In the end we came up with our own architecture comprised of a bunch of Linux servers and a bunch of “disposable” Mac Minis. So far it’s working quite nicely I must say!

On the front end, our engineers are working on some good stuff, but we aren’t ready to talk about that just yet.

What are you most proud of achieving in your career as a Mac developer?

I guess that would be building a company doing mac business software, able to sustain a team of 32 people.

Thanks, AJ!

Thanks for taking the time to share your thoughts and experience with us. I really appreciate you taking the time to contribute, and we wish you all the best with the future success of all your apps!

Keeping up with an RSS reader can be overwhelming, especially if you have a lot of feeds that you read. Sometimes it feels like RSS readers are more of a burden than they are helpful. There are many reader apps that know this, and try to take a minimalist, relaxed stance – but few accomplish it.

Today we are reviewing perhaps the simplest reader we’ve ever seen. It’s called Fresh Feed and it has a very interesting take on reader apps. Is it for you?

Getting Started

Fresh Feed is a very simple app, available on the Mac App Store for free. It is technically an RSS reader, but it’s actually quite different than most others you’ll have seen.

It’s a very simple and sleek menu-bar reader that allows you to check a few of today’s headlines on your favorite websites through a funky-looking drop down interface.

After downloading the app and opening it for the first time, it will have Engadget’s feed configured by default (which you might want to delete!)

Managing Feeds

You can add new feeds by going into the “Config” button on the bottom of the app. A window will pop up with the feeds that you have configured, and from there you can activate or deactivate some of them to keep them from appearing on your feed. You can also delete any of the feeds from this list.

Also on the bottom is a small text bar where you can input any of your favorite website’s feed URLs (be careful though, you have to put the RSS address, not just a link to the website). Once you configure a new address, it will automatically start appearing on your feed. Click “Save” and the app will update the changes you made.

Want to add Mac.AppStorm’s RSS feed? Here’s the link you need!

Checking New Items

Once you have your feeds configured, you can start checking them out from the app. They will be organized by time, and you will only be able to see the title of every item along with the publishing date and time, as well as the source of the article. If you want to read the article you have to click “More” and you will be directed to the website.

The little menu icon of Fresh Feed (a friendly looking milk bottle) will indicate how full your feed is with new items. You can scroll through your items, which will allow you to see the icon image of each of them (one at a time).

For some reason, the app will only pull the most recent items from each feed (I could only read items newer than two weeks from Mac.AppStorm) and there’s no way to mark your items as read, unread, starred, etc.

The Issues

The first and most notable issue with this app is how it could quickly become hard to manage more than a handful of feeds with it. It just would be too difficult to keep up with more than 50 new items per day. It’s not organized enough or convenient enough to handle that much new information.

Then there’s other small but noticeable problems with the app. While it’s supposed to be fast like most menu-bar apps are, I felt it very slow for the most part – especially when I started adding new feeds. It would take too long loading them and it just felt uncomfortable.

The other issue is that it does not support your Google Reader account, so you’ll have to go old-school and add your own feeds by yourself, one by one. This, coupled with the lack of features stated above (you can’t mark your items, you can’t check items older than a certain period of time) make this app hard to love as a primary RSS reader. Which brings us to the next topic:

Will It Replace Your Current Reader?

Fresh Feed isn’t really trying to compete with your normal RSS reader, and if you are comfortable with what you are using right now, Fresh Feed will definitely not make you want to change apps.

My guess is that this is a piece of software made for people that aren’t really familiar with RSS readers and would like a way to quickly access the headlines of their favorite newspapers or blogs without having to quit what they’re doing or having to get into complicated services or apps. Casual users, some might call them.

As for us non-casual RSS users, this might be a nice complement to an app like Gruml, NetNewsWire, or even Google Reader’s web interface. Right now I use a Chrome add-on that does a great job at complementing Google Reader’s web app, as it allows me to check recent items in my feed without going into the app and wasting time. You could give it or Fresh Feed a try, as they are not so different.

Conclusion

On the whole, I really like this app. It wouldn’t work for me as a stand-alone RSS reader, but it would do a good job of complementing another reader app. I just love how simple and easy to use it seems. If it wasn’t for the notifier I use right now (which does support Google Reader), I’d definitely be giving it a try long-term.

If you only have a few feeds that you constantly check out, and you do not use a reader, this app if for you too. It’s free, it works, and it’s pretty!

As well as sponsoring the site this week, Patterno have kindly agreed to offer ten free licenses to a handful of Mac.AppStorm readers.

This unique app is a tiled pattern and background image generator for Mac OS X, and can be a huge time-saver for graphic designers everywhere. Patterno allows to create various images that you may use to design your site, Twitter, MySpace or just to create a new wallpaper for your desktop!

Entering the competition is really easy. All you need to do is:

1. Post a link to this competition – either on your website, or via Twitter
2. Leave a comment, letting me know where you posted the link!

Best of luck, and I’ll be picking the winners in just over a week. The competition closes on Wednesday 4th May, but you can head over to the Patterno site to download a trial in the meantime!

The humble menu bar is a fascinating part of the Mac OS X interface. It’s always visible, and holds a remarkably prominent position on your display – far more so than the Dock.

Some people love to keep it as empty as possible, while others have so many menu bar apps that it’s literally full to overflowing. Whichever camp you fall into, almost everyone has at least one or two apps that they feel are worthy of a place in the magical menu bar.

Today we’re going to take a close look at 25 different apps that offer really useful menu bar functionality. Each has a short description, and a example video of the app in-use.

I’m not for one moment suggesting that you download and run all of these. That would be crazy. Rather I hope that you’ll find one or two that particularly stand out for you, and become a permanent resident in the top-right corner of your display…

FuzzyClock

Often you don’t need the exact time in hours, minutes and seconds. A more human readable style like “five past ten” makes more sense. FuzzyClock is a menubar clock which displays the current time in a “fuzzy” style.

I find this to be particularly useful as it removes the temptation to worry about one minute of time here or there. It also removes the mindless “clock watching” you may find yourself falling into, just watching the minutes tick by!

• Price: Free
• Download: Developer’s Site

Radium

If you’re a little tired of your iTunes music collection, Radium offers a simple way to tune in to thousands of online radio stations. The execution is wonderfully minimal, with basic search functionality and the ability to mark your favourite tracks for easy access.

We’ve reviewed Radium in the past, and I’m a big fan. Various preferences let you scrobble music to Last.fm, integrate with Growl, or even hook Radium up to subscription radio services such as Sirius, Sky.fm, and various others.

• Price: $9.99
• Download: Mac App Store

ExpanDrive

There’s no shortage of FTP applications on OS X, but our readers seem to be dedicated Transmit fans.

I was interested to see how few people use ExpanDrive. This is a menu bar app that’s capable of mounting an FTP volume on your local desktop, which acts in completely the same way as a physically attached USB drive. It’s a whole new way to work with FTP, and an absolute must-see.

• Price: $39.95
• Download: Mac App Store

Take Five

Take Five is the latest creation to come from the Iconfactory, bringing their popular iOS app to the desktop. Take Five gives you a simple way to quickly pause your music, and have it resume after a certain amount of time (five minutes, by default).

Although a simple idea, this comes in handy more often than you’d think. The interface is beautiful, and it’s a menu bar app that’s well worth giving a try.

• Price: $3.99
• Download: Mac App Store

RescueTime

If you’ve ever reached the end of the day and found yourself wondering where your time went, RescueTime might be just what you need. Although more of a web app than a desktop app, the menu bar agent keeps track of all the apps, documents, and websites used throughout the day.

You can then login to the RescueTime site to see a breakdown of all this information, and figure out what you need to cut out to improve productivity!

• Price: From Free
• Download: Developer’s Site

TinyAlarm

As the name would suggest, TinyAlarm is a quick way to set an… alarm. You can either select a time from a pre-selected list, or specify one using the OS X clock widget. When the time arrives, TinyAlarm will notify you with a message and sound.

All these are customisable in preferences, and there are plenty of different sounds to choose from – some better than others! You can also select a “snooze” interval, for when you want to delay the alarm by a few minutes.

• Price: $3.99
• Download: Mac App Store

Caffeine

Although it can be very handy to have a computer that automatically put itself to sleep after a certain period of inactivity, there are times when this can be a real nuisance (when listening to music, or watching a film).

Caffeine gives you an attractive menu bar icon that can quickly enable or disable your Mac’s automatic sleep functionality with a single click.

• Price: Free
• Download: Mac App Store

Jumpcut

Jumpcut is a simple way to store the items you copy to your clipboard for later reference. Rather than each new item overwriting the previous, you can recall them at any time with a few keystrokes.

Although many applications offer this functionality (Alfred, for one), it’s handy to have a single-serving app for the purpose of supercharging your clipboard!

• Price: Free
• Download: Developer’s Site

AllBookmarks

Bookmarks and favourites are probably the most-used feature of web browsers, and I don’t need to explain how helpful they can be for heavy web users. AllBookmarks puts your browser bookmarks right in the menu bar – for all major OS X browsers.

You can navigate through your bookmark folder structure, and go to a website with a single click. From the developers of the excellent 1Password, this is a fantastic utility to have at your fingertips.

• Price: Free
• Download: Developer’s Site

Fluid

Fluid is a fairly unique piece of software, designed to create a “SSB” (site specific browser) for your favourite websites and web applications. This creates a dedicated native application for a particular website that can be placed in your Dock.

An interesting feature of Fluid is the ability to create an SSB that attaches to your menu bar and displays as a small drop-down window. This works particularly well for using mobile-optimised websites, such as mobile Gmail as shown in the example above.

• Price: Free
• Download: Developer’s Site

FaceTab

As if Facebook wasn’t already enough of a drain on international time and attention, FaceTab offers a way to make accessing the social networking site even easier. Just click the icon in your menu bar, and you’ll be able to navigate around the majority of what Facebook has to offer.

You can check your wall, post messages, comments, browse photos, and see any pending notifications – all without actually opening the Facebook site. It’s actually a very well-executed piece of software, but won’t help those of you with a Facebook addiction…

• Price: Free
• Download: Mac App Store

iStat Menus

Even if the immediate idea of a series of live statistics in your menu bar doesn’t particularly appeal, don’t write iStat Menus off. It’s far more versatile that you might expect, and can be a very useful tool for digging into system information. The interface is beautifully designed – as you’d expect from Bjango.

You don’t need to automatically display every available option, but certain pieces of information can be useful to have at your disposal. There’s a 14 day trial available that should give you a good idea of how the app works and whether it’s for you.

• Price: $16
• Download: Developer’s Site

SpaceControl

Although the storage capacity of hard drives seems to be ever-increasing, since installing an SSD I have begun to keep closer track of the data that’s eating up space on my drive. It feels good to be back in control, without a hard drive that’s full of scattered information.

SpaceControl gives you a really simple way to keep track of the space available on one (or several) hard drives, and receive notifications when you’re running a little low on space. Though not particularly packed with functionality – you could do the same thing with AppleScript – it’s a handy utility for a couple of dollars.

• Price: $1.99
• Download: Developer’s Site/Mac App Store

Isolator

Concentrating on a single application at any one time can be a frustrating problem for computer users. There are so many different distractions present – from Twitter and Facebook, to your bouncing email icon – that it’s difficult to keep focus.

Isolator aims to help this problem by, when enabled, only showing one application at a time. The rest of the screen can either be blurred, or “isolated” completed with a single colour. Although not as advanced as a solution such as Concentrate, it’s a great free option.

• Price: Free
• Download: Developer’s Site

WeatherBug Alert

Although there seems to be a wealth of different weather apps available for iOS, the same isn’t really true for the Mac. Maybe it’s because dedicated weather websites offer so much information for free that it can be hard to compete.

WeatherBug Alert for Mac helps you plan your day with confidence by putting severe weather alerts and your live temperature on your desktop. It also contains links across to the full forecast at the Weatherbug.com site.

Although it would be good to have these integrated into the app, this simple menu bar widget won’t cost you a cent (and so it’s hard to complain!)

• Price: Free
• Download: Developer’s Site

F.lux

If you often use your computer into the early hours of the morning, you’ll be familiar with how frustrating a bright computer screen can be with the rest of the room in relative darkness. It definitely isn’t good for your eyes!

F.lux serves the interesting purpose of adjusting your screen colour to be better suited for night-time viewing. There are various preferences to tweak how this happens, and it can be a very handy utility for nocturnally-inclined readers.

Just don’t use it if you’re planning on doing any design work that relies on colour, as you’ll stand to be shocked when returning to your computer in the morning!

• Price: Free
• Download: Developer’s Site

SMARTReporter

Although you should certainly be backing up on a regular basis, there’s no harm in also keeping an eye on the ongoing health of your hard drive. Many new models integrate SMART (Self-Monitoring, Analysis, and Reporting Technology), a technology that detects and reports on various indicators of reliability, in the hope of anticipating drive failures.

SMARTReporter sits in your menu bar as an ongoing reminder that your drive is in a good condition. If any problems occur, you’ll be notified in advance so that you can double-check your backups and look into purchasing a new drive!

• Price: Free
• Download: Developer’s Site

Spirited Away

We’d all love to have a faster processor in our Mac, but what if there was a way to make better use of the processing power you already have? Spirited Away makes it easy to automatically “pause” a particular application, and stop it using any processing power if it’s been inactive for a period of time.

You can choose to exclude certain applications (for instance, you might be watching a video in your browser and would prefer it not to “pause”), and select preferences relating to the inactivity time.

• Price: Free
• Download: Developer’s Site

Dejumble

“Not another to-do list”, I hear you say. There are certainly enough task managers available to completely overflow your Applications folder, but Dejumble takes a slightly simpler approach to most. It has a unique interface, differentiating itself from the usual Mac experience.

You have a task inbox, a list of projects, and simple search functionality. Although it doesn’t technically drop down from your menu bar, it feels more akin to a menu application rather than a traditional piece of software.

• Price: $14.99
• Download: Mac App Store

Notify

If you’re looking for a simple email client that resides in your menu bar, Notify is very likely to fit the bill. You can add multiple accounts, check, read, and reply to messages. Notify supports mutliple accounts, including Gmail/Google Apps, MobileMe, and Rackspace Email. All in a beautiful interface.

Rather than replacing your current email client (although it could, in theory), Notify is meant to be a way to stay up-to-date with new messages, filing those that don’t warrant your attention, deleting spam, and firing back simple replies.

• Price: Free/$10
• Download: Developer’s Site

MailCue

MailCue is another email client that sits in your menu bar, but offers a more full-featured interface and experience that Notify. This isn’t necessarily better, and it all depends upon how you’d like to interact with your new emails and messages.

Particularly welcome is the functionality to “sleep” an email account, so that you can leave email alone and get down to work when needed.

• Price: $5.99
• Download: Mac App Store

Ejector

Ejecting volumes has long been a frustrating process in OS X – both for virtual, software volumes and physical devices as well. To do so, you’re required to either open Finder and click eject next to the drive name, or head over to your desktop to right click > Eject.

Ejector makes the process a little bit quicker, by listing all mounted volumes in your menu bar and giving you a one-click location to eject them. Particularly handy for ejecting all volumes if you’re wanting to unplug your laptop to take with you!

• Price: Free
• Download: Developer’s Site

Desktopple

Desktopple gives you a few unique and interesting ways to experiment with, clean up, and interact with your desktop. A key piece of functionality is a quick button to hide all the icons, folders, and drives on your desktop – they’re replaced with an image or wallpaper of your choosing.

It can also automatically hide windows that haven’t been used for a while (“Window Cleaning”), or dim your menu bar to further reduce distractions when working.

Desktopple is particularly handy if you regularly find yourself giving a presentation – or if you just hate desktop clutter!

• Price: Free
• Download: Developer’s Site

MenuPrefs

MenuPrefs does more or less exactly what you’d expect – puts System Preferences right in your menu bar! Depending on how often you find yourself dipping into System Preferences, you may find this amazingly useful or slightly unnecessary.

It’s certainly very handy to be able to jump straight to a particular preference pane, rather than bringing up the main System Preferences window first.

• Price: Free
• Download: Developer’s Site

Coming Soon: Fantastical

A final application I wanted to give a quick shout-out to is the upcoming Fantastical. I’ve been beta-testing the app for a few weeks, and it seems set to be a very handy piece of software that you won’t want to miss.

Residing in the menu bar, it revolutionises the way you interact with iCal and enter new items. Get your details registered to find out more when Fantastical is released!

• Register for Updates: Developer’s Site

Share Your Thoughts!

I’ve brought together a thorough collection of some of my favourite menu bar apps today, but I’m sure there are plenty more that I have missed. I’d love to hear a few more suggestions in the comments – share your favourite menu bar apps, and let me know which you couldn’t live without!

Also, I’d be interested to hear what you think of the mini-screencasts used above. Are these a helpful way to showcase the applications that we feature, and would you like to see them used more often?