It was 2007, and the nearly 4 year old HP laptop I used at the time for on-the-go work was all-but dead. Its internal hard drive interface had died, rendering the laptop little more than a plastic box. But with no funds for an alternate, it’d have to make do somehow.

There was little else to do other than find a way to install Windows XP on an external HDD, and convince the laptop to boot from that drive. A few hours of hacking together a custom XP install disk that would load USB drivers early enough to make booting from an external drive possible, and we had a working laptop again. Wonder of all wonders, it actually was passably usable, all the more surprising seeing as it was running its OS off an external HDD via a USB 2 connection. The final contraption was far from a real laptop — its battery was long-since dead, so you had to plug it in and have an external drive connected to get it running at all — but it kept me connected for the crucial months that I really needed it in college.

I was reminded of this story this week when, of all things, I was reading a story about making a hackintosh Mac Pro along with a reader’s comment about how he’s continued to upgrade his original Mac Pro to be Mavericks comparable. I never did make a real hackintosh, but did have OS X running in VMware and VirtualBox on PCs in college before I could afford a Mac.

This week, instead of a poll, it’s story time. What extremes have you gone to in trying to keep a computer — Mac or PC — alive? Or how far have you gone to get OS X running on any computer when you didn’t have a Mac? We’ll be looking forward to hearing your stories in the comments below!

If you’re in any way connected with the gaming community, you’ll have heard of the disaster of a launch that EA’s latest instalment in the SimCity franchise suffered. The simply named SimCity brought a fresh new look and feel to the iconic simulator but server stability issues and game-breaking bugs plagued released.

Now, it’s coming to the Mac. Five months later, EA’s provided the game with a slew of major updates and officially released a native OS X version of the game. In this review, we’re going to take a look at the game in the state you’d pick it up on today’s OS X release, irrespective of historic problems with the original Windows iteration and its launch-day woes on OS X.

SimCity: Founded 2013

SimCity was released in March on Windows and — to put it simply — it wasn’t good. In the immediate days following launch, SimCity’s servers were either over capacity, unavailable or prone to data loss and the game itself was fundamentally broken in a number of key areas, such as transport. I invested about 25 hours into the game in the weeks following initial release and, while it did provide some fun experiences, it was very clear how broken the game was.

It was a PR nightmare for EA too, that ultimately pushed the publisher to offer a second game for free to users and forced some retailers to take the game off their shelves. Since then, EA and developer Maxis have issued a number of major updates to the game and a mixture of server upgrades and the natural decline of hype have provided Windows users with more stable, bug-free gameplay.

On August 29th, Mac users joined Windows user’s initial launch-day woes, with installation and full-screen display issues, among other problems. EA was quick to get those problems wrapped, though, and now is reporting that “We are pleased to advise that the installation-related issues some players experienced with SimCity on Mac have been resolved.” Simcity for Mac may have not provided a great Labor Day weekend gaming experience, but it should be ready for prime time now, decidedly quicker after launch than its PC counterpart.

Fresh New Architecture

The 2013 reboot of SimCity puts a fresh new slant on the basic formula of the city building simulator. Rather than a aerial, strategic system of zoning and managing taxes, SimCity puts you up close and personal with your citizens. You’ll be called up by individuals who will make you zoom down to their level to answer queries. You can track individual vehicles as they move about your town, serving as utilities or carrying sims to your leisure attractions. Every sim and every house reacts to your decisions and you can find out what they’re thinking and base future calls on that information. It’s a really fun system that brings the game closer to The Sims than an anonymous metropolis builder.

All the basic necessities of any city — real-life or ones situated in previous instalment of the franchise — are catered for in a sleek menu covering the lower-half of the game. You don’t need to dive in with state-of-the-art emergency coverage in your first year, but eventually you’ll be campaigned to upgrade when the situation deteriorates. Capacity of utilities and services can be nominally improved by adding new departments — such as additional jail cells or more towers for burning coal — to existing structures to expand capacity. This is a neat way of being able to build with futureproofing in mind and is most certainly welcome in the developing stages of a city.

Your city can also sponsor specific categories of revenue-generating ventures. You can attract tourists with new points of interest like casinos or opt to mine for and refine metals and fuels, which can then be exported. You don’t ever need to use them, but they provide important jobs and can make up the bulk of your revenue.

International Politics

When your city begins to generate surplus resources, or require more for utilities than you can provide, the global market becomes an important factor in your game. Your utilities can choose to import fuels and resources at additional cost from a world market if your mining operations doesn’t cover your material expenditure or, if you’re fortunate enough to have a surplus roaming about the city, you can sell it back. This adds a new dynamic to your financial goals in a city, offering you motivation to maximise your income beyond the mere needs of your city.

Each city populates one area of a wider region, which is comprised of multiple cities — the exact amount depends on the region chosen during a new game’s setup. When you’re done with one city, you can back out to region view and establish a new one, offering a pleasant boost of fresh appeal when gameplay in one city gets stale. You can run that city independently or speed the process up by sharing the surplus cash and resources of another, a really cool mechanic previously unseen in the series.

What’s even more cool is that these cities can be ran by other people through multiplayer, either by invite only or through opening it up to the Origin-using public. Personally, SimCity remains a solo game for my personal preference but the multiplayer option is nice to have, providing your have friends that didn’t get turned off with the reception of the Windows version.

Constructing Vistas

SimCity is a downright beautiful game. Each building is fully detailed at street level, giving every structure in your city a personality of its own, even if it does come under a generic name. This contributes to the feeling that the game is more about creating beautiful cities to your design than just generating a strategy to perfect the mix between revenue and happiness. SimCity manages this without the majority of major graphical glitches evident in the early Windows releases, although, naturally, not all Macs will run the game with the highest graphical settings due to hardware limitations.

Hidden in the settings is the option to add a filter to the presentation of your city, offering gorgeous styles such as swapping all your colours out for just a contrast of orange and black. These add a great way to customise the game to a theme of your liking and something that I think we’d all like to see in more games.

Bugs No More

When SimCity was released back in March, server stability wasn’t the only problem. The game suffered at the hands of major bugs that broke core elements of the game. I played for significant sittings when the game first came out but each of my cities quickly became crippled when demand called for more than one emergency vehicle on the road at a time. This was certainly not the only issue with the game and it eventually caused me to give up on playing.

The Mac version’s delay has made it the product of a number of major improvements, the most recent of which culminating a season of fixes that have solved most of the game’s major problems. SimCity isn’t entirely bug-free, but it’s now more than playable and the general reception has been positive.

Final Thoughts

SimCity’s new direction might not be for everyone and the longtime fans of the franchise can be forgiven in their upset over the change of pace. However, the game stands on its own as a both beautiful and fun, with the Mac version releasing with the added benefit of over five months additional QA time than the Windows launch enjoyed. You will still need a persistent internet connection, though, so be warned!

If you already have a copy of the Windows version of SimCity tied to your EA/Origin account, the Mac version will be available free of charge. If not, take note of heavy discounts of the retail release in stores as the serial code can be used to unlock the digital-only Mac version on Origin too.

Got an iMac that stays home when you’re away, or an old MacBook that stays chained to your desk? There’s the whole App Store full of great things for them to do when you’re there, but there’s also an app just for when you’re away: Periscope Pro.

Periscope Pro turns your Mac’s camera and microphone — or a remote camera you have attached to your Mac — into a surveillance system, letting your Mac keep tabs on your home or office while you’re away. It can continuously record, take pictures or short videos every so often so you can check on your house at intervals, or detect motion and start recording whenever there’s motion near your Mac. Then, every time it records a photo or video clip, it can upload it to Dropbox or save to the folder of your choice so you can see what’s going on at your house from anywhere.

The very best thing about Periscope Pro is the brand-new motion detection algorithm in the new v1.4 release. With its extremely high precision combined with significantly reduced CPU usage, you can say goodbye to false alarms and never even need to consider using continuous recording again. Instead, you’ll be able to rest assured that Periscope Pro will catch any motion without overtaxing your Mac.

It’ll take you less than a minute to setup, and will give you peace of mind when you’re away, all for a fraction of the price of a security system. You’ll be able to see exactly what was going on at your house or office anytime of the day with a click.

Try Periscope Pro Today!

Ready to put your Mac to use to make your home safer? Just download a free Periscope Pro trial today and take it for a spin. You can then get your own copy of Periscope Pro from the App Store for just $19.99.

Are you a fan of typography, good design and social content? We have an app that mixes them all, providing a very unique experience in how you digest your content.

It’s called Spout, and what it does is that it pulls all the content from your social networks and displays it to you, one by one, in a very distinctive manner. Want to hear what it’s all about?

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How It Works

Spout retrieves information from your many social networking services such as Twitter, Facebook, Flickr and Instagram, and displays it to you, one piece flying by at a time in a fun and elegant way.

As your content is shown to you in a bold and lively slideshow, if you see any link or picture that catches your eye, just click it and it will be brought up in your browser. Missed a piece because it went by too fast? You can easily navigate and skip or rewind through the loaded content.

How It Looks

As you can see, there’s not much to Spout in terms of functionality, but what really makes the app stand out is the superb design and the fantastic look of how your content is displayed. As your content’s text is displayed, it’ll be stylized with different font sizes and colors, as well as get animated through close-ups and camera rotations that give a dynamic effect and make it very amusing to follow.

While the way content is displayed is very similar throughout the app, there are a few aesthetic things you can tweak. Kinetic text is where the camera rotates and text is displayed toggling between vertical and horizontal axis, which is very cool but it can make you dizzy. Static text, on the other hand, will keep the camera in place and just make your content slide in one word at a time. You can select either of these, none or shuffle through them.

There are also about a dozen themes that switch the visual look of the app in terms of colors and backgrounds. Some of them are pretty basic and consist of a couple colors with a solid background, while a few others get more elaborate and include moving backgrounds like a globe and a wooden texture. Unfortunately, themes must be selected one at a time and they can’t be automatically shuffled.

Services Supported

Remember when Google Reader unexpectedly quit and left a bunch of apps that used to rely on it out in the open? Spout isn’t any different: one of the services that it used to let you pull content from was your Google Reader account, but now that it’s gone, there’s not a lot going on for the app in the news department. Thankfully, there are a few other services that work with it.

Twitter is at the forefront of this app, as the summarized content forced in by the 140 character limit makes it ideal for this kind of app. Spout supports multiple Twitter accounts and it can pull content from various sources: your main timeline, a specific search or tweets by a certain user.

Other services supported include Facebook (given your credentials, it will display your feed’s content), Flickr (given a search term, it will pull all of the recently found photos) and Instagram (via your main feed). There’s also a “custom text” feature that will display anything you write.

You can enable as many services as you’d like and have the app shuffle through all of their content, or specify just one source for the app to pull information from.

Tweaking It

Besides the static and kinetic text display options that I mentioned earlier, there are a few more things you can tweak with Spout. You can choose to keep the Spout window on top all the time, choose which items get displayed (the newer ones on top or a cycle of all the current ones), set the time between each slide and the speed of the text. You can also set how you’d like information to be displayed, and keep the time or the photos from appearing and leaving just the text.

Conclusion

Spout surely presents an interesting concept, and I think it’ll be quite useful for some people. In don’t think it is an app that you’re supposed to stare at, it works better running in the background and just providing quick and cool information at a glance. That’s why it might work better as a screensaver or through a second monitor.

It would be nice for the app to have support for more services, such as Twitter lists and some sort of replacement for Google Reader. Another downside is that the app provides no way to interact with the content you’re shown. However, if you are a fan of beautiful typography and think you can get some good use out of this app, then it might be a worthy investment to you.

I believe in the saying “A penny saved is a penny earned”. That’s because it has worked well for me in the past. Way back in 2010 I was making a decent amount money, but at the end of every month I’ll end up wondering where it all went. I don’t usually splurge on clothes, electronics and I‘m not someone who buys stuff on an impulse.

Yet, there was a big gaping hole in my bank account by the last week of every month. Frustrated, I decided to keep track of all my spending and see what eats into my earnings. Thankfully, I bought an iPhone 3GS at that time and the awesome Moneybook app helped me track every penny and reign in my spending.

It’s my opinion that a mobile app is the best way to keep track of your expenses rather than a desktop or web app. You always have the mobile phone with you and there is very little chance that you forget to add an expense while on the go. However, using a desktop app can have its own merits besides offering a bigger screen real estate.

Direct connection to banks, better organization, advanced reports are some things worth mentioning. That’s exactly what Koku 2 promises to deliver. Let us see if it outweighs the experience of using of my trusted companion Moneybook!

Like the article? You should subscribe and follow us on twitter.

Setting Up

In an effort to centralize your finances, Koku comes with a autoconnect functionality that imports data from your banks and credit cards. I am a big fan of this feature since the days of Mint.com as it saves the hassle of logging into multiple accounts to stay on top of your financial status.

The app auto connects with over hundreds of financial institutions across USA and Canada. And, therein lies the catch. If you are using Koku from anywhere else, you are out of luck and have to be satisfied with the manual entry mode. That might sound like a chore, but Koku’s interface and a simplistic workflow doesn’t make it hard to enter data by hand.

To help secure your financial information, Koku allows you to lock down the accounts with a PIN number right when you are creating the account. It’s a practical and thoughtful integration.

There are quite a few gems like this and one such handy feature is the auto currency detection. The app automatically configures to the local currency complete with the official symbol. Unfortunately, I couldn’t find a way to change the default currency from anywhere in the app though!

Budgeting and Tracking Expenses

One great habit to improve your financial situation is to create a budget and stick to it. Everything will fall into place when there is a solid number in front of you. Better yet, create rollover budgets. That way, if you go overboard or under spend in a month, life would be very interesting the following month. I always look for these two budgeting modes in a personal finance app.

Koku has got a standard budgeting system. Set specific goals like how much you want to spend on coffee this week, or music this month, then watch as your budget gets updated with every transaction you add. Over time, Koku will show you how you’ve done in meeting your budgeting goals by analyzing your budget history, so you can view your progress.

Koku identifies and organizes related expenses with the help of tags. Color codes for tags are nice, but icon fonts, the mainstay in iOS apps would have been great. After adding tags, it’s a breeze to view your transactions or create detailed smart lists to view transactions that meet specific criteria.

However, I couldn’t check for sure if there was a rollover mode and nothing about this is mentioned in their website as well.

Following the Money Trail

I am very much used to having one budget for the entire month and manage my expenses within those limits organized neatly in various categories. The multi budget system of Koku is far more powerful and should save you from a huge headache during the tax season.

The app packs the same punch in the reports section as well. Create a pie graph to view your spending distributions. Or, use the bar charts to see how much you have overspent over the allowed budget. The distribution reports will clearly lay out how your spending breaks down across all your tags.

It might take a few tries to figure out the reports module, but considering the fact that this is key to reign in your spending, it’s absolutely worth your while to poke around a bit.

Final Thoughts

These days people use a variety of personal finance tools. To make a jump to another app and leaving all the data behind is a non starter for many of them. Data import from a CSV file is a workaround that is bound to bring more users to the app.

The companion app for iOS syncs via iCloud and is a USP if you are comfortable tracking finances from a mobile phone. But, an additional $4.99 for the mobile app sounds pricey. I don’t understand why developers don’t see companion apps for smartphones as a great marketing opportunity and as a means to bring down the barriers of adoption.

Koku for Mac is a fairly capable personal finance app that gets supercharged with an auto connection to financial institutions and the mobile app. You should definitely take these two factors into account if you want to make the most out of it.

I believe in the saying “A penny saved is a penny earned”. That’s because it has worked well for me in the past. Way back in 2010 I was making a decent amount money, but at the end of every month I’ll end up wondering where it all went. I don’t usually splurge on clothes, electronics and I‘m not someone who buys stuff on an impulse.

Yet, there was a big gaping hole in my bank account by the last week of every month. Frustrated, I decided to keep track of all my spending and see what eats into my earnings. Thankfully, I bought an iPhone 3GS at that time and the awesome Moneybook app helped me track every penny and reign in my spending.

It’s my opinion that a mobile app is the best way to keep track of your expenses rather than a desktop or web app. You always have the mobile phone with you and there is very little chance that you forget to add an expense while on the go. However, using a desktop app can have its own merits besides offering a bigger screen real estate.

Direct connection to banks, better organization, advanced reports are some things worth mentioning. That’s exactly what Koku 2 promises to deliver. Let us see if it outweighs the experience of using of my trusted companion Moneybook!

Like the article? You should subscribe and follow us on twitter.

Setting Up

In an effort to centralize your finances, Koku comes with a autoconnect functionality that imports data from your banks and credit cards. I am a big fan of this feature since the days of Mint.com as it saves the hassle of logging into multiple accounts to stay on top of your financial status.

The app auto connects with over hundreds of financial institutions across USA and Canada. And, therein lies the catch. If you are using Koku from anywhere else, you are out of luck and have to be satisfied with the manual entry mode. That might sound like a chore, but Koku’s interface and a simplistic workflow doesn’t make it hard to enter data by hand.

To help secure your financial information, Koku allows you to lock down the accounts with a PIN number right when you are creating the account. It’s a practical and thoughtful integration.

There are quite a few gems like this and one such handy feature is the auto currency detection. The app automatically configures to the local currency complete with the official symbol. Unfortunately, I couldn’t find a way to change the default currency from anywhere in the app though!

Budgeting and Tracking Expenses

One great habit to improve your financial situation is to create a budget and stick to it. Everything will fall into place when there is a solid number in front of you. Better yet, create rollover budgets. That way, if you go overboard or under spend in a month, life would be very interesting the following month. I always look for these two budgeting modes in a personal finance app.

Koku has got a standard budgeting system. Set specific goals like how much you want to spend on coffee this week, or music this month, then watch as your budget gets updated with every transaction you add. Over time, Koku will show you how you’ve done in meeting your budgeting goals by analyzing your budget history, so you can view your progress.

Koku identifies and organizes related expenses with the help of tags. Color codes for tags are nice, but icon fonts, the mainstay in iOS apps would have been great. After adding tags, it’s a breeze to view your transactions or create detailed smart lists to view transactions that meet specific criteria.

However, I couldn’t check for sure if there was a rollover mode and nothing about this is mentioned in their website as well.

Following the Money Trail

I am very much used to having one budget for the entire month and manage my expenses within those limits organized neatly in various categories. The multi budget system of Koku is far more powerful and should save you from a huge headache during the tax season.

The app packs the same punch in the reports section as well. Create a pie graph to view your spending distributions. Or, use the bar charts to see how much you have overspent over the allowed budget. The distribution reports will clearly lay out how your spending breaks down across all your tags.

It might take a few tries to figure out the reports module, but considering the fact that this is key to reign in your spending, it’s absolutely worth your while to poke around a bit.

Final Thoughts

These days people use a variety of personal finance tools. To make a jump to another app and leaving all the data behind is a non starter for many of them. Data import from a CSV file is a workaround that is bound to bring more users to the app.

The companion app for iOS syncs via iCloud and is a USP if you are comfortable tracking finances from a mobile phone. But, an additional $4.99 for the mobile app sounds pricey. I don’t understand why developers don’t see companion apps for smartphones as a great marketing opportunity and as a means to bring down the barriers of adoption.

Koku for Mac is a fairly capable personal finance app that gets supercharged with an auto connection to financial institutions and the mobile app. You should definitely take these two factors into account if you want to make the most out of it.

I don’t know why I keep looking at new photo editors. I’ve got a great system of my own here with Aperture, which is my preferred tool. If I felt like drifting into the Adobe world, Lightroom is fantastic (check out my review here on Mac.AppStorm of Lightroom 5). And while I love Pixelmator, there’s nothing wrong with Photoshop or Acorn either — they’re all great.

So what was it about TouchRetouch that made me curious? There was an implicit promise of ease of use that drew me too it, but more than that, its successful mobile apps prompted me to wonder what the Mac version would be like. Read on for my thoughts.

Like the article? You should subscribe and follow us on twitter.

Promising Miracles

TouchRetouch claims to do one thing really well. It allows you to do what’s considered a Retouch in Aperture or iPhoto, and it’s supposed to nail it every time. Retouches allow you to quickly select an area and have the app get rid of the offending patch and attempt to blend the area in with the rest of the photo.

If you’re completely unfamiliar with it, it’s sort of like a Clone and Stamp tool. But since most professional photographers would attack me for such a simplified explanation, it’s important to remember that this is called a Retouch for a reason. It’s meant more for removing scratches or nicks in photos.

The thing is, some people are using it to replace things like people in pictures. And TouchRetouch is banking that’s what you’ll want to use the Repair tool for as well. The thing is, they’re promising some real miracles.

Naturally, I was skeptical. After all, this looked like a lightweight quick and dirty photo editor. What could it possibly do?

Quick and Dirty

Turns out, apart from retouching photos, it can do a fair bit. TouchRetouch also has a Clone tool (more on that later) and allows for a series of small adjustments in a relatively intuitive interface.

The Adjust pane is one of my favourite parts about the app. It keeps everything simple. It makes it easy to take a look at the shadows and highlights in the photos. The sliders let you adjust them accordingly. You can also quickly adjust the warmth and saturation of any photos with the sliders.

The Crop button gives you quick access to straightening and, of course, cropping. Clicking and holding the Original button lets you compare your progress. I like that you click and hold the Original button; it feels more intuitive than tapping it twice.

I do wish that you could enter numbers into the Adjustments pane instead of relying entirely on the sliders to fine-tune an image, but that’s largely a minor quibble. When you’re done with adjustments, you can save your work easily.

Retouching a Photo

The real bread and butter of the app is the Retouch effect. You can simply drag over an area with the Brush or mark it with the Lasso and then let the app work its “magic.” What ADVA Soft promises is that the app will deal with unwanted blemishes quickly and easily.

The thing is, that’s a really lofty promise. And TouchRetouch doesn’t live up to it at all.

I tried with a myriad of images. I was yanking more photos out of my archive than you could probably imagine, and I rarely got the feature to work. Most of the time, it was less reliable than the same feature built into Aperture, Pixelmator, Photoshop or Lightroom. Even iPhoto could occasionally get better results with the same photos.

This is where the Clone tool comes in. To AVDA Soft’s credit, the Clone tool is pretty nice. I like how visual it is. Instead of clicking the area you want to clone with your mouse, you literally drag the Clone circle around. But it doesn’t feel as precise as its competition. Granted, this gives it a leg up over simple software like iPhoto, but professionals will balk.

Who’s This For?

I kept wondering who this was actually for when I was using the app. Although I could achieve similar results to the work I do in Aperture and Pixelmator, it took much longer in TouchRetouch and didn’t seem nearly as effective or convincing overall.

And that’s fine — let’s assume, for a moment, that this is meant for the consumer snapping shots with their iPhones who want to do some quick and dirty editing.

Well, Macs already come with iPhoto for free, which is superior in nearly every way — except for its lack of a Clone tool. And the consumers that are looking for things like a Clone tool are surely more likely to download a pirated copy of Photoshop.

The people who don’t know the first thing about cloning and stamping images are going to buy this app because of it’s marketing, which feels like a lie to me. They’ll be disappointed because the app doesn’t consistently deliver the miracles it promises.

In short, this app is weaker than most of its competition. Its user interface is nice, but there are some elements of it — like a slide-out Adjustment pane — that feel more at home on an iPad than they do on a Mac, where a floating Adjustment pane would be more beneficial. And while sliders work well enough with fingers, they don’t feel as natural with a mouse.

There Are Better Options

Apart from the Retouch feature, which is the same as everybody else’s, I don’t think TouchRetouch oversells itself. I just think it doesn’t know who its market is. On an iPhone or an iPad, an app like this makes sense. There are no real RAW image editors, and the expectations of people editing their quick snaps they took with their iPhone is much lower than the expectations of people with the computing power of a Mac.

At the end of the day, I simply can’t bring myself to recommend the app. It’s not the miracle machine that AVDA Soft promises. If you’re interested in its more complex features, you’d be better off looking into powerful and inexpensive alternatives like Pixelmator. If you just want a quick way to touch up things like Brightness and Saturation, you probably already have a copy of iPhoto, which is sadly better than TouchRetouch in nearly every way.

Droplr‘s been a crowd-favorite way to quickly share files from your Mac’s menubar for years, one that’s one many over including myself. Its basic file-sharing service is fast and customizable with a pro account, and its apps are far more powerful while staying as simple to use as its competition. And now, it’s taking steps to take its pro accounts beyond basic file sharing.

The brand-new Droplr Draw is the first step towards that new future. With the latest v3.5 update to Droplr’s app, you’ll find an included basic annotation app to quickly markup and share images on Droplr. Either select the new Capture & Draw Screenshot option in the menubar app, or press Alt+Shift+4 to directly select an area of the screen (or additionally press your spacebar and select a window) and capture a screenshot that’ll then be opened directly in the Droplr Draw app.

There, you’ll find a basic draw, circle, square, arrow, and text tool to add the most basic annotations to your screenshot. You can’t change the color of the annotations from the default blue, or change the font of your text — indeed, the only thing you can change is the placement/size of objects, or remove them with a tap of delete. Annotations finished, you can simply hit CMD+enter on your keyboard or press the Upload button to immediately upload the tweaked image to Droplr. It’s the very most basic screenshot annotation tool you could imagine.

Much like the existing note tool in Droplr, Draw is a mini-app included with Droplr that you can use — or just use your own favorite tools instead. After all, you could tweak a photo in Preview then save and upload it to Droplr, or tweak it in Photoshop and press Alt+D to instantly upload it to Droplr. The new Draw tool just simplifies that, making basic annotations as drop-dead simple as possible and leaving the rest to other apps. In a market where the other most popular annotation tool — Skitch — is owned by Evernote, it seems a sensible extension for Droplr.

In another interesting move, Droplr has announced Droplr for Business on their site as a collaboration tool for sharing files with your team. It’s yet to be released, but it’ll be interesting to see what they do with it.

For now, though, Droplr continues to be one of the best ways to quickly share files online, and if you have a subscription to their now-$5.99/month Pro service, be sure to take Droplr Draw for a spin. It’s the simplest way to tweak screenshots and share them on Droplr with no fuss. My only real surprise is that it’s only available for pro subscribers; seems opening it to free users, too, would at worst get them to use Droplr more and eventually perhaps subscribe to pro.

If your computer has a multitouch trackpad or you own an external one, you probably use two finger swipes to scroll down a page, show the Notification Center and flip through your photos. But why not put your powerful trackpad to some real use with customizable gestures?

Today we’ll be comparing three apps that build on the functionality of the multitouch trackpad and improve it: JiTouch, BetterTouchTool and MagicPrefs. Want to see which one is the best?

The Gist

By now you likely already know this, but let’s go over it really quick. The more recent Macbooks come with a very elegant glass trackpad that can interpret anything you do with it, even multiple gestures at the same time. Your computer implements this multitouch functionality by giving you a few default gestures that you can use in everyday activities, such as:

• Three-Finger Tap: Brings up the highlighted word in the dictionary.
• Three-Finger Drag: Moves the current window around.
• Two-Finger Pinch: Zooms in and out.
• Three-Finger Swipe: Switches Desktops or Full-Screen Apps

You get the idea, and there are a few more gestures that you can watch and choose to activate under the Trackpad System Settings. However, if you’re like me, you’ll quickly want to explore the full potential of this amazing trackpad with a little more customization. That’s where three other apps come in that can turn your trackpad into a beast. They are all very similar though, so how do we decide which one’s the best? Let’s pit them against each other.

JiTouch 2

I’ve been a loyal JiTouch user since I got my first Macbook. Now when I work in a computer that doesn’t run it, I feel clumsy and awkward. JiTouch gives you a pretty big list of actions that you can trigger through gestures, and you can then choose which gestures you’d like to associate with which actions. There’s a little bit of everything: managing tabs, quitting apps, opening files, and much more.

JiTouch also supports the Magic Mouse in a very similar fashion, and it includes settings for customizing the speed and the sensitivity of the gesture detection. What’s even more interesting, is an extra feature that lets you “draw” shapes with two spread fingers, triggering more specific actions like opening new tabs and accessing the clipboard.

BetterTouchTool

The name of this one pretty much says it all, as it is the most popular alternative out there for improving the trackpad. It has been around for a while and it continues to be in active development, which definitely shows. There’s support for Apple Remote and the Leap Motion controller, for example.

BetterTouchTool is also heavily customizable, to the point where it can get overwhelming. There are no default actions, so you’re going to have to set them up by yourself, but you’ll get to tweak several things along the way such as specific apps where gestures should work, alternate keyboard shortcuts for your actions, and even activate window snapping. And the best part? It’s free.

MagicPrefs

If you feel burdened by BetterTouchTool and would prefer the simplicity of JiTouch for the price of free, MagicPrefs is your app. It doesn’t feature a ton of gestures, but it does include a big number of customizable actions that range from opening Spotlight to locking your computer. You can even setup your own actions through AppleScript.

Just like its competitors, it has support for the Magic Mouse along with the trackpad, and it even has a library of plugins that add extra functionality to the app, like taking an iSight picture with a gesture trigger.

Which one’s better?

Although I’m a fan of JiTouch and I continue to use it regularly, I have to admit it has fallen behind the competition. What was once a fresh and complete app, now stands without active development and with a few Mountain Lion bugs that have made me fall out of love with it.

BetterTouchTool is a recent discovery of mine, and I have come to appreciate it as an extremely complete and powerful tool, even though that’s a disadvantage at times. Using the app sometimes feels sluggish and unresponsive to me, which keeps me from embracing it as my go-to app for implementing extra gestures.

MagicPrefs on the other hand, is a competent free alternative but it feels limited on several areas as it requires a little bit of work to get some actions working, and even then some of them — such as tab management — aren’t readily available.

Conclusion

All three alternatives will more or less give you the same experience, although each one of them has its own specific gimmicks, such as JiTouch’s shape drawing, MagicPrefs’ scripting and plugin capabilities, and BetterTouchTool’s wide list of features.

Although it may not be pretty or easy to get into, BetterTouchTool is clearly the winner given our examination, as its many powerful features make it much more than just an app for implementing touch gestures. But what do you think? Which one do you use and why do you like it? Let us know in the comments!

Bioshock Infinite has been one of this year’s most popular releases, garnering a following of fan promoting a positive reception when the title launched on Windows and select consoles earlier this year. Today, the Mac joins those platforms in offering Bioshock Infinite and it’s our turn to take a look at what it has to offer.

Bioshock Infinite continues the Bioshock series with a fresh new storyline, centred around the fictional floating city of Columbia and its strong political and religions themes. It’s an FPS so combat will naturally come as events unravel but a system of vigors mixes things up with unique interruption.

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Entry to Columbia

After a short intro sequence setting up the brief backstory to the game’s events, the religions themes in Bioshock Infinite are immediately forced upon with the player being ushered into a literal digital baptism before they can proceed to the city. For a game that doesn’t advertise itself as a religious thriller, the early induction into this strong religious backstory can be harrowing but it’s not long until you’re out into the bright atmosphere of Columbia.

Columbia is a beautifully designed city in the clouds, floating a population that seems universally happy and content. It resembles an early 1900s America, filled with classic designs and architectures. With a simple directive, the game offers the standard chance to explore your surroundings without interrupting combat, allowing you to enjoy the delights that Columbia has to offer. Mini-games that resemble carnival games allow you to earn some early currency and the slow-paced introduction offers a pleasant first few steps.

It’s not long before the dark undertones of Columbia’s culture once again present themselves, however. The authorities show off gruesome melee weapons to each other, allowing for quick and painful executions with little rationing of blood, a raffle offers the winner a chance to pelt a tortured mixed race couple with a baseball and signage in the city promotes the hunt for a character referred to as the False Shepherd — one depicted with a strikingly similar mark on their hand as your character’s. The contrast between the city’s initial charming exterior and its much darker soul provide an enticing atmosphere unlike the majority of “the world’s gone to hell anyways” shooters.

Vigors and Executions

The story of Bioshock Infinite sees you locate a girl named Elizabeth and help her escape the city, all while trying to make some nominal effort against the city’s extreme religious overtones and racial injustice. Of course, this isn’t an easy process and combat is a common occurrence throughout the entire game. You begin armed with simple weaponry and Columbia’s own flagship melee weapon — used to perform effective and gore-filled executions when it’s time isn’t taken up hanging onto a system of rails that let you navigate the game world — but new weaponry becomes available as you progress.

Bioshock Infinite distinguishes itself from other FPS with its own unique, fantasy perks and enemies. A variety of vigors provide unique power-ups during combat, such as taking possession of an enemy turret or setting a murder of crows on a crowd of opponents, which are fuelled by the salts gained from scavenging for items around the maps. There’s a pleasing simplicity to the inventory-less Bioshock Infinite; you can’t stockpile health packs or extra salts for use later, so making decisions is more meaningful without the ability to pause and replenish supplies.

When you have the AI-controlled Elizabeth following, she’ll offer her own unique contribution to your combat efforts. Elizabeth can spawn in assistance in the form of additional cover and auxiliary support like turrets, adding another dynamic to combat that doesn’t require you to run across the map to accept a care package.

Final Thoughts

Bioshock Infinite is a fun game with a striking atmosphere you won’t soon forget. Set in a fantasy rendition of classical America, the title offers a refreshing break from the military and sci-fi cliches that dominate the genre. The early exposure to extreme religion can be intense and the time-sensitive choice at whether to throw a baseball in acceptance of Columbia’s racism will question your moral instincts. However, Bioshock Infinite offers a fairly non-repetitive combat system immersed in a world designed with immense care to the intrinsic detail that defines its literal award-winning atmosphere.

You can pick up Bioshock Infinite through the Mac App Store or Steam. If you already own the game for Windows on Steam, the Mac version should unlock for free. The Clash in the Clouds DLC will be available for purchase on Steam from September 12th.

It’d be hard to be a creative professional and not have heard the drama around Adobe’s move to subscriptions with Creative Cloud‘s release. We’ve covered the good and bad of the move to subscriptions, and even wrote an Open Letter to Adobe about the changes. Creative Cloud has many good things — it’s even cheaper than buying Master Collection and upgrading every time — and the upgraded apps have a lot of nice new features. There’s even the value-add of font and file sync. But, if you want to own your apps, or not have to pay for upgrades and new features you don’t want, though, it’s hard to see the upside to Adobe’s new move to a subscription-only system.

The good thing is, Adobe’s got more competition for its apps than ever before, especially on the Mac. There’s an embarrassment of riches on the App Store and beyond for everything from photo editing to web design to animation. We’ve rounded up the best alternate apps to everything Adobe sells, from Acrobat to Premiere and everything in-between, so if you’re not so excited about shelling out $50/month to Adobe, here’s your chance to jump ship with great new apps.

Photoshop

Photoshop — the app name that became a verb, much to Adobe’s chagrin — is to graphics editing what Microsoft Word is to document editing. It’s the absolute standard for photo editing, digital painting, and practically all other graphics work. But it’s not the only choice. There’s opensource alternates that are powerful even though they’re not as polished, and on the Mac especially there’s beautiful alternates that can get the job done for most of us. Here’s some of the best.

Pixelmator

Pixelmator’s perhaps the most well-known Photoshop alternate on the Mac, and for good reason. It’s beautifully designed, runs fast, and has most of the Photoshop features that most people need. It has soft proofing and CMYK support, something most Photoshop competitors don’t include. It’s even got features that’ll keep you from being jealous of other new Adobe CC additions, with the tools to treat text as a shape that’s similar to Illustrator’s new Touch Type tool. It’s still lacking layer styles and a crop/resize tool that’s as simple and powerful as Photoshop’s, but both of those should be coming later this year.

Price: $14.99 from the Mac App Store, free trial available

More Info: Our Mac.AppStorm Review

Acorn 4

Another image editing app designed for the Mac, the latest version of Acorn is designed to make image editing simpler than ever. It’s fast, has tons of layer styles and non-destructive filters that you can link together to make the effects you want, includes a brand new shape tool and brush designer, and more. Best of all, it’s designed to be scriptable, with deep support for Automator, AppleScript, and Javascript to make your own automated workflows, or Python and Objective-C for making your own plugins, so Acorn can do the dirty work of editing for you.

Price: $49.99 on the Mac App Store or Acorn’s own Flying Meat Store, free trial available

More Info: Our Mac.AppStorm review

Can’t decide between Pixelmator or Acorn? Check out our just-released in-depth comparison of the latest versions of Pixelmator and Acorn to see which is best for your needs.

Photoshop Elements

I know, I know: we’re supposed to be talking about alternates to Adobe’s apps. But if the main thing you’re wanting is a robust image editing app that’s not on a monthly subscription, Adobe’s own Photoshop Elements could be what you’re needing. You’ll find many of the features associated with full Photoshop in Photoshop Elements’ “Expert” mode (and can unlock, to a degree, more of them with plugins like Elements+), and can even install Photoshop plugins, brushes, and many Photoshop actions. You can even import most RAW photos into Elements, something you might assume would be left to the pro version, and also comes with many of the Adobe fonts you’d get in Creative Suite. If you need close computability with Photoshop, Elements is likely your best shot — and the full version only cost slightly more than one month of Creative Cloud.

Price: $69.99 from the Mac App Store, $99.99 from the Adobe Store (includes photo organizer not included in the App Store version). Free trial available.

GIMP

GIMP is one of the most ambitious opensource projects, trying to take on Adobe’s Photoshop with a free program. It’s now native on the Mac, so you won’t have to deal with X11 to run it. It’s not perfect, but hey, for a free editor it’s nothing short of amazing. It’s an obvious choice on Linux and Windows, but on the Mac with competition like Pixelmator and Acorn, it’s a bit harder to decide to stick with GIMP unless your budget is $0. In which case, GIMP is great.

Price: Free for OS X, Windows, and Linux

More Info: Our Mac.AppStorm review of GIMP for OS X from a Photoshop pro

Autodesk SketchBook

If Photoshop was your digital canvas, then you might be more interested in alternate drawing apps — like SketchBook. Designed by Autodesk, the company best known for AutoCAD, SketchBook is a great sketching app that you can get for free or for $59 if you’d like the pro version. With tons of brushes, robust tablet support, and even PSD support, it’s the tool digital artists need on their Mac.

Price: Free for SketchBook Express, $59.99 for SketchBook Pro

Illustrator

Most people could name at least one Photoshop alternate off the top of their head, but there isn’t as much competition on the vector drawing space. That is, there used to not be as much competition. Today, however, there’s a number of Mac apps that can go toe-to-toe with Illustrator — and look great doing so.

Sketch

Sketch is designed from the ground-up to make designers’ lives easier, and the team’s dedication to their app shows. It’s built up quite the excited following in recent months after Adobe announced that they’re killing Fireworks, since Sketch can export your designs as CSS, making it great for web designers. But even if you’re designing traditional vector images, Sketch is a great Illustrator alternate, with layer styles, slice exports, beautiful text rendering, and more that make it a graphics app you’ll want to work in.

Price: $49.99 on the Mac App Store, free trial available.

More Info: Our Mac.AppStorm review

iDraw

Like Adobe’s new UI style, but not its price tag? Try iDraw for your vector drawing needs. It’s got a dark UI that looks even classier than Adobe’s new dark UI, and the vector drawing tools you need to create on your Mac or iPad. It can import Illustrator files, something most other vector apps can’t do, and with its just-released v2.3 it’s able to import Photoshop files as well, and more.

Price: $24.99 on the Mac App Store

More Info: Our Mac.AppStorm Review

Artboard

Another nicely designed vector drawing app for the Mac, Artboard is designed to make it simple to get started creating vector graphics. It includes shapes and clip art to get you started, and has a wealth of pre-designed templates and tutorials to help you create stuff even if you’ve never used a vector drawing app before. For pros, it’s still got the power you need, with CMYK color space support and more.

Price: $29.99 on the Mac App Store, free trial available

More Info: Our Mac.AppStorm Review

Inkscape

An honorable mention goes to Inkscape, the opensource vector graphics editor. It’s not the nicest designed, and on a Mac you’ll have to run it in X11 since it’s not a native Mac app. But, it is powerful, and has many of the Illustrator features you might need.

Price: Free

Fireworks

Adobe Fireworks took the web designer world by storm, as a vector drawing program designed for creating web graphics. Instead of slicing up Photoshop files to embed in websites, you could turn your designs into CSS3 and put it directly in your site’s code. Unfortunately, it’s not even living on in Creative Cloud, as even though it’s still available, Adobe’s said they won’t be developing it going forward.

But that doesn’t mean its place doesn’t still need filled. The best alternate to Fireworks right now is the aforementioned Sketch. It’s a full-featured vector graphics app that can export to CSS3 code, just like Fireworks, and its team is working to make it an even better Fireworks alternate. It’s the first app you should try if you’re looking for a Fireworks alternate, but it’s not the only game in town. Here’s another great app to try out:

WebCode

You want to design vector graphics in SVG, take them to the web in CSS and HTML, and animate them with Javascript and HTML5 Canvas? WebCode is the app for you. Its older sibling, PaintCode, let you make graphics in code for native apps, and WebCode brings the same thing to web design. It’s a great app, one that’s not a direct Fireworks replacement but that should definitely find a place in your web design toolkit.

Price: $49.99 from the Mac App Store, free trial available.

More Info: Our Mac.AppStorm Review

Acrobat

Adobe may have invented the PDF standard, but they’re far from the only ones that support it today. Every Mac has Apple’s awesome Preview app built-in for free that works better that Adobe Reader ever has — and includes basic markup features that keep most people from needing Acrobat. And, of course, almost every Mac app can save as PDF, and all can print as PDF, so creating PDFs shouldn’t usually be a problem. There’s only two things left to cover — editing existing PDFs, and OCRing text — and there’s other great Mac apps for both of those. Of course, if you are simply wanting to avoid Creative Cloud, Acrobat can still be purchased directly, but the alternates are nice enough that you should consider them as well.

PDFpen

If you need to edit PDFs, this is the app for you. For $59.99, you’ll be able to edit text, images, and more in PDFs, export them in other formats including Word format, OCR text in images, save filled out forms, and more. Jump to the Pro version for $99.99, and you’ll be able to create interactive forms, add and edit tables of content in your documents, and convert websites into PDF. There’s everything you could want form Acrobat here, and more, all for a fraction of Acrobat’s price (and just over the price of one month of Creative Cloud).

Price: $59.99 on the Mac App Store, $99.99 for the pro version. Both available directly from Smile Software as well. Free trial available.

More Info: Our Mac.AppStorm review of the previous version.

Prizmo

If Preview handles your PDF needs, but you needed Acrobat for OCR, then Prizmo is the app you should try out. It’s a robust OCR app that can detect text in over 40 languages from your Mac’s screen, scanned documents, pictures, and more. It’ll help you OCR everything from documents to the text in street signs, in an intuitive interface that helps you extract just what you need from the images. It’s easily the nicest OCR experience on the Mac.

Price: $49.99 on the Mac App Store, plus a $49 in-app purchase for the Pro Pack to add batch document processing. Free trial available.

More Info: Our Mac.AppStorm Review

InDesign

Macs launched the desktop publishing revolution, with the original PageMaker from Aldus. Adobe later bought out Aldus, then later discontinued PageMaker in lieu of its own InDesign — which itself was the first OS X native desktop publishing app. But that hasn’t kept the competition away — if anything, there’s more desktop publishing apps still on the Mac than on any other platform. Here’s the best.

QuarkXPress

The original competitor to Adobe’s PageMaker and InDesign, QuarkXPress is running on over 16 years of experience as one of the leading desktop publishing applications. It’s a pro tool, with a price tag to show for it. Adobe’s nearly taken over the publishing market with InDesign, but QuarkXPress is still a force to be reckoned with. It’s got a new version coming soon designed for Mavericks, but until then, it’s the other market leader you should consider if InDesign’s subscription is too frustrating for you.

Price: $899 from the Quark Store

Pages

Apple’s word processor is best known as Microsoft Word’s main competitor on the Mac, but it’s actually a rather good desktop publishing app as well. Sure, it doesn’t have the precision formatting features you’d expect in InDesign and QuarkXPress, but for the rest of us, it’s got most of what we need. You can layout your page designs however you want, create master pages, automatically generate tables of contents, and then publish your work in PDF and ePub formats. It’s sorely due for an update, but Apple’s already promised one later this year. We can’t wait to see what it brings.

Want more eBook publishing power? Check out Apple’s free iBooks Author app — though it’s really only aimed at making eBooks for the iBooks bookstore.

Price: $19.99 from the Mac App Store

Swift Publisher

You want full-featured page layouts without a steep learning curve? Then InDesign isn’t what you want anyhow. You’ll find yourself much more at home with Swift Publisher, where for a fraction of the cost you can make great PDF and print designs with a fraction of the effort it’ll take to master InDesign. It’s not perhaps aimed at print professionals, but for the page layout needs that most of us have, it’ll more than suffice.

Price: $19.99 from the Mac App Store

More Info: Our Mac.AppStorm review

Scribus

Another open source alternate to Adobe’s offerings, Scribus is a full-featured page layout application that includes most of the features even professional layout designers would need. It’s somewhat convoluted and difficult to learn, but then InDesign can be the same. If you’re just getting started with page layout, you’ll find Pages or Swift Publisher more to your liking, but if you need more power, you might want to give Scribus a try before switching to QuarkXPress.

Price: Free download

InCopy

Working on a book collaboratively with your editors? If you team isn’t standardized on Microsoft Word, then there’s a good chance that you’ve standardized on Adobe’s InCopy for drafting your book before turning it into a printed volume in InDesign. For the collaboration side of things, you’ll often be best with web apps, from the aging office alternates like Google Docs to brand-new apps like Draft and Editorially. If you still want to work locally on your Mac, though, there’s two standout apps that are the best companions for writers — enough that you should cheat and use them for your own writing even if your team is standardized on InCopy or another app.

Scrivener

The writing app for serious writers, Scrivener is the place to plan out your whole writing project. You can write with the formatting you want — or in plain text, keep detailed info about every character and part in your work, write notes and comments throughout your text, tie in images and text snippets, and pull the whole thing together into a literary masterpiece. You can even use it to collaborate with your editor team via Dropbox. It’s great.

Price: $45 from the Literature & Latte store or from the Mac App Store

More Info: Mac.AppStorm review

Ulysses III

If you prefer to write in Markdown-formatted plain text, then the new Ulysses III is the app you should try out. It’s the perfect place to draft your thoughts, flesh them out further, then pull them together and export them in PDF, ePub, or rich text formats. It’s where I do most of my writing, and I love it. With the upcoming 1.1 release, it’ll include support for export templates that’ll help it replace InCopy and InDesign for basic publishing, and also includes a built-in search tool that makes it easy to find anything you’ve written across all of your current projects.

Price: $39.99 from the Mac App Store

More Info: Mac.AppStorm review

Lightroom

Lightroom’s one of the newer additions to Adobe’s lineup, and one of their only pro apps that’s still available for direct purchase (at $149, or the cost of 3 months of Creative Cloud). It’s a great tool for photographers to organize and tweak their photos without having to resort to a combo of Finder and Photoshop, and is one of the few Adobe apps that seems to get constant praise from all angles. Still, if you’re looking to replace it, there’s plenty of alternates for it too.

Aperture

It’s Apple to the rescue again, with the pro version of their photo organization tool that you already own: iPhoto. Aperture may be getting a little overdue for an upgrade, but it’s still a great Lightroom alternate. It especially shines at organization and full-screen image tweaking on retina displays. Plus, it’s half the price of Adobe’s Lightroom — not bad considering that you’ve got way more than half of the functionality here.

Price: $79.99 from the Mac App Store

More Info: Mac.AppStorm’s Lightroom vs. Aperture comparison

darktable

Perhaps you want more than iPhoto offers, and you don’t want to pay a dime. You’re in luck. darktable, from the open source tradition that’s brought us replacements to almost every other Adobe app, is a rather nice looking photo organization app that actually looks pretty nice. It’s still rough around the edges, but hey, it’s free — and it’s still much nicer looking than many open source alternates.

Price: Free download

More Info: Mac.AppStorm review

Corel AfterShot

Corel’s one of the original Adobe competitors on the creative front, and while you may have not heard of them as much lately, they’re still keeping at it, making pro apps for drawing and photo retouching, among other things. Their AfterShot app was recommend by readers in our Aperture versus Lightroom comparison since its available on OS X, Windows, and Linux, a rarity among creative software. But that’s not all it has going for it. It also has a rich array of photo editing features, as well as photo library organization and bulk exports.

Price: $49.99 from Corel or $39.55 from Amazon

Capture One

Adobe’s not the highest priced — or most professional — offering in this lineup. Instead, that award goes to Capture One, another crowd favorite in the comments on our Lightroom/Aperture comparison article. It has brilliant photo rendering, amazing lens correction, and great filters to help you find what you want in your library. But that power comes at a price, one that’s twice as high as Adobe’s Lightroom and four times more than Aperture. At least it costs a fraction of the price of a high-quality lens still.

Price: €229 (around $300) from PhaseOne

More Info: Mac.AppStorm review

Web Designing with Flash Pro, Dreamweaver, and Muse

Adobe’s Dreamweaver seemed to hold the title of the most popular way to design websites for years. It had everything in one place, produced decidedly better results than the dreaded FrontPage, and came bundled with other apps you needed like Photoshop. Plus, you could use it right alongside Flash Pro to add interactivity to your sites.

Yeah. We’re long beyond those days. Sure, people still use Dreamweaver, but for the most part, we’ve moved on to better coding apps and a whole folder full of tiny utilities that help us out. The iPhone’s introduction was the death knell for Flash, and it’s only a matter of time before it’s fully irrelevant. Muse is interesting, but there’s other simple tools to make template-based websites.

We obviously can’t include every possible web development alternate to Dreamweaver, but here’s the best apps to replace Adobe for your web coding needs.

Flash

Hype

Want animations on your site, without the legacy weight of using Flash? You know you should be using HTML5, CSS3 and Javascript, but unless you’re a coding pro you’ll find it insanely daunting to make a fluid animation from scratch with web-safe tech even today. That is, unless you get a copy of Hype. The just-released Hype 2 makes it simple to create fluid animations out of web tech that work great in every modern browser. You can now even include audio, swipe and touch events, custom fonts, and more. It’s nothing short of amazing, and is everything that Flash should have turned into.

Price: $59.99 on the Mac App Store, but on sale for $29.99 for v.2′s launch

More Info: Our now-outdated review of v.1 — but really, give v.2 a shot regardless

 

MotionComposer

Perhaps you really did want Flash. Ok. In that case, this is the app for you. MotionComposer is designed to help you make animated content in Flash or HTML5 — your choice. Without any coding, you can make animated content in either format, with a focus on HTML5 but an option to output Flash for older browsers that don’t support HTML5. If for some reason you actually still needed to work in Flash format, you still don’t have to stay in Adobe’s camp.

Price: $149 from the Aquafadas Store

More Info: Our Mac.AppStorm review

Dreamweaver

Coda

You want Dreamweaver’s all-in-one approach to web development, with better standards support? Coda’s the coding environment for you. With a  beautiful code editor, Git and MySQL integration, Transmit-powered FTP integration, and built-in documentation that’ll help you make the best code possible, it’s a web developer’s dream come true in one package. Coda 2′s the #1 grossing developer tool on the App Store for good reason.

Price: $74.99 on the Mac App Store

More Info: Our Mac.AppStorm review

Sublime Text

If you want the best coding app for handcrafting your sites today, Sublime Text is absolutely the crowd favorite. It’s insanely fast, has more packages that add extra features than you can count, and includes innovative features like multiple cursors and a built-in search and open tool that makes it quick to jump between your projects. The upcoming v.3 only makes it faster and better. It’s the serious coder’s best friend.

Price: $70 from the Sublime HQ

More Info: Sublime Text tips and tricks from Tuts+

Muse

RapidWeaver

Having a beautiful site shouldn’t require learning how to code. That’s the promise of Muse, one that RapidWeaver has been fulfilling for far longer than Muse has been on the market. You can pick one of the included templates or browse through dozens of handcrafted themes available online, then add your content and customize it to your heart’s content. It’s the iWeb alternative we’ve needed.

Price: $79.99 from the Realmac Store or the Mac App Store

More Info: Our Mac.AppStorm tutorial

Freeway

Coding a site doesn’t have to be all about coding. Perhaps you’re better with normal page design, and would like an app that makes designing a new beautiful site as simple as making a Keynote template. That’s what Freeway aims to offer. You can drag-and-drop elements, format text the same way you would in a word processor, and use simple tools for advanced CSS functions. With two versions, the Pro aimed at coding professionals and the Express for those who want to make a site with templates and without coding, it’s got something for everyone.

Price: $149.99 or $49.99, respectively, from the Softpress Store

Premiere

For video editing pros, Adobe Premiere and Final Cut Pro the two heavyweights on the Mac. Each side has its fans, but when Apple released Final Cut Pro X, it initially got enough bad rap that Adobe was actively courting Final Cut users to make the switch to Premiere. Now, though, Apple’s polished FCPX’ rough edges, and its App Store ratings and general reputation have gone back up. Adobe, on the other hand, put Premiere in its subscription offering, leaving their customers wondering if they should switch.

Final Cut Pro

If you want evidence that Apple hasn’t fully forgotten the pro market, you don’t have to look further than Final Cut Pro X. Initially criticized as simply an iMovie Pro, Final Cut Pro X has finally proved its worth as a leading-edge video editor. It’s fast, feature-filled, and just what the doctor ordered for your footage. Plus, it’s price tag will hardly break the bank these days.

Price: $299 from the Mac App Store

Lightworks (coming soon for the Mac)

Want to really be blown away by a free offering? Meet Lightworks. It’s a complete non-linear editing system that’s 100% free, with a pro subscription upgrade if you’d like. It’s not on the Mac, yet, but it should be coming soon. Seeing as it was used to produce movies ranging from Mission Impossible to Braveheart, we’d like to get our hands on it on the platform chosen by most creatives.

Price: Free download; $60/yr pro version

After Effects

When footage itself isn’t enough, it’s time to bring in the special effects team. Perhaps you need them just to make add eye-catching banners to the bottom of your media (though we’d recommend against that), or to add cinematic effects to your credits. Either way, there’s alternate to Adobe’s AE for you.

Motion

It’s Apple to the rescue again with best-in-class alternates to Adobe’s pro apps, this time with the Final Cut Pro companion Motion. Motion 5 comes with a new interface, on-the-fly edits, simple chroma keying, and simple-yet-powerful motion graphics tools. It’s the tool you’ll need to add to your inventory if you switch to Final Cut Pro.

Price: $49.99

Blender

One of the most beautifully designed open-source apps, Blender is an impressive project to make a free animation tool aimed at the likes of 3D Max. It’s shooting far beyond what After Effects and Motion aim for, but can still be used for the more basic motion graphics like animated credit sequences. Plus, it’s too cool to skip.

Price: Free download

Audition

Using Adobe’s audio tools to record, tweak, and mix your audio? There’s alternates for you, too, both from the open-source side and from Apple — and more. You don’t need to revert to analogue recording just to get away from Adobe.

Logic Pro X

Apple may be accused of having dumbed-down its pro tools, but Logic Pro X is still quite the audio powerhouse. Packed with everything from a redesigned interface and a new audio editor to track stacks, MIDI FX plugins, a brand-new virtual synthesizer, an iPad controller app, and so much more, it’s the audio app to reckon with on the Mac.

Price: $199.99 from the Mac App Store

More Info: A Tuts+ Walkthrough of the new features in Logic Pro X

Audacity

The open-source alternate on this list that I’ve used the most, Audacity is a feature-packed audio recording and editing app that is free and works great. It’s not fancy, but it is decently easy to use. It’s absolutely not as feature-filled as Audition or Logic Pro X, but it will be more than enough for the most basic audio editing needs — and perhaps a bit more than that, too.

Price: Free download

Fission

Another alternate for the more basic audio editing needs, Fusion merges a beautiful interface with a simple editor that makes tweaking your audio simple. Definitely worth checking out if you’re looking for a less confusing way to improve your recordings without going all the way pro.

Price: $32 from the Rouge Amoeba store

More Info: Mac.AppStorm review

Avid Pro

Adobe may own the photo editing market with Photoshop, but audio editing is another area where there’s another 900lb gorilla in town: Avid. Their pro tools are the leading name in audio editing, and if your audio needs go beyond what Audacity and Logic Pro offer, they’re the tools of choice. They come at a price, but they offer the industry leading processing power you’d expect.

Price: $699 from the Avid Store

Adobe Media Encoder

The one Adobe Creative Suite app that’s hardly ever mentioned is Media Encoder. Perhaps it’s because it’s not available on its own, and always came along with Adobe’s other apps — even in Creative Cloud, you can’t download it individually. But that doesn’t make it any less useful as a tool to convert audio and videos to other formats. As such, though, it’s also easy to replace — and odds are you’re already using an alternate even if you have Media Encoder on your system. Regardless, here’s the best replacement apps:

Miro Video Converter

It doesn’t get much simpler than this: you drag the video you want converted into Miro, select the device you want to play said video on, and click Convert. As soon as your Mac’s finished crunching through the conversion, you’ll have the file you want ready to play where you want. It’s simpler than Media Encoder, and while not as professional is plenty for most of our needs.

Price: Free download

More Info: Mac.AppStorm review

HandBrake

An opensource alternate that can easily outshine the Adobe competition, HandBrake is the serious video converter app you need. Whatever format you need converted — and whatever size, format, and more you want it turned into, HandBrake is ready for the job. It’s good.

Price: Free download

More Info: Mac.AppStorm review

Encore

Still need to burn media to disk? Encore is Adobe’s solution for making DVDs and Bluray disks from your media, but chances are you won’t be using it that much, opting instead to digitally distribute your media. But if you’re actually still making plastic disks of your videos, here’s the alternate apps for you.

Compressor

Apple’s Final Cut Pro companion for when you need more flexible exports, Compressor is a fully featured if slightly dated-looking media burning and exporting tool. You’ll be able to make professional DVDs or Bluray disks, stream media online, or publish it on YouTube or as a podcast. It’s straddling the disk and streaming eras, and works great for either. In fact, it’s the Media Encoder alternate you need if your conversion needs are anything on the pro side.

Price: $49.99 from the Mac App Store

Burn

It’s not really aimed at making professional movie disks, but then, perhaps you just need an easy way to put your videos on a DVD for grandma. And that’s fine. Burn will make sure your data is on the disks you need, without any hassle. It’s simple, and works great.

Price: Free download

Adobe’s Online Services

Of everything Adobe offers in Creative Cloud, the online services are the namesake of the whole service and yet are the very easiest to replace. In fact, Adobe’s going to have to try harder to convince Creative Cloud subscribers to use their cloud services than you’ll have to try to avoid using them. You likely already use Dropbox or Google Drive or another cloud storage service to keep your creative files backed up, and likely host your site on your own server or hosting account, or use any of the dozens of hosted alternates to Adobe’s Business Catalyst hosting. You can still use Typekit for fonts on your site without having to get a full Creative Cloud subscription, but there’s a ton of alternate web font services as well.

Conclusion

So there you have it: the best alternates for everything Adobe has to offer. Owning Creative Suite has always been an expensive proposition, but if paying $49/month forever to get everything Adobe makes is too rich for your blood, there’s a ton of other apps that’ll keep you creative and productive for a fraction of the cost — over time, at least. It’s apparent that Apple’s tried hard to ensure the Mac is the platform of choice for creative pros, with their wide range of professional apps that can stand in for a good percentage of Adobe’s offerings, and once you combine that with the great apps in the App Store, open source alternates, and a handful of top-of-the-line professional offerings, and you’ve got everything you could want.

Have you ditched Adobe? If so, what apps are you using for your own non-Adobe suite of creative tools? We’d love to hear your favorites in the comments below!

When the word “email” springs to mind, most people think of those Monday mornings spent gazing at an endless list of messages inside Microsoft Outlook, sifting through and sorting out the useful stuff from the spam, newsletters and other promotions that somehow always end up in our inboxes. Yep, it’s true — email really is an unnecessary evil.

We think we can live without it, yet we still check our inboxes several times a day, no matter where we are — and I’m no exception. I’m pretty much married to my iPhone — as we spend almost every second of the day together — and I feel lost and disconnected when I get that dreaded “circle of death”, the GPRS indicator, meaning I can hardly access anything online.

Yet I’m always a little sceptical when developers claim that they can reinvent email. Allow me to explain why.

Reinventing the Wheel

Just over a year ago now, I wrote an article entitled The Future of Email on OS X. I wrote it as millions of Sparrow fans around the world were spewing foul-mouthed condemnations about the big bad wolf — in this case Google — for buying out their precious little company and mothballing any further development of Sparrow. Yes, I was one of them too. Sparrow had been my favourite email client both on OS X and iOS, and I was certainly sad and angry to see it go.

Yet in that article, I described two new email projects, Mail Pilot and .Mail — only one of which has seen any progress since that piece was written. Mail Pilot appeared on iOS devices — albeit to negative reviews about its stability and price tag — a few months back and the developers are working hard on a Mac version, which should be ready pretty soon. The project actually started out as a fundraising exercise on Kickstarter, which raised over $54,000 in little over a month — an impressive figure when you consider the original goal was a mere $35,000.

The principle behind Mail Pilot is simple: emails behave like to-do lists. You rank them in order of priority and mark each one as complete or incomplete. You can dismiss emails and review them at a later date, or you can scrub them away to reach that state of nirvana — namely inbox zero.

.Mail works off a similar concept — emails are given “action steps” which allows you to prioritise emails by importance. The problem is the last update to the project was back in July 2012 and there’s been no news since then, so it’s unlikely we’ll be seeing a beta version of this any time soon (despite the fact the project outline looks extremely concise).

What I’m getting at here is that developers now are prioritising a different way of working with email. The problem, according to Tobias van Schneider, developer of said .Mail app, is:

When the first email was sent in the early 1970s, there was no big difference to the email we know today. And that’s the problem.

An alternative way of working with email, I hear you cry? That’s surely an attractive prospect. A way that will avoid floods of emails coming in at once and that moment of doom when you fire up your email client to find 200 or so unread specimens awaiting to greet you? Gimme gimme gimme.

But, I’m a bit cynical here. I wrote a recent piece on iPad.AppStorm about the state of the so-called “alternative iPad email clients” and my conclusion was that developers are simply trying to reinvent the wheel. The reason that emails are the same since the 1970s is because that’s the system that has worked so well. I commend developers for putting their thinking caps on and getting creative — I’m certainly not stifling entrepreneurship and free-thinking here — but these “alternative email clients”, on the iPad anyway, will always remain a niche product as it’s extremely hard to try and convince someone who is used to the traditional way of working with email to switch to another method.

Put simply, I don’t believe that there’s a failsafe alternative to email as we know it nowadays. On my iPhone, for example, I’ve tried all sorts of different email clients: Dispatch, Triage, Boxer, Mailbox — you name it, I’ve probably tried it — and I always find myself scuttling back to my trusty iOS Mail application.

Why? There are too many compromises that I have to make — and they are compromises I’m not prepared to make. Mailbox, for example, ditches my Gmail folders, which I use slavishly. I only have the option to snooze, archive, or delete a message — there’s no way to sort them into my folders. Dispatch only lets me see my inbox folder. See what I’m getting at?

At the end of the day, though, it is purely personal taste — and I’m certainly not bad-mouthing the aforementioned apps in any way. I’m sure that there are millions of users around the world who are perfectly happy with them — I just can’t get used to them properly enough to warrant switching from the default Mail application.

The Alternatives

The current state of email on OS X is pretty good, though. Thanks to some ingenious developers, if you fancy ditching Mail.app for an alternative solution, then there are quite a few worth considering.

If you looking a different way of dealing with e-mail, then try Inky. Although the app is designed primarily for Windows 8 users in mind, there is a Mac version (though I couldn’t get it running on my computer due to Javascript issues — however don’t let this sway you!) available as well. Inky automatically sorts messages for you by relevance (though you can manually define this as well) — so important emails will appear towards the top of your inbox and less important ones will appear towards the bottom.

Inky also features a so-called “featured inbox”, so you can filter out all the crap in there like newsletters, daily deals and notifications from the 8 or so social networks you’re currently signed up to. You can view the aforementioned crap in one list, instead of it being scattered liberally across your inbox. It’s a nice idea (Gmail has also introduced the feature into its web interface) and it certainly helps you become more productive. What’s great also is that Inky works with a wide range of different email accounts — it supports all emails with IMAP or POP functionality — so you won’t have to change your email provider to use it.

Two projects in the pipeline, Mail Pilot aside, are Persona and Unibox — which are both currently in the private beta stage. Both of these focus your email on individual senders and turn your inbox into somewhat of an instant messaging application. This functionality is not new, mind you — most email apps currently on the market (including Apple Mail and Microsoft Outlook) allow you to sort your emails by conversation — but it will be interesting to see how both of these projects will deal differently with emails.

If you’re happy with email as it is, but just fancy shying away from Apple Mail, then either Airmail or Postbox are good options to consider. Both feature a different interface to Apple Mail and some really useful little features. Airmail, for example, has Dropbox, Google Drive and (to my joy) Droplr integration baked right in to the app. Postbox features a powerful tagging system, so you don’t lose that important email, plus stellar integration with Gmail. My client of choice at the moment is Airmail, though I do change emails clients almost as often as I do my underwear, so ask me again in a week’s time and I’ll probably be giving you a different answer.

The Future

The reason that emails are the same since the 1970s is because that’s the system that has worked so well.

At the moment, therefore, email on OS X is looking pretty good — and there are a couple of really interesting projects planned for the future. I’m actually quite excited about the upcoming beta of Mail Pilot — although the iPad version was plagued with bugs and carried a stupidly high price tag ($14.99), it did show real promise and I thought that given a few tweaks here and there, it would become a fairly popular alternative email client.

Likewise, I’m also very interested in seeing the betas of Persona and Unibox. Although I’m personally not a fan of the conversation view in email — I prefer having each message in a list — I can see that it will catch on with some people who use email to chat with people, as opposed to instant messaging applications. As it stands at the moment, Unibox is set to be Mac-only whereas Persona will be available on both iOS devices and OS X, making it a more attractive prospect. We will, of course, have full, in-depth reviews of both products as they launch!

That said, I still believe that it is the tried-and-tested way of working with emails that will reign for the future. Airmail, for example, is adding new features to its beta almost every single week (the good news is that Exchange support is coming) and given its tiny price tag of $1.99 (it’s even in the Mac App Store!) and customisation possibilities, I think it’s up there as one of the best email clients out there on OS X, and it’s certainly the one that is most active at the moment. It’s essentially the same way we’ve always used email — just as Sparrow was — but with extra features. That’s a future that seems likely.

But given the burst of excitement surrounding new OS X mail applications, it’s all gone a bit quiet. Sure, there are three options currently in development (Mail Pilot, Persona and Unibox) but it’s not like we are seeing projects appearing on the horizon daily, or even weekly. Unlike note taking applications on the iPad, say, the market isn’t saturated — and I feel this demonstrates something. How many different ways are there to do email? Sure, developers can get as creative as they want but it’s very hard to bring a change to something that is so well-established and understood by hundreds of millions of people around the world.

That’s not to say I just want e-mail to be confined to the likes of Apple Mail and Microsoft Outlook — though Mail.app, at the least, can still be a pretty nice email app. I like entrepreneurship — new, in-your-face features touting a whole new way to help me sift through my endless list of emails — but there will always be that small part of me hankering after those features that I’m used to in traditional email. And that hankering is unfortunately extremely hard to lose.

The App Store’s arrival on the Mac is hard to classify as anything other than a good thing. It’s made great indie Mac apps more discoverable for new Mac users, helped spur the transition of many apps from the iPad back to the Mac, lowered the price of Apple’s pro apps, and even made installing updates for OS X and apps a simple process — one that gets even simpler in Mavericks. I’ve spent hundreds of dollars on Mac App Store apps, and there’s every indicator that I’ll spend hundreds more over the coming decades.

And yet, it’s not perfect. Its sandbox restrictions have prevented apps like TextExpander from releasing their newest versions in the App Store, and the review process is slow enough that you’ll have to wait days after updates are ready to get them in your apps. But worst of all, there’s no way to offer upgrade pricing for new versions of apps. Instead, developers have to either release new versions as a free update for those who have purchased their apps already, or just make a “new” app for the new version, perhaps with a launch-day special price as an overture to those who owned the previous version.

For developers like the Omni Group, that just wouldn’t work out.

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To the App Store, and Back

The Omni Group has a long history with OS X — indeed, a history that dates back to the time before OS X existed. Rather than being an original Mac Classic development team, the Omni team cut their teeth writing software for the OS made by Steve Jobs’ post-Apple venture, NeXT. They transitioned to the Mac, then to iOS, releasing award-winning software on each platform. If anything, they’ve been quicker than most established companies to adopt new Apple technologies and platforms, and publicly embraced the idea of a Mac App Store before it was launched. It wasn’t any surprise, then, that even after decades of selling their own apps, they had their Mac apps available in the Mac App Store on launch day.

Even before that, though, the Omni Group had already had some trouble with the App Store’s default policies. They had always offered a 30 day money back guarantee on their software, something that’s not technically offered on the App Store, but they made the tough call to go ahead and extend that offer to their App Store customers even though it’d cost them 30% on refunded sales. They never went the iCloud sync route, which would have required switching to only selling apps on the App Store, but instead built their own OmniPresence sync alternate. And while they never directly said you should choose their own store over the App Store for purchases, they did recommend that it might be best for existing customers — and expressed the hope that Apple would add upgrade pricing to the App Store before they released a major upgrade to one of their apps.

The latter, indeed, hasn’t happened. So today, the Omni team released a new tool, OmniKeyMaster, to help Mac App Store customers transition back to the original Omni Store licenses, in preparation for releasing the hotly anticipated new versions of OmniFocus and OmniOutliner in the upcoming months. It’s a simple little tool: run it, and it’ll detect your App Store licensed Omni apps, ask for your name and email address, then generate a Omni Store license key and email you a backup copy as well.

You really don’t even need to do anything more than run the app from the DMG download, save the licenses, then delete the download. Then, you can immediately switch to using your license on today’s versions of the Omni apps downloaded directly from them, or stick with your App Store copy until there’s a major new version released. It’s an elegant way to do the right thing by their current App Store customers and still get the revenue they need from new versions of their software.

The App Store Purchasing Conundrum

The App Store is still a great place, and I’ll continue to make it my first choice when purchasing new software simply because having all the apps you own in one place is really, really nice. I never have to think about my credit card info when buying a new app, and never have to worry about backing up license keys and transferring them to a new Mac in the future. The App Store makes it all seamless.

But that convenience comes at a cost of flexibility, one that’s been highlighted by the Omni Group’s plight so far. It works great for smaller apps, but when you get into the realm of professional software, the App Store can complicate things rather than simplify them. You can, for instance, make a basic and pro version of your app, but you can’t offer upgrade pricing to the pro version for your basic customers on the App Store, just like you can’t offer upgrade pricing on new versions or a discount for purchasing more than one of your team’s apps. All of these are sales options we’re used to with traditional software, and the App Store has taken them away. It simplifies things, but also keeps the pros wary of Apple’s one-size-fits-all store. And, if anything, it’s made it easier to nickel-and-dime customers in freemium games with in-app purchases.

Mavericks brings automatic update installs, update history, and a couple other tiny tweaks to the App Store, but it’s not the overhaul that pro apps need from the App Store. But then, maybe the App Store is best as it is: a simple marketplace that helps new developers get discovered and the rest of us get simple app installs. For the rest, it seems that we’re increasingly forced to turn to monthly subscriptions with Creative Cloud, Office 365, and even Billings — and in that backlight, the Omni Group’s switch back to focusing on sales from their own store with upgrade discounts seems a refreshing return to the good old days.

I, for one, am looking forward to purchasing an OmniFocus 2 upgrade on the Omni store, after getting started with my OmniFocus 1 purchase on the App Store.

You’re busy, and you need a calendar. That much is apparent. What’s a bit tricker to figure out is what calendar app you should use to make your busy life more manageable. You could just stick with Calendar.app, corinthian leather and all, or get by with your calendar service’s barebones web app.

Or, you could get the calendar that has been the leading full-featured calendar app on the Mac for years: BusyCal. With a legacy dating back 4 years, it’s been the pro calendar alternate of choice ever since Apple decided to rebrand iCal. It’s easy to use, with a UI similar to the older iCal, but packed with extra features like customizable calendar views, built-in weather and moon phases, alarms and to-dos right alongside your calendar events, and more. It’s just been updated to support Exchange calendars, so it can help you keep track of your work events right alongside your personal calendars and todo lists.

All of that power normally comes at a cost — $29.99 to be precise — but this week we’ve got 3 copies of BusyCal to giveaway to our readers. All you have to do is leave a comment below letting us know what calendar app you currently use and why you want to switch to BusyCal, and you’ll be entered in the giveaway. Then, share the giveaway on your favorite social networks and share a link to the post in a second comment below for an extra entry in the giveaway.

Hurry and get your entries in; we’ll close the giveaway on Tuesday, September 3rd.

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

The epitome of a businessperson always used to be an employee of a Venture Capital company on Wall Street. When someone spoke about this sort of individual, you’d imagine them with short hair, always wearing a suit and tie, typically taking a taxi to the workplace each day, and maybe going out for nightly cocktails with equally important people at the karaoke bar a few blocks from work. This would be the typical stockbroker.

In his set of tools, the aforementioned person would typically have two displays at his desk always keeping an eye on the industries he’s responsible for. In the movie version of his life, at least, the stock app would look beautiful — but in real life, they usually look more like the LED ticker boards in use on Wall Street. There’s never really been a native Mac app dedicated to making stock market monitoring an effortless — and may we say, tastefully designed — task. At least, that used to be the issue. Visible Market, the developer of StockTouch for iPad, has recently brought its popular iOS Stocks app alternative to the Mac. It’s pretty, yes, but does it do the job?

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Swipe, Pinch, Zoom — Navigate!

As the name implies, StockTouch is heavily reliant upon a touchscreen. The entire iOS app was built for one, after all. When porting an app from iOS to Mac, things can often get jumbled. It’s not common to see mobile apps brought to the desktop (it’s typically vice versa), but the developers did it right with StockTouch.

Macs have their own version of a touchscreen: a trackpad. StockTouch introduces you to its control scheme when you first open the app, explaining that there are three gestures: tap to zoom, pinch to zoom out, and tap to favorite. The problem is, it doesn’t explain a bunch of other things, like the fact that you have to tap with two fingers to zoom in, you can also expand your fingers to zoom in, and “tapping” in all senses requires that you have tap to click enabled.

Zoom in on a category or stock by clicking it or using the Mac’s zoom gesture (expand two fingers on the trackpad).

Such incomplete instructions make the base user experience rather unimpressive, but there’s more under the shell. When you click away the welcome screen, a beautiful wave of green, red, and black colors is displayed. It’s the entire stock market at your fingertips, presented in a way you have only seen on a mobile device. In short, it’s beautiful.

A User Interface Worth Showing Off

After you use StockTouch to check in on your investments, you won’t ever want to go back. Its user interface is far superior to anything offered by Google, Yahoo, and other popular Web apps. The simple use of three colors, in different shades, makes for the epitome of market browsing. Individual stocks have their own beautiful graphs, too, with the option to display data from one day to five years time. For all timelines, there are little indicators telling you where the high and low points of the stock.

It’s the little things in this interface that make you proud of having it on an external monitor while you do work. Favorites, for example, are highlighted with a raised 3D look. Rather than changing color and becoming distracting, they match the rest of the interface, but manage to distinguish themselves in the perfect way.

Only Basic Functionality

I have a few concerns about the way StockTouch presents its data. First there are the little indicators I was talking about. It’s nice to know the high and low points of any stock, but it’s very silly when you can’t see exactly when they were. For example, if you are writing an article on the recent $MSFT (Microsoft) spike (which I was the other day), you may want to use StockTouch as a reference tool. Well, don’t. It doesn’t work very well. You can’t get approximate dates for the high and low points and the app doesn’t let you zoom in beyond one day (to, say, an hour’s time). It also doesn’t support jumping to a certain point in a stock’s history.

StockTouch isn’t technically meant for research purposes, but it is an all-purpose stocks app. It’s one of the few, in fact. Others either don’t look as nice or simply crash when you launch them. StockTouch isn’t this bad, but it could definitely use some more advanced features. Most of the app’s features are rudimentary ones. It doesn’t really go beyond the call of duty in anything but the user interface, and that’s disappointing. It’d be nice to see a special screen capture function so you can grab charts from the app. A way to save the currently statistics as a PDF could also come in handy.

The Issues: Sporadic Crashing, Slow Loading, and Fullscreen Glitches

Let’s talk about bugs, which is all Mac App Store reviewers can talk about. Apparently the app crashes “instantly” for quite a few other users. I have only had the app crash twice in my use. I’m not running any developer OS, just the latest version of Mountain Lion on a late–2012 MacBook Air.

While I haven’t had any major problems with the app crashing, it does load very slow at the start, taking about a full minute to load all the stock information each time I launch it. Refreshing is the worst effect of this. Whenever I manually refresh the app, it takes nearly five minutes, sometimes just timing out. Leaving “automatic refresh” enabled is the best option, but this simply should not happen on a solid 7 Mbps Internet connection.

Last, but not least, is a very strange bug related to fullscreen mode. StockTouch does support fullscreen, but whenever I open I’m presented with is an app that takes up as much space as it can without overlapping the dock and menu bar. There’s no toolbar with the usual fullscreen button and no options in the View menu. The usual shortcuts of CMD + Shift + F or CMD + Option + F don’t work either. I found that I had manually shrink the app by pushing the corners and force it into a true windowed mode, then the button appeared.

It still glitched like crazy whenever I did anything and didn’t remember that I had it in fullscreen in the last instance, which suggested that fullscreen mode may not actually be supported. I spoke with the developer about the issue and a team member informed me that they have submitted an update to the Mac App Store.

Nice with a Trackpad, Buggy in Areas, Shiny All Around

You can’t deny that this is a good-looking app. After using it, you’ll never want to browse any crummy stock Web services anymore. However, you may have to. The lack of research features stops StockTouch from fulfilling its potential and becoming the best stock market app to ever be developed for Mac. It can get there, though, and I’m sure it will eventually.

The pressing issue is for owners of desktop computers. If you have a traditional mouse for your Mac, even if it’s a Magic Mouse, you will not find StockTouch experience at all enjoyable. It doesn’t feel natural. To solve this problem, the developer could have included some keyboard shortcuts, but the only one I actually ended up was CMD + S for searching. A simple “F” keystroke would be useful for favoriting stocks, with CMD + F to open Favorites (the latter currently shows and hides them). It feels very inconsistent to press escape to zoom out when you just clicked to zoom in, which is why a regular mouse doesn’t work with this app.