Thanks to Our Weekly Sponsor: Courier

Sponsoring the site again this week is an increasingly popular app from Realmac Software – Courier. This fantastic piece of software makes it easy to quickly share files, images, photos, movies, and more with all your favourite online services – including Flickr and Facebook.

It’s wrapped up in a functional and beautiful interface, and seven built-in plugins mean you’ll be able to start sharing in under 30 seconds. With Amazon S3, Ember, Flickr, Facebook, FTP / SFTP, Vimeo and YouTube support, Courier has the most-requested services in the bag!

Courier is now a completely Mac App Store exclusive application, and has seen a huge reduction in price to $9.99. This is a great deal, and well worth checking out if you’re looking for a piece of software to make sharing all your social content easier!

Win the Latest AppSumo Bundle of Mac Software

The popular deals site, AppSumo, has recently kicked off a month long series of Mac software discounts. The first one of these contains a series of apps designed to “Supercharge OS X”, and I’m pleased to let you know that we have five free bundles available to give away to a handful of lucky readers!

The software included in the bundle is:

Entering is very straight-forward. All you need to do is leave a comment below, and we’ll select the five winners at random in three days, on Wednesday 19th January! Best of luck, and be sure to keep an eye open for other AppSumo deals over the course of January!

Grappler: Download Video & Music From Anywhere

I often find that there is audio or video content online that I would like to download to my computer or iPod, but there appears no easy way to do so.  Media across the internet comes out in all kinds of formats and most don’t lend themselves too well to downloading, like Flash for instance.

Grappler is the latest wonderful application from The Little App Factory which says “If it plays, it probably saves,” and this seems to stand up pretty well.  This review will delve into how Grappler makes it surprisingly simple to get media content from just about anywhere.

Overview

Grappler’s soul purpose is to quickly download music and video from just about any site and convert into an iTunes friendly format ready for syncing.  The interface is simple yet effective and offers a few different methods to download content.

The large area at the top of the Grappler window displays search results or entire websites, under which is a search and navigation bar which sits above the clip tray.

The Grappler window upon opening

The Grappler window upon opening

The Grappler search bar has a couple of functions which I’ll explain below…

Searching

If you search a word or phrase in the search bar, Grappler will run up a huge list of videos complete with thumbnails in a second. And it’s not just showing what you’d find on YouTube. Grappler manages to discover related videos on all kinds of sites to ensure you get the best quality version or exactly what you’re looking for.

Clicking on a thumbnail plays the video inline without ever leaving the search results, and clicking ‘Download’ drops it into the Clip Tray and starts downloading.

There is also an ‘Auto/Audio-only’ switch which means that you can choose to download only the audio from a video.

Search the internet for videos, ready for download

Search the internet for videos, ready for download

Specific Sites

If there’s video or audio you found on a specific site, you can paste the URL into the Grappler search bar, and the website will load up within Grappler.  From here, all you have to do is navigate to the content in question, start it playing, and Grappler will automatically begin downloading.  Works like magic.

This method works on all kinds of flash videos and music sites, including Grooveshark and even on videos embedded in Mac.AppStorm.  Whilst it can’t download every video the internet has to offer (It was unable to download video from Apple’s site), it certainly comes close. Overall I’ve been incredibly impressed by its ability to pick up on media to download.

Grappler can download video or music from a specific site

Grappler can download video or music from a specific site

Preferences

The Grappler Preferences have a couple of features worth mentioning. You can pick where you’d like your videos and music saved to—be it in iTunes or a folder. Most importantly there’s the optimization option, which allows you to choose between downloading in the highest video quality, or that optimized for iOS devices or for Xbox 360/PS3.

Optimize videos for various devices

Optimize videos for various devices

Conclusion

Grappler makes downloading media of almost any format off the internet an absolute joy. It’s not super quick, and it can’t handle every single video, but that would be an impossible task for the developers and I’d say they’ve done a fine job at making an application that works flawlessly almost all of the time, not to mention a stunning interface.

Grappler is available for $19.95, and can be trialled with 10 free downloads. For anyone who regularly – or wishes they could – download media off the net, I’d highly recommend checking out Grappler. Let us know how you choose to download content or your thoughts on Grappler in the comments!

Alarms: Simple & Stylish Reminders on Your Mac

You usually have a general idea of what you’ll work on during the day, that’s why GTD apps work: you schedule ahead of time what you want to get done through your day, so that you don’t forget about it. But what about the tasks that come up during the day? You know, suddenly you remember that you told someone you’d give him a call, or that you haven’t washed the car in weeks.

That’s what the app that we are reviewing today, Alarms, is useful for. It’s a simple app that lets you create quick and simple reminders without interrupting what you are doing.

Interested? Read on to find out more.

Getting Started

Alarms is as simple and pretty as apps can get. It will run in your menu bar, showing up by way of a little bell icon. If an alarm goes off, the bell will continuously vibrate and make a sound until you snooze the task or get around to doing it.

Once you complete something, you’ll have to notify Alarms by going into the app and checking the task. If you click the little bell, a timeline will drop down where you can schedule new tasks and interact with the ones that you already have. You can also drag pretty much anything to the bell and make it into a task.

That’s pretty much Alarms in a nutshell, but let’s take a slightly deeper look…

The Interface

As I mentioned, Alarms is very pretty and it goes along with your Mac well. If you click the Menu Bar icon, Alarms will bring up a timeline divided into three parts.

The first one is a box that has all the things that are due now. There you can check tasks as done or view them (if your task is a link, for example, it will bring up the page). You can also drag the tasks that are due to re-arrange them for a later time.

In the second part, there’s the timeline itself. Here you’ll see a bar broken down into hours. This is where all the other tasks that are due later in the day live. The third part is a small calendar that is positioned to the right part of the timeline, and with it you can jump between days so that you can schedule tasks ahead of time.

Interface

Interface

Adding New Reminders

Adding new reminders or tasks is, like anything in this app, very simple. You can jump into the timeline and double click on any hour and create a task there. Once your task is created, if you want it to be at a more specific time (say, 2:15 instead of 2:00), you can slowly drag the task to the time that you want it to be in. I’d much prefer to just type in the time that you want the task to be in, but there doesn’t seem to be any option to do that.

Another option to create a new task is simply to drag something into the app. I tried this with folders, files and links and all of those seemed to work. You just need to drag something into the bell icon, and the timeline will open. Then you’ll be able to drop what you are dragging to a particular point in time.

New Task

New Task

Managing Tasks

Once an alarm goes off, you’ll be notified by an alarm sound, a Growl notification (if you’ve selected this as an option), and the little bell icon will begin to “vibrate”. You can then go into the app and view the task, mark it as done or move it to another time.

The sound will continue to play every minute or so, and the little bell won’t stop vibrating until you complete the task, so if you want to avoid all this annoyance, you can snooze the task by quickly moving your cursor to the left and right 4 times.

Once snoozed, the alarm will stop bothering you for some time, but it will come back to remind you again a little later.

Notification

Notification

Other Features and Settings

Alarms also has a few additional features. If you click the bell and drag it down, a timer will activate, which you can control by moving your cursor further down or up. The timer notifications work very much like the reminders, and it’s a handy way to quickly set a timer. Maybe you’ve started boiling an egg, and want to be reminded to take it out after a few minutes…

You can also transfer your tasks from iCal, and birthdays from Address Book to quickly create reminders related to particular calendars or events. Under the applications preferences, you’ll find lots of options. You can change sounds, set shortcuts for the snooze feature, and even stop the alarm sound from repeating after it sounds the first time.

Conclusion

Alarms can make a great little companion to your GTD software of choice. Even though it doesn’t have a “History” feature and lacks some features, the sleek simplicity makes up for that. It might not replace your current GTD app, but I don’t think it’s really trying to.

Think of Alarms as a reminder app that gets you through the day, used for quickly setting up tasks that you have to get done by a certain time. Handy, reasonably priced, and worth looking into if you regularly get interrupted with tasks and to do’s during the day!

How the Mac App Store Has Affected Developers

Although many people have differing opinions on the recently launched Mac App Store, there’s one thing that’s almost unanimously agreed upon – it’s great news for developers.

Many critics cite the restrictions and limitations as being a terrible thing for developers everywhere, but I’ve heard very few complaints from current Mac developers. Everyone seems thrilled with how things have gone so far.

In today’s post, I want to spend a few minutes showcasing how being featured in the Mac App Store has positively impacted developers and their software. We’ve also asked a few developers what the associated increase in support requests has been, and whether they’d consider going Mac App Store exclusive. Some of the statistics shared are truly remarkable, and I’m incredibly pleased to see how much exposure desktop Mac software is receiving.

Little Fin

Little Fin are the developers behind two popular Mac apps – Chronicle and Compartments. Before the launch of the App Store, Little Fin noted that they received an average of 6-10 sales per day of each application.

During the launch period, Compartments was selected as a “featured” application on the Mac App Store. This lead to an enormous jump in sales; 1,500 on the first day, and over 1,000 on each subsequent day since.

Their second application, Chronicle, was not a featured piece of software on the new store, but has still been selling around 100 copies per day. In addition to this, a presence in the Mac App Store is also leading to an increase in the number of downloads from their own website.

Little Fin feel really strongly about the importance of the App Store:

The Mac App Store has provided us with an audience large enough that we have been able to lower our prices substantially and still bring in dramatically increased revenue. We are reaching a lot more people than we ever did before, which means we are getting wonderfully motivating positive feedback and well thought-out suggestions. The effect has been so dramatic it almost feels like our business didn’t even really start until now.

Evernote

A few days after the App Store launched, Evernote announced a fascinating set of statistics about the number of signups they’d received over the launch period.

For me, this hit home how many Mac users out there don’t really know about the amazing range of third party software available. If you’re a regular AppStorm reader, it’s easy to assume that everyone has heard about widespread software such as Evernote. Their statistics would seem to suggest that this really isn’t the case, and it’s great to see the additional exposure and promotion that the Mac App Store is able to bring for developers.

DaisyDisk

Although DaisyDisk wasn’t one of Apple’s “featured” applications, Taras Brizitsky explained that they have still seen a big surge in interest. In the last three days, the company has seen a ten fold increase in sales from the Mac App Store than from their own site.

They received a large spike in support requests during the first day of the launch, but this has since returned to normal (most requests were concerned with customers migrating from the old version to the Mac App Store release).

iBank

iBank is a popular financial management application, available on the App Store from day one. We spoke to the Scott Marc Becker, the managing director of IGG Software, who shared the following:

We’re really pleased with the Mac App Store, much as we expected to be. Our prior experience selling iBank Mobile through the original App Store has been fantastic, and the new App Store seems to have brought iBank an entirely new universe of customers. After just these first few days, I can’t say whether sales at our site are up as a result of our visibility in the Mac App Store – they’ve been running really high, as they typically do this time of year. But they definitely are not down – we’ve seen no cannibalization so far.

So at this stage we’ve got no reason to sell through the Mac App Store exclusively. It seems to be just another great channel, much as our retail package appeals to a person who’d rather have a disc than a download. Right now we feel that’s the three-legged stool for serving the greatest number of customers however they prefer: site downloads, the Mac App Store and a retail product.

Regarding support, we generally see an uptick in requests in this season tied to year-end: getting last year’s financial house in order, resolutions to save more in the new year, tax preparation and so on. More customers come on board and that means more questions. The Mac App Store happened to land in the midst of all that, so we’re a bit backlogged after some time off for the holidays. Fortunately we’ve built up a library of video tutorials for iBank 4, and that’s done a great job of helping new users with the basics. And some folks still read manuals – the iBank User Manual is now available as well, and many Mac users are happy to figure things out on their own.

Marketcircle

Without disclosing particular financial data, Marketcircle told us that they’d seen a three fold increase in regular daily sales of Billings from the Mac App Store alone, along with no noticeable decline in sales processed in-house.

They also saw an increase in support requests due to unforeseen complications that they weren’t aware of prior to the launch of the store, such as apps showing up installed (when in fact they aren’t the Mac App Store version), and people inquiring about migrating previously purchased versions. The company hasn’t seen an increase in sales through their own web store, however internal sales have remained strong with the launch of the Mac App Store.

When asked about the possibility of going exclusive, Marketcircle noted:

The Mac App Store has been great so far, however with Apple’s current model in place it would be impossible to sell all of the products we develop exclusively through the Mac App Store. For example, Daylite and Billings Pro both have background processes and headless servers, both of these are currently forbidden by the rules. We believe that rules will be relaxed in the future and we’ll re-examine our options at that time.

Kiwi App

Interestingly, the trend doesn’t seem to be the same for all applications. The developers of Kiwi told us that they were disappointed with sales on the first day, so subsequently dropped the price down to 99¢. Sales the next day were in the hundreds of units – much better than average – but total revenue was similar to non-Mac App Store daily revenue. Since then, unit sales have decreased slightly but remain high.

Interestingly, sales on their own store immediately dropped to zero, even before the reduction in price on the Mac App Store. This conflicts slightly with the experience of other developers, and shows that the same trend isn’t apparent across the board.

Alfred

This fantastic application launcher publicly stated that their downloads made up around 3% of the 1 million downloads on day one of the App Store, implying downloads of around 30,000 in the first day alone.

One of the Most Popular “App Store Exclusive” Apps

Another developer, who we’ve agreed to keep anonymous, is one of the highest profile “App Store Exclusive” developers, who immediately took the plunge of selling solely through this medium. They found sales to increase in the “ten folds ballpark”, with support requests also increasing by around the same 10x amount.

Going exclusive immediately seems to have worked for several apps, but it’s by no means a widespread trend across the board. Most companies are offering this as an additional sales outlet – at least in the short term.

Realmac Software

And finally, Realmac software shared a set of statistics on their own blog this week, highlighting how the launch has gone for them. Their approach was to dramatically drop the price of the – now Mac App Store exclusive – Courier, and continue to sell RapidWeaver and LittleSnapper in both locations.

Although LittleSnapper didn’t fare as well as their other two pieces of software initially, Realmac have today announced a huge discount on this app for the next few days. LittleSnapper is currently available for $4.99 until the 17th Jan (previously costing $39). It’ll be interesting to see whether this pushes LittleSnapper into the top downloads list. I hope so, as it’s a fantastic piece of software.

Will they be going App Store exclusive in the future? It seems so:

When we release LittleSnapper 2 (sometime this year) and RapidWeaver 6 (which, whilst on our roadmap, is still a long way off) we’ll almost certainly go App Store exclusive with these apps. The ease of use of the App Store, compared to any store a developer can ‘roll themselves’, will soon become a competitive advantage for developers – the App Store almost entirely eliminates the barriers associated buying software. Sticking with our own store would not only make the purchase and registration of our apps a hassle, but each sale outside the Mac App Store obviously doesn’t count towards Apple’s chart positions.

It’s a Big Deal

For a company to receive a ten fold increase in customers and sales in a single day is fantastic, and it’s hard to overstate just how important this new sales channel is – particularly for high profile developers with a great product. All this considering that the Mac App Store launch wasn’t hugely publicised, and came in the form of a relatively simple Software Update (that many users won’t yet have even been prompted to download).

Mac developers have never had a more ubiquitous way to promote and distribute their software, and I’m excited for two reasons. First, because developers will see a huge, well deserved pay-off for the time and hard work dedicated to their software. And second, that thousands more Mac users will discover what a phenomenal range of software we have available for the platform.

Ultimately, I think it’s great news for everyone.

Swatch: A Sleek, Stylish Mac Colour Picker

Are you a designer, developer, photographer, or just a colour lover in general? Have you ever wished there was an easy way to save any colour of your screen, and then copy that colours hex or rgb colour code? If you answered yes to any of those questions, then you’re in luck, because that’s exactly what Swatch does.

Swatch is a lightweight colour picker that sits as a paint-brush icon in your Mac’s menu-bar. So what makes Swatch better than all the other colour pickers? Read on to discover how Swatch can work for you, and also find out about a few similar utilities available for OS X!

Getting Started

To get started with Fuel Collective’s Swatch, head on over the the app’s Swatch website. You can either download the 14 day free trial, or purchase the app for just $9.95 (about £6).

Once downloaded, open the DMG file, and drag the application into your application’s folder (Swatch isn’t available in the Mac App Store just yet). Now you can open the application, and you will see it in your menu bar. So now, let’s begin using this app!

Design & Interface

As you can see from looking at the screenshot, Swatch’s interface is very sleek and sexy. On the top left, we see a colour’s hex code, and on the top right, we see a colour’s RGB code. Underneath that, we have our colour picker, our choice of a colour wheel, CMYK slider, Grayscale, HSB slider and RGB slider, and then Swatch’s preferences button.

The Swatch Interface

The Swatch Interface

In the middle of the interface, we have the colour wheel and the slider to make the colour darker or lighter, and toward the bottom we have the current colour selected.

Using Swatch

Using Swatch is really easy. When you come across a colour on your screen that you would like to save, just click on the paint brush icon, or press a hot key, and it will open up Swatch’s main interface. To choose a colour, click on the icon on the top left, and it will now show a magnifying glass.

Using the magnifying glass, just click on any colour on your screen, and it’ll open in Swatch and show you the colour’s hex and rgb code, as well as allowing you to save this colour.

The Colour Picker

The Colour Picker

If you see a colour that you’d like to use in Photoshop, or any other application or document, you can click on the colour’s hex code or rgb code to copy the colour’s code to your clipboard.

Since Swatch is a lightweight menu-bar application, it doesn’t use too much RAM or CPU, and it almost goes unnoticed until you need to use it. Picking colours is snappy, and the process works smoothly.

Preferences

If you click on the little gear icon, it will open up the preferences menu. This allows you to tweak various settings, and customise the application to your own needs. You can record a keyboard shortcut to launch Swatch, choose the type of colour picker you’d like to use, select how colours are copied, and decide whether or not to use lowercase letters:

Preferences

Preferences

This is the perfect level of customisation. Enough that you can change those few settings that need to be adjusted, but not so many options that you become overwhelmed.

Colour Picking Alternatives

Although Swatch is certainly one of my favourite colour-picking applications for the Mac, a handful of alternatives are available. You may also like to take a look at:

  • Hex Colour Picker – Hex Colour Picker puts an extra tab in the system-wide colour panel. Instantly see the hex colour code for any colour, and edit it just the same with a number of shorthands.
  • ColoaColour – CocoaColour is a colour finder for Mac and CSS web development. It integrates with the colour picker on Macs, but provides a much more robust interface for colour picking.
  • ColourSchemer Studio 2 – ColourSchemer Studio 2 is a professional colour-matching application for your Mac that will help you build beautiful colour schemes quickly and easily. It’s a pricy option at $49.99, but definitely the most powerful app available in this genre.

Also worth noting is that OS X has a completely free colour picker built-in. There are various ways to access this piece of software, but this handy tip is particularly useful if you’d like to turn the colour picker into a standalone application.

Conclusion

Fuel Collective has done an amazing job with Swatch. It’s sleek, fast, easy to use and very affordable. I love being able to save colours for later use, and the ability to copy CSS3 rgba colour codes is awesome. The app is perfect in my opinion, and there’s not much to improve; everything is already great. So if you’re someone who works with colours on a daily basis, I’d really recommend checking out Swatch.

A Swatch license will set you back $9.95, but like I stated earlier, there is a 14 day free trial available so you can see if you like Swatch before purchasing it. I definitely think you will love Swatch, and it’s definitely worth the $9.95 price tag.

Ask the Mac.AppStorm Editor #6

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

Some of the topics covered this week include speeding up Safari, how to create and edit PDFs using OS X, replacing your MacBook hard drive, and tracking down pesky startup items.

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

My hard drive is not working, and my MacBook is out of warranty. Every time I put a CD in, it pops it back out. I know that a new hard drive is very expensive, so what should I do?

– Luke White

First up, the obvious question to ask would be whether you’re inserting an official OS X install CD? If so, be sure to hold down the “C” key when booting, as this should launch you into the OS X setup program and allow you to Verify your hard drive using Disk Utility.

If this doesn’t work, and you can’t boot from the CD, maybe there’s something wrong with the disk. You could either try to borrow an install disk from a friend, or take your machine into an Apple Store Genius Bar.

They should be happy to take a look at your computer and diagnose the problem. As you’re out of warranty, they’ll charge you parts and labour to install a new hard drive for you (which is always considerably more expensive than replacing the part yourself).

Installing a new hard drive in a MacBook is far less complicated and expensive than you’d think. Take a look at this guide for more information about the type of hard drive required, although it’s likely to be a 2.5″ SATA.

These aren’t particularly expensive, and you can pick up decent sized drives from upwards of $40. Fitting it is just a case of removing your battery, pulling out the old hard drive, and pushing the new one in.

Also worth considering is whether you’re able to recover the data from your old hard drive. This works more often than you’d think, and a fantastic utility for data recovery is DiskWarrior. This has worked splendidly for me in the past, and it’s worth every cent if the data on your old hard drive is particularly important.

With several tabs open, Safari starts showing the spinning beach ball. Is there any way can make my Safari to work smoother, or an alternative browser I could use?

– Girish Kolari

Safari can be a frustrating beast at times, and performance is definitely a problem experienced by many users. It often seems to improve with new releases, but can still slow to a crawl if you have a series of processor-intensive tabs open.

First up, you should clear our all your caches, history, cached favicons, and preview images. You can do this from the Safari > Reset Safari menu item.

Reset Safari

Reset Safari

Next, you should disable any add-ons or plugins you have installed that could be causing performance to suffer. These are less prevalent since Apple introduced official support for Safari Extensions, but they might be lingering around in your system.

Finally, I’d recommend installing ClickToFlash, which will disable Flash unless you explicitly load a particular animation by clicking on it. This is a nice alternative to uninstalling Flash completely, but can give you a huge performance boost on Flash-heavy websites.

Hopefully, performing all these steps will lead to a much snappier Safari experience. If not, you could always give Google Chrome a try, another popular browser for the Mac that’s based on the same underlying engine as Safari.

ClickToFlash is a great way to speed up Safari

ClickToFlash is a great way to speed up Safari

I have a new iMac and am looking for a good piece of software for creating PDFs (commercial software is fine).

– Johan Bos

First up, it’s worth noting that OS X has great in-built support for handling PDFs. From any document, you can press File > Print, and select “Print to PDF”. This will create a PDF from any document, and it allows you to use popular software such as Microsoft Word and Pages for creating great looking documents.

Save to PDF

Save to PDF

There’s even a way to make this process easier if you do it regularly, by creating a keyboard shortcut to automatically export your current document as a PDF. It works system-wide, and saves me lots of time every day.

For editing existing PDF files and merging documents together, you can use Preview. Just open a PDF document, and drag another file into the Preview sidebar. You can re-arrange pages, and then export it as a new document in a few clicks.

A few other piece of software you may like to take a look at include PDFLab, Jaws PDF, and Adobe Acrobat.

Certain applications launch upon startup, even though they don’t show up in the Login Items in System Preferences. How do I stop these programs from running every time I turn my computer on?

– Matthew Butler

As you mentioned, the first place to look when you encounter an unwanted startup item is in System Preferences > Accounts > Login Items. This is great for disabling many applications, but a few always manage to get under the radar (such as CleanMyMac and Adobe Updater).

Login Items

Login Items

So how can you track down and disable these other login items? Well, there are a couple of places you can look. Here are a few different directories that you can scout through to try and find the file that might be launching the program you’d like to avoid:

  • /Library/StartupItems
  • /Library/LaunchDaemons
  • /System/Library/LaunchDaemons
  • /System/Library/LaunchAgents

If you spot the offending application in any of these folders, move the file in question to your Desktop, and then reboot your computer to test it out (don’t delete the file, as it might turn out to be something crucially important that you need to put back!)

It might take a little experimenting to find and delete the right file for a particular app, and be careful – you don’t want to delete something that was required for your computer to boot correctly.

Didn’t See Your Question?

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

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

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

Exploring the Advanced Features of QuickTime X

QuickTime has been the standard media player of the Mac operating system for many years. It has gone through various iterations over the past two decades, beginning with the release of Version 1 in 1991.

QuickTime X originally shipped with Mac OS X 10.6 (Snow Leopard). Apple used to have two versions of the media player, a free, very basic version and a paid, more robust version. I’ll be honest – I’ve never used the Pro version of QuickTime, so my usage up until this release was just basic media playback.

Many of us have been standard (free) users forever. But we couldn’t justify the cost to purchase the “Pro” version, offering functionality that was done better by other applications. Things have changed with QuickTime X. The Pro version is gone, and some great new features have been added to the standard version that are available for everyone. Let’s take a look at some of them!

Share to YouTube

Sharing your movies to YouTube directly from the QuickTime interface is now possible, and QuickTime X makes this process dead simple.

This probably goes without saying, but I’ll say it anyway, you will need a YouTube account for this to actually work.

With the video you wish to upload to YouTube loaded, select the Share option from the menu bar and pick the YouTube option (you’ll also see an iTunes and MobileMe Gallery as well). The first time you use this feature, you’ll be asked to enter in your YouTube credentials. Check the option to store in the system keychain and you won’t have to do that again.

YouTube Share

YouTube Share Dialog

Fill in the necessary information in the dialog box and click next to start the process to upload the movie to YouTube. You’ll see a message box displaying the progress of the upload. That’s it. You’re done. There’s no need to do any converting or anything like that. QuickTime takes care of the whole process for you.

This integration is very helpful for those (like me) that have great intentions of sharing a video to YouTube and end up not feeling like taking the time to go through the extra few steps. I know it’s not difficult, but with this built directly into QuickTime, it’s much more likely that I’ll upload a video to YouTube right after I save it to my Mac.

Video and Audio Recording

QuickTime X has the ability to record audio and video. This was previously only a Pro capability, but is now included as a basic feature in Version X. It is very easy to complete a surprisingly professional audio or video recording.

Audio

From the File menu, select New Audio Recording and off you go. The audio recording controls will load. To kick off your audio recording just click the record button. Whatever mic you have set as your default system mic will be used to record the audio. You’ll know you’re recording when you see the time start ticking away along with jumping audio level indicators.

I actually used this recently to record a Google Voice call and it worked beautifully. The simplicity of the audio recording is where this really becomes useful. From loading QuickTime to starting an audio recording takes all of 10 seconds, and about three clicks.

Some very minor editing is possible with QuickTime as well. From the Edit menu you’ll see a Trim option. This will allow you to trim from the beginning or end of your recording. It’s not much, but if you’re just doing a basic recording (which you more than likely are) it may be all you’re looking to be able to do. Again, the simplicity of this process makes this a really nice little feature.

Audio Trim

Audio Trim

Sharing an audio recording is, unfortunately, not possible through the QuickTime interface. I could see it handy to be able to at least share to iTunes or MobleMe, but that option isn’t available with an audio only recording. If you’re a podcaster, more than likely you’ll be using some other more audio specific software to edit and produce your audio so it probably isn’t a big deal.

Like I mentioned, I think the audio recording will see it’s best use for those instances when you need a quick, simple recording.

Video

A video recording takes the exact same process as does an audio recording with the obvious exception of selecting the New Movie Recording option from the File menu. Your iSight/FaceTime camera will turn on, and you’ll see live video with controls on the screen. Again, whatever camera is set to your system default will be shown right away.

There’s a small drop-down arrow that will allow you to select any other installed cameras to use as the video source along with option change to other available microphones, change quality settings for the video (medium, high or max) and also an option to choose save to location.

Movie Recording

Movie Recording

As with the audio recording, simply click the record button to begin the recording. You’ll see the time begin to tick and the audio indicators will begin bouncing as well. Click the stop button when you’re finished. Save it and/or share it.

It is also easy to trim a video. It’s basically the same process as trimming an audio recording. Select Trim from the Edit menu. You’ll see a timeline at the bottom of the video and you’ll be able to trim from either the beginning or end. As with the audio trimming, if you’re looking to do some more in depth editing, you’ll be looking to other software (something like iMovie), but it is certainly a handy tool for a quick trim.

Movie Trim

Movie Trim

Screen Recording

This is probably the most interesting and I think least-known use for QuickTime X. This will essentially allow you to do a video recording of what you’re doing on your screen. Whatever windows you open. Wherever you click. Whatever you do will be recorded.

To start a screen recording select New Screen Recording from the File menu. The screen recording control will appear. You’ll see a small drop down arrow once again that will allow you to change some settings. You’ll be able to change the quality of the recording, the save to location and you’re also able to pick a microphone if you’d like to add audio into your screen recording. Click the record button to begin recording.

Screen Recording Stop

Screen Recording Stop on the menu bar

The recording controls disappear and you’ll then just see a small stop control on the menu bar. That does just what it says, stops the recording and your recording will open up for your review (Command-Control-Esc will stop the recording as well). Trim, save, or share as you’d like.

Conclusion

The common theme of this post is really that the new features of QuickTime X are an excellent way to accomplish a few simple media tasks very well. For former Pro users, these features don’t seem like that big of a deal, but for those of us basic users, these are fantastic.

QuickTime has been around for a long time, and I think it has been easy to cruise by the updates and just take for granted that it is going to be another update to a standard media player (for the non-Pros).

This update changed a lot, and made QuickTime a tool that can be useful to just about everyone. The functionality is so simple and quick to use while still producing fantastic results it’s really a difficult application to overlook.

Weekly Poll: Is Mac App Store Exclusivity a Good Thing?

Developers have taken one of three approaches with the Mac App Store. It’s either being completely passed over by a developer, used as an additional way to sell their app (as well as through their own website), or adopted as the sole, exclusive way to buy their software.

The initial anecdotal evidence seems to suggest that both of the latter approaches are working extremely well, with many developers seeing sales increase by over ten times the usual number.

But what do you think of the Mac App Store becoming an exclusive sales channel for Mac software? Many developers (such as Pixelmator) have chosen to now sell their software only through the App Store. The advantages are obvious – Apple handles payment, processing, distribution, and gives a serious promotional boost.

Personally, I’m fairly happy with this arrangement. Buying software through the Mac App Store is easy, fast, and a huge improvement over the previous disjointed and inconsistent process that varied significantly between developer websites. Many of the problems that plagued the App Store at the outset are gradually fading away, and we’re starting to see a much improved system with fewer high-profile rejections and judgement errors.

But what do you think? Is selling exclusively through the Mac App Store a great way to simplify your life as a developer, or should software creators be thinking twice before putting all their eggs in Apple’s basket? I’d love to hear your thoughts!

Meet the Developers: Sherman Dickman of Postbox

Today’s interview is with Sherman Dickman, one of the founders of the exceptional Postbox email client. Sherman teamed up with his co-founder, Scott MacGregor, to create Postbox after serving as Director of Product Management at Mozilla Corporation.

I’m a huge Postbox fan, and it was fascinating to learn a little more about what goes on behind the scenes. In our interview with Sherman, we’ll shed some light on the company, discuss the importance of desktop software in an increasingly web-dominated world, and consider the benefits and drawbacks of developing a single application.

I hope you enjoy the interview!

Tell us a little bit about the Postbox team – where are you located, what brought you together, and what motivates you as a company?

Postbox is based San Francisco, and the company was founded by myself and Scott MacGregor, who was one of the original creators of the Thunderbird email client.

While working at Mozilla, we discovered that we shared a desire to do something more with email. We wanted to move it forward in bold and innovative ways, free from the preconceived notions of what an email app should or shouldn’t be.

In a nutshell, our goal is to help people become more efficient and productive through the most innovative email experience possible. We love developing a great product, but making a positive change in the lives of our users is really what motivates us as a company.

The Postbox Website

The Postbox Website

It seems like many of the Postbox team are scattered around the world. How do you all communicate and collaborate on various projects?

The development team uses Bugzilla to track bugs and new features, iChat and Skype for meetings, Google Docs, and of course, lots of email.

Customers play a big part in the development of Postbox, so we use Zendesk to collaborate on new features and Wufoo to conduct surveys.

The marketing side uses Basecamp to collaborate with graphic artists and Web designers, ExpressionEngine to work with Web developers, Dropbox for sharing files, Google Analytics and Bit.ly to coordinate campaigns, and a few other services that we share with accounting, etc.

We have people and services all over the place, but somehow it all just works beautifully.

Many people are moving away from desktop email clients to web apps such as Gmail. Do you think there’s still a strong market for desktop clients, and why?

What’s nice about Postbox as a desktop app is that anyone can download it, install it, and instantly make a meaningful change in their work lives. Postbox works with any POP or IMAP account, it’s private, secure, standards-based, ad-free, well integrated into the OS, and provides a reliable backup when your webmail services go down.

You don’t have to wait for your company to adopt Gmail, you don’t need permission to redirect your email (and confidential information) to a 3rd party service, it’s something you can do for yourself right now.

In fact, about 20% of new Postbox users have come from Gmail, so luckily we see people migrating in the other direction as well.

The Web is awesome, but desktop apps rule!

As a developer, do you feel the need to always be running the latest hardware, or do you prefer to run a simpler setup with fairly basic kit?

Our setups are fairly basic, and we prefer to run hardware that’s a bit under-powered to avoid having a false sense for application performance. We have a Mac Pro for rendering video, but since most of our infrastructure is hosted our hardware requirements are somewhat modest.

How regularly do you receive requests for new features in Postbox, and how often do you act upon and implement them?

We receive requests all the time through our Ideas and Feature Requests forum hosted on our support portal. Users can post new ideas, collaborate on features, and then vote on the ones they like best. We’re just about to begin planning exercises for Postbox 3, so there will be a lot more activity within those forums over the next few months.

We typically break features into three buckets: 1) game changing features that create excitement and buzz, 2) highly requested features from customers, and 3) platform or maintenance work, bugs, clean up, etc. All three buckets are necessary, and prioritization is certainly a challenge.

Main Postbox Interface

Main Postbox Interface

What’s the number one Postbox feature that you’re most proud of having available in the app?

My personal favorite is Summarize Mode for replies and forwards, which just released in Postbox 2.1. It enables you to create a clean and stylish who-said-what-when message summary that you can send to your colleagues and friends.

It’s a really neat feature, and it has helped us to extend the benefits of Postbox to a wider audience in ways that are viral, yet natural.

Many Mac development teams focus on a range of products and apps. What do you think the benefits/drawbacks are of focusing on just one piece of software?

The benefit is that you can focus on just one thing, and do it really well. The drawback is that you are dependent on just one revenue stream, which can be cyclical, and you’re also more vulnerable to moves by competitive offerings.

We’re currently developing several versions of the product: Postbox and Postbox Express for both Mac and PC, and we’re planning on having Postbox in the Mac App Store in the near future. So even with one piece of software, there’s a lot to do.

What aspect of creating and developing Postbox do you find most enjoyable, and equally, what do you find frustrating?

The most enjoyable aspect is creating a product that people love using. The most frustrating is not being able to develop features fast enough.

For someone interested in developing their very first Mac app, where would you recommend they start?

Solve a small but important problem, create the minimum viable product that you think could sell (even if it’s $1.00), and then bring it to market as soon as possible. Make it simple, easy to use, and hopefully social. Create a community, learn from your customers, and iterate quickly. The Mac App Store will be a great vehicle for this.

Next, look at some of the most popular Mac applications, and try to determine the secrets to their success. Panic made an FTP client that’s sexy. Things made to-do lists friendly and fun. Pages, Numbers, and Keynote brought office productivity to a completely different level. Dropbox just works. None of these apps are “paradigm shifting” or “revolutionary,” but they’re designed better than the rest and they’re a delight to use. Learn from their successes.

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

We have some really interesting things in the pipeline, but no sneak peeks just yet. Stay tuned for more surprises over the next few months!

Thanks, Sherman!

Thanks so much to Sherman for taking the time to share his thoughts and experience with us. I really appreciate you taking the time to contribute, and we wish you all the best with the future success of Postbox!

If you’re getting tired of Gmail’s wonky interface, or finding that Mail.app isn’t really meeting your needs any more, I’d strongly recommend giving Postbox a try. It’s a wonderfully designed piece of software, and arguably the best desktop email client available for the Mac.

10 Must-Have Free Apps in the Mac App Store

The Mac App Store has brought a few new fantastic releases, but the majority of software stealing the show has been around for some time. And although these brilliant applications aren’t new, they are worth mentioning once again for new Mac users, and those who need a quick reminder.

Today I’ll be showcasing ten of my favourite free Mac App Store apps. These wonderful pieces of software won’t cost you a dime, but will go a long way towards improving and refining your Mac experience. I hope you find them as useful as I do!

Kindle for Mac

Kindle for Mac

Kindle for Mac

I love reading books on my iPad, and I’m a big fan of the Kindle app. Although I’d love to use iBooks, the content available just isn’t up to scratch yet (and the prices are often higher than the equivalent book through Amazon). Needless to say, I’ve amassed a decent collection of books over the past year. Being restricted to reading on the iPad is fine, 99% of the time.

But there’s always that occasion when you’d like to find a reference in a book on your desktop. Or you’d like to read for a few minutes on your notebook while sitting in a coffee shop. Kindle for Mac is a functional, free application for accessing all your Kindle content on the desktop. It works well, and does everything you need a simple reader to do.

Definitely worth downloading if you’re a Kindle user.

Alfred

Alfred

Alfred

If you’ve missed all our ranting and raving about Alfred over the past year, you must be new here… If you’re looking for an application launcher that’s fast, friendly and free, Alfred is a wonderful creation. I use it countless times every day, and regular updates keep making the software ever more functional.

Although Alfred is free through the App Store, I’d strongly recommend picking up their Powerpack add-on. It’s available for £12 via the Alfred website, and adds plenty of more excellent functionality to an already stellar app.

Caffeine

Caffeine

Caffeine

I often find myself frustrated when my Mac goes to sleep unexpectedly – often when converting video, or downloading a large file overnight. Caffeine gives you a quick way to disable the automatic sleep functionality of your computer, and easily re-enable it when you’re ready to resume normal operation.

It sits unobtrusively in your menu bar, and performs one function exceptionally well. The sign of a perfectly crafted piece of software.

Bowtie

Bowtie

Bowtie

There’s no shortage of iTunes mini-players, shortcut apps, and album artwork tools/displays. Bowtie has been around for a while, and established a reputation as one of the better applications in this category.

It adds various iTunes shortcuts to your system, displays album artwork on your desktop (if you’d like it to), has a fantastic theming system with plenty of pre-built options, and integrates fully with Last.fm.

There’s also a companion iPhone application that makes it easy to control the playback of music on your iPhone using your Mac (that’s right – the opposite of a normal iPhone remote control situation). This is more useful than you’d think, particularly if you regularly play music on your iPhone as you work!

Sketchbook Express

Sketchbook Express

Sketchbook Express

It has been a big hit on the iPad, and now Sketchbook Express is available on the Mac App Store as well. Although you’ll need to purchase the full version to unlock the full range of functionality, Sketchbook Express is still a worthwhile download. Labelled as a “fun and intuitive drawing application”, it’s a completely new experience for graphic designers and artists.

This cut-down version restricts you by not saving different layers (although you can work with up to six layers when designing). If you’d like to save your creations and keep your layers intact, you’ll need to purchase the full version.

Evernote

Evernote

Evernote

The king of note taking and personal organisation applications is now available through the Mac App Store, and this is as good a time as any to give it a try if you haven’t already. Evernote is a phenomenally popular app, packed with functionality. You can capture and store almost anything within your Evernote database, and it’s automatically synced across all your different devices and gadgets.

All the information, documents, notes and scanned images you import are processed automatically with OCR technology. This means that everything is exceptionally easy to search, and you’ll never again be stuck wondering where on earth you saved that scan of an important contract…

Premium accounts are available for $5/month, adding extra features such as searching within PDFs, an unlimited storage allowance, unlimited file type storage, and priority image recognition.

TextWrangler

TextWrangler

TextWrangler

I’ve been a TextWrangler user for around a decade, and really enjoyed this fantastic free text editor. It’s surprisingly laden with functionality, and definitely one of the best free text editors available for the Mac (if the surprisingly powerful TextEdit isn’t enough for you).

Some of the many features include grep pattern matching, search and replace across multiple files, function navigation and syntax coloring for numerous source code languages, code folding, FTP and SFTP open and save, AppleScript, Mac OS X Unix scripting support, and much more.

SoundCloud

SoundCloud

SoundCloud

Feeling a bit tired of playing the same old tunes in your iTunes library? Give SoundCloud a try. It’s a thriving community of musicians and artists, all sharing their creations completely free of charge. Perfect for discovering new music, and connecting with like-minded listeners around the world.

The free application lets you search the SoundCloud archives from your desktop, see your favourite tracks and playlists, and even record and upload your own tracks if you’re a musician.

Telephone

Telephone

Telephone

Telephone is a really simple desktop SIP (Session Initiation Protocol) client, that works with a huge range of SIP providers. If this is a technology used by your workplace/office, or you have an existing SIP account with one of the providers, Telephone is a great piece of software to download.

There isn’t much to dislike about Telephone. It fully integrates with the Address Book of your Mac, and makes it easy to make cheap phone calls over the internet without being tied to a particular commercial service (e.g. Skype).

Twitter for Mac

Twitter for Mac

Twitter for Mac

Although I’m sure you’ve seen enough links to the new Twitter for Mac to last you a lifetime, I felt that it needed to be included to round out the list. It’s a wonderful application with an appropriately designed interface, all the functionality I need, and a user experience that’s great fun to use.

I’ve never been a huge fan of the Twitter website, and wouldn’t really consider myself a Twitter “power user”. Although I’m sure there are some people who will still relish the multi-column complexity of an application such as TweetDeck, Twitter for Mac is more than powerful enough for me. And there’s a good chance that it’s the perfect desktop Twitter client for you as well.

What Are Your Favourite Free Apps?

So, these are my favourite picks. Which free applications were the first you’ve downloaded and enjoyed from the Mac App Store? Although there’s an awful lot of poorly designed, cringeworthy software in there, I’ve stumbled across a few gems as well.

I’d love to hear your favourites, so feel free to share in the comments!

PersonalBrain: A GPS System for Your Information

A new year always brings the chance to start fresh with a new approach to staying organized, so we’re going to take a look today at PersonalBrain, a sophisticated knowledge management solution I’ve come to think of as a GPS system for my information.

PersonalBrain is unlike any other application I’ve come across for managing information. Superficially it looks somewhat like a mind mapper, and it has the ability to create networks of links among your notes like a personal wiki. But PersonalBrain is more than the sum of those parts. It always indicates what neighborhood of your information you are currently prowling.

Is it the right solution for you? Let’s take a look.

PersonalBrain plex

PersonalBrain shows you where you are in your information database.

First thing to know about PersonalBrain is that it is a Java application. This means two things: 1. It is cross-platform, so you can use it on Mac, PC or Linux operating systems; and 2. It is not particularly Mac-like. It is produced by TheBrain Technologies.

Its inventor, Harlan Hugh, began working on its development over 15 years ago, and the software has been evolving ever since. You can download a free 30-day trial, which is fully functional. Installation is fairly standard, but you’ll need to have Java installed on your system — Java is standard on OS X systems, so this should not be an issue.

There are three editions: Pro, Core and Free. This review covers the Pro edition.

As with a mind mapper, you create a map of your various topics in PersonalBrain. Dogs is a subset of Pets, while Golden Retriever and Border Collie are subsets of Dogs, and Fido is a subset of Golden Retriever. While a mind mapper can handle that hierarchy very well, drilling down from broad categories to more and more detail, PersonalBrain can do a lot more with this same information.

In PersonalBrain Fido can be be both a child of Golden Retriever AND the parent item to Pets. Moby the Goldfish can also be a parent to Pets. This cross-relational linking, multi-parent capability is what gives PB its wiki-like flair.

PersonalBrain pets example

Thoughts in PersonalBrain can have multiple parents.

There are two major differences between the links in a wiki and links in PersonalBrain. In PersonalBrain, the links are visual connectors, not hyperlinks. And, the links in PersonalBrain convey meaning. In a wiki there is no such thing as a parent or child note. In PersonalBrain, however, a note can be a child or parent; there are also jump links that connect related information, and are not hierarchical in nature.

The power, then, in PersonalBrain comes from being able to create these inter-connected links among your data. It allows you to quickly map out a project, adding necessary information as you go. Your information is never static in PersonalBrain. The networks you build are organic and constantly changing as you add information and redefine the links.

The Geography of a Brain

Before we continue, I should make some definitions so we are speaking the same PersonalBrain language. In PersonalBrain, a database is known as a “brain.” The items that make up a brain are called “thoughts” and these thoughts are displayed in the “plex.” The thought with focus is the “active thought.”

The plex, of course, is the feature of PersonalBrain that is most distinctive. It’s really a substitute, animated Finder for your information, and it has its own geography that denotes the relationship among that information. The screenshot below demonstrates this geography.

PersonalBrain plex geography

How thoughts line up in PersonalBrain defines their relationships.

In this example, the active thought is “Plex Geography.” Below the active thought are its child thoughts. Above the active thought is the parent thought (or parent thoughts, because thoughts can have multiple parents). To the right are sibling thoughts — that is, thoughts that share at least one parent with the active thought. And directly to the left are jump thoughts, items related to the active thought, but unconnected by hierarchy.

This is the GPS aspect I alluded to. You always know where you are among your thoughts, because you always see what neighborhood it belongs to. You can see immediately just from this one example how PersonalBrain differs from a mind mapper, which displays hierarchy in one direction. Let’s see this in a more powerful example:

PersonalBrain book detail

You can learn a lot about the active thought simply from the relationships displayed in the plex.

In the screenshot above, the active thought is the book The Big Burn. You can see that it was written by Timothy Egan, who also wrote The Worst Hard Time, and that it is a non-fiction work. The Big Burn is about the U.S. Forest Service, Teddy Roosevelt and Gifford Pinchot. It is related to Idaho, where much of the action takes place.

The plex is also flexible. The plex geography I’ve outlined above is for the plex in normal mode. But you can optionally choose to view your information in outline mode, or expanded and shifted around to your satisfaction. The next two screenshots demonstrate this:

PersonalBrain in outline mode

PersonalBrain can arrange thoughts in outline mode.

PersonalBrain in expanded mode

Or you can expand the view and shift thoughts around at will.

Tools and the Tool Window

So far I’ve focused on the plex area of the PersonalBrain interface. Now we’ll look at how you can access several tools through the six tabs displayed in the tools window. In most Mac applications, the tools window would be called the Inspector.

You can move the location of the tools window to suit your need. It can be displayed horizontally along the bottom of the screen, or in a more vertical format to the right or left. You can disengage tabs to view them side by side simultaneously. And a simple double-click on the plex can open and close the tools window should you need the full screen to adequately view your brain’s plex.

PersonalBrain tools window right

You can move the tools window to suit your needs.

Through the tools window you can control additional information related to the active thought, adding notes, assigning tags, giving it a thought type and more. You access and control the attached files and links. You can also view the results of advanced searches, and create reports. Finally, you can view PersonalBrain’s built in calendar.

The Notes Editor

It’s no secret what the notes tool is for. Type or paste formatted text for future reference. You can include lists, check boxes, and tables too — although I must confess that some of these features don’t always work as expected on my MacBook. There is even a spell-checker.

Nevertheless, I find the notes function one of the weaker aspects of PersonalBrain, as it is built on an HTML editor (which may account for the erratic behavior) that does not provide a fluid, word-processing feeling. For me it is not a comfortable environment for composing longer text documents. It is perfectly adequate for jotting notes, and pasting text from other sources, which is really all I need it to do.

PersonalBrain notes window

The notes window in PersonalBrain.

A nice feature is that you can optionally open the notes window even when the tool window is closed. In fact, you can open multiple floating notes if you need to reference the notes of several thoughts simultaneously.

Searches

There is a small search box located in the lower left side of the plex. As you type the word or phrase you are looking for, a list of hits appears allowing you to instantly activate the thought you’re looking for. If you don’t find what you’re looking for from this list, click the “search” button and a longer list appears beneath the search tab

The found items are broken down into categories starting with matches in thought titles, and continuing with thought content, local attachments (files that are attached to thoughts and stored internally), and then Spotlight search results for Mail, iCal and Address Book. The search below was for the string “movies.”

PersonalBrain search results

Search results are displayed in the Search tab.

You can also access controls for an advanced search from the search tab.

Calendar

The calendar tool is probably not going to replace your daily calendar, but it is handy for adding dated events to your brain, especially as each event is associated with a thought. So, if you’re planning an advertising schedule, say, you can create various milestones connected to that project. I’ll provide an example a little further along in this review.

How to Build a Brain

Building your brain is fun and very easy. Just select New Brain from the File menu, give the brain a name, and that name is automatically set as the home thought.

I’m creating a brain to keep information about an American Revolutionary War historic site in Vermont where I volunteer. The screenshot below focuses in on the central thought, which, in this case, is the home thought and only thought.

PersonalBrain thought detail

A PersonalBrain "thought"

Notice the three small, blue circles. Those are called gates. The one just beneath “ep” is the child gate. The one on top is the parent gate, and the one to the left is the jump thought gate. To create a child thought, I click on the child gate and drag a line. A little dialog box pops up, where I can add the title of the new thought.

As I type, I will get a list of other thoughts from this brain with matching text. In this way, if I so choose, I can select an existing thought to link to, instead of creating a new one.

Navigating Your Brain

As you might imagine, information networks in PersonalBrain can get very large, very quickly. The developers have provided a few handy methods for ensuring that you can navigate your data efficiently. First of all, there is the home button, which will always take you back to the home thought (any thought in your brain can be designated the home thought; by default it is the first thought created when you build a new brain).

You can also “pin” any thoughts, which will then appear along the top of the plex. It is useful to pin frequently accessed thoughts, so you can navigate directly to them from anywhere in your brain. In the “Big Burn” screenshot from earlier in this review, you can see the pinned thoughts are “Interesting Words,” “Arts & Entertainment” and “History.”

The thought names displayed along the bottom of the plex are of recently viewed thoughts. This row often comes in handy when connecting thoughts, because you can draw links between any thoughts in the plex and thoughts in the history row.

All thoughts can be classified with one or more tags. Create tags for urgent thoughts or thoughts that need follow-up, or which pertain to certain colleagues. Whatever works best for you. Then click on the tag, and a virtual thought is displayed with all the thoughts with that tag.

For my brain about the historic site, I’ve created a list of historic characters associated with the site. I tagged each of these with their affiliation — either American or Britain. The screenshot below shows the virtual thought for the tag American, and lists those characters who fought on the American side.

PersonalBrain tags detail

Selecting a tag creates a virtual thought with tagged thoughts as children.

You can also give each thought a type. Types differ from tags in a couple of ways. You can assign multiple tags to a thought but give it only one type. Types can have hierarchy. That is, you can have a super type source, and sub-types of primary, secondary and tertiary, for example. Types can also have pre-defined characteristics, such as a common icon and color.

Links can be typed, the way thoughts can be to further define relationships.

A Real-World Example

So far I’ve given you the nuts and bolts of how PersonalBrain functions. Now I want to spend some time discussing how all this functionality comes together to make PersonalBrain different from other knowledge management solutions.

Most information managers are receptacles for notes of some kind or another. For example, when you create a new item in DEVONthink, you are generally creating a rich text or plain text note. You might also be dragging in a PDF or a web page. You can add an attachment or link, but essentially the content of the item is what matters.

When you add a new thought to a brain in PersonalBrain, you are not necessarily creating a note at all. Rather, you are creating a nucleus around which several different pieces of information revolve. This is best demonstrated with an example.

Say I’m planning a trip to Nova Scotia. Under my Travel thought I create a new thought called “Nova Scotia Vacation.” I then use the search the web function in PersonalBrain, which leads me to the Nova Scotia Department of Tourism site. I copy the URL and paste it into my Nova Scotia Vacation thought.

PersonalBrain web search detail

Press the F4 key to instantly access a web search dialog for the active thought.

After continuing my research, I add thoughts for attractions in Nova Scotia that I’d like to visit. Among these is the Fortress of Louisbourg, a national historic site on Cape Breton Island. I decide Louisbourg is going to be a major stop on the vacation, so I begin gathering more information, including a list of books to read.

Also, I learn that there is going to be a lecture about Louisbourg at my local library in April. I make a calendar listing. With “Fortress of Louisbourg” set as the active thought, my brain looks like this:

PersonalBrain thought as nucleus

Thoughts in PersonalBrain become a nucleus for additional information.

As my plans start to gel, I can add thoughts for accommodations and places to visit, such as museums and historic sites.

PersonalBrain museum detail

PersonalBrain for planning a vacation.

You could certainly organize a vacation with any number of applications, and possibly even as efficiently or more so. PersonalBrain, however, seems to aid the thought process, organically growing with your plans, and even catalyzing them.

Sharing a Piece of Your Brain

Sharing the information in a brain is pretty easy to do. You can export it as a “site brain,” which retains the plex-style navigation of the information, or as a simple html page. You can also upload your brain to webBrain, a web-hosting service provided by TheBrain Technologies.

Simple brains without attachments currently are hosted for free. If you want to post more complex brains with attachments, you will need to pay a fee — about $75 a year. This also allows you to keep brains synchronized across more than one computer, which I’ve found works well and is quite convenient.

A Few Missing Marbles

I don’t believe PersonalBrain is a substitute for a data catch-all like Yojimbo or DevonThink. It has no inbox for dumping information until you’re ready to deal with it. When you grab information you want to put into PersonalBrain you’ve got to know where you want it to reside in your brain.

PersonalBrain does not take advantage of Services, so you can’t save something to a brain through that method, nor can you print a PDF to a brain, as you can with most Mac information managers.

I’d also like to see saved searches that can be added to the plex, essentially mimicking how tagged items can be grouped beneath a virtual tag-thought.

And, while the company makes an effort to emphasize their support for Mac OS, it sometimes feels as if this platform is a second sister to the Windows version. For example, the Windows version has a nice auto-hide feature lacking in the Mac version.

For the most part, however, these issues are all minor and easy to overlook.

Three Editions to Choose From

As mentioned above, you can select from three editions:

Pro Edition ($249.95): The version I’ve reviewed here.

Core Edition ($149.95): Limits you to one attachment per thought. No export to folders, HTML or XML. No import of folders. No capture of thought icons. No calendar. One-computer license.

Free Edition: Though highly limited in features, this version retains the basic plex functions with notes and web links. It is a reasonable alternative to a mind mapper, and would make a convenient bookmark manager.

No Brainer?

PersonalBrain is a deep application, and I have not covered all its many features. The developer’s web site is full of informative tutorials and how-to videos that provide a richer understanding of the power of this product.

PersonalBrain is a unique personal knowledge manager, but it isn’t for everyone. If you prefer an information warehouse that you can access when necessary, but otherwise isn’t much on your radar, then you won’t go for PersonalBrain. If you prefer your applications behave Mac-like, you won’t go for PersonalBrain.

But if you like tinkering with your information, and enjoy the process of growing your knowledge base, PersonalBrain might be just what you’re looking for to get 2011 off to a well-organized start. Just like a GPS system that helps you navigate the wilds, PersonalBrain can help you find your way in the jungle of the information that comes your way.

Thanks to Our Weekly Sponsor: Jumsoft

I’d like to take a moment to say a big thank you to this week’s sponsor, Jumsoft. In particular, their latest release of Pages Templates 6.0. These are a great way to spruce up your collection of pre-built Pages designs, and some of the new graphical layouts are really gorgeous.

Jumsoft has created a handy mini-site where you can quickly view all the included templates, which gives you a good feel for what to expect.

Pages Templates 6.0 includes 100 different templates, each containing up to 12 sections designed for the type of document. Use single-page templates such as invoice, letter, and poster for basic documents, or choose one of the several multi-layout templates for brochures, newsletters, and other publications.

Most layouts include placeholders for your photos or pictures – simply drag and drop the selected image – and you’ll be able to benefit from all the other fantastic page layout features built into Pages itself. Although the stock designs included in Pages Templates 6.0 look great, they are also very easy to customise. You can choose your own font, change graphics, and easily combine multiple designs into a single document.

If you’d like to find out more, be sure to visit the official Pages Templates 6.0 site, and take a look at what’s on offer. The full collection of 100 templates is available to buy now for $39. Definitely worth considering if you’re a regular Pages user!

Embracing the New Format: 7 Apps To Buy, Read and Convert eBooks

Have you ever heard anybody say that paper outlets, like newspapers, magazines and books, will soon be extinct? While we have seen some newspapers and magazines move to digital services, it’s still hard to imagine a world without paper books. However, this has partly become a reality with devices like the Kindle and the iPad.

The advantages of eBooks are hard to overlook. They take much less physical space, they are cheaper, and they offer more features and interaction, like the “popular highlights” feature on Kindle devices.

Have you made the move yet? I have owned a Kindle for a few months now and I have come to love the little device. Whatever device you use, you’ll need some sort of app on your Mac to buy and interact with these eBooks. Here are some of our recommendations.

Kindle

The Kindle App for Mac

The official Kindle app for Mac is more of a manager for your Kindle books, but it also lets you read the books you buy. A great feature it has is that it syncs everything in between all the Kindle apps (like the iOS app and the Mac app) and your Kindle. For example, it will pick up on the last page you read on any device and it will also sync your bookmarked pages and text.

The app itself doesn’t allow you to buy books, but it does have a button that leads you to Amazon’s book store on your browser. Kindle books usually are very cheap (most go for about $10), and their library is truly great – it might be the biggest eBook store.

Price: Free
Requires: Max OS X 10.5 or greater
Developer: Amazon

iTunes

iBooks on iTunes

I think the iBooks feature could be so much more. As it is right now, it is a store that is only accessible through the iBooks app, from iOS devices like the iPhone and the iPad. There is a tab on iTunes called “Books”, but the only thing you can do in it is add your own PDFs to get them uploaded to your iOS device, so that you can read them on it through the iBooks app.

In terms of reading books, there isn’t much support for this within iTunes itself. PDFs open in Preview when double clicked, but there’s no way to read your iBooks purchases on your computer just yet – at least not within iTunes.

Price: Free
Requires: iTunes
Developer: Apple

B&N

Barnes & Noble eReader

This app is provided by Barnes & Noble, the same company that creates the Nook device, but there doesn’t seem to be any syncing feature between the Nook and this app. This app, like its name says, is just a reader and it doesn’t let you do much, other than open and read .epub books (it doesn’t even allow PDF books).

My guess is they want you to use this app to read the books that you bought through their online store, on your Mac. But unlike the Kindle app, this one won’t automatically download the book you bought; instead you’ll have to point the app to the file where you saved the book.

The interface of it is pretty nice and it does a great job at being a pretty reader, but that’s it. There are features like bookmarks and notes, but you can only get to see them in this app, as it doesn’t sync to any device or service.

Price: Free
Requires: Mac OS X 10.5 or greater
Developer: Barnes & Noble

Stanza

Stanza

Stanza is a popular iOS reader app, but it also has a Mac app and it’s pretty good. It is very simple and it is free. The interface is a bit different from others, as it displays all the pages from the book you opened horizontally, and instead of loading one by one, it loads all of them at once and you can see multiple pages in one window.

It supports most popular formats, like ePub, PDF and Mobi. It does not let you bookmark text, but you can bookmark pages. Other features include themes and layouts. It’s not very pretty, but it works well.

Price: Free
Requires: Mac OS X 10.4.8 or greater
Developer: Lexcycle

Calibre

Calibre

I have used Calibre as an eBook converter for a while now, and I just found out that it also doubles as an eBook reader. As a format converter it works wonders, it’s a bit hard to get into, but it can transfer pretty much any eBook file type into pretty much any eBook file type. In fact, it can even email files to your Kindle account and also transfer or retrieve books from and to your iTunes library.

As an eBook reader, it’s OK. It’s not particularly attractive, but it can open pretty much any format. This app has an advantage over the others: it can also work as a manager for all your eBooks; meaning, it can hold all your books in different file types and keep them organized.

Price: Free
Requires: Leopard or greater
Developer: Kovid Goyal

Reader Library

Reader Library Software from Sony

Sony’s involvement in the eBook reader scene has been something of a struggle. They have been coming out with various devices for quite a while now, and none of them have really caught up with the competition. This app is, I guess, a companion for their devices. The installation is very not Mac-like, but once you get through it, it’s actually pretty nice. It has its own eBook store (from Sony), but the library doesn’t seem to be very big.

It also has a reader feature, and it looks and works excellently. It supports only certain files (I couldn’t get MOBI files to work with it), but it has enough features and it works well. Still, I don’t see why you would want to use this app, unless you have a Sony reader device.

Price: Free
Requires: OS X 10.4 or greater
Developer: Sony

PDF to EPUB

PDF To Epub For Mac

PDF To Epub for Mac is a simple but expensive solution for transfering PDF files into Epub files, so that you can use them on numerous reader devices that only accept the Epub format, or that offer more features with it.

It has a very simple drag-and-drop interface. This is a converter app for non-tech oriented people, because while it is a little bit more complicated, Calibre does this and so much more.

Price: $49
Requires: Mac OS X 10.5 or greater
Developer: AnyBizSoft

Conclusion

eBooks have grown exponentially in recent years, especially with new devices like the Nook and the iPad. Have you picked up one of these devices for yourself?

As for me, I’ll stick to my Kindle until Apple can deliver a reader that doesn’t strain my delicate eyes. Whatever your decision is, we hope that you find some of these apps to buy, read and convert eBooks useful.

What are your thoughts on this relatively new way of reading?

Improving Mac App Switching With LiteSwitch X

Mac OS X provides many ways of switching apps; Exposé, Spaces, the Dock, customizable “Hot Corners”, and the old school Windows-like app switcher that opens up with Cmd+Tab. The app that we are reviewing today aims at improving this built-in app switcher, and make it more functional, especially for users that are used to Windows’ classic app switcher.

Keep reading to find out why this app has the potential to improve the way you switch between apps, and how it can help to simplify your computer workflow by helping you focus on one application at a time.

Getting Started

LiteSwitch X installs directly into System Preferences, and everything you need to change about it will be there. The first thing you’ll want to do will be enabling the app, and to do so the app will need to restart your dock.

Once you have enabled it, you should choose which combination of keys you want to use to open LiteSwitch X. The default one is Cmd+Tab, since that is also the one used in the built in app switcher. Right below the keys option you’ll see an option that allows you to choose how LiteSwitch handles windows, which we’ll get to next.

Getting Started

Getting Started

Handling Windows

This is a setting that allows you to choose how you want LiteSwitch to manage windows. It’s broken down into two parts, the first one lets you choose how windows behave when you open them from LiteSwitch. It has two options, “One window forward” and “All forward”.

It took me a while to fully understand this, but it means that if you have two windows open of the same app, in the “one forward” mode LiteSwitch will only bring up the top, or most important window of the app, while on the “all forward” mode, it will bring up all the open windows of the app. I’m not sure how LiteSwitch chooses which window is more important, but it works.

The second part of this setting manages how windows behave every time you open them, whether it’s from LiteSwitch X or not. There are four options here, the first one is the Classic choice, which does nothing special. The second one is called the “Classic Finder”, and if active, once you select the Finder app, all of the open Finder windows will come up to the front.

The third option is called “Classic Window” and if active, any app you bring to the front will be brought up with all of its open windows. The fourth and last option is probably the coolest and the most useful. It’s called the “Single App Mode”, and we’ll talk about it next.

The Infamous Single App Mode

This little feature brings this app to a whole other level. What it does is simple, yet very useful. If active, this option hides every app that you are not working on directly. So, if you are working on Safari and you bring up iTunes, Safari (and every other app that isn’t iTunes) will be automatically hidden and iTunes will be brought up to the front. Switch to Safari again, and now iTunes will be hidden.

This feature makes sure you only have one window (or one app) on your desk at all times, to avoid clutter and confusion. It’s pretty great. And not only does it work with the LiteSwitch app, it also works if you open apps just from the Dock.

Single app mode

Single app mode

Other Useful Features

Interface

Interface

LiteSwitch’s advantages over the classic Mac app switcher don’t stop there. There are also a lot of details that make it much more useful. For example, you can modify the size and location of the app switcher overlay. There is a small bar on the bottom of the app switcher that lets you change its size, much like the left-bottom corner of any window on your Mac.

Also, if you grab the app switcher, you can move it wherever you want it to be on your screen and it’ll stay there.

There’s also the keyboard shortcuts. Every time you open LiteSwitch’s app switcher, you have the option to use any of these shortcuts to save time. Some of them include force quitting apps, show/hide an app, showing only a selected app, quitting apps, and many more shortcuts.

If you don’t like memorizing shortcuts (like me), perhaps you’d prefer using your pointer. Good thing you can also use it to double click apps in the app switcher and bring up a bunch of options. Another cool feature is drag and drop directly in the app switcher. Just drag a file, bring up the app switcher, drop the file on another app and you’re done.

Other features

Other features

Exclude List and Advanced Settings

You can also choose apps that you don’t want displayed in LiteSwitch, in a feature that is called “Exclude List”. This is very useful for apps that are always running in the background but that you don’t use often.

For example, I always have Last.fm running in the background, but I never actually open it, so I chose to hide it from LiteSwitch. These apps can be easily changed from the settings if you ever decide to start showing them on LiteSwitch.

There are also a handful of advanced settings that can change the behavior of the app. Under these settings there are some that include a color chooser for the app switcher, showing background apps (cool, but I don’t recommend it), hiding app names, disabling mouse selection and a lot more.

Exclude List

Exclude List

Conclusion

I’ve never been a fan of the app switcher, I have always used Exposé and the dock to switch apps. Even on Windows I could never get myself to use the Alt+Tab thing. If I could get used to it, however, I would totally switch to this app. I might try it just for the Single App mode, and I’ll see if I can get used to using the app switcher at the same time…

What do you use for switching apps? Do you know any apps like this one? Let us know in the comments below!