Category: Mac

There are lots of repetitive tasks that people do every day, and sometimes it can get a little bit monotonous. Uploading a file to an FTP site, installing a new application, or copying files to a folder buried deep in your system can all be annoying. After doing it for the one hundredth time, you may decide that it would be nice to have some way to do these tasks without the hassle.

Dropzone does all this and more, all via the dock. Once the program is set up, it’s just a case of dragging a file to the Dock icon, then dropping it into the correct “action”. Sounds easy, right? Well it is, and there’s so much more to it than just drag and drop…

Installation & Setup

Installation of Dropzone works the same way as for most other apps, with the exception that it shows up on the right side of the divider bar on the Dock. Confused? That’s because Dropzone is available all the time, and you don’t have to open it up to get it going like on most apps.

If that doesn’t sit well with you, feel free to change it by opening up the preferences, then selecting Setup. From there you can choose which side of the Dock the program sits on.

Once the program is in the Dock, right click the icon and start playing with the preferences. On the left is the Destinations button, which pulls up all of your options, and there are quite a few of them.

Each option is called an Action, and since these are coded in Ruby, they’re constantly expanding and being added to. Pick an option, and then give it a name. After that, you’re done! But wait, there’s more.

Action Options

Each action comes with a specific list of guidelines to help set things up properly. Let’s say that you want to setup a Dropzone action that automatically installs a new application to your hard drive.

Select the Install Application action, and your list of options will appear below. In this case, you can choose the simple option of moving the source file to the trash once everything is installed. Click on OK and it’s ready to go.

Now you’ve set it up, performing that action is really straight forward. Drag a .dmg file onto Dropzone, and the grid pops up. Move the file onto the Install Application action and Dropzone goes to work.

The program mounts the disk image, locates the application inside the disk image, copies it over to the Applications folder on your hard drive, launches the program from the dock, ejects the disk image from the computer, and dumps it in the trash, all in one fluid motion. And that’s just one of the actions available!

Seemingly Endless Options

There are so many options with Dropzone that it gets pretty dizzying. It can launch applications; upload images to Flickr, TwitPic, ImageShack, or Posterous; print files; mount and unmount all connected Firewire drives; shorten URLs via bit.ly or Is.Gd; and even speak text dropped in place. It’s pretty crazy how many things Dropzone really can do.

I use Dropzone daily. For example, every day I have a few files to upload to my FTP server. I drag the file onto the FTP icon, then a link to the file on the FTP server is placed on my clipboard. I can then paste that URL into my web browser and see the file instantly, or put it in an e-mail to send to a client.

I also have multiple folders that I store company invoices on, and they’re on both connected USB drives and my MacBook Pro. Drag and drop again, then I’m on my way.

Finally, another option I’ve started using recently is the Launch Application feature. I don’t like having dozens of apps in the dock, and this keeps some of them in Dropzone to keep the clutter away from the desktop. It’s a nice bonus.

The Verdict

As an added bonus, Dropzone is a steal at only $14. There’s even a trial version if you want to give it a shot before you plunk down the cash. Technically, it’s still in beta at version 0.3.3, but in the eight months I’ve been using the app I’ve never had a problem.

Dropzone is another one of those programs that you don’t really think you’ll need, because the tasks involved seem almost abstract compared to other programs. Once you have it, you’ll find yourself dropping items into the app all day long, which can increase productivity dramatically. It easily saves me thirty minutes a day just in FTP work, and it can do the same for you!

Apple’s retail operation has been a huge success for the company, with over 300 stores worldwide, across 11 different countries. Rather than a dry retail experience, everything in an Apple Store is carefully thought about—right down to the type of wood used for the counters.

The model of “Come to shop. Return to learn.” works well, instilling a sense of creativity and education into an otherwise very commercial experience. Although the primary aim of an Apple store is obviously to sell Apple products, the commitment to having creative specialists and dedicated trainers is something rarely found elsewhere.

I have a couple of Apple Stores close by in Manchester, but have been finding that over the years they are becoming far more crowded, all the time. What used to be a fantastic browsing experience is now akin to fighting your way to the front of a packed concert venue.

Are you finding the same thing? And how often do you visit an Apple Store nearby? I’d be interested to know whether you still find it a great place to check out the latest Apple gadgets, or if the ever-increasing crowds make visiting more of a necessity than a pleasure.

Your Mac already comes loaded with three functional calculators: the actual application “Calculator”, the Dashboard calculator and the Spotlight calculator (try typing an mathematical operation into Spotlight to see what I mean). However, all three of these lack certain advanced functionality that you may need.

In this roundup we’ll go through some of the best third party widgets and applications that give you greater calculation power on your Mac, as well as a handful that are great for converting all manner of different values.

Calculator Apps

Currency and Unit Converters

Conclusion

As good as the calculators that come included with your Mac are, eventually you’ll find something that they can’t do. Hopefully the alternatives offered today will help you when that time comes around.

Perhaps you wanted something that simply offered a few more functions. Or something completely different and revolutionary like Soulver.

Whatever functionality you were looking for in a calculator or converter app, we hope you found some of our suggestions useful. If you feel that we left something out, feel free to share it in the comments!

If you regularly find yourself typing the same piece of text over and over again, TextExpander could be a real life-saver. It’s a simple way to store a library of regularly used text snippets, and easily recall them using a pre-defined keyword.

I use TextExpander countless times every day, and it comes in handy all the time. Whether you often send out very similar emails, or just like to speed up your coding, you should definitely give TextExpander a try.

Version 3 brings a range of new features, including fill-in-the-blank snippets, shortcuts for entering new snippets, a shortcut to edit the last expanded snippet, and snippet search and suggestion via a quick keyboard shortcut. There’s an excellent video tutorial that demonstrates all of TextExpander’s features, including these new ones.

We also have an exclusive discount code for AppStorm readers, good for 20% off the full version TextExpander (single license or family pack). Just use the code APPSTORMTE when checking out, and be sure to do so before it expires on the 5th December!

Whether you’re a frequent business traveler or just a thrill-seeking nomad, we all know that venturing out into the world can be a complicated process.

In place of notebook pages taped to the fridge, Post-Its stuck to your monitor, and scrawled itinerary on a sturdy coffee-shop napkin, Outer Level offers you Knapsack. This all-in-one trip planning solution aims to de-clutter your preparation process and take the hassle out of planning for your next big (or small) adventure. We delve in to see if Knapsack delivers on its promise.

Overview

Knapsack is designed for organized travelers. People who need to keep track of frequent conference trips, or those who want a flexible and straight-forward way to construct and manipulate a complicated itinerary for their trip will find plenty to love about it.

The ability to leave dates and timings unspecified will also appeal to more spontaneous people though, so there’s something for everyone in this tool.

Interface

When you open Knapsack, you’re met with a simple and effective 3-panel design. The large map is the obvious centrepiece, and it is framed on the left by the trips panel where you’ll find your trips organized into Groups. Below the map is the listing of individual trips within the selected Group, and several columns for holding the most important information about each.

The layout is pleasing, familiar, and uncluttered, which is a major plus; there’s hardly any learning curve here. The toolbar is sparsely populated with all the basic functions of the program, and for those who accrue huge lists of trips, there’s a search bar at the top right. It might be tempting to assume that the search bar is for items on the map, but it’s actually for finding a specific trip in your catalogue — there’s a separate search button for map items in the toolbar.

Features

Despite the simple interface, Knapsack is a powerful and multi-faceted trip planning solution, so let’s take a look at the four major aspects of trip management that it focuses on.

Research

Before launching into your trip, it’s a good idea to iron out the little details. Knapsack’s integrated map system allows you to zoom in on your destination and scout out anything from the usual things like hotels, restaurants, and museums to the more pragmatic items like parking lots and transit stations. The integrated search makes this relatively painless, though searching for specific brand names can yield…unhelpful results (incidentally, did you know there’s a ‘Starbuck Island’ approximately halfway between Australia and Africa?)

Knapsack’s integrated map comes courtesy of the amazing OpenStreetMap.org: the Wikipedia of internet cartography. While at first it would seem as though Google Maps would have been the obvious choice, OpenStreetMap.org has the advantage of being constantly updated by users. So what it lacks in extra viewing modes (no satellite or hybrid views here, sorry), it makes up for with up-to-the-minute accuracy and an ever-expanding level of detail.

Plan

This is the bread-and-butter item, where the core of Knapsack’s functionality lies. Once you’ve set up your basic trip parameters (name, duration, description), you can start adding ‘days’ within which you create individual itinerary items with the “Add Activity” button.

The items can be moved, so if your plans change or you want to test out new configurations, you can simply click and drag an activity or an entire day around to re-order things. In lieu of those Post-Its on your monitor, you can also add To-Do list items to your trip to keep track of all the things you need to get done to prepare. This is a great place to put a packing list.

You also have the opportunity to create unscheduled activities that sit in a separate sidebar above the To-Do list items.

Organize & Revisit

Besides being a simple planning tool, Knapsack intends to help you organize your past trips and make them easy to reference and remember at a glance long after you’ve returned from them.

Trips can be rated using a basic five-star system, and based on that and the trip dates you can keep track of past ventures using the built-in Smart Groups (basically these are folders that contain trips). It would be nice to be able to tag individual trips more extensively and create your own Smart Groups to contain them, but this functionality is missing. You can, however, create standard Groups and manually sort your trips into them.

Trips are also attached to the main map as pins that you can click on to bring up a ‘postcard’. This little info window is a great way to keep a quick summary of each trip, including a picture, so that you can always remember the highlights of all of your travels.

When it comes to actually going on the trip, you can not only sync Knapsack with iCal to keep your itinerary handy and editable on your mobile device (it syncs both ways, which is great), but you’re also able to export as PDF or print for easy sharing with other travelers.

Speaking of which, it would have been nice to have an option to attach or ‘invite’ Address Book contacts into your trips to make working on shared itineraries easier. No such luck for now though, so if your trip has several participating members you’ll have to use the iCal sync or exporting features to keep everyone up to date.

Missing Links

Despite boasting an undoubtedly robust system for managing your trips, there is still room for improvement.

Besides the items mentioned above, it would be nice to have an integrated module for searching for, booking, and saving flight and hotel information. Even just that last aspect would be incredibly useful, so that once you have everything booked you can just check your trip itinerary for all your flight and hotel information instead of needing to refer back to the original documents each time.

An all-in-one itinerary solution shouldn’t leave us heading elsewhere for trip-related information, after all.

Conclusion

For most people’s purposes, Knapsack is clearly an excellent one-stop solution for trip planning. The sleek interface, streamlined functionality, and attractive price tag will no doubt be appealing to the majority of travelers. Nevertheless, there are still some notable gaps in functionality that hold Knapsack back from the title of ultimate travel assistant.

Positives:

• Simple, flexible itinerary creation
• OpenStreetMap integration
• Easy iCal Sync
• Uncluttered Interface

Negatives:

• No integrated flight/hotel booking
• No dedicated flight/train/etc. info as separate module for each trip
• No method to attach contacts to trip and share itinerary updates easily
• No way to tag individual trips and create custom Smart Groups to organize them

Overall, Knapsack delivers on its promise and to help you keep all your trip planning in one un-stressful and easy to navigate place. There’s a fair bit of untapped potential, and future updates will no doubt capitalize on the strong foundations established in the current version, but for now it’s still a no-brainer for frequent travelers — and there’s a free demo available to help you see if Knapsack fits your style.

Have you tried Knapsack? Or have you got a different trip planning system you favour? Let us know in the comments!

Perhaps you have more than one Mac in your life. I know several people that have an iMac in their house, a work machine, and also their own Macbook for travelling around. If that’s the case, then it can be hard to avoid a “media mess” spread all over your different machines. Now, you can fix this by using web services like Dropbox, but if you want something more specific and easier to setup, this might not be a good fit.

That’s where applications like iPhotoSync come in. This one in particular aims to offer an easy iPhoto synchronization process across different computers, so that you can automatically have the same photographs available on all your machines. But does it deliver?

Getting Started

The first thing you will need to do in order to use iPhotoSync’s magical service is install the application across all of the Macs that you want to use it with.

The setup process is surprisingly simple: as soon as you open it, iPhotoSync will start “synchronizing” or “recognizing” all of the photos that are in your library. I have what I consider a mid-sized iPhoto library (around 4,000 photos), and it took about 5 minutes to synchronize everything in my library and get it all working with the application.

iPhotoSync uses your own network to keep content in sync, so one of the immediate downsides is that you won’t be able to use it with computers that aren’t in your home or work network.

Manual Mode

iPhotoSync has two modes that you can use: the manual mode and the automatic mode. They are exactly what they sound like. In the Manual mode, you are presented with all the photos from your other systems, and you can select which ones to ignore, which ones to import, or elect just to import everything.

It’s actually very smart and interesting the way it imports images. It adds them to iPhoto’s “Automatically Import” list, so that they will be automatically added to the app next time you launch iPhoto.

Automatic Mode

In the “Automatic Mode” you are able to choose specific albums or events that will be automatically imported from this point on. A few “smart lists” are offered by default (such as photos taken in the past few months, all new photos etc), or you can choose specific albums that you want it to start importing automatically.

I’m not sure how it works beneath the hood, but after you set it up it will start synchronising your libraries together. The process is surprisingly fast, and completed without a hitch.

iPhotoSync can handle more or less everything that appears in your iPhoto sidebar – the “Flagged”, “Last Import”, “Last 12 months” categories, as well as Albums, Books, or anything else you’ve created or designed.

Mac OS X Integration

As far as the integration with the OS goes, iPhotoSync has an “agent” that runs in the menu bar. This doesn’t do much, other than alerting you of what is going on behind the scenes of the synchronization process.

It’s very handy if you want to go to quickly open the application, and iPhotoSync also uses Growl to alert of every change and sync that’s occurring behind the scenes (you can turn this off if you’d like to).

“Automatically Import” vs. iPhotoSync

You might be wondering why you should pay for something that is already included in your iPhoto application. The truth is, you might not need to. Perhaps you didn’t know (I didn’t) that iPhoto has it’s own set of sharing features readily available.

They are actually very similar to iPhotoSync, and work pretty well once you set them up. iPhoto’s own syncing abilities also use your home network, let you choose specific folders to share, and even have password security. So, why would you want to pay for an app that does exactly the same?

Well, for one, iPhotoSync has automatic imports, so you can set it and forget it. That feature alone, if you take advantage of it, is worth the price. There are also other features that iPhotoSync has over iPhoto’s syncing (confusing names, I know), like the ability to sync even if iPhoto isn’t running, video syncing, and the ability to show which photos you have already imported.

Conclusion

There are plenty of ways you could keep your libraries synchronised – you could even go “old school” and transfer all your new photos with a USB to all of your computers. But that’s not very convenient in our modern day and age!

iPhotoSync is a handy application, but it would be even more valuable if it didn’t do something that the iPhoto application already does pretty well.

Still, if you want to have an easier way of keeping your iPhoto libraries synchronized across all of your computers, with a useful interface and automatic syncing, iPhotoSync is a very worthwhile application. You can buy a two-machine license for $15, or pay $25 for a five-computer license.

My desk has become a sea of paper. Drawers and drawers filled with old reports, warranty guides, receipts, and papers whose origin I haven’t the slightest idea about. I’ve never really considered trying to scan and catalog my physical world, converting it to a digital one.

I guess that is why I was taken aback when asked to review Optical Character Recognition (OCR) software like ABBYY FineReader. I never really thought I’d be able to organize everything in any of my drawers. But after looking at the different scanned-file organization and OCR options, I may yet find a way to search through the mess…

After the jump, I’ll explain what exactly OCR is, and walk you through a number of different solutions available for the Mac!

What is OCR?

Before we jump into the world of software comparisons, it might be good to ensure everyone has an understanding of Optical Character Recognition. Essentially, a scanned document is nothing more than a flat picture – it doesn’t contain any readable text, just pixels.

You can’t search for any of the words inside the document with Spotlight, as the actual text can’t be read from the computer’s point of view. OCR uses software to recognize the words and letters within an image, converting them into digital text. That way, it can be searched or edited later.

ABBYY FineReader for Mac

First up is the must-loved (on the Windows side at least) ABBYY FineReader Express for Mac. First though, a short tangent. I feel as if the most Mac-like applications have a similar naming convention. Normally, our most coveted applications have simple, easy to remember titles: Things, Adium, Billings, SuperDuper!.

However, corporate focused, multi-platform applications tend to tack on extra words to the name of the program. ABBYY FineReader Express for Mac is no exception – why not just “FineReader”? Anyway, that’s not particularly important in the long-run. Let’s assess how the application actually works…

Unfortunately, to add fuel to the fire of having to register for a trial download, FineReader also forces you to install the program via an install wizard (rather than the usual drag-and-drop).

Once you open up FineReader you are given a very simple (albeit slightly uninspiring) interface. You have the option to Scan or Import from a File and automatically perform the OCR process. After you grab the file / scan the paper, you can convert the file to various document formats. FineReader will convert the scanned document into editable formats like Word, Excel, HTML or an indexable PDF.

Once you have imported the file into FineReader, converted and OCR’ed the image, the editing window will appear (it will also automatically open the default program for that file type.)

Within the editing window, you can designate Text, Picture, and ‘Table’ areas in the document. All-in-all, ABBYY was super easy to use, very fast at OCR’ing my pre-scanned images, and comes in at under $100.

DevonThink

This Mac-only program is well loved across our community and is developed by Devon Technologies. They just recently released an iOS edition for your favorite mobile devices as well.

This app has a much steeper learning curve than ABBYY FineReader, as it combines both file organization and databasing as well as OCR. The OCR technology does require you to get the ‘Pro Office’ version, which is more expensive than the regular version of DevonThink, at $150.

However, if you have a need to manage hundreds of files as well as have them searchable, this slightly expensive offering might be what you’re looking for.

It should be noted that DevonThink also utilizes ABBYY OCR technology behind the scenes, so you should receive similar results and speed.

ReadIris 12

Another fairly pricy option which is also multi-platform: ReadIris. This one costs nearly 130 Euros and isn’t as well designed as either DevonThink or FineReader.

Also, there are some restrictions including per document page limits, multi-language support and folder monitoring. To access these features, you will be forced to spend over 400 Euros for their Corporate edition. A trial is available for their ‘lower’ cost version.

VelOCRaptor

VelOCRaptor is the lowest cost OCR app I’ve found for the Mac – at just $29. It is very simple – just drag the PDF on top of the drop-zone and it will process through its ‘No-Click OCR’ process.

The application doesn’t offer any features available in the more expensive applications- like organization, Excel spreadsheet export or multi-platform support. However, this inexpensive option seems to work with most files I threw at it.

Definitely give it shot if you aren’t sure that you really need a more expensive application.

Conclusion

After running through all of these applications, I can’t say I’ll jump into the world of super-organized OCR users just yet – but it definitely would be a wonderful thing to have all of my receipts and important documents loaded up and ready to access anywhere with my Mac.

Alas, I’ll need to get a much faster scanner to handle my paper load! This is a very important factor if you’re planning on importing a big stack of documents, and you might want to consider something such as the ScanSnap for a quick and easy solution.

How about you? Are you a big paper-free OCR fan, or do you prefer a good old-fashioned filing cabinet?

Corkboard is the future of copy and pasting on Macs. It provides a simple and elegant way to manage all the data you put in your clipboard. You can drag photos, text, links and more to the application’s menu bar, and it will be securely stored until you need to use it.

This review will give you an in depth look at one of the most powerful clipboard managers available for the Mac. Read on to find out just how amazing this $10 application is, and how it can change the way you copy and paste!

Overview

If you consider yourself a Mac “power-user”, then you probably use Command-C and Command-V dozens, if not hundreds, of times daily. But sometimes copy and paste just isn’t enough for what you. Say you’re working on a project that requires you to cut, copy and paste a bunch of text, links, pictures or code into the document you’re working on.

You’re probably switching between all your open windows and applications and copying bits and pieces into a different application. Don’t you wish there was a nice and easy way to copy and paste all that information, and then keep it in a safe place until it’s ready to be used?

Well, you’re in luck. That’s exactly why Ayluro made this fine piece of software called Corkboard. It’s essentially a virtual clipboard for you Mac where you can store — or “pin” — images, text, links and much more.

Using Corkboard

Using Corkboard is almost too easy. When you launch the application you will see a little pin icon in your menu bar. Here, you can display Corkboard, change preferences, or quit the application.

First, let’s open up the preferences. There are a few settings you can change, such as the hot key to display Corkboard, and whether you want to start the application automatically at login. If you have a slow or older Mac, you can choose to disable the animations as well as turning off the complex corkboard-looking background, both of which use a few extra CPU cycles.

Once you have Corkboard set up as you’d like, you can begin using it. There are a couple of different ways to add items to Corkboard. You can either drag an image, some text, or a link to the menu bar or dock icon, or you can copy some data into your clipboard, press the hotkey and then paste the item into Corkboard.

Once your item is added, you can move it around and place it where you want. When you’re ready to use it, you can either double click on it or click on it and press Command-C to copy it to your clipboard. Then, just copy into a document or window to use.

You can also choose to “lock” a clipping, so it will stay in the same place. And don’t worry. Once an item is in Corkboard, it will remain there until you remove it. It will even stay in Corkboard if you quit the application or if your computer crashes.

Corkboard works with all kinds of files, including colors, vCards, URLs, text, HTML code and files. Whatever you need to store, you can be sure that it works with Corkboard

Time Machine for Your Clipboard

Everyone’s had the problem: you copy something important, and the you accidentally copy something else, removing the previous item from your clipboard. Corkboard fixes this unfortunate problem.

Corkboard keeps a record of everything you copy to your clipboard. If you make the mistake of copying over something important, you can still retrieve it. Just open Corkboard and you’ll see a clipboard with a list of all the items you copied.

You can scroll through pages for items even further back in time, and once you find what you were looking for, just double click it to bring it back into your clipboard.

Using Corkboard is a breeze. Like I stated earlier, to open Clipboard, you can either click on the menu bar icon, drag an item to the dock or menu bar icon or press a keyboard shortcut.

Ayluro has also added support for VoiceOver, so you can fully control the app just by speaking. You can hear the content of a certain clipping read out to you, and navigate the app using just your voice if you’d like to.

Conclusion

At only $9.99, Corkboard is a steal. There’s also a free trial version that limits you to keeping only four items in your Corkboard at any one time.

Corkboard is definitely one of my favorite applications. It’s always open on my Mac, and it’s set to launch on login. It’s very simple to use and understand, and I love the framework and APIs that the developer added to the app. The overall design and performance of the app is great.

As far as suggestions go, I’d love to be able to resize clippings so I can make room for more images and files. And I wouldn’t mind being able to hide certain clippings. Other than that, the application is amazing. I’d rate it 9/10 and I highly recommend this for any Mac user.

I’m pleased to announce that we have another awesome giveaway this week, offering you the chance to win a license for Knapsack. We’re going to be reviewing this app in the coming weeks, but by way of a quick summary, it’s a great way to plan, organize and document your travel.

The Knapsack website does a brilliant job of explaining all the various features the application has, and I’d definitely recommend taking a look.

We have five full Knapsack licenses up for grabs, and entering is really simple. All you need to do is leave a comment on this post, letting us know which part of the world you’ve love to travel to!

The competition will run for one week, and we’ll announce the randomly selected winners on the Thursday 2nd December. Best of luck, and enjoy the Thanksgiving weekend!

Happy birthday, OpenOffice. Believe it or not, it’s been ten years since the mighty “other” productivity suite—the open-source uncle of Microsoft’s ‘Monopoloffice’—began the slow fight for recognition. How far we’ve come.

Of course, it’s been slightly less than ten years for us Mac folks, but in any case the milestone merits a re-evaluation of this streamlined suite of apps, especially in light of Microsoft’s recent release of Office 2011 for OS X.

At the end of the day, the question has always been whether or not OpenOffice is able to sufficiently replace Microsoft Office. Has it reached this stage today? Read on to find out…

The OpenOffice Advantage

Before delving into the nitty-gritty of the matter, let’s take a broader look at the situation and discuss some of OpenOffice’s overall characteristics.

A significant leg up that it has over Office 2011 is size. OpenOffice is a lean 430MB when installed, versus Office 2011′s significantly beefier 1.3GB footprint. This not only makes it more portable, but also means that it’s quicker to install — plus, you can download it right from OpenOffice.org wherever you are.

The entirety of OpenOffice also launches from a single icon, bringing up a “portal” screen from which you can open whatever kind of document you need. This can save some space in your dock if you frequently use a word processor, spreadsheets, and presentations but don’t want an icon for each taking up space.

The most obvious advantage is, of course, price. OpenOffice is completely and utterly free. You are encouraged to donate to the project to help fund ongoing development, but it’s neither required nor pressured. Furthermore, the open-source nature of the project also means that there’s only one version of the suite, unlike Microsoft Office’s ‘Home & Student’ and ‘Home & Business’ editions.

Performance Anxiety

When it comes to actually working with OpenOffice, the advantages of its lean nature seem oddly understated. You’d expect that at a fraction of the size of its Office 2011 counterpart, it would load significantly faster…but that simply isn’t the case. While the main window typically opens in under 2 seconds and each of the component applications jumps to attention nearly instantly, the same is true of Office 2011. So much for that.

The one area that OpenOffice is noticeably quicker in is font performance. Office 2011 will periodically slow down to “optimize font performance”, an operation that reduces the program in question to a crawl. It doesn’t take long to perform, but OpenOffice seems able to handle font performance just fine without optimization. Furthermore, even when you have many fonts installed, OpenOffice’s font menus tend to be distinctly more responsive. Office 2011′s feel sluggish, even after the “optimization” routine.

Now let’s have a look at each of the major components of OpenOffice in more detail and determine how they stack up against Microsoft’s.

Documents & Interface Issues

OpenOffice’s document editing application is called Writer. In the bluntest of terms, Writer is a minimalistic application that is truly focused on word processing. This stands in contrast to Office 2011—or especially Apple’s own Pages—both of which combine word processing capabilities with some advanced layout design functionality. For those who are only interested in producing text and have only a passing need to style it up, this will be a positive distinction.

When you open Writer, you’ll notice a clean and familiar interface that clearly adheres to the ‘classic’ interface layout established years ago for word processing applications. Whereas Word from Office 2011 seeks to offer some eye-candy in its design and interface, OpenOffice is evidently the old grandfather recommending salt crackers and prunes because they’re healthier.

Nevertheless, OpenOffice’s interface is undeniably functional and accessible… but it is also undeniably dated. There is a sense that in striving to maintain this barebones, ubiquitous look, the OpenOffice team has forgotten to take into account the positive developments in user interface design research that have cropped up over the past several years.

The elephant in the room here is Microsoft’s ribbon interface, so let’s bring him into the conversation. In 2007, Microsoft revolutionized the design of their Office suite for Windows by introducing their “Fluent User Interface”, which consistent primarily of a fundamental re-thinking of how features and tools were laid out in their applications.

The so-called “ribbon” interface was a transformative element that purported to provide quicker, more intuitive access to the available features of the Office suite. Unfortunately, for a customer base that grew up learning that the original interface was intuitive, the switch was received with a great deal of controversy.

Fast-forward a few years and the ribbon has made its way to all Microsoft Office products on Windows and Mac. The concept has been refined based on user feedback, but it remains largely the same. It is a different paradigm and whether or not you like it will most likely have a profound effect on how you view OpenOffice versus Office 2011 aesthetically.

Functionally speaking, the lack of aesthetic flair in OpenOffice is a non-issue. Unless you need a pretty interface to work, you’ll be able to put words on a page without a problem in either Writer or Word. Writer will also allow you to import PDF files, which Word does not (it can only export them).

Useful for wordsmiths with ADD, Writer features a full-screen view to help minimize distractions, but unfortunately it’s quite crude — removing access to toolbars while maintaining the garish margin markers. Word’s full-screen implementation seems considerably better thought out, with calm black surrounding your page while everything else disappears. Even so, they’ve kept the menu accessible: mousing to the top of your screen prompts it to slide out of hiding, creeping back out of your way when you’re done with it.

Spreadsheets

The second pillar of office suites is their handling of spreadsheets. OpenOffice’s answer to Microsoft’s Excel is a powerful tool called Calc. The new version of Calc not only adds extra security enhancements for files, but also bumps the number of supported rows in a spreadsheet to just over one million, making it almost infinitely robust (though performance when loading large spreadsheet files is significantly less efficient than in Excel).

Calc is probably OpenOffice’s strongest contender, if only because it is the one component where design tends to matter the least. In terms of being easy for someone new to pick up and use, Calc falls way short of Excel and its easy-to-manage ribbon and extensive wizards to help with more complex functions, but power users and spreadsheet gurus will find that it is more than capable of handling the vast majority of things they throw at it. Calc also supports more languages for macro functions, though their use is somewhat less accessible.

Presentations and Templates

OpenOffice’s Impress is a smart presentation program. It suffers from an inexcusable lack of attractive built-in templates and design options when compared to PowerPoint 2011, but its multiple-monitor support and efficient handling of effects and transitions makes this forgivable.

It’s a difficult component to judge because the entire paradigm of slideshow presentations seems to be transforming slowly into something more video-like and less linear and stale. PowerPoint 2011 seems particularly in tune with this shift, offering the ability to export to a movie file so you can transfer your multi-media presentations around without worrying about it opening strangely on another computer.

That being said, if you’re just after raw slideshow-based presenting, then Impress will do the job fine.

Extras

With the main elements out of the way, it’s worth mentioning the extra components of OpenOffice since they can be extremely valuable additions depending on your workflow. Draw is OpenOffice’s answer to Microsoft’s Visio — fans of Microsoft Office will be shrugging here because Visio has yet to make it to the Mac, even with this latest 2011 version. Draw doesn’t just win by default though, since it actually does provide a powerful set of tools for creating and manipulating diagrams and graphics in 2D and 3D.

Base corresponds to Microsoft Access, once again absent from Office 2011. OpenOffice Base is flexible enough to handle both personal databases and large, enterprise-scale affairs with its support for MySQL, Adabas D, as well its ability to integrate with existing databases thanks to its support for JDBC/ODBC standard drivers.

Last up is Math, a simple outboard equation editor for setting up complicated mathematical statements that can then be integrated into Writer, Calc, and Impress or exported freely for use in another environment. Office 2011 also has its own dedicated equation editor (called, creatively enough, “Equation Editor”) that gets called up to handle equation entry from within each application, or can be run separately from a subfolder of the main Microsoft Office 2011 directory in your Applications folder.

If you’re using the business edition of Office 2011, you’ll also have access to Outlook, Microsoft’s mighty email/calendar/contacts super-application that has been the staple of its Windows counterpart for years.

Replacing the intermediate Entourage from previous versions, Outlook is now an extremely powerful and well designed solution for handling day-to-day tasks, scheduling, and mail. OpenOffice has evidently not seen this aspect as one worth pursuing, and it’s not terribly surprising considering the competition in the field even from Apple’s own dedicated iCal, Mail, and Address Book apps.

Conclusion

The spotlight is on you now. Do you hate the ribbon? Do you value beautiful aesthetic interface design and loads of shiny templates to work from? If so, then OpenOffice will still fail to impress you, despite its continuing advancements “under the hood”.

If you’re a business user looking for a powerful alternative to Microsoft’s suite that offers the same fundamental functionality without any need to worry about licensing costs, then OpenOffice will seem like a godsend. Similarly, if you’re a casual user who only occasionally needs to use an office suite and therefore can’t justify ponying up the cash for the premium Office 2011, then OpenOffice will serve as a suitable alternative.

My own feeling is that OpenOffice remains the underdog for now. It’s ironic because if I had been asked the question just a short while ago when Office 2008 was still the best Microsoft could do, I might have said otherwise. Office 2008 was a sluggish, awkward, and foreign-feeling set of applications that failed to deliver the kind of performance and working environment that I had hoped.

Since 2011 though, I must give credit where it’s due and admit that Microsoft have stepped up their game to produce a truly stunning set of programs that run well, feel like they’re native to the Mac, and go above and beyond the call of duty making them a pleasure to work with.

I’m rooting for OpenOffice though. I think the project is a valuable and admirable one, and I suspect that as more and more people adopt the software, contribute donations toward development, and lend a hand in making it better, OpenOffice will close the gap between it and its competitors swiftly and decisively. After all, the open-source model offers it an agility that is hard to come by in commercial development cycles.

So for what it is — a compact and barebones but powerful office suite at an unbeatable price — OpenOffice is a winner. But can it outright replace Office 2011? It seems unlikely.

Leave us your thoughts about OpenOffice and Office 2011 in the comments! Which do you prefer?

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 tagging your photographs in iPhoto, whether you need to defragment your Mac’s hard drive, sharing specific folders across your network, and how to know when the time is right to upgrade your Mac!

What software can I use to have a library of photos with multiple, fully searchable, tags?

– Guido

Although you mentioned in your question that iPhoto isn’t capable of doing this, I’m pleased to let you know that you can! The process is fairly straight-forward – just pick a photo, then click “Info” towards the lower right. If you don’t see the “Keywords” panel displaying on the right, click “View > Keywords” to show it.

You can then type in various keywords (tags, essentially), and those you’ve used before will be suggested automatically. After tagging your photos, searching for a relevant keyword will show that image as a match.

There are plenty of other apps available for the Mac that support photo tagging as well. If you need a more powerful implementation, try Lightroom, Aperture, or even Picasa!

I’m looking to upgrade my 20″ 2007 iMac to a 27″ 2010 iMac. Is this a good time to upgrade? Also, is it worth paying extra for the 256GB SSD or should I get the 1TB disk?

– Torsten C.

One of my favourite websites for investigating this type of issue is the MacRumours Buyer’s Guide. This page lists all the different Mac models currently available, shows how long each previous upgrade cycle has been historically, and predicts how long it will be until the next update to this particular hardware line.

At present, you can see that the iMac is “mid product cycle”. It’s just over 100 days since the last upgrade, and historically the iMac has been updated every 226 days. Of course, this is just a best guess – it could be way out! All things considered, now is a pretty good time to consider buying a new iMac.

If you’re happy to pay extra for the 256GB SSD, I’d certainly recommend it. You can buy a 1TB external drive for next to nothing, and the extra investment would be best spent on a solid state internal drive. That is, unless you have a specific need for a large amount of internal storage.

How can I share a specific folder with other people on my network? For example, a web project is based in my “Sites” folder. How do I share this specific folder with collegues?

– Erik

By default, your Mac is set up to only share the “Public” folder in your home directory. This makes file sharing across your network fairly safe, and prevents people from seeing the contents of your whole hard drive!

One way to add a new shared folder is through System Preferences. Open the “Sharing” panel, and click on “File Sharing” in the left-hand menu. You’ll then see a list of the currently shared folders on the right.

You can add a new one by clicking the “+” icon – in your case, add the specific folder inside the “Sites” directory. After doing this, you can set what type of access other people have; Read Only, Write Only, or Read & Write.

Another method for doing this would be through a web service such as Dropbox. This would have the added advantage of allowing people to contribute to the shared folder from anywhere, even if they aren’t on the same network.

Why don’t you need to defragment a Mac?

– John

In years and operating systems past, defragmenting your hard drive was a common occurrence, and good practice to ensure the smooth, speedy running of your computer. As technology has come along over the past few years, defragmenting a drive isn’t nearly as important as it used to be.

Apple’s documentation generally advises against the need for defragmenting your drive, citing various technical reasons – some specific to the way OS X works, others related to the general improvement in hard drive technology.

The bottom line is that while you don’t need to defragment your Mac’s hard drive, if you regularly work with very large video/audio files and notice a gradual slow-down when using these files, it might not be a bad idea to give it a try. Equally, if you’ve been running with a very low amount of disk space for an extended period of time, defragmenting could help to speed things up.

For further reading, check out the support article above, or this short piece on when it might be necessary to defragment. If you do decide to give this process a try, be sure to read our review of iDefrag, one of the leading Mac utilities for doing just this!

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!

Much has been written about Apple’s decision to no longer ship the MacBook Air with Flash pre-installed, and while there are plenty of arguments for and against this, there’s plenty of evidence to suggest that uninstalling Flash can dramatically improve your browsing experience and battery life.

Apple themselves have stated that Flash is the number one cause of crashes in Safari, and—if you’ve ever watched a YouTube video on your MacBook—you’ll know that all the system fans kicking in can’t be good for your battery life.

Unless you spend a great deal of time designing or visiting Flash websites, you should definitely try uninstalling it for a few days. I have, and I won’t be going back in a hurry.

Fortunately, there are a few simple workarounds to make the transition easier and still allow you to use Flash when you really need to.

John Gruber posted a great article on this topic a few weeks ago, explaining that even after installing Flash system-wide, it’s still available in Google Chrome (as it has its own self-contained Flash plugin). For the few times I need Flash on a day-to-day basis, this workaround is more than reasonable for me.

I’ve noticed a far quicker browsing experience, and found that many sites actually serve alternative content when they discover you don’t have Flash installed. This is more notable than when you’re running ClickToFlash, and uninstalling Flash altogether is a more honest process than tricking websites into letting ClickToFlash handle this type of content.

Is this something you’ve tried on your own machine? If not, I’d strongly recommend giving it a go, even if just for a few days! Have your say in the poll above, and let me know your thoughts in the comments.

I remember when I used to have computer classes in school—we all used to spend our class time in MS Paint creating cool drawings. Later, I found out Paint was useful for other things, and I started using it as a quick image editor for tasks like adding captions to an image. Like me, there are a lot of people that don’t need to use a full-featured app like Photoshop or GIMP to make and modify their images.

That’s where Paint-like apps come in. Like their original Windows counterpart, they tend to be simple and very easy to learn and use. The problem is, there are no bundled apps with your Mac that do what Microsoft Paint does (at least not any more).

If you too are looking for a MS Paint equivalent for Mac, then check out some of the options we are presenting to you today!

Conclusion

Here we have presented some very good substitutes to Microsoft Paint on Mac OS X. There really are plenty of options, and each of them has its own set of capabilities and deficiencies.

If you want something easy and free, I would go with Paintbrush. If you want something a bit more professional and with more features, then you could use a paid app like Pixelmator or Scribbles. It really comes down to what you want to do with your image editor, and what type of functionality you need.

If you think we’ve missed some alternatives, please feel free to share them in the comments below!

Thanks to Radium for sponsoring Mac.AppStorm this week! It’s simple, functional, and an absolutely fantastic way to listen to the radio on your Mac. Plus, we have a 25% discount for Mac.Appstorm readers this week only!

What is it that grabs you about your favorite Mac app? Is it the extensive feature list, or the attractive user interface, perhaps? Our favorite Mac applications make use of a variety of things that make them great, but relatively little can impact the usability of an app more than the inclusion of seemingly insignificant integration features.

I’m talking about those little features that you almost never notice, until you use an app that doesn’t have them—features like an automatic move-to-applications-folder on download, or in-app updating.

These features can make or break the integration of an app into your daily workflow, so it’s important for developers to understand the necessity for them.

The Bare Minimum

Move To Applications Folder

The move-to-applications-folder feature is absolutely crucial for Mac software. When you first run a downloaded program, you wouldn’t normally notice if you weren’t prompted to move the .app file to the Applications folder.

However, what happens without it is that a user deep in the zone of their work routine will download a piece of software, and absent-mindedly run the application from their Downloads folder for the rest of eternity—or at least until they get around to cleaning out the Downloads folder, and then it becomes an issue that they have to deal with then.

In-App Updating

There’s nothing that takes me out of my workflow more (except, perhaps, Facebook and Twitter!) than having to visit a developer website to manually download the next build of a particular app that I use.

When my application greets me with a new version upon startup, I’m more than happy to “Install and Relaunch,” because the process could not be simpler.

Native Interface Uniformity

As a Mac user, I’ve become accustomed to all of my core applications behaving in a similar fashion. This is no different when considering apps that I download or purchase via the Internet.

I expect that system functions, common menu items, and standard application features will be accessed and utilized the same ways as I’m used to in standard OS X applications like Mail or iTunes.

Above And Beyond

Core OS X App (And Mobile) Integration

This is a subset of features that is particularly important in productivity apps (a favorite genre of software for me, if you haven’t gathered yet). For example, I look especially favorably upon to-do list applications that can sync with iCal, so when I think of something I need to do, I don’t have to remember to enter it into both applications (assuming the item is time-sensitive).

An added bonus, provided an application has a mobile counterpart, is seamless syncing between the desktop and mobile versions. This is becoming ever-more important with devices such as the iPad, and the way in which a piece of software approaches the idea of syncing is crucial. It should be simple, easy to set up, and “just work”.

Keyboard Shortcuts

I realize that keyboard shortcuts are more important to some than others, but depending on the app, no one can deny their utility.

Cultured Code’s GTD application Things, for example, has a mappable global keyboard shortcut for a quick-entry window. If you’re struck with a task that you don’t want to forget, but don’t want to interrupt your workflow, you can just hit the shortcut, enter some text, and revisit it later to add details.

Additional Workflow Features

I suppose this is kind of my catch-all category for those especially useful features that truly demonstrate an ‘above and beyond’ commitment to the user, by the developer. I am reticent to bring up The Hit List again, after my criticism of Andy Kim’s communication practices, but I do love the application so much, and it is such a perfect example of so many things.

Below, you can see the beautiful built-in task timer in The Hit List that I’m using as I write this article. But it doesn’t have to be a timer. These features can include anything from Growl notifications to an app’s ability to sit quietly in the menu bar until it needs your attention.

Conclusion

Let’s face it: there is a lot of Mac software out there that is designed for power users. Those power users have a daily workflow. The fact is that the little features matter, and they can make or break an application’s integration into your workflow . Ultimately, they define the usability, and therefore popularity (and profitability) of a particular application.

I have a supreme respect for app developers, as software development is not a skill that I possess. However, if it were, I know that I wouldn’t let my opus out of beta without at least including the “Bare Minimum.”

I would do my best, even after that, to go above and beyond for users, ensuring that my work integrates as seamlessly as possible with their daily workflow.

And let’s not forget that a sexy dock icon can go a long, long way…

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

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

You can listen to all manner of subscription radio services, share songs with your social network friends and followers, adjust equalizer settings, view a song history, and use an array of useful keyboard shortcuts.

If you like Radium as much as we do, you’ll be pleased to discover that AppStorm readers can get 25% off the price of the app this week. Just order your copy from this page, and the discount will be automatically applied.

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