Category: Mac

I adore my Retina MacBook Pro. It’s powerful and fast, and that display is beautiful. As an early adopter, I’m well aware of some of the compromises I’ve had to make for this laptop. Early adopters are different than the rest of consumers — we don’t care if we need to adopt hacks or special utilities for our new toys. We already own the future.

But those hacks and utilities aren’t always easy to find. That’s why we’ve compiled some insanely useful apps for your shiny machine. It took me months to realize I needed some of these, but especially if you’re a developer, you’ll easily see why you need these tools. Here’s the best little utilities to make your retina display MacBook even better.

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Conclusion

These are some of the most useful apps in my Retina workflow. Do you have any other favorite apps that make your retina display MacBook better for your work? If so, we’d love to hear about them in the comments below.

You won’t believe it but it’s true: Snapheal, the award-winning image-healing photo editor, is absolutely FREE this week for Mac.AppStorm readers!

Snapheal is the fastest, easiest software available to help pro and amateur photographers remove unwanted objects, heal skin blemishes, and fix common imperfections such as scratches in photos. Just mark what you want removed, and then click one button — Snapheal will do the rest.

Restore old photos, heal skin blemishes and remove wires, people, pets, signs, watermarks and more – anything that distracts from your favorite photos. Finish your images before sharing them on your favorite social networks by adjusting exposure, toning, sharpening or blurring details. With 20 handy tools in all, it’s got everything you need to make your photos pop. And this week, you can get all of that for free!

Go Get Your Free Copy of Snapheal Today!

Even if you’re not an imaging editing guru, Snapheal is an ideal tool for anyone who wants an uncomplicated way to quickly improve photos. Normally $24.99, you can get Snapheal absolutely free this week until September 3, 2013. Make sure you download it at http://snapheal.macphun.com/mb and try it on your favorite photos!

The RSS reader market was fully dominated by Google Reader for years, and the best native apps for RSS were all designed to sync with Google Reader. There just wasn’t any other way to compete. In that market, Reeder quick won most of us over with its beautiful UI, something that other apps rushed to copy.

Then, Google announced that it was closing down Google Reader, and we all rushed to find another way to read our feeds. There’s great Mac-only RSS apps, like the new NetNewsWire 4 beta and the just-released Leaf 2, but that’s going to keep you from reading your feeds on the go. You’ll still get your feeds, but will have lost the ability to read your feeds from anywhere that you had with Google Reader.

Syncing’s tough, of course, and there’s so many popular services now you’d need to support. To that challenge, one unlikely app has risen to be the best-in-class app that’s the one app any serious RSS user on the Mac should buy: ReadKit. Now with the customizable sharing options you’d have expected from Reeder, it’s the one RSS reader to beat.

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The Road to the Crown

Where it all started: reading later

Launched early last year as a read later app for the Mac, ReadKit initially looked like the best alternate to Read Later, the now-defunct app that brought Instapaper and Pocket to the Mac. ReadKit boasted a familiar UI that, yes, feels Reeder inspired, and it worked great with the reading services we loved, so we were hooked.

Then, just 3 months after Google announced that they were killing Google Reader, the webin team released ReadKit 2 with support for NewsBlur and Fever, the initial standout options for RSS syncing, as well as native RSS sync. It worked great, and we declared it the “RSS reader your Mac needs.”

You’d figure ReadKit would be facing stiff competition from other Mac apps right now, but really, it’s the only app today that syncs with the most popular RSS sync services. While everyone else is making apps just for reading RSS on your Mac, ReadKit has continued working to improve their initial RSS sync support, and make their app the best place to read and share. That’s why today’s release is so neat: it makes ReadKit feature-complete for sharing and reading across all the services you already use.

The App for Serious Syncers

ReadKit 2.3 is a brilliant app for RSS and reading later

Chances are, if you’re serious about your RSS, reading, and bookmarks, ReadKit supports the apps you love. If anything, its options now read like a “who’s who” of the winners of the RSS and reading later app market. It supports Feedly (a great free RSS sync option), NewsBlur, Fever (the self-hosted geek favorite), Feed Wrangler, Feedbin, and native RSS sync, as well as Instapaper, Pocket, and Readability sync for reading later, and both Pinboard and Delicious sync for bookmarks.

If you really only care about RSS sync services, ReadKit is fine with that now too, having fully left it’s roots as a reading later-only app behind. You can now drag the RSS News folder to the top and have it open by default when you launch the app, and can get by without even having a reading later service enabled if you want. It’s fast at syncing as always, and with support for so many services, it’s a great place to start even if you haven’t decided which service to use it with. Then, if you do sync with a reading later service, you can save RSS articles to read with a quick drag-and-drop to the appropriate folder — no fiddling with menus required.

Simple or tweaked: your choice

You can sign into your RSS accounts and forget about it, or customize your experience as much as you want. ReadKit now lets you choose how its unread indicators and dock icon appear, how often to refresh, how to group and sort items, and even lets you refresh Fever on your server before it syncs. Then, there’s still the nice built-in reading themes, along with your choice of font and font size.

Sharing the Way you Want

Save and share the way you want

The original ReadKit only included the default OS X sharing options, since that’s not where most of us do most of our sharing — and plus, most reading later services have their own sharing tools, or could work with IFTTT to automate sharing. With RSS, though, sharing and saving is a lot more important, since it’s where we discover new stuff.

Quickly share and save anything you’re reading.

The just-released ReadKit 2.3 focuses mainly on the sharing and saving experience. It now supports sharing articles on Facebook, Twitter, Messages, and Mail, as well as saving articles to Evernote, Instapaper, Pocket, Readability, Pinboard, Delicious, or the Safari Reading List, all with custom keyboard shortcuts. Best of all, you can save to all of the latter services even if you don’t sync to those bookmark or reading services. Alternately, you can just copy the link to the post — instantly with a keyboard shortcut of your choice — and paste it in your favorite social networking app. With the customization options and Evernote saving, it’s the perfect way to archive the stuff you read so you can find it later, or share it on your favorite networks.

The hidden power of smart folders

Then, of course, there’s ReadKit’s smart folders that can find articles in your feeds, bookmarks, and reading later archive about any topic you want, from the date range and author you want. It’ll take a bit of tweaking, but if you’re really serious about your feeds and reading, ReadKit’s smart folders can be a really powerful tool. Combine it with the quick save options, and you just might find that it’s the research companion you’ve been looking for.

But perhaps you just want a simple way to keep up with your feeds and reading. If so, ReadKit provides that too. It’s powerful, yet simple, and really works great. I couldn’t recommend it enough.

Conclusion

ReadKit 2 is absolutely the RSS reader and read later app to beat on the Mac today. If you’re not already using it, and you want your feeds synced online so you can read them on your phone and tablet as well, you should do yourself a favor and pick up a copy of ReadKit 2. It’s just $4.99, and I’m certain you won’t regret it. It’s absolutely one of the standout Mac apps of 2013, hands down.

Apple undoubtedly make some of the best keyboards, mice and trackpads that money can buy. Their Magic Trackpad is perhaps more a work of art than it is an input device. For those of us who, for one reason or another, prefer to use devices from companies other than Apple then you may find your options limited due to poor driver support or lack of customisation.

USB Overdrive has been around since the days of Mac OS X Jaguar, over ten years ago, and provides a whole suite of controls for customising your input devices. I spend some time with the app to see just how much we can tame our USB input devices.

Going into Overdrive

The Mac already works with almost any USB input device that you can think of, from mouse to keypad to fully-fledged game controller – whether or not the device states it is Mac compatible. I’ve used PC keyboards and unbranded mice over the years and OS X has never had a problem, always doing its best to manage these devices. The Mac will usually assign the necessary functions to each of the buttons and wheels automatically but when it comes to extra buttons, you’re usually limited to simply controlling certain aspects of Mission Control.

USB Overdrive offers a level of customisation that goes far beyond anything provided by OS X or indeed any software driver package. Designed to work with any standards-compliant USB input device, meaning that for most devices you’d not even need to install any additional software to start using it.

USB Overdrive includes a wide array of settings, controls and customisation options for most USB input devices.

Everything but the Kitchen Sink

USB Overdrive has a wide range of controls and customisability depending on the input device you’re wanting to configure. During my testing, I used a HP wireless mouse which has a number of additional buttons as well as a scroll wheel that is not only a button in itself but also features left and right navigation buttons. To better understand which buttons are which in terms of their numbering, you can press each button within the app which then highlights the relevant button in the list, allowing it to be customised.

Simply click a button or move a scroll wheel for USB Overdrive to detect it.

OS X can only really let you assign Mission Control functions to mouse buttons but USB Overdrive can do far, far more. You can have the button press a keyboard key, do an automatic double-click, launch an app and even execute keyboard shortcuts. As an example, I have Alfred launch whenever I press a specific button on my mouse so that I can launch it from either the mouse or keyboard.

I use a shortcut button on my mouse to launch Alfred.

With regards the scroll wheel and movement of the mouse, you can also change its tracking speed and acceleration far more granularly than you can do with OS X alone and even control exactly how the scroll wheel works.

Accessibility

From an accessibility standpoint, USB Overdrive can give far more control to those Mac users with limited mobility as it opens up a whole world of USB devices that may have been overlooked previously due to a lack of Mac support. Whilst OS X includes what I consider to be the best support for accessible devices in any operating system, being able to customise them even further and assign very specific functions that OS X wouldn’t otherwise be able to do only adds to the Mac’s usefulness when it comes to users who need additional support.

Global Superpower

Customisation can be set globally so that any type of input device you connect will use the same buttons and shortcuts that you’ve created or you can set the settings to only apply to one specific device. If you’re using a MacBook Pro and have a different mouse at home and work then you may want different shortcuts.

Creating new settings based upon specific hardware lets you create custom “profiles” just for a specific device.

Whilst USB Overdrive offers this feature, it’s slightly let down by the lack of help and the online documentation could be better since a novice user might not immediately know that any changes they make would apply to any device.

Gaming

The Mac is enjoying somewhat of a renaissance thanks to the Mac App Store and Steam with more people than ever before playing games on their Mac. Unfortunately, gaming is still woefully supported and unlike many games on the PC that support gamepads and joysticks natively, the Mac doesn’t have this luxury.

Casual gamers will be pleased to know that USB Overdrive’s support of USB devices includes many USB gamepads and joysticks, all of which can be customised to allow them to control many of your games. Instead of the game requiring support, simply assign keyboard commands to your gamepad’s buttons and directional controls so platformers such as Braid can then be played with a controller instead of the keyboard.

USB Overdrive supports many USB gaming devices which will let you get more out of your Mac games.

For die-hard gamers who insist that a keyboard and mouse is the only way to go, USB Overdrive allows for the use of USB number pads to be set with shortcuts to frequently used gaming triggers such as action buttons.

Caveats

USB Overdrive supports standards-compliant devices, of which many input devices on the market do as well. Unfortunately, companies such as Logitech use proprietary software that acts as a middle-man between the input device and the Mac, meaning USB Overdrive can’t detect what buttons or keys are pressed. Both my Logitech K750 keyboard and M570 trackball couldn’t be customised due to the way Logitech implement their software. This isn’t a fault of USB Overdrive by any stretch though I would recommend testing the trial version that’s available thoroughly before you make a purchase, since there is no guarantee every device will be supported.

Likewise, those thinking they can extend their Apple Magic Mouse and Trackpad further with some of the great features of USB Overdrive will be disappointed as they are unable to be fully supported due to some of Apple’s private APIs.

Conclusion

USB Overdrive is an excellent utility and whilst I can’t use it with my own preferred keyboard and trackball, I do still use it whenever I’m in the mood to play a game on my Mac. For many who find that their preferred choice of keyboard and mouse lacks any decent support then USB Overdrive is a worthwhile utility to consider.

Being able to launch apps, keyboard shortcuts and AppleScript from the press of a button or click of the mouse can prove very useful to a power user. For casual gamers, USB Overdrive’s ability to map the same types of commands to gamepads makes it a great tool to have when it’s game time.

We love the apps that developers make for the Mac, but it’s easy to forget about the apps that help developers make the apps. From code editors to icon designers to documentation and snippet repositories, there’s a ton of different apps that developers rely on to help them make the best Mac apps they can. This week, we’ve got an exclusive interview with a developer who’s apps are expressly designed to help Mac developers.

Vadim Shpakovski is the creator of CodeBox, the wonderful snippet-storing application for OS X that we liked when we reviewed it last year. He’s also made ResolutionTab, PNG Compressor, and Hunting, all tools aimed at helping developers on the Mac platform, and released a decent amount of open source work at his own site. We thought it would be interesting to talk to Valdim about his work, and he kindly agreed to answer some questions about OS X and what it means to be a designer of top-notch OS X applications.

Here’s the scoop for your weekend reading pleasure!

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Hi Vadim, thanks a lot for agreeing to be interviewed! What inspired you to start developing OS X applications?

Vladim’s work, including Codebox

I was a Windows and web developer before switching to OS X. I used my Mac mostly for Flex and Rails development until Apple announced iPhone in 2007. One year later they released developer tools for iPhone OS, and this is when I started to read Objective-C documentation and books. The new world of Cocoa and its frameworks blew my mind. Having experience with Qt, Delphi and WinForms, I found that the Apple platform is much better for building user interfaces.

I was lucky to find some client projects for iPhone OS 2.0 and learned Apple development through Cocoa Touch and Xcode 3. Finally, somewhere in 2009 my former partner Vladimir proposed to create a new application for OS X 10.6 that would be used to collect and reuse snippets of code. I found this idea really great and left my regular job to concentrate on developing my first OS X app, Snippets.

Where do you get your inspiration for creating new apps?

Well, it seems like you need different kinds of inspiration when you create software.

First, the idea. I make apps for my own needs. Snippets and then CodeBox were created because I was fan of snippets and Gist was not that popular. Then I found that ImageOptim has a limited set of configuration parameters and does not support adding new console tools, so I made PNG Compressor. Finally, when Apple released MacBook Pro with a Retina display, I had to switch between standard and HiDPI modes all the time using System Preferences. This is when I did ResolutionTab.

Even the lowly System Preferences can provide design inspiration

Second, an app appearance and design, or user experience. I prefer standard chrome in apps. As result, Pages, Numbers, Safari, and even System Preferences are places where I look while figuring out how some menu, window, panel or control should look and behave.

And third, the feature set. Any app has so many potential improvements and missed features that there is no lack of inspiration of this kind. If you add user feedback that you get all the time, it is easy to build the roadmap and plan the future development.

What are some of your favorite Mac apps?

Besides Terminal, Xcode and Instruments, there are not many tools that I use daily. My toolset is very modest: Things, 1Password, Evernote, Dropbox, Sketch, Photoshop, Kaleidoscope, PaintCode, Tweetbot and TextMate. All of them are easy to use, but extremely powerful and can be used in very creative ways. This is what I value in any software.

Do you have any words of wisdom for anyone starting out as an OS X/iOS developer?

There is a lot of books on iOS and OS X development nowadays, but it is really hard to find material that is up-to-date and useful for real-world software development. Examples from such books are often academic and showing how to develop one-trick ponies through the whole book. This is where Apple Documentation and WWDC videos become indispensable. The documentation made in Cupertino is top-notch, so do not ignore it. Be sure, there is an Apple book for any technology, be it ARC, or KVC, or KVO, or CoreData, and it’s all part of your developer account. Invest some time into reading it before diving into Stack Overflow, and you’ll save much time later.

If you could choose use 1 app, what would it be?

I assume Xcode does not count, so it is Things. This app changed the way I work and live, and create software. Cultured Code does amazing job of inventing something so simple that you do not see the software, only your content and actions.

What’s your favorite OS X app category?

When I open the Mac App Store, I always go to the Developer Tools. This is a place where I discovered fantastic apps like PaintCode, Patterns and Base. This is a category where I sell my own CodeBox and ResolutionTab.

Are you working on anything new, or is it under wraps for the time-being?

Last year I was busy with client projects for iOS, but after WWDC’13 decided to go indie again. This time, I’m planning to release something for the App Store. Cannot say much, but one of the apps I’m working on right now is for tracking personal time, because everything I tried in this category did not fit. So please stay tuned!

Thanks again – good luck with the future of CodeBox and we look forward to what else you have in store for us!

Thanks a lot for the interview and kudos to the Mac.AppStorm team. Your articles and reviews truly improve the Mac platform 🙂

Any Questions for Vadim?

We enjoyed hearing Vladim’s perspective on creating Mac apps to scratch his own itches as a Mac developer, and can’t wait to see the new apps he releases going forward. If you’ve got anything else you’d like to hear from Valdim, be sure to add your questions below in the comments and I’m sure he’ll stop by and fill you in!

Firefox is the alternate browser we all switched to back when the rest of the world was using IE 6. It was refreshing, with far better standards compliance and performance than other browsers at the time. We’d customize our Firefox install with themes and extensions, have our own favorite shortcuts and default tabs. It was the serious web user’s browser.

Then, Safari happened. Google, Firefox’ chief supporter, built Chrome. Microsoft even got its act together, and made current versions of IE far less reprehensible. And casual browsing shifted to smartphones and tablets, where the built-in browser is all most people think to use.

Firefox is still around, with decent marketshare, even, but the energy feels gone. The newest extensions come out for Chrome first. Firefox’ UI still doesn’t fit with modern OS X’ scrollbars and pinch-to-zoom, and it still feels more sluggish than Chrome.

So why stick with it? But then, many still do. So today, we’d love to hear why you’ve stuck with Firefox. If you still use Firefox regularly, we’d love to hear why in the comments below!

I thought I could outrace the sun. I knew it was impossible, that I was always going to lose, but still I thought that somehow this time I would actually make it — that I’d reach some kind of singularity where I’d somehow be past the sun, or that I’d find a way to keep it indefinitely up in the sky above me.

There’s no “winning” in Race The Sun, a game about endlessly speeding toward the horizon in pursuit of nothing in particular, but you’ll often be lured into the preposterous notion that your run will end in something other than a crash or the disappearance of your almighty glowing foe. This is its great strength — that you’ll want to keep battling the impossible — but ultimately also its weakness, as you become conditioned to crashing and losing all the time.

Don’t Die

You pilot a solar-powered craft across a vast landscape filled with pyramids, large blocks, and other three-dimensional shapes. Your goal is fourfold: keep the sun above the horizon, collect tris, don’t crash, and complete tasks for experience points. All this in the name of ratcheting up a big score, or simply not dying.

Don’t ever let that sun get out of your sight, or you’re a goner.

Tris are blue crystal things that give you extra points and increase your score multiplier. You lose a bunch of them and drastically reduce speed if you clip the environment. They are a means to an end, though — you don’t need them at all, except to climb higher on the leaderboard.

You do need to grab the assortment of powerups, though. One sends the sun higher above the horizon, another provides a one-time jump ability, and others help in more significant ways — restoring your craft after your next crash or warping you ahead to the next section.

Race The Sun divides its world into sections. You get a short breather between each one, with a small stretch of empty plains before things get hairy again. Each section is tougher than the last, adding an element of strategy to how you divvy up your use and collection of storable powerups — especially given that there’s a limited number of these to find, they’re hard to get to, and you can only hold one or two at a time.

Use your powerups wisely…Hey ma, look! I’m flying!

It’s a simple game, but from this simplicity emerges great depth. And the levelling system is designed in such a way as to encourage you to always do one more run. There are three challenges to complete, like performing four double jumps in a single run, or collecting 20 tris in a section, or colliding with obstacles 10 times. The harder the challenge, the more experience it’s likely to be worth. Each time you complete one, a new challenge takes its place.

This is the only way to gain levels. You want to gain levels because doing so unlocks more cool stuff, like new powerups, decals for your craft, and other game modes. Level 11 unlocks the Apocalypse mode, which is a pure adrenaline rush of edge of your seat survival. This separates the boys from the men, so to speak — only the most foolhardy and quick-reflexed can survive for any meaningful amount of time when the world around them turns to chaos.

Rockets smash into the ground, casting fiery white energy outwards that temporarily blinds you, while tall blocks fall every which way and short ones roll in front of you. It’s frenetic, and the exhilarating payoff of a high score and multi-section survival is well worth the effort.

Apocalypse mode is so hectic that it took me several tries to get a decent screenshot.

The Times They Are A-Changin’

You don’t get much time to master and memorize the level designs, because they change every 24 hours. Race The Sun gets entirely new levels every single day. This is the game’s big genius move. It doesn’t take long to tire of one set of levels in a game like this. But here you don’t have to worry about that — every day you can boot it up and be greeted by a new procedurally-generated world to master and a new leaderboard to climb. It’s a completionists nightmare, but perfect for the rest of us.

Better yet, you can create your own worlds and race through the worlds created by other Race The Sun players. The world creator is easy to learn and only slightly intimidating to non-programmers, operating mostly on a point and click interface where you just adjust the parameters and drop objects onto the map.

The world creator looks harder to use than it is.

The real reason I mention this world creator, though, which would only appeal to a small subset of players, is that it’s been used to design some breathtaking worlds that blow the main game out of the water. They let you enter worlds of giant mutant bunnies, technicolor fantasies, space odysseys, and whatever other wonders people think up, using custom objects and a much broader color spectrum.

It’s just a shame that you can’t gain experience points in these custom worlds, or compete on leaderboards, or even participate in the co-op relays that are available in the main game. They really are the highlight of the show, and if you’re lucky you might stumble into a portal to one of these worlds from a run in the main game mode.

The dark side of cute.

Grasping At The Horizon

Race The Sun hooks you right from the first moment. It takes the endless runner, now getting tired and old at its core, and breeds new life into the formula. You’re no longer just racing against yourself and competing for high scores; you’re also struggling against something we all battle with throughout our lives — the falling of darkness.

Unlike in real life, here you can prolong your day time for as long as you can both endure and achieve. Hit the right powerups, and dodge all the objects, and you can go on forever. You’re always looking ahead to the horizon, wondering what lies beyond, while desperately trying to not crash and burn in the pursuit of the impossible.

Whatever you read into its themes, Race The Sun is spectacular. It pulls you back again and again, frustrating and relaxing you at the same time. And it feels fresh and exciting, showing how more can often emerge from less. That less does lead to a few rough edges in the presentation and an art style that strangely shines most in player-created worlds, but that’s all worth ignoring for what’s at the heart of the experience — a soaring, high-octane, exuberant race against the sun.

In the past few months, RSS has gone through a dramatic transformation from being a one-man show to becoming a free-for-all with many players in the fold. I know a lot of people on Feedly, but I ended up going with Feed Wrangler to get things done. I think the transition to privately owned content, instead of Google’s focus on ad-serving, is highly beneficial.

But that being said, some services have been replaced by apps who operate independently of any free or paid RSS service. These are app-dependent RSS feeds that operate independently of cross-platform services. The most popular of these is probably NetNewsWire, but with version 2.0 of Leaf RSS Reader, Leaf enters the fold as a prime contender. I imported my Feed Wrangler feeds to the service to give it a whirl.

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Sort-of Easy Setup

We’ve looked at Leaf before, back when it was a brand-new basic RSS reader. It’s grown up since then, with a lot more features.

Leaf comes ready to go. By ready to go, I mean there’s already a few subscriptions in there — most obviously, TUAW features prominently — but a quick visit to the Preferences pane let me delete everything I wasn’t interested in reading. (Sadly, that was everything.)

Leaf is a beautiful RSS Reader that fits right in on OS X.

From that point on, it was a little interesting to set up the feed. Importing my own OPML file was something I had to do from the File menu, but I could add a subscription in the Preferences pane without a problem. The fact that these two functions are in separate menus seemed a little odd to me until I realized I can also add a subscription from the FIle menu as well. But then I started wondering why I could add a subscription in two places in the app.

From the perspective of pure design aesthetics, Leaf looks really nice. It’s a simple little feed reader. Its design belongs on the Mac. It uses all of the advanced Mac technologies, including Notification Centre. I like the included colour options, but I was disappointed to see they only affected the article view and not any of the sidebars. While article reading can be customized, the entire app feels locked in stone.

The app also supports a great full screen view.

Some people will also find it irritating that they can’t select articles by feed, instead only having an Unread and a Read view. Leaf is very minimalist in that regard.

These design principles are echoed by the fact that this is a stand-alone RSS Reader. It’s very “locked in.” There’s no iPhone app or iPad app. There’s no way to access these feeds anywhere else. In that sense, it’s a bit like an Apple product. It’s extremely polished aesthetically, but if you want to really use it, you have to be okay with it being your sole RSS platform.

Views: Trading Accessibility for Power

I don’t rely on Folders (or Smart Streams in Feed Wrangler) the way that I know many people do, but I do use them and I think they’re an essential part of many people’s workflow. For me, I want quick and easy access to folders.

These are the Smart Views in Leaf, and yes, they are amazing.

Well, although Leaf does use folders, that’s not the primary way you’ll be organizing subscriptions. Leaf has different Views, which are customizable and similar to the Smart Playlists in iTunes. This is, again, something you’ll find in the Preferences pane. It’s a powerful and customizable system that allows you to create everything from a basic folder for unread articles in only certain feeds to a folder filled only with articles that match a certain search term.

In other words, I’ve organized my AppStorm feeds into one View. I can also designate a View specifically to news concerning iOS 7, if I so desire, just by setting one View to only include articles with “iOS 7” in the article or title. I can also add other rules to that View. If I want only articles with iOS 7 in the title, but I only want them from sources like TUAW or Apple’s website, I can do that too.

Views are really easy to access, but people using a mouse will feel more at home than those using keyboard shortcuts.

What Leaf achieves with this setup is, actually, pretty tremendous. It’s a combination of the Smart Streams that make Feed Wrangler so unique and regular folders that other people have come to love. It takes a few minutes to set these Views up, but generally speaking, the power they provide trumps the loss in ease of use.

It would be nice if you could view your Feeds and quickly click and drag a few feeds on top of each other to create Views without any hassle, but if Leaf allowed that, there’s a good chance many people wouldn’t discover the power their service has. I’m not even sure if Feed Wrangler’s Smart Streams gets this specific.

Leaf’s Future

But despite a really smart, pretty user interface and a powerful View mode, does Leaf have a future in the RSS world? If it was able to connect with Feed Wrangler, Feedly, Digg, Feedbin or any of the other popular options, this would be a no-brainer of an app. It has better integration with popular Read Later services than Readkit does, which is the other app I’ve been using for my Feed Wrangler subscription.

it’s easy to favourite an article by dragging your cursor over the icon. It’s also easy to send articles to Instapaper.

For example, Readkit doesn’t have a visible Read Later button at all. I haven’t found a way to connect my Instapaper account to save articles to it (although I can read my Instapaper queue in it, but that solves a different problem). With Leaf, it’s insanely easy to connect with a Read Later service.

In short, Leaf might be my favourite RSS Reader on the Mac right now. But the fact is, there’s no way to keep up with my RSS feed on a mobile device (I use Reeder on my iPhone, Mr. Reader on my iPads, and Press on Android devices). That’s a shame.

The powerful Search is also worth mentioning.

Rocky Sand Studio has two options with Leaf: Build their own syncing solution and offer well-designed mobile apps, or succumb to open web and integrate with the other popular RSS subscription sites. Until then, it’s hard to recommend it to anybody but the most die-hard Mac user.

Final Thoughts

Leaf gets full points for design and power, but I see no reason to make it my primary RSS reader. I check RSS so much on my mobile devices that my Mac is hardly the first place I go anymore. And let’s be honest, the prettiest design in the world can’t save anybody from a service that’s incomplete.

At the end of the day, that’s my recommendation: Those who use RSS solely on their Mac need look no further. But for people who need it on their mobile devices, you can sigh wistfully and hope for a future where Leaf allows you to use your own preferred syncing option. That’s the state I’m in.

The least enjoyable part of setting up new computers is installing apps, for me anyhow. The Mac App Store makes this a lot easier, but many essential and valuable Mac apps are not present in the App Store either by choice from the vendor or due to the limitations placed on apps located in the store. Instead, you have to find the installer, download it, install it, then rinse/repeat a dozen times.

In the Windows ecosystem, Ninite offered a way around this problem. It allows you to install a number of popular apps from their library by running a single application. It’s simple and convenient, and made setting up a new PC or reinstalling Windows a little bit less annoying.

While you need to reinstall OS X far less often than Windows, it’s can still be a time consuming task when needed. Plus, you still need to setup apps anytime you get a new Mac. That’s where Get Mac Apps comes in. Their home page says “It’s like Ninite for mac!”, so let’s take it at its word and see how well it works.

How Get Mac Apps Works

You use Get Mac Apps by going to the web site. There you’re presented with a list of the currently supported programs. These are all free apps or the demo versions of some paid apps. Currently the app list includes both the Chrome and Firefox web browsers along with other popular tools including Dropbox, Evernote, Handbrake, Coda, TextWrangler, Sublime Text, flux, and Notational Velocity. In total the site currently lists forty-six supported apps with new ones are being added regularly.

List of Some Apps offered by Get Mac Apps

The site supports installing from a single app supported app to potentially every listed app on the site. You select the apps that you want by checking the box next to each app. One you’ve completed your selection, click the Install These! button at the bottom of the web page.

After you select the apps you’d like to install, you must run a command in a terminal window to start the installation.

You then receive a unique command to paste into a terminal window to actually complete the installation of your selected apps. The command is worth looking at for a moment to see what it does. In short, it downloads a shell script using the built in Curl program and executes it on you Mac. This should give you a bit of a pause since by using the command you are allowing the site to execute code on your computer — albeit only in your user directory. This could still be misused in the wrong hands, so using Get Mac Apps comes down to trusting the site to provide the software it states and do nothing malicious. To ease your security concerns, Get Mac Apps will show you the generated script by clicking on the link below the command, which will bring up the script in a new window to review.

Installation in Process

The generated script also demonstrates how the automated process runs. The script downloads the installer from the product’s web site. It then automatically completes the steps needed to install the application from this downloaded file. For a zip file for example the file is unzipped and the .app file is moved to the appropriate place on your Mac. Disk images are automatically mounted, installed, and unmounted when done. The script creates a temporary directory under your home folder on your mac and all files are downloaded into a temporary directory onto your computer while the installs take place. Each install is completed before the next begins minimizing the extra disk space required. In my tests all temporary files were cleaned up after each install leaving nothing on my computer other than the new programs, which is nice.

Should You Use It?

Ultimately a site like Get Mac Apps provides the most value when you’re installing a number of programs at the same time. While the days of reinstalling Windows every few months are past for most of us, reinstalling the OS a Windows PC is still a more frequent need than for Mac users. That’s probably why a site like something like this has been so long to arrive on the Mac. That doesn’t reduce the usefulness of this for the setup of a new Mac, though. Another place this can be useful would be to speed the creation of a test or development machine which is more likely to be created from scratch or reinstalled. The automation also makes it handy even if you’re just installing a single app on your computer for the first time.

For those who always find themselves working on the computer of friends, coworkers, or customers, then the ability to install a number of useful apps quickly and without manual intervention can save time. It’s nice to start the process and walk away knowing it will be done when you come back in a few minutes.

Some Improvements I’d Like to See

I like Get Mac Apps, but it could use some additional features. The process of relying on a pasted script feels a little clunky, especially compared to the wizard like installation Ninite provides. A nicer front end that automated the download and installation through a graphical interface would seem more polished and appeal more to the casual user. I also found that the scripts cannot do upgrades. No check is made to see if you already have the program and if so, you’ll be presented with a series of questions in Terminal about overwriting files, which would leave many users confused. While the list of supported programs is growing quickly, it’s still limited.

Conclusion

If you’re installing several programs on a Mac for the first time, then Get Mac Apps offers a nice convenient way to do so quickly an easily. It’s perhaps more of a nice tool for IT pros, since average users would be reluctant to fire up Terminal in the first place, but it’s still simple enough for most people to handle without trouble. It’s far more limited since it can’t reinstall your App Store purchases automatically at the same time, but it’s still a nice tool to have for the other freeware apps you’ll want to install anyhow.

So, next time you’re installing OS X or get a new Mac, give it a try to get your non-App Store apps installed. It’ll at least save you a few minutes and a couple dozen clicks.

If you still haven’t found the perfect notebook app to organize your thoughts and ideas along with the snippets of info you find online and more, then you need to try out NoteSuite. It’s a new notebook app that brings together rich-text notes with full formatting and images, to-dos, and web clippings in a nice interface. Combine it with its companion iPad app, and you’ve got a serious competitor for the notetaking crown.

We found it to be a powerful productivity tool in our NoteSuite review. It’s especially nice if you like the tabbed interface of apps like OneNote, but want the flexibility of an app like Evernote without relying on their cloud storage. It’s currently on sale for just $4.99 in the App Store, but we’ve got something even better: 10 copies to giveaway to our readers!

NoteSuite lets you bring everything together in your notes.

As with most of our giveaways, just leave a comment below and tell us why you want a copy of NoteSuite to enter our contest. Then, share the giveaway on your social networks and leave a second comment with a link to your post for an extra entry.

Hurry and get your entries in; we’re closing the giveaway on Wednesday, August 28th!

Also, our sister site iPad.AppStorm is running a NoteSuite for iPad giveaway as well; be sure to enter it also if you have an iPad!

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

Even though Apple users are blessed with iMessage, it’s not truly cross-platform, so some people prefer Google Hangouts (which doesn’t have a native Mac app) or Facebook. There are even those who still use WhatsApp, but this once-popular system has recently been challenged by Line, a competitor from Japan. Sporting “stickers” and a solid messaging platform, the service has taken Asia by storm; it’s now becoming very popular stateside as well.

Line’s developers recently released a Mac companion to the fleet of mobile apps. It looks nice, but is it worth using?

Start Mobile

Because of the way Line works, you can’t create an account in the Mac app. Instead, you must begin using the mobile app first. You’re required to verify your mobile number to sign up, so the developers prefer you download the mobile app first.

No sign up, just a sign in.

It’s a shame this service doesn’t let you sign up with the usual credentials of email, password, and a verification code that is sent via email. It’d make things a lot easier for people who want to use the app on just one device. At any rate, once you’re signed up, it’s simple enough to get Line on your Mac as well, via traditional login or by scanning a QR code with your phone if that’s your thing.

Fast Chat with Mobile Sync

Chatting with the editor.

Line is one of the fastest messaging services I’ve ever used. Everything feels instantaneous — faster than SMS, even — and the app has an option to disable notifications on the mobile app while the Mac one is open. It also allows for a timeout period, which can be set for 3, 5, or 10 minutes. This is far better than iMessage, which still receives the messages on other devices and marks them as read a few seconds after. Line actually feels more seamless. Unfortunately, the option is not enabled by default.

One of the major lacking features in Line’s Mac app is read receipts. The iPhone app will tell you whether or not something has been read by the person you sent it to. It’d be nice to at least have an option for this, but there’s nothing in the settings.

Sending an image is effortless and blazing fast.

I found that multimedia messaging worked very well. Images transferred much faster than competing services like Skype and iMessage. Additionally, you can transfer any type of file, making this a great alternative to Dropbox or Droplr. Why upload something when you can just drag it into the window and transfer it directly to your friend?

Interestingly, file transfers are separate messages. You can’t “attach” them to one, but rather send them before or after it. Also, I found a slight problem with canceling a transfer. Instead of only needing a single click, it requires multiple clicks to register.

No Themes or Custom Backgrounds

The coolest feature in Line’s mobile apps is theming. You can add “wallpapers” to your chats for a custom look. Sadly, the desktop app doesn’t support this. Themes aren’t supported either, so your personalized look will have to remain mobile.

Notifications are Broken

The core functionality of Line works fine, but when it comes to anything else, the app breaks down. Notifications are the worst problem. Instead of using Notification Center like most apps do, Line employs its own special notifications, which are far worse than OS X’s. For one, they don’t look nice. Unlike Notifications Center’s smooth popups, Line’s just show up with full opacity and stay there for however long you set them to. That’s not the true downfall, though.

The dock icon doesn’t display the number of messages received.

Just having notifications that worked would be helpful. These ones only pop up if someone starts a conversation with you. Any new messages from current conversations are excluded. Worse yet, when you go back to the app after receiving a message, it doesn’t highlight the text field so you can start typing. Instead, it brings the main Line window to the front and pushes the chat window behind it. This creates a mess if you enjoy a quick workflow.

Obviously, using its own notification system means that Line can’t display anything when it’s closed. Overall, Line’s notifications are at an unusable level. They’re not reliable, don’t help you continue a conversation, and the sound is so blaring that wearing headphones becomes annoying. Back to the mobile phone it is, then?

A Lost Opportunity

Other bugs include strange appearance for ellipses.

At version 3.1.12, this app is a major disappointment. Its notifications are broken, ellipses don’t display properly, it’s missing key features of the mobile app, and all of the development efforts appear to be focused on inconsequential areas of the app. (The slider to adjust each chat window’s transparency is supposed to help people who want to multitask, but making the window less opaque only compromises the user interface.)

Line could be something great. It offers free voice calling internationally, which can easily trump iMessage. However, among these benefits there are too many issues. Stickers and Emoji look nice and are very popular in Asia, but they’re not worth a wonky app. Line’s still a service you might want to consider trying out, but you’re going to find the Mac app to provide a far from stellar experience.

I’ve been using Mac for years, but sometimes there are apps that everybody else swears by that I’ve never used. One of those apps is Yojimbo, which has a long history on the platform and is something many popular bloggers completely swear by.

Recently, Yojimbo was upgraded to version 4.0, which brings with it a new syncing option and — well, not much else. But in today’s day and age, is a service like Yojimbo still relevant when our Macs aren’t our sole tool anymore and we’re all using iPads and smartphones everywhere we go? Read on to find out what my thoughts are on the state of Yojimbo in 2013.

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What Is Yojimbo?

I know a lot of people who have only started using the Mac platform in the past couple years, and if you’re anything like them, you’ll have no idea what Yojimbo is. Yojimbo is an easy-to-use catalogue program of sorts for any file on your Mac, be it a miscellaneous PDF or an online password. It’s heavily built on a tagging architecture that makes finding files easier, and it integrates with Spotlight so it’s still easy to find files.

Yojimbo is a place where you can store anything.

The idea is simple: All you need to do to save a file in Yojimbo is click and drag into the dock or the little Drop Dock that sits on your screen at all times. If you want to save a URL or a password, all you need to do is copy the item to your clipboard and then hit F8 (or, for many of us, fn+F8). Yojimbo is what Shawn Blanc has somewhat referred to as an Anything Bucket for your Mac. If you don’t have a place for something on your Mac, Yojimbo is where it could go.

Yojimbo is best when you make use of editable labels.

Yojimbo stores all of your files in its own database. You can give them labels or search for them with Spotlight. If you ever want to leave the app, it’s easy to export files and head out.

I could make this review very simple for you: Yojimbo is very good at what it does. But that would be selling the review short, because what it does might not be enough in 2013.

The Syncing Problem

The first, and biggest, issue for Yojimbo is sync options. With Yojimbo 4, Bare Bones Software has finally made it possible to sync between Yojimbo on multiple Macs. If you have more than one Mac and you have a place for Yojimbo in your workflow, or you already use it, syncing alone probably makes this a must-have update.

Syncing is now an option across multiple Macs, but I only have one so it feels irrelevant to me.

But syncing requires a monthly subscription at $3 per month. And at $30 for the app, or $20 for an upgrade license, that starts to add up. Your first year of use is going to cost over $50, no matter how you slice it. And to make matters worse, the sync solution doesn’t include syncing to mobile devices.

There’s an iPad companion app, available for $10, but it’s only a companion app. It’s not meant to be like Yojimbo for the Mac, and it doesn’t offer you the ability to manage files or add tags or anything like that. Yojimbo on the iPad is just a way to view your Yojimbo catalogue. It syncs over wifi, but it doesn’t require a $3 monthly subscription. It’s an entirely different sort of sync.

This button, which is configurable to sit on any side or corner of your display, is an easy way to click and drag files of any sort into Yojimbo.

In other words, at the end of the day, you’re still better off dumping all your files into a Dropbox folder than you are in Yojimbo. And that’s an obviously huge problem. I have an Anything Bucket of sorts in my Dropbox account; it’s a folder labeled “Other.” And I’m not sure what I’d do without it, but at the same time, it’s also nice to be able to add things to it from any device.

Yojimbo Vs. Everything Else

Yojimbo still does some things really well, don’t get me wrong. The oft-cited receipt example is one such thing: Instead of printing as a PDF, you can save a receipt PDF to Yojimbo and add a label to it to keep it all organized. As nifty as that is, I don’t remember the last time I needed to keep an Amazon receipt for my records — and if I did, there’s a paper receipt in the shipping box. Of course, some people will find this service useful, but $30 for a receipt tracker is a little pricey.

It’s easy to archive a webpage, but Pinboard does it better.

There are some other things that Yojimbo does well, like web archiving. If there’s a webpage you want to keep track of, you can simply save it to Yojimbo, and an archive of that page is kept safe for you. As fantastic as that is, I can count the number of times I needed or wanted that on one hand in the past six years. And if I did really have a burning desire for it, I could use a service like Pinboard and get access to the webpages I need from any device — not just my Mac.

And Yojimbo as a password saver sounds great, except that 1Password does it better and Mavericks is going to do it natively this fall, and use iCloud to keep all of them in sync with our iToys (and Mavericks is probably going to be cheaper than Yojimbo).

Labels are a great taste of what’s coming in Mavericks, but that’s the problem: They’re coming to the Mac with Mavericks.

Furthermore, Mavericks is also bringing tags to Finder. In effect, Apple is turning your entire Mac into an Anything Bucket with this feature. It doesn’t make Yojimbo irrelevant, but it does strip it of one of its core differentiating features.

Evernote and/or Simplenote kind of make this feel impractical.

When it comes to notes, I think most people I know — even my mother — have moved on to Evernote or other similar cross-platform apps. Remembering serial numbers might be handy for some, but again, Simplenote or Evernote are great for that, and they sync across multiple computers and devices without a $3 fee. And at this point, I think even Shawn Blanc is taking a similar stance.

A Couple Caveats

I’m the first person to admit that I’m not always right, especially when I take a stance that I know will be controversial. I’m sure that some people will have a use for Yojimbo, but I don’t think I’m one of them. I know that some apps, like 1Password, are also more expensive than Yojimbo at the end of the day. But they’re also supported across multiple devices, including Android.

I also can’t rag on Yojimbo’s design. This app is solid. Version 4 introduces a full-screen mode, and the entire thing is easy to navigate. I have no problems finding my way around, and I think anybody who uses the app for even a short period is going to feel like they’re living in a second home.

My Final Heavy-hearted Thoughts

And this is what makes Yojimbo work: It’s so utterly charming and ceaselessly appealing. It does do some very cool things, and the hotkeys and ceaseless automation for the app make it an interesting buy for many Mac users. But for those of us who rely on other devices for our workflows — and at this point, I know a lot of people who do — I’m not sure that Yojimbo is an appropriate buy.

At the end of the day, Yojimbo is a beautifully-designed and solidly-coded app. It works well, and it does exactly what it advertises itself to do. But Yojimbo still feels like it’s stuck in 2009 as far as its approach to multiple devices. And that’s a crying shame. Unless you’re a diehard Mac user and don’t rely on any other devices, my advice is to try out the trial before you buy. I doubt it’s going to be as flexible as you’ll need it to be.

You don’t have to be a designer to be surrounded by images you need and love. There’s always Instagram, pictures you were tagged on Facebook, a cool infographic you saw at a random page, photos from your child’s birthday or your New Year’s party. Snapping a picture is so effortless these days we even burn ‘film’ on our so-so everyday meals. We’re swarmed by images, some of them we’d like to store.

Regarding this personal matter, we recently reviewed Ember, but some readers weren’t satisfied by its terms of acquisition and lack of a few features to justify its price tag, some even mocked it as nothing but a private Pinterest. Among the comments, we heard of a promising upcoming app, currently in beta, called Inboard. Can it rekindle the flame of our image libraries?

First impressions

Inboard comes with a dark theme and a simple structure. Folders and tags are kept on the left, your images in the middle and the information regarding selected images on the right. You can narrow down the displayed images by using a tag or making a live search. As you select more than one image, the information panel will show tags they share and tags added will be applied to both.

Drag and drop images to your library and the grid automatically adjusts.

You can add new images by dropping them on Inboard or using the “Add New” option. Every image is placed in a nice responsive grid, which adapts as you add more items or resize the thumbnails. You can also sort your images by date or title and order them. If you double-click a picture expecting editing tools, you’ll be frustrated since Inboard has none, reinforcing its aspect as a library.

Any organization system requires a great search and even though Inboard’s search is smooth, I wish it could be more complex. It doesn’t need boolean operators, but would be nice to have autocomplete for your tags and saved searches as smart folders. At the moment, the support for tag search is poor as you can’t look for more than a single tag and get satisfying results.

I also have a huge personal issue with tags displayed among folders and default options, since most of us use plenty of tags to cover every hierarchy limitation, they clutter the sidebar entirely. I’ll always stand up for tags in a different panel (I find Yojimbo‘s Tag Explorer as the perfect way to handle it), but that’s a general issue of other apps as well, such as Evernote.

Tweaking your library

Inboard doesn’t have a RSS feed to collect your images, however, it integrates with your Dribbble account and grabs your liked shots. It would also be fascinating if you could link your Instagram likes or tagged Facebook pictures, because that’s what a personal library of images is about.

Store all your Dribbble likes for offline view.

It’s still easy to add images from the web to Inboard — just drag and drop it on the menubar icon and Inboard will prompt you to change title or add tags. But it doesn’t stop there. The menubar also offers a few screenshot options. It’s not as resourceful as LittleSnapper or Pixa, but it is good enough to store entire websites or parts of your screen to Inboard.

A limited set of screenshot tools in the menubar.

However, Inboard has been promoting itself as an application to “build a creative library that organizes your screenshots” and that merit comes with an issue. Most screenshots are taken for immediate action, not storage, which means these apps must be great mediators, the image must stay there, but putting them in should be as effortless as pulling them out. Opening the app just to drag an image out is definitely not a great example of it.

Stripping down features

If you compare Inboard to every other application of its kind, you’ll notice how it has far less features than the competition. Actually, it’s the simplicity that stands out. Don’t think of it as a screenshot tool, but a personal image library, because that’s the way it is heading. Among the future plans of Inboard you’ll find iCloud sync, video support and folder sharing, the last one being the most significant for a supposed social side of the application.

Considering it as a library, it becomes the final destination of your images, you’ll drop things there and forget until the day you need them again, and since including images from anywhere, especially from the web, is easy and unobtrusive, Inboard turns out to be a great candidate for the job.

“Ok, where are they hiding the editing tools?”

This focus would still require improvements for the future, such as the aforementioned integration with social networks. Seamless integration is more familiar to the average user than RSS feeds, most of us don’t even know what the latter means, while we can easily spot a Facebook badge and understand its purpose.

The minimal UI of Inboard holds a lot of potential, at its actual state it is already a fast and stable beta, but just a glimpse of its Twitter account makes it clear the developers have big expectations for its next features. Also worth mentioning, they said when the app goes out of beta, it will be “at least half the price” its newest competitor. Therefore, let’s hope this zeppelin doesn’t burn into ashes as the Hindenburg did. What a picturesque choice for an icon!

If you’re interested, you might want to join their public beta and make your own conclusions.

Quick access to a reliable forecast is important for reasons beyond simply having some fall-back material during lulls in everyday conversation. Knowing what the weather has in store for your location can guide wardrobe decisions and help you decide on whether that picnic should be postponed to a drier day.

There are plenty of websites that offer accurate forecasts, and even Google can give you a quick-look at your location’s weather with a simple search query. Living Earth HD for Mac aims to keep you up-to-date on weather conditions without having to open your browser. Is it ready to replace your local weatherman?

Getting Started

Upon launching the app, you’ll be asked to input your current location. You can do this manually by typing your city’s name, or you can use the auto-location function to find your city. I opted for the latter, and found that it worked quickly and it correctly found where I was. You can also choose to add additional cities.

The location-finder worked quickly and accurately.

Interface

What makes Living Earth somewhat unique from competing apps is that is combines a menubar icon and drop-down with a full display of the planet’s weather on your desktop or as a screensaver. As a menubar app, you get the temperature (set in either Fahrenheit or Celsius) and an icon that summarizes your current conditions. These icons include sunny, sunny with clouds, rain, snow, haze, and a handful of others.

You get the temperature and an icon symbolizing current conditions.

Activating the menubar’s drop-down window reveals a wealth of information. At the top, you are shown a spinning globe with real-time cloud cover. The image looks fantastic, and the data it uses is very accurate. Next is your list of saved cities. Clicking on one of them centers the globe on that location and gives you more detailed weather information. You’ll get sunrise and sunset, humidity, wind, and a week’s worth of daily forecasts. Click on a given day and you can choose from three different charts that map the hourly temperature, humidity and wind.

Left: Living Earth shows you a weekly forecast. Right: Selecting a day gives you a more advanced look.

If you choose to use the wallpaper feature, your desktop shows a large view of your location, along with the time and current conditions. The graphics are sharp and the visuals are a beautiful option for your wallpaper.

Features

The simplest yet most welcome feature is the iCloud option that syncs your cities across multiple devices. The developers also have a universal iOS version of Living Earth that shares a similar interface. Frequent travelers who like to keep an updated list of cities available their Mac, iPhone and iPad will appreciate this feature, especially considering that it can double as a world clock.

The control panel gives you plenty of options for shortcuts, units, and syncing.

The settings pane for Living Earth offers a ton of customization options. You can set keyboard shortcuts that start the screensaver, add cities, and activate the menubar drop-down. You can choose from four wind speed units, including MPH, KPH, Meters per second, and Knots.

Power-users with multiple displays are given the option to display a mirrored image of the globe, your default background, or a plain black screen that matches the background behind the image of the earth. These options are available for both the desktop and screensaver.

The desktop view is a great alternative to static wallpapers.

The screensaver activation can be set to occur at various intervals between three minutes and two hours. You can choose to have the earth rotate on its axis, to randomly jump to various cities around the world, or to just jump between your saved cities. You also have a slider for these transitions, allowing the earth to either spin extremely fast or crawl along at a snails pace.

You get plenty of control over the screensaver options.

Perhaps the only major disappointment regarding Living Earth’s featureset stems from comparisons to the iOS version. On mobile devices, the app allows you to view the map with several different filters for various weather conditions, including humidity, min and max temperature, as well as the ability to find tropical storms and hurricanes with a single tap. The absence of those options on the Mac version stands as a glaring omission.

I was slightly concerned when I first started using the real-time desktop display that it would hog system resources. A quick glance at my Mac’s Activity Monitor relieved those worries.

The footprint on your system is minimal.

Comparison to Similar Apps

When it comes to weather apps on iOS and Mac, sometimes it feels like I’ve tried them all. None that I’ve used on any device has been perfect, as each struggles to balance a wealth of information in an easy-to-use interface. The app that Living Earth replaced for me was Clear Day, which has a similar functionality but places more emphasis on presenting advanced weather data.

Clear Day has some beautiful animations, but ultimately those began to feel trivial when compared with the real-time cloud cover that Living Earth shows. While Living Earth won me over with it’s visuals, I do wish it had a similar alert function as Clear Day. When a bad storm is approaching, Clear Day can send desktop alerts warning you and brings up National Weather Service advisories.

Conclusion

Taken individually, none of the features that Living Earth offers are particularly unique or innovative. But as a sum of its parts, the app performs enough roles to justify a spot on both your menubar and your desktop. At $7 dollars, it might feel like a cost that isn’t low enough to lure you away from one of the myriad of free options you have in your internet browser. While it lacks the robust data of elite weather apps like Seasonality Core, I think it offers enough of an upgrade from free options like Degrees to justify its cost.

However, I think potential users shouldn’t look at this as a menubar app that comes with a neat desktop display and screensaver. This is primarily a great-looking real-time desktop display and screensaver that adds an accurate, feature rich menubar weather forecast. Off all of the apps I use on a daily basis, Living Earth is undoubtedly responsible for the most rubbernecking from passersby.

Bored of your iTunes music? Want more music without paying for a subscription to any of the new online music services? Then you need to get a copy of Radium 3, our sponsor this week.

Radium is the Mac app for serious internet radio listeners. It’s beautifully designed, simple to use, and filled with over 8,000 stations of every genre so you’ll always have something to listen to. Just search for the type of music you feel like listening to, and get back to what you’re doing. Radium will stream the music, let you easily see what’s playing in your menubar, and keep a list of your favorites so you can buy them from iTunes later. It’s great.

If you take your internet radio seriously, then you’ll want the best audio quality possibly. Radium makes that easy, with a built-in equalizer, and support for AirPlay to send music to your wireless speakers or Apple TV. It’ll let you share the songs you like with your social networks, find the currently playing song on iTunes, and even lets you subscribe to premium radio stations if you want. It’s everything you could want from an internet radio player app, and it works great.

Rediscover Internet Radio with Radium Today!

There’s no better way to enjoy internet radio on your Mac than with Radium, so why not give it a try today? You can download a free trial of Radium 3 from their site, or get your own copy of Radium 3 from the App Store for just $9.99. Then sit back, and enjoy the music.

We’re pretty sure you’ll decide it’s chocolate for your ears, too.