Category: Mac

We’ve covered a ton of the apps our team relies on in our long-running Apps We Use series which we finished up the end of May. We didn’t get everyone included, though, so today we’re back with one more installation of our Apps We Use series.

This time, you’ll get to see that apps that our writer Jonathan Garro uses in his work.

Productivity

Media

Utilities

Games

Other Stuff

Here’s a list of stuff I obviously use but likely required no explanation:

Dropbox
VLC
Parallels
Chrome
Droplr
Crashplan
Alfred
Evernote

That’s All for Now!

That’s the last of our Apps We Use posts for a while — but we’d still love to hear your thoughts if you think Jonathan should change out any of his apps. Or, if you’ve recently changed the apps you use, we’d love to hear what Mac apps you’re relying on to get your work done in the comments below.

When I first started using a MacBook after years on PC laptops, I instantly noticed the better trackpad. After becoming used to gestures on iOS devices being able to bring some of them over to a laptop seemed a welcome idea. Scrolling by dragging two fingers on the trackpad worked much better than most other methods I’d seen on laptops before. It’s these subtle enhancements to getting around Mac OS that I really feel separate using the MacBook from other computers. Still, Mac OS X supports only a few gestures by default and it would be nice to have more options.

I find tools that speed the small things to be very beneficial. It may take only a few seconds to move and resize a window, but I could do that dozens of times a day which quickly adds up. So I always look for utilities that can ease this process and help me be more efficient when working on my computer.

Enter BetterTouchTool, an app that lets you create custom actions for gestures using your Magic Mouse, Macbook Trackpad and Magic Trackpad. We’ve mentioned it in roundups and more a number of times, but haven’t reviewed in depth by itself. Let’s correct this and take a look at this useful free tool.

Your Touchpad’s Best Friend

BetterTouchTool brings tons of gestures to your Mac

BetterTouchTool is a powerful free tool to configure gestures for you Mac. The newest version requires Mac OS X 10.7 or greater along with a supported input device. This can be a Magic Mouse or Magic Trackpad connected to your Mac or the MacBook’s built in trackpad. You can also use the program with a normal mouse or the Apple Remote. The latest release also added preliminary support for the LEAP Motion controller that we looked at recently, and there is an active thread on the BetterTouchTool forum on the using this new input device.

How BetterTouchTool Works

Make the gestures work the way you want.

BetterTouchTool lets you define gestures on your input device. These gestures then cause an action or shortcut to take place after the gesture is detected. The gestures are dependent upon the device. The trackpad on a MacBook can have gestures tied to using one to five fingers to tap, click, and swipe. Gestures with fewer fingers also gain a few additional recognized motions such as rotation. There is also an 11 finger gesture I really can’t even imagine trying to use on a regular basis. In total there are over 60 gestures over the built in Mac OS X gestures.

Other input devices will have different gestures. The remote gesture ties to buttons on the remote. The Leap Motion controller gestures include supported gestures including the unique slow clap that makes me with I had a Leap controller just to try. In addition the keyboard can be used as a source device in effect allowing you to have keyboard shortcuts.

The gestures can be set globally or made specific to an application. This lets you have the same swipe gesture mapped to forward and back only in Chrome, Safari, or Firefox, but turn the pages in a reading application. You can also increase the number of gestures by combining the gesture with some combination of the Command, Option, fn, Control, and/or Shift keys.

Make windows work the way you want

Each gesture can then produce either an action or a keyboard shortcut for non keyboard gestures. The predefined actions include doing nothing, which allows you to block a built in OS X gesture. The more active actions include mouse clicks, application control, window resizing, and window movement. The full action list is lengthy and includes Mac OS actions such as activating Airplay Mirroring, executing an AppleScript, maximizing a window, or muting the audio.

I use BetterTouchTool to replace some window management items I missed from Windows 8. I can press Shift+Command+Left Arrow and the current window will fills the left side of the screen. The same keys with a right arrow causes the window to fill the right side of the screen. Similarly I’ve defined key commands o cause a window to expand to fill the current screen (not the Mac OS full screen mode) or to hide all windows.

Remote Control

Keyboards, touch pads, mice, the Leap Motion controller, or even your iOS device can be used to control your Mac

BetterTouchTool also provides remote control of your Mac from your iOS device. The 1.99 BTT Remote app can connect your iOS device to your Mac using the same protocol that connects Apple TVs and other devices. As long as your phone and device are on the same wireless network, the connection works with no problem. Before taking over the device you are prompted to accept the connection which prevents unwanted connections.

From the remote app you gain an impressive ability to control your computer. For each application you can access the menu, bring it to the front, hide the application, quite or force quit the application, or restart the app. You can also browse files on your Mac. Selecting a file will then open the file on your Mac. You can also adjust setting such as the brightness, volume, use play, pause, and audio skip buttons. You also gain remote access to the trackpad. You can also define remote actions within BetterTouchTool you can then kick off from the remote app.

Conclusion

Overall BetterTouchTool is a powerful and useful tool. And at the low price of free, there is no downside to trying it out. You may be tempted to add a bunch of gestures from the start, but doing so will quickly leave you overwhelmed. It’s best to add only one or two new gestures at one time and integrate those. This lets you find the ones that are really useful and delete the ones that aren’t as useful as you’d expected.

While the interface is a bit complex, there really aren’t many other downsides to the program. If you use a Mac and want to make it easier to work on it, then give BetterTouchTool a try.

Apple was just the Mac company for forever. It had the Newton and numerous other side projects, but the Mac was really what it was known for. Then, the iPod came along, and iTunes, and suddenly Apple stood for mobile media almost more than computing.

Then, 2007 happened, and Apple became the company that reinvented the smartphone, followed by 2010 when they reinvented the tablet. Investors loved it, pushing Apple’s market cap to record-breaking heights.

But what’s next? Apple still makes beautiful iMacs, MacBooks that get better battery life than any other laptops in their categories, and just radically reinvented the Mac Pro. They’ve got great new versions of both iOS and OS X coming out soon. And yet, everyone’s wondering what’s next — the whole world is expecting Apple to do something big and take on — or invent — a whole new category of devices.

There’s rumors of everything from an Apple watch to a TV. But what do you think Apple’s going to introduce next? We’d love to hear your thoughts in the comments below!

I have long been a strong supporter of cloud storage, highlighting the many different ways to use Dropbox, for example. Combine that with iCloud automatically backing up most of our digital purchases and the documents we create in tons of popular apps now, and cloud syncing suddenly just works. We can just sit back and forget about all the complexity — that is, until we need to restore something.

That’s still usually not too much of a problem, since iCloud has all of our purchased music, apps, and movies ready for redownload. But it’ll come as a shock, however, to realize that iTunes does not fully meet this expectation at the moment. Audiobooks purchased through iTunes allow a one-time download at the point of purchase, but you can’t then download to other devices or even the same device once erased. You can re-synchronize them from your PC or Mac library back to your device, but it is the cloud functionality that is not behaving as expected here.

We thought it best to give you a general advisory about this, and to briefly show you how to prevent the loss of your important digital media purchases with a short backup tutorial.

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What’s the Issue?

iCloud is a reliable central source for copies of all of your purchased apps, even older apps that you can no longer purchase from the App Store. It will save and restore all of your eBooks from iBooks, look after music purchased through iTunes or uploaded via iTunes Match, and even store and protect your movie downloads. But, for one reason or another, audiobooks are not included in iCloud.

I am investigating further the reason for this, but if you have any idea of the underlying issue, do drop a note in the comments below. I’m guessing it has something to do with content rights, and I do hope it gets resolved soon.

Protected Rights — For You

In the meantime, lets take a look at protecting what you already have. If you have purchased an audiobook from iTunes, it is most likely that it has been downloaded into your iTunes library as a file with digital rights protection. If you still have the audiobook on your device, but not in your iTunes library on your PC or Mac, then go ahead and get those two in sync straight away, ensuring your audiobook is transferred into your iTunes library using the Transfer Purchases option of iTunes.

The next step is to create a Playlist that lists all of your audiobooks that are likely to be affected. You should not need to include in this any titles that are not protected by digital rights. For these, you can already copy or convert to other formats without issue, and you probably have already realised that these are not normally copied to iCloud due to being incompatible with Apple’s implementation of file syncing in iTtunes.

Ensure that the above criteria are met in your new Smart Playlist.

When creating your Smart Playlist, the key aspect to filter on is Kind. Set this to be equal to “Protected AAC”. Go ahead and open up iTunes, and select to create a new Playlist from the File menu. Check the criteria in the screen above to ensure you get a match. Press OK, and you should be presented with a list of your audiobooks purchased through iTunes.

For non-protected files, we would have the option of writing to disc media, or perhaps converting to a standard AAC for uploading to the cloud via iTunes match. These options are not available to us here, because of the protected nature of the files.

Drag and drop your precious digital audiobooks to a safe place (or three).

Instead, simply select the list of audiobooks shown, and drag and drop them from iTunes to a safe place on your local hard drive, or perhaps to a USB storage device. And remember the age-old rule of 3 regarding safe storage: Take 3 copies of your data onto 2 different types of media and keep 1 copy off-site. It’s as easy as 3,2,1…

Another good idea is to copy these files into another storage folder that is synchronised with a cloud backup service, such as Dropbox or Skydrive. I’ve not tried playing these direct from this cloud source, but I would imagine there would be a media player capable of doing so. Perhaps you can advise us in the comments box if you find something that works well for you.

I have raised the issue with Apple support, and I hope that over time they will follow the example of Audible to allow full backup and restore from iCloud, but for now I hope this has been of some help to you.

When Instacast came to the Mac a few months ago, I decided it was time to make the switch from Downcast on my iOS devices. I’ve enjoyed Instacast ever since, but now the people over at Downcast have released a shiny new Mac counterpart. I was intrigued, so I’ve spent the past day learning its ins and outs to tell you whether or not it’s worth downloading.

Let’s take a look.

Not As Polished in Design

Not the most pleasant user interface.

Right away I noticed that Downcast simply wasn’t as nice-looking as Instacast was in its first beta. All the icons inside the app seem choppy around the edges and most transitions just aren’t smooth. The pause button, for example, is so slim that it looks misplaced. Additionally, the advance (30 seconds or 2 minutes) and backtrack (15 seconds and 30 seconds) buttons look as if they’ve been rendered for the wrong PPI. I used a MacBook Air to test this app and all around, the graphics were choppier than I would hope to see in a final release.

Importing Podcasts Can Be Twitchy

Importing feeds and settings with iCloud is quick and easy.

Since I already had a bunch of feeds synced to iCloud, I immediately clicked the cloud icon in the bottom right corner of Downcast to import them. The app allows syncing of settings, episodes, podcasts, and playlists, so I was able to import everything nicely. I did like to see Downcast making use of iCloud rather than only allowing for cross-platform sync on its own server, which is what Instacast does. The latter method requires that you create an account, and that just seems silly since iCloud is typically registered with your device already.

Upon refreshing my feeds following the initial iCloud sync, I found that the app was re-downloading all the podcasts it had already stored on my hard drive. Earlier in the morning, it sent me a notification saying all feeds were refreshed and new episodes had been downloaded. However, that must have been a bug or something, because it proceeded to re-download the episodes I was listening to before.

Searching produces no results.

The only way I was able to import a podcast was manually using its feed URL or through iCloud. Downcast’s search function failed me with no results on every query I initiated. I even tried popular shows like MacBreak Weekly, but the search didn’t yield any results. I also found that I wasn’t able to browse categories after searching: they too were empty. I had to reopen the app to successfully explore for new podcasts.

Playback, of All Things, Also Has Issues

I encountered some glitchy behavior when scrolling through my episodes. Hovering over each one makes a play button appear, but there’s a delay between when you hover and the button actually displays. It also enlarges the size of the text, which makes part of the title disappear at times.

Playback worked well most of the time, but sometimes the app beach-balled in the middle of an episode. I found that this was due to a feed attempting to refresh and getting stuck somewhere along the way. This happened on quite a few occasions and I found it impossible to refresh all my feeds successfully while something was playing.

A downloaded episode must “prepare” for playback.

One of the weirdest things about the app’s playback feature is that it spends a good 10–20 seconds “preparing” the episode for your listening pleasure. That makes no sense, though, because all the podcasts I tried to play were around 40 MB, I was using a MacBook Air with a SSD, and episodes always open instantly on my iPhone. Why would it need to “prepare” one for playback? My only theory is that it didn’t actually download the episode, which would mean that the small “downloaded” icon was false.

My major quibble: When listening to a podcast, it’s not possible to pause it with the hardware play/pause button. (To be fair, Instacast doesn’t have this function either. Both apps just open iTunes.) Rdio and Spotify seem to have no problem with such functionality, so why are podcast apps stumbling?

Show Notes are Hidden

Strangely, show notes are hidden in the Get Info pane of an episode.

Most podcasts use show notes to give you links to what they talked about. Downcast’s are a bit harder to find than average. You’d expect them to be on the now playing screen, but since the app doesn’t technically have one, they’re actually hidden in the Get Info pane of the episode, which can be opened with the shortcut Command + I once the item is selected. The notes are then displayed in a small pane below the episode information. Really, this entire pane should be shown by default when an episode is playing, or there should at least be an easier way to access it.

Sharing is Limited

Twitter and Facebook are supported, but App.net and others are left out.

Sharing is an important feature in all apps nowadays. Downcast’s options are limited to the stock four, though: Twitter, Facebook, Email, and Message. Instacast, on the other hand, offers the ability to add a podcast to your Safari Reading List, Pocket, or Readability account, and even share it App.net. The developers of Instacast also ask you to support the podcast by Flattring it, something that Downcast doesn’t integrate.

Good Effort, Bad Start

Downcast in fullscreen.

I used to enjoy Downcast on iOS for two reasons: it supported gestures for quick navigation in the car and it always worked well. However, I never enjoyed the bland iOS default user interface, and after trying Instacast there’s no reason for me to go back. Downcast for Mac doesn’t integrate gestures, much less a mini player, and has far too many bugs for daily use.

A choppy example of design in Downcast.

In Conclusion

I like that the developers chose to go with iCloud as their syncing service, but other than that, the app doesn’t make me want to switch from Instacast. In fact, it helps me to appreciate the polish of that podcast client even more. For half the price of Instacast, Downcast may be worth it for some.

By the time that Apple introduced iTunes 11, many were hoping for a radically redesigned and rewritten version of the world’s most popular music player. While version 11 did feature an updated UI, it still left some wanting a music player focused not on Apps, device management, and videos, but rather the music itself.

Into that void steps Vox, a new music player from the makers of Focus, Wallpaper Wizard, and Forismatic, which is designed to put music front and center.

The Design

Vox, alongside the iTunes Mini Player.

Where iTunes is a behemoth of an app, Vox is something much different, with it’s main interface most closely resembling the iTunes Mini Player. Beyond the player’s tiny size, it also features a color scheme outside of what you’d normally find in a Mac app. The heavy use of orange and dark grey reminded me a bit too much of a construction site, but I suppose it could be appealing to some. In that same vein, the app’s icon is a recreation of a professional grade speaker which looks almost too industrial to fit in with the other apps in my dock.

But while those are all nitpicks and matters of personal preference, what really counts is how the app works. On that front, Vox is a winner with well placed controls that put your music first. It’s menu bar features a button to show or hide the playlist, standard playback controls, and a volume control that, when selected, lets you choose your audio output including AirPlay devices. Like pull-to-refresh on the iPhone, I hope this combined volume and input control is something that catches on across other Mac apps. Overall, while the color scheme and icon design wouldn’t be my first pick, the team behind Vox took time in creating the layout and controls, and it shows.

Music Management

You can drop in a song from anywhere on your disk to create a playlist.

One of Vox’s most notable features is it’s drag-and-drop playlist creation functionality which does what it’s name suggests. It’s essentially a queue on steroids allowing you to mix together songs from anywhere on your hard drive. Once songs are in the Vox Playlist, you can reorder them as you would a list on a touchscreen; it works great if that’s all you’re looking for in terms of music management.

Outside of the Vox Playlist, the app relies on iTunes to supply it’s music library. Taken in isolation, that’s a huge negative, but if you add in the fact that there’s absolutely no support for browsing by artists or albums, Vox seems like little more than a third party iTunes Mini Player. If you can look past those omissions, Vox also supports Last.fm scrobbling and Internet Radio which are nice to have but, don’t exactly break the mold of what we’ve come to expect from an alternative music player.

Behind the Scenes

An optional Preference Pane circumvents Apple’s sandboxing restrictions.

Then, with the installation of a separate Preference Pane, you can enable the use of keyboard media buttons, an Apple Remote, or headphones to control Vox. While this isn’t ideal, it’s a clever workaround Apple’s App Store sandboxing policy. Its playback core is also robust, and Vox, unlike iTunes, is a friend to most any audio file, supporting the standard AAC and MP3 formats as well as more obscure ones like ALAC, FLAC, and OGG. Windows converts will likely also appreciate it’s support for WMA files.

Unfortunately, though, no matter what format your music is in, you’ll have to obtain it elsewhere, as Vox doesn’t include any sort of music store, streaming service, or recommendation engine. Any time you want to hear a song that’s not in your collection you’ll be forced out to a third party store like iTunes or Google Play. This is a pretty big drawback, preventing the application from providing the seamless listening experience it was designed to provide. It plans to add support for internet radio with an in-app purchase going forward, but that’s still not enough.

Conclusion

Vox isn’t an iTunes replacement in any meaningful sense. For even the most common tasks including purchasing songs and even basic library management, you’ll have to go back to iTunes. That begs the question: where does Vox fit in? For users with audio files scattered throughout their hard drive’s an app like VLC will probably work just fine, and for those looking for an iTunes alternative with a focus on music there’s Ecoute. So while Vox lives up to every claim it’s creators make, in such a wide market, it doesn’t seem to have a place.

Mostly when you’re not expecting it, serendipity kicks in. Just as I was searching for a Chrome extension for Pinboard after reading about some unexpected use of this bookmarking service revived my interest in it, I hear of a new Pinboard client for Mac OS X.

Shiori is brought to you by the guy who developed the Twitter client that has the most unique name on this planet: YoruFukurou. And his new tiny tool is also unique in regard to several aspects.

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Content is chrome

Shiori shows a user interface that has yet to be seen in any other Mac app so far (it might remind you some customized Alfred themes, though). It’s simple, clean, elegant, and, dare I say in these times of forthcoming iOS 7, flat. Actually, it looks a lot like it was designed for the upcoming Ive-flavoured revision of your favorite mobile OS, except it is a Mac-only app. The main window features no buttons, no toolbar — in fact, it is absolutely chromeless. Even the window itself has no border, much like what iA Writer windows look like once you’ve started typing in.

At first launch, you’re directly shown the Accounts tab in the Preferences so you can add your Pinboard and Delicious credentials. From then on, when you activate Shiori, it shows your last x (configurable from 1 to 10, set to 7 by default) added bookmarks. You can scroll down to reach a maximum of 50 of your latest bookmarks, each displayed on nicely formatted, large Helvetica Neue, 3-line blocks along with tags displayed in white-on-green boxes.

The main window is one of the most minimalist you’ve ever seen, with a striking iOS 7 touch.

The magic kicks in when you notice the first empty line includes a giant blinking cursor. Start typing a few letters: there, the list displays bookmarks matching your query in real time. A quick look at the Acknowledgements window of Shiori indicates that the app is using components from the awesome Quicksilver launcher for this to work — most likely its matching algorithm, which would explain it’s such a cinch to browse through your bookmarks.

Accessing a bookmark in the list is as easy as clicking on any of the results or using Up/Down arrows then the Enter key, which will activate your default Internet browser and display the related web page.

Tiny but strong

The option set offered in the Preferences window of this little piece of software is as minimal as the UI. In retrospect, though, it turns out that you will only find super useful things there.

Hence, you can define system-wide keyboard shortcuts for what are called “Start Searching” and “New Bookmark”. The former will activate Shiori main window and focus the blinking cursor so you just have to start typing to filter your bookmarks list, while the latter will grab whatever URL is in the active tab of your web browser and fill it for you, along with the title of the page, in a popup window. All that’s left to you is then to fill in optional tags (all with autocomplete; and by the way the ‘tags’ text field is already focused so you’re ready to type) and click Done or just press Cmd-Enter. Notice that clicking the plus button on the right of the tags text field will make a Lion/iOS-style popup appear, populated with tag suggestions.

Adding a bookmark is easy. Beware, though: in the tag list, green tags are not selected while gray ones are. I’d expect the other way round.

Another neat addition is that the developer took into account that Pinboard is advertised as “social bookmarking for introverts”. Indeed, for one, all my Pinboard bookmarks are set to be private by default. In the third tab of Shiori, you can specify so-called “Private URLs” for which the “Private” checkmark in the “New Bookmark” window will be checked by default. You can use wildcards in URLs, which makes it easy to broaden the scope of private links.

All you need is a little wildcard and all the links you add to Pinboard will be private by default.

Wrap up

I’d love to wake up and see such beautifully executed ideas like this everyday. If I’d be nitpicking I’d say the only two things missing are an option to hide the menu bar icon and the possibility to choose your accent color (which would make the minimalistic UI a bit more customizable).

Apart from that, Shiori is almost perfect to my eyes. And most of all, its design approach is unique. I’ll go as far as to say that, much as Loren Brichter’s Tweetie defined a whole new UI design trend in Mac apps (remember the side bar of Reeder, Sparrow and the likes?), Shiori might announce things to come on the OS X side, were Apple to decide that the version following Mavericks will follow the same ‘flatification’ iOS got this year. Time will tell.

It would be wrong to say that Shiori has no competitors on the market. However, it is really different from the menu bar apps like Thumbtack or Delibar and definitely has a futuristic look that makes it stand apart from Delish, which really looks like a native OS X app. Also of note is that, if you just need to add Pinboard bookmarks and would rather browse your full list from the website itself, maybe the recently released Diddums is all you need.

As a conclusion, Shiori is just innovative, easy-to-use, lightweight, fast and well thought enough you would really miss something by not using this little tool as a Pinboard/Delicious user, especially given it’s free. It’s a must-try app.

Disclaimer: I don’t have a Del.icio.us account, so I assume that Shiori behaves exactly the same way with Pinboard and Delicious — though I haven’t tested the latter.

There are too may weather apps on the Mac. All I’ve ever wanted is an accurate forecast in a simple yet beautiful user interface. Most apps are inconsistent in design, aside from the fantastic Clear Day.

The other day, I stumbled upon Beautiful Weather, a nice-looking app with a basic black, white, and pictorial design. It was only two dollars, so I decided to give it a test run to answer the typical question: was it worth downloading?

Greeted with a Pleasant User Interface

The Flickr photos compliment the minimal design nicely.

Some apps are just too simple. Beautiful Weather has a perfect balance of design and functionality. I really like the monochrome user interface with its slight hints of blue and illustrated forecasts. Rather than using animations, which typically lag, it displays fitting Flickr photos geotagged near the location. These blend well with the rest of the app, which has a nice selection of icons and a pleasant font for all the temperatures.

An error I was presented with just after I started using the app.

I did encounter one issue: after a location is added, you’ll need to reopen the app for it to pull photos from Flickr, else you’ll get a pixelated “This image or video is currently unavailable” message. Thankfully, it only happens when you just added a location.

Even though the user interface is well-designed, there’s no fullscreen mode to show it off. This seems like a necessity for any weather app that is over 900 pixels wide by default. It is by no means a menu bar app, so it should have a fullscreen option for secondary displays (when this mode actually works properly in Mavericks).

Accurate Weather at Just the Right Detail

Adding a location is simple, but you wouldn’t expect organizing them to be under the + button.

It’s not always necessary to know the precipitation, wind speed, and conditions of each day. For that, you can just go to Wunderground. This app doesn’t include a ridiculous amount of numbers, and I like that. It also uses data from Wunderground, which makes it very accurate. Hourly forecasts, high and low temperatures for the day, and precipitation is all the average user needs from a weather app, and this one delivers on each of those in a presentable way.

Organizing locations isn’t as user-friendly as it could be. Rather than clicking an X beside the name, you must click the + button as if you were to add a new location and then hover over each one to reveal the X.

The tiny menu bar app is perfect for quick stats. If only the dock icon would be hidden while this is open.

While it isn’t a menu bar app, Beautiful Weather does include a handy micro counterpart. The app’s preferences include two options: display weather in Celsius rather than Fahrenheit and include the temperature and condition icon of the selected location in the menu bar. The latter looks very nice and does the same thing as Degrees. It would be nice if clicking it opened the app though.

A Few Idiosyncrasies

In addition to the weird image display bug, this app is extremely slow at loading conditions the first time you add a location. No, not a few seconds of waiting: a few minutes. For some reason, it takes a while to pull the data from Yahoo Weather’s API. Another thing I’ve noticed is the app lags a bit when the window size is adjusted. All the other transitions are fine, but it has some trouble in this area.

Such Potential

In the end, the best part about the app is the photos from Flickr.

Beautiful Weather is a very nice app for viewing Yahoo Weather natively, outside the browser. The problem is, it just isn’t consistent in its delivery. The user interface is fine, but the functionality is partially broken with its lagging, display errors, and occasional crashing when adding a location. For the price, you can get the aforementioned Clear Day, which is equally alluring and much less buggy.

Although the Mac App Store may be the first choice for many (including myself) to find and purchase apps from, many developers (such as Dropbox) offer their apps as more traditional download, and almost always in a DMG file.

Designing and building these DMGs can be very difficult, which is where DropDMG comes in. The app offers a complete suite of tools and aims to not only provide an easy way of creating disk images, but also to create fully customised DMGs that app developers can use to distribute apps. Here’s how DropDMG can help you out if you need to make disk images anytime soon for your projects.

The Purpose

If you’ve ever downloaded Dropbox, Skype, or most other apps that came bundled in a DMG, you’ll no doubt see that they appear to be much more than simply a folder. Custom background colours, instructions for installation and shortcuts to your Applications folder all add up to a rather wonderful user experience. DropDMG, by C-Command Software, is a tool that has been created to provide you with a way of building these very DMGs.

Dropbox is an example of an app using a custom DMG

Instant Disk Images

DropDMG is a great way to automatically generate DMG files just by dragging files over to it

At its core, DropDMG is a disk image generator. If you don’t need any of the frills of a more interactive DMG then you can simply drag any files you’d like over to the main window and DropDMG will automatically create a DMG that will take up only the space required, placing the finished product in the same folder as your files. You can even specify a folder containing files which can be converted to a DMG.

If you’ve ever created a DMG with Disk Utility, you’ll know how much of a chore the entire process is. Many of us usually give up and not bother, simply archiving the files in a ZIP instead. For this feature alone, DropDMG is a great tool as it provides a truly one-click DMG generation and inclusion of files, not to mention the ability to accurately size the disk image.

Custom Designs

The biggest feature of DropDMG is its wide range of customisable options when it comes to designing the DMG. You can add text, graphics and even specify icon positions, with DropDMG including a built-in option to add a shortcut to the Applications folder.

DropDMG allows for
building custom layouts with icons and text

There aren’t any arrow tools, unfortunately, meaning if you want to create a graphical representation of moving an icon to the Applications folder, you’ll need to design that outside of the app. Some basic arrow and drawing tools like those found in Skitch would be a great addition, but it’s not a deal breaker.

Developers, Developers, Developers

DropDMG supports different designs (called Configurations) that are saved within the app. This way, developers releasing new updates to their apps don’t have to rebuild their DMG layouts from scratch and can simply drag the app over and build the DMG in just a few seconds. Thanks to placeholder names, you can specify the app name and simply add the app, with DropDMG adding its name to anywhere you need it to go.

There are a lot of configuration options available, perfect for app developers

If you are using DropDMG to distribute software, you’re able to include a license agreement in multiple languages – a nice touch.

License agreements can be written and included, along with multilingual support

Hidden Extras

Rather surprisingly, DropDMG includes some features you wouldn’t expect. Built into the app is the ability to burn a bootable disc of an OS X installation right from the File menu. If you’ve got a downloaded copy of Lion or Mountain Lion from the Mac App Store, DropDMG will be able to burn a copy of this.

Finally, DropDMG includes a suite of command-line tools so you can run many of the features of DropDMG from Terminal, allowing for some great scripts and automation workflows to be written.

Conclusion

DropDMG is certainly a niche app as many casual Mac users will likely find no use for it. For app developers and system administrators, this app provides a whole suite of tools to create some great DMGs. This is reflected in the app’s interface as it’s assumed that if you’re using this type of app, you’re probably familiar with many of the functions regarding DMG creation (though the app includes an in-depth help guide).

Whilst not for everyone, this app serves a specific purpose and does it very successfully. Some additional annotation tools when designing the DMG would be good to see at some point in the future but as it stands, it’s a great functioning tool to take the hassle out of disk image creation.

Have some old text messages you’d like to recover from an iPhone, or need to get music off an old iPod? Or, perhaps you have data locked away in an old iTunes backup that you’d like to restore. Sounds like you need a copy of iExplorer, our sponsor this week.

iExplorer is the utility you need to access anything on your iPhone, iPod, or iPad. It can help you intelligently transfer music to your devices, or export every single SMS, MMS, or iMessage you’ve sent and received from your iPhone. It can export your voicemails, calendars, contacts, call history reminders, notes, web history, and more from your devices in the formats you want. It’ll even let you browse the contents of your iPhone or iPad from your Mac or PC, so you can copy out files you’ve created in apps, backup your photos, or even look into the contents of an old iTunes backup.

If you need to get anything off of any of your iOS devices, iExplorer is the one app you need to get it all. It’s a great tool to have in your Launchpad to help you get data off your iPhone, iPod, or iPad from any Mac or PC.

Get Your Copy of iExplorer Today!

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While iCloud does a lot of nice things for owners of Apple products, Dropbox works on every platform, making it an always-accessible service for file storage. Most people don’t keep more than a few gigabytes of data in their accounts, but sometimes people decide it might be fun to sync all their music or videos to the cloud. I currently have my entire photography portfolio and all my important documents synced to Dropbox.

Why this instead of iCloud or another competing service? For access to deleted files. If I accidentally remove something from my account, I can go back and get it within 30 days. And if I pay for a Pro account plus the packrat add-on, I can access all my files ever synced to the service. It’s a pretty handy feature, and it’s a good reason to back up some of your information to Dropbox’s secure servers. In this short tutorial, I’ll teach you how to do this without moving everything around using a tool called MacDropAny.

Before You Begin: Find Your Files and Folders

Skimming through my files.

Before you begin, gather a list of all the files or folders you wish to backup. You can sync anything, but it’s not a good idea to back up any system files to the cloud. Instead, we recommend using Time Machine, which will also serve as an extra, physical backup of anything you sync with Dropbox.

Don’t be limited to multiple gigabytes in files. You may need to upgrade your Dropbox account to upload the content (the free account is limited to 2 GB), but it may be worth it to pay $9.99 each month for 100 GB of storage. I’ll leave that to you.

I recommend synchronizing your pictures, documents (Pages, Word, PDF, and other text files take up very little space and should definitely be in the cloud if they’re important to you), work files (PSDs, Logic Pro projects, and even 3D renders may be worth syncing, despite the size), and even music if you can’t download it again or if your CD was lost.

Keep in mind that pictures and music take up a lot of space and will take a while to upload, so make sure you have a sufficient Internet connection before proceeding.

Download and Install MacDropAny

To sync files with Dropbox, you will be creating a symbolic link, which basically notifies Dropbox’s servers of changes as they take place and allows the service modify files on its own (from other computers) without the need to move things to the Dropbox folder. MacDropAny is a free tool that allows you to create a symbolic link between any folder and your cloud account. It works with Dropbox, Box.com, Copy, Google Drive, iClouDrive, and Microsoft SkyDrive, but today I’ll be looking at the first one since it’s been the most reliable for me in the past.

Launch the App and Link Your Folders

Selecting a folder to sync.

MacDropAny is an extremely simple app. When you first launch it, the app will ask what folder you’d like to sync. You can only do one at a time, so navigate to the first thing on your list and click Choose.

Select a service.

You’ll be presented with a screen asking which service you’d like to sync the folder to. I chose Dropbox and clicked OK. You can use one of the other options, but this tutorial is focused on Dropbox alone.

Make sure everything goes to the right place.

MacDropAny will make sure it syncs the folder to the correct destination. It will ask you to navigate your Dropbox folder and select where you’d like the selected folder to be synced. If you’d like it to stay in your main Dropbox directory, simply click Choose.

Before you’re finished, make sure you give the folder’s copy a name. The app will automatically use the original name of the folder, but you can change it if you’d like. Click “Sync ‘Folder Name’ with Dropbox” and Dropbox will automatically begin backing up your files.

The Waiting Begins

That’s it! Your files are now being backed up to the cloud. Not too difficult, was it?

Speed up the process by removing the upload limit.

If things are running slow, open Dropbox’s settings by clicking the menu bar icon, then the gear, and selecting Preferences, then head to the Network and click “Change Settings…” beside Bandwidth. Make sure the upload rate is on “Don’t limit” and click Update. Please note that this may slow down your Internet browsing speed while syncing is underway.

Let us know if you had any trouble with some of the steps in this tutorial or if you have a suggestion. Thanks for reading!

We’d like to say a special Thank you! to our weekly sponsors from July for sponsoring our site and for the great apps they make. If you would like to feature your app on our site with an advertisement, be sure to check out our available slots on BuySellAds or register for a weekly sponsorship for your app.

If you haven’t already checked out our the great apps that sponsored our site last month, be sure to check them out now!

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YouTube is on the road to becoming a quality replacement for cable television. There are currently many channels that offer daily news coverage, comedians like Rhett & Link have their own weekly program called The Mythical Show, and even The Associated Press, WSJ, and other major news outlets have channels on the video streaming giant. While the browser is still the main way to watch YouTube, mobile platforms have official native apps for the task. Why not on the Mac, then?

Tuba is the answer to a native YouTube solution on Apple’s personal computing operating system. It’s not just another browser window that cleans up YouTube — it’s an app that accesses the API of Google’s network and pulls the videos in directly for your viewing pleasure. But is it worth using over the website?

Straightforward User Interface

Refreshing a feed.

When compared to YouTube’s mobile apps, Tuba’s user interface is lacking. However, if you put it side-by-side with the desktop website, the app looks a lot cleaner by comparison. There’s a slimmed sidebar that shows only the sections of the service you need access to: popular videos, your subscriptions, five categories, and playlists from your account. All of these are collapsible with one click to make the interface as clean as you need it to be. However, after some testing, I found that the app doesn’t store your menu preferences, so the sidebar is always fully open.

To check for additions to the feed you’re viewing, there’s a pull-to-refresh feature with a perky little analogue TV (with antennas). Searching, in my use, was surprisingly fast. Even when I had a very slow 1 Mbps connection, queries results were generated quickly.

Playback is Fluid, But Has Peculiarities in User Experience

Looks like YouTube, right?

By default, the app loads the highest quality available, which is typically either 1080p or 720p. However, it does not support 480p, no matter what video you’re watching. I found that strange because 360p is available from the quality selector. Regardless, all options worked great and loaded much faster than YouTube’s website because there was no extra time for the app to “think” about what quality to use.

One reason to use this app over the website is that it caches recent videos and you don’t have to reload them if you want to show a friend.

Longer descriptions do not display properly.

Here are the other bizarre things I discovered in playback:

• Clicking the video does pause it, but there’s a two-second lag before it registers (the same goes for playing it).
• While the volume slider looks cool with a red glow, it too is sluggish when moved back and forth.
• Long descriptions are simply not supported, as seen in the image above.
• Seeking only works when the video is buffered, making it only half supported.
• If you hover over the sharing and then move your cursor back to the playback area, it plays a paused video.
• Worst of all, there’s no way to visit someone’s channel by clicking their picture or name (even if it’s the author of the video you’re watching).

Interaction: There’s Only a Like Button

If you’re thrilled about the content you’re watching, great! Otherwise, disliking videos is not supported. Either the developers wish to disregard the demoting of videos or they completely forgot about the feature. Whatever the reason, disliking is necessary for the YouTube community and should be included in a third-party app.

You can share a video by hovering over the triangular menu above it and then selecting the social network. It’s not native though: you will be taken to the browser.

Leaving a comment in a different way than you’d expect.

As for commenting, Tuba doesn’t adopt the inline method that most use. Instead, clicking the Comment button will open a small separate window for you to type your thoughts in. When finished, there’s a Post button. Replying is not supported and neither is liking, disliking, or reporting a comment as spam. Even more surprisingly, none of the comments are sorted by likes.

All of this basically makes involvement with the YouTube community impossible. You can say what you think, but you can’t reply to someone else and there’s no way to even dislike the video if it doesn’t appeal to you. All of this is available with one click through the “View on web” button, but it seems like a waste to exclude it from the app itself.

No Ads, Which Means Content is Missing

VEVO videos are not playable.

A nice perk of using this app is that it doesn’t show the advertisements you would usually see on YouTube.com. While this is wonderful news, there’s a downside: no VEVO channels. I tried to play music videos from Owl City, Psy, and others, but the videos didn’t load. The videos simply didn’t buffer and the play button did nothing, which is understandable since the app doesn’t show ads before it. I’d rather see ads than not be able to view the content at all.

Good for Quick YouTube Sessions, But Overall Unstable

Native fullscreen mode is the best part of the app.

I wanted to like this app. Its premise is exactly what I’ve been looking for on the Mac since I got one, but sadly it doesn’t deliver. The content is only half there — I count comments as part of YouTube, since the people should have a voice — and there’s simply no way to get around some of the issues. I have a bunch of feature suggestions, but I’ll leave those out since the app isn’t ready for daily use yet. Instead, I recommend that you try out the free version of the app for a taste of what you’ll get.

The nice thing is that the developers are serious about improving the app. They updated it on the 1st of August, which is the day I wrote this review, and they continue to work out the bugs. Once it’s more stable, I may be able to recommend this app to friends. Until then, it’s nothing more than a good idea.

The practice of DLC seasons in games is not one that has been well adopted by the hardcore gaming community. While some games are showcased by this community for offering real expansion to a title, many developers’ oversaturation of paid additional content shortly after release presents a controversial topic.

What if, to have even the most basic shot of a real gameplay experience, you needed to pay for some downloadable content? That’s the angle DLC Quest aims to exploit in a satirical commentary at the ever-evolving landscape of downloadable content and in-app purchases in games. DLC Quest is a game in it’s own right, with a Mario-esque “save the girl” storyline, but makes you unlock everything from the ability to have a pet to walking in both directions using in-game cash.

Why the DLC Hate?

The idea of expanding games post-launch, without going all-out on a sequel, is not new. Many games – the most prominent example that comes to mind is The Sims – have offered additional content, at a price, following launch, although the practice of making that digitally downloadable is newer. Developers sometimes opt to use DLC and expansion packs as a means of delivering more campaigns in story-centric titles or more objects and things to do in open-ended games, but the modern day immediacy at which this has become available has proven controversial.

Some games are known for their many post-launch expansion options.

When SimCity launched for Windows earlier this year, three DLC packs (each of which contained unique items for placement in one’s simulated city, revolving around a national theme of either the UK, France or Germany) were available to buy on day one, either individually through EA’s Origin or as part of a higher-price special edition of the game. When Battlefield 4 launches in the coming months, those who didn’t preorder will likely face a fee for China Rising, the game’s first DLC map pack which is currently being offered as a pre-release purchase incentive. A lot of controversy has arisen over moves like these, leaving some gamers who don’t purchase the packages feeling like they’re somehow being ripped off by developers who evidently have content prepared prior to a title’s release, but who have made a concious decision to not include it in the base game.

On day one of release, SimCity had three DLC packs available to buy.

Another slant on the mass DLC hate arises when microtransactions rear their head, especially with claims that they result in changing a game into an unbalanced pay-to-win experience. In other cases, like The Sims 3, microtransactions offer players the chance to expand their game with new items without buying a bundle full of other content they don’t care about, commonly being delivered by EA in the form of a retail “Stuff Pack”. However, with individually items and sets selling higher than the equivalent divisible price of a stuff pack, the complaints are certainly not unfounded.

Bad Guy to Defeat = $29.99

DLC Quest is a very simple, linear platformer with a very simple aim: defeat the bad guy and get the girl. The game comes with two relatively short campaigns (overall, I spent about 40-60 minutes on each although speedruns of the game show it’s possible to complete in about a quarter of my time), the latter of which was a little more fleshed out with areas to explore and NPCs to interact with. You’ll jump around and adventure into different areas, but the whole experience is very straightforward and simplistic.

The actual DLC Quest game is a shallow 2D platformer.

The twist to DLC Quest is that to do anything, even pause the game or move in two directions, requires you to buy DLC in an overarching joke of a dystopian gaming world whereby games are nothing without day one DLC. Fortunately, this is just satire and you won’t need to actually put up any real cash to buy this DLC; rather, it’s unlocked using in-game currency that you’ll collect along your travels. This is the main attraction of the game, but it does get annoying when you have to run back across the map to a shopkeeper NPC to actually unlock the DLC. Even games that charge for real cash will let to buy it from an in-game overlay! It’s funny the first time, but soon gets annoyingly boring, repetitive and ends up being one of the most frustrating aspects of the game.

To do even the most basic moves and actions, you’ll need to unlock the DLC with in-game currency.

Final Thoughts

DLC Quest is a funny commentary on the state of gaming and makes a prediction into what the future might be like, albeit with a little bit of hyperbole. That’s the main attraction of the game – the light satire – since the gameplay is rather shallow and doesn’t offer an awful lot of replayability. Sure, there’s some achievements and a few challenges that might pull you back in for a second playthrough, but you’re essentially paying $2.99 for about an hour or two of gameplay. I only paid £0.67 for it in the Steam sale so, at full price, you’re going to have to make the call to buy it or not yourself.

The Mac has yet to see a ton of brand new RSS reader apps to fill in the gaps left by Google Reader’s death. There’s the new NetNewsWire 4 beta, and a handful of other apps with native RSS syncing, but old giants like Reeder still haven’t updated to sync with the most popular new RSS services. Instead, ReadKit has emerged as the best app to sync with the major RSS services today, despite its roots as an reading later app.

And now, another reading later app has added RSS syncing: Words. It was already a reading later app that synced with Instapaper, Readability, and Pocket that we’d covered before that’s now added native RSS syncing.

A Focus on Newspaper-style Reading

The new themes in Words App

Words App has grown up a lot from the first time we reviewed it. It’s always been an app to bring Readability, Pocket, and Instapaper to your Mac, but originally only gave you a very basic reading view. It then got a fully new UI when version 2 was launched, one that makes it perhaps the most unique reading app on the Mac. Since then, it’s gotten brand-new article view templates, each with a light and dark reading mode and optimized for single or multiple-column reading. It’s with multiple column reading that Words app really shines, as few other apps are designed for this. With multiple columns and the Traditional theme, you could be forgiven for thinking you were reading an article in a real newspaper.

There’s one thing you might not expect, though: dynamic fonts. Similar to iA Writer, Words automatically resizes the text of your articles based on the window size. The changes aren’t too drastic, though, so there’s an option in the settings for standard or larger base text. There’s also no way to change the reading fonts, as they’re hard-set to the themes. The good thing is, the themes’ font choices look very nice, so there’s little to complain about there.

What you can complain over, though, is that Words app doesn’t ever remember the window size you used last time when you reopen it, so you’ll always find yourself stretching it back out to get your fonts readable. That’s a mild annoyance we’d like to see fixed.

Add your RSS feeds

Then, the new headline feature is that Words app now has its own built-in RSS syncing engine. You can’t sync with any RSS services, but rather can add your favorite sites’ RSS feeds individually, or import your OPML file from Google Reader or other RSS services for native syncing. There’s only one setting for your feeds: an option to turn on or off Automatic Rendering. By default, Words will fetch the full article from your feeds, not just the text contained in the RSS feed. That way, if someone you follow shortens their articles in the RSS, you’ll still get the full article in Words. Or, if they make a link post (as John Gruber’s Daring Fireball is known for), Words will show the original post rather than the link post summary.

The full linked articles, not just link posts

Once Words syncs your feeds, you’ll have the same great reading view for everything your favorite sites publish online. Words works best with long-form articles, especially since the reading settings for your read later services and RSS feeds are the same, but that generally works out ok since it fetches the full articles from link posts.

The only problem is, Words is rather pokey at syncing feeds. It’s good for reading, but is far from real-time. It also doesn’t give you any way to send articles to your reading list in Instapaper or Pocket, which seems odd considering that it does let you drag-and-drop articles but doesn’t seem to do anything when you do so. You’ll also find an option to “like” and “archive” RSS feed articles, but it doesn’t seem to do anything with your liked and archived articles, unlike in the reading later section. The RSS side of things definitely needs a bit of attention — it works, but it’s not quite ready for primetime.

Conclusion

Words App isn’t perfect, but there’s a lot in it to love. Its new themes, responsive text, and nice multi-column reading view definitely makes it stand out in a market saturated by Reeder lookalikes. The option to parse the full linked articles in RSS feeds rather than showing the original link post is neat, though it’d have been nicer to have a way to see both the linked post and the original post.

It’s not the app for people who live and die by RSS feeds. If you really want the very fastest native RSS reader, you need to get the new NetNewsWire 4 beta. And if you want an RSS reader that’ll sync with the best new RSS services and reading later services, you need to get ReadKit 2. Those are the best — the apps to beat — right now.

But, everyone doesn’t need that. Some just want to keep up with a few feeds, in addition to the articles you’ve curated in your reading later service. For that, Words is perfect. It gives you a nice place to read, one much more like a newspaper or magazine than other apps. Even if it’s slower than the competition at syncing feeds, that won’t matter if RSS isn’t the biggest deal in the world to you.

Now, we just hope it takes the features it has right now, and irons out the bugs and speeds up the sync engine to make it an app that’s easier for anyone to love.