Category: Mac

In my constant search for new apps that are worthy of a review, I stumbled across a pretty minimalistic to-do app called Done in the Mac App Store. After a few weeks of trying it out, I’ve found myself using it almost everyday and preferring it over my usual to-do app, Wunderlist.

This got me thinking about similar minimal to-do apps like Clear, and where they might fit in a workflow. Are they really necessary? Are they just surrounded by hype? Why would you pay for a premium for an app like this?

Done

Done is as simple as a to-do app can get. There’s no synchronization, no iCloud linking, no registering or logging in, no iPhone apps or complicated task inputs. Instead, with Done you get a light and intelligible interface, with just a couple columns and big, prominent text and buttons on the forefront of a pale, paper-like background.

Done Interface

There’s nothing to configure or set up, what you see on first sight is all there is to the app. A sidebar gives access to a button for creating new lists, as well as navigation buttons for browsing through a view that shows active and past tasks, or a view that hides completed activities and shines a light on the current ones.

Starting a new task is very similar to Wunderlist: you just type it into the text box while browsing the list you’d like your task to go into. Everything else is just what you’d expect, check a task to mark it as done, and there’s a configurable keyboard shortcut for automatically opening the app and creating a new task. It can be that simple.

Clear

We’ve covered Clear before: it’s a beautifully designed app that relies solely on touch gestures to get you across. It’s colorful, simple and expensive. Its design might be familiar to iOS users (there’s also a complimentary Clear iPhone app, where it started out originally), but when brought to the Mac it’s a truly unique thing to see.

Clear Interface

Just like Done, it has support for different lists, but beyond that there’s not much to the app other than creating new tasks and marking them as completed. So, what justifies the $9.99 price tag, compared to free apps like the similar Done and the more complete Wunderlist?

A Premium for What Exactly?

It’s hard to justify the staggering price of Clear when most of its competitors go for free and offer many more features, but given the success of the app, there are plenty of people willing to pay a premium for the app.

Done, while just as simplistic in nature, lacks the interactivity and visual stunningness of Clear, but unlike it it’s also free and has no learning curve at all. On the other hand, Clear takes quite a while to get into: it’s meant to be used fast when you’re already familiar with it, but getting used to it is the difficult part just because it’s a tad unconventional. Its main strength is also a problem in terms of adaptability.

Clear Prices

Compared to Wunderlist, which offers wider platform support for free and a much more conventional approach to the category, Clear takes the upper hand in terms of design and simplicity. It feels much more rewarding to use: it is very pleasing on the eye and its “slide to mark as complete” feature provide a special kind of satisfaction, much better than just clicking on a box to check it off. Overall, it’s a better experience at the expense of a few features and some bucks.

Less Is Better?

Even though I am a user of Wunderlist and I’ve tried tons of to-do apps out there (we all know there certainly isn’t a shortage of them out there), there’s something about Done and Clear that caught my eye and made me interested in giving them a try.

Wunderlist

See, there’s a point when apps like Wunderlist get too needlessly complex for daily tasks, and they end up getting in your way instead of being useful. I don’t really need to set dates, “starred” items and collaboration members just to set my daily tasks in the morning. Those things have their time and place, but it’s a bit annoying having to deal with all the bells and whistles that these apps have, when I just want a simple way to input tasks for the day and cross them off later. I mean, didn’t we use to do this kind of thing in a plain piece of paper?

Conclusion

I’m not knocking elaborate to-do apps, I’m just making an observation that perhaps, when it comes to managing such mundane tasks as setting and crossing off duties, less is better and something simpler might make you more productive, which is ultimately the goal of this type of apps.

I still use Wunderlist for collaborative lists and for keeping up with long term projects and tasks, but for daily usage I find it easier and more comfortable to use something a tad less demanding. What about you? Do you prefer your apps to be simplistic, and if so, would you pay a premium for that kind of thing? What works for you in terms of productivity?

Theme Hospital was, and remains, one of my favourite simulation games. In your time with the game, you build and manage a hospital that has to deal with a variety of illnesses and have the facilities to do so. But Theme Hospital is not the only government-funded accommodation simulator on the block.

Prison Architect is a business management and simulation game currently in development by Introversion Software. Prison Architect is all about building and maintaining a high-security prison, implementing facilities such as visitation and labour, and reacting to the dynamic needs of your inmates. It’s still an alpha build but since it’s widely available through Steam, we’re going to take a look at it in this review.

Day One

When you launch Prison Architect, you’ll be given an empty plot of land, eight workmen and $10,000 in the bank. As you’d expect (yet unlike a game like Theme Hospital), the prison is entirely of your construction so before designating rooms or hiring more staff, you’ll need to actually mark out foundations and have the outer structure of the building formed.

Prison Architect is presented in a single, top-down view that allows for grid-based planning of your prison.

Once your small army of workmen have built your outer design, you can begin to construct internal walls and place objects. These objects are almost everything that you’d expect from a prison, ranging from metal detectors to serving tables for the canteen. They don’t instantly spawn in, however. Instead, your workmen will collect them from a designated delivery area and then carry them into your prison – being held up by any security layers you’ve put in their way. This is a welcome change from the norm of construction simulators, as you can change your mind and cancel the placing of objects, or dismantle pre-built ones, and have them moved to storage to be used in the future at no further cost.

A Puppet Warden

In order for your prison to be run efficiently, you’ll need to hire staff such as guards, cooks, janitors and administrators. Some of these jobs need to be researched but the essential guards, cooks and workmen can be hired from the start. You’ll also need to hire some administrators, the first of which is a warden.

Employing prisoners in the workshop and laundry will help to reduce staffing costs and create assets for the prison to sell.

While you’ll need a warden in your prison, you’re the real warden in Prison Architect. You’ll need to tweak the prisoner’s regime to accommodate their changing needs and react to an influx of new inmates, choosing when to cut off supply or expand your personnel to meet them. When your inmates’ collective needs get higher than what you can handle, riots will occur and it’ll be your job to lock down areas of the prison and call in the emergency services to react. Being an alpha, not everything in your management arsenal works, though; riot guards, for example, can be called in but they’ll just stand around until you tell them to leave.

Alpha Inmates

Prison Architect is still very much in development, receiving near-monthly updates to the alpha build. Developers Introversion aren’t exactly secretive about the game’s development progress but it still feels more polished than I first imagined. There are bugs and you will notice them, but they aren’t enough to make Prison Architect feel more like a technical demo than something you can actually sink hours in. Sure, I needed to go into my save file and manually edit some abandoned vehicles out a few times, but I still managed to sink more than twenty hours into the game in less than a week.

Let your prisoners get unhappy and you’ll have a riot on your hand.

Financing, as a game mechanic, is a specific game mechanic that I oft took issue with during my time with the game. Once you’ve built the bare essentials of a working prison, you’ll want to expand but the only sustainable source of income is from prisoners and it can get boring to just wait for midnight for some more funds, especially when your prison isn’t constantly encountering rioting and other incidents. You can get extra money through grants, but there’s only four in the game and your money from these will still run out fast.

Prison Architect is certainly not a bug-free experience.

Of course, though, Prison Architect is still in development so hopefully further expansion and bug fixing is on the way.

Final Thoughts

Prison Architect is really fun and my Steam playtime suggests it’s ended up being a little more addicting than I had initially thought. The game is fairly easy to pick up but it takes a while to instinctively optimise your layout, staffing and regime. However, once you have the basics down you can play a lot more efficiently and expand a lot more rapidly.

Reviewing this game in an earlier alpha build would probably involve complaining about some of the missing essentials, but in my time with Alpha 11, I didn’t feel like anything vital was MIA. However, there’s definitely a lot of room for expansion and that’s something to look forward to in the months to come. It might be a while before Prison Architect gets out of alpha but, even today, it offers up an entertaining and relatively bug-free experience that will have you playing for hours.

Phone calls — the original electronic communications, after the telegraph anyhow — are still an important part of life today. We might take our calls on pocket-sized supercomputers, but they’re still phone calls. And there’s nothing more annoying than having to break out of your work to reach in your pocket and take a phone call. Plus, if you want to call someone whose number you found online, it’s annoying you can’t just copy the number and call it directly without using having money in Skype.

That’s all changed, now, with the new app Dialogue. Rather than routing all of your calls over the internet, it lets you use your phone — any phone with Bluetooth 2.0 or newer, not just an iPhone — directly through your Mac. Here’s how.

The World’s Largest Bluetooth Headset: Your Mac

An incoming call, on your Mac

Imagine this: you sit down at your desk, ready to work. A half hour later, a phone call comes in. You see a notification right on your screen, complete with caller ID, and can either accept it and get the call done in one click, or you can decline it and keep on working. An hour later, you need to call your client about the project you’re working on, so you just head up to your Mac menubar, search for their name, and call them instantly from your Mac. Perhaps you need to keep a record of the call, so you let them know and then start recording your conversation. With that done, you go back to work — but then you get a call right before you’re done with work. You start the conversation on the Mac, then when you’re done working you just pull your phone out and keep talking.

Sound good? With Dialogue, that’s entirely possible.

Simple phone connections

It’s insanely easy to get working. You install the app, then turn your phone’s Bluetooth on and click Connect in the Dialogue app. You’ll need to select your phone from the nearby devices, then seconds later you’ll be connected. That’s it. Best of all, if you go away from your Mac and come back, or the next time you restart the Dialogue, it will automatically reconnect to your phone without you doing anything.

Now, any call that comes into your phone will bring up a Dialogue notification as seen in the first picture, where you can accept or decline the call. It’s essentially getting your phone to treat your Mac as a Bluetooth headset, and routing the audio through your Mac. Obviously, you’ll get the best results with a headset connected to your Mac, but that’s easy enough if you’re already using your Apple earbuds to listen to music throughout the workday.

Contacts are integrated seamlessly

Making a call is equally easy. You can search through your contacts and call numbers with a single click, straight from your Mac. And, as mentioned before, you can record audio of calls with one tap while you’re on a call, though you should remember to tell the person that you’re talking to that you’ll be recording the call, or otherwise it could be illegal in some areas.

Wait While I Pause iTunes

Dialogue works great for the most part — I did get it to crash once by hanging up on the phone instead of through the app, though then couldn’t get it to crash again with the same thing afterwards. But, it isn’t 100% smart. It won’t pause your iTunes music while you’re on a call, or mute other audio. And, there’s no way to accept or decline a call with a keyboard shortcut, something that’d make the app an even better productivity boost. Here’s to hoping it’ll improve going forward.

An App That’ll Be Even Better in Mavericks

Dialogue is great today, but in just a few more months, it’ll seem like an even more obvious part of your workflow when iOS 7 and OS X Mavericks are released, since Mavericks is supposed to have unified notifications from your iPhone. When one of your iPhone apps sends you a push notification, it can show up on your Mac desktop so you’ll stay informed without having to pull your phone out of your pocket. And now, with Dialogue, you’ll be able to take your calls just the same — straight from your Mac, without having to stop what you’re doing.

If Facetime and Skype already keep you from needing to make normal voice calls that often, you might not find Dialogue that needed. But, if you’ve ever wished there was a way to make normal calls straight from your Mac, Dialogue is a no-brainer to buy. It works great, looks great, and makes a lot more sense than wearing a bluetooth headset all day.

Now, the Zebraa team just needs to make it a little smarter, and it’d be the perfect Mac+phone integration.

Have you ever thought about picking up that abandoned guitar that has been in your basement since high school? Learning to play the guitar shouldn’t be something difficult and expensive anymore, especially since there are so many tools out there that can turn your Mac into everything you could ever need to learn and master this instrument.

Today we’ve gathered up our favorite guitar-related apps for the Mac, thinking about each of them from the perspective of a beginner guitarist. Here are the 10 best apps we’ve found to help any budding guitarist get started — and perhaps give old-timers a helping hand as well.

Learning

We all have to start somewhere! These are apps that will teach you basic concepts that any guitarist ought to know.

Practice

Have you ever heard about the 10,000 Hour theory? Well, let’s just say if you want to be a pro, you better get working.

Tune

These are simple tools that will help you keep your instrument in tune.

Play & Record

These is where the fun begins: apps for recording your creations and messing around with different sounds.

Conclusion

That’s about it! We hope at least one of these apps catches your eye an helps you learn, practice and have fun with your new instrument — or help you get more out of the instrument you’ve already grown to love.

Are there any apps we missed and you’d like to recommend to a beginner? Post them in the comments!

Apple’s upcoming OS X Mavericks is a great new overhaul to OS X, bringing better performance and battery life along with new features such as Finder tabs and tags, Maps and iBooks, better multiple display support, and more that we’ve been wanting forever. We still don’t know exactly when it’s coming, but Apple’s promised that it’s coming this fall, and that’s not too far away now.

But every time a new version of OS X comes out, you have to make the decision of how quickly you’ll upgrade. Many of us love to jump the gun and install it the first second the new version’s available, or even go ahead and start using the beta full-time before it’s been officially released. Others prefer to hold out for the first wave of updates and bug fixes, to make sure it’s working smooth when they upgrade. And some never upgrade, sticking with the version of OS X their Mac came with until they buy a new one.

Which camp are you in? Are you planning to install Mavericks the first moment it’s in the App Store, or are you going to wait and see how it’s working for everyone else? Or, will you stick with the Lion you already have installed?

I’m always somewhat amused at the attention screenshot tools get on the Mac. Back when I used a PC every day, a 3rd party screenshot and quick image editing tool was quite the necessity. Saying Prnt Scrn and Paint didn’t quite cut it is the understatement of the decade. But on the Mac, there’s an embarrassment of riches for screenshots and quick editing built into your Mac, for free.

Frustrated about Realmac’s new replacement for LittleSnapper, Ember? Think Skitch 2 isn’t as good as it used to be? Here’s why Preview is the best built-in app on the Mac, and why you shouldn’t even worry about finding a replacement for either of them.

The Best Simple Image Editor You Can Get for Free

The simple edits app that’s built into your Mac.

You’ve surely used Preview before, if for nothing else than to view PDFs and other files that you don’t have an app to open. It’s absolutely great for viewing files, since it can display so many different filetypes — everything from images, icons, and even Photoshop files to most standard iWork and Office files like Word documents and Excel spreadsheets. Anything you can open, you can export in another format, giving you a simple, built-in way to turn a Word document into a PDF, or an icon file into a .png image.

That’s nice — but Quick Look can show you all of these files by just pressing your space bar, so aside from reading a full PDF, you wouldn’t ever need to open Preview viewing. The annotations and tweaking tools, though, are what makes Preview such an important app. There’s everything you could think of from standard apps like Skitch: square, circle, text box, speech bubble, line, and arrow tools, complete with one-click color change and thickness settings. Want to change the text? Just

You want to tweak color and sharpness and more? Sure, no problem.

You won’t find a blur tool to knock out sensitive info, but you can select an area and “delete” it to your default background color. And for selection, there’s all the tools you could want, including an instant Alpha and a magic lasso tool that works very well. Then, you’ll even find options to tweak the exposure, contrast, saturation, and the color levels of your photos, so Preview even works as an easy way to make your vacation pictures pop.

Resize and scale, with better results than in other apps.

But perhaps you don’t want to edit the photos. Perhaps you just want to take a screenshot, and crop or scale it, then save it in the format you want. Preview’s still the tool for you. You can quickly select the area you want to crop and crop it, or scale the image to the resolution you want — just enter one side’s dimensions, and Preview will automatically keep the other side proportional if you have the lock on. You can even tweak the resolution of the image and see how the changes will affect the filesize. And, if you want to speed things up even more, you can add keyboard shortcuts for any of the tools that don’t have a keyboard shortcut from your Mac keyboard preferences.

As a quick refresher: you can take screenshots of your full screen in OS X by pressing CMD+shift+3, or of an area you want by pressing CMD+Shift+4, or of a specific window by pressing CMD+Shift+4, then the space bar, and then clicking on the window you want. Your screenshots will be saved to the desktop, ready for you to edit with Preview.

All the great Mac features you’d expect

Throw in all the other default OS X features that other apps may or may not support — file versions, iCloud sync between your Macs, Automator and Applescript support, quick sharing options, and more — and you’ve got the perfect quick image editor that you’ll likely use for everything from quick resizes to annotations once you’re used to using it. Like Skitch’s option to drag the file from the bottom of the window to the folder where you want to save it? You can do the same from the file icon in the top of Preview, and could even drag it straight to Droplr or Cloudapp to share it — or use those app’s shortcuts to auto-upload directly from Preview.

It’s Not Just for Images

Preview’s great for viewing and marking up other files, too.

Remember the other filetypes that Preview supports beyond images? Even after all the great image editing features, you can still view PDFs in an app that works much better that Adobe Reader, and can annotate them as well. You can’t edit existing text, but you can highlight and markout text, add in extra text, draw shapes and callouts and notes on your PDF, and even merge multiple PDFs or rearrange their pages. You can even sign PDFs by signing a piece of paper and holding it up to your Mac’s camera. It’s great, and will keep you from needing to spend money on a PDF editor.

The Competition

Skitch 2 for Mac

So, Preview’s not the only game in town. There’s Snagit for Mac and the new Ember on the paid side, among other apps, and Evernote’s Skitch for free. But honestly, Preview and OS X’ default screenshot tools are equally as good as the competition, if not better, and they’re free. They’re built-into your Mac. And they work great.

It’s great that there’s tons of other apps trying to improve screenshot editing and visual idea storage, but for normal screenshots and annotations, your Mac’s already got the best tools.

They’re good enough for our team, anyhow, and I’m rather pleased with it.

Growl, the original notifications app on the Mac, has been one of the mainstays in the realm of pro Mac apps for years now. If you want to keep up with everything that’s happening with your apps and accounts, you had Growl. It was also free, but a couple years ago started charging to support its updates — and not too long after, Apple added notifications to OS X, making Growl a harder sell.

But Growl‘s still great. With the apps that support it, you can tweak your notifications, get everything in one rolled-up list, or forward notifications to the OS X Notifications Center if you want. You can find out more about what’s going on with your Mac with addons like HardwareGrowler, and much more. It does plenty to justify the $3.99 it costs on the App Store.

And, even better, we’ve got 3 copies for our readers this week!

The new Growl — with OS X Notifications integration.

To get your chance at a copy of Growl, just leave a comment below and tell us why you still want Growl today, and how you plan to put it to use if you win a copy. Then, you can share the giveaway on your social networks and leave a second comment below with a link to your post to get an extra entry.

Hurry and get your entry in; our contest closes on Friday, August 2nd!

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

Everyone loves a great deal — but how about a great deal once a week? That’s exactly what Two Dollar Tuesday, our sponsor this week, brings to the world of Mac apps: a great Mac app each week for just $2.

Even better, this week the Two Dollar Tuesday team has a whole bundle of 7 apps for just $10. The $10 Bundle brings you iTeleport to connect to remote computers, A Better Finder Renamer to help you quickly rename and organize your files, Chronicle to keep up with your bills, Focus to tweak your photos,AppDelete to fully remove apps from your Mac, Animix to animate your photos, and Deal Alert to help you find the very best deals online. It’s a great set of apps — all for just $10!

But even after this week, the Two Dollar Tuesday team will keep bringing you great deals, with at least one great app for $2 each week. That’s enough to make you want to keep up with their site.

The Deal Site You Should Follow

If you love getting good deals on Mac apps, then Two Dollar Tuesday is the deals site you should follow. They’ve got great apps on sale for just $2 each week — with bundles and more as well. And if you’re a developer, Two Dollar Tuesday is a great site to work with to get your app’s deal featured. Be sure to subscribe to their site and follow @TwoDollarTues on Twitter if you haven’t already!

When you get a laptop, you lose a typical connivence from using a desktop, where you could lay one hand on the keyboard and the other on the mouse. From the moment that you open the lid for the first time, you gotta make the choice: trackpad or keyboard. I picked the keyboard as my favorite place to keep my hands, perhaps because I write quite a bit, you know?

Maybe you’re a writer, a developer or just can’t get used to the trackpad. Either way, this is a roundup of the best keyboard-centric apps for you, a keyboard lover.

Launchbar or Alfred

You knew that these apps would be in this roundup, so I’ll take them out first. Hitting the shortcut to display any of these apps is opening such a large range of possibilities, it definitely wouldn’t fit into a single article. With both of these apps, you can dig into the deeper settings of your Mac, manipulate files in plenty of ways, and search through your computer in a way Spotlight envies. Launchbar and Alfred are the kind of apps that turn you into a keyboard-junkie by themselves.

Keyboard Maestro

Another easy pick, Keyboard Maestro defies the limits of what keyboard shortcuts can do. It allows you to create sequences of actions (macros) triggered by the keyboard or many other ways, such as system wake or wifi connection. You can organize your actions into palettes and only make them available from there, giving you almost infinite possibilities to activate your macros. It’s so much power, you can make any application keyboard-centric just by using this app.

Moom

Honestly, most window management apps could be here, like Spectacle, Divvy or Cinch; Moom just wins me over on personal preferences. It allows you to create specific window-sizes and assign keyboard shortcuts to them. That way, for example, you can designate your window to be only one-third of the screen or even move it to a different display with a keystroke. Moom and other window management apps are essentials to keyboard users, especially if they’re on a laptop, struggling to fit content on the screen.

Mail Act-On

Most may complain that the default Mail.app is no good to look at. That’s not a lie, although the real power of Mail is only unleashed after you tweak your workflow a bit and grab a few plugins. Mail Act-On the first and best, as it allows you to trigger Mail rules with keyboard shortcuts. It’s a beast working with MailTags, but a gem even on its own. For example, you can send emails perfectly formatted in HTML to Evernote with a single shortcut and some Applescript. Ain’t that wonderful?

Apptivate

If you just want a quick way to launch applications, perhaps the free Apptivate is your best shot. It lets you set quick shortcuts to any file in your Mac, including apps or even videos and music. What’s the most interesting about Apptivate are the combos of shortcuts it offers, for example, configuring an app to only open after 2 keyboard shortcuts are hit. Unfortunately, there’s no indication if you’re moving deeper within your shortcut sequences, so you’ve gotta work from memory.

FastScripts

Scripts allow you to do wonders in your Mac, the only problem is activating them every time you need them. FastScripts not give you a quick access to most of the default scripts of your Mac from the menubar, but also lets you attach shortcuts to them, giving you an easy going way to trigger your favorite scripts from the keyboard. It is available with an unlimited trial with a limit of 10 script shortcuts — which maybe will be all the shortcuts you need.

Shortcat

Every previous mention is about triggering stuff, opening with your keyboard and navigating through your files. But what if you want to deal with the actual content in front of you from your keyboard, such as a website? This little beta, Shortcat, comes to your service. It searches your active window according to the terms you add as you call it from a shortcut. Then it highlights your options on the screen, which can also be accessed with an extra string. And you will never touch that mouse again.

Hyperswitch

If there’s one keyboard shortcut everyone knows, it is ?+Tab to open the application switcher. The one on the Mac is disappointing, especially if you manipulate more than a single instance from the same app. It’s the kind of thing to blame for your girlfriend having twenty Safari windows open without knowing it, causing her to call you complaining of the computer’s performance (true story). Hyperswitch brings window previews and allows you to select windows from the same app using the arrow keys and much more. It’s keyboard lover’s dream.

TextExpander

Just because you’re a keyboard lover doesn’t mean that you like typing at all. Actually, we try to avoid it as much as possible. TextExpander is easily the best known app for creating snippets of text triggered by tiny abbreviations; however, it is not about expanding into larger words as much as it is doing quick date maths, dealing with your clipboard, pressing common keys or creating templates for you to fill-in. Or maybe you just want to type your name quicker. TextExpander is there for you.

CheatSheet

Truth be told, you can’t rely on your memory to keep track of every keyboard shortcut available out there in the wild. CheatSheet is a free app that, as you hold the ? key for a few seconds will display every keyboard shortcut available from the active window. Then you can simply click on the action you want or use the prescribed string to proceed with your desired action. There’s also KeyCue for barely the same features, but that will set you back 25 bucks.

The Hit List

People say The Hit List is dead, and its users are switching to other GTD apps. Still, none of them offer what THL was always the best with: effortless interaction with the keyboard. THL went beyond the quick creation of tasks with shortcuts and introduced ways to move, manipulate and jump to different screens without leaving your keyboard even once. Plus easy, one-key shortcuts as those you find on Gmail and other web apps.

We reported before about The Hit List being abandonware back in October 2010. Seven months later, The Hit List hit the App Store without previous notice. Now yet again, it has been forsaken for more than a year with no public news from its developer, Andy Kim. I actually received an email from him a few weeks ago promising news from THL soon, though, so let’s cross our fingers for, at least, iCloud sync and the promise of more active development before Mavericks comes along.

Conclusion

There you have it, at your fingertips: a list of apps that will make you never touch your trackpad again. Ok, maybe that’s too much to expect, but at least you won’t be so dependent on it. Plus, with these apps, you just opened the possibilities of automatization in your Mac. If you don’t want any app at all, remember you can do a few magic tricks with keyboard shortcuts from the Keyboard settings at System Preferences. Or, with a bit more keyboard work, you could code up your own keyboard centric apps — and get the rest of us to switch to them!

What’s your favorite keyboard centric apps? We’d love to hear your favorites in the comments below.

CloudApp and Droplr have been the two main ways most of us quickly share one-off files from our Macs. They’re so simple to use, it’s hard to find a reason not to keep one of them around. But then, they’re so similar, it’s tough to pick between the two.

I’ve used CloudApp for years now, even sticking with it after digging deeply into the differences between the two apps. But recently, I’ve switched to Droplr. Their new Mac app and iOS apps are so nice, it’s hard not to switch to Droplr once you’ve tried it again.

The new Droplr for Mac

I wrote about the reasons I switched to Droplr, and why you should give it a shot, over on Web.AppStorm. Check out the full article for the scoop on why, right now, Droplr is the best simple way to share files.

Continue Reading on Web.AppStorm…

Some games go big. Not content to produce a tiny slice of virtual reality, they craft entire worlds for you to wander and inhabit. Bethesda’s latest Elder Scrolls title, the enormously popular — and just plain enormous — open-world fantasy role-playing game Skyrim stands as one of the best examples of this epic scope, and this appears to be what Crescent Moon’s Ravensword: Shadowlands tries to replicate.

Ravensword doesn’t have Skyrim’s hundreds of hours of questing and exploring, but it still manages an impressive few dozen hours — which is doubly notable for the fact that it was made on a budget a fraction of the size of Skyrim’s and it’s being sold at a fraction of the price.

Blank Slate

You take control of a warrior who alone survived a great battle between man and the forces of the underworld. In typical video game fashion, he has no memories and his skills have atrophied. You will, over the course of playing, mould his talents according to your play preferences, levelling up skills in different weapon classes other abilities and developing your four main attributes (strength, agility, endurance, vigor).

Oo-kaay, strange lady.

Most skills improve with practice, although you can also bump them up by paying for “training” or by equipping special items. Each level has a ceiling number for maximum ability in skills, which serves to keep all the systems balanced and to give you a challenge in every new area.

You can get body and shoulder armor, helmets/hats, pendants, rings, magical stones, shields, and weapons — which fall within one of five classes: blade, blunt, bow, powder (gun), and crossbow. These all change your appearance, and many can be imbued with special attributes (such as extra strength or agility) by fusing them with enhancement stones.

Picking one or two weapons classes to focus on gets best results — there’s very little difference between fighting with a sword versus an axe, or a bow versus a crossbow, but it helps if you can hold your own in close quarters and weaken enemies from a distance. Low attributes limit the accuracy, power, and speed of attacks, and there’s only so much you can do to compensate with weapon enhancements and stealth attacks.

I focused on swords, crossbows, and stealth attacks.

Not the Sharpest Tool in the Shed

Ravensword offers a large, beautiful, detailed world, and all the elements you’d expect of this sort of game — horses, magic, stealth, quests, upgrades, reputation, lockpicking, combat, optional subplot mysteries, hundreds of items, and much more. But Ravensword’s world is mostly empty, and its inhabitants are dumb as bricks.

This bucket was perhaps the smartest foe I encountered.

Non-playable characters stand motionless or wander back and forth as though lost, then offer wooden, boring dialogue that adds little to flesh the plot or backstory — with a few humorous exceptions and corny pop-culture references. Enemies and animals patrol set patches, mostly standing still until they see you. You can often pick them off at your leisure by strategically standing in a direct path blocked by some obstacle — like a log or broken boulder — or, if you’re skilled with ranged weapons, just outside their detection area.

Combat would be decent if it weren’t for issues like this. With enemy AI so inept, it tends to degenerate into a battle of brute-forced wits. A bit of strategy creeps in on the rare occasion you’re not just slogging at each other, though. You have limited energy. Each weapon attack uses a small amount of energy, as does each use of magic. Magic is more effective at stunning foes — even when you’re not using the freeze attack — but it also costs more energy than even swinging an axe.

You can only equip one magic attack and one weapon at a time, although there are six quick-change buttons for swapping between them. This quick changing works remarkably well, saving you from repeatedly going through the clunky menu inventory.

Quick changing to the sword for the kill strike. There’s a first-person view option, by the way.

Interfacing

The menus, as a whole, suck. It doesn’t seem like any effort was made to adapting them to mouse and keyboard instead of the original touch controls (Ravensword debuted on iOS). Inventory appears in a row that you have to drag left and right — a gesture that’s comfortable with a finger but annoying with a mouse. The Stats, Talent, and Quest menus translate well to the Mac, but the Map leaves a lot to be desired.

You have two ways of accessing the map. You can pull up the tiny mini-map that sits in the top right corner of the screen and varies between totally and partly useless. Or you can press Escape and select the Map menu item, which brings up a complete stylized map of the game. This shows a few basic terrain details and marks out each of the different areas. If you’re not inside a building and you’ve visited an area at least once, you can use fast travel.

“I’m somewhere where I don’t know where I am.”

The trouble is that the Shadowlands are really big, and neither map actually helps you figure out where exactly you are. Both provide some general direction, but if you want to go to a particular place within an area you’ll have to just wander around until you stumble upon it. Going on visual landmarks helps you if you’ve been playing for a while, but even then I had trouble distinguishing one spot from another — in the main town especially, buildings look the same.

Victim of Its Own Ambition

That’s not to take away from Ravensword’s visual splendor. It often throws up breathtaking vistas, and there’s plenty of character in the design of each area and enemy type. The Shadowlands are indeed huge; it’s just that Ravensword fails to make full use of the space, and it struggles to convince you that you’re more than a tourist — just stopping by to soak in some of the sights and sounds before moving along. People still play Skyrim, two years after release; how many will stick with Ravensword after two months?

Sometimes Ravensword is really pretty; I’m on a horse.

It plays and looks like what it is: a well-produced ambitious mobile game ported to OS X with little consideration for the Mac’s extra horsepower or the different needs of the platform. Along the way, its ambition turned half-assed; Ravensword is a poor man’s Elder Scrolls game. It’s good, but with way too many caveats to recommend on merit alone.

If you can play Skyrim or Oblivion, do that instead; for the rest of us, Ravensword’s a decent imitation at a bargain bin price.

Here at Mac.Appstorm, we love finding apps that can simplify our work — especially when it comes to Markdown writing apps that make it easier to craft our articles. We’ve looked at 35 unique Markdown apps for the Mac — a series of editors, previewers, and other categories where Markdown can be applied. Adding to the list is 9Muses’ Erato ($5.99). It’s a simple and minimalistic app designed for editing and viewing your Markdown documents side-by-side, following the split-screen concept adopted by apps like Mou and Markdown Pro.

Besides its beautiful and simple design, what sets Erato apart is how it offers additional support for Github-flavoured Markdown syntax and YAML front matter. But while these may be its unique selling points, Erato as a Markdown editor isn’t as powerful as Mou or other more robust editors. And after testing the app, I realised that it still has to iron out a few bugs, particularly with how it converts Markdown to HTML.

Let me walk you through the app to show you what I mean.

Clunky Conversion to HTML

Erato: your workspace.

Erato offers you a clean slate to work with the moment you launch the app. You have the black editor on the left and the white preview pane on the right. If you already have a good grasp of the standard syntax, jump right in and start writing your article, essay, or blog post in Markdown.

If you use GitHub-flavoured Markdown or YAML front matter, you’ll find that Erato is a great editor to use when writing with both. You can now define a blog post’s meta data, add friendly line breaks, quick quoting, and insert fenced code blocks and task lists.

This is cool if you use any of these frequently when writing in Markdown, but Erato seems to have trouble converting basic Markdown syntax. For instance, after bolding or italicising a word and hitting the Return key, Erato would treat the next line as an unordered list item by automatically inserting the asterisk first.

Might be a bug somewhere.

Another instance would be how an ordered list would appear as a bulleted (unordered) list on the preview pane. I’ve tried creating another ordered list after breaking a few paragraphs to see if it would repeat the problem. Thankfully, it converted it to a numbered list properly this time.

More problems with how Erato converts Markdown to HTML.

These issues get in the way with the writing process. It confuses the user, leaving him or her wondering if s/he is using the correct format. So until the developers squash these bugs in the next update, you can toggle the preview pane to work with just the editor by hitting ??P or by clicking on the left arrow button at the top right portion of the preview pane.

The Good and the Lacking

Erato comes with different themes for both the editor and preview pane.

Besides support for GitHub-flavoured Markdown and YAML front matter, Erato’s features include live scrolling, autocompletion of ordered/unordered lists, task lists, and blockquotes; auto-indentation for code blocks; and Mac retina display and full-screen support. In the customisation department, you can choose from four editor themes, two preview themes, and different font faces and sizes. In Preferences, you can tell Erato to indent code blocks with four spaces instead of using the tab button and to use GitHun-flavoured Markdown.

In terms of saving your work, Erato autosaves and resumes so you can always go back to where you left off whenever you launch the app. You can also take a look at previous versions to see if there’s anything you’d like to go back to when writing—definitely a huge plus for me.

But with these features, you would expect support for MultiMarkdown, a superset of Markdown that adds other formatting features like footnotes, citations, and tables. Unfortunately, it works with just the basics, so you’ll have to stick to the standard syntax when creating your documents.

The truth is I’m more irked by the fact that Erato doesn’t have the ability to copy the raw HTML of your work. You can only export your Markdown document to either HTML or PDF. With Markdown Pro or Byword, I’d just copy the HTML format and paste it onto the text editor to be edited and published right after.

Finally, Erato doesn’t have keyboard shortcuts to quickly add formatting to your document, so you can’t use Ctrl+B or Ctrl+I when editing specific words or phrases. It’s quite frustrating after getting used to doing so with shortcuts, so it may take some getting used to.

Torn In Between

The pros and cons of using Erato are pretty clear cut. On one hand, you have a simple and clean Markdown editor that extends itself by giving you more flexibility in terms of formatting and saving your content. You can also go back to previous versions in case you need to retrieve or pull out past content. On the other hand, there are certain features and issues that Erato needs to add and address. You have keyboard shortcuts and copy HTML, which are must-haves for a Markdown editor. There is also the inconsistency of the app’s ability to convert Markdown to HTML, which I hope will get sorted out soon.

Overall, Erato continues to be a work in progress with lots of potential. I look forward to seeing significant improvements to the app that would give it the oomph it needs to contest existing editors, particularly those that cater to more advanced Markdown users.

Did you just get a new Mac? Or maybe you’ve had one for a long time and are just looking for some cool affordable apps to download. Either way, we’ve got a fun roundup for you. There are a bunch of paid apps on the App Store, and many of them do their job well, but what about free ones? What if you don’t want to pay for a new text or photo editor? There are a lot of free and open-source alternatives to popular apps, but they’re often hard to find.

In this roundup, we’ve gathered a list of great free apps that you should download, even if for a moment to try them out. They’re great, and you’ll likely find at least a few to add to your workflow. They’re also all native apps not tied to a service — so you won’t find the likes of Evernote and Droplr — so you can use the apps anywhere, anytime.

Here’s the best free stuff, just for your Mac, in 2013.

If you enjoy using these apps, please consider donating to the developers or purchasing one of their other paid apps to show your gratitude.

Notes, Task Management, Markdown, and Word Processing

Grandview: instant fullscreen writing.

• Imagine — Quite possibly the best little text editor for the Mac. It supports Markdown, has eight background colors, and saves everything in a plain or rich text file for easy access in any other editor. Imagine is the most affordable way to go distraction-free.
  
• TextWrangler — A contender for the top-of-the-line text editor. This is basically the free version of BBEdit, one of the most popular text editing apps available. It can be used for coding, server administration, basic text editor, and much much more. It even has the ability to open a file from an FTP server directly and then save it back there once finished, which is handy for Web developers.
• Brackets — If you don’t like TextWrangler, there’s always Adobe’s open-source code editor Brackets. It’s updated ever two and a half weeks and includes many handy features, from fullscreen editing and a beautiful interface to syntax highlighting. Check it out.
• OpenOffice — It’s one of the most powerful and popular open-source word processing apps on the market. If you really need to edit a Word document and aren’t in the mood to spend $20 on Pages, this is the perfect alternative. It’ll perform as well as Microsoft Word, but without the hefty price tag. And, it just got updated to v.4.0, with a number of small improvements. There’s also its slightly-less-well-known fork, LibreOffice, but they’re both very similar.
• nvALT — Even though its user interface may not be as “pretty” as the default Notes app, Brett Terpstra’s little bit of jotting software is perfect for any type of note-taking. It can even sync with Simplenote, and is by far the best client on the Mac (Justnotes is second, but at $9.99 it’s under par). Best of all, Brett always keeps the app up to date, so you don’t have to worry about unreliability.
• Anxiety — A very basic to-do app. Its design is reminiscent of small preferences windows you’d find in older versions of OS X. That’s not a bad thing. In fact, it looks nice and behaves very well. The app syncs with Calendar and resides in your menu bar. It may be old (from 2007, actually, and for Leopard) but it still works great if you need something small.
• Done — Quick, shiny task management. It’s a good middle ground between Anxiety and Wunderlist, if the former isn’t enough and the latter is too much. Just create a list and get going.
• Grandview — This little app lets you enter a small fullscreen writing app to compose. Rather than open iA Writer, Byword, or Imagine, you can quickly trigger this tool with a hotkey and then write down what you’re thinking. When finished, the text will be copied to your clipboard for use elsewhere. It’s great for emails, short to-do lists, and other text documents.
• Ommwriter Dãna I — A full-screen distraction free writing environment, complete with 3 background themes, soundtracks, and keyboard sounds to take your mind away from your distractions and let you write. It’s a writing experience you shouldn’t miss, especially with the free version.

Photo Editing and Graphic Design

Autodesk’s SketchBook Express lets you draw anything.

• HDRtist — A quick way to process your photos with HDR (high dynamic range). You could go out and buy Photomatix Pro for $99, but that’d be a waste if all you need is some quick processing. HDRtist does a decent job for free, and it’s fairly easy to use.
  
• Fotor Photo Editor — This is a fantastic alternative to iPhoto. If you need some more advanced editing functions, Fotor will do the job nicely. It has a simple user interface with quick adjustments, frames, borders, and even a tilt-shift mode. If you would like to get started with photo editing, this is a great tool.
• Skitch — You’re telling me you use Preview for annotating images? Well, not after you use Skitch. It has a fantastic array of features for annotating, cropping, rotating, and inserting text into your images effortlessly. The app is developed by the Evernote team and it’s updated regularly (and, yes, it can function 100% without an Evernote account).
• SketchBook Express — Do you enjoy drawing on your computer? Take it to the next level with SketchBook Express. It includes a number of beautiful brushes, six layers of space for drawing, and a drag and drop feature for importing images. Grab a capacitive stylus and you’ll be set!

Utilities

Cyberduck makes editing files on your website a breeze.

• The Unarchiver — There was once a time when, to extract a RAR or StuffIt file, you had to download StuffIt Expander, which cost money. Well that is no longer an issue since the developers made the software free, but who cares? The Unarchiver does that much faster, also for free, and you’ll never notice its presence. Uncompress anything, from BinHex (whatever that is) to CABs and LBRs.
  
• Caffeine — You remember that one moment when you’re downloading an update, but your Mac refuses to stay on? Caffeine will give it some Kenyan brew and cheer it up for you. With one click, the app will stop your Mac from going to sleep. Handy.
• Wake Up Time — Alarms are easy on iOS devices, but if you don’t have one there are alternatives. Wake Up Time is the best free one we could find. It looks nice and makes setting an alarm extremely easy. Why not give it a try for tomorrow’s big early meeting?
• GeekTool — Make your desktop look like one from all the cool films. Using “Geeklets”, you can add information about your system right to your desktop, from CPU usage to internal temperature and battery health. On top of that, you can put the weather on there using Yahoo. There’s a whole lot more, too.
• Houdini — Rather than using the CMD + H shortcut to hide apps, Houdini will do it for you once they are inactive for a certain amount of time. It can be handy if you like an organized workspace.
• Spectacle — Another window control app, this time for organization. It will quickly resize windows to your preference with a quick few keystrokes.
• AppCleaner — There is no better way to uninstall an app. This will gather all related files and permanently remove the software from your computer. Don’t worry about any additional files being left on your system once the app has been removed with AppCleaner.
• Transmission — The smallest torrenting app available for Mac. It does everything you need in a speedy fashion and doesn’t take up as many resources as uTorrent.
• Cyberduck — A fantastic free FTP client. It’s been updated recently and supports FTP, SFTP, WebDAV, Cloud Files, and Amazon S3. If you need to edit code on your website or just upload some pictures to your portfolio, this will do the job well.
• Blackmagic Disk Speed Test — Find out if your flash drive is performing optimally. It also helps you if you need to know whether or not your SSD is still up to speed. In practical application, the app tells you whether or not your drive can play video.
• Onyx — It’s like CleanMyMac, and all those other things, but free. This app will make sure your Mac is running at optimal speed by allowing you to clear all caches quickly, even system ones. You can perform disc operations, too, and clean up all the other hidden unnecessary files on your Mac. Just make sure to read the instructions first.

Productivity

Your math homework is one shortcut from being done with Alfred.

• Alfred — With just a few keystrokes, you can do magic. Alfred makes it easy to launch an app quickly with a shortcut, search your entire Mac or the Web, and even empty the trash and perform other system actions. If you’ve decided to purchase the Powerpack license, we have a roundup of 16 Alfred workflows to help you get more out of the app.
• VirtualBox — It’s no Parallels or VMware, but Oracle’s small virtual machine app does a good job of letting you run Windows or Linux on your Mac without the need to dual-boot. Since it’s free, there aren’t any “convenience” features like Coherence in Parallels. Do you need them though?
• BootChamp — Don’t feel like using a virtual machine to run Windows on your Mac? Install Microsoft’s operating system using Boot Camp and then install Kainjow’s BootChamp to quickly restart to your Windows partition with one click from the menu bar.

Media

HandBrake makes those DVDs truly digital.

• Audacity — One of the most popular audio editing/recording apps available. It’s open-source and can do almost anything, if you have the time. When compared to GarageBand, it’s hard to see the appeal here, but some people like the plethora of plugins available for Audacity.
• Muzzy for iTunes — A menu bar app to control iTunes and view now playing artwork. It even has the option to display lyrics.
• VirtualDJ Home — Put your audiophile traits to good use at parties with a full DJ app. VirtualDJ Home is the best free app for any beginner disc jockey. Please note that you will need to purchase the Pro version if you want to use your turntable as a controller for more than ten minutes.
• VLC — It’s simply the best multimedia player for the Mac. With VLC, you can open anything from MKV to FLAC and play it back flawlessly. The app can even try to fix video files when they’re broken. It also opens Internet streams. What’s not to like? The only thing it can’t do is play Blu-Rays.
• HandBrake — Basically, the only DVD ripping app you should download. It also converts video files to playable formats and popular devices (iPhone, iPad, etc.). If you want to take your favorite films or TV shows with you, it’s the tool you need.

Games

Don’t save up for a supercar, race one now.

• Touchgrind — Use your Mac’s touchpad for something useful. (If you don’t have one, either buy one for this game or move on to the next listing — it’s required.) The game basically gives you the ability to control a small Tech Deck-like skateboard with your touchpad. It’s also Retina-optimized.
  
• CSR Racing — Need for Speed is no longer a pricey dream. CSR Racing makes it free (so long as you don’t opt in for those in-app purchases) to have a street race with a custom car. You can only do a certain amount per day since you run out of fuel, but if you leave it for a while the tank will fill back up. Use up that nitrous.
• Pocket Planes — From the developers of Nimble Quest comes a tycoon-style game in which you create a airplane enterprise and fly around VIPs. It’s fun, in a pixellated way.

And From You?

That’s all from us, but maybe you have some cool free apps you’ve been using lately. Tell us all about them in the comments. We want to know about your adventures into the depths of the App Store. Quests are also interesting. Either way, start typing!

When it comes to editing photographs on OS X, Apple users are quite spoilt for choice. Those who just want to remove those ghastly devil eyes from their holiday snaps and turn them into a fancy scrapbook for the rest of the family to coo over can use iPhoto, part of the iLife package, which is bundled in with all new Macs. Photographers looking for a few more advanced features often turn to Apple’s offering, Aperture, or Adobe’s Lightroom — both offering a feature set that keeps most semi-professional and professional photographers happy.

You’ll notice my use of the word “often” in the above paragraph — this is because that for most, Aperture and Lightroom seem to be the de facto options. Funnily enough, there are other professional photographic programs out there for Mac users that offer a feature set that rivals both Aperture and Lightroom. To see whether this statement was true or not, I took a look at Capture One Pro, from Danish developers Phase One. What is interesting about these guys is that they are both a hardware and software manufacturer — the company sells camera bodies for professional use and lenses to match — much like Nikon does with its Capture NX 2 software.

Let’s see whether Capture One Pro lives up to the reputation of Aperture and Lightroom and, perhaps more importantly, if it is worth that €229 ($300) price-tag.

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Getting Started

Luckily enough, there is a demonstration version of Capture One Pro available for download from Phase One’s website (the demonstration version will be featured in this review, however it offers full functionality of the program’s features for 30 days after installation). You’ll need a pretty powerful Mac to run Capture One Pro — the recommended system requirements listed on the product’s website are 4 GB of RAM and at least 10 GB of free web space.

The startup screen for Capture One Pro.

For users of Aperture and Lightroom, the interface of Capture One won’t cause many surprises. On the left-hand side is your Library, where all your photos are organised into folders after you’ve imported them. Capture One also features “smart folders”, so recently imported or captured pictures will show up in their own special folder and, just like Aperture, the app also features its own Trash folder, where you can restore any deleted photos if needs be.

Importing photos from your hard drive.

Importing photos into Capture One is relatively straightforward thanks to the built-in Import tool. You can import photos from anywhere on your hard disk drive or from an external drive, and Capture One will also detect when either a camera or an SD card is connected to your Mac. Unfortunately you cannot easily import photos in an already existing Aperture or iPhoto library (as Capture One doesn’t recognise the file format), so if you want to transfer photos across, you’ll have to export them in a common image format (PNG, JPG and so on) then import them from there.

Capture One features a number of filters that help you sort through all your images. You can tag them by rating and colour and of course sort them by date, place (if the image location is embedded into the metadata) and by any keywords you’ve assigned to them.

Working With Images

Unlike previous versions, the seventh iteration of Capture One Pro comes with an all-new processing engine, which offers vastly superior image quality and excellent colours from your camera’s RAW files and I found this was indeed the case. I imported a few RAW files into the program to work with and colours came up bright and vivid and all the little details in my pictures could be seen. Obviously, the limitations of my camera meant that pictures did start to pixelate after a certain zoom level but on the whole, images showed up nice and clear.

Working with an image in Capture One.

Capture One is mainly aimed towards photographers who work primarily with RAW files and given its slightly hefty price tag, you won’t be using it to edit a few holiday snaps from your point-and-shoot. This is precisely what that new processing engine is designed to do: extract most of the details out of your RAW images. Independent tests have shown that Capture One draws more detail out (read: sharper images) and renders colours better and more vividly than both Aperture and Lightroom, though they do stress that this does depend on your camera.

Whilst zooming in and out, Capture One rendered the image very quickly and in some cases this was quicker than Aperture (for reference, I’m working on a 21.5-inch iMac with a 3.2 GHz processor and 16 GB of RAM). I was also delighted to see that the pinch-to-zoom feature was enabled in Capture One (just like in Aperture), so I could zoom in and out quickly and easily.

Editing Images

Editing your photos is a total breeze thanks to Capture One’s massive range of built-in tools and even the most hardy of photographers will surely find everything they need buried within its many menus. As I’ve explained above, Capture One is designed more as a replacement to Aperture and Lightroom, which are both photo editors, as supposed Photoshop or Pixelmator, which are both graphics editors.

Colours and Exposure

All image editing undertaken in Capture One is non-destructive (just like in Aperture and Lightroom), so you can easily revert back if you don’t like the changes you’ve made (this is one of the advantages of working with RAW files). You can lock images from further editing by exporting them either as a JPEG or TIFF files. Capture One’s editing tools are displayed in tabs on the left-hand side (much like in Aperture) and the selection is pretty decent — you can fiddle with the white and colour balances of your picture, change it into black and white and play around with the image’s exposure, its high-dynamic range (more on this in a second), the clarity and you can also add vignetting effects.

Editing an image using the Color toolbox.

The white balance tab features a useful pipette tool which allows you to click on any part of your photo to set the white balance. Although this only works accurately when you zoom right in, you can change the look and setting of your photo entirely by experimenting around a bit — and I certainly found this with the photo I was editing. Clicking on one part of the image gave it a moody, industrial feel whereas clicking on another part brightened the image up considerably and made the colours a lot warmer and more vivid.

High-Dynamic Range and Lens Correction

The high-dynamic range tools within Capture One allow you to play around with your photo’s highlights and shadows. This lends it a more natural-looking HDR effect, unlike third-party plugins (some of which are supported by the program) such as HDR Efex Pro (of which I am a great fan, don’t get me wrong here) which tend to give photos a more artificial and surreal effect.

The built-in lens correction supports over 100 types of lens, including the most popular ones from both Canon and Nikon.

A further tool is lens correction and currently the list of supported lenses stands at around 100, with more expected in future updates. The software supports both Canon and Nikon lenses, as well as others, and this feature is something that fans of editing in the RAW image format are starting to expect in their software, along with the ability to customise the highlights and shadows when it comes to HDR. Luckily, then, Capture One includes these features and they are both very simple and easy to use.

For Those Little Tasks

There are also options for undertaking minor editing, such as adjusting the focus, sharpness and moire of your photos, along with noise reduction and spot removal. You can either use the sliders to adjust the levels for the entire photo or you can use the useful brush or gradient tools, which both allow you to selectively edit regions of your image. Any local adjustments, such as exposure and image sharpening are created on a separate layer, much like in Photoshop, so you can selectively delete adjustments if you don’t like them.

In this version of Capture One, your image catalogues and search tools are now incorporated within the application, as supposed to previous iterations whereby users had to download additional software (Phase One) to access these features. This brings Capture One up to the standard of more established and well-known programs in the same field, and makes it a worthwhile contender to both Aperture and Lightroom.

The quick tools available within Capture One Pro.

In the top-right hand corner of the screen are quick tools, which allow you to undertake some simple image editing without having to click through all the separate menus — I found these to be really useful if you just want to quickly touch up an image. A useful feature here is the little exclamation mark icon, which highlights all the “problem areas” in your image (overexposure etc). This detection is done automatically and my advice would be not to rely too heavily on it — I found that the app tended to pick up areas that weren’t actually overexposed. Having said that, it does help amateur photographers spot any areas in photos that need retouching.

For a quick fix, Capture One can automatically retouch any areas of an image that need it, such as the white balance, the exposure and the high-dynamic range — all you need to do is click on the A button. If you click and hold down on it, a little menu will pop up which allows you to select which areas of the image should be fixed.

In Conclusion

Capture One is certainly an extremely impressive software and users wishing to migrate from either Aperture and Lightroom will find their wishes fulfilled — there is certainly plenty to keep most photographers, no matter whether they are amateur or professional, satisfied. The image processing engine is one of the most impressive features about Capture One — as I mentioned earlier it has been rewritten almost from scratch and I found that it pulled most of the vital details from my snaps.

That being said, though, Capture One does carry a hefty price tag, and I really can’t see whether it’s worth shelling out any extra cash for it — especially when Aperture can be had for only $79.99 from the App Store (Lightroom costs $149 for new users, or $79 if you’re upgrading from an existing version). There are certainly some pretty nifty features, but if you’re happy with Aperture then I really don’t see a reason to upgrade. It’s extremely hard to test the image processing engines of all three applications side-by-side and like I said — sometimes Capture One rendered images better than Aperture and sometimes I really didn’t notice the difference.

So, the all important question still looms: should you buy it? I really can’t give an answer to this question — it’s like asking a wine expert what the best wine is. My answer would be: go with what you feel comfortable with. If you’re happy with either Aperture or Lightroom then stick with them — Capture One certainly isn’t worth the money. But if you’re looking to change, or if you just fancy giving a new piece of software a test drive, then Capture One is seriously worth considering. The developers offer a 30-day free trial from their website (with full functionality, of course) so you can have a play around with it, and there’s also a slightly cheaper sister option — Capture One Express — which is built around the same processing engine as its bigger brother but doesn’t offer all of its features.

Capture One Pro therefore earns a very commendable 9 out of 10 rating for all its fantastic features and ease-of-use, but if you’re perfectly happy with either Aperture or Lightroom, then stick with them. But if you’re on the lookout for a new photo editor then make Capture One Pro one of your options: the results are certainly very impressive.

Tip: Don’t forget to check out our in-depth comparison of Aperture and Lightroom, as well!

For most people, science classes were a memorable part of their education, but the reasons for this differ from person to person. Some individuals found the talk of nuclei and cell structures to be some of the most engaging and relevant information they had ever encountered. Others simply appreciated it as a good background to some of their most engrossing and creative daydreams.

Both camps could, in general, agree on one point, however — science is better seen than read. Obviously, practical considerations prevent the classroom dissection of a whale, or the physical inspection of lava. Modern technology can provide the next best thing, though, in the form of interactive on-screen experiences.

A shining light in this field has been an iPad app, named, quite simply, The Elements, which provides detailed descriptions, interactive 360º imagery and high quality videos of the periodic table’s constituent parts. Now, it has arrived in the OSX App Store, priced at $19.99. Given that a major part of the original iOS app’s appeal was the ability to “touch” elements on a display, can the desktop environment really provide the same, insightful experience?

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Introduction

As an AppStorm writer, I review a lot of apps. Very few — certainly none that I can think of — have stopped me in my tracks with their introduction. The Elements did, however.

Rather than the usual “how it works” tour, this app begins with a song: “The Elements”, a 1959 patter song composition by entertainer and lecturer Tom Lehrer, in which every known element is sung, to music, at great speed, is played on first opening the app. And if that isn’t modern enough for you, a J-Pop version is also on offer.

The opening song is great fun, and it introduces all of the elements well.

This may not be a feature, as such, but it provides an entertaining introduction to every element.

The Table

Not that you’ve come here for music. This app, lest we forget, is very much a high quality science resource.

The main menu is actually the periodic table, with each element’s box containing an animated representative image or video clip. The result is the most visually appealing scientific diagram you’re ever likely to encounter. The idea is to select the element which interests you to view its digital Filofax of information, although the iPad roots of The Elements make themselves apparent here, as you’re asked to touch the element you wish to view.

That’s one stunning periodic table.

Elemental, My Dear Watson

Element selected, you’re thrust into a mass of statistical and visual information. The signature of The Elements on both platforms is its bespoke, high-resolution 360º imagery, and the majority of the window (or screen, if you’re in full screen mode) is filled with the element’s featured image. This photo rotates automatically, but it’s a joy to rotate it manually with a click and drag of the mouse.

The 360º imagery brings the elements to life, and it is accompanied by plenty of Wolfram Alpha-sourced information.

Alongside are the vital statistics — stuff like boiling point and atomic mass – which are all taken directly from the all-knowing digital brain that is Wolfram Alpha, itself the product of Theodore Gray, who created the original web version of The Elements. In fact, a Wolfram Alpha badge is placed at the bottom of every element, which allows the geekier types among us to see Wolfram’s output directly, within a pop-up.

On the far right of screen are two thin, vertical graphs, both of which are temperature relevant. The first is the atomic emission spectrum, which illustrates the wavelengths, or colours, of light which the element emits at the given temperatures. The second provides a simple scale of the temperatures at which the element is solid, liquid and gaseous.

Using the right arrow key, or by using its on-screen counterpart, you can slide right to reveal each element’s textual description. These have been well written, balancing ease of comprehension with a lack of condescension, something with which many apps in the education genre struggle.

The textual description aren’t desperately long, but they are well written.

Accompanying each description is a selection of relevant imagery, again usually in the interactive 360º format. These images can be rotated in place, or double-clicked to open a full-page gallery, allowing a closer look.

The 3D function here, though not an exclusively in-app feature, must be noted. Purchase the inexpensive stereoscopic goggles available via the Theodore Gray-built periodic table website, and The Elements will provide you with a truly eye-popping 3D view of the objects on display. Yes — this really is the closest to holding a lump of thallium (not a good idea, so I’ve discovered) you’re going to get.

The multimedia appeal of The Elements continues, as you flick to the last page of each substance’s profile, home (usually) to a demonstration video. These are often only a few seconds long, but they provide another layer of tangibility to their subject matter, as well as the necessary dynamism to portray chemical reactions.

Chemical reactions are illustrated by high quality videos.

Conclusion

For so long, high quality print has been unrivaled as the best format for education. Apps such as The Elements are truly challenging that, providing the written material of a book, and combining it with the best of modern, high-resolution photography and app interactivity.

That said, The Elements is not ready to replace a great book, and that’s mostly because it more closely resembles an educational picture book than an in-depth read. Equally, this OS X edition is very obviously a port of the iOS version, and a bulky (2.91GB download), fairly expensive one at that.

Picture book app it may be, but that’s not really a consideration when you come to use The Elements – it’s gorgeous, and if you have the smallest interest in science, or even an interest in what our planet is made of, you’ll find it, quite simply, enthralling.