Category: Mac

This summer’s been a great one for Mac sales, and it’s not even over yet! Our friends at Two Dollar Tuesday have an extra special deal this week: The $10 bundle. Actually, for just one cent less than that, you’ll get 7 apps that together are worth $100 more than that.

You’ll get 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. That’s a great deal for $10, but we’ve got 3 copies to giveaway to our readers for free!

All you’ll need to do to enter the giveaway is leave a comment below letting us know the app you want most from the bundle. Then, share the giveaway on your favorite social networks and share a link to your post in a second comment below for an extra entry.

Hurry and get your entry in; we’re closing the giveaway on Monday, July 29th! Also, don’t forget to enter this week’s Pagico Desktop giveaway as well if you’d like to get your projects organized.

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

Two years ago, a little project showed up on Kickstarter that’d excite anyone who loves old typography and traditional printing presses: LetterMpress. It was a rather ambitious project to recreate the traditional craft of letterpress printing on the then-new iPad. The project was successful, and they acquired authentic wood type collections, digitalized them, and put them inside a virtual printing press. You could drag wood type and art around on your screen, mix colors, and “print” letterpress art to your heart’s content. It was the next-best-thing to buying and restoring an antique letterpress printer.

Later that year, the Mpressinteractive team brought the original LetterMpress to the Mac, then set to work on their next app: SimplyMpress. Released just a few months ago, SimplyMpress made it much simpler to make letterpress art on your Mac, albeit without the photo-realstic printing press and traditional tools you’d find in their original app. Together, they’re the best apps for making letterpress-style art, but which one should you get?

Let’s take a look at SimplyMpress, along with the app that started it all, LetterMpress, and see which one you should add to your Launchpad before taking on your next poster design project.

SimplyMpress: Letterpress, Simplified

At $6.99 and a mere (by comparison) 165Mb download, SimplyMpress is the entry-level letterpress app that’s far simpler to use for beginners than its older sibling. But just browse through the sample designs on its site, and, if you love old-fashioned letterpress posters and art, you’ll be dying to try it out. The good thing is, it’s easy to use. Even if you’ve never handled real wood type before, or couldn’t care less how a printing press works, you’ll be able to make beautiful designs in SimplyMpress in minutes. It lets you turn any font on your computer — or the 25 included MPI fonts that are designed from LetterMPress’ wooden type — into designs that look like they’ve been pressed into your paper with actual wood type in the color and darkness you want. You can even include images from your computer or the included art library and icon fonts to go beyond basic type in your designs.

It’s not perfect, though. SimplyMpress is actually designed with Flash Builder, and it’s rather painfully apparent throughout the app that it’s not truly a Mac native app. You’ll pick your paper style, add type, change the font and type settings, insert images, change colors and more from the bottom menus, all of which defy keyboard control and gestures. You’ll actually have to type in your words in a text box in a generic font, then add it to the document and tweak the font, color and size from there, much like you would when adding Word Art to Microsoft Word documents in older versions of Office a decade ago. Want to add more text? You’ll need to add another text box, rinse, repeat.

If you can get past that, though, it’s a fairly fun app to play around with. You’ll find alignment options to get your type straight, resize and rotate tools, and plenty of traditional graphics and wood grain styles to add to your type that you’ll be able to create classic-style posters that you’ll love. It’d be perfect if it wasn’t for the UI frustrations.

Then, though, there’s another rather frustrating part: the way SimplyMPress has you save your designs. You can always export your art as a .png file with the resolution you want, but if you want to save the design to edit directly later, you’ll have to save it in the app’s own file library. It’s a rather clunky way to save files that somehow reminded me of saving SimCity maps in ancient versions of Windows — not exactly the experience Mac users would expect. But then, at least you can save your designs in an editable way.

The good part is, though, that it does work good if you can get around the interface oddities. The included paper textures and wood typography, along with an extensive PDF manual, make it a nice enough way to make letterpressed art on your Mac. We just wish it was a tad bit more Mac native.

LetterMpress: The Real Deal

That brings us to LetterMpress, the older sibling that started it all. At $9.99 and a hefty 801Mb download, this is the app for anyone who wants to experience honest-to-goodness wooden type letterpress printing from the comforts of a MacBook. It’s as skeuomorphic of an interface as you could imagine, with a photorealistic 1964 Vandercook model SP-15 cylinder proofing press and dozens of authentic wooden font sets and art pieces. You’ll drag out each character you want, upside-down, into the words you want. Each piece can be dragged to the spot you want, and can push around other pieces you’ve already got on the press. You can use metal lockup tools and magnets to keep your pieces in place, or turn on free movement and place the pieces however you want.

Everything’s manual: there’s no typing, only dragging-and-dropping precise wooden type and art onto your press. It gets tedious quickly with a mouse, but then, that’s how dragging and dropping goes.

When everything’s all set, you can switch from the Compose view to the Print view, where you can pick your paper, ink color, and ink coverage. When everything’s set, you drag the carriage handle across your type to make a “paper” print. You’ll then be shown a full-screen view of your page, and you can either keep it if you like the results, or reject it and try again. If you keep it, it’ll be saved to your “paper rack”, where you can then print on the page again to add additional artwork, or export it as an image to your computer. The paper rack for saving here makes more sense than the specialized save menu in SimplyMpress, but perhaps that’s because everything in this app is custom designed, and it doesn’t feel as much like a traditional app.

At any rate, you can turn out some rather impressive graphics with LetterMpress, especially by saving prints then printing in another color on top of it. You could do something similar with just filters and graphics in most photo editing apps, but LetterMpress lets you make art and feel like you’re taking a tour of the history of printing at the same time. There’s definitely some creative fun here — despite it being slightly odd to use with a mouse (or trackpad, in my case — perhaps it’d be easier to use with a traditional mouse, actually).

Which One Should You Get?

AppStorm, letterpressed. Made with SimplyMpress

It’s tough to have apps that you want to love so much, and yet find that they come up short. Both LetterMpress and SimplyMpress are impressive apps that are fun to use, and I’d easily recommend the former if you want to get the real printing press experience on your Mac, even if just for fun, and the latter for making quick classic-style graphics. You could do the same in Photoshop, but SimplyMpress does make it easy and cheap, despite its flaws. And there’s really no other way to experience a real printing press experience on your Mac without LetterMpress.

But, if you have an iPad, there is one other way: get LetterMpress on your iPad. There, the UI doesn’t feel so out of place, and moving type blocks around with multitouch is far more natural than it is on the Mac. So much so, you’ll likely won’t find anything to complain about if you’re using it there. LetterMpress has similar limitations on iOS as its Mac version, but then, those limitations again don’t feel so odd in an iOS app.

Perhaps this shows that we’ve basically got different expectations for Mac and iOS apps. It’s nice to see so many iPad apps making their way to the Mac, but it can be really tough to translate a great touch interface to an environment where we expect multitasking, keyboard shortcuts, and an array of pro-user features. Perhaps some stuff really is best meant for touch screens.

I’ll be keeping SimplyMpress around on my Mac, and expect I’ll continue to find plenty of little, fun projects to use it for. But, I’ll be keeping the iOS version of LetterMpress on my iPad, and will play with it there — but likely won’t use it more on the Mac. I happen to suspect you’d want to do the same.

Technology continues to evolve into new and different things and it continues to amaze me how far we have come just in the last ten years — heck, even in the past five years. I am not that old, but I have been able to witness the evolution of technology from black and white computer screens to now where we have tablets and smartphones that are almost as powerful as our computers. It just amazes me how far we have come.

The same can be said about the piece of technology that I am reviewing today, the Leap Motion. The movie, Minority Report, gave us a glimpse into the future when it came out in 2002 and I remember thinking that what Tom Cruise was able to do with that computer screen was amazing. I thought there was no way I would see something like that in my lifetime. Well, I only needed to wait twelve years to see a similar concept come to fruition in the Leap Motion. I have had the chance to run it through its paces and have come away with some interesting thoughts on it.

Getting Started

The Leap Motion is a 3D motion controller — similar to the Microsoft Kinect, but with motion sensors and no cameras — that lets you turn your traditional screen into a pseudo-touchscreen. You connect it to your Mac (or PC, incidentally) via USB, and leave the small device at the base of your monitor. From there, you’ll have a 3D virtual space that detects your hands and other objects in front of it, so you can move things on screen around with your hand, Minority Report style.

When you first get your Leap Motion there are really two things that need to be done before you can start to get your inner Tom Cruise on. You first need to download the software for your Mac or PC and then you need to calibrate the Leap Motion device to your computer. Once this is finished, then you sign up for an account for AirSpace, which I will talk about in a bit. Now you are read to start using your device.

Creating an Airspace account

Airspace

Airspace is the application that is used to house all of the apps that you have or want to get for your LeapMotion: think of it an App Store specifically for your device. When you first open it up, there are some preinstalled apps that you can start to use right away to get a feel for how to use the LeapMotion. If you want to check out other apps, there is the Airspace Store that will open up in any browser.

Right now there are a decent amount of apps that are in the store that are all categorized by type and for specific platforms. As I glanced through they range in price from free all the way up to $10. For launch they do have a pretty good variety to choose from in just about every category and I felt like they did a good job of getting this up and running. It was very easy to find apps that were either free or low cost in just about every category to test out and see what it was like.

Airspace Store

Using The Leap Motion

After you download some apps that you like, you can now launch them from Airspace Home. They will open up as a separate application just like when you launch any other one on your computer. From there it really depends on the app that you are using as to how you use the Leap Motion with your computer.

Airspace Home

There were a few things that I took away from my experience with using the device for a few hours. The first thing both my wife and I noticed is that our arms got tired very fast. This made sense since I am not used to having my arm and hands up toward my computer screen to interact with it. Your desk position along with your chair height will dictate how high you have to raise your arm to use the Leap Motion. I think the better that your device calibrates, the truer it will be in alignment with your screen, so depending on your screen height, that could also dictate how much you are going to have to move your arm around.

One area that I found very hard to get used was trying to zoom in on a small target on the screen. For example, I had downloaded the Touchless app which lets you use the Leap Motion as a pseudo mouse for your computer. As you can see in the video below, I was able to scroll up and down okay, but it was somewhat of a struggle to try and click on buttons. I had to move my arm back and forth slowly in order to hit a target on the screen that was in a 2-3 inch radius. A lot of times when I would move my finger to “click” on something, it would either hit above or below it and I had to readjust. For what it is worth, I found that my non dominant hand worked a little better for me when it came to being accurate with interacting with the screen.

Being Patient

As most of you know the Leap Motion got a lot of hype and press over the last year, and I could’t wait to get my hands on mine. I was initially a little disappointed when I first tried it, as I had expected it to work better than what I was experiencing. In my initial testing, I found it a little frustrating trying to use the different apps with my hands and fingers.

But, I soon realized two things that I felt were very important to know. One, this is the first device of its kind and although we have been using touch screens with tablets, this is different. My hands are not used to interacting this way with a computer screen, so I have to be patient in that I need to get used to this type of interaction. Secondly, the Leap Motion just came out. It has literally been released as of this writing for just over 24 hours and so to give it harsh criticism is just not fair.

Granted, they have been doing a lot of beta testing on it, but you still can’t fault them for not coming out with the “perfect” product right out of the gate. Again, being patient, and letting the developers of the device as well as of apps continue to get feedback from customers will only make it better. The one thing us early adopters sometimes forget is the fact that even though we get the reward of getting something early, we also get the risk of getting something that is not as good as it potentially is going to be.

Final Thoughts

I will be perfectly honest and say, the Leap Motion is a device that definitely takes some getting used to. It is not one where you can easily just pick up and start using and get great results, at least that was my experience. It is something new, something we are not used to interacting with, and so my brain and my hands need to do a little adjusting. I know the more that I play around with it, the more I will get used to it. There are some interesting apps for this device and I am sure the list will continue to grow once people get their hands on the device and figure out ways it can be used. The one thing that does get me excited for the Leap Motion is its ability to be used in so many different lines of work. As an educator myself, I can definitely see this being used in the classroom. Whether you are a designer, photographer, engineer, or anything else, I think the Leap Motion can and will be used in a huge variety of ways.

One last thing to ponder, as I still don’t know the answer to this question. As I have been using my Leap Motion, I couldn’t help but think, is this the future of computing or is the touch screen the future? I initially want to say the touch screen is going to be easier to use, but that is because I have been using an iPad for the past four years and have gotten used to that interaction. I am not sure and as it was ten years ago for me, I will be continually intrigued as to where this type of technology will go and how it will be used in the future.

If you have been a reader of Mac.Appstorm for any considerable length of time or you consider yourself fairly up to date with the Mac software world, chances are that you are familiar with Realmac Software. The team that brought you Analog and Clear have been working hard for several months to bring you the sequel to their LittleSnapper app, and it’s called Ember.

LittleSnapper, which is no longer available from either their website or the App Store, was a digital scrapbook and screenshot tool for your Mac, and Ember is here as a revamped and exciting update to replace its older brother. Let’s take a look and see how it holds up in the competitive screenshot app market.

Digital Scrapbook

Ember allows you to save and organize images and screenshots into collections in the hope that it will become your digital scrapbook on your Mac. The idea is simple: be the hub of all your images and screenshots, yet it leaves itself open to be used in a myriad of possibilities as the user sees fit.

I started using Ember to help with my fitness and gym workouts. When researching about workouts online I could snap the specifics of the workout and when it came to going to the gym I could decide what I want to work on, and then browse through my ‘Workouts’ collection. I followed the same route when looking for new equipment; Ember allowed me to store my favourite weight benches from Amazon, and I knew I could always come back to it a few days later once the pay check came in.

Filling your library

The most important part of having a digital library and making it useful is filling it with the appropriate material. Whatever way you choose to work with Ember there are numerous ways that you can get your images into it. LittleSnapper users can easily import their libraries to Ember, so fear not if you are worried about a transition.

Ember Library

Screenshots

The most obvious way to get content in your library is using Ember’s screenshot tool. It allows you to capture Fullscreen, Timed Fullscreen, Area and Window images – it is available through a button in the app, or in the menubar.

Snapping from within the app

From the web

One of Ember’s best features is capturing images from the Web. You can use its extension for Safari or Chrome and snap whole sites to your library, or use the built-in browser to snag your desired image. Both work well, but I feel the extension could do with some work; for example you can currently only snap entire web pages, whereas there is a great tool in the built-in browser that lets you snap a specific section of the site, and it works surprisingly well. Dragging and dropping images from the browser also imports the images to the library – a great time saver if it’s just small parts of the site you need.

Built-in browser’s selection tool

Subscriptions

Subscriptions are a completely new part of Ember that it’s predecessor never saw. They are what it looks like, subscriptions to your favourite websites via RSS, and you can easily save them directly into your library. If you’re struggling for inspiration, Ember comes with some recommended sites to add to your subscriptions.

Subscribing to your favourite sources of inspiration could be a great way to use Ember

Local import

The last way to import is by dragging and dropping files on your computer into the app like you would when you are moving them around. It’s quick and easy, and lets you fill up your library with images painlessly. If I could add one feature on how you add images to your library, it would be that you could have live folders as seen in Pixa, that would allow you to link folders on your Mac to Collections in your Ember library – this would make Ember much more convenient for me, knowing I had all my images in one place.

Annotations and Sharing

Of course one of the biggest benefits of a digital scrapbook is that it is much more versatile than its paper counterpart, and perhaps the best tool to take advantage of that is the annotation of your images. Unfortunately this is one of the only places that I think needs some adjustment.

In what I assume was an effort to simplify and streamline the process, the editing features have been reduced to text, freehand tool, crop and rotate. It has left me wanting more flexibility, and ultimately I think it falls short in this aspect compared to other apps like Skitch which has more colour choices and shapes like arrows that often times work better on a computer than freehand tools.

The colour palette and editing tools

On the plus side I think that these minor flaws are the sort that most apps have when they enter the market, and should the team want to, could be fixed fairly easily.

When you are done with your image, Ember has some pretty powerful sharing options with a number of services like Twitter, Messages and CloudApp, all just a few clicks away. Furthermore you can drag the files out of your Ember library and into anywhere on your Mac.

Sharing options

Conclusion

Ultimately Ember is a powerful app that lets you keep a very well organized library of images and edit and share them as you please. The price factor is likely going to be a barrier to some, at $49.99 (£34.99) it is going to dissuade some, but for a large number of people I can see it being well worth the money. While it has a few flaws, I have great confidence in the Realmac Software team, and am certain we will see great updates in the near future that make Ember even better.

Overall, it is a fantastic update to an already great application, and could be your way to creating a perfect digital scrapbook for whatever your needs.

If you like to read on your Mac, then Apple’s WWDC 2013 announcement of iBooks coming to the Mac with OS X Mavericks was a breath of fresh air. Macs have had a great PDF reader — Preview — built in for as long as we’ve had OS X, but for ePub eBooks, we’re left to forge for our own best reading app. There’s tons of contenders, but very, very few exceptionally good apps in the category.

Even if you have Mavericks Developer Preview today, though, you still can’t get iBooks just yet. If you want to read eBooks on your Mac today, you need another option. And if your Mac can’t run Mavericks, or you don’t want to upgrade when it comes out, you’ll still need something else then.

That’s why we’ve got though every major eBook app for the Mac, tried them out, and put together the very best for you. There’s one standout app, the one we really recommend, and then others that fill in other gaps.

Here’s to the readers!

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Adobe Digital Editions

Leave it to Adobe — the people behind the PDF reader that’s standard, and yet universally hated, and the pro apps that are hailed as far too expensive as a subscription — to make the best free eBook reader for the Mac. And yet, they have. Adobe’s Digital Editions 2 is the app, after our testing, that held up and worked great though everything we threw at it. It’s fast, lightweight, and renders ePub eBooks perfectly.

Its UI is bare-bones, with a design similar to the help menu from any Creative Cloud or Creative Suite app. It doesn’t have options to change your reading font or background, and its 2-finger swipe is backwards from what you’d expect. But if you’re fine with just using your arrow keys, you’ll be fine. It’s the simplest app on the Mac to simply open and read ePub eBooks, with a decent library feature as well. It even supports DRM’ed eBooks with the Adobe DRM, the most common DRM outside of Kindle and iBooks — and the one that most libraries with digital books use. It’s fast, and likely the very best option if you want a no-fuss eBook reader on the Mac today.

Verdict: Download it, now. It works great as an ePub and PDF reader, regardless of whether you want to use it to manage your library or not. But it’s good at that too. Plus, it’s free – and uses a fraction of the ram other eBook readers use when reading books on your Mac.

Price: Free Download from Adobe

Sony Reader App

eBook apps bring out the big names in tech, as we see yet again with Sony’s Reader app. It’s designed as a companion to the gadget giant’s eBook reader devices, but it’s a decently nice eBook reader app on its own. It renders ePub eBooks beautifully, much more like iBooks on the iPad than any other app we’ve tried. Seriously, if you get frustrated by rendering oddities in the other apps, you should give it a try. If it was only faster and less annoying, it’d get far higher marks in our book.

But, it is slow, and a memory hog compared to the other apps we tried. Plus, while the reader view is nice, the library management is anything but nice. Then, its installer is straight out of the ’90′s, complete with an unsigned installer that Gatekeeper blocks by default, and a required reboot after installation. That’s enough to make it worth avoiding. That’s sad, though, because its actual ePub rendering feels more book-like than most apps.

Verdict: A nice app, bogged down with an ancient installer, draconian practices, and Sony’s services. It’s pretty, but a somewhat slow memory hog. And don’t even try it with PDFs.

Price: Free Download from Sony

Kitabu

Take iBooks, strip out all of the fancy UI, and you’ve almost got Kitabu. It’s a bare-bones free eBook reader that you can download on the App Store, and it’ll only take up a little over 2Mb on your hard drive. In exchange for that, it’ll give you the simplest ePub eBook reading experience you could ask for. Its rendering isn’t perfect, and you’ll likely find it not as fun for reading as many of the other apps in this list.

But, of everything we touched, this one feels the most “Mac native”. Its 2-finger swipe works perfectly as you’d expect, and you’ll find options to use any font on your Mac, along with the standard 3 background color options. For free, it’s the best alternate to Adobe and Sony’s apps.

Verdict: A nice free native eBook reader with no frills. iBooks without the book-style background. Great if you want something lighter than Adobe Digital Editions.

Price: Free Download from the Mac App Store

Bookinist

The newest app on the Mac eBook reader scene, Bookinist is the app that promoted us to write this article. It’s a brave shot at making a nearly perfect iBooks clone, months before Apple is set to release iBooks for OS X with Mavericks release. Bookinist brings the familiar book-style reading experience, complete with an iCloud-styled library (one that doesn’t sync with iCloud, though), bookmarking, searching inside books, quick font-tweaking options, and a 3D page-turning experience.

It could be great, if it weren’t for its many problems. It’s supposed to be able to open books without adding them to your library, but that only works sometimes at random. Add books to your library, and there’s no way to organize them or even remove them. eBooks render fairly nicely and you can turn the fake wood background off, but the 2-finger page turning is precisely the opposite of the default 2-finger swipe motion in OS X and you’d be better off without the very buggy page-turn animation. It’s an app we wanted to love, but just couldn’t.

Verdict: If you really want an iBooks style app today, you could do much worse than with Bookinist. Its price tag combined with its general quirkiness, though, make it very tough to recommend at this point. It’s not much better than the free Kitabu, and the other apps are better than both of those.

Price: $9.99 from the Mac App Store

Calibre

Oh Calibre. If I had a dime for every time someone’s recommended you as the be all and end all of eBook apps, I’d be a rich man.

But see, I’ve never gotten the hype. It’s slow, its confusing, and its UI is even more outdated than LibreOffice‘s (and that’s scary). It’s decent for eBook library organization, lets you sync with a number of eBook readers, and has tools to convert eBooks to and from a ton of formats. That’s great. But if you’re looking for a fun way to read books on your Mac, this isn’t what you want. It’s anything but a simple reading app.

Verdict: Keep it around if you need to convert eBooks. Otherwise, don’t bother.

Price: Free download from Kovid Goyal

Ehon

If you look around for Mac eBook app suggestions, Ehon is one of the first that’ll come up. And for good reason: it’s far more unique than most of the others, with a Delicious Library-style approach for organizing your books, along with more sorting and organizing features than you’ll find in most apps. And, it looks like a nice, modern OS X app.

The problem is, it ends up being fairly cluttered with two ever-present toolbars in addition to the already thick window borders, and a reading experience that’s more designed for comic books than traditional text-centric eBooks. Instead of a traditional table of contents, Ehon shows each book’s contents by “pages” — though these aren’t normal pages, they’re actually what other ePub readers would call chapters. Then, each page/chapter is treated as one long page, perhaps like a long page online. That’s great for comics, which normal ePub readers would break up and make confusing, but it’s far from idea for normal books unless you love scrolling.

Verdict: Ehon is great for comic books and organization. Beyond that, you’ll likely find it more frustrating than anything.

Price: Free download from the Mac App Store

Kindle for Mac

eBook lovers everywhere rejoiced when Amazon announced that they were making Kindle apps for the desktop, first for the PC and soon after for the Mac. It brought the extensive Kindle library of books to almost any computer on earth, after they were already available on practically every mobile device on earth. If you want to buy books and read them immediately on your Mac, and then make sure you can still read your books later from any other platform, Kindle is the way to go.

But that’s where the good news ends. The Kindle for Mac app has barely changed since it was released, and is rather kludgy and slow at times. Its text formatting is far from the best, just as in its mobile apps, and its main strength is the library behind it, not the apps themselves. In fact, if you want a premium reading experience, you’d be better off using the Kindle Cloud Reader in your browser, which provides a far more fluid experience.

Verdict: Kindle is great for books purchased through Amazon, since it’s the only place to read them, but for DRM-free eBooks, it’s definitely not our app of choice.

Price: Free download from Amazon or the Mac App Store

Conclusion

It’s no wonder why we’re all so anxious for Apple to release iBooks for the Mac, since honestly there’s no perfect solution for reading and organizing your eBooks on the Mac. There’s a ton of apps, but unfortunately there’s a ton more junk than good stuff out there. Half of the apps on this list, even, have enough problems that we’d hesitate to recommend them at all if there were any better apps available.

For now — or for Macs that can’t upgrade to Mavericks once it’s released — here’s our advice: use Preview to read PDF eBooks, Adobe Digital Editions for ePub eBooks, and the Kindle app if you want to buy books protected books and read them on your Mac and other devices. Once iBooks for OS X is released, we’ll have to try it out and see, but I’d seriously guess we’d recommend it first for PDF, ePub, and purchased eBooks, along with the Kindle app to read everything you’ve already purchased. But really, Adobe Digital Editions is good enough that you shouldn’t have too much to worry about if you stick with it. It’s a surprisingly nice eBook reader app, despite its few faults.

If you read ePub or PDF eBooks on your Mac, and have a favorite app, we’d love to hear why you love it in the comments below!

There's tons of apps for sharing files, and tons of ways to store your files in the cloud. It's almost unusual to go a couple weeks without hearing of yet another app for quick file sharing. And yet, two apps have stood the test of time and continued to be the flag-bearers for simple file sharing: CloudApp and Droplr.

Both CloudApp and Droplr have been with us for years, both have a simple menubar for quickly sharing files, and both have free and pro accounts. They're equally simple to use, and practically unrivaled in their simplicity. They were both so close of competitors, I decided they were both almost equal in my point-by-point comparison of their features for Web.AppStorm. Yet, I remained a CloudApp devotee until very recently.

Droplr finally won me over with its relentless improvements, making their Mac app and most recently iOS apps far nicer than before. Throw in the already-nicer web app, and the extra stats and customizations available with their pro account, and Droplr sold me on a pro subscription.

But then, there's another elephant in the room: Dropbox. It's decidedly not the simpler way to share one-off files, but it's something many of us already pay for, and it works great for sharing larger files. Then, with new apps like Share Bucket, you can make Dropbox act almost like Droplr or Dropbox. I love Dropbox, and store most of my files in it, but sharing small files and such from Dropbox still seems like too much of a hassle, and I'm glad to use Droplr for sharing and Dropbox for syncing everything else.

So, how about you? Are you in the CloudApp or Droplr camp, or is Dropbox enough for your needs? We'd love to hear your thoughts on the two — nay, three — apps in the comments below.

Need to get media off of an iPhone, iPad, or iPod without syncing it to iTunes? Perhaps your device was originally registered to another computer, or to your computer before you reinstalled your OS, and it won’t sync with iTunes now? Then you need to try out Sharepod, our sponsor this week.

Sharepod is the simplest way to get your music, movies, podcasts, and more from any classic iPod or a new iOS device like an iPhone or iPad. You won’t have to sync with iTunes or anything else. Whether you’re getting back long-forgotten tunes from an old device, or are recovering your library after you lost your Mac’s iTunes library (or got a new Mac), Sharepod is the perfect companion for your media.

Sharepod is fast and simple, and you’ll have all of your media back ready to play faster than you would have ever imagined, all without jailbreaking or doing anything else to your iOS device. You’ll even get to keep all of the playlists you’ve spent time putting together. Best of all, it can work on your Mac or on a Windows PC, so you can get your media off your devices wherever you are.

Try Sharepod Today!

Ready to get your old media back from your old iPods? Sharepod is the app you need. You can download Sharepod and try it out for free, then purchase your own copy for $20.

Apple’s brand-new Logic Pro X is the latest music production app for the Mac, and it’s filled with brand-new features. You’ll find everything from a new interface with more options than ever, JavaScript-powered Midi scripts, powerful tools to tune your songs, a companion iPad app to bring touch controls to Logic Pro, and more. It’s beautiful, powerful, and is just what you need to make the best music on your Mac.

Our friends at Tuts+ have put together an in-depth set of walkthrough videos about Logic Pro X. They’ll take you through everything you’ll find in the newest version in over 30 minutes of videos. If you’ve been wondering if you should get a copy of Logic Pro X, this is what you need to check out first.

Head Over to Tuts+ to Continue Reading about Everything New in Logic Pro X

As a guitarist, I’ve learned there are a few tools I consider to be essentials. They’re on me all the time. I’ve got the standards, like a pick in my wallet, even though the likelihood of me playing a stranger’s guitar is precisely 2% (and I already have fifty other spares in my guitar case). I’ve got a leather strap which feels great on my shoulder and never comes off my main electric guitar. And I’ve got my iPhone. With Agile Partners’ Guitar Toolkit app, I’ve got a great tuner on hand whenever I need it. The app’s loaded with tons of incredibly handy features, but let’s be honest: my main use is the for the insanely accurate tuner.

That’s why I was excited when Agile Partners got in touch with me to show off a preview of their newest Mac app. SteadyTune, as it’s been appropriately titled, is a multi-instrument tuner that lives in the menu bar of your Mac. How awesome is it? Read on to find out.

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It’s in the Details

First of all, I need to say I have a predisposition against menu bar applications. I find menu bar apps are often cumbersome for a variety of reasons, but usually because I often forget what they are or what they do — a little symbol sometimes isn’t enough — or because they’re better served by a full-out app. Menu bars make the most sense with utilitarian apps like Dropbox, Swing, Droplr and Caffeine. Fantastical makes great use of the menu bar as well, simply because it’s got a drop-down menu that doesn’t necessitate a full app. Finally, although Tweetbot’s notification display is very handy, the app’s logo looks more like a poorly chosen “g.”

Some menu bar apps have nicer icons than others. I tend to be selective, and I love SteadyTune’s icon (far left).

I say this so you understand my standards are very high for menu bar apps, and I like SteadyTune’s. The icon is an example of great design. When I look at it, I don’t think “What’s that?”. Instead, I see a tuning fork. I know it’s a tuner. It couldn’t be more obvious.

The tuner is also an example of carefully considered and appropriate design.

The tuner itself is exactly what I’d expect it to be. It’s easy enough to read, provides all of the necessary functionality within one screen and looks very Mac-like. I do wish the contrast was just a hair higher for legibility reasons.

The Tuner Itself

Anybody who’s ever made a tuner will tell you how difficult it is. Tuners are also a pain to use. I’ve got a very nice KORG tuner that still wavers at any given pitch. It’s not like it’s defective — great, steady tuners are unreasonably expensive and usually only owned by professionals. Common musicians or indie artists can’t afford them. I’ve used one nearly-perfect tuner in my day. It was a Korg DTR–2000, which were well over $100 at the time of their availability. The only reason I got to use it was because we booked recording time at a very classy, expensive studio, and it was part of their gear.

SteadyTune’s pitch doesn’t waver like many cheap tuners.

It’s been a while, so I can’t say if SteadyTune is as accurate as that rack-mounted Korg. But the SteadyTune is very… Well, steady. As the name implies, this tuner doesn’t get distracted and start wavering around like a hummingbird. It finds your pitch and displays it without second thought. Eventually, as your note tapers, so does the pitch. But it never vibrates, which is a huge compliment. That makes SteadyTune more useful than the Korg tuner in my gig bag.

Of course, the tuner in my gig bag is more useful than the SteadyTune when I’m out gigging. But for musicians recording some demos or, dare I say, professional studios running OS X, SteadyTune is a godsend. This is the sort of app that’s completely obvious, but can be really easily botched. Thankfully, Agile Partner’s didn’t botch it.

Setting Up Some Preferences

Of course, Agile Partners has been in the development game for a while. They know what they’re doing. With that in mind, they’ve allowed for some important — and easy to set up — preferences.

The app’s Preferences pane has just the right amount of settings.

Within the app, you can choose from just about any stringed instrument that you’ll be tuning, or you can let the app auto-detect it. The All Instruments setting will even let you tune non-stringed instruments, like a trumpet or clarinet. Although I used to play trumpet, I don’t have one handy anymore and can’t verify the accuracy of the tuner with a non-stringed instrument.

These are the instruments available in the app.

When I chose guitar, I was able to choose my tuning — handy if you’d like to explore something new — and how many strings my instrument had. The app supports just about every imaginable setting in this regard.

Just a small selection of the tunings available in SteadyTune for a six-string guitar.

The app’s Preferences pane allows you to set up a hotkey for the app, which I’ve found really handy. (Mine is Shift+Command+T, with T acting as a short-form for Tuner, if you’re wondering.) You can also select a microphone. Because I’m using a 15″ MacBook Pro, I’m able to choose if I want to use the right or left built-in mic. If you use a USB interface with support for an electric guitar, you can have SteadyTune use that as an input setting, which is going to be the de facto way to tune guitars for many professionals.

The app also automatically supports Retina displays, and it looks great on mine.

In a Word? Finally.

I can’t believe nobody’s done this before. It’s clever and as accurate as my gig bag tuner, not to mention the fact that the interface is rock solid and easy to navigate. I love that SteadyTune includes support for hotkeys, and I love that it takes careful care to make sure that its menu bar design is well-implemented and carefully thought out.

I have very few complaints. Outside of your personal favourite recording software, there are very few Mac apps for musicians that I think are must-haves. SteadyTune sits on the top of that list. For $4.99 on the App Store, you could spend a lot more money on a far less efficient and accurate tuner.

Keeping all of the info for your projects and tasks together in one place can be difficult, especially if you need to work on a Mac and a PC. I was so excited to see how well Pagico works for cross-platform productivity when I tried it out for our recent review. It more than met my expectations for a cross-platform productivity app, and is honestly one of the nicest team productivity apps for the Mac, period.

That’s why we’re excited to have 5 copies of Pagico Desktop to giveaway this week. You can use it on your Mac or PC — or even on Ubuntu — so this giveaway is something you can take advantage of even if you’re planning on getting a Mac sometime but don’t have one yet.

As normal, just leave a comment below and tell us why you’d be excited to get a free copy of Pagico to enter the giveaway. Then, share the giveaway on your favorite social networks and share a link to your post in a second comment below for an extra entry.

Hurry and get your entry in; we’re closing the giveaway on Friday, July 26th!

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

I’ll never forget the first time I installed Mathematica in college. I was excited by the demos, and wanted to see how much it could help me take my calculus knowledge further — and take the drudgery out of math. Turns out, it was far more complicated to use than I ever anticipated, even more so than my trusty TI-89.

Couldn’t CAS — computer algebra systems — be a bit less complex and more accessible to everyone who doesn’t have time to take a whole class on using them? Computers were designed originally to solve complex math, but normal calculators, spreadsheets, and CAS systems have remained too basic on the one end and too complex on the other to change the way most of us feel about math.

It’s more than understandable that we’d tend to be skeptical when a new app claims to make math simpler for everything from engineering to basic budgets at the same time — but that’s exactly what Calca claims. It’s a markdown text editor fused with a CAS; can it possibly be the answer to the frustrations of math?

Calculated Writing

Calca at first glance would seem to be a text editor more than a math tool, but dig deeper and it’s easily more of the latter than the former. But it’s not a half-bad text editor at that, complete with Markdown support that’ll show the formatting as you add it and makes links clickable.  Everything — including the calculated numbers — are saved in your Calca document in plain text format with a .txt extension, so you can open your notes and calculations in any app or share the finished document with anyone even if they’re not on a Mac.

But that’s not the best part. The best part is Calca’s brilliant math engine that lets you type out equations just as you’d solve them on paper, and then it’ll go ahead and solve them for you when you type the function name followed by =>. You can write everything out in words, as in the examples above, defining variables naturally, and then ask it what the final answer is. 99.9% of the time, it’ll give you back exactly what you’re looking for (and the other 0.1% of the time, you’ll realize that you’ve messed something up, declaring a variable twice or mistyping something).

Calca is very easy to use. Essentially, you can declare a variable by using any normal word or phrase, followed by an = and the value or equation it’s equal to. This can be something simple, such as the things that are in your budget, or it can be a standard f(x)= algebra function. Then, you can see the final value of your variable by typing your variable followed by =>. Anything in bold black is a variable, anything blue is a number value, and anything with a grey background is a result that’s been generated by Calca.

Then, if you need more info, you can find out numerical facts from Google directly in the app. Just type in “USD to Euro exchange rate” or “distance from earth to sun” or anything else you want to find, then type =? and Calca will find the answer for you from Google. You can then use that in your following equations. It won’t find everything, but I’ve already found it powerful and useful.

Calca goes far beyond the basic math you’d think of at first with an app like this, and can do everything from compute logs, solve matrices, compute basic logic statements and for statements, solve functions for a variable, or even just simplify equations as much as it can. Just look through the examples on the Calca site to see what it can do — it’s one powerful app.

Haven’t We Seen This Before?

It’d be impossible to hear about Calca without thinking of Soulver, the original text-based simple calculator for the Mac. There’s a lot of similarities, but Calca is definitely the more powerful of the two. Soulver is designed to keep things simple, with calculation bar on the right that automatically shows the value of each line, and a sum at the bottom. You can use variables and solve simple functions with it, depending on how you set them up, but its primary purpose is more ordinary calculations such as budgets that end with a tally at the bottom.

Soulver is likely simpler to get started with, but it can be confusing in its own right, and I’d tend to think most people who’d like Soulver would equally like Calca. You may miss Soulver’s quick conversions, though, and if you’re looking for the simplest way to do quick text-based math that mainly involves sums and conversions, it still can come out on top. Calca’s Markdown text formatting, built-in Google search function, and far cheaper price tag, though, make it more attractive, even aside from the advanced math features.

Conclusion

Calca is an incredibly promising new way to work with math and text together on your Mac, one that’s even more surprising than FoldingText‘s text-based timer and other plain text innovations we’ve seen recently. It’s really, really impressive, and is an app you’ll have to try out if you use math often at all.

It’s already got a companion iPad app — one that actually came slightly before the Mac version — and iCloud sync, so it’s one of the best ways to calculate and keep your thoughts straight at the same time, anywhere you are.

With the rise of the App Store and a divergent wave of mobile gaming, independent developers are finding it easier to get their ideas out there. It’s still hard to publish a full Xbox 360 or PS3 game because the most popular ones are found on shelves and available in disc format. The PlayStation Store and Xbox Games Store are beginning to change the way titles are distributed by pushing digital delivery methods; new consoles, the PS4 and Xbox One, are helping pave the way for this change with more storage and even some cloud capabilities. Valve’s Steam platform has understood this concept for a long time, and it’s now moving into Apple’s domain with Steam for Mac.

The App Store, though, is still where the indie action is. Since the App Store has made it so much easier for developers to promote their creations, there are some amazing new indie titles making their way to players like you. After a good deal of research, AppStorm wants to share with you the best indie games available right now, along with reasons why they’re worth purchasing.

Action and Adventure

Puzzle

World of Goo

Navigate the world … of goo! No really, that’s what you do in this game. Basically, you have a certain amount of Goo Balls for each challenge to build a bridge or ladder so that you may ascend to the next level. Navigate the puzzling world of balloons, cliffs, and other humorous situations, then check up on your status at the World of Goo Corporation. While the graphics for this game aren’t anything special, the gameplay makes up for that in its amusing and sometimes ridiculous ways of forcing you through a level. And if you really like it, their team has another game — Little Inferno — where you get to play with fire, literally.

Bottom line: It’s a fun game for your inner child, or maybe just for the days you are bored and need some inspiration. For example, I should be playing it as I write this to make my run-on sentences less present.

Price: $9.99
Requires: OS X 10.6.6 or later
Developer: 2D Boy

What Other Great Games are There?

That’s it for our roundup, but you can contribute as well. In the comments, tell us what your favorite indie games are and why we should check them out. If you’re a developer, even better! We’d love to take a look at your title. Until next time, then?

Apple’s best known for its devices and the operating systems that make them shine, but it also has quite the variety of professional software that it produces as well. This week saw Apple unveil its brand-new Logic Pro X, which by all accounts is a great upgrade to Apple’s professional music production tool — but Apple makes far more than just that.

Perhaps most commonly seen on Macs and iOS devices is Apple’s consumer media apps — iPhoto, iMovie, and GarageBand — that used to make up iLife, but since they come free on all Macs anyhow and aren’t really aimed at pro use, those don’t count for this list. But let’s include the iWork apps — Pages, Keynote, and Numbers — which compete head-to-head with Microsoft Office and can definitely stand for a decent amount of professional use. Then, there’s Aperture, which is the best competition for Adobe’s Lightroom, and Final Cut Pro, one of the top professional film editing apps. There’s also the companion apps — Motion, Compressor, and MainStage — that take them further.

I love the iWork apps, and others on our team love Logic Pro, Aperture, and Final Cut Pro. We’d love to know which of these you use in your work!

I’m always a little bit bemused when I see reviews characterizing one app as the absolute best compared to another. I’ve been writing software reviews for a while now, and I’ve been a tech junkie for a significantly longer period of time. I’ve learned that there is rarely such thing as an absolute proof in the software world. In fact, there are usually compelling reasons to use as many apps you can get your hands on.

Photo management and editing software is the perfect example of this. I like Aperture and Lightroom — I recently gave Lightroom 5 a glowing review here at Mac.AppStorm. Professionals are also divided: Many use Aperture, but many others use Lightroom. There is no clear winner, and since the programs are mostly mutually exclusive, I decided to do a ton of workflow comparisons and some sleuthing to see if I could make them work together.

What Makes Aperture Awesome

Aperture is one of my favourite apps on my Mac. It shines at organization. Aperture’s managed library allows me to make sure that all my files are in one place, and makes them easy to move from one folder to another. It’s very similar to the way iTunes consolidates music within its own folder, if you haven’t used that.

I love the way Aperture lets me organize and view my photos.

Of course, you can forego the managed route and use a referenced library with a traditional hierarchy of folders, but why would you? The managed library is easier to use. If you find your managed library is slowing Aperture down, you can store it on a backup drive and create a new one. Aperture lets you merge multiple libraries down the road, so it’s easy for me to get everything onto externals when I’m ready to archive it. I really like that.

I’m also a big fan of the interface, particularly the full-screen view and navigation. Aperture makes it easy for me to browse my library and even make some edits and bring up the Inspector when I’m ready to make adjustments with the tap of the H key. The UI is relatively understandable, even to new users, and that give it an upper hand over Lightroom.

I’m also in love with fullscreen editing in Aperture.

Easy labeling, rating and searching makes Aperture a pro photographer’s organization dream. When it comes to editing, Aperture’s big feature is brushes. You can brush in any adjustment, from lighting to colour temperatures, on any part of the image instead of applying it to the image as a whole. For the most part, Aperture can become a one-stop shop for me as a result.

That being said, there are some areas where Lightroom is the better app.

What Makes Lightroom Awesome

I hate the way that Lightroom manages my library and handles photo browsing, finding it a cumbersome process compared to Aperture. That being said, there are a lot of things Lightroom can do that Aperture simply can’t. With Lightroom 5, for example, you can build Smart Previews of every photo that enables you to preview and edit your images even if the original images are on an external drive.

Lightroom has some great lens correction. This is the before shot.

Lightroom also has some features that can be essential, depending on your lens. Lightroom’s lens profiles allow for chromatic aberration correction and proper lens corrections. If you’ve been using Aperture and aren’t familiar with it, lens corrections straighten any distortion or barreling in the image at the expense of slightly cropping the edges. Sometimes, the tradeoff is well worth it.

And this is the after shot. Even some colour anomalies have been adjusted. (The visual differences are much more obvious at a higher resolution.)

The Develop module of Lightroom also does some editing better than Aperture. For example, it handles vignetting very well and has far more options for it than Aperture does. And despite the fact that it doesn’t have the same brushes as Aperture, its shadow detail and colour changes are often more precise and bring out more detail and clarity in your image.

Speaking of clarity, Lightroom offers a Clarity tool that does some amazing things to a picture that needs it. And if it shares a feature with Aperture, the general consensus is usually that it’s faster to get it done in Lightroom with greater precision.

What I’m Using and Why I’m Using It

This might shock you after the heaps of praise that I just gave Lightroom, but I’m using Aperture by default. I’ve got a ton of different reasons for it, but most of it comes down to ease of use. I love the fact that Aperture integrates really easily with my iPads, so if I’m out with a prospective client, I can bring a digital portfolio with me they can flick through.

This isn’t the best way to look through photos for me or a client.

I also love how easy everything is to customize to my specifications, and how easy it is to filter searches based on labels and ratings. I use both for various reasons, and it’s not so much that Lightroom can’t do that, but it’s that Aperture makes it so much easier to do that.

Aperture has a couple problems though, even for me. The first is that it’s a RAM hog. Whether or not anybody can scientifically prove it is irrelevant, since I know somebody will want to debate me, but it simply is and I know it is because it can even bring my 15″ Retina MacBook Pro to a grinding halt if it’s in the mood.

The second is that its brushes aren’t always spot on, while Lightroom generally does a better job (plus, it’s got lens correction). But all this feature comparing isn’t going to help you decide which app you should use. Let’s break it down into which one is going to be best for your type of photography.

What You Should Use

People who take hundreds and hundreds of images at a single shoot need to be using Aperture. It’s the fastest way to go through racks of images at a time, and the file import is still way faster than Lightroom’s. If you’re a largely mobile photographer, moving from one shoot to the next, staying in hotel rooms, etc., I would go so far as to say that Aperture is your absolute best bet. It’ll help you get more sleep and find the best images you need quickly.

If you’re an elaborate shooter, one who thrives on absolute perfection in every shot and doesn’t leave anything to chance, Lightroom is for you. I know that I just described every photographer in existence, but there’s a difference between a perfectionist and people who lose sleep over an imperfect colour temperature. Lightroom isn’t going to the best way to manage all your files, but it is going to help you get through the editing as quickly as possible.

There’s the price tag, too, to consider. Aperture is just $79.99 in the App Store, while Lightroom costs $149 from Adobe, or is included as part of a $49.99/month Creative Cloud subscription along with Photoshop and Adobe’s other pro tools.

At one point, there was a referee in this photo. Two clicks later in Lightroom, and he’s gone.

There’s a flip side to this as well, one that’s a bit more complicated. Aperture’s reference library is the typical file/folder hierarchy that Lightroom users are used to, but since both apps feature non-destructive editing, you can’t just use the originals — the RAW files — in both apps and expect them to work together. There is, however, a workaround.

If you use Aperture as your home base, but crave some of the additional editing functionality that Lightroom offers, I’d suggest the Automator workflow in this post over at the Aperture Blog. Read the instructions very carefully, and make the necessary changes — after all, this workflow was published before Lion — before even Lightroom 4 was out. And keep in mind any changes you make in Lightroom will save back in your Aperture library as TIFF files instead of in their original RAW state.

Wrapping It Up

These two apps are bound to stir up some discussion. For many people, it’s no contest and they already know their preferred workflow. For others, it’s cause for pause. Adobe offers a thirty-day trial of Lightroom 5 if you’re on the fence about it, but Apple no longer provides an Aperture trial for interested parties.

Personally, I think Aperture covers my needs, but I do suffer from some Lightroom envy — especially when it comes to lens correction and Smart Previews. That being said, there are better things to lose sleep over than photo management apps. Hopefully this post has made your decision an easier one. Leave a comment and let us know which app you’re using and why!

Do you think you are already set on an app for viewing your pictures? Well, I can almost guarantee that app is slow and full of stuff you don’t need, as most of these are bundled as image viewers, image editors, and social network apps all at once. But what if we were to show you the simplest app for viewing your images without any hassle, just perfect for that occasion when you are trying to show your latest trip pictures to your family? One that, even, aims to be faster and simpler than OS X’s Quick View.

The app we are reviewing today — LilyView, from the team that brought us Unclutter and DaisyDisk — tries to remove any kind of complexity from an image viewer app. It provides a super simple way to view your pictures, and that’s about it. The concept sounds a bit lackluster, but maybe that’s good thing. Let’s see?

LilyView

From the get-go, LilyView’s main marketing point is its simplicity. There’s nothing to configure, nothing to setup, no buttons, no complex interface. It just exists as a simple image viewer with a barebones interface and some hidden interactivity. There’s no instructions or welcoming page, you’re just left to figure out how the app works through intuition. Let’s figure out then how intuitive the app really is.

LilyView

How It Works

Once you’ve got LilyView installed, the first time you fire it up it might be a little bit disconcerting. There’s just a window where you are told to drop an image, but that’s about it. If you look through the menus, there’s not much there. In the preferences, you’ll only find some configurations for selecting which extensions you’d like to manage through LilyView. Is that all, drop an image and see it through the app? Well, not quite.

How It Works

The Good

As soon as you drop a picture through its little window, LilyView will display it, but there’s not much else you can do with it on first sight. The app’s gimmick lies in that whenever you select a picture through the app, it will automatically select the folder that’s holding the picture as a default folder and it will load every single picture in that folder as the set of pictures that you are browsing.

Settings

That’s not it, though. Once you’ve got your set of pictures going on in the app, navigating between them is the easiest thing ever, just swipe two fingers on your trackpad left and right to move throughout your folder. Cool, right? Well, there are a few more things you can do with trackpad gestures, such as rotating your pictures by twisting two fingers and zooming in by pinching.

The Bad

Drag and Drop

As much as LilyView tries to be intuitive, simple and cute, I actually think the app fails at addressing its clients that are least familiar with the Mac. It may come as second nature for a long time Mac user to swipe two fingers on the trackpad to communicate that he wants to go forward or back, but if anyone else were to grab a computer with this app running, it probably wouldn’t be as easy to figure out how to flip through a set of pictures. That’s a minor gripe, though. My main gripe with the app is its price, which leads me to…

Is It Worth It?

LilyView is cool and all, but it doesn’t really do much. I mean, it’s a very convenient app, but any savvy Mac user already has a way for quickly browsing through his pictures, and it’s probably one that they didn’t have to pay for. Be it Preview, iPhoto or even QuickLook, your Mac comes installed with many ways to deal with photos, and there’s even more third-party options out there.

What’s the point then? Well, convenience. Having the ability to drag-and-drop a photo and getting the app to automatically load every other picture in that directory makes for a quick and easy way to showcase your most recent pictures without having to import them into weird places or making new folders. That’s about it, though.

Conclusion

LilyView’s premise is pretty good and I can relate to it. Sometimes all I want to do is to be able to select a folder and have an easy way to slide through all of my images for showing them to my family and friends. However, there are plenty of ways to do that, even if they take you a couple more steps to do so.

I would say that the main disadvantage of LilyView is its price, particularly since pretty much any other photo viewing app is free. Sure, Preview, iPhoto and QuickLook might not be as fast to manipulate as LilyView, but they can do a hell of a lot more things and they have another huge advantage on their side: they’re completely free and come installed in your Mac.

Deciding whether the few seconds that you might save with this app are worth the five bucks, is entirely up to you. LilyView is drop-dead simple, it’s fast and it’s very convenient, but would you pay for it?