Category: Mac

Whether you’re protecting sensitive financial documents from thieves or you’re hiding your embarrassing journal secrets from your nosey sibling, keeping the contents of your computer safe from prying eyes is important. Encrypting your hard drive is an effective solution, but may be overkill for many users.

DocWallet is a lockbox for your Mac that allows you to store any kind of file with full encryption, without having to worry about disk partitions. There are a number of ways to protect the data on your Mac, and DocWallet tries to set itself apart from the competition with drag-and-drop simplicity. How does it fare in everyday usage?

Getting Started

You are greeted by a brief tutorial when you first launch the app and asked to create a password. A small gauge helps visualize its strength. DocWallet politely reminds you that if you forget this password, there will be no way to recover it. The lack of a recovery feature can be problematic for the forgetful, but as we have learned from high-profile hacks of online accounts, the password recovery feature is often the weakest link in the security chain.

You’ll want to pick a password that you can remember, as the app doesn’t offer a recovery option.

Interface

Let’s get one thing out of the way: DocWallet is not pretty. The black and gold theme feels like it was stripped from the cheesy decor of a Vegas casino in the 80′s. The dark background makes some of the grey text hard to see, and overall, it’s just not a pleasure having the window open.

It isn’t pretty, but the interface is stripped down to the essentials.

Visual unpleasantness aside, the layout is intuitive, relying on a single window without any distinct columns to organize your navigation. Across the top of the window are buttons to sync your database and import new files, as well as access to the settings panel and a quick-lock button. Below these controls are buttons to create a new folder, as well as view-options to change from a list to a grid view.

The folder navigation lets you jump back to parent folders.

The main listing of your files are shown with some basic, sortable categories, including name, modified date, size, and a colored dot indicating whether or not it has been synced. At the top level, you can place either files or folders, and to demonstrate this, you are given a few empty folders and a welcome document when you first launch DocWallet. You also get some basic shortcuts, including a quick jump back to the parent folder and a quick-lock.

Features

While the import button brings up a simple Finder window to help locate files you may want to add, the app allows simple drag-and-drop functionality from anywhere on your system. I found that dropping files and folders worked seamlessly. DocWallet accepts many common file types, but there are limitations to what it will take. I was able to drop most common text and photo formats, PDFs, and all the standard Microsoft Office formats. However, I wasn’t able to drop Photoshop files (or any Creative Suite files, for that matter).

The settings panel is basic, but has several important functions for sync subscribers.

Perhaps the most appealing feature that DocWallet has to offer is a cloud syncing solution. The developers have created versions of DocWallet for iPhone, iPad, and even Windows, which certainly removes most of the potential obstacles to accessing your files on the go. Unfortunately, syncing isn’t offered as part of the free download, and will cost you $11 per year for syncing between three devices, and $22 per year for syncing between unlimited devices.

Oddly, closing the app doesn’t lock it. You’ll have to do that manually.

If you decide to purchase syncing, the app allows you to export your settings so that DocWallet will behave the same way on all of your devices. A much more elegant solution would just be to sync the settings automatically, or at least give you the option to do so rather than deal with exporting and importing the file. I found the syncing to work quickly, and you can choose to either have the app sync on startup or to force the sync manually.

The pricing structure for syncing isn’t outrageous, but competitors offer more attractive deals.

Conclusion

Ultimately, I think there is a market for apps like this, but potential users should evaluate what their needs are before jumping in. DocWallet is built to serve as a self-contained secure file system, and in designing the app, the developers tried to recreate the wheel. A simple, Finder-like interface would have sufficed, but the clunky structure makes navigation overly-complicated. Syncing is a nice additional feature, but the yearly subscription cost isn’t competitive with what similar services charge.

If encrypting files is a more robust way to keep others from seeing private files, you may want to consider apps like MacHider, which simply hide the files from anyone using your computer. If you just need to sync files, Dropbox and similar cloud services are free, they accept all file types, and offer integration with Finder. Of course, DocWallet’s selling point is the encryption function that prevents others from accessing your data locally, and for that purpose, DocWallet does its job. The basic app without syncing is free, and if you just need a locker, it’s worth trying out.

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You got Photoshop or Pixelmator or Acorn to create. A Dropbox or Droplr account to share. Email or FTP to send off your creations. But you got a Dribbble account to show off.

That’s not bad — we all want to show off our best work, after all. But really, Dribbble is the place we go when we’ve whipped up some beautiful pixels and want to show them off and let everyone ooh and ahh over them. And what matters most is that people see what we designed, like it, comment on it, or even rebound it with their own design ideas.

And so, for the seriously Dribbbler, LastShot is the app you need to track all the stats on your latest shot.

Track Your Latest, or Your Best

From the team behind PassLocker, the beautifully simple menubar password app, LastShot is a menubar app to track the stats on one Dribbble shot with much the same style as PassLocker. You simply enter your Dribbble username and it’ll grab your latest shot (and then refresh to your newest shot as soon as you upload a new shot), or enter the address of a particular Dribbble shot you want to track. It’s most fun to track your own shots, of course, but you could also use it to spy on other people’s shot stats — but remember, you can only track one shot at a time.

Seconds after you’ve entered the shot address or account name to track, LastShot will pull up the picture and the related stats. You’ll see at a glance how many views, hearts, rebounds, and comments it’s gotten, as well as how many buckets it’s been added to. Right above the stats, you’ll see what position the shot is in the current popular 250 list, as well as how long it’s been since the shot was added. If a shot has more than 10,000 views/comments/likes, the numbers will roll up to the nearest hundred (e.g. 12.8k).

What self-respecting Mac app doesn’t have notifications?

What self-respecting Mac app these days wouldn’t have push notifications? Rounding off its simple feature set, you’ll get notifications whenever your shot gets new likes, comments, or moves up in the popular list. The notifications are still only for this one picture, but seeing as most Dribbblers don’t upload multiple shots a day (what with your upload limit and all), that’s plenty to stay on top of your shot’s activity. It gives Dribbble the native Mac integration you already expect from social networks and email, and will keep you from having to check Dribbble.com nonstop.

That’s basically all there is to LastShot, beyond the settings screen. Here, you can remove the shot or account you’re currently tracking, set LastShot to launch when you start your Mac, choose how often it should check for notifications, and pick what you’ll get notifications about.

And that’s it. It does what it’s designed for — tracking the stats on a Dribbble shot or the latest upload to a particular Dribbble account — perfectly.

Your Best Shot for Tracking Dribbble Stats

So, if you’ve wanted a simpler way to track Dribbble stats, here’s the app you need. It’s $1.99, cheap enough to make it an impulse buy if you’ve got to know your latest Dribbble stats. It’s pretty, works great, and is the perfect Mac companion to Dribbble. If you’d rather browse Dribbble itself and look around for inspiration, the $4.99 Play by Play app would be far better suited to your needs, but just for tracking your own scores, LastShot is great.

Now, if Dribbble would just add an upload API so LastShot could let you post new shots from the app, it’d be perfect.

In May, Adobe announced that it would be discontinuing the Creative Suite line and focus solely on Creative Cloud. While this decision left the creative professionals somewhat frustrated, it doesn’t really affect the average consumer since Photoshop was already priced out of reach.

However, May also ushered in two bits of news with particular interest to the everyday user — both Acorn and Pixelmator received major updates. While not the powerhouse that Photoshop is, don’t be too quick to dismiss them, since they’re very capable and affordable apps.

I decided to pit the two against one another to see which would fare best and was somewhat surprised by what I found.

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Setting the Scene

Comparing two apps of similar ilk is always a delicate matter. Although they may serve the same purpose, seldom are they on par in terms of features and pricing. Therefore, rather than ticking off a feature checklist for each, I decided to use both in tandem in my normal everyday workflow. I’ll focus on a few aspects that I feel are relevant and important to most causal users and myself.

The User Interface

Both Acorn and Pixelmator have separate windows for the image, tools palette and the various other available palettes (layers, colours, brushes, filters, etc.). The similarities however, end there.

Acorn feels as though it’s a part of OS X.

With native UI elements and pale, almost monochrome icons, Acorn feels as though it was bundled with OS X. Pixelmator, on the other hand, makes a stark departure from native UI, with sleek dark chrome and colourful icons creating a pleasing contrast.

Pixelmator has a sleek dark look and subtle animations.

While aesthetics is highly subjective, I prefer Pixelmators look. Given the fact that Pixelmator’s tool palette is customisable and it offers a wider array of useful palettes, I have to declare it the victor in this round.

Speed

In terms of speed, both apps performed admirably well. Even on my humble Macbook Air, Acorn and Pixelmator opened a series of medium sized files in a mere couple of seconds (Acorn was marginally faster). Applying layer styles and effects was quick, as was adjusting them on the fly.

Pixelmator forces the user to use export to obtain other formats since it defaults to saving in .pxm

However, when it comes to speed, what most really care about is how fast they can get work done, and in that respect Acorn trumps Pixelmator for a myriad of reasons:

• Save vs. Export – In order to take full advantage of what each app has to offer (filters, layers, versions, etc.), images need to be saved in the apps’ respective format (.acorn or .pxm). There are times, however, when all I need is a quick fix (crop an image or do some minor colour adjustments). These times, I’ll usually open a PNG or JPEG, fix what needs fixing and then save. Acorn allows me to do this with ease, whereas Pixelmator will always default to saving in .pxm format, forcing me to export the image to PNG or JPEG once again. This can quickly become tedious and time consuming.
• Automation – Although both have support for a few Automator Actions, Acorn also offers scripting via AppleScipt, Python and JSTalk, allowing for greater automation possibilities.
• Experimentation – Thanks to its non-destructive filters, I found it far easier and therefore quicker to experiment with Acorn until I achieved the desired result. With Pixelmator, I had to resort to a lot of undo/redo, saving and version browsing when things didn’t pan out as I wanted.

Supported Image Formats

On a feature checklist, both apps would score about the same on support for file formats, yet upon closer inspection, Pixelmator wins this bout. While each app supports a wide array of formats, including (much to my surprise) support for PDF, Pixelmator renders better results consistently.

When opening a PDF, Acorn produces a very pixelated and reduced image, whereas Pixelmator fairs far better. The same can be said for PSDs. Pixelmator manages to remain truest to the original image (no layer styles, though). Acorn, on the other hand, had mixed results. At times it managed to retain most of the detail of the original image, while other times the results were frighteningly wrong.

Acorn (left half) offers worse and inconsistent support for PSDs when compared to Pixelmator

Getting images into the apps is, as you’d expect, pretty standard and straightforward. Each app offers however something unique that the other doesn’t and therefore has me bouncing back and forth on occasion.

• Acorn – Allows creating a new image from a layered screenshot. While this is a little buggy in dual monitor setups, it has proven to be a valuable feature.
• Pixelmator – Has support for importing images directly from an attached camera or scanner. Network attached scanners are also supported.

Layer Filters and Effects

Acorn and Pixelmator take a very different approach to layer filters and effects. While both have their merits and niceties, Acorn emerges champion with features that – dare I say – equal Photoshop.

• Pixelmator  – Has a large selection of logically grouped, interesting and useful effects. They can be searched and added to favourites for quick access. When mousing over each effect, there is a subtle animation showing exactly what the effect will do. While it’s possible to apply multiple effects, they’re somewhat final (not counting versions and undo of course) and can’t be easily toggled on/off.

Some effects in Pixelmator offer further tweaking, done in a beautiful popup.

• Acorn – Has an equally large selection of categorized, searchable filters. Clicking on any one filter will apply it immediately to your image allowing you to quickly preview the effect. Double clicking will effectively apply the filter, after which you can tweak settings. Acorn takes things one step further, though, and uses a philosophy similar to that of layers. Filters can be stacked, rearranged, toggled on/off, and deleted. Each of these actions produces a varying effect on the image, and experimenting with them is not only effortless but fun.

Acorn filters can be stacked, reordered and deleted. You can also toggle visibility for individual filters.

Both apps offer the ability to tweak filters and effects via an on-screen HUD, so there’s no difference there.

Working With Shapes

• Pixelmator – The developers went the extra mile implementing vector shapes in this latest release. The addition of new smart shapes, custom shapes that can be exported and shared and the ability to vectorize text attest to this. Boolean operations can be performed on shapes on the same layer while retaining the ability to later change these shapes. The shape style palette allows for quick and easy adjustments to each shape. There is also an interesting easter egg called Vectormator (hit cmd-shift-V to toggle, and you’ll be presented with an optimized layout for vector work).

Pixelmator’s new powerful custom shapes palette. Shapes can be exported and shared.

• Acorn – Shapes in Acorn seem a little like an afterthought. Some smart shapes (namely the arrow and star) offer little in terms of customizability. Boolean operations are tucked away in a pop-up and are somewhat final, meaning that once applied you can no longer change the original shapes. Instead, you’ll have to undo, change the shapes and then redo the operation. On the other hand, Acorn offers great tools to arrange and align shapes (Pixelmator falls short in this respect).

Acorns smart shapes aren’t as powerful and therefore, as with other things, it takes more steps to achieve similar results.

Both apps are capable of working with vector shapes; however, it clearly isn’t their strong suit. Despite the fact the boolean operations can only be performed on shapes that reside on the same layer, Pixelmator offers no easy way of arranging these shapes (say, moving them forward/back). Even with these little quirks, it’s the better app for working with shapes.

Whenever I need to do some serious work with vector shapes, I’ll inevitably reach for Sketch, the indie vector drawing app for the Mac.

Selections, Corrections & Masking

With regard to selection, both contenders are pretty much on par offering a similar array of tools. Each app lets you to load a selection from a layer (ex. complex shape), reload a previous selection, and edit the selection in quick mask mode.

However, Pixelmator takes things one step further, allowing you to transform and refine a selection as well as introducing a new selection tool (Paint Selection Tool) — a score for Pixelmator.

Pixelmator offers more options for manipulating your selection and the Paint Selection Tool makes quick work of selecting similar colors.

The clone stamp tool, indispensable for removing unwanted objects or blemishes, is present in both apps. However, Acorns implementation leaves much to be desired. It’s not possible to use a soft brush, thus creating harsh edges that need additional steps to be smoothed out. Furthermore, Pixelmator has the Healing tool and although it’s not perfect, I’ve found it performs rather well the vast majority of times — another point for Pixelmator.

Pixelmators Healing Tool works rather well the vast majority of times, making this antenna disappear.

Masking is another relevant feature available in both apps and implemented in pretty much the same manner, but Pixelmator has once again bested Acorn by allowing you to use vector shapes in clipping layers (Acorn doesn’t have clipping layers).

Saving & Export

When it comes to exporting the end result, there is in no clear victor in my mind since each app has benefits and drawbacks.

• While Pixelmator relies on the tried and tested slices tool, ideal for exporting individual image of your latest web site mockup, Acorn introduces a new and ingenious feature called Smart Layer Export, perfect for creating retina ready @2x images;
• Also present in both apps is a web export option. Pixelmator has more formats and updates the image live with your adjustments while Acorn allows you to see the original and final version, but oddly enough it won’t let you zoom out, showing you the image at its actual size;
• Although both apps can export to a plethora of formats, only Acorn allows you to “save as”, whereas Pixelmator forces you to export.

Acorn’s native format produces smaller file than Pixelmators native format (very relevant in an age of small SSD disks).

Final Thoughts

After using both apps for an extensive period I can honestly say that I’m divided. I was expecting a clear victor from this clash but alas, that was not the case. There is much more to both apps that I either glossed over or simply didn’t mention; to do so would make for long and tedious reading. But this is the basics of each app, and it should be apparent that each has its strengths and weaknesses.

Acorn is a very powerful app. Stellar automation features, files actions, and an intuitive brush designer are just a few of the many things still left to discover. So, if speed is essential and outstanding layer filters a must, then Acorn is without doubt the way to go.

Pixelmator is an app that has surprised me time and time again. It’s stock full of useful and time saving features such as the healing tool or red eye removal. Its vector tools are superior in every aspect, and some of its effects are utterly gorgeous (especially the vintage effect and light streaks). If you don’t need the flexibility of Acorn’s layer filters or its extensive automation support, then Pixelmator is the app to get. At a fraction of the price it’s a remarkably capable app that is a sheer joy to use.

Having said that, you can’t go wrong with either app! So, download a trial of Acorn and Pixelmator (you’ll find the download links on their respective homepages), and let us know your favorite of the two. We’d love to hear why you use Acorn or Pixelmator, and how they’ve helped out your creative work.

We’ve all accidentally deleted an important file — or forgotten to save a file after typing up a whole page worth of changes. The latter problem is fixed with Autosave in most modern Mac apps, and the former is usually fixable if you have a Time Machine backup setup or if the deleted file was in Dropbox (where you can undelete files or roll back changes to them for up to 30 days for free, from their site).

But what if you manage to delete a file that wasn’t backed up? Or — even worse — what if you wipe your whole backup disk without meaning to? You’re going to need a disk recovery tool, one that can undelete files. I just had this happen to my personal backup disk, and after recovering from my initial panic, took Disk Drill for a spin to see how much it could get back. This time, I wasn’t just testing an app for a review: I honestly needed the app to work.

The good news: it worked, most of the way. Here’s the good, the bad, and the ugly of disk recovery, and how to get the most of your data back if you ever find yourself in a similar situation.

When Your Heart Drops Into Your Stomach

Here’s what happened for me. My Mac is a 13″ MacBook Air, with 128Gb of internal storage. That’s not too cramped, but you sure don’t want to store all of your photos and videos internally. So, I’ve got a 500Gb USB3 external hard drive, where our full-sized images and videos get stored, along with installers, ISO files from CD/DVD rips, and a backup of everything in my Dropbox (which is where all my documents, code, and lots of my music and pictures live). I’m not too much of a hoarder, since it all fits there, but it has some rather invaluable stuff like our wedding pictures and videos.

But then, I also have VMware Fusion virtual machines on my external harddrive — yes, the same one I use for backups. There’s not internal space in my Mac to have a copy of Windows 8, Ubuntu, and a second test copy of OS X installed, so I keep them installed in virtual machines stored on the external hard drive. They work surprisingly well from there.

Then, I downloaded a copy of OS X Mavericks beta from my developer account inside the OS X virtual machine, and think I’ll copy the installer to my external hard drive before installing it. I access my Mac (the host machine, remember) over the virtual network, open the external drive (that the virtual machine file is stored on and currently running from), and start copying the file over. I noticed that it only showed one file — the OS X virtual machine — on the external drive, but for some reason assumed it was just a quirk.

It wasn’t. The transfer crashed, I shut down the virtual machine, and then opened my external drive on the MacBook. Low and behold, everything was missing other than the virtual machine and the Mavericks installer — and the virtual machine file was messed up too, enough that it couldn’t reboot.

Moral of the story: don’t access an external hard drive through a virtual machine that’s running from said external hard drive. Whether it’s an OS X or VMware Fusion bug that caused the crash, or somehow I went too deep into digital Inception, I don’t know — but I do know that it wiped my “backup” drive.

Digging Through the Scrambles of Your Data

Look through your disks and figure out what to do

And that — or hopefully a less crazy scenario — is what Disk Drill is for. It can repair failing disks and find missing partitions, backup your hard drive to a DMG image, do a quick scan to find files of any type that you just deleted, or in the worst case scenarios, it can dig deep and find almost anything that’s been deleted from your drive if it hasn’t been already overwritten. In a case like mine, you need the deep scan. It’ll take quite some time — around a half hour for me — but will start showing you the files that you can recover almost immediately, organized by file type and extension. It won’t recover your original folders, or even your original file names in most cases, but it will find the actual data, or even the parts of it that are left.

It’ll find most files — but not virtual machines

Disk Drill lets you see all of your files as they’re rediscovered, organized by type and format. You can use Quick Look to preview the files as they’re discovered, even while it’s still scanning for other files, so you can stop the scan as soon as the files you needed were discovered. Or, you can mount everything it finds as a disk and browse through the files in Finder, where you can open or copy them as your would normally. You won’t want to do that forever, but it’s a great way to get your files if you only need to get a few. Otherwise, let the scan run the whole way, then recover everything you have to another disk to prevent your files being recovered from getting overwritten.

You’ll still need to hunt a bit for your files — and get rid of the corrupted ones.

If you’ve spent hours organizing your files into folders, you’re going to be terribly disheartened to see your files organized simply by file type even after you recover the whole drive. If you have a ton of junk on the drive — as I did thanks to the virtual machines — you’ll find tons of files that you don’t want and likely had no idea were on your drive. I found everything from the file copy animation from Windows XP (saved as a .avi file) to cached images apparently from the Windows 8 news app that were terribly corrupted. Worse still, you’ll only see the first 999 files in the top folder; the next thousand(s) will be organized in to group folders on down. Trying to find my wedding pictures among the mess would seem daunting at best.

It turned out to not be so bad, though. The files I wanted tended to be larger, 2-5Mb photos, so just by simply sorting by size I was able to rediscover my photos, with all the metadata intact except for the file name itself. You’ll still have quite the organizing task ahead of you if you need to recover hundreds of gigs worth of files, but it’s at least approachable.

For me, most documents, pictures, and videos came through fine. 8 of my 13 recovered ISO files were fine as well, though figuring out what’s a Windows 8 and Windows XP installer takes opening the ISO and digging through files. None of the DMG files came through openable, though. Your mileage may vary, of course, but if you’re needing to recover documents, pictures, audio, and videos in normal formats you should be fine, but anything else is hit or miss.

Conclusion

Now, the best case would be that you’d never need to use Disk Drill. I sure hope you won’t have to. But this isn’t the only time I’ve needed to recover files — the other time, a memory card was somehow corrupted, and I used Receive on a PC to get the data back years ago. I’ve also accidentally deleted individual files numerous times, but almost always can get the files back from a backup or Dropbox, so these two times are the only times I’ve needed to use a disk recovery app.

But here’s the thing: I’ve needed to use apps like this, and I do backup my files and sync them online. Odds are, you’ll need something like this too, sometime. So bookmark this article, and when you need to restore files from an apparently empty disk, you’ll know how. Disk Drill Pro is rather pricey at $89, but it’s invaluable if you’ve got to recover a ton of files. Plus, if you just deleted a couple files, or want to use its other protection features like the tool to turn a disk into a DMG image, you can likely get by for free. That’s not too bad.

In the world of browsers, fortunes can change terribly fast. If you browsed at all in the '90's, you surely used Netscape, at least for a time. Then IE 6 was the only game in town, while the cool kids started switching to Firefox. Apple's Safari came along, and while it didn't seem as important at first, it became the #1 way people browse from phones and tablets thanks to iOS. And Chrome, built on Safari's Webkit foundation, became the most popular browser. IE still has enormous marketshare, but it lost the mindshare long ago.

All along, in the background, Opera has been the alternate browser that everyone forgot about. It's 15th version just got released — now powered by Chrome's fork of Webkit, of all things — but it's still little more than a blip on web browsing statistics. It's had mobile versions for longer than iOS and Android have been around — I originally used it on a Nokia Symbian device, and later used it on a Windows Mobile 5.1 phone, far before the iPhone was around, much less had native apps.

And yet, it's never become a popular browser. But with Opera 15, more developers like Evernote are making browser extensions for it, and it could just possibly become a more popular browser — but the odds are against it.

That's why we're wondering if you use Opera, or if you used it in the past. We'd love to hear your thoughts about the European browser that won't quit in the comments below.

There’s little doubt that Minecraft has been an unprecedented success, attracting literally millions of sales in a reasonably short space of time for an indie developer. We’ve written about it before, from an initial review and extra coverage on new versions to a tutorial on setting up your own Minecraft server. It’s continued to be popular, enough that it’s every bit as relevant today as it was when we first wrote about it.

But what could we — and app developers of all types, not just games — learn from everyone’s favorite block-building simulator? In this article, we’re going to take a look at some key factors of Minecraft’s business and design that we hope can influence other Mac apps in the long run.

Platforms, Platforms, Platforms

Minecraft is one of those games that you can get on almost all your devices, in one form or another. Of course, the game is developed primarily for a Mac and PC audience, but versions of the game are available on iOS (for both iPhone and iPad), Android and the Xbox 360. An edition for the Xbox One is also planned following the console’s release.

While there is certainly compatibility issues between some of these platforms, due to various unavoidable limits and constraints, it does mean you can play Minecraft in your living room on your TV, at your desk on your Mac or PC and on the go with the special Pocket Edition. There’s also a range of third-party tools and apps available for both desktop and mobile platforms to achieve tasks like server administration without even needing to be in the game itself.

Minecraft is available on a number of platforms, including Xbox 360.

This isn’t something exclusive to Minecraft. But Mojang has created a strong example of a good practice, by providing users access to near-identical gameplay across a wealth of platforms. Too many apps’ effectiveness suffers at the hands of single-platform development, especially productivity apps where you might not be able to access a service when on the go, however good the OS X app is.

Modding and Extension

Minecraft is home to a vibrant modding community, with thousands of mods available to manipulate or extend your gameplay. Some mods have allowed players to add brand new items and gameplay dynamics to the game while others have allowed multiplayer Minecraft worlds to have their own meaningful economy.

Minecraft has an incredibly active modding community, with mod packs like Feed the Beast proving very popular.

By supporting modding, Mojang have provided an almost endless supply of extension strategies for when players get bored of the core, vanilla gameplay. This is a valuable trait to have in any app, especially when it powers an ability to manipulate what the app offers into something more useful. Thankfully, this is a practice not exclusive to Minecraft by any means. For example, WordPress and most CMS services offer the ability to add plugins which, in turn, make them a more universal, versatile option. Many more apps could benefit from an ecosystem like this.

Updates

If you’ve been a Minecraft player for any significant length of time, you’ve probably received at least one or two updates bringing brand new content to the game. Even since the game’s official launch in 2011, the game has received six “major” updates amongst other, smaller incremental additions. Most recently, Minecraft was updated with 1.6 adding new horses with new armor options, colored clay building blocks and new player effects, along with a wealth of smaller additions. The update was provided entirely free to owners of Minecraft, with no need to purchase DLC or expansion packs.

Mojang only just recently released Minecraft 1.6, implementing a number of new additions including rideable horses.

Of course, this is not to make paid DLC offerings look bad by comparison. In fact, if Mojang requested payment in return for these updates, I’m sure many of us would be happy to put up the cash in return for a new DLC installment. The praise comes simply in return for offering any official expansions at all, paid or not, and seeing developers continue to add new features and optimizations is something we love to see. No one needs to go as far as The Sims-level of expansion packs, but continuing to make changes is always going to be welcome, especially when it’s based on feedback from the…

Community

Community support is a really valuable trait in any app, especially when changes to the software or game are effected by community feedback. That’s been the case in Minecraft where updates have been partially crafted based on community demands and, in the case of the recent addition of horses, originate from community-led modifications. Integral to the early beta releases of Minecraft was community feedback where original creator Notch was able to shape the game into something the community wanted.

Minecraft has a strong following, including on sites like the /r/Minecraft subreddit.

Of course, that’s not as easy to do if your app or game is already developed and released. However, listening to your community is not only an action that will be appreciated by many members but also something that can lead to better satisfaction. It’s Business 101 to meet the demands of your target audience, but so many developers fail to reach out in the same way that Mojang does.

Final Thoughts

Minecraft is an excellent example of some best practices we’d like to see evident in all developers, and, from the lessons it’s learned as an indie developer, it might even have a few things to tell the biggest of AAA title-makers. Ensuring cross-platform availability, a constant supply of updates and optimizations (especially those influenced by the community) and allowing extensions by users are all traits that Mojang has embraced with Minecraft and that pretty much all apps — not just games — could benefit from employing.

However, in a world that’s being faced with a reliance on platform exclusives and paid DLC, it might take a while before some of the big guys change their stance. Until that time, we’ll be left praising the indie developers for their hard work towards building a better app.

Ever wished our giveaways let you pick the app you won? Well, this week, we’ve got a giveaway that’ll let you do just that — actually, it’ll let you pick the ten apps you win!

Our friends at Paddle our running their second Pick a Bundle Mac from now until July 14th, and it’s a great way to get a huge discount on a number of great Mac apps. You can pick any 10 apps you want from the included selection of 30 apps for just $49.99. And this Pick a Bundle includes a ton of apps you’ll love, including apps we’ve covered before like ExpanDrive, On the Job, TotalFinder, TotalSpaces, DEVONthink‘s DEVONnote and DEVONsphere, Popchar X, Typinator, and 28 more apps!

But you might just be able to get all of that for free, since we’ve got 3 copies of the bundle to giveaway to our readers this week! This giveaway will take a bit of extra work to enter, but it’s worth it. Here’s what you need to do: sign up for the Pick a Bundle newsletter at http://promo.paddle.com, then comment below with the 10 apps you’d pick if you won the bundle, and finally share this post on Twitter or Facebook and add the link to your post in the comment below. We’ll then pick 3 random winners from the entries!

Hurry and get your entry in: we’re closing the giveaway on July 10th!

Best of all, any competition winners whom have already bought the bundle will be refunded in full for their purchase, so your bundle will be completely free if you win even if you go ahead and buy a copy of the Pick a Bundle before we close the giveaway!

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

Finding new music you like is hard. If you’re not completely enmeshed in a community that happens to perfectly match your taste, you’re sure to be missing stuff you’d like, and only Top 40 pop is reasonably represented in the mainstream.

That’s probably why big names like Amazon, Apple, Last.fm, Pandora, and even the top record labels invest heavily in tools that suggest songs and artists you might like, based on databases they piece together from your listening or buying preferences.

Walknote brings its own recommendation algorithm to the table, coupling it with your iTunes music library and an attractive interface. It’s unlikely to surface many obscure gems by artists you haven’t heard of before, but between its genre-sorted recommended mixes and tight integration with YouTube, Last.fm, Amazon, and the iTunes Music Store, Walknote brings just enough to the table to be useful.

Knowledge is Power

As with most recommendation algorithms, Walknote benefits from more information. It automatically pulls song data from your iTunes library (you can change which library it uses), and also has an option to manually input a number of your favorite artists. I found the recommendations are biased toward your manually-elected favorites and whoever the two or three most represented artists are in your library.

The main app display has three kinds of recommendations — artist spotlights, genre mixes, and new/recent releases.

For instance, I had lots of recommendations based on my fondness for Sugarcult, The Clash, and The Cure, seemingly because of the sheer quantity of songs I have by them. But I wouldn’t call myself a fan of The Clash at all. I like some of their music, sure, but it’s pure coincidence that I have several of their albums.

I only have one album by rapper Kendrick Lamar, however, and as many recommendations showed up based on him as on Jay Z — by whom I have more than 50 songs, presumably because I explicitly stated that Lamar is one of my favorites (and did not do so for Jay Z).

This is good, in as much as the app adjusts its brute-force suggestions based on your more nuanced “favorites” input. But I haven’t seen any way to tell it, “hey, I don’t like that artist you suggested,” or, “I know I have music by Rihanna in my collection, but those three songs are just an exception — I don’t really like her stuff in general.” I’m getting ahead of myself, though, so let me step back for a moment before I explain how this one thing hamstrings the app.

Sometimes strange suggestions sneak in; previews are either iTunes snippets or YouTube clips.

Brute Force Recommendations

Walknote takes a few hours to process larger music libraries — mine includes over 17,000 tracks, and it seemed to be four or five hours before the import bar in the Processing tab disappeared in lieu of a statistic boasting 938 recommended tracks. The app checks every day for new releases by artists in your library — also a slow process when you have a big collection.

This all happens in the background, invisible to you unless you seek it out. I wouldn’t quite call it seamless, though, because the Home tab only refreshes when the app boots up — so you don’t actually find out whether Walknote found new recommendations until you quit and re-open, then painstakingly look through the new releases and Recommended Mix panels.

There’s a lot to process, but you can enjoy the entire app’s functionality while you wait.

There are three artists spotlighted atop the Home tab each day and 30 recommended mixes across the central panel — broken into genre groupings that are presented with a nice rounded square of four album covers, drawn from recommended tracks.

Clicking on any of these takes you to the playlist view, which features a vertical pane displaying the Recommended Mix and a main pane that shows either a music video or a band image — with a mouse-triggered overlay of artist info and links to iTunes, Amazon, Last.fm, and YouTube. The music itself, meanwhile, is drawn from either iTunes or YouTube — so you get short previews on some and full tracks on other songs — and automatically continues down the list.

There’s an attractive playlist presentation you can hop in and out of by clicking on the track info in the bottom left.

It’s very well presented for the most part, with lots of images, large text, and fairly-intuitive controls — even if it is hard to gauge why the app chooses one preview source over another. Although I can’t fathom for the life of me why the space afforded to the middle and lower panes does not match the space they require, which leads to unsightly vertical scroll bars that harm the aesthetic.

The new releases panel at the bottom of the Home tab shows album art and album titles for the 50 newest albums by artists in your library. In a bout of inconsistent design, clicking on these opens the iTunes album page in your default web browser. Hoping to preview the tracks right in Walknote, as you normally would? You’ll have to use the search field.

It’s the little things that Walknote gets wrong. It looks good and has a great workflow…until these minor issues start to stick out. I stumbled across a niggling problem every time I started to like a feature. Walknote frustrates precisely because it gets so close to doing things right. It’s like the designers forgot to finish their job.

Did no one ask at any time, “What if someone doesn’t like a recommendation? What if they’d like to choose their preview source? What if they already have this album?” The longer I used Walknote, the better my suggestions got, but songs I don’t like kept showing up in every mix — often by the same artist — and I could do nothing about it.

Then there are things like the music profile, which — cool as it may be — is completely wasted as just a static image like this.

Boon and Bane

Musical tastes change. We fall in love with genres and styles, then grow out of them. What you listened to at 20 probably isn’t the same as what you’ll want to hear at 30, and you may decide that your teenage self’s musical preferences are altogether far-too-loud after you’ve had offspring of your own. Or maybe you won’t, but chances are at least something you obsessed over at one point in your life won’t register as an interest at another.

Walknote makes no real allowances for this. Unless you regularly prune your digital library to suit only your current preferences, it will throw out suggestions that fit a former you rather than the you of today. The suggestions do improve over time, gradually introducing you to new sounds that you’ll come to love — especially if you are diligent in specifying “favorites” — but these odd ducks keep sneaking in.

And like an old lover turning up on your door unannounced, that’s sure to cause friction.

A few weeks ago, LaunchBar 5.5 update brought — among other interesting things — a new feature called Snippets, which actually is a complete overhaul of its previous “Text Clippings” feature. As the devs advertised Snippets as “a serious text expansion tool”, I was curious to see how this compares to one of the references in text substitution on the Mac: TextExpander.

So, for one week, I did a little experiment: I closed TextExpander and acted as if it was never installed on my Mac, and chose to use only LaunchBar instead. Read on to find out how all of this turned out.

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Before you read on, I must warn you: if you use TextExpander to perform scripts and so on, the Snippets feature of LaunchBar can’t do that. But if you’re just using TextExpander to, well, expand text as I do, or occasionally add dates/times and grab something from the clipboard, then LaunchBar Snippets and TextExpander play in the same field.

Setting up LaunchBar for text expansion

In this little tutorial, I’ll guide you through how to create snippets and how to use them. Also, one of the welcome features of TextExpander is the ability to synchronize your snippets between machines using Dropbox. LaunchBar does not offer this out of the box, but it’s not that difficult to achieve it. I’ll show you first how to do this, so your newly created snippets will instantly be available everywhere (except on iOS of course, we’re talking about LaunchBar here).

Synchronization

To synchronize all of your LaunchBar snippets between machines, follow these simple steps:

1. First, quit LaunchBar, just to make sure you don’t mess up with anything in progress.
2. LaunchBar snippets are stored in ~/Library/Application Support/LaunchBar/Snippets. Copy this folder to Dropbox. I chose put this Snippets folder within a newly created folder /Dropbox/Applications/LaunchBar.
3. Create a symbolic link for this folder you’ve just put in Dropbox. You can do this the simple GUI way by downloading SymbolicLinker, which will give you a contextual menu within the Finder to make symbolic links.
4. You now have a ‘Snippets symlink’ folder. Move it back to /Users/[yourusername]/Library/Application Support/LaunchBar/Snippets
5. Delete the old Snippets folder in ~/Library/Application Support/LaunchBar.
6. Rename ‘Snippets symlink’ to simply ‘Snippets’.
7. Restart LaunchBar.

SymbolicLinker makes it a cinch to create a symbolic link, if you’re not familiar enough with UNIX commands and Terminal.

That’s all! Now every snippet you create on one machine will be available on other Mac too.

Creating new snippets

There are many ways of creating new Snippets in LaunchBar.

Create a new snippet from scratch with the ‘Add Snippet’ action

If you want to create a new snippet from scratch, just press your general keyboard shortcut to activate LaunchBar (Cmd-Space in my case) then:

1. Start typing Add Snippet (remember: never type spaces in LaunchBar commands, these will activate Quick Look — typing “addsnip” without the quotes should be enough to highlight the corresponding action). Once the Add Snippet action is selected, press Enter.
2. In the field right next to “Add Snippet”: type the text you want to store as a snippet.
3. Press Enter: You’ve just created a new snippet in LaunchBar!

Writing some text to be stored as a snippet in LaunchBar is easy.

Overtime, due to the learning algorithm of LaunchBar, you will have to type less and less. After a few uses, I just need to type ‘as’ and ‘Add Snippet’ is the first match in the list.

Instant Send then ‘Add Snippet’

If you’ve already typed something in, say, your favorite text editor, or if there is some text within a document or a web page that you want to store as a snippet, then perform the following steps:

1. Select the text.
2. Use the Instant Send of LaunchBar (you can simply use your keyboard shortcut to activate LaunchBar and hold the last key a bit longer to do this; as I use case Cmd-Space for LaunchBar, I just press Cmd and hold Space for one second to achieve this).
3. Press Tab.
4. Start typing ‘Add Snippet’ (without the quotes and without space) to make LaunchBar match this action name. Once the ‘Add Snippet’ action is highlighted, press Enter.

Here, I’ve selected the “Select some text” words from the previous paragraph and passed it to LaunchBar via Instant Send: the orange icon on the right indicates you’ve successfully gotten your selection into the app.

Create a snippet from items stored in the Clipboard history

If you have some text stored in your Clipboard history that you’d like to store as a snippet:

1. Make LaunchBar show your Clipboard History (see the “Show clipboard history:” field in the “Keyboard Shortcuts” list from the Clipboard tab in LaunchBar preferences to define your own shortcut for this)
2. Select (with Up or Down arrow) the desired text
3. Press Tab and type “Add Snippet” (without quotes and without space, as usual)
4. Once you’ve pressed Enter, a new snippet is created based on this item from your clipboard history

Playing with placeholders

As you might expect from “a serious text expansion tool”, you can use some placeholders in your snippets. The most common ones are:

• <date>
• <time>
• <clipboard>

For dates, you can specify a format by using different “YYYY MM dd” combinations or simply use the shorthands <date full>, <date long>, <date medium> and <date short>. The shorthands will reflect what you’ve set in the Formats tab of the “Language & Text” category in OS X System Preferences. Same thing with the various <time> placeholders.

If you don’t want to try and guess which combination of letters to use to craft your perfect date/time snippet, I strongly recommend you head over to this online help document. That’s the only place where I found useful info on how to use the new Snippets feature, documentation being inexistent within the app itself (good luck trying with the LaunchBar Help file, or I missed something there).

Because LaunchBar keeps track of your clipboard history, you can access every item using ‘numbered’ clipboard placeholder. For instance:

• while <clipboard> refers to the most recent copied text,
• <clipboard 2> refers to what’s been copied just before,
• <clipboard 3> to what’s been copied before <clipboard 2>,

and so on.

Finally, something TextExpander users will be familiar with is the “|” (pipe symbol) that moves the text insertion point to where the placeholder was.

Browsing through, acting on, and using snippets

A new Snippets category has been added to the LaunchBar index. Browse through it to show the complete list of your snippets. There is even a new “Snippets:” keyboard shortcut in the Shortcuts tab of LaunchBar Preferences that, when activated, will directly open your snippets list in LaunchBar. By the way, when browsing this list, pressing Cmd-N is another way of creating a new snippet.

While a snippet is selected, you can:

• press Enter to insert its content in the frontmost application
• rename it by pressing Shift-Cmd-R
• assign it an abbreviation by pressing Shift-Cmd-A

If you assign a snippet an abbreviation, you then have something really similar to TextExpander. The only difference is that you have to invoke LaunchBar first (Cmd-Space for me) instead of adding a trigger as you would do in TextExpander.

The beauty of LaunchBar and its powerful smart search is that you don’t have to remember an abbreviation to use a snippet. Just start typing something the snippet you’re looking for contains and LaunchBar will easily find it. You don’t even need to narrow your search to the Snippet category first. Snippets are indexed just like anything else. This reminds me of the “Search Snippets” accessible from the TextExpander icon in the menu bar.

Searching through snippets: Simply typing “time” brings up a list of all my time-related snippets.

What LaunchBar Snippets really are

Surprisingly, LaunchBar Snippets are just text files stored in the Finder. It means you can easily:

• show a snippet file in the Finder with Cmd-Enter
• edit each snippet individually with any text editor (or directly open it in your default text editor with Shift-Enter)
• preview a snippet with Quicklook within LaunchBar (just press Space or Cmd-Y)
• move them to Trash (Cmd-Backspace)
• navigate into them line by line, word by word (with the Right, Up and Down arrow) just as with every text file accessed in LaunchBar

You might wonder why having snippets stored as text files might be handy. If you just use short (no more than a few words long) snippets, there’s a chance you won’t need this. But imagine now dealing with long, multiple lines snippets. Since LaunchBar doesn’t offer a multi-line editing window as TextExpander do, bringing up your own text editor for the task is a really nice addition.

So, what to choose?

If you have some basic text expansion needs (i.e. you don’t use the geekiest features of TextExpander like shellscript/AppleScript or the fill-in snippets), then the Snippets feature of LaunchBar might be all you need.

Creating new snippets is easy, inserting one too, and you can, with the little trick I explained at the beginning of this article, have them synchronized between your Mac. As LaunchBar snippets are just plain-text files, it’s easy to deal with them. Also, not having to remember any abbreviation to use a snippet is neat. Though you can already do that with the menubar Search feature of TextExpander. In conclusion, if you don’t already own TextExpander but already have LaunchBar at hand, it might be worth it considering not spending the extra cash on a text expansion tool, especially when your launcher can already do most of it.

I am — maybe a bit overly — attached to the TextExpander snippet workflow, though. TextExpander monitors all keystrokes and instantly expands characters sequences — provided you correctly remember your defined abbreviations. With LaunchBar, you have to activate the app first to use its snippets. Getting used to this LaunchBar way takes a bit of time if you’re a long TextExpander user.

But it was a fun thing to experiment with and remember, Snippets are just new to LaunchBar, who knows what the devs might have in store for the next iterations.

Do you see a use case for the Snippets feature of LaunchBar? What’s your favorite text expansion utility? Please tell us in the comments.

Storage space is at a premium these days, with SSDs coming standard in MacBook Airs and Retina MacBook Pros. SSDs are speedy and a huge improvement over platter hard drives in most ways, but it’s rare now to have a 500Gb or larger drive built into your Mac. Rather than having to buy a new Mac, or shuffle files between external drives, why not clean up the space that you have? That’s exactly what Detox my Mac, our sponsor this week, can help you do.

Detox My Mac is an advanced deep-clean app for your Mac running OS X 10.5 or newer. It simplifies the tools that you’d normally find in OS X’ disk utilities, and then gives you over 30 extra tools to clean up your Mac and keep it maintained. It’ll help you find and remove old cache files and logs, the extra files left behind when you uninstall apps, and more. You can clean up all of that and more in just 2 clicks with Detox my Mac.

It won’t magically make your Mac brand new, but it will clean out the old cobwebs from old apps and help you have the most space free for the stuff you really want on your Mac. So, if you’ve noticed that your Mac is running out of storage space, now’s the time to clean it up. There’s no reason for all of your SSD’s space to be wasted by junk files that you don’t need anyhow.

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Watch out Evernote. Look nervously in your rear view mirror. You see that hot sports car quickly gaining on you that seemingly came out of nowhere? That’s NoteSuite.

Okay, maybe Evernote doesn’t need to be that nervous because NoteSuite is only available for iOS and OS X — so it doesn’t compete across platforms. But for Mac and iPad users, this app is the next big thing in note taking, task management, Internet research, and file annotation. In other words, NoteSuite wants to be your Mac’s new productivity powerhouse.

Overview

NoteSuite does a lot things. Covering all its features would make for a too-long, too-dry review, so I am going to focus in on the key features. For extensive apps like this, a good help menu is a must, and luckily this app has a comprehensive help manual that will take you through all the features.

So where does NoteSuite have advantages over the incumbent Evernote? The first thing I noticed using the app across the iPad and the Mac is the unified experience. The UIs are similar, and so is the functionality. The lack of uniformity across platforms was, and to some extent still is, one of my main sources of frustration using Evernote. The second advantage is the lack of subscription fees — all your data is synced over iCloud. Finally, NoteSuite’s innovate integration of todos and notes really sets it apart. In fact, it is a full featured task manager, something Evernote could not come close to claiming.

If you find NoteSuite’s feature set attractive, you may also want to compare it with an app I reviewed a while back called Notebooks. It also combines note taking, task management, and file management.

UI and Design Basics

Overall, the interface is great, it has some quirks, which I will get to, but I really like the way this app looks. It’s modern and fits perfect with OS X, definitely built for the Mac. The notes view and the todo view are presented in separate tabs. The left hand pane — which can be hidden — is where the notes and to dos are listed. Where the UI gets a little bit quirky is with resizing the window — making the window larger makes the text bigger? This is really odd behavior and also happens in full screen mode. You can also interact with the app through the menu bar, but there is a bug right now where some of the functions do not bring the NoteSuite window to the front like they are supposed to.

Example of a note in NoteSuite.

The interface is built around the app’s two main functions: note taking and task management, so lets take a look at both of these in turn.

Note Taking

Taking notes in NoteSuite for Mac is just like taking notes on the iPad app, minus the drawing function. The first thing I noticed is the ability to customize the default font and styles. Styles are a big deal for me because tote taking is so much faster when you don’t have to mess with bolding text or making it bigger to denote headings.

List making is definitely a strong point for NoteSuite. You can make bulleted lists, to dos, and to dos that actually link to the app’s task manager (numbered lists are conspicuously missing). All of these lists are collapsable, a feature missing from a lot of note taking apps. The to do lists that link to the task manager are especially handy. Basically, you can make to dos in your notes, and they automatically go to your task inbox complete with a link. The task in your inbox also links back to your note. That’s just plain awesome.

What about getting notes into the database quickly? NoteSuite has a couple of ways for getting that great idea off your mind and stored away. One option is web clipping. I used the Chrome extension for clipping webpages and had good success using all three clipping options (clip article, clip full page, and clip selection). Notes can also be added directly into the app through email. Adding notes and tasks through email is a little different than Evernote. You have to set up a new email address to forward information to and then NoteSuite will download the emails from that address once you select the Get Mail option in the File menu.

Clipping an article with the NoteSuite extension.

NoteSuite provides a lot of options for organizing your notes including folders, smart folders, sorting options, and tags. If you need to refer to outside files in your notes, you can also link to other documents (unfortunately just Microsoft Office documents right now, no iWorks), not to mention articles in your Instapaper or pocket account. Not much of an organizer? The powerful built in search will help sift through your notes and find the one you need.Similar to Evernote, NoteSuite will even help you find relationships between your notes.

A look at tags in NoteSuite.

Overall, the note taking experience is straightforward and enjoyable, but there are some annoyances that need to be taken care of. First, the standard Mac keyboard shortcuts for moving the cursor around and selecting text are completely absent?! I am really baffled that this was left out. I need those shortcuts. Additionally, the powerful organizational features of this app are severely hindered by the lack of ability to select multiple notes at the same time. Its great to have tags and folders, but organizing notes one at a time can be a big time sink. Also, notes cannot be viewed in separate windows, this is a must for users who often compare notes side by side.

Task Management

In general, task management in NoteSuite works like many of the other full-featured task management apps you know and love. All of the default lists are there: All, Today, Inbox, Today, This Week, Next (some of which need to be turned on in the preferences) and unlimited user created lists. A bunch of other features that don’t need explaining are also included:  due dates, repeating tasks, tags, and task flagging to name a few.

NoteSuite brings some unique features to task management.

What you are probably more interested in is what makes NoteSuite’s approach to task management different? One way that NoteSuite is different is calendar integration. Not only will it show you calendar events in the Today and This Week views, but you can also add calendar events from the app. I am interested in apps that do this because I find it very helpful for scheduling so I was thrilled to see it implemented. However, the current implementation is not as helpful as it could be. For example, the This Week view does not show the dates for the events, just the times. Plus, clicking on an event does not open the event in the Calendar app. Hopefully this gets better over time.

The way task notes work in NoteSuite is also unique. You can attach any existing note to a task, or create a new note that will be available both through the task, and in the notes portion of the app.

There are also options for getting to dos into NoteSuite quickly including a system wide quick add feature and email forwarding.

Many of NoteSuite’s note taking irritations also apply to task management. Again, no ability to edit multiple tasks at once, and no drag and drop. Tasks are definitely a little more buggy, sometimes disappearing and reappearing along with some other odd behaviors that I’m sure will get worked out.

Final Thoughts

This is an exciting productivity app. NoteSuite is on to something amazing with the way it combines tasks and notes. This app is feature packed and has the flexibility to adapt to how you work. Having said that, it does need more polish, stability, and  a couple of key features. The odd window behavior and lack of standard keyboard shortcuts for editing text need to be addressed.

On top of that, while the unified experience between the iPad and Mac is a big selling point, NoteSuite needs an iPhone app yesterday. I can’t imagine not having my notes and tasks on my iPhone. I am going to hold off on moving my data over to NoteSuite until some of these issues get worked out — speaking of which the theory.io team might want to consider an importer. Despite that, my recommendation is to pick up NoteSuite while the price is low because it is going to be a excellent productivity tool.

For many of you, March 13th was a dark day. In fact, in the intervening months, just the mention of the words “Google” and “Reader” in the same sentence has been enough to send chills down many a spine. The time has come for all of you who are wedded to the Google style of RSS aggregation to face the facts, though, and find a new home for your feeds.

The innovation and competition among feed readers in the Mac App Store, however, is rather lacking. The granddaddy of Mac feed reading, NetNewsWire, is currently beta testing a new version, and the reading later app ReadKit has emerged as one of the best new RSS readers if you’ve switched to one of the new reading services. Outside of this, the field is looking wide open.

There is one promising entry, though. Mixtab Pro is the $4.99 descendent of the free, long-term resident of the App Store, which was named, simply, Mixtab. It is one of the new breed of magazine-style readers, which provide a highly visual way of staying up to date with the latest headlines. The popularity of many such apps on touchscreen devices shows that this look can be popular, but does that extend to the desktop environment?

The Feeds of Choice

The first port of call in any RSS reader is, obviously, the addition of some feeds. As you might expect, you can add feeds singly, or grouped together in an OPML file, which is a format many Google Reader outcasts will now be very familiar with.

It should also be noted that Mixtab Pro, like many of its competitors, has a feed search and discovery area, which is known as the Gallery. Here, collections of feeds – called tabs within this app – compiled by your fellow Mixtab Pro users can be browsed through by subject, or via the in-built search, and added to your list of sources with one click.

The Gallery provides a very competent area for feed discovery.

Once you’ve added your reading matter of choice, you can then arrange the sources into whatever order you please.

The Browsing Interface

The look of Mixtab Pro can be described, essentially, in three words: Flipboard for Mac. No, it may not share certain specifics of design with the world’s favourite iOS news browser, but the large number of similarities make for an obvious comparison.

Mixtab Pro’s Home page is pleasant enough, but it isn’t the apps strongest area.

The home page of Mixtab Pro is filled, almost entirely, with a grid of box-shaped feeds and tabs. The content of each box includes the title of the feed or collection, the latest headline, and a RSS-derived background image when one is available. At times, this can look classy, but the text sometimes gets lost if the background image is light in colour. Additionally, it must be noted that the list of feeds is not paginated, meaning that if you are an avid reader, you may end up having to scroll a long way to find a particular source, especially as there is no search available in this area of the app.

The look changes subtly, but significantly, when you enter a feed or tab, and start browsing the stories it contains. The grid layout remains, but the large white spaces between boxes on the home screen are minimized noticeably, providing more understated demarcation. This also allows the boxes to be a little bigger, and it removes some key visual clutter. Another positive here is the placement of each story’s headline on top of a dark, semi-translucent rectangle, which offers much improved legibility.

The article browsing view looks good, and provides access to the useful sidebar.

The best part of the article browsing view, however, is the expandable sidebar, which is only available in this part of Mixtab Pro. It contains access to the Favourites folder (see below), as well as links to all of your individual feeds and tabs. It is a more traditional way of accessing feeds, and though I understand that the design is meant to be distinctive, the option to use a simple list, at all times, should you wish, would be welcome.

Reading Your Content

Mixtab Pro certainly has a unique design – among desktop apps, at least – throughout its browsing screens, and this trend continues when you arrive at the single article view.

Articles are split into columns, and are placed on a large white canvas. Acting as a background behind this is the article’s featured image. This looks great if the image used is of a decent resolution, but small images, when stretched in this way, start to become badly pixelated.

Another quirk of Mixtab Pro makes itself apparent when you come to scroll down an article…because only sideways scrolling is on offer. As the owner of a Magic Mouse, I don’t have a problem with this. Folks who use a non-Apple mouse, though, may find this unusable, especially when you consider that the direction keys do not provide an alternative method of scrolling. Some comfort, however, can be taken from the fact that a linear scrollwheel, when combined with the Shift key, does work with Mixtab Pro’s articles (something I tested personally).

The article view is quite newspaper-like, but pointlessly side-scrolling.

Aside from all of this visual playfulness, Mixtab Pro’s article design is pleasantly uncluttered. It is disappointing that there is no font size adjustment on offer, but you can mitigate this to some degree by viewing, within the app, the original web page of any article.

Also included with each article are a handful of sharing options – email, Twitter and Facebook – as well as the ability to favourite the post you are reading by clicking the star.

Though limited, Mixtab Pro’s sharing options work nicely.

Conclusion

It is certainly the case that Mixtab Pro provides a unique RSS environment on Mac, and users who enjoy visual influence in their feed reading will love this app’s design. In spite of the timing of Mixtab Pro‘s release, I don’t think it has actually been designed with Google Reader refugees in mind, so to judge it in terms of its suitability as a replacement seems unfair.

Equally, I must note Mixtab Pro‘s weaknesses, which are mostly related to usability. The default text size, for example, is comfortable for me, but it seems silly not to include the option to adjust it. Similarly, the sideways scrolling may be fashionable, but it seems to be an unnecessary stifler of usability.

Mixtab Pro is very well put together, though, and suffers from no faults on the development side. It isn’t an app which will please hardcore readers, but designers, creatives, and others who enjoy visual browsing, may find Mixtab Pro to be the best of the Mac feed reading options available.

If you’re still using Google Reader, there’s a weekend project that you’ve got to take on: exporting your RSS feeds, and finding a new RSS reader app. That’s because it’s the end of June already, and Google’s shutting down Google Reader on Monday!

Over at Web.AppStorm, we’ve written a tutorial for getting your data out of Google Reader — including your favorites — and into other services. Then, we’ve just rounded up the 5 best online replacements for Google Reader, most of which already work with Mac and iOS apps you likely already have tried out. They’re all great, and we’re sure you’ll find one you like there — even without leaving your Mac behind.

The Best Mac Options

ReadKit 2 is the best RSS app on the Mac right now

Then, if you want to read your RSS feeds natively on your Mac, but also want to sync them online or with your iOS devices, there’s really only one app for you right now: ReadKit 2. It’s gotten even better since our review, and works as a great native RSS reader or one that syncs with Fever, Feed Wrangler, and FeedBin right now, in addition to most popular reading later and bookmarking services. Reeder 2 for Mac promises syncing with those services as well, but it’s not out yet, and ReadKit works great right now.

The all-new NetNewsWire

If you don’t care about syncing, there’s a ton of other apps that might work for you. The brand-new NetNewsWire 4 beta is one of the most polished, and it is getting a sync service and brand-new iOS apps going forward. It’s definitely one to keep an eye on — and if you like it now, you can preorder it for just $10 and use the beta for free right now.

A notification center just for news

There’s more, too. There’s NewsBar that shows your RSS feeds in a news-ticker style sidebar, and syncs with its iOS app over iCloud. There’s the simple-yet-useful Favoriteer that might be nice if you want your RSS reader to get out of your way. There’s the beautiful-but-tiny Leaf that now has its own RSS sync engine, so you can read news in its app or via Notification Center. All of these won’t work if you need your news on every device, but they’re great Mac-only options.

There’s a Lot More to Come, Soon

And there’s more to come. Stay tuned, as we’ll be covering a number of new and newly updated RSS reader apps over the coming weeks, such as the now-in-beta Dayspring, the next version of Reeder for Mac, and more.

For now, what’s most important is getting your Google Reader data exported, and finding an app or service that can either be your full replacement or at least hold you over until something better is released. There’s these great Mac apps for it, and the aforementioned roundup of web apps that are absolutely great Google Reader replacements.

The best thing is, RSS reader apps are hot again, thanks to Google killing Reader, and we’re seeing a lot of interesting apps coming out. The web apps seemed to catch up and even exceed what we’d expected before March quicker than anyone expected, and a number of Mac apps (most notably ReadKit) did the same. Now, it’ll be fun seeing what comes next in the much more competitive RSS reader market.

We’d love to hear what RSS reader app and/or service you switched to in the comments below. Personally, I switched to Fever, synced to ReadKit on my Mac and Reeder on my iPhone, and I couldn’t be happier.

Just don’t forget to export your Google Reader data before Monday!!!

I was recently introduced to Kippt, and I felt like I’d been missing out on something big. It’s similar to Evernote in that you can save notes and links and even annotate the links you’re saving, but there’s a bonus social aspect. Find Kippt users you admire or with similar interests and watch for all the neat stuff they’re clipping.

Klipps is a snazzy client that frees you from your browser and lets you do all of that cool Kippt stuff on your Mac. I’m going to try it out and see if it stands up to the official web app.

Kippt It Safe

If you haven’t already, you’ll need to sign up for Kippt. Users already joined up can log right into Klipps and start accessing saved notes. You’ll probably notice right away that the Klipps app looks a lot like the Kippt web interface. That’s certainly not a bad thing, since Kippt already looks pretty good, and if you’ve got a feel for the web app, you’ll be good to go in Klipps.

Snag some clips, and your inbox will look like this.

I’d never used Kippt before trying out the Klipps app, so I’ll run through some of the basic ins and outs that may feel super familiar if you’ve already been using Kippt to keep your notes, or clips, for a while. Along the left side you’ll see the buckets your clips are automatically sorted into. Unorganized clips get popped into the Inbox, but those can be sorted into lists. Clips from users you follow fall into the Feed, and you can mark your own clips or those of others to find later in your Favorites. All Clips is sort of an unsorted pile of all of the clips you’ve save to Kippt. Hover over the Lists to create a new one, but new Folders are only for premium users.

You may be asking yourself at this point what sets the Klipps app apart from the Kippt web app. I think it comes down to how nice Klipps makes the Kippt experience. Toggle the navigation sidebar on and off, and you can use the full Klipps window to browse your clips. While you can read or edit your clips in a full browser window in the web app, the sidebar is omnipresent. Without the sidebar, though, you can still navigate into different folders and lists. Click the folder or list name in the title bar to open a drop-down navigation menu.

Sort all of your clips into folders.

With a clip open, enter fullscreen to get an immersive reading and editing experience. This is a lot nicer than in the web experience, since even in fullscreen in the web app, you’ll still see your browser tabs or address bar. I ran into a problem with fullscreen, though, because if I was browsing clips in a list in fullscreen without the sidebar, I couldn’t navigate to another folder or list because I’d lost the title bar drop-down. While it may sound like a pretty specific set of circumstances, Klipps looks so good without the sidebar and in fullscreen, I kept ending up in the same conundrum.

Navigate in the sidebar or from the title bar.

Pros and Cons

I’m a big fan of web apps. If it makes sense to have something run in a browser instead of from my Applications folder, I’m all for it. That said, sometimes a Mac app complement is nice to have in my back pocket. I’m a bad one for closing browser tabs, so when it’s something I rely on like a notes or clipping app like Kippt, it’s nice to have a way to get to my clips without fear of constantly closing and having to reopen browser tabs.

What makes Klipps really great is that I can use the Kippt web app or the browser extension to clip stuff all day, from anywhere I’m signed into Kippt, and then I can sort through all of that stuff using the Klipps app. Because it’s a great standalone app, it’s nice way to come back to my clips later and move them around or add notes.

Klipps is a really great place to browse and edit your notes.

There’s a glaring omission in the Klipps app, though. So far it’s pretty good, but there’s not enough to make it a must to download. What it needs is offline editing. Klipps would be a hands down winner if I could organize my clips while I’m offline. There’s a great little markdown-compatible editor attached to Kippt, and that’s been carried over to Klipps. I’d love to have access to all of my clips when I’m offline, annotate them to my little heart’s content, and then sync them up with Kippt when I next go online. That’s just not how Klipps works, and it’s a bummer that such a great functionality, the kind of thing users of the similar Evernote app have come to expect, isn’t present here.

Final Thoughts

Klipps sure is a nice app to use. If you’ve been looking for a Mac client for Kippt, this is a great one to try. It works beautifully and provides an experience just as nice as what you’ve come to expect from the official Kippt web app.

There’s not a lot of added value here, though. What you’re getting is Kippt out of your browser and onto your Mac. The editing experience is nicer, but you can’t get to your clips offline. I definitely liked using Klipps and would recommend it to anyone looking for a way to use Kippt on their Mac, but whether Klipps is right for you depends on what you need from a Kippt client.