Category: Mac

Dear Adobe,

You’ve done a great job with your Creative Cloud apps. We love the new features, and the new Creative Cloud installation process is worlds better than the old Creative Suite installer. We’re excited about your new direction with training videos, versioned backup, and Typekit font sync. It’s great.

But that hasn’t kept everyone happy. Every time we write about Creative Cloud, our readers let us know how the new subscriptions plans don’t work out for them. Even if they like the new features, they’re not planning to upgrade because of price, or because they want to know that they’ll be able to keep their programs forever. They’re frustrated enough that they’re signing petitions to get you to change back to the old Creative Suite style.

That’s why we’re writing this letter. We think you’re onto something good with Creative Cloud — but you need to go just a bit further to make everyone happy. We think there’s a way to make everyone happy, or at least almost everyone, so here’s the idea.

Everyone Doesn’t Need Everything

A smaller CC could be neat, too.

As nice as it is to have every Adobe app, we all don’t need them all. Some of us just need to edit images and do page layout work, so Photoshop and InDesign (and perhaps Illustrator) are all we need, and we used to buy Design Standard. Others needed the web dev apps too, so they went with Web Premium. And those who did video and audio work went with the Production Premium suite.

Now, perhaps some of us will learn to use more of the Adobe apps now that they’re all in Creative Cloud, but for most of us it’s just too much. Odds are, everyone doesn’t even have space on their Mac to install all the apps. But then, many of us need more than just Photoshop, so CC’s individual app subscriptions aren’t enough either.

That’s why we think you should add suites back to Creative Cloud. If you had, say, a Design Standard CC for $25/month with the same apps as the old Design Standard suite, it’d make a lot of us lighter users very happy. Or, perhaps, you could do something new, more inline with your Creative Cloud vision, by letting us make our own suites and chose any, say, 3-4 apps for $25, and then get the full CC for $49 like normal. Many of us might still decide to go for full CC, but the smaller subscription would make CC even more approachable for those of us who don’t make our full living in Adobe apps.

A Bit of Security

Clinging to software legacy (via computerhistory.org)

Then, the other major thing that’s troubling many people about Creative Cloud is that they won’t be able to use the Adobe apps they’ve invested in if they quit subscribing. We’re used to being able to keep old, trusty software around, even running it on older computers to be able to use it when necessary. Whether it’s from being frugal, or simply preferring the look and feel of an older, familiar edition of software, many people continue to use older versions of Adobe software today, and they’d hope to be able to do the same with Adobe software they buy in the future. Plus, after spending thousands of dollars on software over years of time, we like to have something to show for it.

We know you’ve said that Creative Cloud users can stick with a current version and not install updates immediately, but that’s not quite enough since we’d still need to keep a current subscription to use it. So here’s our proposal, similar to what’s been proposed elsewhere: let long-term Creative Cloud subscribers download a non-subscription installer of the current version of their Creative Cloud apps after they’ve been a member for several years. Perhaps require a 3-5 year subscription, if you need to, but after someone’s subscribed to the full Creative Cloud for that long, let them download an installer of the current version of their Creative Cloud apps that they can archive for later use, or install and use without a subscription. They won’t get any updates if they let drop their subscription, but they’ll have a copy of the apps at the last time they had an active subscription to use.

Honestly, most of us wouldn’t end up really using this. But, it’d be that little extra security that would make many people feel a lot better about switching to Creative Cloud — and most would likely continue to subscribe after their minimum time anyhow. If not, you’d still have gotten as much revenue in that time as you would have from a full Master Collection sale in the past. Combine that with a way to still at least view and export files when your subscription’s up (perhaps through your now-unactivated apps), and there’d be little left for anyone to complain about.

And Keep the Updates Coming

As a Creative Cloud subscriber myself (with the CS6 upgrade discount), I’m loving the new features, and can’t wait for the Typekit desktop font syncing to be released. So keep the updates coming, and we’ll all look forward to seeing what’s next in store for Creative Cloud after the initial CC release. Keep up the great work.

And if you can, consider the suggestions above. Those two things — smaller and cheaper subscription options, and a way to get a non-subscription (and non-updatable) copy of CC apps — would make a lot of our readers and colleagues happy, and would stop a lot of the anti-Adobe complaints we’re hearing of late.

Here’s to the future of Adobe and AppStorm!

PS:

Got anything you want to add? Let Adobe know what you want to see changed in Creative Cloud going forward. It’s highly doubtful they’ll go back to selling traditional Creative Suite packages again, but they’re far more likely to make changes to Creative Cloud going forward than most people give them credit for.

Despite its recent acquisition by Yahoo!, Tumblr is still the cool kid of the blogging platforms, and I want to be cool, I really do. But I’ve had trouble integrating myself with the Tumblr community. Mostly it’s come down to the Tumblr dashboard, which I’ve never liked the look of and have always thought was more than a little convoluted.

If only there was a Mac app to create a better Tumblr experience. That’s where Milk comes in. I’m going to try out this feature-packed Tumblr client and see if it can create a better experience.

I’ll Tumble for You

The app opens up to your Milk dashboard, which is a lot like the Tumblr dashboard, but better. Look to the menu of icons in the top right and select the silhouette. This will display your drafts, queue, and posts. If you have more than one Tumblr blog on your account, switch among those in the drop-down. You’ll have quick access to any scheduled or in progress posts, and you can also edit or delete live posts right from this window.

Edit your posts and manage your drafts and queue.

Click the Tumblr “t” icon to the right of the silhouette to browse a more conventional dashboard roundup of all of the latest post from the Tumblr blogs you follow. Any images and text are displayed, and you’ll see the author’s username as well as a clickable “heart” icon to like the post. All notes and tags are hidden behind the notes icon. Within the notes window, you can reblog a post or right-click on the bookmark icon to open, download, or copy a link.

Next, behind the tray icon in the menu, you’ll find all of your liked posts. Everything you’ve favorited is stuck in here, so it’s a great way to get at everything you enjoy on Tumblr. By going into the notes window within a post, you can click on relevant tags and find even more stuff to like. Hit up the search icon to find posts tagged or mentioning specific keywords, too. Click the pushpin to the right of the search field to save your search for later.

View your favorites or perform a search for tags and keywords.

You can start a new post for your own Tumblr just about anywhere in the Milk dashboard by clicking the new post icon in the bottom right, but if you lose sight of it, new posts are available from the File menu. Just like at the Tumblr website, you can choose whether you want to make it a text, photo, quote, or some other kind of post, and add your images and captions to your post. Tag it so interested readers will find your blog, and Milk lets you save your post as a draft, queue it up, or publish it right away.

Create a new post, with all the options of Tumblr.

Milking It

I may have mentioned that I’m not a huge fan of the Tumblr dashboard, and it’s prevented me from really making the most of Tumblr. It’s pretty unattractive, and it’s easy to get lost among the myriad posts that just seem to appear in a short span. Milk’s dashboard looks so much better, and I find its interface much more intuitive and easy to navigate. My posts and those of the people I follow are pulled out and separate, and my drafts and queued posts are front and center so they don’t end up lost down some Tumblr hole. I also always know which blog I’m working in with Milk, so I don’t end up posting about Sherlock Holmes to my Korean drama blog or about Adventure Time to my Mac tutorials blog.

I’m something of a notifications junkie, and I want to know everything that’s happening when it’s happening. With notifications turned on in Milk’s preferences, I don’t have to keep Tumblr open in a tab or be constantly referring back to my dashboard to find out if there have been any great new posts or if my Lumpy Space Princess pic has gone viral. I did run into a problem the first time I opened Milk, because it seemed to notify me of every post that has ever happened on Tumblr; I was just inundated. I was forced to turn notifications off, but I just gave Milk’s notifications a try again after about a week, and everything’s tickety-boo now.

Text and image posts are viewable in your Milk dashboard.

You’ll find all of the post features you expect from Tumblr in Milk’s post window, too. Milk even lets you edit your posts in Markdown, and that’s pretty cool if you’re not down with HTML. There are a couple of things missing, though. The preview feature doesn’t allow you to see your post as if it was on your blog, so you have to hope it turns out alright. My posts are automatically pushed to Twitter and Facebook, but I can toggle that on or off at the Tumblr website. That’s not possible in Milk, though you can customize your Tweet before it’s sent.

Final Thoughts

I’m sold on Milk. It makes for a really great Tumblr experience. I can’t say it will become my number one destination for creating Tumblr posts, but it’s already my go to spot for browsing my Tumblr dashboard and searching out new blogs.

I’ve had various Tumblr blogs for a few years, and most of them were pretty neglected, because I couldn’t find it in me to plant myself in front of that ugly Tumblr dashboard. Since downloading Milk, I’ve experienced a Tumblr renaissance. I’m enjoying the site, others’ posts, and curating my own Tumblr blogs like I never did before, and it’s thanks to Milk’s awesome tools and attractive UI.

Facebook means many things to people—a platform to grow your brand, a place to do business, or a tool to spread advocacy campaigns. To me, it’s where I house portions of my personal life, and so I share hilarious videos of my tot singing Grace Potter’s “Something That I Want” or photos of my kids’ milestones to family and friends.

But because I use Facebook for completely non-professional networking, I don’t always log in and “connect” with these people. If I have a photo or a video worth sharing, I just pull up Facebook, upload it to an album, tag people, and make my exit as soon as it’s done. Call me antisocial, but the busy newsfeed, crowded profile page, overly stacked up sidebar, and noisy (sometimes dumbing) content being shared left and right makes me want to run for the hills.

That is, until I gave Moment a try. It’s a menu bar app that aims to “reinvent the way you post to Facebook” through easy drag and drop. I’ve used it for a while now and I’m impressed with the app so far. It certainly went over and above my expectations of a Facebook-related application with features that I’m very excited to share with you in this review.

A Better Way to Share Moments on Facebook

As shown in the video, the key feature of Moment is being able to drag and drop almost all types of content to post on Facebook. While there are apps like Courier with the same functionality, it sets itself apart by allowing users to post status updates, add captions to photos and videos, and post links of websites and pages.

I’ve tried dragging and dropping photos, videos, links, and highlighted text to Moment, and so far had no problems with how they are displayed on my timeline. My favorite feature is how the app allows me to drag single or a batch of photos to either its menu bar icon or photo tray, and prepares them by giving me options to create a new photo album or select an existing one. I can then slap on a message to go with the photos, add my location, tag people, or change my photos’ privacy settings.

Uploading photos of the little guy via Moment.

Once its done, I just hit the blue Post button to upload. I’d get an audible notification and a link to the uploaded content—otherwise called “moment”—pasted to my clipboard afterwards.

Easy, right? But Moment offers more than just convenience and simplicity. The intuitive design and user experience looks and feels great that I find myself wanting to post more stuff to Facebook with it. It isn’t cluttered with features, messy, or confusing to use. And with just a click of the small “F” button at the bottom right portion of the app, it takes you immediately to your Facebook account via the browser.

Focused Timeline, Preferences, and Other Points of Interest

At this point, I’d like to clarify that Moment is not a Facebook desktop application to browse your newsfeed, comment, or chat with your connections. You have apps like Menutab Pro for Facebook and Social Tab for that.

A focused timeline showing your Facebook notifications.

What Moment does have is a “focused” timeline where you can see all of your notifications, with the ability to click to view the activity in full on the browser. So instead of seeing posts of all kinds dripping from the app, you only see activity that involves and matters to you. This of course would depend on your Notifications settings, which you can edit when logged in to Facebook.

This may or may not work for you depending on how active you are on the network. If your daily activities include posting, commenting, chatting, and sharing to Facebook, you may feel limited by this minimalistic timeline.

Check out the Preferences panel for more options.

You can change Moment’s default settings by clicking on the gear button to open the Preferences panel. You can set a global shortcut to bring Moment in front of your active windows, have it start at login, and disable/enable sound effects.

At the bottom, you can choose to have Moment auto-enhance your posted photos—reducing its size for faster uploads; you can deselect this if you want to retain the original file size—or deselect the Copy posted link to clipboard feature. Finally, if you want to know more about Tapmates, the company behind Moment’s development, you can do so by checking the About tab.

Beautified Facebook Sharing

Share photos, videos, and even text to Facebook.

Moment is an app with a clear and precise focus in mind, built with just the necessary features needed to make sharing content to Facebook easy and seamless. However, in my opinion, the idea that it “reinvents” Facebook sharing isn’t completely there yet, since the ability to drag and drop content has been around and adopted by other apps already.

Furthermore, Moment is currently priced at $3.99 at the Mac App Store. Some may balk at this, considering that you can just log in to Facebook and do all that Moment can do for free. But, if you want a clean, beautiful, and simplified way of sharing your thoughts, moments, and the occasional content nuggets you’d pick up on the web, this a great quality app for the job.

Overall, Moment gets a thumbs-up and a rating of 9/10 for excellent performance, a great feature set, and being able to deliver as promised. There were no bugs or crashes when uploading, posting is a quick and easy process, and the added flexibility of adjusting privacy settings, tagging, and adding one’s location gives me more control over what and how I want to post my content. Finally, I love how its design enhances the user experience further, and so sharing to Facebook isn’t just a chore or a task you gotta do before heading off to bed.

If you’ve been using the Mac before the App Store was around, and even before the iPhone was released, it’d be virtually impossible to not have heard of — or tried out — NetNewsWire. Developed by Brent Simmons, lately of Vesper fame, NetNewsWire was the original RSS reader app, all the way back in 2002 before most of us were blogging or had even heard of RSS. It was later bought out by NewsGator, as the Mac counterpart to their FeedDemon on Windows, and was designed to sync with NewsGator’s RSS synchronization service. Then Google Reader came along, and NetNewsWire and FeedDemon jumped ship to the search giant’s reader for sync, just like everyone else.

Google Reader’s impending death on July 1st spelled death for FeedDemon, and could have well done the same for NetNewsWire if it hadn’t been sold to Black Pixel in 2011. It took a while for any news to come out, other than that when NetNewsWire first sold to Black Pixel, Brent Simmons said “NetNewsWire’s best years are still to come.”

This week, at long last, we get to see what the future holds for the Mac’s most storied RSS reader app with the long awaited NetNewsWire 4 beta. And the future looks pretty good.

Rebuilding a Legend

MacNewsWire, the precursor to NetNewsWire’s 1.0 release (via carpeaqua.com)

The Black Pixel team had their work cut out for them, trying to deliver on our collective expectations for the new version of an app that has, if anything, been a trendsetter. Look through the history of NetNewsWire, and you’ll see how the design has changed through the years, often in advance of other apps. It’s hard to imagine an app like the one pictured above being a beloved Mac app these days, but Brent commented that the first version “got the most compliments on being a beautiful app”.

NetNewsWire Lite, the closest we’d come to NetNewsWire 4 before now

Looking towards version 4, we already had some idea of what to expect from it thanks to NetNewsWire Lite from back in 2011. NetNewsWire 4 was supposed to take that design torch, run with it, and add in Google Reader Sync and more, but it took a lot longer to come than we could have expected then. Now, Google Reader is all but dead, and NetNewsWire grew beyond the expectations from the previous Lite version into a standalone RSS sync tool for your Mac. Along the way, it picked up a number of design touches we’ve come to expect in modern Mac apps, with a few tricks of its own.

NetNewsWire 4 Beta

NetNewsWire 4 Beta

NetNewsWire 4 is immediately familiar, with a 3-column interface showing your feeds on the left, your article list in the middle, and your current article on the right. There’s no Google Reader-style keyboard shortcuts, but you can read through your articles and jump to the next one with your space bar or arrow keys, or jump between the Unread, Today, Bookmarks, and Favorites sections with CMD+1 through 4. You can choose to have feeds organized manually or automatically by name, and can have articles organized by oldest or newest (the default) as you’d expect.

If you’re still using Google Reader, you can still sign in to your account in NetNewsWire 4 beta to download your current subscriptions and save them to NetNewsWire. It won’t keep syncing with Google — that wouldn’t do much good anyhow, past this week — but it will let you keep your feeds from being lost when Google Reader is shut down July 1st. Alternately, if you’ve already exported your data, you can import an OPML file to bring your subscriptions into NetNewsWire.

And that’s when you’ll notice how fast NetNewsWire is. It’s really, really fast, syncing my subscriptions from Google Reader far quicker than I’ve ever seen any other app. If there’s one thing you can say about NetNewsWire today, it’s that it is fast and works great for syncing and reading feeds on the Mac. There’s absolutely no complaint there.

NetNewsWire’s special features

Overall, if you’ve ever used a feed reader app, you should be right at home in NetNewsWire 4, but there’s a few extras you should make sure to take advantage of to get the most out of the app. On the top left, there’s an All Unread “smart folder” that shows all your unread articles, as well as a Today view that shows everything that’s come in today (complete with an icon that shows today’s date). Further down, you’ll see your All Sites list, where you can select an individual feed or folder of feeds and see what’s new on those sites. Both of those should obviously be familiar if you’ve used NetNewsWire before.

The two extra things are the Favorites list, which shows all updates from the sites you’ve marked as favorite, and the Bookmarks list that shows all articles you’ve bookmarked. When you’re reading an article, you can add an iBooks-style bookmark to the right edge, then quickly find all of your bookmarked articles here in this list. That gives you a way to make a Mac-only read later list from your RSS feeds, perhaps, or just a way to find the best stuff in your RSS feeds. Combine that with a fast full-text search, and you shouldn’t have trouble finding anything you want.

It’s the Little Things

Simple iBooks-style font controls

There’s a number of extra touches in NetNewsWire as well. If you jump in the settings, you can set any font and size you want as the default, but right from the toolbar you can pick from a number of nice font choices, change the size, and enable a dark mode (one that only changes the reading area, though, not the whole app). There’s also a nicely styled share menu that lets you send articles to Instapaper or share them via Facebook or Email, but there’s no way to add share services. Then, if you want to find more sites to subscribe to, you can add popular sites to your subscriptions directly, a feature that harks back to the first version of NetNewsWire.

A neat side-tab view for browsing

Or, you can add your own extra sites to NetNewsWire, either directly or through the built-in browser. You’re only a CMD+T away from a new browser tab anytime you’re using NetNewsWire, and you can open any site or links from articles directly in the app. The tabs load on the side, letting you preview the content even when a tab isn’t open, and if an RSS feed is available on a page you can add it from the address bar. It’s a convenient little extra that’s nice to have around.

But then, if the little things matter, it’s worth mentioning what’s not there. You won’t find any syncing, though Black Pixel is working on building their own online sync system right now. That still means that it won’t support 3rd party sync services going forward, so if you’ve found an online alternate to Google Reader you like, the new NetNewsWire might not be for you. Then, there’s no way to collapse columns, something you might be used to from apps like Sparrow and Reeder, but perhaps that’ll be added going forward. Finally, there’s no current iOS counterpart app yet, but that’s coming soon as well — and will get a new look that’s more inline with iOS 7′s design.

It’s Worth Trying if You’re Not Committed to an RSS Service Yet

The current beta of NetNewsWire is works very, very well, and it’s absolutely worth trying out if you don’t already have a web-based RSS sync service you’re committed to; otherwise, you might want to give ReadKit a try for syncing Fever and NewsBlur to your Mac, or wait for the promised update to Reader. Its yet to be seen how NetNewsWire’s upcoming sync service will work, or what its redesigned iOS apps will look after their new iOS 7-focused rewrite, but for now, if reading your RSS feeds on your Mac in a fast, modern app is enough for you, then you’ll likely fall in love with the new NetNewsWire. It’s free while in beta, but if you really like it, you can go ahead and preorder a license for $10; it’ll cost $20 after its fully released.

I can’t help walk away from the beta feeling that something’s missing, though. NetNewsWire hits most of the spots you could want, and yet, it doesn’t do more. It’s new on its own, but not unique to the Mac. Perhaps it’s too much to wish for, but it would have been nice to see NetNewsWire push the status quo further, and perhaps be a leader, again, in UI design. But then, just having NetNewsWire back is nice on its own, and with Reeder’s update yet to be seen, it’s the best full-featured Mac-only RSS reader right now.

And perhaps, one can hope, the next version (or the finished beta, if they slip us a surprise) will push NetNewsWire even further. We’d sure like to be surprised with something fully new.

Looking for some summer sales on Mac apps? Our friends at StackSocial are running their iStack 3.0 Bundle this week, with over $500 worth of apps for your Mac for just $29.99. It includes Corel Painter Lite — a great digital painting app with 97 brushes, Voila — a great Mac screenshot app, MoneyWiz — a beautifully designed app to keep track of your finances, Tuneup — a great tool to keep your iTunes music organized and cleaned up, and more.

Best of all, we’ve got 3 copies of the iStack 3.0 Bundle for our readers! Just leave a comment below and let us know what app you want most out of this bundle to enter the giveaway. Then, share the giveaway on your favorite social network, and add an extra comment here with a link to your post for an extra entry in the giveaway.

Hurry and get your entry in; our giveaway closes on Tuesday, July 2nd.

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

We all were expecting iOS 7 and OS X 10.9 to be announced at WWDC, and perhaps were hoping to see some new hardware, but no one predicted that the Mac Pro would get such a radical overhaul this year. Sure, Cook promised us that Apple hadn't forgotten pro users, and the old Mac Pro was the most outdated Mac Apple was still selling, but many of Apple's biggest fans and most popular developers had already given up on Apple doing anything interesting with the Mac Pro. The 27" iMac is beautiful and powerful anyhow, and Apple had already killed off the Xserve, so it didn't seem too much of a stretch to think that the Pro was next on the chopping block.

Boy, were we wrong. Apple absolutely had not forgotten Pro users, but instead was quietly building a fully redesigned Mac Pro that looked like nothing before (well, other than perhaps R2D2 with a bit of Darth Vader's style. Or a trash can. Or a Cray, if you squint.). With up to 12 cores on its CPU and two GPUs built in and designed to be used directly for computing power, the Mac Pro new in the way it works internally, as well. It's built to let you, as Apple says, edit 4k resolution video while live-rendering effects in the background. It can take up to 128Gb of Ram — or at least may, based on Apple's OS X Mavericks documentation.

Its only drawback for pros is that its not designed to be upgraded and expanded internally, relying instead on Thunderbolt 2 and USB 3 port for expansion. That, and the lack of dual CPUs, has some pros wringing their hands, wishing Apple had kept the upgradable design of the former Mac Pro.

What do you think? Is the new Mac Pro the True Mac Pro Successor that John Siracusa wished for, one that's for the computer industry what halo cars are for the automobile industry? Or is a computer that's already irrelevant, either by its lack of expandability or its inherent tie to the past of desktop computing?

If you’re an avid traveler, and especially if you’ve ever been in charge of planning a trip for multiple persons — your family’s summer vacation, perhaps — you know how important it is to have all the related information, such as your planned itinerary, handy at all times and neatly organized.

Today we’re going to be reviewing an app that can help you do just that. Keep your itinerary, contact information, documents, packing list, budget, expenses, photos, and anything else you might need, all in one place. It’s called YourtTrip. Let’s get to it!

You can think of YourtTrip as your personal assistant in remembering and planning anything you might need on a trip. Seriously, anything. It can store your photos, plan your budget, compare it to your expenses, and give you a to-bring list for making packing easier.

YourtTrip Interface

All of these awesome features come at a hefty price tag, though, and the Mac version of YourtTrip goes on the Mac App Store for $19.99. An iOS version is said to be in the works, but as of now it doesn’t have a release date.

What Can It Do?

To get started planning your next adventure the first thing you have to do is set a new trip in the app. Just so you can test it out, YourtTrip already comes with a custom trip already filled out with example itineraries, packing lists, and more. But why not start with the planning of your own trip? Here’s a rundown of everything you can plan for using the app.

Itinerary

The Itinerary is where you can keep a timeline of every single event in your trip, and have it all neatly arranged for easy reading. Whether it’s a flight, dinner reservation, hotel arrival or any other kind of thing you can come up, it can all be stored here. Best of all, each event can have its own custom contact, budget, location and corresponding attachments.

Itinerary

Packing

YourtTrip has a custom premade list of anything you might need to pack up for your travels, but if you can make your own or complement theirs with any other items you consider necessary. Once you’ve got your list set up, it doubles as a to-do list, giving you the option of checking off items as they are already packed up or accounted for.

Packing List

Budget and Expenses

These two features work together, and resemble a spreadsheet of your monetary management. The budget gives you the option of setting an expected spending amount for every part of your itinerary. You can then compare this expected budgets with the real expenses you had in your trip in those same activities.

Budgets

Both of these features are quite useful, as they can give you some  convenient information such as a pie chart of which category (shopping, dining, etc.) you’re spending most of your money on, and they also have support for different currencies even giving you automatic conversion between them.

Photos

Perhaps the most unnecessary part of this app is the “Photos” feature. It’s a very basic feature that only allows you to upload your trip photos, where they’ll be arranged by date. Having a few photos allows you to set a thumbnail in your trip for easy identification, but that’s about it.

Photo Viewer

In Depth

At its forefront, YourtTrip tries to provide a place where you keep a collection of information on every single trip you’ve had. That’s why in its main menu where you can create a new trip or browse your old ones, there’s a timeline that showcasts every existing individual trip with a thumbnail and some other information.

Exported Itinerary

However, the most useful thing I’ve found in the app is exporting all the information from your trips via Twitter, Email or PDFs. Exporting will give you a clean, organized and useful view of your itinerary, budget, and all the other information you might need while you’re on the road, including a map of the location of every single place in your itinerary.

Worth the Money?

If you are planning a trip for multiple people and are obsessive about the amount of money needed, complete itinerary and planning of every single moment of your trip, then this might be of use to you. I would say most travelers won’t use every single feature this app has. It’s a nice way of putting everything together, but every individual feature that this app has is done better and cheaper by other apps.

At $20, pricing is likely the biggest problem this app faces, especially since there are free alternatives that can help you accomplish similar results. For storing your information and itinerary, there’s Evernote. For pictures, there’s iPhoto. For budgets, there are tons of personal finance apps out there. The thing about YourtTrip is that it incorporates all those features into one single package, but with only decent results.

Conclusion

My first impressions of YourtTrip were that it lacks focus and it’s a bit pricy. In terms of features, it’s all over the place: it tries to do a little bit of everything but it doesn’t really excel at much. Its functionality is a little shallow and could be done better by other apps.

However, if simplicity is your thing and you’d prefer having everything in one single place, YourtTrip might not be a bad option for keeping all your information organized. Perhaps with a companion iOS app and a more accessible price, it’d be a much more useful tool for travelling.

I’ve been trying to find just the right RSS feed reader. I’m pretty low maintenace. I just want to put feed URLs in and get posts from my favorite sites out. If the app looks good and doesn’t take up too much space, that’s even better.

That’s why I was so excited to try out Favoriteer. It’s a slimmed down feed reader, and it looks to have just the features I want with none of the extra cruft that just gets in my way. Can Favoriteer stand up against all the other feed readers on the market?

It Might Be A New Favorite

Click the Favoriteer menu bar or Dock icon to open the Favoriteer window. It’s going to be pretty boring to start out — just a bunch of updates from the developer. You need to get your RSS feeds into Favoriteer, right? Click the RSS icon at the bottom left of the window to open the subscriptions settings. There are a lot of default feeds already set up, and you only need to click them to subscribe. Lots of them are great, and they’re sorted out by subject, so you can look for topics that interest you.

Favoriteer presents each post or article in a really clean interface.

That still doesn’t solve the problem of getting the feeds you read daily into Favoriteer. You’ll do that by pasting the feed URL into the address bar at the top and clicking the plus sign. Full disclosure, when I first downloaded Favoriteer, I couldn’t get it to add any of my feeds, which you can imagine was sort of a bummer in a feed reader. With their most recent update, thought, the problem has been solved and I haven’t had any more issues. Find all of the feeds you’ve added by clicking the drop-down and selecting #My Favorites.

When you add a new feed, it can take awhile for it to show up in the Favoriteer window. Speed the process along by clicking the Reload icon. Quickly scroll to the top and check out your newest posts with the up arrow icon. The windows icon in the bottom right will automatically resize the Favoriteer window to the default.

Subscribe to default feeds or add your favorite RSS feeds to Favoriteer.

Favoriteer is great looking, if you want a really clean way to read your RSS feeds. It’s also super easy to share stuff with your friends. There are links for Twitter, Facebook, Google+, and even LinkedIn sharing, but rather than use OS X’s built in Twitter and Facebook integration, all of these links direct you to the social network websites. It’s still neat to be able to share right from Favoriteer, though. Clicking the email icon, however, opens Mail.app, and that’s not the mail application I use. If I want to mail an article, I have to go about it in another way.

Adjust how Favoriteer opens and syncs.

Pros and Cons

Favoriteer will display an entire article if that’s how the individual feed works, and while I usually prefer to read the whole article in my reader, it’s nice to get a preview snippet before I commit to loading the whole thing. If I’m not interested, I have to scroll through the whole article to get to the next article. Any feeds that don’t display an entire post will have a clickable link that loads the article at the original site in your browser.

All of your feeds are sort of mixed together, and there are pros and cons to that, too. Everything is in there chronologically, so you can read all of the newest stuff first. Users up to date on all of their feeds won’t have a problem, but if you’d like to just read a single feed or feeds about a certain topic, you’re out of luck. Your only option is to turn off all of your other feeds temporarily. It’s not a hardship to do that, but if you like to read each feed one at a time, Favoriteer isn’t going to make it easy.

Share what you read or open your browser to read more.

An oddity is Favoriteer is that you’re automatically subscribed to updates from the developer in Favoriteer, and if there’s a way to unsubscribe from that, I haven’t found it. It’s not so bad, though, because the updates are pretty infrequent. Still, it would be nice to have the option to turn all that off.

Final Thoughts

Despite the inability to read single feeds, I’m on board with Favoriteer. That’s not really a feature I need on a daily basis, and if I do want to just browse one site’s past articles, I have other readers that will do that. I like the single, clean stream of news I get from Favoriteer.

I wish I could import my feeds from another reader, but Favoriter has a lot of other great stuff going for it. It’s small and stays out of the way until I need it, and it looks really good when I finally do want to do some reading. If you’re looking to try a new RSS reader and want something that’s going to take up a bit less visual space, Favoriteer is a nice option.

The last time I took a look at App.net’s file storage, I took a look at Swing, a Droplr-like app for easy file sharing using the social network’s storage API as its backbone. I loved it (and still use it), but also saw the need for an app that could leverage ADN’s API to act more like Dropbox.

Entire Filebase: It’s a beta app developed by Pete Burtis, but it’s largely stable now and mostly feature complete. Let’s take a look and see what Filebase has to offer Mac users.

Dropbox, Sort Of

Filebase is reminiscent of Dropbox in some ways. Not unlike Dropbox, it acts as a repository for any files stored in ADN’s cloud. It also makes them accessible. Think of the app like a gateway to ADN’s servers where you can upload, download and share files. You can even upload and share the contents of your clipboard, a feature power users might find useful.

Filebase has a really simple interface.

But the app is different from Dropbox in a lot of other ways. First of all, unlike Dropbox, it doesn’t sit in a folder on your computer. Filebase is an app that looks like a Finder window, but it isn’t. Unlike Dropbox, it doesn’t live in your Mac’s menu bar and it isn’t always on. It’s also Mac-exclusive.

ADN’s API is open, so all it takes is a savvy Windows or iOS developer to get something like this on other platforms, but for now, Filebase is the only app of its kind I’m aware of. So files stored in Filebase are only useable in between Macs. If you have Mac at work and home, you’ll find it to be an incredibly useful service, but users who don’t have more than one Mac will only really find it appropriate as a cloud-based backup solution.

Adding files to Filebase is as easy as clicking and dragging or using the in-app Finder navigation.

The advantage, of course, to using Filebase over something like Dropbox is privacy and security. ADN isn’t interested in what you store on its servers, and they have no intention of selling your information because you’re likely already a paying customer.

Separating Filebase from the Pack

Filebase does have some functionality that separates it from Dropbox and other similar cloud-based storage apps, though. The major difference lies within its Preferences pane, wherein you can choose the hotkeys you want to use to share content publicly on ADN. You can set your hotkeys to be available system-wide, with the caveat that the beta software doesn’t check for sensible hotkeys (Command Z is totally okay, as the screenshot suggests).

Command Z sounds legit.

Filebase is also different because of its support to ADN, which you can post to directly from the app. This separates it from Swing, which allows you to upload but doesn’t include a fast way to post to ADN directly. In the case of Filebase, if there’s a photo you’d like to share, you can quickly drag it into the app and immediately tap the Share button and choose App.net.

I really appreciate the ability to share directly to ADN.

Finally, what makes Filebase really useful as an ADN client is the ability to download files to your computer that you uploaded from other devices (such as an iPhone). Let’s say you shared a photo to ADN from Felix on your iPhone. It’s available right in Filebase when you get back to your computer. Every file you’ve ever uploaded to ADN is available within Filebase, which makes it really handy to have for efficiency alone.

About the Beta State

At the time of writing, Filebase is at version 0.5.1, precisely half-baked. Pete has provided a lovely summary of the app’s shortfalls on the download page, even including a note that the app “has a stupid icon” — no arguments there. As far as I’m concerned though, Pete’s awareness of and dedication towards fixing the problems mostly negates them.

It’s worth noting the app’s detailed info pane for each file.

And for what it’s worth, the software is incredibly stable as it is. Animations aren’t buttery smooth when I resize the app, but I haven’t had any issues with files not uploading or downloading. The app works completely as promised, with the exception of the issues Pete’s specifically made a note of.

That being said, there are a couple small things I hope Pete addresses by version 1.0 that he doesn’t list.

Improving Usability

The first thing I’d like to see is a menu bar tool for the app. I don’t need anything fancy (or want anything fancy), but something like Dropbox’s current implementation would be great. It would also be a handy way to note the app’s activity. Dropbox’s menu bar addresses this problem with a checkmark or a blue loading icon, and I think Pee’s service could benefit from something as simple as that.

I’d also like the option to run in the background and open it automatically when I log in. Instead of having a dock icon, I’d like to be able to choose between an icon in the menu or the dock (or both). That way any file activity I have on ADN is always ready to go on my Mac.

It would be nice if the app supported multiple accounts, so tapping on the username in the bottom right would allow quick access to separate files. And finally, I wish I could choose a folder on my Mac to always keep synced to the service. I’ve got 10GB of space with my ADN account, and it’d be an easy way to use it for a useful backup of important files. Pete does say that AppleScript support is coming, so that might assuage many of my concerns and make it easy and convenient for power users to really put the app to work.

Final Thoughts

I’m really intrigued by Filebase. I think the potential is there in the app for it to be a great all-in-one file solution for ADN users on OS X, but I do have a long feature request list. As it is, it’s a very good beta that is only going to get better with time, and it’s free. Filebase is an easy way to keep track of all the files you’ve stored on ADN’s network without hogging your Mac’s resources — an essential app for everybody on App.net.

It would be fair to say that only one photography app can even claim to be king of them all – Instagram. Despite its daft requirement for images to be square, and its quirky filters – to give them a sympathetic description – it has revolutionized the way we share images, and has rapidly risen to be one of the most popular social networks in the world.

What makes these achievements even more remarkable is that this is a mobile-only platform, and for some time, it was an iOS exclusive too. Until Instagram’s surge in popularity, no other network creators had the bare-faced effrontery, let alone the skill and nous, to go mobile only. Facebook‘s recent $1bn acquisition of Instagram only highlights the brilliance of the people behind the app.

Whilst all this mobile stuff is very forward thinking, many of us have wished, over the years, for the ability to play with Instagram on a larger screen – on a computer, in other words. The current web-friendly version of Instagram’s website is the closest we’ve ever got to an official desktop environment, so it is little wonder that independent developers have stood up to fill the gap.

One such developer, FIPLAB, has created InstaReel for Instagram, a $2.99 native Mac Instagram browser. Without image uploading – the critical part of the Instagram experience – though, can InstaReel truly be better than just using your phone? Time to find out…

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The Interface

As a desktop client of a mobile platform, InstaReel has its work cut out to find the right design balance. Mostly speaking, though, I think a good job has been done.

InstaReel’s window and ubiquitous controls are a stylish white-on-graphite colour scheme, with blue trim. It may not be a completely “flat” design, but it is at the more minimal, refined end of the UI spectrum. It is also a design which retains much of the Instagram feel about it, utilizing carbon copies of the service’s icons, and retaining a similar layout.

InstaReel’s blue-on-graphite looks pretty good.

By default, InstaReel is one of those annoying apps which disappears every time you click elsewhere, only providing a menu bar icon to retrieve what you were doing. Thankfully, you don’t have to stick with the default. Clicking the anchor icon makes InstaReel always remain on top, and a rummage through the preferences reveals that you can actually make InstaReel operate like any other app – i.e. windows remain visible behind other apps, a dock icon is available, and so on.

You can fix InstaReel’s annoying habit of disappearing by utilising the preferences.

In Action

Of course, Instagram is about image sharing. But in reality, we spend just as much time browsing, commenting and liking our way through other users’ photos as we do posting photos ourselves. It is for these tasks that InstaReel was designed, and in these areas, it does provide a respectable improvement on the touchscreen interface.

The Feed view in InstaReel is one of the more immediately notable enhancements. As you adjust the size of the app’s window, the stream of images first becomes enlarged, and then separates into two columns. This two-by-two layout really speeds up the browsing process – in fact, it is a shame that three- or four-column browsing isn’t available, as this would closely resemble Flickr‘s redesign. Each image can be liked without leaving the stream view, although I, for one, found the heart-shaped icon really quite small to locate with the mouse.

The two-column browsing makes flicking through your stream much speedier.

Hovering over images in your feed gives you a quick view of the comments which have been attached, and clicking on an image swipes you sideways to the photo view, which closely mimics Instagram’s equivalent page. On the surface, InstaReel doesn’t provide anything new here, but right-click on the photo, and you discover a decent bag of tricks. From the pop-up menu, you can like the photo, copy the photo’s URL, view the image’s Instagram photo page in your browser, or save the image to your hard drive (I’m watching you, copyright dodgers). The final option is to view the image in OSX’s Quick Look. In theory, this is a really nice idea; in practice, I could never get it to locate the image.

A summary of comments can be seen by hovering a photo in InstaReel.

Away from these niggles, InstaReel is a simple pleasure to use. All the usual tabs are present – Popular, Favourites, Profile and Search – as is a list of your outstanding notifications. Speaking of notifications, InstaReel can (if you so wish) provide you with desktop pop-ups, as folks like and comment on your pictures, and the menu bar icon also turns red to provide further indication.

One of InstaReel’s biggest advantages – notifications on desktop.

Stability

Unfortunately, there is one other issue with this app. Despite the fact that I installed InstaReel via the App Store, and I have been running it on Mountain Lion, stability seems to be an issue. During my testing, InstaReel crashed and burned a number of times, usually while loading a stream of images. A future update could fix this problem, but in the meantime, it did cause me some frustration.

I spent too long looking at these.

Conclusion

It would be fair to say that, in spite of its evident competence as a desktop Instagram client, InstaReel is a mixed bag.

The design may not be revolutionary, but it is both passively pleasing, and practical. The ability to resize your Feed from small, to large, to two columns, makes for efficient browsing and use of screen space, and for those who are avid photo sharers, the ability to receive desktop notifications is a significant improvement over browsing Instagram’s website.

There are problems, though. Instability, whilst easily fixable with an update, is a notable problem, considering that this app comes with a price tag. Equally, the broken Quick Look integration is a frustration, especially given that it would be a neat little feature if it were to function properly.

If you are an Instagram power user, then InstaReel is definitely worth a buy, even with the niggles. The more casual snapper of square photos might want to wait for an update or two, though. I will, however, continue to use InstaReel on desktop, in spite of its faults, because it is still good way of browsing Instagram on your Mac.

Your email app is one of the most important apps on your Mac, since email is likely the main way you communicate and collaborate with your colleagues. But all email apps aren’t created equal, and while there’s many out there, they all don’t include the features you need. Postbox 3, our sponsor this week, is the email app you need to try if you haven’t found one to fit your needs yet.

Postbox has tight Gmail integration, including support for Gmail labels and important message indication, but it also works great with any other email service you want to add. It’ll organize your emails into conversations, let you Quick Reply inline in your emails, find your contacts’ avatars from social networks, and let you save messages to Evernote or send larger attachments with Dropbox. Postbox will even make your more productive, with a favorites bar that’ll let you quickly access the folders and labels you access most, and more. Best of all, it’s integrated with the best Mac features, including full screen and trackpad gesture support.

Postbox is more than just a normal email app. It’s team describes it as a “a system for managing your life”, and with its social network integration, advanced search, dedicated views to help you find images and attachments, and more, it’s an email app that can help you stay productive and keep your inbox at Inbox Zero without leaving anything behind.

Give Postbox a Try Today!

If you haven’t tried out Postbox recently, and are looking for a better way to keep your inbox in check, you should definitely give Postbox a try. You can try Postbox for free for 30 days, and then buy your own copy of Postbox for just $9.99. You just might find that Postbox is your new favorite email app.

Way back in 2009, when Mac.AppStorm was in its infancy, we reviewed Daylite, a really easy way to manage your business using just one app — and it impressed us. We really loved the range of features, different business areas present within the app and the tight e-mail integration.

Since then, though, a lot has changed with Daylite so let’s take a look at the fourth version to see if it is still as good as we remember it to be.

Getting Started

As Daylite is designed to be run across multiple computers, you’ll need to set up one of your Macs as a server so that others can access the company database easily. But don’t worry: Daylite includes a server administration program in the package, so all you need to do is install it and get it up and running (which takes no time at all).

Daylite Server Admin, which helps you customise one of your Macs as a server for your Daylite database.

You can create as many different databases as you like (though it’s best to keep one per company, in my opinion) and through the Server Admin panel (as you can see in the screenshot above), you can manage all the devices accessing your database (including iOS devices, which we’ll come onto in a minute) as well as configure the backup schedule. Your database is normally backed up once a week (in the example above, my database backs up every Sunday at 2 AM) though this can be altered to suit your individual preferences.

As I currently only have one Mac, I’m going to set up Daylite to access my database locally (rather than over a local or wide-area network) however setting it up over a network is really simple — all you have to do is enable server access over the internet by clicking on the relevant option in the Server Admin panel.

Features

Daylite is designed to replace your existing content management system (CMS) in your business through integrating your company’s calendars, contacts, objectives, tasks, notes and so on. Individual features can be accessed via the menu which runs down the left-hand side of the screen and the Home panel gives you a quick overview of what’s going on for the day, including a list of any events planned, tasks due and any upcoming events in the next week.

The main screen of Daylite.

The app features an in-built notifications system (which also show up as a badge icon) that alerts you to any important upcoming events, tasks and so on. You can click on Dismiss to get rid of them or More to be taken to that particular notification within Daylite.

Daylite’s in-built notifications system alerts you to any tasks or notes that require your attention.

You can quickly add an item to any section of Daylite by clicking on the plus button, meaning that you don’t have to navigate to that particular section of the app. I personally found this quick-access toolbar highly useful — Daylite is a complicated app with plenty of features and this made it easy to add something really quickly, rather than flicking to the relevant section.

Calendars and Contacts

The Calendar and Contacts section of Daylite throws back no surprises to the novice user and there’s pretty much everything you’d expect in there from a business-orientated app.

Calendars within Daylite can be shared and any changes are automatically pushed across to all users.

Daylite focuses on collaboration, so with individual appointments, for example, you can see all the tasks assigned to that particular event. In my example above, for my client approval meeting, I have to plan and execute the DVD release event (which is due on July 11th). You can also create multiple calendars and assign them to various staff members (for example, I’ve created a calendar especially for the sales team).

Your business contacts within Daylite.

Your contacts within Daylite can be sorted into individual groups (I’ve got groups for my clients, my potential sales leads, my suppliers and so on). Just like with calendar events, clicking on an individual contact brings up a list of any activity associated with him or her, allowing you to keep track of everything really easily.

Projects

Project management is a really powerful feature within Daylite. Not only can you add tasks, notes and appointments to individual projects but Daylite will also help you keep track of each stage through the Progress view (shown in the screenshot below).

Managing the progress of a particular project.

And of course, as everything in Daylite is accessed from one database, any changes made will automatically be pushed to every single user, ensuring that your team (or entire company) stays up to date with all the latest changes. There are plenty of other features within Daylite that come in useful when it comes to managing projects, such as the ability to define individual objectives and tasks and support for sales opportunities. It really does seem that whatever business you’re in, Daylite will work for you in some way or another!

Reports

Of course, accurate reporting is vital to any business and Daylite features this built-in — there’s no external software to use (and no messing around with complicated Excel spreadsheets!) at all. There are a number of built-in reports (the one in the screenshot below shows me an analysis of my sales opportunities by type, and whether or not they have been won or lost) however users can set up customised reports by clicking on the Preferences pane.

Creating a report.

Any reports within Daylite can be tailored to a specific date range and can be printed or saved as a PDF for future reference. Unfortunately, there’s no option to export reports to, say, a spreadsheet format, however given the complexity of Daylite you probably won’t need this.

On the Move

With the iOS version of Daylite, you needn’t be tied down to the office. Both the iPhone and iPad version of the app allow you to access most of the features in the desktop version, including your business objectives, contacts, calendars and tasks. Due to the larger screen, the iPad version (as you can see in the screenshot below) is more similar to the desktop version and shouldn’t throw back any surprises.

The iPad version of Daylite is a condensed version of the desktop version, however it still allows you to perform some common tasks whilst on the move.

To access your database on either your iPad or iPhone, you’ll have to have both Daylite Server and Daylite 4 set up and configured on your company’s network. Administrators can control which iOS devices can access the database and any access can be revoked if necessary.

Conclusion

This review really doesn’t do Daylite justice, as the app is so feature-packed and thorough that it’s impossible to cover everything without making the reviews hundreds of pages long. I really admired the seamless integration and collaboration that Daylite emphasises and the range of features was simply the icing on the cake. It really is a great business app and Daylite can easily replace a whole host of existing software with one, unified solution.

What is interesting about Daylite as well is the one-off fee of £189.95 (around $290) per user. Although this may sound like a hefty amount, especially for smaller businesses, it may work out cheaper in the long run than paying for a subscription-based model. The disadvantage, though, is that one of your company’s Macs has to act as a server (there’s no cloud hosting at the moment) and this may sway some users away from it.

Having said that, though, the app thoroughly deserves its 9 out of 10 rating, purely for making business apps sexy. Daylite is functional, yes, but the developers have managed to squeeze in some really aesthetics and design features that cements the Mac firmly in the world of business. Of course, you can try before you buy at Marketcircle’s website, which I’d highly recommend as it gives you the opportunity to explore this great app further. It’s simple to use yet immensely powerful and I can see Daylite becoming one of those apps that businesses rely on heavily in a range of different scenarios.

How many windows do you have open on your Mac right now? How about when you are working? If you consider yourself a Mac power user, you likely work with a large number of windows open at the same time. There are a few ways to make working with droves of windows more manageable including the built in options (mission control and cmd-tab), using multiple monitors (like this guy demoing the new Mavericks multiple display features), or third part solutions. For the past couple of years I used Optimal Layout until recently switching to HyperSwitch — based on Paula’s review — for my window managing needs.

Another third party window management solution recently updated to 2.x: WindowMizer. It replaces the discontinued app WindowShade X as a way to “roll up” your windows similar to a window shade rather than minimize them to the dock. This is actually a previous feature for Macs back in the day, but is it still useful?

An Alternative to Minimizing Windows

The history of WindowMizer is actually pretty interesting. Apparently, back in the days of System 7, Apple included the window “roll up” feature in response to the window minimize feature in Windows 95 because there was no dock to minimize to in System 7. Later, Apple incorporated the dock and window minimization features; hence, the roll up feature was discontinued. In the early 2000s, WindowShade X came along to bring the window roll up feature to OS X. Eventually, quite recently actually, WindowShade X was discontinued, and WindowMizer took its place as the alternative to minimizing windows. I never used WindowShade X, but a fair amount of Mac users seem to prefer the roll up feature for managing windows so lets see how well it works.

Working with WindowMizer

Once WindowMizer is up and running on your Mac, there are two main ways to use the app: the mouse and keyboard shortcuts. I’ll review the workflows for both.

On first startup, WindowMizer will ask you to turn off the “Double-click a window’s title bar to minimize” option.

Mouse

Once WindowMizer is active, simply double click the title bar of a window to roll it up. For me, grouping all of the rolled up windows at the top left of the screen was most helpful because when switching to WindowMizer, all of my rolled up windows are in the same area. If you use the cmd modifier key while double clicking a title bar, all of the windows for that app roll up. Add in the alt key with the cmd key to restore or roll up all open windows.

I used WindowMizer to group all of my rolled up Windows together.

In addition to rolling up windows, you can also set double clicking the title bar to make windows transparent. Transparent windows are not my cup of tea, in fact they drive me crazy, so I didn’t explore this function much. However, you can also choose to make the rolled up title bars transparent, which I did find useful.

The title bars are transparent in this shot.

Shortcuts

When running, WindowMizer also takes over the cmd-m shortcut key. So when running, pressing cmd-m rolls the window up in place rather than minimizing it. I always hide my dock, and I always use shortcuts, so this is where WindowMizer really shined in my workflow. I came to like having windows rolled up rather than minimized because with my hidden dock, they just disappear. WindowMizer also includes a keyboard shortcut for minimizing all windows in an app: cmd-alt-m. Oh, and in case you were wondering clicking on the minimize button still minimizes the app to the dock.

Other Stuff

So that’s the basics of WindowMizer. Pretty straightforward right? Not quite, there are a few odd cases to note in WindowMizer’s workflow. First, switching to an application does not bring rolled up windows to the front. This is the same behavior as minimizing windows to the dock, but for some reason I expected the rolled up windows to be brought to the front because the windows were being “rolled up” and not “minimized”. I’m sure this is because the roll up feature piggybacks off of the built in minimize feature, but if the developers can change this behavior, it would make the app more useful. Second, you can’t drag items onto a rolled up title bar. Well, technically you can, but nothing will happen. Adding the ability to drag items onto rolled up windows would be another welcome change. Third, I could not get the roll up feature to work in a couple of apps, including CleanMyMac.

A few other WindowMizer features are worth mentioning:

• You can choose applications for WindowMizer to ignore in the preferences.
• You can also tell WindowMizer what to do with rolled up windows when quitting the app.
• There is an action menu for rolled up windows within WindowMizer that allows you to take certain actions on rolled up windows. For example, if you click on a rolled up Ulysses III window, the menu provides options for creating a new sheet and quitting or hiding the app.

Another shot of WindowMizer with more windows rolled up.

Shortcomings

I was surprised at the lack of an option to have WindowMizer live in the menubar. This is the app’s main shortcoming. Being able to click on the menubar, or even better, activate WindowMizer with a global shortcut and have it run completely in the background would definitely make the app more appealing. The app performed pretty well for me and was not a memory hog, but I did get the spinning wheel when performing actions on multiple windows (e.g. cmd-alt-m to roll up all windows for one app).

Conclusion

Using WindowMizer takes some getting used to, and after using it for a while I can see where it would be useful, but it didn’t quite work its way into my workflow. Luckily, a 15 day trial is available so you can try it out and see if it works for your window management needs. For old school System users, WindowMizer might trigger some nostalgia from the days this was a built in feature. For previous WindowShade X users or users who find themselves often minimizing windows, WindowMizer is surely worth a try.

There’s Markdown writing apps, and there’s rich text editors. Then there’s Ulysses III, the app that combines the best of both into one of the nicest writing environments on any platform. It looks sharp and works great, and I use it for a good portion of my writing these days — something I never would have considered back in the days of Ulysses 2.

Recently I had the chance to talk to Max Seelemann from The Soulmen team, and was able to arrange an interview with him about his team and their work. Here, for your reading pleasure, is their thoughts on OS X Mavericks, iCloud, building the best apps for each platform, and the story behind how Ulysses III came to be.

Max Seelemann, one of the two Soulmen

Thanks so much for taking the time to do the interview with us, even with WWDC going on. Since OS X Mavericks and iOS 7 are fresh in everyone’s minds, could you tell us your thoughts on the changes in Apple’s software and design strategy?

Apple is up to something big this year. iOS 7 is the long-needed overhaul we all have been waiting for. The interface is absolutely beautiful. Once Apple works out current inconsistencies and listens to some of the feedback it is getting right now, nobody will be looking back. We could not be more excited about it.

Mavericks, on the other hand, is a solid update to OS X. While it’s coming with little surprise, the changes are more than welcome. The removal of textures, addition of long-missing features like Maps integration in Calendar and finally fixing multi-monitor support are all great. And, of course, iBooks for Mac.

Your team already seems ready for iOS 7 — at least most of the way — since Daedalus Touch already has a flat design and unique document interaction gestures. Why’d you go with the document and gesture based layout when you did, while everyone else was still focused on menus and traditional interactions?

At that time, everybody was just porting over desktop metaphors. File lists, drill-down folders, etc.

Marcus wanted to focus on what made the tablet so wonderful: Multi-touch interaction, the instant manipulation of objects. The first sketches had no UI at all, just a text view and a loupe, which would be used for zooming out and search, with pinches and swipes used to access different parts of the text.

That was highly experimental, but we had lots of such ideas. At one point, we even had a truthfully recreated typewriter/page metaphor, with the iPad fixed in portrait, a fixed page height, and auto-swapping of pages, once you reached the bottom. Even five-finger pinch to crumble the paper. 😉

The final product has none of that, but what we are always trying to identify is a system’s unique appeal, its underlying concepts, then go from there. We will do the same on iOS 7.

Going back even further to 10 years ago when your company started, what originally inspired you to create Ulysses I?

The plain lack of an app designed for just writing longer texts. There were word processors designed for secretaries and code editors built for programmers. But no one had done a plain text app for book writers on any platform. We wanted to fill this hole.

What were the biggest changes in the world of writing apps that prompted you to start over with a whole new program in Ulysses III?

Ulysses III

None, really. We started in October 2010 with discussing a UI redesign only. That was after Marcus saw the OS X 10.7 announcement and instantly got hooked on the new Mail.app interface. He started work on a modern look for Ulysses, and the more we discussed, the farther we went, and we eventually just realized that we wanted to build a completely new editor.

See, the editor component in Ulysses 2 was showing its age. There was very little room left for expansion, and we just couldn’t do a lot of what we wanted to do.

For example, Ulysses was started way before Markdown was publicly known, and it never was built to be truly semantics-aware. We made it look as if the app knew, but unless you told it during export, an emphasis was basically identical to an h1 or a link-tag. This was tedious, complicated, and we wanted it fixed.

We also always felt that while plain text editing was great, the file format itself has its own fair share of problematic limitations. For one, it’s overly technical, even with so called minimal markup. Images, Finder based file structures, the fact that you need to learn, master and remember a predefined markup in order to insert links – it’s no wonder RTF is still popular.

So instead of fixing what we had, we decided to take a shot at re-imagining plain text editing as a whole: Not so much as in “plain text, the file format”, but more in the sense of interaction – still a single font, tags instead of formats, a strong emphasis on semantics (sorry, no pun), but at the same time allowing advanced stuff such as annotations and footnotes without the clutter. All the stuff standard plain text/markup is really horrible at.

Out came the Ulysses III engine.

Once we swapped out the UI and the engine, there was little left to be bring over from old versions, of course. This is when we decided to really start anew and free version 3 from all dependencies on previous releases, going as far as opting out of any upgrade path for any of your previous content. We just “ended up” writing an entirely new application. From scratch.

What was the most difficult thing to get right in Ulysses, with all the custom features you’ve included like hidden Markdown and the Pure mode.

Definitely the editor. It’s the part we started coding first about 1.5 years ago and we are still tuning. The problem is, that once the basic stuff is sorted out and actually working, there are just so many subtile issues to be taken care of. Think of indentation, alignment, broad font support, text selection with objects (links), copy & paste behavior, drag & drop, implementing undo, redo, versions and so forth. It all must work, of course, but it must work in a way that feels natural to the OS.

As an example, we literally spent months on and off making text objects look and behave like they do. You can now look at them and ask “what’s the big deal, they work as I would expect”, but getting there took countless iterations.

You’ve spoken elsewhere about the difficulties you had in getting iCloud sync working. What would you most like to see Apple improve in iCloud, and how hopeful are you for its future?

The most important thing I want from Apple is to just fix the issues. There are a number of things that do not work as expected and that took us weeks to figure out and ultimately work around. From what I have seen at WWDC, and what I’ve been told, this is exactly what Apple is doing for iOS 7 and Mavericks regarding iCloud: No new features, just fixing bugs.

How’s the App Store worked for your team? Would you ever want to go back to selling apps directly on your site?

We switched all our sales to the App Store in the month it launched and have not looked back since. There is just so much stuff we no longer need to care about: licensing, sale transactions, taxation, download traffic, updates, user discovery, restoring previous purchases, international sales — the list goes on. The App Store is so much more convenient for us and our users. Without being on the App Store, Ulysses III could not use iCloud.

Plus, the App Store really helped boost sales, and in no small manner. The occasional Apple feature sure helps, so long story short: no, we would not want to go back.

It seems slightly odd that Ulysses III doesn’t sync everything with Daedalus, its iOS counterpart, when other writing apps like iA Writer and Byword do. Why’d you implement the syncing you did in Daedalus?

There are two aspects to consider here: First, Daedalus was there before we even started working on Ulysses III. It also had iCloud sync before Ulysses shipped. We added support for Daedalus to Ulysses, not the other way around. As a result, syncing between the two is currently limited by what Daedalus can do.

Second, the data model of Ulysses is much more complex. Unlike the apps you named and even Daedalus, texts are no longer just “plain text”. Ulysses embeds images and videos and allows for additional markup options like comments or annotations. There is just no way to make standard iOS text components suite to our needs.

So we only had two options: Either limit Ulysses III by what iOS has to offer – bad idea. Or to go for partial support at launch and then port Ulysses’ engine, data model and backend to iOS.

Hint. Hint. 😉

We’re excited over the upcoming Alfred-like search in Ulysses that you’ve previewed, as well as additional import/export tools that you’ve promised. Is there anything else we can expect to see in Ulysses III in the near future?

The upcoming Quick Open in Ulysses III

We will begin by addressing the most requested features first. In addition to the open panel you already mentioned, Ulysses III 1.1 will gain something similar to a global search bar. We will also add typewriter scrolling, ePub export, full theming for all exporters and a bunch of commonly requested localizations.

From there on, our plans are neither fixed nor disclosable yet. We have a big enough idea backlog to keep us busy for the next couple of years, though, and we’re very happy to now have a solid foundation to build on, extend and improve.

At AppStorm, we always curious about what apps others use to get their work done. What apps do you rely on in your work and more?

I don’t need many apps for my everyday-use. I think I spend most time of my day in Xcode, Mail and Safari. For Twitter I use Tweetbot, for graphics I use Pixelmator and Sketch, our Git management is mostly done in Tower, issue tracking is handled via Jira. Marcus relies on Photoshop, Coda and Balsamiq Mockups, all of which I barely touch. 😉

Do you ever go back and use Ulysses II, or do you swap around with other writing apps, or is Ulysses III your only writing app?

Except from code and short mails, all my writing is in Ulysses III now. In part because I believe in “eating your own dog food”, but it’s pretty easy here, because I really just like it that much. (BTW: This is different from Ulysses 2, which I admit to have used only rarely.)

We mentioned Ulysses III’s Pure Mode in a recent poll on our site about skeuomorphism versus flat UI. Where do you stand on the great design debate of our times?

Ulysses III’s Pure Mode

I think we’re rather ambivalent about it. While I (and I think my team as well) do not like leather textures and animating cassette decks, not every relation to real-world behavior is bad. There are situations where the adoption of real-world behaviors can help to convey the use of an app. Take the gravity simulation in iOS 7 or Daedalus’ sheets.

Also, design is so much more than just the look of things. Some people tend to forget that.

That’s All for Now

We’d like to extend a special Thank You to Max for taking the time to do this interview with us. If you haven’t tried out Ulysses III yet, you should go download the trial and give it a shot. The Soulmen’s passion shines through the app, and we can’t wait to see what else they cook up going forward … Ulysses III for iPad?

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