Category: Mac

Let’s be honest, Apple’s calculator app nearly as appealing as the other stock apps on the Mac; heck, it even falls short against its iOS counterpart. With just the basic functions available, it’s one of the least used (not to mention forgettable) apps on my computer. And of all things, it has a Dashboard sidekick that’s even more forgettable.

On the flip side, this can mean more breathing room for more flexible and powerful mathematical tools for the Mac. In fact, a quick search on the Mac App Store shows a wide range of apps to choose from, ranging from scientific to purpose-specific calculators.

One of these that I’m interested in is Numi by Dmitry Nikolaev & Co, a menubar app that moves away from the typical way we use calculators by incorporating text into computation. The idea is that calculations can be made more comprehensive by adding text into the process, and so it is easier to see and understand how we’d arrive at the result.

Where Words and Numbers Meet

To distinguish numerical expression from ordinary text, Numi bases it on the symbols used. If the line begins with numbers, operations, or parentheses, it would interpret it as a computation. Otherwise, it would treat it as text by enclosing it with mathematical brackets.

But the main purpose of Numi’s functionality is to combine the two in a comprehensive manner. To do this, you only need to press the Tab key to switch modes while typing. Numi then formats text and calculation in an organized manner, making it visually easy even for those who aren’t fond of math. For example, you can begin with a heading, then jump to the next line with a number or parentheses to start the computation. You can label these figures with text to indicate what exactly is being computed.

Numi automatically computes the total of a computation, placing the result on the right side of the screen. You can add, subtract, multiply, and divide as many numbers and combinations as needed, and you’ll get the correct result at the end of the line. Besides the regular operations, you can also get the percentage of a value, and vice versa. I found this particular function pretty handy whenever I’m computing for tax, service fees, and the like.

But it doesn’t stop there. You can get the sum total of all of the results of every computation by pressing CTRL+= until an empty row or separate sum appears and breaks the flow of the equation. There are more keyboard shortcuts to use — all basic shortcuts we’d use on the Mac — and can be found in Numi’s documentation.

More Math Magic

Numi reminds me of Hog Bay Software’s TaskPaper wherein you create tasks and task lists simply with plain text. Here we have calculations rendered using just plain text in that you only need to type numbers, text, and perform operations on the screen—Numi takes care of the rest through lightning fast (re)calculation, formatting, etc. This saves me the trouble of using my mouse to input values or the hassle of losing myself to the flow of the calculation, and having to start over again.

But before you get your hopes up, this is where the magic ends. Automatic summation, regular operations and percentage functions, and organized formatting are Numi’s notable features. Everything else, such as autosave and keyboard shortcuts, are understood to be necessary features for an app like this. Sharing your calculations with others isn’t even interesting; you simply copy and paste the data to an email or message to send to whoever you would like to share it with. Finally, it would be nice to have the ability to create a new “page” or “ticket” for a new set of calculations, since text is now a part of the process and can get unorganized at some point.

Extending Numi

I think the lack of features is really due to the limitations of a basic calculator. Unless this is a powerhouse scientific calculator or a weight loss calculator, there’s really nothing more for Numi to do but to perform simple computations.

A suggestion that could pump more juice into the app is to go beyond its limitations. Since integration is the theme, the developers can add integration with other note-taking apps, or synchronization with file sharing apps like Dropbox. I can envision this to work with Simplenote or Evernote, wherein you can save your calculations as notes for viewing, with sync and backups on Dropbox, Google Drive, or Skydrive—all this to keep your notes for safekeeping.

On the other hand, the developers can brush up Sharing by enabling users to email the calculations directly to the recipient. This would make things much more convenient than copying and pasting the data to share with others.

Conclusion

Numi’s plain text approach coupled with speed and convenience makes it a much better calculator to use than the stock Calculator app. It’s almost as if I were writing notes and Numi simply does the work of calculating and providing me with the correct results. The best part is that it saves all of my work, so I don’t have to worry about forgetting and redoing everything all over.

Where Numi is headed at this point we don’t know, but I believe it has plenty of space to work and become an even more innovative calculator for all users. It just needs a bit more magic to really give it that edge over other, regular calculators. By extending beyond its limitations, it has the potential of becoming a leader of its niche.

We all love finding great deals, but it’s easy to waste more time trying to find good deals than it’s worth. Then, it’s easy to get tempted to get things that you don’t really need right now, just because they’re a good deal.

What if you could spend $2 and let your Mac find the deals you’d like to know about automatically? That’s exactly what LittleFin’s new app, Deal Alert, is.

Don’t Waste Time Searching for Deals

Deal Alert is a simple menubar app that brings the best deals from Woot!, That Daily Deal, One Sale a Day, Yugster, and Daily Steals to your Mac, with more deals sites coming soon. For now, at least, it’s not bringing you deals on apps, like you might expect at first from the popularity of tools to find free apps of the day on iOS. It’s also not an app to track changes in prices on Amazon, something you can do with popular apps like Price Drop Monitor or PriceWatcher. Instead, Deal Alert is curating the deals from the top deals sites online, with tools to surface the deals from those sites that’ll interest you.

You’ll be able to quickly see what today’s deals are right from your menubar, and can jump to the deal site directly from the link in the menu. Better yet, you can add keywords for things you’d like to buy in the near future, and Deal Alert will send you a push notification when it finds a deal containing that keyword. That way, if you’re looking for (say) a new set of speakers but aren’t in any hurry about getting them, you can add the keyword speakers and then just forget about it. When a deal on speakers comes up, though, Deal Alert will notice and let you know, and you can jump right to the site to buy them straight from the notification. It’ll save you the time and frustration of checking every day, and hopefully save you some money on stuff you were already looking to buy.

Rounding off the simple app are settings to customize your notifications and set which sites (from the ones it has included) to monitor. The on/off switches can be a tad hard to use, and you’ll have to click on the button itself to set it (say, if something’s on, the slider will be on the off side. Click the Off to turn it off.). And, unfortunately, there’s no way to add sites to monitor, though the LittleFin team says they’ll be adding more deals sits going forward.

A Simple Way to Save Money

Deal Alert likely won’t be an app you’ll use everyday, but if you love saving money but want to cut out the time of checking deals sites all the time, it’s an app you’ll be glad to have around. It’ll help you find the deals you really need without having to wade through every deal on the ‘net.

Japanese is notorious for being one of the hardest foreign languages to learn as an English speaker (alongside Arabic, Chinese and Korean). Not only it is radically different to English, with very little similarities to our own mother tongue, but the entirely different writing system can make it a real nightmare to learn. Yet the question, “how do I learn a foreign language?”, has, unfortunately, a multitude of different answers and there isn’t one simple way of learning a tongue from far-away lands. You could, of course, by just a textbook and learn it yourself, but in this day and age, with our modern technology, there must surely be a more effective and exciting way of learning some conversational Spanish before your trip to the Costa del Sol or, in this case, some Japanese before that big business trip to Japan.

Human Japanese, which has been featured on the front of the App Store, believes that it can help you learn Japanese in a new and intuitive way. At a mere $9.99, it’s certainly less expensive than the options out there (such as Rosetta Stone, which starts at $179 a level) but does a bargain price equate to quality?

First Thoughts

Upon launching Human Japanese, you are presented with an introduction to the language, giving you a gist of the grammar (which, apparently, is much easier to learn than English grammar), the syntax of Japanese and the various sounds. Although it’s not vital to learn everything in the introduction, I’d highly recommend taking a read of it as it gives you a great background to this fascinating language.

Wherever any Japanese text comes up, you can click on it to hear it spoken by a native Japanese speaker. Unfortunately there’s no way to slow down the text as it’s spoken and as of the latest version, Human Japanese does not highlight the syllables as they’re pronounced. It’s a minor issue, but one that I would have liked to have seen, as being able to match the sound to the individual character would, in my opinion, have helped me learn it a bit quicker.

Human Japanese is divided up into a number of different chapters (there’s 40 in total) which cover almost every aspect of the Japanese language and way of life. The first two, which we’re going to look at in a bit more detail, cover the fundamentals of Japanese pronunciation and learning the writing system.

Pronunciation and Learning Hiragana

The Pronunciation section of Human Japanese aims to help you replicate the sounds of Japanese by equating them to their closest English equivalent. There are audio recordings by both native Japanese speakers and, to show you how not to pronounce a word, by the app’s developer himself.

However, it is the section on the writing system where Human Japanese really comes alive. This was a section that I was interested in looking at — as the writing system makes Japanese a difficult language to learn — and especially how the app deals with teaching you all the different characters. Fortunately, the results impressed.

The writing system is boiled down into 3 different chapters and works off a drip approach — you are gradually introduced to new characters, rather than having to learn them all at once, which I believe from my own personal experience is a far better method.

You can click on any character within Human Japanese to be shown an animation on how the character is written on paper, which helps you memorise it even more. In my example, we start off with the basic vowel sounds, a, e, i, o and u before progressing onto other sounds, such as ka, ke, ki, ko and ku.

Besides the animations, there are also more detailed guides on writing characters, including some tips from the app’s developer himself, which I feel is a really nice touch.

At the end of each chapter, there are self-quizzes that are designed to help you test your progress and whether you can remember what you have learnt so far.

Course Content

The rest of the chapters are dedicated to areas of the language that you would expect to learn from any language court, such as greetings, food, directions and so on. The author intersperses cultural background knowledge into the lessons — in the Food chapter, for example, he explains about all the different kinds of Japanese delicacy (interesting side note here: the term sushi actually refers to the rice, not the fish!). Again, within all the different chapters, you can click on the Japanese to hear the pronunciation by a native speaker.

At the end of each chapter, just like above with the writing system, there are vocabulary quizzes, from Japanese into English and vice-versa, to help you test your knowledge and what you’ve learnt in that particular chapter.

Besides from the little observations buried within each chapter, there are chapters dedicated to helping you learn Japanese culture. The app’s developer also shares his experience in Japan (by the sounds of it, he’s travelled the country quite extensively) and I feel that this lends Human Japanese a really nice personal touch, something which you wouldn’t see from a larger app developer or corporation.

There are also individual chapters dedicated to helping you learn Japanese grammar and any new concepts are introduced gradually, from the easy to more advanced stuff.

Conclusion

For a language course, I think Human Japanese is one of the best bargains out there on the App Store, because for $9.99 you can’t get a better deal at that kind of money. The app is so detailed and explains so many features and technicalities to you that you almost become engulfed in its almighty awe — Human Japanese really is an app that you’ll be using every day.

The app therefore gains our highly respected 9 out of 10 rating. Sure, it’s no Rosetta Stone, and it isn’t the de facto way to learn Japanese on your Mac. But, if you want a beautiful and simple overview of this fascinating language, whilst picking up some interesting cultural facts on the way, then Human Japanese really is the way to go. At $9.99, it’s an absolute bargain and I’d highly recommend it to anyone wanting to learn Japanese, from young to old.

Do you love your Mac, but still prefer using an Android phone? Or perhaps do you have an Android tablet but a Mac and iPhone? It’s more common than ever these days to use a number of different operating systems, and thanks to cross-platform apps and cloud syncing services, it’s also easier than ever to get them all to work together.

Our sister site Android.AppStorm has put together a roundup of the best tips and tricks to get your Android devices working great with OS X and iOS. Take a few minutes and jump over there to see how you can get all of your devices working together they way they should anyhow.

Continue Reading on Android.AppStorm…

There’s extremely powerful and complex task management apps like OmniFocus that are the subject of books and screencasts. Then, there’s the barebones, dead-simple task lists like Clear, or plain text todo lists that feel more like text editors, such as TaskPaper.

But perhaps you want something different. An app, perhaps, that has features like due dates and tags you’d expect in a professional task app, but that’s simple and uncluttered. You want a todo list that’s great with a mouse, but equally great with just your keyboard. And you don’t want to spend a fortune.

How does $4.99 for a menubar todo list app with scheduled tasks, tags and task notes, and rich keyboard support sound? That’s exactly what Taskdeck is.

Simple Menubar Productivity

There’s something about menubar apps that just makes them great for productivity. They’re right at the top of your screen, even when you’re using a full-screen app, ready for you to use them whenever you need. They keep you productive without cluttering your desktop, out of the way but never out of reach.

That’s exactly what Taskdeck is for tasks. Designed by Karl Traunmüller at microLARGE, which you might already know for the Spotlight alternate Disklens, Taskdeck is a simpler take on a todo list that makes it simple to keep up with what you need to do from your menubar. And for keyboard aficionados, you can start Taskdeck, add new tasks and lists, filter through them, and find more info on the tasks you need to complete all from your keyboard.

Taskdeck is a list orientated todo list. You’ll first need to add lists for your tasks, either from the plus button or by pressing CMD-N. Then, click the arrow or tap your arrow key to jump into the list, where you can add tasks in the same way. Enter the task, tab to add a description or tags, click the plus to add a link to a related file, or click the checkmark then select the date the task is due to schedule the task. Unfortunately, there’s no way to type in a date right now, so you’ll have to stick to selecting dates from the calendar popover.

Filtering your tasks is simple as well. You can use the search bar to find any task in the list you’re in, searching for words contained in the task or its tags (there’s no global search, though, unfortunately). Or, you can filter by tasks that are due today or overdue, either with a click or by pressing CMD+3 or 4. Back in your list view, you’ll be able to see how many tasks each list has, as well as how many tasks are due today or in the future as seen above.

You can navigate through the whole app with your keyboard, opening it with a CTRL+CMD+Space, adding tasks with CMD+N, and going back and forth between tasks and lists with your arrow keys. You can delete tasks or whole lists by pressing CMD+delete, or undo changes by pressing CMD-Z, just as you’d expect. It’s a simple way to keep up with the stuff you need to do without having to deal with a complex app.

A Promising App With More to Come

You might have noticed that I didn’t mention sync or a companion mobile app. Neither of these are available yet, but the upcoming v1.1 update will bring syncing between Macs and iOS devices, along with a dedicated universal iOS app so you can keep your tasks with you. That’ll make Taskdeck an even better way to manage the stuff you need to do.

Even today, though, Taskdeck’s nice take on menubar and keyboard-powered productivity with a balance between simplicity and power features makes it a nice choice if you don’t have a favorite todo list app yet. Its price is attractive as well, especially in a market where Clear costs $10 and more popular full-featured apps cost $50 or more.

Last year, we took a look at some of the best games available on Steam. Since then, we’ve had a fantastic year of releases for the platform, giving us enough reason to take a revised look at gaming on a Mac through Steam.

While some of last year’s entries remain undoubted staple components to any good Steam library, they’ve been joined by a host of fantastic games from both AAA and indie developers. Whether you’re a long time Steam user or planning on making a start with OS X gaming, here’s the must-have collection of games that you may well want to add to your wishlist for this summer’s sale.

Team Fortress 2

Kicking off with a classic, Team Fortress 2 is a game that should be in every Steam user’s library. That’s not an exaggeration either, since the game is free-to-play so you can jump into it without paying a penny. While released all the way back in 2007, the game still has a incredibly strong community of players and continues to receive regular updates.

Team Fortress 2 sees players take on one of several unique classes and affiliate themselves with either the RED or BLU team, working collaboratively to win a round of varying objective in one of several game modes. With a focus shifted from traditional individual statistics like kill/death ratio, Team Fortress 2 creates an entertaining collaborative experience. The fairly-recent addition of a co-op mode now sees players have the option of teaming up against waves of NPC enemies in the hope of completing a Tour of Duty and attaining some unique loot.

Price: Free

The Walking Dead

The Walking Dead is one of the most critically-acclaimed releases of the last year, and is a fantastic adaptation of the universe laid out by the comic book franchise of the same name.

A primarily point-and-click game, The Walking Dead sees players follow the story of Lee, a convict and former university professor, in the middle of a zombie apocalypse. Encountering different characters and locations along the way, The Walking Dead tells a thoroughly engaging story where the decisions you make can have an influence on future events.

You can check out our recent review of the game where we awarded the game a full 10/10.

Price: $24.99

Portal 2

Another entry retaining its title from last year and a personal favourite of mine is Portal 2. Portal 2 sees players assume the role of Chell, a test subject in the abandoned Aperture Science research facility. Following on from the events of the first game (Portal, also available for OS X through Steam), players will navigate through the dilapidated facility in an attempt to escape, only for those plans to be upset by an awakening maniacal AI.

Portal 2 is an excellent game that runs fantastically on OS X, and in fact was the first title released simultaneously on both the Windows and OS X versions of Steam. It’s highly recommended you pick up a copy!

Price: $19.99

Don’t Starve

Don’t Starve is a hardcore indie survival game with one goal: don’t starve. Surviving is based on your ability to keep three metrics — hunger, sanity and health — in tact by reaping resources from a procedurally-generated world. You’ll encounter a unique set of beneficial and obstructive resources and mobs in the nearby environment that’ll keep you on the edge of your seat as you try to avoid death for another night.

Playable on OS X through both Steam and Chrome, Don’t Starve has garnered consistently positive reviews and it’s easy to see why. The developers are even continuing to update the game with new content and gameplay mechanics, so even after playing for a while, there’s still more to discover.

Price: $14.99

Half-Life 2 Series

Half-Life 2 is an iconic game that was brought to the Mac with the initial release of Steam on OS X. In the game, players follow the stories of Gordon Freeman and the resistance, fighting off the invading Combine that have taken control of Earth following the events of the first game (Half-Life, also available on Steam for OS X). Half-LIfe 2 has an engaging storyline that’s built on by an unprecedented ability to simply let you take in the atmosphere of a post-apocolyptic world.

Half-Life 2, alone, is a fantastic experience and it’s continued with Half-Life 2: Episode One and Half-Life 2: Episode Two. As a package, this series should undoubtedly top your Steam library and have you furiously waiting for the next instalment.

Price: $9.99 (for Half-Life 2 only) / $19.99 (for The Orange Box, including Half-Life 2, Episode One and Episode Two with Team-Fortress 2 and Portal)

Borderlands 2

Borderlands 2 is the follow up to Borderlands, where the game’s new protagonists must kill Jack, the main antagonist of its predecessor, in the hopes of bringing peace back to Pandora. Launching late last year to wide critical acclaim, Steam offers access to everything you need to enjoy Borderlands 2, including the sale of the game’s DLC season and accompanying guide.

Price: $29.99

Prison Architect

Prison Architect is a simulator where players can construct their own maximum security prison and ensure its smooth operation.

Currently in Alpha on Steam, Prison Architect throws players some empty land to build their prison, hopefully evolving from a small cell block into a bustling metropolis capable of handling any prisoner that needs the facility. You can choose to go down an intensive Alcatraz-esque route or throw your inmates a bone and let them enjoy a relaxed rehabilitation.

Price: $29.99

Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare

Widely regarded by fans as the best in series, Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare is the earliest instalment of the Call of Duty franchise available on the Mac.

Call of Duty 4 sees players compete a campaign that kicks off the the Modern Warfare storyline (unfortunately only followed up by Windows-only Modern Warfare 2 and Modern Warfare 3), and offers access to the incredibly popular multiplayer gameplay that sees players enter combat on a literal virtual battlefield.

Price: $19.99

Call of Duty: Black Ops

Call of Duty: Black Ops is another, yet distinctly different, instalment of Call of Duty on the Mac. Forming a storyline that runs separately from Infinity Ward’s Modern Warfare series, Call of Duty: Black Ops sports a campaign where players assume the role as an elite special forces member in a variety of conflicts, including part of the Cold War and Vietnam War. As is expected, Black Ops also features a popular multiplayer mode that affords the game its high replayability and is extendable with DLC packages.

A personal favourite game mode of mine in Black Ops is, however, Zombies, which sees players work co-operatively to battle of unlimited waves of the undead across a variety of maps (again extendable with DLC).

Price: $49.99

Unlike other games in this roundup, Call of Duty: Black Ops is sold separately as individual Mac and Windows editions. Make sure you’re buying the OS X version so you can actually play it on your Mac.

Left 4 Dead 2

Left 4 Dead 2 is set in the zombie apocalypse and sees players in the role of one of four survivors aiming to take out the undead. Left 4 Dead 2 builds upon Left 4 Dead (also available on OS X through Steam) but with a variety of new infected, survivors and weaponry.

If you’re a fan of zombie/horror games, this one’s for you.

Price: $19.99

Counter-Strike: Global Offensive

Counter-Strike: Global Offensive builds upon the historic Counter-Strike franchise — a series that originated as a Half-Life mod — with new maps, weapons and characters. Fans of classic Counter-Strike will enjoy revamped versions of classic content, available as one package as part of Global Offensive.

Counter-Strike: Global Offensive sees players join a terrorist or counter-terroist team and then battle it out on a variety of objective-based game mode over a number of maps.

Price: $14.99

Sid Meier’s Civilization V

Sid Meier’s Civilization V is a turn-based strategy game where players take control of a civilization and lead them from primative beginners right into the space age by conducting diplomacy, entering war and discovering new technologies in the process.

A variety of DLC is available for Civilization V through Steam, including the soon-to-be-released Brave New World expansion which hits virtual shelves on July 12th.

Price: $29.99 (base game only)

Grand Theft Auto 3D Universe series

Grand Theft Auto III, Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas and Grand Theft Auto: Vice City are all available through Steam, offer an OS X-compatible perspective on the 3D Universe of the highly-popular and equally controversial franchise. With the 3D Universe considered the real breakthrough for the franchise and with Grand Theft Auto V due out later this year, the series available through Steam is a great way of starting out with the franchise.

Price: sold separately from $9.99 to $14.99 each

Who Said Macs Aren’t for Gaming?

Grab these games and you’ll have a fantastic Steam library with many hours of fun ahead. Of course, these are only a selection of the entire OS X catalogue available on Steam. If you’ve got any favourites not featured, be sure to share your recommendations in the comments below!

There’s opensource freeware software, the bundled apps that are essentially free with your Mac, dirt cheap apps on the App Store, and incredibly expensive apps like AutoCAD and Adobe’s Creative Cloud apps. And everything in between. You could spend nothing on software, ever, if you really wanted to, and use just what comes on your Mac and other free apps you could download. Or, today, you can spend a fairly small amount and get quite a few really good programs, with the wealth of apps on the App Store today.

On the other end, though, even as apps seem to be getting cheaper, there’s more in-app purchases and subscriptions that’ll eat up your money. You’ll find yourself paying to unlock that feature you really wanted, or subscribing to Office 365 so you can collaborate with people at work. Or, you’ll pay for an Evernote subscription after you find it so useful as a free app.

We’ve all got different budgets for software, and we’re wondering how much you usually spend. Think of all your software purchases and subscriptions, and let us know about how much you spend per month. I’d personally be somewhere in the $20-$50 range, but then, I buy a lot of software for testing and more. Where are you on this scale, and has that gone up or down over the years? We’d love to hear more about your app spending in the comments below.

iMessage is a great idea. It makes SMS and MMS a thing of the past, between iPhones at any rate, and is as fast and full-featured a one-to-one chat system as you could want. With the Messages app on the Mac and iPad as well, it’s the best of old-school chat and SMS, rolled into one.

At least, it’s supposed to be, theoretically. In real world usage, though, iMessage doesn’t always work perfect. It works best between iPhones, in my use at least, but can often get things messed up when syncing to the Mac. Then, Messages.app itself on OS X is a rather anemic messaging program, despite including support Jabber and other chat services that were traditionally included in iChat. It works for chatting, but if you need to dig deep into your chat archives to find a file someone sent you, you’re going to have a tough time.

That’s why the folks at Flexibits — the people behind my favorite calendar app, Fantastical — made Chatology. It’s the companion app for Messages.app that can make iMessage a power-user tool.

Supercharged Search for Your Chats

Messages.app works fine for having conversations between Macs (regardless of its issues with syncing chats you had on your iPhone while your Mac was asleep), and if you use it with your teammates at work or just with your family to share pictures and special moments, you’ve likely got quite the backlog of old chats. Chatology can distill all those records down to find the exact messages you’re looking for, letting you search through your chat text or sort through chats by their date and time.

Essentially, it gives you a nice way to sort through your Messages archive, which are actually stored in your /Library/Messages/Archive/ folder, organized by date and conversation. Chatology takes those archives and lets you search through all of them lightening-fast while maintaining the separation between conversations that makes things make more sense. You can search through everything, drill down into chats that happened Today, this week, this month, or in the past year, or view just specific conversations on a certain day.

Just looking for images or the site your colleague shared? You can filter and see just images or links contained in the chats. Unfortunately, though, there’s no way to isolate other attachments in the chats, and there’s also no way to bulk-export the images in chats. You can drag-and-drop images out of Chatology, see where they are in the chat context, or see them in Quick Look, but there’s no way to save all of the images at one time. Let’s hope this part gets improvement going forward, as it could be a seriously powerful feature for those who want a way to archive all the pictures their friends have shared in iMessage.

Just Replace Message.app’s Search Already

But the best part of Chatology is how nicely it integrates with Messages. If you leave it enabled in the settings, Chatology will automatically open with your curser in its search box when you press CMD+F in Messages.app. That makes it a no-brainer to use Chatology as your only way to ever search for your messages. And it’s a rather ingenious integration into one of the default OS X apps that doesn’t even have any options for extendability.

Once you find what you’re looking for, you can export the conversation as a plain text file, select text and share or save it with your OS X services, or open the original chat conversation in Finder. From there, if you open the chat log file, you’ll be able to see the conversation back in Messages — otherwise, there’s no way to jump back in Messages to the spot you’re looking at in Chatology.

An App for a Purpose

Chatology isn’t for everyone. If you don’t go digging through your chat archives on a regular basis, and just use it for casual chit-chat, then you might not get much out of it. But if you collaborate with your team in Messages, share lots of pictures with your family, and more, you’ll likely have already wished Messages.app had a better search tool. Chatology is exactly what you need.

One of our goals at Flexibits is solving problems to help reduce or eliminate frustration.

The Flexibits Team

That’s why the Flexibits team made Chatology. They found that Messages search was buggy at best, so they decided to fix the problem with their own app, one that works with Messages so well you could almost be tricked into thinking that it’s built-in. And the Flexibits team isn’t stopping there: they’ve still got a replacement for your Mac’s Contacts app coming out soon, but just wanted to hurry and get Chatology out since it was so useful for their own team.

If you’ve ever had trouble finding an old message in Messages, download the free 14-day Chatology trial and see if it hits the spot for your messaging search needs. If it makes your chats and collaboration more productive, its $19 price won’t seem that bad at all.

Skype, FaceTime, Facebook, and more have revolutionized how we communicate with others. It continues to blow my mind how we are busting through the walls of communication to work with others who are miles apart. It’s more normal these days to collaborate with people across the planet, in many ways, than it is to collaborate with those across the hall. It’s a brave new world.

One new app that can make communication simpler, in many ways, is Collaaj. It’s an app that lets you communicate to others using video, audio, and your Mac. It’s the collaboration of Skype combined with the simpleness of email, in a way that’ll help you get your point across to others better than you could with just text and images but without having to be online at the same time.

Using Collaaj

Collaaj is designed to let you create videos or audio to communicate and show something on your Mac screen. For example, let’s say you want to show someone a design you are working on. Instead of just sending them the design, you can record a video or audio to explain to them what you are trying to do in the design. This gives it a whole new meaning as sometimes you cannot always communicate through just an image what you really want your audience to know. There are four different ways that you can record using Collaaj.

The first two ways involve using a screen capture and either video or audio. You can have a screen capture and just use your voice to explain what is in it or any other information you want to let your audience know, very similar to screencasts. If you want more than just audio, you can use your webcam instead to take video of yourself explaining the image you are showing to people.

The other two ways to communicate involve only video and audio and take away the screen capture feature. If you decide you just want to record a video that you want people to see, you can just fire up the app in webcam mode and record yourself. If you are camera shy, there is an audio record feature where you can just get your voice captured and send it out. In my opinion these two features are not as effective as the other two, but nonetheless, I am sure it could be helpful to have.

Interacting With Others

What makes Collaaj so effective is the fact that you can use it to interact with others. Just because it is more of a one way app, where you are sending people something that you are trying to communicate to them, that doesn’t mean that they cannot respond. Once you are done with recording, you have two options on how you want others to see your recording. You can either make it somewhat private where only the people you send the link to, can see it, or you can make it so that anyone can see it. Create a title for the recording then add a short description and you can then upload it, and it is now on the web for others to see.

When people get the link to view your video, there are a few different ways that they can interact with you. There is an option for them to leave comments or even “like” your recording. There are also some sharing features where they can share it to Twitter, LinkedIn, or Google +. There is also a link that is made so that it can be shared with others, and you are also given an embed code so that the recording can be integrated into other sites.

Variety of Uses

What made me really like Collaaj is the way that it could be used in my line of work as well as for others. It is a great tool to be able to explain a concept to people or to add meaning and depth to an image, that you normally can’t portray when you just show someone the picture. I can see this being used by educators, especially math teachers who want another way to be able to explain a problem to students. I can see designers using this to explain their work, as well as business people.

There are a number of different ways that Collaaj can be integrated into many different lines of work. I like that they integrated features where you can embed your recordings on a website as well as some of the interactive tools that they give you. It gives you the opportunity to really use it as a collaborative tool to work with others.

Final Thoughts

I found Collaaj very easy to use and it came in very handy for me in when I tested it out with others. When I showed it to a few of my colleagues the overriding comment that I got was that by adding video or audio, it really enhanced the image that you were showing people.

There are three different price plans to choose from, ranging from free all the way up to $15/month. It really all depends on how and what you plan to use Collaaj for in your life. I think most people who will use it casually can easily get away with the free plan, while even small to medium sized business could get away with the $5/month option.

Collaaj even has an iPad app that adds more features to the app than what the Mac side can offer. It gives you the opportunity to create screencasts and actually write and draw, while having audio and video. Although you can do this on the Mac, the iPad gives you a lot of the features to make this happen from within the app itself. It is free to use, so I would check it out if you are interested.

Overall, this is a great product to have on the Mac, web, as well as on the iPad. It was very easy to use and I found it as a nice way to be able to get my message across to people that I may not have had the chance to come in face to face contact with. If you are one who does a lot of screencasts, or works remotely, I would definitely give Collaaj a try.

Adobe released their latest version of Creative Suite — what would have been Creative Suite 7 — earlier today. Only this time, Creative Suite is no more, superseded by Adobe’s new subscription offering, Creative Cloud.

Creative Cloud is a controversial release, since longtime Adobe customers want a way to buy a permanent license, or at least wish for more subscription options so they don’t have to get everything. But for now, Creative Cloud is what it is — and it’s a big upgrade to all of Adobe’s main apps.

Here’s how Creative Cloud will work for you, if you’ve already got a copy of Creative Suite and want to upgrade and get the latest features.

The Upgrade Decision

First off, you’ve got to decide if you want to buy a Creative Cloud subscription. There’s a number of updates to each of the major Adobe apps; be sure to check the Creative Cloud blog post for a summary of what to expect. Many of the Adobe apps, including Photoshop, have already gotten updates in Creative Cloud since CS6′s release, such as options to copy designs as CSS and more. So, if you have CS6 — and especially if you have an older version — there’s a lot to look forward to in the new versions.

Then, you’ve got to decide what you want. You can either purchase a subscription to one app for $9-$19/month, depending on the app (Muse is on the low end, Photoshop is obviously on the high end), or you can purchase a full subscription that’ll get you every app Adobe makes for $49/month with a year commitment. If you own CS3 or newer, you can subscribe to one app for just $9/month or the whole suite for $29/month for your first year, and if you own CS6, you can get the whole suite for $19/month for your first year. Oh, and students can get it for $19/month as well, and all of these “upgrade” offers end July 31st. That’s all: there’s no suites to pick between, it’s just one app or the whole shebang.

What The Cloud Means for You

 

Again, remember that Creative Cloud’s apps aren’t web apps. They’re still normal Mac (or PC, if you happen to be on Windows) apps that you’ll install and run locally. They’ll work when you’re offline. They still use the same keyboard shortcuts as before, and can still save files to your Mac directly or to other cloud services like Dropbox. Nothing at all’s changed there. In fact, with just a rough glance at Photoshop CC running on a Mac, you could easily think it was Photoshop CS6.

All that’s changed — what makes it different than just being CS7 — is that you’re subscribing to the apps. Instead of paying for the apps directly as you would have in the past (say, $1-3k for a new copy, or $300-600 for an upgrade), you pay per month for your Adobe apps. Along with that, you’ll get some extras: 20Gb of online storage (again, you don’t have to use it), a Typekit Portfolio subscription, a Behance profile and ProSite, and up to 5 websites hosted on Adobe’s cloud. Essentially, these are just extras to sweeten the deal, and are the only “cloud” aspects of Creative Cloud. Everything else is normal programs that you install on your Mac as before.

As far as Creative Cloud file storage goes, anyone can sign up for a free Creative Cloud account, with 2Gb of free storage and 30 day trials to each of Adobe’s apps (and full access to Adobe’s free apps). A full Creative Cloud subscription will get you 20Gb of storage, as mentioned before, where you can store your creative files if you want to. Again, you don’t have to store anything in Creative Cloud’s storage if you don’t want to: your choice. If your subscription dies, Adobe’s promising that they’re working to provide ways to access your data; my guess is that they’ll let you keep your cloud storage as read-only if you quit subscribing, just to quelm everyone’s fears, but that’s yet to be seen.

Subscribing to Creative Cloud

Ok. You’ve decided to bite the bullet and subscribe to Creative Cloud. If you’ve ever bought software from Adobe before, you’ll find they’ve really streamlined the process. You’ll just sign in with your Adobe ID, choose the subscription you want, verify that you’re eligible for an upgrade or educational offer if you chose one of those, add your payment info, and you’re done. That’s it.

Your browser will redirect you to the Creative Cloud account homepage, which will show any files you’ve already uploaded if you had a free account. Minutes later, you’ll get an email welcoming you to Creative Cloud with a receipt for your purchase. With that, you’re done, ready to get the greatest and latest apps from Adobe.

For the test here, I’ve personally purchased a Creative Cloud subscription, using my own CS6 license to get the $19/month discounted subscription, both of which I paid for myself.

Downloading Your Creative Cloud Apps

You could go ahead and download any of the Adobe apps you want, from Photoshop to Premiere, but you’d best start off with the Creative Cloud app. It’s your hub for all things Creative Cloud: the place where you’ll download your Creative Cloud apps, install Typekit Fonts to your desktop, share designs on Behance, and more. It’ll install automatically when you install a product, since it’s the new way Adobe has you install apps and updates, but you might as well just install it first and go from there. Just head to the Creative Cloud download page in your Download Center, click Install, and if you already have any Adobe apps installed, it’ll start installing it through the Adobe Application Manager.

A OS X password entry later, you’ll have the Creative Cloud app ready to roll from your menubar. Select the Creative Cloud icon, enter your Apple ID, accept the terms of service, and you’ll be ready to install your Creative Cloud apps and more directly from the app. Select the Apps tab first; surely you want to try out the apps you just paid for, right? Here, you’ll see all of the Adobe apps you’ve already got installed, including previous versions of Photoshop and more, and you’ll be able to see if they’re up-to-date. Interesting, Acrobat and Media Encoder didn’t show up, but everything else did.

To install your new Creative Cloud apps, just scroll down and find the one you want, then click Install. You may be asked to go ahead and enter your Mac’s password to install the app, or you may be asked to do so later on after the app is downloaded, depending on the app. Adobe’s made installing Creative Cloud apps as simple as installing an App Store app: one click, one password entry, and that’s it. The next thing you’ll notice is a push notification when the app’s installed; no more clicking required. Creative Cloud’s app works fairly good for downloads, but it’s far from perfect: there’s no way to pause downloads, and it won’t download multiple apps at the same time, but rather queues them up for download. There’s also no way to search for the app you want to install, though you can filter the apps by category (say, graphics or audio).

Here’s the good thing, though: the Creative Cloud app will let you download and install the new versions of Photoshop and more as new apps, without overwriting your old Creative Suite apps you may have installed. That way, you can keep the Creative Cloud apps and your older traditional Adobe apps installed side-by-side, and try out Creative Cloud for a month. If you don’t like it, you can get your money back, uninstall the Creative Cloud apps, and everything goes back to normal. If you subscribe for a year, then uninstall the Creative Cloud apps, it’s the same.

If you have CS6 installed, the Creative Cloud app will bring your updates to those apps, including compatibility plugins for the new CC formats to make sure you’ll be able to open your files in the older apps without having to save in older versions for compatibility. (And if you’re curious, yes, the icons for the CC apps are only slightly tweaked versions of their CS6 equivalents).

If you’re going back and forth from the Creative Cloud app to other apps as you’re installing your apps and getting everything setup, you might find the menubar app annoying since you can’t CMD-tab back and forth from it. Just drag it from the top of the popover, and it’ll turn into a traditional window. You can then get it back in the menubar from the settings gear in a click.

You’ll also quickly notice that everything isn’t there yet. The Creative Cloud app won’t sync your files to your desktop yet, which makes the cloud storage rather useless at the moment — though when it comes, it’ll save versions of your files as you’re working, so you can always go back after you’ve made changes, which alone is reason enough to consider using it. Then, you’ll notice that Typekit font download, unfortunately, isn’t available yet, and while Behance profiles are already integrated enough that you can make your own account straight from the Creative Cloud app, you can’t start projects or even update your profile picture from the app.

What is ready today is the new Creative Cloud apps, with the updates to Photoshop, InDesign, and more that we’ve been waiting for. App setting sync is also ready, so you’ll be able to keep your PC and Mac’s Photoshop settings synced right now. You’ll also find a wealth of video tutorials from Adobe about each of the apps, ready for you for free in your online Creative Cloud dashboard, something you never found back with Creative Suite. Adobe’s trying to make sure everyone gets the most out of everything in Creative Cloud, so if you learn a new app, everyone wins this time.

You can signup and get the new apps today, and let us know how the install process goes for you. We’ll be digging deeper into the Creative Cloud apps going forward. And hey, if Creative Cloud doesn’t seem like it’s the solution for you, don’t worry. We’ve got a huge roundup of the best Creative Cloud alternates coming out soon!

When you put your photos online, you run the risk of someone stealing your work and claiming it as their own. Trying to protect your digital copyright can be quite a headache. The simplest way is to add a watermark to your images, but with most image editors you’ll have to do it individually, one image at a time. That’s why you need Visual Watermark, our sponsor this week.

Visual Watermark is an easy-to-use professional watermarking app that incluedes over 10 integrated composite watermarks, 250 built-in fonts, an interactive Watermark Designer, and more. You’ll be able to design unique watermarks, preview how they look on your pictures, add it to all your pictures at once, then save it for future use, all in a modern UI that makes it straightforward to use.

Visual Watermark is designed to work great with your Mac. You can import iPhoto libraries directly, or drag-and-drop your own images into the app. Its photo editing algorithms are optimized for speed, so it’ll only take a few seconds to process all of your photos. Then, it makes it simple to publish your photos online, with automatic downsizing to the resolution you want when it adds the watermark to your images.

Get Your Copy of Visual Watermark Today!

Best of all, Visual Watermark won’t cost you much to use. You can get your own copy of Visual Watermark starting at $19.95, with a 30 day satisfaction gurantee. Get started today and see why thousands of photographers, designers and bloggers worldwide have chosen Visual Watermark.

If you’ve followed gaming at all over the past year or so, you’ll have undoubtedly heard of The Walking Dead from Telltale Games (not to be confused with The Walking Dead: Survival Instinct, a very different game based off of the TV series). The Walking Dead sees players explore an apocalyptic storyline following a zombie outbreak, making choices that ultimately effect how the story is told.

At E3 earlier this month, Telltale Games unveiled 400 Days, a DLC expansion that follows the events of game’s first season. In today’s review, while we wait for that July release, we’re going to take a look at what the first season is all about and hopefully convince those of you yet to have played it to, well, play it … or at least get excited about what’s coming up next.

Out of the Frying Pan

The Walking Dead is a largely story-driven game where the evolving events are the main feature here, rather than opting for the action that many other zombie/horror games lean towards. Ultimately, The Walking Dead has as linear a storyline as most other games and without encouraging you to run off and shoot a bunch of zombies, the game manages to really immerse you in what’s happening.

Throughout the game, the story can be manipulated lightly by choices you’ll make as a player. Things you say and decisions you make will be noted, and can influence how other characters react or even who shows up in the future scenes. In the end, you’ll get the same result; decisions you make will have a very visible effect at times, but nothing that’s going to lead you off into a whole other storyline. However, decisions you make will enact enough minor changes to the storyline to make you feel immersed and in some sort of control of a storyline that, realistically, isn’t changing that much. In this way, The Walking Dead manages to engage you enough in the stellar storyline that you might otherwise have missed if this had been as static an experience as other games. Little details can change your gameplay in ways that will have you either regretting or celebrating your previous choices, something that, to date, only real life has been able to truly emulate.

Clementine and co.

During your tenure with The Walking Dead, you’ll meet a variety of characters that will enter and leave your life at times dependent on some of the choices you make. Early on in the game, you’ll meet Clementine, a character that you’ll never control but who forms a consistent narrative throughout the entirety of the game. Of course, other characters will come and go, the context of which may very well be up to choices you make as the player.

With the overarching sense that your actions might be influencing how a character reacts rather than an expectation that whatever happens was meant to happen, The Walking Dead manages to create an unprecedented level of affection (or, conversely, a very real hatred) for the characters that make deciding on actions and dialogue a concious decision, rather than one made by just randomly pressing a button.

The Walking Dead is a physiological experience. Not only will you see the results of your actions play out on screen but major decisions you make are collected and compared with those made by other players so that, following the conclusion of an episode, you can see how many people made the same choice as you and how many didn’t. When matters truly become about life or death, this can be a daunting experience and might well leave you feeling like a terrible person when you found out everyone else chose option B.

Presentation

The Walking Dead is all about the story. It’s not an FPS or some other sort of action game, and the presentation reflects that fact. As the world and storyline is certainly not dynamically generates with story events set nearly in stone, the game’s audio creates a striking and, at times, horrific atmosphere.

On the other side of things, the game’s graphical style resembles and remembers its comic book origins. The game doesn’t feel cartoonish but, equally, the graphics don’t try to be anywhere near photo-realistic so even those who tend to stay away from horror need not be instantly turned off by a game that will obviously involve killing some zombies.

Final Thoughts

The Walking Dead is a truly unique experience. It’s less of a game and more an interactive story, but not in the “we’re just going to play out a movie and get you to press a button every so often” way. The story doesn’t branch off massively, but by relying on player choices, The Walking Dead does a fantastic job at retaining a level of immersion that many games fail to create. You really will care for some of the characters and you really will hate some of the others, meaning decisions are truly a psychological experience that makes you really think about how the NPCs will react and whether you’ll be in the minority when the statistics are presented at the end of each episode.

With the conclusion of the season, you can pick up The Walking Dead for $24.99/£20.99 from Steam (although it is also sold separately on iOS, PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360, if those platforms are more appealing for you). The 400 Days DLC is expected out in July and a second season is said to be due with a targeted release of this autumn. Stay tuned for a look at these later on in the year.

The Walking Dead sets the bar high. You’ll enjoy hours of immersive gameplay and might even come out of it with a lot of questioning of your own motives, making the game well worth its $24.99 price tag.

We all expected to see iOS 7 at the WWDC keynote. That one was a given. The next version of OS X was also practically a given, but didn’t seem nearly as anticipated. New Macs were a nice extra, that both weren’t surprising to see but none of us would have been that surprised if they hadn’t been included. A new version of iWork and iLife were hoped for, but again, we’d almost given up hope that Apple would have time for anything besides iOS 7.

But practically no one was expecting that Apple would spend a serious amount of time during the keynote talking about web apps. And yet they did. Apple, the company that almost entirely makes software just for its own devices took the time to show us how great their new iWork for iCloud apps worked in Chrome on Windows 8. iWork has always been seen as a distant runner-up to Microsoft Office, the 900lb gorilla in the room whenever you talk about apps for word processing, presentations, and spreadsheets. The very fact that the iPad doesn’t have Office has been used as an advertisement point for Microsoft’s Surface ads. But we all thought the discussion was long-since beyond Office, and we’ve all learned to get along very well without it, thank you very much.

Apple isn’t in the business of leaving well enough alone, though, and they’re taking their own Office competitor directly to Microsoft’s homefront. If you’ve stuck with Office simply because others won’t be able to preview your files if you use iWork — or if you’ve stayed away since you occasionally need to edit from a PC — here’s why iWork for iCloud just might be the best thing to happen to iWork yet. It’s a bold foray into Microsoft’s territory, just as Microsoft launches its own Office apps on the iPhone.

Apple: The Best Web App Company You Didn’t Know Existed

It was nearly two years ago when I first was able to try out Apple’s iCloud web apps, during an early (presumably accidental) login before they’d been fully released. I’d tried — on a PC netbook, of all things — to login to iCloud, and there for a half hour was able to try out the apps before the site said it was “Coming Soon” again. The Mail, Contacts, and Calendar apps then were much the same then as they are now: near-perfect copies of their sibling apps on iOS 5. A year later with iOS 6, we got Notes and Reminders added to the fold, apps that again nearly perfectly matched their iPad counterparts, complete with skeuomorphic leather and stitching.

Now, apps that look as nice as Apple’s own iPad apps that ran smoothly in the browser were impressive then, but they’re really still impressive today. Web apps tend to be basic, limited tools, especially when they’re from software giants that use them as a selling point for their native apps (hello, Microsoft). Regardless of your perspective on skeuomorphic design, the iCloud web apps are still some of the nicest looking web apps out there. They’re full-featured, at least compared to their iPad counterparts, they’re slick, and they load surprisingly fast considering how graphically intense they are. They still look like iOS 6 today (if anything, they’re the most skeuomorphic apps in Apple’s lineup now, as is starkly apparent even from their icons), but that’s one thing we’d expect to change before iOS 7′s launch this fall. Either way, they’re very nice web apps that are ad free and full-featured.

The problem is, they’re practically unknown since everyone that has an iCloud account, by extension, has an Apple device with native apps that do the very same thing. They give you a way, say, to see your iPhone notes and reminders on a PC, but somehow I doubt very many people use them for that. iWork in the browser, however, just might change that equation.

Your Apple Apps, Everywhere

iWork has been the nicest looking office suite for quite some time, with Keynote leading the way in beautiful presentations. It’s never been as powerful as Office — try using Numbers for a statistics class, and you’ll decide that Excel is still worth its price — but then, most of us don’t need all of Office. We need to make documents that look sharp without tons of fuss. Done. We need to keep track of finances and tabulate data, and perhaps turn that into nice charts and more. Done. We need to make presentations that won’t have those watching rolling their eyes? Done (well, if you don’t go overboard).

The iWork apps for OS X and iOS are getting a bit long in the tooth, without a major new version since 2009, but that’s going to be remedied this fall according to the WWDC keynote (and we have no idea what to expect from that upgrade as of yet). But even as-is, the iWork apps actually great. They’re the best Office alternate on the Mac — seriously, you don’t want to be using LibreOffice — and they just cost $19 per app. With App Store licensing, you can run the whole iWork suite on up to 5 Macs in the same household for just $59.97. That’s what Office 365 — Microsoft’s new subscription version of Office — will cost you for 6 months. That starts making iWork look even more enticing.

The traditional argument against iWork that you need Office compatibility to be able to share documents with others isn’t even the best argument. I’ve edited my Microsoft Office files in iWork and shared them in Office-only environments after exporting to Office formats — even in university, where Office is absolutely, religiously required — and had no problem. No, they won’t work for every use case, but they will work for most.

And now, the free iCloud-based iWork web apps take away the problem of only being able to edit your files on a Mac or iOS device. It’s the one little extra that’ll make relying on iWork only a less nerve-wracking proposition.

The iWork Web Apps in Action

It’s obviously not fair to fully review the iWork for iCloud apps today, as they’re still in beta and aren’t even accessible at the normal iCloud.com (though you’ll find them just a login away at beta.icloud.com). For now, there’s no printing support, no way to share a link to a document with anyone else, no chart and table editing, and no version history, but all of those are promised to be coming in the final release. Even then, there still may be no simultaneous document editing like Office Web Apps and Google Docs offer; Apple hasn’t mentioned that at all.

But then, that’s hardly an issue if you’re just looking for apps to create and edit your own documents, something that iWork for iCloud already excels at. Login, and you’ll see all of your iWork documents that were already synced to iCloud ready to be viewed or edited, with popover hints that are reminiscent of iPhoto for iPad’s help popovers. The overall design is very similar to iWork on the iPad, though with a more subdued interface and no fake wood, canvas, or leather — perhaps indicative of how iWork for iOS will look this fall. Office files are welcome, too, and a drag-and-drop to your browser will get them ready for editing in iWork.

Dive into each of the apps, and literally everything else you’d expect is there. There’s all the same document templates, picture effects, shapes, backgrounds, and fonts that you’d expect from iWork on an iPad (which, yes, means you can use Zapfino on a PC in your browser). Keynote feels the most full-featured, with all of its slide transitions working perfectly in the browser, even on a PC. Keynote’s long been the app to use if you want the nicest looking presentations, and now you can get the same experience from any computer — even for full-screen presenting.

Pages, in the same way, is nearly full-featured. You can’t set your page size right now, and you can’t add columns to your document if they’re not already in the template you started with. But, you can add images, give them shadows and boarders like you’d expect in Pages, and move them fluidly around your document, something that’s entirely impossible the Word Web App and Google Docs. You’ll also get great text formatting, again with all the Apple-standard fonts you’d expect.  When it comes time to share your documents, you’ll be able to download them in Pages, Word, or PDF formats, just as on the iPad. And if for some reason you’re editing in two places at once, don’t worry: Pages kept the changes refreshed between different browsers almost instantly in our tests, which means it could work for simultaneous editing with others in the future if Apple wanted to add that.

Even Numbers, the spreadsheet everyone regards as anemic compared to Excel, manages to shine as a simple yet functional (and rather full-featured) online spreadsheet app. It includes all the user-friendly templates and the page-rather-than-tables focused UI that you’d expect from Numbers, and throws in a very nice new functions pane that makes it easy to find functions and understand what they’re fore as you’re entering them into your spreadsheet. It’s not going to take the world of statistics by storm, but for the rest of us needing to make a budget, it’s still the best spreadsheet out there.

iCloud.com as an App Platform?

Even two years ago, though, iCloud had a tiny bit of iWork: file viewers and exporters. You’ve always been able to see your iWork documents in iCloud.com, and download them in iWork, Office, or PDF formats. The apps, of course, take it to a whole different level, but even the file viewing and exporting was nice.

What’s still missing is a way to access the rest of your iCloud documents from your browser. Hundreds of 3rd party apps are using iCloud to sync their iOS and Mac apps, and yet we users can’t access our files from those apps outside of Apple’s platforms. What would be very nice — and a much stronger affront to cloud services like Dropbox and Microsoft’s Skydrive — would be at least a way to access the files from all of your apps in iCloud.com, perhaps in a similar interface to the old iWork files access in iCloud.

But, what if Apple opened iCloud.com itself as an app platform, letting 3rd party developers make their own apps that could run in the browser alongside Mail, Calendar, and the iWork apps, perhaps using some of the Javascript libraries and more that power Apple’s web apps? That could be a very interesting to make iOS  and OS X apps extend their functionality to the browser, letting us all get all of our data anywhere while staying in Apple’s beautifully walled garden — with a small, web-shaped gap.

OS X Mavericks has a number of great new features, from tabs in Finder to new apps to better notifications. It looks like it’s going to be quite the great 10th release of OS X, and we’re definitely looking forward to it. But one of its headline features is something that you can actually get today thanks to the app we’re giving away this week: AirParrot.

See, in Mountain Lion you can use AirPlay to push your desktop to your Apple TV if you have a recent Mac, and Mavericks extends that by letting you use your TV as a full second display. But if you’re serious about using your TV as an extra screen for your Mac, AirParrot offers all of that and more for any Mac running Snow Leopard or later, or PCs running XP or later.

AirParrot lets you stream your desktop to your Apple TV in full HD, as a copy of your desktop or as a full second screen. Or, you can use it to stream just one app to the TV, while you’re using the other apps on your Mac’s screen. It’s packed with all the features and settings you’d need, including options to overscan, hide the cursor, change the streaming quality, and more, unlike OS X’ default one-size-fits-all AirPlay.

All of that normally costs $9.99, but we’ve got 10 copies to giveaway to our readers this week. Just leave a comment below letting us know why you want to use AirParrot, and we’ll randomly pick 10 winners at the end of the week. Or, for an extra entry, you can share our giveaway on your favorite social networks and share the link to your social network post in a second comment below.

Hurry and get your entry in; we’re closing our giveaway on Wednesday, June 19th!

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

After the excitement of the opening keynote at the annual WWDC, Apple always have something extra special for the best developers on OS X and iOS: the Apple Design Awards. Given to recognize apps that “raise the bar in design, technology, and innovation”, the Apple Design Awards typically go to beloved indie apps that are beautiful and go far beyond what other apps have before, especially with their UI. Letterpress winning a Design Award wasn’t much of a surprise, seeing as the game is already featured in ads and posters at Apple Stores. It, along with other popular iOS-only games and apps, seemed a shoo-in for the award.

What was, perhaps, more of a surprise was Evernote winning a Design Award for their Mac and iOS apps. Evernote’s hardly a new app, and is likely the most recognizable name for the public of all the apps that got a Design Award. But its apps today are so much better than before — speedier, beautiful design, and plenty of useful integrations — that it really shouldn’t be surprising that Evernote finally won an Apple Design Award. It’s been quite the journey for the notebook that’s so much more than just a notebook, one that’s cumulated with quite the amazing past half-year of app releases.

From XP Tablet PC Edition to the iPad

Evernote’s journey began before most of us were using touchscreens — when Macs still used PowerPC processors, and Windows XP was the most popular OS. It started in late 2004 with a spinoff of Parascript‘s Pen&Internet subsidiary (which had made, among other things, riteMail, an app for drawing emails rather than typing them). Its first order of business was releasing Evernote 1.0. Or rather, EverNote 1 and its sidekick, the $34.95 EverNote Plus that included handwriting and shape recognition. The first version was released to the public in mid-2005, and earned a 3.5/5 rating from PCMag, which noted that it worked well on Tablet PCs and was coming soon to Pocket PC and Palm OS. The Evernote team wasn’t a stranger to Apple — some of their team had developed software for the Newton back in the ’90′s — but Microsoft’s platforms were dominant enough that it only made sense for Evernote to focus on them.

Even from the start, Evernote was designed to help you remember everything. The notes originally styled as a continuous strip of paper, where you could store all your notes and easily find anything you’d ever written down — literally, with a stylus on a tablet PC — or clipped from the internet or other apps. It was a great idea, but one that didn’t make nearly as much sense when it was tied to a PC that you in all likelihood weren’t carrying around 24/7.

Fast-forward a few years, though, and the world of computing had totally changed. The iPhone was released in 2007, Macs had switched to Intel processors a year earlier and were gaining popularity (Windows Vista made switching even more appealing), and cloud storage was becoming more of a part of everyday life with Dropbox’ initial release in early 2008. It was against this backdrop that Evernote for Mac was launched as a fully native Mac app, designed from the ground-up to be a best-in-class Mac notes app. It had all the features you’d expect, and much of the functionality you’d find in Evernote today. Interestingly, Brett Terpstra noted then that Evernote was going to add a way to track all of your tasks, a prediction that wasn’t fulfilled until this year.

The Trying of Evernote’s Faith

Even as Evernote was firing all cylinders, though, there was an underlying problem: Evernote was running out of money, fast. By mid-2008, it was time to either raise money or call it quits. Evernote had been a freemium app all along, but instead of the original paid version Evernote had long-since switched to a subscription model — and that wasn’t bringing in enough to run the company yet. As Inc.com covered in their feature on Evernote when they named it Company of the Year in 2011, a 3AM email offering half a million dollars in funding saved the company just one day before they would have otherwise had to shut down.

Money wasn’t a problem after that, but the service still had its challenges to overcome. Evernote tried to do everything, but — especially at first — it wasn’t always the best at anything. It could recognize text in images amazingly well, but didn’t give you a way to export the text it recognized (which everyone expected from an OCR app). It could store everything you threw at it, but didn’t make sense really as an app to store all your files. And, especially on the PC, it would slow to a crawl as your notes database grew, which made it not so useful for storing everything. Evernote had the features we needed, but it felt like a lumbering giant, even as it was still a startup.

Then, it added more features, through acquisitions and new apps. Evernote made their own iOS, Android, WebOS, Windows Phone, and even Blackberry, in addition to their Windows and Mac apps, browser extensions, and full-featured web app. They made extra apps like Evernote Peek to help you study on the iPad, Evernote Hello to help you remember people you meet, and Evernote Food to do the same for your favorite foods. They went on a buying spree, adding Penultimate and Skitch to their roost, and turning Readable into Evernote Clearly. It seemed Evernote was ever-growing, potentially making the service better for users, but at the same time making it more confusing with so many disparate apps and use cases.

Clarity Through Design

“About a year and half ago, we began to fundamentally shift our product thinking. We moved from focusing purely on features to becoming obsessive about the design and experience of everything we build. We’re on the right track, but there’s still tons of work left to do.”
Andrew Sinkov, Evernote

Today, over 50 million people use Evernote, it’s integrated into dozens of the best apps, and Apple chose Evernote as a 2013 Apple Design Award winner. Clearly, Evernote did something right since its crisis of faith.

And indeed it has. As the Evernote team mentioned in their blog post about receive the award, they’ve doubled-down on design over the past 18 months, and it’s shown. Their original focus on features was swapped for an obsessive focus on design, one that’s now readily apparent in their work. During that time period, they’ve shipped Evernote 5 for Mac, iOS, and Android, all with a beautiful new design and spiffy performance that makes notetaking fun and productive. It was such a break from Evernote’s old style that it surprised us all, and showed how much Evernote had matured. The redesigned menubar Quick Note tool on the Mac that came a few months later was enough to get me to switch back Evernote after having left it behind years back.

Not just that, but Evernote’s finally been able to pull together some of the loose ends and add features that they’d promised years back, like a better way to handle todos. The new Evernote Reminders is an obvious extension of the service that aims to help you remember everything, and it looks as good as it works. That’s the overriding theme in Evernote’s apps today: they look sharp, work exactly like you’d expect, and are fast enough to make taking and finding notes totally painless. Even with their acquired apps like Skitch, they’ve managed to turn around their lackluster attempts at new versions of the apps, turning them into apps that are still useful on their own or in the greater context of Evernote.

Having so many apps, even, doesn’t seem quite so crazy now, since it gets more useful when you can use your data in more ways. In our world of smartphones and tablets, Evernote finally makes sense where it never really could in the days of XP Tablet Edition. You can collect info from any app you want on your phone, tie together your web services and Evernote through tools like IFTTT, then easily sort through it all on a tablet or desktop. Login from the web, and all of your data is just a click away from any library on earth. Instead of it being painful to pore through all that data, Evernote’s search is accurate and fast enough that you’ll likely find anything you need in seconds even if you don’t faithfully use tags and notebooks. And most of us have found the balance between storing files that go with notes (like PDFs and scans of business cards) in Evernote, and using Dropbox or iCloud when they make more sense.

There was a method to Evernote’s madness, one that, like Apple’s, lands at the intersection of technology and design. Evernote today stores all of our stuff, makes it accessible everywhere, and looks great doing it. Unlike other services that come and go within a couple of years, Evernote is planning to stick around for the next century or longer — and of all startups, it likely has a good chance at doing that if it keeps improving this much over the coming years. It’s good enough now that it’s one app that you should give a second shot if you’ve tried and left it years ago. That’s more than a good enough reason for Apple to finally give their most prestigious recognition to the notebook app that does it all — and actually does quite the good job doing it all now.