Category: Mac

Apple’s 2013 Worldwide Developer Conference starts on Monday, June 10th. By this time a week from now we’ll already have seen what Tim Cook and the rest of the Apple team have prepared to show the world. The whole world — not just techies this time — is anticipating iOS 7, but there should be a lot more interesting stuff.

There’s OS X, of course: it’d be tough to forget that here at Mac.AppStorm. Apple’s committed to a yearly upgrade cycle for OS X, and Mountain Lion was released at the end of July last year. That should mean that we’ll get word of the stuff coming to OS X v.NeXT.

There’s also Apple’s own apps, from iLife and iWork to their pro tools, all of which seem far overdue for a new version. There’s iCloud, which almost every developer would like to see improved. There’s also the iOS apps like iBooks that have never made their way to the Mac, even though they seem like perfect fits.

Then, there’s hardware. Apple hasn’t updated the Mac Pro in forever, and the rest of its lineup is likely due at least for a spec bump. And none of us would mind if Apple decided to release some brand-new, non-rumored hardware like a new addition to the Mac lineup.

We’d all like to see all of the above, I’m sure, but what do you want to see most? Is iOS mostly on your mind, or are you hoping for more Mac attention? We’d love to hear what you want to see at WWDC 2013 in the comments below.

And, stay tuned: our AppStorm team will be live-blogging the keynote speech, and we’ll have more to share about that later this week!

I love turn-based strategy, and tactics games are just the thing to scratch my itch for scheming. Even better that rough-housing against the CPU is facing off with a real person. Hero Academy, new to the Mac from iOS, has my back on this one. With lots of maps and character teams to pit against friends and randomly matched players, there’s plenty to love here.

Let’s see whether Hero Academy can pass the test or if it flunks out.

Exam Time

You’ll need to set up an account if you want to match up against other people, but if you’ve already been playing Hero Academy or any other games from the developer, you can use the same login you already have. Hero Academy will notify you whenever anything happens in any of your games, and you can make yourself available for random matches against opponents. The game is playable without an account, but a lot of the fun comes from playing against real people.

Click the big Play button, start a new game, and wait for Hero Academy to match you up with another player. You can choose the team you play with or let the game set you up with a random team of humans or elves. That’s about all the choice you have going into a new game. The boards are random, and so are the units and buffs at your disposal.

Hero Academy is a two-player, turn-based tactics games. That means you get a turn and then the other person gets to move. All of your characters are spread out on a grid, and you move them around at the start of each turn. You get a total of five moves each turn, and you have to ration those out to move your guys around, attack, and apply buffs. You win when you’ve destroyed the huge crystals the other team is protecting.

If playing against other people you’ve never met isn’t your thing, you can stick to the challenges. These don’t work like the matches against online players and won’t just be a regular tactics game. Instead, these are short puzzles, with limited resources and moves; you’ll usually only get a single turn to complete the challenge puzzle. Hero Academy gives you a bunch of different puzzles to play, all split up by character theme. There’s even a collection of puzzles that feature the characters from Team Fortress 2; yeah, I could barely handle it, either.

Pencil’s Down

The meat of the game isn’t the puzzles, though. You’re here for the online play. That’s what makes Hero Academy what it is. I originally played Hero Academy on iOS and was sort of addicted. My friends and I were constantly at war, and when I was waiting for them to take their turns, I’d play random strangers. Hero Academy is a lot like a board game; you go around the board, and you each get a turn. There’s no real time limit, though, so you or the other player can take just about as long as you want.

Which is fine when you’re getting notifications on your phone. You can pick up and put down your phone to play whenever you feel like it, and no one really expects you to sit hunched over the tiny screen, playing a turn-based game for hours. A computer is a lot closer to a console, though, and while there is plenty of room for casual games, when you sit down to play a game on your Mac, you’re likely going to want to be there for more than just a couple of minutes and a single turn. Because your opponent is likely to walk away while waiting for you to make your move (and vice versa), it’s hard to pour as much attention into Hero Academy on the Mac as you might like to, addictive though it may be.

Don’t Forget Your Lunch Money

The game is fully playable when you download it, but there are in-app purchases you can buy to make it better. I’d argue the IAP are closer to DLC, the downloadable content you’d find on a console or Steam game and for which you’d be, more or less, happy to pay. Like any game without DLC, you can play and have a lot of fun without the DLC, and the game is completely winnable without any additional purchases.

What you do get with in-app purchases is pretty nice though. There are more teams to unlock, and they’re arguably better. You can download extra single-player challenges, too. The rest of the in-app purchases are pretty much cosmetic, allowing you to customize your avatar or change your armor colors, but that’s not unheard of in DLC for even AAA console games. If you don’t want to spend any money, though, you can stick to the free game and still have a blast.

School’s Out

Hero Academy is a thoroughly addictive turn-based tactics game, and there just aren’t enough of those around anymore. It’s a lot of fun, and though the in-app purchases can definitely make it a better time, it’s still a great game as a free download.

Unfortunately, I’m not sure how well the turn-based nature works on a computer unless you’re playing with a friend and have an appointment to sit down together. The solo puzzles are great but aren’t the main reason to play. Still, with enough games going in Hero Academy, you might not even notice you’re waiting on a player’s next move, and if you happen to log in at the same time as your opponent, you’ll have a lot of fun passing Hero Academy back and forth.

Nektony, our sponsor this week, is a company focused on creating simple and intuitive business applications. Among others there is significant line of products that started Nektony’s history – its file and disk management utilities. If you want to keep your Mac’s hard drive or SSD organized and cleaned, they’re the apps you need.

ClearDisk is a great app to clean up your startup disk in few clicks. It helps you to get rid of “straggler” files that remain after applications usage – Cashes and Logs – as well as unwanted Language Resources for localizations in various countries. At the same time you can quickly manage your Trash and Downloads folders during the same interaction with the app. So ClearDisk is great for quick plain cleanup of most clogged system folders.

Disk Inspector is a disk space analyzer with a beautiful interface that makes travelling through your hard drive spectacular and very effective. Inspector represents file system in a form of sunburst diagram, where biggest sectors represent biggest files and folders; its special color-representing algorithm makes this process simpler and just fun. It is also able to scan any type of disks and drives, even folders with FileVault protection. Disk Inspector will be extremely useful if you need to find and delete unnecessary files and folders.

Disk Expert – Nektony’s flagship application – is an elder brother of Disk Inspector that has even more specific features that will be extremely useful during general file management. For every folder, Expert creates list of 25 biggest files, which changes during navigating. You can form “drop lists” of files from different folders and transfer them together to external drive or just to Trash at once. Furthermore, instead of scanning only full disks, it could scan custom folders and display hidden and system files. Disk Expert is like a surgical knife to perform operations of any complexity for any disk.

So don’t waist your time and energy on organizing of your hard drives! Let family of Nektony disk utilities to do all the nasty jobs for you.

For sole enterprises, keeping a good set of books is probably one of the most essential tasks. It helps keep all your paperwork in order and it makes it far easier when it comes to the end of the year and that massive tax bill is due. Unfortunately, though, Mac users are slightly neglected when it comes to this, and although OS X has slowly but surely clawed some of the market share away from Microsoft, when it comes to business-related apps, Windows rules the roost.

Not wanting to be outdone, Austrian-based developers Teischl, the team behind Employment:app (which we reviewed last year) have developed book’n’keep – a simple accounting software designed for sole enterprises. Unlike other accounting software, which can often run into the hundreds of dollars and require an extensive set of licences, book’n’keep is available on the App Store for a mere $29.99. Let’s take a look at it and see if it’s a worthwhile purchase for sole enterprises.

First Thoughts

The first thing I’m going to say about book’n’keep is that it’s more of a functional, business-orientated app than a consumer one, with a design to match this direction. This disappointed me slightly, as I don’t think that business apps necessarily have to skimp on design. However, book’n’keep is certainly nice and easy to navigate around, which is always a good start.

The app is divided up into 5 different sections: Profit & Loss, Payables, Receivables, Assets and Bank. book’n’keep orientates itself to your Mac’s default regional settings (and as I’m based in the UK, my default currency is the pound sterling) and there’s no way to change it unfortunately within the app without changing your Mac’s default settings.

Another issue that I spotted early on is that there is no way to change the default business year. This isn’t a problem if you live in a country with a standard business year (e.g. 1 January – 31 December) but if, like me, you live in a country with an archaic fiscal year (6 April – 5 April) then this can present a few problems.

Booking Transactions

To book a transaction, you simply select the relevant section within book’n’keep (in this case, the Payables section) then click on the Add button in the toolbar. A dialogue box will pop, colored red for payables or green for receivables which allows you to enter all the details about that particular transaction. Your transaction will automatically be assigned a number (in this case: PAA130001) for which the sequencing can be customised from within the Preferences section of book’n’keep (here, you can also change the default tax rates as well).

The same applies for receivables as well, except the transaction is assigned a different sort of number so you can distinguish it easily.

After booking each transaction, they appear in the main window of the Payables and Receivables section of book’n’keep and you can sort them via a number of criteria, such as number, date, net amount, total amount, method of payment and so on.

Working with Assets

Adding an asset within book’n’keep is fairly straightforward and works pretty much the same as booking a new transaction — except this time, the box is coloured yellow. You can choose the type of your asset (in this case, I’ve used the example of a server), add its purchase value, date and planned usage time. book’n’keep will automatically calculate the depreciation for you (which can often be written off against tax) and use this value in reporting, profit/loss accounts and so on.

It’s probably worth mentioning here that despite its slightly functional and blocky interface, I found it extremely easy to add new transactions and assets to my inventory. Everything is very clearly explained and book’n’keep does not overwhelm you with loads of advanced options — everything is explained pretty much in plain English, which really impressed me. Although with bookkeeping you do need a bit of prior knowledge, I found that book’n’keep made it quite simple to perform mundane tasks, and that the learning curve associated with it was quite shallow — something which impressed me greatly.

Reporting

After you’ve added a couple of transactions to both your Payables and Receivables sections, then they will start to accrue in the Profit/Loss section of book’n’keep. This gives you a quick overview of every single transaction within the app and it also allows you to sort each one according to a number of different criteria, such as the client’s name, the transaction date, the net amount, the amount of tax and so on.

You can also easily view your Total Profit, Receivables, Payables and Assets in the bottom right-hand corner of the screen (the default view is Total Profit, however, clicking on either of the arrows allows you to change this).

book’n’keep also allows you to produce a number of different reports, which come in very handy either just to check how your business is getting on or when it comes to filing your company’s tax return. Clicking on the Reports icon in the toolbar brings up a dialogue box (as you can see in the screenshot above) which allows you to choose from a number of different reports.

You can choose the date range for each one and, in some cases, the items which should be included in the report. Unfortunately, reports cannot be viewed directly from within the app — you’ll either have print them off or open them within Preview. Another slight annoyance is that reports are only produced in PDF format — you can’t, for example, export all your data to a spreadsheet program for further processing.

 

I was slightly disappointed by this feature and for $29.99, I would have expected better and at least have been presented with the option to customise my reports to my liking. I’m hoping that this feature will be implemented in a future update.

Customisation Possibilities

I’ve already mentioned the lack of some customisation options above (for example, the currency and the default fiscal year). Actually, though, you can tinker with quite a few of the presets from within the Preferences section of book’n’keep. Here, for example, you can change the default tax rate, the numbering of each transaction, your company’s name and logo and the bank accounts your company holds.

book’n’keep can automatically keep a backup of your database and if you purchase the app from the App Store, it will also synchronise with iCloud, so you can rest assured that your data is safe. If the default categories (e.g. for transactions) are not sufficient enough, then you can modify these from within the Master Files section of the preferences pane.

Final Thoughts

book’n’keep is, in my opinion anyway, a bit of a mixed batch. On the one hand, it does what it says on the tin: it helps sole enterprises keep their books in order, and for $30 it is quite a steal, especially when compared to other offerings out there on the market. Yet on the other hand, the app is slightly limited in what you can do with it (especially reporting, which disappointed me slightly) and this might be insufficient for some people who want to tailor the app to their liking. The interface doesn’t give much to be desired, either, but as I mentioned before, book’n’keep was designed with functionality, not aesthetics, in mind.

So if you’re looking for a simple way to keep your books in order but you aren’t bothered about being able to customise the app to your exact liking, then I would recommend getting book’n’keep. However if you’re looking for a more powerful, flexible option, then it’s probably worth checking out the competition before committing to buy.

We’d like to say a special Thank you! to our weekly sponsors from May for sponsoring our site and for the great apps they make. If you would like to feature your app on our site with an advertisement, be sure to check out our available slots on BuySellAds or register for a weekly sponsorship for your app.

If you haven’t already checked out our the great apps that sponsored our site last month, be sure to check them out now!

And a special thanks to you, our Mac.AppStorm.net readers, for reading and sharing our articles. We couldn’t do it without you!

I love finding color inspiration from all over, but short of taking screen shots of every website I visit or opening all of my favorite photos in the same image editor, it’s been impossible to get those colors where I can use them. Sure the green of the grass in a photo may be exactly what I want for my website header, but it’s not an easy job converting that to something that makes sense to Tumblr or WordPress.

Sip is here to help, though, allowing you to copy colors from all over and then keep a history of what you’ve seen. We’ll look at how useful it really is and if it saves all that much effort!

Take a Sip

Once you’ve launched Sip, it will sit in your menu bar, waiting for you. When you find a color you want to use, click the Sip icon. The color you’re capturing can be anywhere, in a picture on a website, the Finder scrollbar, or an application logo, You’ll want to choose Pick Color, but you can also get to this with the default shortcut Control+Option+P. This will bring up the color picker, a giant loupe that will let you focus on any pixel on the screen and select the color.

Sip places the numeric code for the color you grabbed into it’s history, found in the Sip drop-down menu. You can get Sip to automatically copy the color’s code to your clipboard, too, if you like, and I think that makes Sip a lot more useful. You don’t just have to choose a single color, though. If you’re creating a website layout or graphic based on the color scheme within an image, you can select as many as six colors at a time, and they’ll be stored in Sip’s history.

I do a lot of work on websites, so I usually need everything in hexadecimal notation, but sometimes I’m taking the colors I grab back to Photoshop, and I want RGB or HSL. Sip will let you choose the default for how you get your colors, but if the default just isn’t working today, it’s a cinch to choose any of the other options from right in the menu.

So what id the color you want isn’t in a picture or on a website? You can’t really grab it from anywhere, and you just want to sort of experiment and see what you can come up with on your own. Sip has a color panel, the same that you’d seen in Preview and most other Mac apps, that will let you do just that. Why doyou need Sip to get to the color panel, though? Because if you’re throwing color ideas at the wall to see what sticks, Sip’s history is a great way to keep track of the last few colors you’ve tried.

Sip vs. the Competition

This is such a great tool, I can’t get over how useful it is. So often I’ve wanted to take my color picker loupe outside of my image editing app but was stopped at the window’s edge. That’s a bummer and has prevented me from getting great colors into whatever I was working on at the time. Sip opens up my entire display, so I can use any colors I can see on my display, even the blacks and grays of the OS X interface.

It’s hard not to compare Sip to Frank DeLoupe, which has a similar function. Unlike Frank, though, Sip won’t connect to Photoshop. Whether this is a problem depends on how you work. If you don’t really rely on the Adobe giant or have a different image editor altogether, then Frank DeLoupe doesn’t have anything on Sip. On the other hand, if you’re a pro who spends most of your day inside Photoshop, you might miss having all of your copied colors immediately become your active color in the app.

Sip does have the upper hand when it comes to actual color picking, though. The Frank loupe, while the same size as that in Sip, doesn’t magnify as greatly as does Sip. That means when I’m trying to pick out a single pixel among a jumble in a photograph, it’s a lot easier to get the job done with Sip. I can imagine your mileage would vary depending on screen resolution, and Frank is perfectly usable as is, it’s just that Sip is a little easier to use.

Final Thoughts

Sip scratches an itch you might not have even know was there. Once you start using it, though, it’s hard to imagine how you got along without it. If you did know the itch was there, if you were wondering why someone couldn’t just make an app to do this one thing, an app that could grab colors from anywhere, Sip will be a godsend.

It’s simple, and there’s almost zero learning curve. Sip does exactly what a single-function app should; it fits so well into my workflow, it’s like it was always meant to be there.

Oh, another application for screenwriters. Before you wonder about niche-dedicated applications, think about that day you had an epiphany that would be an awesome movie. One of those you would pay twice to watch, like you did with Avatar. Then you looked for an application to write a screenplay only to find out it would cost you more than what you’d expect it to sell for. So you opened your everyday word processor and began typing your story. As you’re finished, you sent to a few movie agents.

You never got a reply, even after your mother got high hopes that her child would become famous. That’s because writing a great story is not enough. The screenwriting business also requires your script to to follow a strict presentation style, which those expensive apps help achieving. Fountain changed the table, allowing regular Jacks to write screenplays in plain text. Slugline takes the game to the next level.

Dude, this is the next Pulp Fiction!

Before you start typing, hotshot, let’s recap on Fountain. It’s markdown for screenwriters, which allows you to write full screenplays in plain text and have them perfectly formatted in the end. Fountain was created by John August and Stu Maschwitz, the first got his team and built Highland, which we reviewed previously. Maschwitz, with Clinton Torres, now released Slugline.

Since Fountain allows you to write your screenplay anywhere but a napkin, technically, you can use Byword, iA Writer or even TextEdit. Problem is, none of these applications offer you the “What You See Is What You Get” (WYSIWYG) treatment. Even Highland, which offers a very accessible preview, still doesn’t fall into that category and fits more as a conversion tool. Slugline, on the other hand, is here to offer an unobtrusive writing environment.

Int. Hollywood – Soon

As you open Slugline, besides the typical options, you can appeal to one of the ready-made templates. There you can find the beat sheet from the author of Save The Cat, Blake Snyder, which is a regular resource for writers trying to break into the Hollywood world. Picking one of these templates will lead you to an outlined page according to your selection.

But let’s start with no tricks on our sleeves. The blank page. The most terrifying vision a writer can stare. As most apps for writers you know, Slugline offers you the sheet, there’s a navigation in the bottom that displays the number of pages and quick access to the Preview.

“Hey, wasn’t this a WYSIWYG application? Why would you need a Preview mode?” As well-known minimal writing apps, Slugline formats the Fountain syntax. When you apply italic to a string of words, the style changes, yet the sentence is still wrapped by asterisks. Symbols that react as part of the syntax turn out only slightly colored, so it doesn’t disturb your reading pace.

Another reason is that writing is not pretty and until the draft is done, it is often cluttered with notes, revisions and post-its. Fountain also offers resources to create text that won’t be exported on the final draft. This often comes in the form of notes, but you can also exclude whole blocks of text using the Omit tool.

How does it make writing easier?

We can’t teach the screenwriting 101, but as long as you know a bit of Fountain, we can work this out together. Slugline will do the rest. One of the major issues on writing a screenplay in a plain-text editor is that characters, along with dialogue, aren’t aligned properly, which leads us to a stream of left-aligned text and a script doesn’t flow like that. Slugline puts every element of the screenplay in its right place, making it effortless to scroll through your writing.

One of the biggest advantages of choosing Slugline is outlining. You can nest your structure using number signs (#), just as you write in markdown for the headers. The more signs, deeper the item. You can also use synopsis, which are sentences preceded by an equal sign. Everything will be displayed aside your page and you can jump to any section using the list, including your notes.

Even being a straightforward syntax, Fountain has its tricks, like creating a title page, which in Slugline can be reached from the menus as most of the actions you may need when writing in Fountain with plenty of keyboard shortcuts. There are also a few extras, like sending your script directly to Highland or assigning specific settings for the document, like using Courier Prime as font family.

Time to rehearse the Oscar speech

There are a few improvements to make on Slugline, for example, I find the type size way a point too small compared to the applications I usually pick to write, but maybe that’s caused by the high-contrast combination of colors. As a rule of thumb, black on white is never a top pick. Add that to the light surroundings, which could be a darker gray. Overall, this emphasizes the issue of not having Preferences: you must be pretty confident of your product, like iA Writer, and Slugline doesn’t seem as well thought.

Beyond that, Slugline still doesn’t support dual-dialogue. Ok, that rarely comes in hand and amateurs are often recommended to avoid using those, but still, we like to learn from our mistakes. Then comes exporting, you can let Highland handle that if you own it, however, Slugline has no direct option for exporting, you gotta check the Print menu to use the Save as PDF option. I can live with that, but it is another step into friction.

As a writer, I’m very picky on my working environment and since Fountain is no stranger to me, I’d rather sacrifice the formatting to write somewhere I feel more comfortable with. Nevertheless, if you’re a newcomer to this world, Slugline is a great introduction to screenwriting, specially on how to format a screenplay. As Slugline makes clear, writing is the essential part of screenwriting.

Ever been surprised by the arrival of something you ordered or have you found a package waiting for you after several days in some weird hiding spot created by the delivery person? Sure would have been nice to have known ahead of time that you had a delivery due so you could be on the lookout.

If you get a lot of things shipped to you or send a lot of stuff to others and are always trying to keep track of all of those tracking numbers, you could probably use a little assistance. Let’s take a look at Parcel and see if it can deliver on its promises to help you manage package tracking better.

You’re In the Know

You need to create a login to use Parcel, but if you’ve already been using the app on your phone, you can sign in with that account. The Mac version looks pretty similar to the mobile, so feel free to skip ahead if you do already have the iOS app. We’ll catch up with you.

Once you’ve got your account set up, you can start loading in your tracking numbers. Click the plus sign and paste–or if you’re feeling bold, type from memory–your package’s tracking number in the top field. Parcel was pretty good about grabbing the correct carrier for me, but if you end up with something like Deutsche Post as I did a few times, that’s easy to fix. Just grab the Courier drop-down and select the one you need. Parcel should have already narrowed it down for you.

Your package’s tracking information will appear to the right of your list of deliveries. Depending on how far along its path your package has found itself and how much info the carrier is willing to provide, you may have a ton of tracking data or just a check-in or two. Parcel will tell you an estimated delivery date if it’s available and where you package is right now, so you can plan when to expect the delivery person at your door.

If it looks like something’s missing, you’re not getting all the information you want, or you want to contact the courier, you can do that from the sharing icon by clicking Track on Website. Parcel will open the package tracking on the carrier’s website, and you can find anything you need from there. For instance, if there’s a signature confirmation, you can access that on the carrier’s website from within Parcel.

A Great Problem Solver

I like apps that solve problems. It’s phenomenally useful to have all of my tracking numbers in one spot and not just stuck in my email or my various online retailer accounts. A couple of friends had birthdays recently, and I was buying presents online and having them shipped all over. When I wanted to check the tracking on all of those packages, I had to either dig through my email–and after more than a week, they were buried under a ton of messages–or log into all the various websites and run through my purchases individually. This was a big pain.

Being able to manage all of that from one place would have made that couple of weeks a lot simpler and a lot less stressful, as I kept up with where all of my packages were going. What would have made that even easier would have been to connect a really awesome Mac app to my email account and let it just collect all of those tracking numbers itself. Parcel doesn’t do that, and I can’t seem to find any Mac apps that do. I’ve got an iOS app that will not only scour my email and automatically update itself, but I can also add anything that doesn’t make it in on its own if I need to. I can’t find an application that will get tracking accomplished so efficiently on the Mac, even Parcel, and that’s a bummer.

Premium Tracking

What Parcel does do, it does well. It looks good, and is easy to navigate. Unfortunately, it doesn’t do much of the good stuff without feeding some coins into the machine. Parcel is free to download from the App Store, but what you get is really more or less a demo. You can only track three packages at a time, and even if a package is delivered and tracking is no longer active, you’ll have to remove something before you can add that fourth tracking number to the list. You also won’t get any notifications if you don’t upgrade to premium. The whole point of the app is keep up with everything you’re shipping or is being shipped to you and get notified when anything happens, so the app isn’t very good as is.

Upgrading to premium requires a yearly subscription. It only costs $1.99 a year, which isn’t much, let’s be honest, but it’s not clear why you can’t just purchase the app outright. I’d lay down $1.99 for a good package tracking app, but with a subscription, I expect something for that money over time, and except for some unnecessary access to the Parcel website, all the subscription does is unlock the full app.

Final Thoughts

Parcel actually works and looks great. I’d love for my tracking numbers to magically appear in Parcel, and though that doesn’t happen, it’s not hard to get the numbers for your shipments, especially your most important, into Parcel quickly and easily.

I’ll be honest and say I think the subscription service is kind of bogus. I don’t need web access, the only thing worth paying for on a rotating basis, because if getting all my tracking data on the internet was something I dig, I’d just go to the carrier’s websites myself. The subscription unlocks the app, and while you could keep three tracking numbers in rotation all the time, that’s not really practical, and it sure would be nice to have those notifications. If you can find value in the Parcel website and the subscription, though, it’s really a great little app.

Google Reader’s demise has left those of us who rely on RSS feeds for our news scrambling for options. There’s tons of web services that we’ve covered on Web.AppStorm, but if you prefer using native Mac apps for your news reading, then that only helps you so much.

Reeder and other popular Google Reader apps for the Mac have promised to add support for other sync services, but another app showed them up: ReadKit. If you’re an Instapaper fan, you’ve likely tried it out after Pocket bought out the Read Later app and turned it into Pocket for Mac. Then ReadKit came along and made an app that was, if anything, nicer for reading web articles later on the Mac.

Today, they turned it up to 11 with ReadKit 2, by adding support for sync with Fever, NewsBlur, Delicious, Pinboard, and its own native RSS sync engine. ReadKit’s now your one app for all your online reading — RSS, read later, and bookmarks.

A Reading App and More. Much More.

First off, if you haven’t already tried it out, take a moment and read our initial review of ReadKit. For reading your Instapaper, Pocket, or Readability articles on the Mac, ReadKit is still much the same as it was, though with a refined interface and snappier performance. When it was first released, ReadKit was an app for reading articles later on your Mac, and it did a great job at that. Now, though, that’s only one of its many features.

Of all things, the top comment on our ReadKit review asked why the ReadKit team hadn’t added a RSS reader to the app. That’s been answered, and more, in ReadKit 2. Now, ReadKit can keep up with everything you read online: your feeds (the new stuff that comes in), your read later list (the stuff you’ve saved to read later), and your online bookmarks (the stuff you’ve saved to remember forever).

Bring Out the Feeds

First up, and most exciting for those looking for a Google Reader alternate for their Mac, is ReadKit’s RSS support. It has its own hand-coded RSS sync, so if you haven’t settled on a web RSS service it can take care of it all for you — and do quite the great job at it. It’s speedy, lets you organize feeds into folders, and can import your feeds from other services via OMPL (with export coming soon if you ever want to move away).

If you use it for feeds, though, they’ll be stuck to your Mac, and you won’t be able to check them on the go. For that and many other reasons, you’ll likely want to use it with a web service. ReadKit is ready for that, with built-in support for Fever (the self-hosted RSS reader) and NewsBlur (one of the best online Google Reader alternates). Both of which will cost: Fever costs $30, and runs on your own server, while NewsBlur Premium costs $24/year. That’s not bad, but you’ll need to be prepared.

Just head into the settings to add the service you want — or better yet, add as many services as you want. They’ll all sync fast; I’ve got Instapaper, Pocket, Fever, and native RSS sync all enabled, and ReadKit is still lightening fast.

Want even more? You’ll find sync options for Delicious and Pinboard (pro account required) as well, so you can keep offline copies of your bookmarked sites on your Mac. And if for some reason you have two Instapaper accounts or Fever installs, no problem: you can even add multiple accounts of any service to ReadKit!

The ReadKit Experience

Since ReadKit is built around reading, it works a bit different than apps that are designed first-and-foremost for RSS reading. The best way to read you feeds is via the RSS News smart folder, which will show all of your unarchived articles from all of your RSS services together. Notice I said unarchived, not unread. Most RSS readers will show your unread feeds, but ReadKit treats everything as an article you want to read and need to Archive — more like the way you’d treat articles in your Instapaper or Pocket queue than the way most of us treat RSS feeds.

That’s not a big problem, though. If you actually read through all of your unread feeds each day, just tap the A key to archive the article you’re reading when you’re done reading it to archive it and go on to the next article. Alternately, you could browse through your feeds, reading the articles that interest you, and then select them all and tap A to archive them all at once.

Beyond that, ReadKit is great if you like to save articles from your RSS feeds to your bookmarks or reading later services. You can simply drag-and-drop articles from your RSS feeds into the service and folder you want to save it in, and it’ll all be synced correctly, ready to find later or read on other devices. Best of all, reading your feeds will be a nicer experience than ever with ReadKit’s beautiful reading experience you already expect from your reading later service now being used to display your feeds. There’s search, push notifications for new feeds, timed auto-sync settings, native OS X sharing, and more to give you everything you could want from a RSS reading app.

Fever devotees will be sad to know that the Hot list isn’t visible in ReadKit, though that’s not too surprising. You can, however, view all the feeds in your sparks, if you want. You also can’t add feeds to Fever from the app, due to Fever’s API limitations, so you’ll still need to add feeds via the bookmarklet.

It’s Smart, Too.

As briefly mentioned before, ReadKit 2 has smart folders that can automatically grab the articles you want from criteria you add to the app. It has Read Later and RSS News news smart folders by default, that show all of your unarchived articles from your reading and RSS services, respectively. You can take it further, though, and make smart folders that’ll, say, show only articles about the apps you want from both your RSS and reading services.

That feature’s great for news, since it gives you a way to drill down on the most important news of the day from your feeds — or only see the stuff that’s been published this week, and ignore your older stuff. But, it’s also great for the reading later and bookmark services. It gives you a way to sort your content into topics without having to do more than a minute’s work, or perhaps split your reading list into sets of recently added stuff and stuff that’s been in there forever.

The App To Keep You Well Read

It seems like a genius move, in hindsight, putting the best reading, RSS, and bookmarking services together in one app, and if anything, it’s only surprising that it hasn’t been done yet. That’s not today’s worry, of course, since ReadKit 2 does such a great job at it all. It’s definitely the reading app your Mac needs, and if you use Fever, NewsBlur, or want a native RSS sync app, it’s the RSS reader app your Mac needs as well.

For $4.99 — or a free update if you’ve already bought ReadKit 1 — that’s quite a bargain.

Developers, bloggers, anyone who uses iOS screenshots, lend me your ears! For too long have iOS screenshots been published with embarrassingly low battery percentages and times that reveal the nocturnal nature of the author. In some cases, you are virtually contract-bound to have your screenshot prepared in a certain way and, of course, if Apple can have every one of its own screenshots timed to a minute of each other, so can you!

This is where Status Magic comes in. It’s a simple utility for your Mac which takes your iOS screenshots and lets you polish them up with custom times, carriers, locations and more.

Getting Started

Getting started with Status Magic is as straightforward as simply opening your screenshot(s) into the app. When they’re opened successfully, you’ll be able to pick one to work with from the list at the bottom of the app which displays your opened files in welcome fashion of images rather than text, so you can easily pick out the one you want to edit.

By clicking on the gear icon, you’ll be able to make all the possible edits to the screenshot, everything from changing the network and connectivity status to whether or not to show the Location Services icon. You can also disable parts of the status bar all together, a versatile feature of the application which favours some of the unique uses of iOS screenshots where you might not want the time (or other part of the status bar) showing at all.

You can also change the overarching style of the status bar from a variety of native styles from both iOS 5 and iOS 6, or opt to remove the status bar altogether from your screenshot, cropping it down to exact size. Fancy a different coloured status bar? You can even do that too, although the value of the feature outside of some initial novelty is questionable.

When you’re ready to export, Status Magic will even give you the convenient option of resizing 2x Retina screenshots down to the traditional 1x size which is a welcome feature.

Editing in Batch

While you can certainly use the app to modify just one screenshot, the process of manipulating multiple files in the same way, to represent a consistent status bar, is as simple as opening the images (or, alternatively, dragging the files into the app from Finder).

This is especially useful if you have a lot of files to modify, but yet want all to be done so in the same way. It also means that, for as long as Status Magic is updated to include them, new developments in iOS (such as new releases) can be instantly reflected in your screenshots without having to go through and take them all again. Got a load of iPhone screenshots that still show the 3G indicator? Simply dropping them into Status Magic and switching the connectivity option to 4G/LTE is a straightforward and speedy process.

App Developers, Beware!

The app is really useful if you’re developing any sort of app yourself, rather than simply capturing preexisting ones. As many will know, Apple maintains tight control over how App Store products are represented, making requirements like having no carrier name shown in the screenshots you use to market your app.

Status Magic allows the process of ensuring your compliance with Apple’s guidelines is super efficient and means you don’t have to pull out a copy of Photoshop to scrub off your carrier branding in the top-left corner.

Final Thoughts

Status Magic is a niche app that’s not going to be needed nor wanted by everyone. However, if you do work with iOS screenshots, especially in a professional or commercial context, Status Magic provides the tools for adding a bit of polish to them in a simple, intuitive manner that’s as straightforward as opening a file, ticking some boxes and then exporting it.

Status Magic isn’t cheap, though. It’ll cost you $6.99, which is somewhat of a heavy investment for such a small utility. However, if you work with iOS screenshots regularly, the app offers enough value in the form of speed and convenience that there’s little against it. Ultimately, Status Magic is a worthy investment if it does what you need to get done, and does so in a manner that’s very difficult to criticise.

Good apps for musicians that don’t cost an arm and a leg are hard to come by on the Mac — perhaps owing to the fact that Apple provides a fine one with every computer in GarageBand. But there’s no one-size-fits-all music creation apps, since we all have different needs and use cases.

Tabular bridges the two core prongs of creating music. It’s a composition and notation app, suited to writing and editing music for multiple instruments with both tablature and the modern stave/staff format. But it’s also a MIDI reader and a practice tool, specifically geared toward — but not limited to only — guitarists and drummers.

Building Blocks

Despite the name, Tabular is nothing like ChordMate — which we recently reviewed. It fills a different purpose in the guitarist’s arsenal, and I’d suggest would actually be a fantastic complement to that other app.

Tabular is rather more comparable to a stripped-down Guitar Pro or to the long-running Finale NotePad and Finale SongWriter — only more geared toward guitarists and people uncomfortable with standard notation (in the absence of accompanying tablature, at least).

Tabular’s composition tools pale in comparison to most professional suites, but they are intuitive and perfectly serviceable for whipping together quick ensemble arrangements — they’re more than you’re likely to ever need transcribing your favorite songs by ear. Most common division, measure, and note markings are present — although I was confused at the absence of crescendo/decrescendo (there’s only fade in/fade out and standard dynamics for indicating volume).

Learn by Osmosis

If you never learned to read sheet music, the dual setup of staff and tab could prove to be the best teacher you could hope for. Tabular shows both forms of notation in parallel, so you’re likely to learn what all those squiggles and scribbles mean with only the slightest effort.

If you’re completely clueless when it comes to music theory, pay close attention to the excellent tutorial — which walks you through not just the basics of using the app, but also the fundamental concepts you need to grasp before you can get anywhere.

There are seven exercise sets for guitarists to enjoy, covering scales, picking, warm-ups, and right and left-hand fingering. The built-in practice tools come in most handy here, allowing you to play along with virtual instruments and to speed up or slow down the tempo.

Tabular offers incremental speed ups on looping, along with logs, metronome, count in, and timed exercises — you might want to repeat an exercise for five minutes, to improve dexterity and endurance at the same time, for instance. I’m a big fan of these features, and I’ve added them to both my guitar and my violin practice regimen.

As for controls, most functions are better accomplished with simple mouse clicks or key combos. You place the cursor (with mouse or arrow keys) above the string you want the note to be played on, then press a number key corresponding to your desired fret number. If the number is in double digits, hold the key for the first digit then press the key for the second.

For stringed instruments without frets, think of your finger position for each semitone as a fret — so the A string on a violin will go from 0-4 with the notes A, A#, B, C, C#. Chords can be added one note at a time or via the chord chart button under Division Notations.

Percussion instruments have different notation input rules, with the characters o, x, and @ corresponding to on the head, muted, and on the rim, respectively.

It’s simple and intuitive, although I found myself wishing at times for the option to apply a note with mouse clicks or by entering the note name — rather than its position on the instrument.

Off the Beaten Track

Tabular supports custom tunings, and includes a number a common ones as presets. You can individually adjust the tuning and add or remove strings on notes in the track settings (either the Edit Track or New Track menu), with a cool mock fretboard to help you visualize things.

You can also add a capo, although I had trouble putting it higher on the instrument than is visible in the little graphic (my workaround is to tune the virtual strings according to the capo position on my physical guitar, which amounts to identical notation).

Library Management

If you have an existing library of tabs, you could be in for a painful transition to Tabular. The app supports importing from Guitar Pro 5 and MIDI formats, but none of the common text-based tablature formats. You can export to five different formats, however — OpenTab, PDF, MIDI, Tabular, or ASCII (plain text) — as well as print directly from the app.

Be warned that the PDF export — or the print option — saves only the currently-selected track, so if you have a multi-track composition you’ll have to export multiple times to get the whole thing. ASCII exporting lets you choose which tracks to include, while the other formats preserve everything.

An iTunes-like library makes it easy to keep track of Tabular songs, allowing you to set Title, Artist, and Album metadata, and to organize everything into groups. The built-in search looks at this basic metadata only, which should be perfectly fine until you go to look for “that song with a mandolin” and can’t remember the name.

On a semi-related note, I find it strange that you can create songs with a keyboard shortcut, but both importing and creating a new group require use of the mouse. Tabular seems well thought-out and meticulously designed, so little interface niggles like this really stand out.

A Strong Contender

Tabular won’t replace Guitar Pro if you rely on the latter’s advanced features, but it offers a great alternative for people who are happy with basic library management and composition tools on top of a robust tablature reader.

I was impressed by its clean, easy-to-use interface — even though it does have a few rough spots — and by its excellent practice tools. For amateur and hobbyist guitarists, drummers, and guitar-centric songwriters/composers, this might be just the thing.

Ready for the final installment in our popular “Apps We Use” series? Want to find all of the apps that’ll solve all of the problems of your life?

Wait, what? You say you want a more universal answer to your problems? Here it is: 42.

Anyway, I’ll give you a sneak peek at what my intimate life with my Macs looks like. Don’t be shy, come closer, but shhhh… please keep quiet or you might end up scaring a couple of bits and bytes.

Like the article? You should subscribe and follow us on twitter.

Three Apps That Save My Day… Hundreds of Times a Day

There are lots of tools I use on a daily or weekly basis. They all provide added functionality to OS X but are not strictly essential to my life. That is, except for these three apps that I just can’t live my digital life without. I feel highly frustrated, to say the least, when I must use a Mac without these installed.

In fact, I even think LaunchBar, TextExpander and Hazel should really, really be part of OS X.

Here are some of the not-so-obvious things I do with LaunchBar:

• Add color label to files and remove them,
• Search my Evernote notes,
• “Grab” files and send them attached in email messages,
• Display a phone number in large characters on the screen,
• Unmount USB keys and external hard drives,
• Access my Downloads folder to mount a disk image, install the app it contains, then unmount and delete the now superfluous disk image, all of this without ever touching the mouse,
• Read the content of a text file and copy some information from it,
• Directly create a new note within nvAlt with some text selected in a web page,
• Append something to my todo list,
• Store the last 40 chunks of text I copied and paste some of it at will — no need for a clipboard manager! (as long as you’re dealing only with text).

Here’s just one example among the overflowing number of possibilities offered by this tool. Every month, when my bank statement is available as a PDF on their website, all I have to do is download it. Then Hazel takes care of the rest, i.e.:

1. Renames it with something that matches my filenaming scheme, i.e. yy-mmdd-hhmmss-A1FB-bankname-Checking Statement-Year-Month,
2. Files the PDF in an appropriate folder elsewhere on my main hard drive,
3. Makes a backup copy of this file on my NAS,
4. Creates a new Evernote note with the PDF document attached, all with tags and so on,
5. And finally notifies me (Growl inside Notification Center) that the document has been processed.

My Flexible Writing System

I must admit it: I’m obsessed when it comes to plain text writing apps. I have to try every new app out on the market. Hence, it is a bit difficult for me to tell you what my favorite writing tool is. I can tell you what my current one is. But ask me again next month! (Spoiler: in fact, I use a lot of apps in my workflow.)

I was really attracted by the completely overhauled Ulysses (3.0) when it went out a couple of weeks ago. You should read Matthew’s review to understand why Ulysses is awesome.

However, due to my specific writing workflow, I am in some sort of love/hate relationship with Ulysses right now. Indeed, all of my writings are plain text files located in a Dropbox folder, and the first version of Ulysses III still struggled with what they call “external sources” such as Dropbox folders (Ulysses is a bit too much focused on iCloud sync, IMHO). The resulting too-frequent crashes quickly kept me away from this text editor. I’ve just seen they released a new version that fixes some of what the devs call ‘mysterious’ crashes, so hopefully this is now fixed.

It was written by many people before: the beauty of using Dropbox and plain text files is that you can use whatever program you like at any time. I constantly switch from app to app, depending on my humeur du jour and my needs for specific features. That’s why you’ll find iA Writer, Byword, nvAlt, Sublime Text, Ommwriter, Scrivener, FoldingText and the afore mentioned Ulysses co-existing on my hard drive, and none of these apps are neglected.

I keep a special place in my heart for some of these apps, listed below.

If you’d like to use Sublime Text 2 for writing in Markdown, I can’t recommend enough the MarkdownEditing package offered by the never-ending-tweaking-guy Brett Terpstra.

How Do I Deal With All of These Writing Apps?

You might wonder how and why I use so many text editors. Right now, my typical workflow is:

1. Jotting down an idea for a new article in nvAlt,
2. Creating a basic outline within nvAlt or FoldingText,
3. Drafting the article piece by piece and putting things together in Scrivener: its Corkboard and the ability to reorganize things at will is really helpful when trying to transform your tiny pieces into a long and coherent writing,
4. “Compile” with Scrivener by exporting as a plain text file,
5. Revise this draft in one or more text editors, depending on my tastes and/or specific features (SublimeText comes handy for extensive search/replace support),
6. Finalizing the draft in Byword so I can export it easily in WordPress.

Connecting With the Outside World

Organizational Needs

By now, you surely have understood that I’m a big fan of the plain text format. That’s why TaskPaper is my tool of choice for dealing with tasks. I’ve already described in great detail what my workflow looks like with this wonderful program by Hog Bay Software. Of note is that I’ve found a solution of dealing with deadlines simply by sparingly using the @due tag, so I don’t really need any sort of reminder app to get things done.

In a (not so) near future, I might use FoldingText instead of TaskPaper for the same purpose. For now, I still prefer using TaskPaper with a theme I created on my own.

For appointments, I simply use the OS X built-in Calendar (iCal if you’re using an OS X version older than Lion) that syncs with my Google calendar. When I’m not at home, Google Calendar is accessed either through its web interface or through my phone stock calendar app (big confession: I don’t own an iPhone anymore). I don’t have a lot of things to jot down on my calendar so great apps in the likes of Fantastical are overkill for me.

To Fight My Fear of Losing Files

Not content of having all my most often used files on Dropbox and backing up all my files on a RAID1-configured NAS, I use two more apps to try to rest assured:

• CrashPlan makes an offsite backup copy of all the files stored on my NAS, my iMac and my MacBook, for a modest yearly fee (unlimited storage included). I backup to their Crashplan Central server, not to a another computer.
• CarbonCopyCloner helps me keep a bootable backup of my Macs, just in case.

Small Handy Utilities

Manipulating Audio Files

DJing is one of my hobbies — a third part-time job, in fact. So I can’t write this roundup without mentioning Native Instrument’s Traktor, though this might be both a niche and less useful software for non-DJ people and an undisputed must-have for digital DJs.

Traktor integrates with your iTunes library and lets you mix, beat-match and act live (add sound effects, for instance) on music files (MP3, WAV, FLAC, AIFF…). It’s like having a full fledge digital replicate of two turntables/CD players and a mixer, for only $79.

While I’m still using an old, unsupported version of Traktor, latest versions offer incredible possibilities, such as controlling files with real-world, physical hardware (think traditional turntables where specially ‘time-encoded’ 12 inches spin) or live remixing a track.

Also, when I’ve finished recording a DJ set I played, I often feel the need to enhance the recording, for instance by adding dynamic compression and fade-ins / fade-outs. For this, Audacity is my free tool of choice, maybe because it is a cross-platform software I used to deal with in my old Windows days. I really love its minimalist, non-eye-candy yet informative UI, where the most important thing is the waveform.

When It’s About Money

When It’s Time for Fun

I don’t know if this is because I was a big fan of Lego when I was a child, but in my eyes this is the best game released on any platform. Ever. Period. Why? It is lightweight, has oldschool yet charming graphics that are simple enough to be supported by almost any machine, is a pleasure for your creativity, is endless (even ‘The End’ is not a real one), has a beautiful soundtrack, is in constant development, has a huge community, and is really cheap for all you get.

Some Crumbs for Those of You Still Hungry

Finally, I also run some other (sometimes widely used) apps like:

• 1Password (see for instance Joel’s article)
• Evernote (read Jorge’s review of version 5.0)
• Pixelmator (the new 2.2 Blueberry features are amazing!)
• iTerm 2
• and F.lux is my favorite among apps that help you tame your monitor at night.

What About You?

You’ve just had a sneak-peek at my world of OS X apps — and at the rest of our team’s apps through the other entries in our Apps we Use series. Please, let us enter your world in the comments!

Most people don’t spend their days obsessing over what fonts they should use. They use Times New Roman for documents, the default font (Helvetica or Ariel, usually) in other apps, and only think about switching that around when they’re making a banner or something else with special type. Then, though, there’s those of us who love collecting fonts, debate over the best fonts for coding, writing, reading, and more, and go crazy when we see a new, beautiful font. There’s finally those who are a step above the rest of us: the designers who actually make fonts.

Now, Macs come with quite a number of great fonts. In fact, they’re one of the many added values in OS X, since just adding Helvetica Neue to a PC would cost you € 35 per weight. On a Mac, it’s included, gratis. Then, if you own Creative Suite (or even just a single Adobe design app), you’ll get quite a lot of beautiful fonts from the Adobe collection. And then, there’s free fonts, including Source Sans Pro, Maven Pro, and so many more.

But sometimes, if you love typography, you’ll come across a font that you’ll just have to buy. That happened to me before when browsing the fonts on Envato’s GraphicsRiver, and it happened to me recently when I came across Klim Type Foundry’s Pitch font recently. The latter’s become my default writing font in Sublime Text, and it’s beautiful.

So how about you? Have you ever purchased a font? Tell us about some of your favorites in the comments below.

If you are a writer by trade, or have to do a lot of writing in your trade, you have likely (certainly?) had to deal with writer’s block. You know what I’m talking about. The dreaded staring at the screen blankly while your mind wanders aimlessly or just seems to stop working altogether. Sometimes writers block is just plain lack of motivation. Of course there are things you can do to overcome writer’s block. For me, nothing works better than a good workout or caffeine to clear the cobwebs or a pomodoro timer for a little extra motivation.

I was actually struggling with writers block at the very time I noticed Flowstate, an app that claims to help users fight through writer’s block. That’s a pretty big claim, and I couldn’t resist putting it to the test.

What Flowstate is Supposed to Do

Flowstate’s description in the MAS says, “Flowstate is a writing app designed to subdue the inner critic, and enable writers to translate their feelings and ideas onto the page without over-analyzation”. Because writer’s block is often associated with writers being overly critical of their work, Flowstate tries to force writers to get words on the screen. So how does Flowstate do this? More importantly how well does Flowstate do this? That’s what I hope to answer in this review, so here goes.

Getting Into the Flow State

The first thing you notice after opening Flowstate is that it is a full screen only app. This is, of course, by design, to force the user into a distraction-free zone. At the welcome screen users can choose the options for their writing session. This includes choosing the font, how long the session will be (one minute to two hours), night mode, and page width. That’s pretty much it for options and preferences.

 

If you are starting a writing session with a new document, you title the document and the app automatically goes into editing mode. All you will see on the screen is the inconspicuous timer at the type right of the screen. Once you start typing, the timer starts and you are now in a flow state.

What Exactly Is a Flow State?

A flow state is basically a writing session that can be slightly scary, or even intensely scary. After you start typing, you can’t stop typing. If you do stop typing, the letters on the screen begin to fade. What happens if the letters fade completely you ask? Let’s get to that in a second. In a flow state, grammar and spell check are turned off. There is even an option to turn off the delete button. I did not like this option, but if you truly want to be forced to keep writing, this option may work well for you.

Now back to the question of what happens if the letters fade completely? All your work is deleted and the flow state starts over again. Okay, take a second to read that sentence again. Yes that’s right, all your work is deleted. And yes, I did learn this the hard way. On another occasion I started a flow state and finished with about thirty seconds left. I panicked and ended up just typing nonsense until the flow state ended. After further experimentation I figured out you can actually hit command-Q to end a flow state if you need to. Warning: if you do quit the app during a flow state, you will feel like a quitter. The author describes the app as brutal, and it is, but it is also good to know you can quit the app if you need to and not loose your work (unless you let the letters fade away, then you are out of luck).

What Happens When a Flow State Ends?

When timer hits zero, the flow state ends and the screen fades back to the the welcome screen. From here you can create a new document by entering a title and hitting enter putting you in another flow state. You can also select any previous document for editing outside of a flow state with spell check and grammar check turned on. Alternatively, you can start another flow state with any existing document. There are not a lot of options in terms of document management, you can delete or export the documents and that’s it.

The export options in Flowstate include: mail, Facebook, message, and export as a .txt file

A Few Things to Keep in Mind

As you are typing in a flow state, any keyboard shortcut for moving the cursor around does not count as a key stroke. So if you are pressing alt-arrow or command-arrow, the letters will fade as you do. This is actually one thing I would like to see changed. The developer may be hesitant to go down this road because the whole point of the app is to force the user to get on the screen, and moving the cursor around is not getting content on the screen. Another handy feature is the ability to add time to a flow state. As a flow state is ending, you can add one or five minutes by hitting command-1 or command-5 respectively.

Flowstate also has iOS versions that sync with the Mac version through iCloud.

Conclusion

Rating this app is difficult. It’s so subjective. Either this method is going to help you push through writer’s block, or it will drive you crazy. Flowstate’s feature set and UI are perfect for what it does, no complaints on this front. So did it work for me? Kind of. The type of writing I do usually requires me to reference a lot of other material, which is not conducive to working with Flowstate.

However, when I tried using Flowstate with my reference materials on my iPad or printed out, I found that it did help me push through writer’s block. Where Flowstate excels is writing pieces where you don’t need to reference other material or just want to get a quick page or two out. If you are really struggling with writer’s block, this app is likely worth a shot if the $10 price tag doesn’t strike you as too high.

As more of our lives moves onto the internet every day, the importance of protecting our sensitive data grows. While many of us are happy to share vacation photos and blog posts with the world at large, some information will always need to be protected yet easily accessible when we need it.

mSecure from mSeven Software is one of the many apps designed to keep your passwords and more safe from prying eyes, one with a far cheaper price than most. The app stores everything from credit card information and web passwords to Social Security numbers and bank account numbers. In a field of increasingly-cramped competition, can mSecure offer new features and better performance to help it stand out?

Getting Started

When you first launch the app, you’ll be asked to create a user account with your password. This password is the only way to access what will become your encrypted database, so you’ll want to remember what you choose. If you want to make sure you don’t forget, you can use a password hint that displays at login.

Once you are ready to start storing your information, you’ll be greeted with a clean slate. Across the top of the main window are some self-explanatory buttons to help you navigate and create your first entry.

Interface

The spartan interface generally stays out of your way and focuses on keeping entries organized. When you are ready to create your first entry, you click on the “Add Item” from the top navigation bar and a new window slides down.

At first, the generic titles for your inputs may seem disorganized. However, once you select the type of entry, these will change to help guide you through the process of entering the necessary data. For instance, clicking on Bank Account will change the input areas to more relevant names, such as “Account Number,” “PIN,” and “Branch.”

After you have created an entry, it will show up in the main window. All the entries will be broken down as a spreadsheet, and sensitive entries like passwords will get hidden. By selecting any given entry, the information will be displayed in the window to the far right for quick viewing. If you need to copy and paste a password from mSecure into your browser, you can click on the clipboard icon to copy it.

Features

mSecure gives you a great deal of flexibility when it comes to organization. When you create a new file, you can choose from a two main, top-level categories – Personal and Business. You can add additional categories here as you wish. Doing so allows you to easily filter what you are shown in the main window, and can be a useful feature when you are looking to separate mSecure’s information for your work and personal uses.

My favorite feature with apps like this is the random password generator. If you are creating an entry for a website and want to make sure that you choose something that is complex (and thus, hard to break), mSecure will create one for you. As different websites have different requirements for the characters that you can use, mSecure allows you to specify whether to use any caps, numbers, symbols, etc.

In addition to grouping your entries, you are also given a number of templates for the type of information you will put into each file. As I mentioned when creating a bank entry, you will be presented with relevant input areas for your PIN, routing number, etc. These are all easily editable. You can edit the templates that come as the defaults, or you can create your own. When editing, you are given plenty of control in customizing the field-type (alpha-numeric, phone number, email, etc.), as well as the number of fields and the order in which they are shown. When you create a new entry, you can also choose from a large set of icons that helps to add a visual element in order to quickly identify the entry in the list view.

Almost as important as keeping your information secure is the ability to quickly access it wherever you are. For this reason, mSecure’s developers have also created an iOS app that syncs with the Mac version. Syncing can be done via iCloud, Dropbox, or via a shared file that you choose. I synced with iCloud and found that it worked quickly and without issue.

If you choose to bring the data in mSecure elsewhere, you can easily export the database via a CSV file. If you want to bring existing data into mSecure, you can import via CSV, SplashID, KeePass, and Dataviz.

Criticisms

When it comes to an app like this, there is no getting around the inevitable comparisons to the leader in this category, 1Password. To put it rather bluntly, 1Password looks much cleaner than mSecure, and it uses what I consider to be a cleaner layout. That said, for $40 less than 1Password, you can easily look past some of the aesthetic shortcomings of mSecure.

Perhaps the most glaring problem is not with the app itself but with the lack of extensions for your browser. What makes 1Password so convenient is the tight integration with Chrome, Firefox and Safari. When you encounter a login page, you can simply hit a keyboard shortcut and have the information automatically appear. Conversely, when you are signing up for a new website, 1Password will identify the information you’ve entered and ask if you’d like to create a new entry. mSecure simply doesn’t do this, so if you plan to use this app to catalog hundreds of web logins, plan on tabbing over to this app frequently.

Conclusion

As I mentioned, you can’t help but compare this to 1Password. While mSecure lacks some of the most important features, it is significantly cheaper. As a standalone secure database for your sensitive information, it works exceedingly well. Syncing with the iOS counterpart means that you worry about being without your credit cards, passport numbers, checking account information, and whatever else you choose to save.

When it comes to being a place to store web passwords, the lack of browser extensions makes it a much tougher sell. Personally, my 1Password database is full of hundreds of logins, and it grows daily. The ease of automatically logging into sites makes the steep price-tag worth paying.

Ultimately, I’d have no hesitation in recommending mSecure if your needs are basic: Backing up the contents of your wallet and other personal information. But if you plan to store all of your web logins, I’d recommend sticking with 1Password.