Category: Mac

Looking for a great new way to edit your photos and make digital graphics? Then you’ve got to check out Pixelmator 2.2, our sponsor this week.

Pixelmator’s already one of the best graphics tools on the Mac, and it’s even better with its latest updates. Now, you can use custom vector shapes in your creations, tweak text as shapes, make quick changes with the quick paint selection tool, and move objects smarter with the new move tool. There’s even a new light leak effect, gradients, and color popovers to easily pick the colors you need.

That’s in addition to all of the great Pixelmator features you love, including its beautiful, Retina Display ready UI, painting tools, and more. It’s got over 160 effects to make your photos pop, is designed to work great with OS X, and has the awards that set it apart.

It’s great.

Go Get it!

If you’ve ever bought Pixelmator from the App Store, but haven’t tried out the great features in Pixelmator 2.2, be sure to download it today! It’s a free update for anyone who’s ever bought Pixelmator from the App Store, and has more features than ever. If you don’t already own Pixelmator, you should get your own copy from the App Store for just $14.99. That’s cheaper than one month of a Photoshop CC subscription!

If you’re like me, you probably play quite a lot of games and, at one time or another, have probably considered a life of developing your own games. Not all of us possess the skills to develop our own games (nor the contacts and finance to get someone else to on our behalf) so our ideas remain mere concepts… until now.

Game Dev Tycoon is an indie business simulator that centres on the life of a game development studio, starting out at the birth of the industry as a garage programmer and eventually evolving into an AAA-creating development powerhouse. You may have already heard of it, though, after it garnered many headlines for an innovative stance on piracy. Let’s take a look at while you’ll be investing hours on end into setting the scene for your own Call of Duty knockoff.

From TES to mBox 360

Game Dev Tycoon is largely open-ended, allowing you to choose what games you make, what consoles you develop for and how you otherwise invest your money. However, there’s a continuing storyline working its way through in the background that follows the development of the industry. When you start out as a single developer in your garage, you’ll be living in the mid-80s where the PC and G64 — the latter a reference to the Commodore 64 — are the only platforms available to develop for. However, over the course of your first thirty in-game years of play, new platforms will be released, all resembling real-life consoles.

Game Dev Tycoon starts with one lone developer in a garage, eventually evolving into a busy team of workers with diverse skills.

Along the way, you’ll meet consoles like the TES, Playsystem and mBox that are released and discontinued as you play. After year 30, the releases will end but you’ll be satisfied with the equivalent of the iPhone/iPad, Xbox One and PlayStation 4 that are left over. The inclusion of references to the real life industry (you’ll also find publishers and rival developers like “Ubersoft”, an in-game parody of Ubisoft, mentioned) adds a nice dynamic to the game that can make it a little easier to come up with ideas.

As you make your way through the initial thirty-year span, opportunities will present themselves to advance. You’ll be able to move into new offices, open hardware and R&D labs, hire and train staff and more. Dave Johnson of Departure Science might even pop up to offer you a cash injection in return for some product placement, a charming reference to the late CEO in Portal 2.

“Game Design For Pirates”

Developing games is a fairly simple process. After initially selecting key characteristics such a name, platform and genre, you’ll be guided through three development stages where sliders determine how you spend your time on core aspects of the game. Eventually, you’ll be able to research the ability to select a target audience and create a custom engine built to your own specification of features. The share of time and the inclusion of features from your engine are instrumental to how successful your game is, with certain focuses being better suited to certain genres. Eventually, you’ll get the hang of what works and what doesn’t which limits replayability a little when you’re able to produce perfect games time-after-time, although a few outside factors judging success also keeps things somewhat fresh.

Success is measured in your positioning of nine key sliders.

After you’ve made your first few games, research opportunities become very important to your success. By working on games, creating engines or contract work (small, non-gaming tasks that your characters perform in return for cash), you’ll earn Research Points which can be spent, in conjunction with cash, to gain access to things you can build into your engine, unlock the ability to set things like target audience and launch marketing campaigns and train yourself and your staff (which, in turn, can increase attributes that affect efficiency and allow staff to specialise in specific areas). The points system encourages you to make choices, and therefore build engines specific to the genres and type of game you want to develop in a clean, well-balanced fashion.

By performing research, you’ll be able to extend the options available for your game during development.

You’ll also unlock different types of games, such as sequels, expansion packs and MMOs. These have different features; for example, MMOs will sell indefinitely but will encounter rising maintenance costs that you’ll need to keep an eye on, choosing to take the game off the market and cease new sales, or inject some popularity with a marketing campaign or expansion pack. It seems like these types of games only become available fairly long into the game and not all players will appreciate not being able to concentrate on one or two particular franchises from the start, instead having to create fake sequels or establish tens of unrelated games before the ability to build on the success of one becomes available.

Naturally, unlocking the ability to make an MMO might take longer to represent the real technological development involved, but it seems fitting that the option to develop a sequel should be immediately available and that expansion packs shouldn’t need to be limited to just MMOs — I want to parody The Sims!

Once you’ve moved into an appropriately-featured office, adding a hardware lab will eventually allow you to produce your own console and sell units alongside your own games which is a big achievement in itself, as the process can be extremely costly.

“Game Dev and Simulation is a Great Combination”

Once you’ve finished developing a game, fixed all the bugs and ran an appropriately-sized marketing effort, your game is pushed out onto the market, kicking off with a round of reviews. Reviews are based on a number of factors, including the quality of your game, and return a numerical score which can help deem how successful your game is.

Not every game is a runaway success.

Produce a high-quality game for a popular platform and a well-suited target audience and it’s not uncommon to be looking at millions in profit. Try the opposite and you’ll encounter limited success and even the loss of fans, which can endanger your future publishing efforts. As mentioned previously, extensive play can reveal exactly how to execute a successful game which does limit replayability, although even the most calculated endeavours can still have a turn for the worst in the hands of the press. And, if you didn’t pay for your own copy of Game Dev Tycoon, you’ll find your sales eaten up by virtual pirates, in the most perfect version of poetic justice ever show in an app.

Presentation

The indie nature of the game’s own development definitely shows. Sound is limited to very little more than the looping background track you’ll eventually get bored by, but the graphics are strong enough to still have a charming, immersive experience. The in-game parodies of real consoles and the posters of popular video games are a really nice addition that don’t resemble the drab, generic setting the game could’ve had.

Eventually you’ll be able to develop your own console to compete with the likes of the Playsystem 3 and mBox 360.

For what can be expected of an indie game of this price, Game Dev Tycoon ties together fun, immersive gameplay into a package that might not win any accolades of its own for visual or audio innovation, but is strong enough to not limit the entertaining qualities of the game.

Final Thoughts

Game Dev Tycoon is a really fun game that will have you engrossed in hours and hours of gameplay as you attempt to simulate your own version of the gaming industry. Recreating your favourite franchises is something you’ll get around to and it’s entertaining seeing how your own parodies are received by the virtual critics of Game Dev Tycoon.

The game is most certainly not without its floors. There are clear improvements that could be made with some gameplay choices — such as the aforementioned waiting time until you can develop a sequel — being highly questionable, plus a lot of room to expand the game even further, but its difficult to complain when the price more than pays for an adequate amount of immersive, addicting gameplay.

We’d highly recommend picking up Game Dev Tycoon. The game has been greenlit by Steam and will be making its way onto the platform in the coming months, but it’s available to play right now for $7.99 (and you’ll even be given a Steam key when the game does get around to launching on the service).

Have you used apps like Byword or WriteRoom? They are simple text editors, and the reason they are so popular is that they embrace minimalism and provide a distraction-free environment for getting your writing done.

As a big fan of apps like Evernote that allow you to store and organize notes, I’ve always wished for a note-taking app that took a hint from those kinds of apps. I recently came across such an app, and it’s called Lenote. It’s almost just what I was wanting from a notes app.

Lenote

A quick glimpse at Lenote’s interface is enough to reveal all there is to know about it. And that’s exactly what the developer claims he wanted to go for with this app: he says that most note-taking apps are unnecessarily complicated, which makes it hard to concentrate while working in them. Lenote parts with that premise and tries to provide a solution to it. The tough thing, though, is delivering simplicity while retaining enough power to be actually useful.

Lenote intro

Interface

Lenote’s interface is very simply defined and easy to understand: a sidebar on the right provides the navigation between different notes and the big blank space to the right is where the writing gets done. Like most minimalistic writing apps, the backdrop is a light grey/tan, and it works great in full-screen mode.

Lenote Sidebar

On the sidebar you can find a couple other elements other than the notes list; underneath it there’s a search bar and above it there’s a drop-down menu which works for choosing and editing notebooks, as well as creating new notes.

Notes and Notebooks

The notes system Lenote implements is pretty traditional. Notebooks work for classifying content, and notes need to be placed under a certain notebook, otherwise they’ll go directly to the navigation category of “All Notes”, which works as another notebook as well as a quick go-to for checking all your content. The “Trash” category works similarly. Think of them as smart notebooks: you can save notes in them, but they’ll also automatically be updated with all the corresponding notes that should also be there.

Notebooks

If you ever get lost and don’t know where you’ve saved a note, a small button on the corner of the corresponding note can give you all the details about it. Unfortunately, there’s no simple way to switch the notebook of a note once it has been created, other than creating the note again under the right notebook, copy-pasting the content and deleting the old note.

Note Details

Likewise, there’s not much else to edit in your notes other than the title and content. There are no tags, attachments or any other fancy stuff that you might be used to with other note-taking apps. But that’s the gimmick of Lenote, isn’t it?

What Else Can It Do?

To keep your notes safe, there’s an option that quickly backs up your entire notes library so that it can later be restored with the app if it were necessary. In similar fashion, you can export individual notes as PDF or plain text files, and share them through the usual Mac OS system commands (including iMessage, Mail, Twitter, Facebook, and such).

What Else Can’t It Do?

First off, Lenote needs proper Markdown support. It has partial support, but it’s confusing and not very useful. Let me explain: Using hashes and stars will style your text as bold headers and lists, but there’s no way to then export your content to HTML, or even to PDF with your rich formatting. It only works as a quick way to style your text within the app, and it doesn’t even work with most Markdown commands.

Markdown Support

Then, there are a few bugs with the app. Ocassionally my notes get lost momentarily until I restarted Lenote, and I’ve gotten stuck on menus like “Quick Open” with no other choice than to force quit the app. Aside from that, there are a few details that need improvement, such as a better search and a bit more customization, but those will surely come naturally as the app gets updated. The app’s already improved since its initial release, but more work is needed before it’s the Markdown notes app to beat.

Conclusion

When I first heard about Lenote the first thing that came to mind was that it was trying to be a crossover between Evernote and Byword. That’s an interesting concept, although there are a few things to be said about it.

Lenote is not up to the standard of Evernote or even Apple’s own Notes when it comes to platform support. Those services stay in sync over multiple devices, which I imagine most people would think is a necessity for any note-taking app. I don’t see myself switching Evernote for Lenote as of yet, but maybe in the future if it gets a proper web service and an iOS app, I might consider making the switch.

On the other hand, even though I’m a hardcore Evernote user, I continuously find it a bit too complex to use at times. Lenote removes all that intricacy and provides a clean environment for getting your notes down, thus achieving that “Byword with note organization” thing that jumps to mind when you first see the app.

For the price of free, Lenote is a pretty good deal. If I didn’t own Byword yet, I might instead use this to write up my articles and keep them all in one place. Although it lacks a few things in the execution, the concept behind the app is pretty good, and I look forward to watching Lenote grow and improve over time. Give it a try, and let us know what you think of it.

Email nailed communications, and tiny file sharing. Dropbox nailed syncing folders between colleagues. CloudApp and Droplr nailed small file sharing. But none of the above helped us send large files (RAW photos, and videos, and such) quickly.

Oh, there’s ways to send large files. You can FTP them to your server or put them on S3 and let your colleague download them later. If you both have large enough Dropbox accounts, you could just sync the files over Dropbox. But either way, you’ve got to upload the files, wait for them to upload the whole way, and then remember to go email your colleague that the files are sent. Oh, and once they’ve downloaded/saved the files, you’ll likely need to go delete them to clear up space.

How about something that’ll let you send files of any size within seconds of realizing you need to send them? No waiting for uploads, just drag-and-drop the files — of any size — and send the message, then forget about it.

That’s exactly what Minbox lets you do.

Drag the File, Send it, and You’re Done

Drag, Drop, Send. Instantly

Minbox strips the process of sending files to others down to — literally — 3 steps that you can complete in under half a minute, no how many files or how large of files you’re sending. You’ll just drag-and-drop your files to the Minbox icon in your menubar, enter your colleague’s email address and optionally add a quick message, then hit the send button. And with that, your files are sent, and you’re done with the task, ready to forget about needing to send files.

Really. That’s it. Whether you’re sending a few photos or a 1.5Gb video file, you can send it and forget about it in seconds. Your colleague will get a basic email with your (optional) message and a link to view the files online, download each file individually, or download a zip of all of the files together. Just about can’t get more practical or simple than that.

An uploaded set of photos in Minbox’ online gallery

That Just Can’t Be.

Of course, the laws of physics — and the limits of today’s internet connections (unless you’re on Google Fiber already) — still exist. Minbox has a few tricks up its sleeve to make it faster.

First up, it does concurrent uploads to get all of your files up faster, and uploads directly to Amazon’s S3 storage rather than sending the files first to its own servers. Then, it goes ahead and sends the email to your colleague before the files are fully uploaded. The links still work, but your colleague will have to wait to download the files until they’ve fully uploaded from your computer. They’ll be able to see a preview, as seen above, while the files are still being fully uploaded, though.

A setting you’ll either love, or want to turn off — pronto.

But, they likely won’t have to wait too long, since Minbox also by default converts your files, downsampling videos to 480p Mp4, and images (including RAW images) to 2400px width JPEG. You’ll see some serious savings there, taking a 5Mb RAW image down to a few hundred Kb, and a 22Mb screencast video down to just over 2Mb. That’s fine if you’re needing just to let your colleague see the pictures or videos you’re sending, and even might be good since it’ll save you the step of converting RAW images to lossy JPEGs that are fine for basic viewing.

But, it’s decidedly not what you what if you’re needing to send the real original files for work. The good thing is, Minbox alerts you that it’ll compress your files before you send the first message that’ll have compressed files, and you’ve got an option to turn the compression off, with individual settings for images, RAW images, and videos.

Don’t Forget to be Sociable

Sharing via email might seem a tad quaint today, with most sharing apps focused on social networking sharing. That’s why most of us keep CloudApp or Droplr around, and they work great for the small files you might want to tweet about. They don’t work great for sharing, say, a folder of images with others, though, if you don’t want them to have to download a zip file to see the pictures.

Email makes the most sense for most scenarios that would warrent using an app like Minbox. The larger files we share are, after all, more likely to be for a private project, and email’s still the best direct messaging tool for the most part.

But Minbox threw in some social networking features as well. If you enable the social networking integration, it’ll tweet a link or post on your Facebook when you’ve shared an image gallery in Minbox — but you’ll first have to share said gallery via email first. That makes it rather unadvisable to turn on, as you’d likely end up accidentally tweeting an image gallery you meant to keep private.

Minbox makes most sense for private file sharing, and I hope they’ll add, say, Twitter DM and Facebook private message support in the future. That’d make the most sense.

Seems Like I’ve Seen That Before…

Ge.tt: Minbox’ older competitor

Now, Minbox isn’t the only app in town that lets you share links to files before they’re fully uploaded. In fact, the web app Ge.tt has been doing this since 2011. You can drag-and-drop files (up to 2Gb total) into your browser, and it’ll instantly give you a short URL you can share, before everything’s uploaded.

Minbox makes it simpler by being directly actionable, letting you actually send your files via email in the same action as starting the upload. And, it lives on your Mac’s menubar, so there’s no webpage to keep open while your files continue to upload — or the inherent problems of failed browser uploads that’s especially troublesome with large files.

A Halfway House with some Nice Tricks

Which brings up one more thing: Minbox lives at a slightly uneasy spot between the Mac and the web. You upload via the Mac, but your files are stored online, and your recipients will see them in the browser by default. And that’s nice: they can see a whole folder of RAW files or watch a video without downloading it. The web interface looks decent, too, though it doesn’t display PNG files with transparency very well.

Then, the app itself is rather tied to the web. The login/queue screen is a web view, and tends to be a tad slow to respond — or refreshes at odd intervals.But that’s not too big of an issue, especially since that app does work reliably once you’re logged in.

But the rest of the web integration is practically missing. You can’t manage uploaded files, and the only way to manage your email notification settings (which can get noisy, since it emails you each time a file is viewed by default) is through a link you’ll get in an email. There’s no way to manage your account, or tweak settings like that in the Mac app.

That’s not a deal killer, per-se, but it’s for sure something the team will have to address going forward.

Go Try Minbox

Minbox is ready for you to try today, and if you have to send files of any size privately to colleagues on a regular basis, then you should definitely give it a shot. It’s simple to use, does what it says on the box, and is almost guaranteed to be quicker and simpler than whatever other file sharing tool you’re using right now. It’s free by default and will keep your files online for 30 days with no upload limits. There’s pro accounts coming as well, which will add extra features and indefinite storage.

Get in the queue soon.

There’s one caveat, though: you’ll need to wait to get in. If you download the app today, you’ll have to get in the queue to try the app, similar to the way Mailbox worked when it first launched on the iPhone. The wait shouldn’t be too long, though, as one of my friends downloaded it yesterday and had a 3 day wait time.

So go download it, get in the queue, then let us know what you think of it. It’s not going to replace Dropbox, or CloudApp, or email, but it’s a good compliment app for something that none of those apps do great.

Web development — and app development — is an ever-growing industry. Over at ThemeForest, there are thousands of website themes available because developers spend time coding them. But it’s not easy to construct one of those masterpieces. It takes knowledge, effort, and the right tools.

Here at Mac.AppStorm, we try to make sure you know about the latest and greatest in software machinery. The best software tools. Today I’m going to introduce you to ten of the best code and markup editors available on the Mac, from free feature-packed apps to paid workhorses. They’re first and foremost designed to help you code and write markup, but most are customizable enough that they can be great writing apps, too.

Let’s jump right in.

What are Your Favorites?

Well, that’s our list of this year’s best code/markup/text editors for the Mac, but we’d love to know what you use and why. Let us know in the comments below!

I’m a big fan of Dropbox, but I don’t think it’s necessarily the easiest to use of the various cloud storage services I subscribe to. That said, if I could find a way to make it work better for me, I’d probably use it a lot more.

Spotdox extends the functionality of Dropbox, giving it that extra oomph and making it work just that little bit better. Putting all of your files in your browser so you can upload anything to Dropbox at anytime, Spotdox wants to make Dropbox go the extra mile. Will a little extra access make me love Dropbox more and turn Spotdox into a winner?

Making Dropbox Better

Spotdox is a tiny little app that runs from your menu bar or Dock. You won’t really even notice it on your Mac, and the app itself doesn’t do a whole lot. You won’t use it to browse Dropbox or access your files or anything like that. You will need to have it running at all times, though, so make sure you keep it open.

With the Spotdox app running on my Mac, I can access my computer with a browser.

You’ll use Spotdox to access your Mac’s files from your browser, but it doesn’t just have to be your Dropbox files. When you launch Spotdox for the first time, it will ask for authorization to connect to your Dropbox account, and each time I tried to use Spotdox, I let Dropbox know it was okay to connect up. When Spotdox is connected to Dropbox, the menu bar icon will glow blue.

The app will connect you to Spotdox’s website in your browser. Pretty much all of the files from your Mac will be viewable in your browser on the Spotdox website, and your Spotbox homepage will have links to the contents of what are likely to be the most used folders on your Mac. You’ll see your Home folder, Hard Disk, and Documents, Downloads, and Desktop.

View the files in any folder on your computer.

Click on any one of those to see its contents. You won’t be able to interact with your files on the Spotdox website in the same way that you could in Finder, and that’s probably a good thing for security reasons. What Spotdox does is show you what files are where and get file previews. You can get a little more information, too, like file size, extension, when it was last updated, and a few notes, like the dimensions of an image.

You can’t move your files around or delete them, but what you can do is add a file to Dropbox that isn’t currently in there. Once I got my head wrapped around what Spotdox actually does (and doesn’t) do, I was sort of blown away. Forgot to add some files to Dropbox, but now you’re on a different machine and really need them? Spotdox can help. Remembered to shift your files to Dropbox, but you did something foolish and interrupted the upload? Spotdox to the rescue!

Preview a file, get more info, or copy it to Dropbox.

But What Is It?

What Spotdox won’t do is move files from your Downloads folder to your Documents or allow you to delete or edit anything on your computer. Which is great. Unless you’ve got a good reason (and there are good reasons, don’t get me wrong) you don’t want to just log on to some website and start messing around in your actual files on your actual computer. That’s weird and a little bit scary, again unless of course you have a good reason for doing it, know what you’re up to, and trust the company accessing your data.

That’s not what you’re doing here. Instead, you’re uploading the file to Dropbox, in a special Spotdox folder. The file isn’t actually getting copied to your Dropbox folder, and it won’t get moved there until you sync with Dropbox. Once you’ve got the file into Dropbox from the Spotdox website, you can download it to another computer via Dropbox or share it with colleagues.

Remove files from Dropbox, too. They’ll be added to your Downloads folder.

If your Dropbox account gets filled up from all the uploading you’re doing, no worries. Spotdox can access all of your Dropbox files and send them to your Downloads folder if you want. This allows you to add files, like images or videos, to Dropbox away from your computer and send them to your main machine, bypassing the need to email stuff to yourself.

Security and Final Thoughts

I was concerned about security issues with something like Spotdox looking at all of my files, and if security concerns are a dealbreaker for you, I don’t really blame you. But it’s maybe not as bad as it could be. Spotdox is only looking at thumbnails, previews, and your file structure. Yes, that is a lot of information, and if you have credit card numbers or passwords in a text file, that’s probably going to be visible in a preview, and that preview image exists somewhere on Spotdox’s servers. They assure users they get rid of everything after about ten minutes, though, so your stuff isn’t hanging around indefinitely, and any file transfers you initiate are handled by Dropbox, not Spotdox.

If you’ve ever made it away from home and realized you’d forgotten to email that very important file, Spotdox can be a huge help. The caveats to that are that you’ll need to have both your computer and Spotdox running, but if you can manage that, it’s a great little productivity booster, especially if you rely on Dropbox to get your stuff done.

It’s the season for game console news, with both Sony and Microsoft recently unveiling their new game consoles, and Nintendo having beaten them to the punch by releasing the Wii U last winter. That’s, of course, at the same time that mobile devices and Macs are becoming more popular for gaming, and with AirPlay through an Apple TV, your iPad or Mac can power some serious widescreen gaming.

That doesn’t make consoles obsolete, of course. iOS devices have great touch and motion capacities, but the Xbox’ Kinetic gesture controls and the Wii’s motion controller — not to mention the gamepads used in all consoles — give console gaming a serious leg-up. Then, there’s the exclusive titles — from Mario to Halo — that are only on consoles.

That’s why we’re wondering if you have a game console, or if the announcements of new consoles have you thinking about buying one. We’d love to hear your thoughts on console versus Mac/iOS gaming in the comments below!

Earlier this year, I made the move to a MacBook Pro being my primary machine after years of having a desktop with a supplemental laptop. This change really just acknowledged the way I already used my computer since I seldom sat down in front of my several year old desktop. Over time I’d moved to doing almost all my work on my MacBook. In fact, for much of the last six month before making the change, the most common way I accessed my desktop was by remoting to it from my laptop.

This change lets me be more mobile and that brings a lot of freedom when working, but also adds a few challenges with having a computer that’s meant to be on the go. Over the last couple of years while gradually making the switch from my laptop being a supporting machine to my primary computer, I’ve come to use several apps that help simply the job. Let’s look at a few of them.

Conclusion

The increased power and resources available in laptops today makes them a viable option for a full time computing platform. The ability to take your work away from the desk when traveling or just when you need a change of scenery make the decision even more appareling. While laptops face additional challenges in network connectivity and battery life, these apps can help make them less problematic.

It’s now my turn to tell you about all the amazing apps I’ve found and kept using to this day, after years of reviewing tons of wonderful software for Mac.Appstorm. Some of these won’t surprise you; in fact, they might have been repeated several times by other authors that have posted in this series. However, I hope you get some cool ideas as to how you could use some of these apps, or perhaps pick up a few new apps that you hadn’t heard of.

I’ve broken these apps down into categories of what I generally do with them. Hopefully that’ll make this easier to read and relate to. Let’s do this!

Just Alfred

I have to admit I wasn’t really a fan of Alfred until a few weeks ago, when I decided to get into it after I read Pedro Lobo’s Alfred articles. Now I have Alfred with the Powerpack and workflows for everything: creating a reminder, rebooting into my Boot Camp partition, creating new notes in Evernote, and a long etc.

The other features of this launcher are of course a huge plus as well, I have a bunch of custom sites setup to be launched with a keyboard shortcut, and the clipboard and snippets integration have completely replaced a bunch of apps I used in the past like CopyLess and SnipEdges. Nowadays, I couldn’t use my Mac without it.

Note Taking

I’m a hardcore Evernote user, I’ve been a fan for years and have notes on everything from long overdue to-do lists, to a huge catalog of audio notes for songwriting. It works for me as an immense archive with neat organization, and the newest Mac update has made it even more of a delight to use.

However, there are times when I’m concentrated on work and I don’t have time to open up the app and set up my new note with tags, corresponding notebook, format and more. That’s where apps like Scrawl and Noteworthy come in. They’re simple little menu bar note apps that let me scribble things quickly without getting too distracted. Neither of them are perfect, but they work as a temporary storage place for my notes so that they can later be moved over and organized in Evernote.

Entertainment and Procrastination

I love Spotify. Not only does it let me stream music from the web, but it has also replaced iTunes as my library music player, since it also gives me access to the music in my hard drive. The in-app plugins make it even better, giving the app integration with services like Last.fm and sites like Pitchfork. Really, I only open iTunes nowadays to download podcasts, transfer new music and sync my iOS devices.

As far as social networks go, Tweetbot is by far the best Twitter app I’ve used. It’s pretty, very easy to navigate, supports Tweet Marker, integrates well with its iPhone counterpart, and it even lets me send articles to Readability right from the app. It’s a dream come true and totally worth the money. For interacting with Instagram, I use Carousel, which gives me a very native-like glance at my feed.

Work, Work, Work

For writing, there’s nothing else like Byword for me. It’s fast and easy to get started working on it, it provides a very clean and pretty writing environment for keeping distractions away. Markdown, exporting, line and paragraph focus, those are all just a few more goodies that make Byword one of my favorite apps.

On those days where I’m dreading work and putting it off with procrastination, I use Eggscellent. It’s a task/time-tracking app that makes you productive through time intervals of breaks and hard work, similarly to the Pomodoro Technique.

The Rest

• TicToc: A simple menu bar app that tracks the time you spend on given tasks. It’s useful when I’m not working with Eggscellent and would like to just know how much time I’m spending writing or watching my YouTube feed.
• Seashore: A pretty basic image editor based on GIMP. It’s very easy and fast to work with, and it fills my ocassional image editing needs.
• Broom: I have an old low-end Macbook, and as a poor college student, I’m always hurting for HDD space. Broom lets me easily see which files or folders are taking up large amounts of space, so that I can delete them or move them over to a DVD (no, not even an external HDD).
• JiTouch: This app extends the functionality of the trackpad by giving you customizable gestures for pretty much anything. I almost exclusively use it in my web browser for switching and closing tabs, but just with those two things, it’s something I couldn’t live without.
• F.lux: It lowers the intensity of your screen’s glow at night so that you don’t strain your eyes or get into weird sleep cycles. Some people can’t stand it, but I find it quite soothing.
• Chocolat: The perfect text editor. It’s a shame I don’t have much of a need for it, since I love using this app.

Closing Thoughts

As I’ve mentioned previously, the best tool is the one that doesn’t get in your way. Some of you may find my picks inadequate, but for the moment, all of them are working out great in my workflow. In a few months, who knows? I tend to switch most apps pretty quickly, with only a few being mainstays in my computer (Evernote and Byword, for example). But what about you? What do you think of my picks, and where would you differ? Let me know in the comments!

Typographic artwork is very popular at the moment with all sorts images being created, from maps to movie posters. They look really cool but don’t you just wish that you could do it yourself using any picture you want?

Wordify brings creating these types of graphics to your Mac in a very simple to use app that will convert any image you want into a typographic piece of art. It gives you beautiful results, and actually looks great doing so.

Word Art, for Real

Wordify lets you drag images directly to the main window to start converting into typographic artwork

As soon as you launch Wordify, you’re presented with a small window onto which you can drag an image. There’s a selection of templates to get you started, ranging from shapes to animals. Wordify works best when using portraits of people or images shot on clear backgrounds as you get the best effect from it but in my testing I was able to get some pretty good results from photos on multicoloured backgrounds.

If you’ve not got any pictures to use, Wordify includes some templates to get you started and see how the app works

The app is sparse when it comes to controls and only has three button on display once an image is loaded, one of them for deleting the image. The other buttons start the text rendering and provide access to the settings.

In Your Own Words

Once you’ve selected an image to use, you’re then able to customise some of the text options

There aren’t many options in the way of settings but what you can customise is useful nonetheless. The default text used is, rather fittingly, “Here’s To The Crazy Ones” but can be changed to any text you wish. Only unique words are rendered so if you paste in your favourite quote and it contains the same word a few times, you’re not going to see it more than others. So, there’s no way to get a phrase — even just two words — to be guaranteed to show up together.

You can specify the text to use and Wordify will randomly place the words with varying sizes throughout the image

You’re also able to customise the font, size and colour of the text generated. A nice touch is the option to completely randomise the font used if you’re not too interested or would like to see what your image would look like in different fonts. I like this option as you get to mix up all the different fonts that you have available, resulting in some really great looking artwork.

You can see a preview of your image being generated within the app’s window once you start the conversion

Instead of just outputting an image for you to use, Wordify shows you a preview of the artwork being generated and, once finished, results in a PDF that’s approximately 10×8 inches. Not only can you print it at home but because it’s a PDF, there’s no loss in quality so you can scale it up to almost any size you wish. If you think the artwork is truly special, you’ll find no shortage of online printing companies that can print your typographic piece onto canvas or large poster formats.

Room For Improvement

Whilst you can pick any colour you’d like for the text, you’re limited to just using some RGB sliders without being able to specify an exact colour

The app does have one or two weak points that are worth mentioning. Although you can specify any colour you want for your text, there’s no colour picker or even palette. Colours are controlled by a red, green and blue slider but with no feedback on the exact colour you’ve chosen. If you’ve got a very specific colour you’d like to use then you’ll need to have a keen eye to make sure it’s the same.

Some fonts (such as Wingdings) are symbol fonts that contain no readable characters so you’ll often find random symbols appear within your artwork. I’d like to see the option to specify a number of fonts to use rather than everything in my font library.

Generated PDFs are also just opened, in my case, with Preview. Whilst Wordify generates the PDF, the actual saving and management of it is done within your preferred PDF viewer. I find this a little counterintuitive as the file that’s generated is a temporary PDF, you need to save (or move) it using Preview if you want to keep it. It would be a little easier if the app simply saved the PDFs to a folder rather than sent them to Preview first.

You can alter the colour and fonts used, creating some remarkable pieces of work

Conclusion

Wordify is an interesting app and despite it’s lack of customisable options is quite fun to use. Not every image you use will come out great but once you get used to the types of images to use, you’ll have plenty of fun. The fact that Wordify saves artwork as lossless PDF files means that you can create some truly great posters and have them printed to put up on your walls.

With Adobe’s “no CS7″ announcement, everyone seems a little shaken up. Some are even looking for good software alternatives already. If you’re one of them, this app may catch your attention.

Let us introduce you to MotionComposer. MotionComposer is Aquafadas’ answer to Adobe’s Edge Animate or Tumult’s Hype, so if you are a web developer having a tough time animating websites with HTML5 and CSS3, it’s an app you should be checking out.

MotionComposer HTML5 Preview window.

MotionComposer Overview

We’ve all played around with lines and lines of code trying to conjure up the coolest HTML5 and CSS3 animations, but we can all agree that this can be a little hectic and time consuming. That’s why apps like MotionComposer exist.

MotionComposer gives you the ability to create your animated vision using a friendly UI that generates the code for you. You won’t have to deal with any code, which makes this app perfect for non-developers.

MotionComposer’s intuitive UI

Working with MotionComposer

The first time you open up MotionComposer, you will be greeted with the welcome screen that helps you get started with the product. You will find the intro video to be the most useful. (I like videos, anyways.) Technically, by watching their introductory video, you can get a good idea on how to operate this application and create something basic – add to that the fact that you can use pre-made templates, and you’ll be set.

Once you start your first project – whether you use a pre-made template or start with a blank document – you will get a very clean UI that isn’t as daunting and as intimidating as most design/development apps. This is great because users won’t have to spend so much time learning the ins and outs of the app.

MotionComposer gives you a canvas and timeline UI that most users will be familiar with. You can interact with these pieces easily. The other parts are as intuitive as the timeline and canvas, but they do tend to be more option-heavy. Most of your time will be spent on the Inspector tab where you can edit slides and document settings as well as Components (layers/items) gradients, effects, opacity, and other properties. This area gives you a lot of flexibly when creating your content, and it is all labeled and divided into understandable chunks.

The upper section of the app let’s you add media, text, rectangles and preview or publish your work. This is where knowing what you can do with a rectangle comes in handy. If you round all the borders of the rectangle, you can make a circle. You can create many shapes and other things with CSS3, but MotionComposer only gives you the rectangle. It would be nice if it gave you access to other CSS3 shapes. It would be even cooler if you could create your own elaborate shape.

Transforming a rectangle into a circle.

MotionComposer’s Missing Tools

As cool as it is to play around with MotionComposers capabilities, though, I can’t help but to notice a few things missing. For starters, custom fonts aren’t supported. The app only allows you to use web-safe fonts, so if you want to get creative with your typography, you’ll need to use pictures instead of fonts.

That isn’t it. The ability to add shadows, or glow effects to elements is only supported for your Flash export. Why? You can achieve these effects with CSS3, so why doesn’t the app support that? This goes for text as well. If you want to add shadows or some kind of style to your text, you won’t be able to do it with this app.

MotionComposer’s publish settings.

Which brings us to this question: why is there no code editor? Sure, some may not want to deal with code, but what if you want to learn how to do this by hand? MotionComposer could serve as an amazing learning tool, but sadly there isn’t even a preview of the code.

The code editor would be useful if you want to add your own styles, too. You could add a crazy gradient to your text and then animate it. Of course you can do this after you export it, but that will probably have you deal with other factors of your animation.

MotionComposer’s exported project.

The Verdict

MotionComposer has a lot of room to grow, but it is hard not to see the advantages of using an app like this one. You can create amazing HTML5 banners, ads, sliders, and so on with ease; you could even make a simple piano, if you so desire. However, if you plan on doing bigger, more elaborate things, you might want to spend your money on another app. Which is interesting considering that MotionComposer’s main competitor is 100 dollars less and doesn’t require you to have Flash player.

The animated GIF has never been so prevalent. What was once a way to bring some motion to a very static internet has now become a hugely popular way to share short animated clips without the need for YouTube or other Flash-based video. Unlike internet video, animated GIFs work in most browsers, requires no plug-ins, and even instant messaging services such as iMessage support them.

Until recently, creating animated GIFs was a painstaking process, either using apps such as Photoshop to build them frame-by-frame or relying upon web services to convert videos with little control. Now there’s an app for Mac OS X called GIF Brewery which aims to make generating animated GIFs from video clips as easy as possible.

GIF Brewery works by converting video clips (such as MPEG–4) but providing you with controls over the finished GIF with options for as resolution, frame rate and even special effects. All of this lets you create truly customised animated GIFs that you have complete control over.

Getting Started

When you launch GIF Brewery, well, not a lot happens. There’s no introduction or Open… window, leaving you wondering what to do or if the app is working correctly. Moreover, the app doesn’t support the Resume feature of OS X Lion or Mountain Lion so if you quit and re-launch the app, the same happens – the menu bar and dock icon are the only clues that the app is running. Only after selecting File > Open… does any part of the interface appaear.

GIF Brewery has a very easy to use interface that isn’t overly complex

One feature I’d like to see in future versions would be for the app to have an Open… window or splash screen, something that lets the user immediately know that the app is ready to use.

You can open any number of movie files that are playable on your Mac natively within QuickTime, which covers a wide range of formats including MPEG–4 (iTunes purchases aren’t supported). The app presents the video file with a progress bar as well as information about the video’s resolution and duration, all useful to know when you’re wanting to generate a small GIF.

You can specify the start and end of the animated GIF you want to create by dragging the cursor along the progress bar to the desired positions and selecting the appropriate option. For fine-tuning the exact location, there’s even the ability to scrub frame-by-frame until you get to the exact frame you want. Your desired selection is highlighted in blue, making it easy to distinguish between it and the rest of the clip.

Special Effects

Video clips can be resized, cropped and rotated before you export as a GIF

A great feature of GIF Brewery is that all of the changes you make to the video file before generating the GIF are done on the fly. Resizing or cropping the image gives you an instant preview so you know exactly what your GIF will look like without altering either the final GIF or the video you’re working with. You can even rotate or flip the canvas if you’re wanting to change the orientation of the finished GIF.

GIF Brewery includes a number of special effect filters (such as blur and greyscale) that can be applied non-destructively

Going beyond just grabbing portions of video files and converting them, the app includes some useful edit effects to further enhance and customise your finished GIF. A number of filters can be applied non-destructively (meaning you can remove them at any time and not have to start again), from blur to comic book effects.

Oh Hai Meme!

You can overlay different text at different times of the clip

A popular use for animated GIFs is to use them for internet memes. Usually this involves a static image overlaid with text but animated GIFs are fast becoming as popular. GIF Brewery has you covered, offering the ability to overlay text which can be placed wherever you want, simply by dragging them. Even better, you can add multiple pieces of text and specify when they appear and disappear.

Final Cut

Rendering the GIF is as simple as pressing the Create GIF button and the app takes care of everything automatically. Before the GIF is saved, you’re presented with a preview of the final product, along with a very useful file size indicator. Should you want to tweak your GIF further, it can simply be discarded.

You’re able to change almost every aspect of the GIF, from the number of frames to generate, the delay between each frame and how it loops. Just by using this app I was able to discover animated GIFs had a lot more features available than I realised. Because of this, I found that some tweaking was needed to get the GIF down to a suitable file size and I was able to shave off 2MB just by changing some of the settings myself, along with getting a smoother-looking animation. Your progress editing a GIF can be saved and a project file created, letting you open and continue at any time.

That’s a Wrap

If you’re someone who likes to share animated GIFs but has always wanted to create them yourself, GIF Brewery is the perfect app for you. It’s very easy to use and includes a comprehensive set of options, effects and tools to create your perfect animated GIF. A splash screen when loading or more information on how to start using the app would be a nice addition but overall GIF Brewery is a must-have app for anyone wanting to create their own animated GIFs.

If you’d like to see some examples of GIF Brewery’s work, check out the app’s website.

It shouldn’t be so difficult to find that one document you need, but it often is. You’re stuck searching between different storage services and apps, and it’s still tough to find what you need. doo, our sponsor this week, is the app that just might change that.

doo is the one app for your documents. It brings together all your documents, wherever you keep them: in folders on your Mac, or in Dropbox, Google Drive, Skydrive, email accounts, and more. It then automatically generates intelligent tags for individual categories such as Companies, Document Types, Filetypes, People, Places and more, to help you quickly sort through your documents. It also seamlessly integrates with scanners and your smartphone’s camera, and uses OCR to let you search for text even if it’s in an image or scan.

doo lets you find your documents wherever you work, with native apps for your Mac, iPhone, and iPad, as well as for Android and Windows 8 devices. It’ll also help you make sure you never lose documents again with its built in backup that’ll let you keep everything organized in the doo cloud with EU-standard security.

doo organizes every document in your personal and business live, giving you a quick and effective start into a paperless life.

Go Get it!

Sound like what you’ve been waiting for? Then why wait any longer? You can download doo for free from the App Store for your Mac and start finding documents quicker then ever. You can get 1Gb of doo cloud backup space for free, then upgrade to doo Premium starting at $4.99/month for 10Gb of storage and more premium features coming soon.

Undoubtedly the first time you used a real-time collaborative web tool like Google Docs, you were wowed. I definitely was, and the way it lets multiple users make changes to the same document at the same time even when they’re halfway around the world from each other keeps me using it to this day. The only problem is that it’s limited to a few Google tools, and is only for Google users. You can’t just flip a switch and use Google Docs’ collaboration in Photoshop or whatever app you’re using.

Enter Screenhero, an app designed to bring real-time collaboration to any app, or website, or anything for that matter. And it actually really works, though not perhaps quite as smoothly as Docs sharing. Here’s why it’s worth checking out.

The Rundown

Screenhero is still in beta, but it’s a public beta so it’s open to all. The best part of its beta status is that it’s also completely free for now, so you can pop over to Screenhero.com to download the app for nil. You won’t find it in the App Store, though.

Screenhero is available for Mac and Windows and cross-platform collaboration is fully supported. Even though this is Mac.Appstorm you can still invite your Windows friends too. Is it a viable way to run Mac apps on your Windows computer or Windows on your Mac? Probably not, and I’ll cover why below.

You’ll feel right at home with the interface of Screenhero if you’ve used Skype or iChat.

Using the App

Fire up Screenhero and you’ll land on a window that immediately recognizable if you’ve used a communication tool like iChat, Google Talk, or Skype. Basically, it’s a friend-list of all your acquaintances that use Screenhero. You can see when they’re online, offline, or if they have another status (ex. busy, idle, etc.). Unless you’ve been sent the invite from another user, your friend-list will likely be empty. The burden to the user arises in that you must now use the Add People+ button to find some collaborators. Adding them is as easy as sending a link via email that instructs them on how to download the app and start sharing.

Once you’ve enlisted a buddy to work with, you need only double-click his/her username in order to start a sharing session. You’ll have the option to share everything, just one window, or a particular application. I know this has become the standard but I still must acknowledge gratitude to developers who realize you may not want to cede control of your whole screen to someone else.

My Screen Es Su Screen

When the sharing begins, the magic of Screenhero begins to show. Instead of taking over the mouse from your control, there are now two mouse pointers, the original and one with the username of the person with whom you’re sharing. Each person can click and interact with whatever is on the screen (within the bounds of the sharing type chosen). It makes the experience less of “watch while I fix this problem” and opens up the possibility of “let’s solve this together”. It’s a type of collaboration you don’t often see unless you sit down next to someone and because Screenhero doesn’t limit you to a productivity suite, the world of possibilities opens. You could screen-share a Photoshop mock-up or even a game if your bandwidth were fast enough.

Having the two cursors adds to the functionality because it doesn’t mean one person runs the show.

The screen-sharing quality is pretty good and adapts based on internet speed. Overall, I found it to be smooth enough with very, very few lags or glitches. The connection between the two computers is direct, according to the Screenhero website, and I was even able to fire up Bastion and experience a playable game via someone else’s screen. I’m not going to say it you can do the same with a resource-heavy first-person shooter, but I didn’t have one on hand to try.

Playing games from someone else’s screen isn’t out of the question with Screenhero.

One small smudge on the otherwise seamless two-cursor integration is the requirement that the users switch back and forth as they interact with the content on the screen. It’s almost like bringing the window into focus, except because each pointer needs to do so, there’s a back and forth of clicking to focus to make a change. In most cases, this probably wouldn’t be a big deal given the ease-of-use of Screenhero, but it’s worth mentioning.

More Features

While in the screen-sharing mode, users can use a chat box to communicate. Voice chat is in the works according to the Screenhero website so hopefully that’s headed down the pipe in an upcoming release. One nifty thing to point out is that keyboard shortcuts set up on the peer computer will work from the host computer. For example, my wife has a different key combination to call up Alfred than I use so when we were sharing screens, I had to use her key combination to bring up the app. I’m sure the same goes for sharing to a Windows computer–for example, Ctrl-C for copy instead of Command-C, though I didn’t have one handy to test out. Lastly, Screenhero comes with a menubar shortcut so you can leave the app running in the background if you’re waiting on a collaborative appointment.

You can chat while you work and voice is in the works as well.

Hiccups

I ran into a few small issues while using Screenhero, but none are really deal breakers. The first is that you won’t be able to use an app in OS X’s fullscreen mode while using Screenhero. Doing so breaks the app’s functionality. In the same vein, you won’t be able to switch desktop workspaces either. Another small inconvenience is that if the peer’s mouse is hovering over the chat box on his/her screen, then it will appear frozen on your screen. In other words, the chat box isn’t transparent to the screensharing experience, and I did find myself wishing it were a bit smaller and inconspicuous.

Final Thoughts

Screenhero is quick, easy, and mostly unobtrusive. I would easily recommend it over a remote desktop app for things like technical support or educational purposes. It would also work for shared coding projects or collaborating on productivity suites, but it’s probably not fluid enough for high-resource gaming or highly intricate tasks like drawing vectors. Even though the recently revamped Google Hangouts offers a similar feature, I found it clunkier and less reliable than Screenhero. In the end, if you need a screen-sharing app that does a good job, look no farther than Screenhero, especially once they add voice chat.

In the continuing search for the perfect task management app, I’m trying out Organize:Me. More than just simple todos, Organize:Me gives you lots of awesome tools for creating and organizing everything you need to get done. With smart lists included, plus projects and categories, I should be able to finally stay on track.

Will Organize:Me be able to unseat my favorite task manager? I’ll take a look and see if it has all the features I need in a great todo app!

Get More Done

Organize:Me is one of those todo apps that I sort of find overwhelming. I take a look at it and think maybe I’ve gotten myself too deep into Getting Things Done territory, and I don’t have a map or compass to find my way back. There’s a lot going on, and not all of it makes sense right away. (What the heck is a “Context”?) That’s okay, because my eyes alighted upon the Add Task buttons like lanterns in the dark, and I know what to do with those.

Get organized in the main window.

Yeah, I’m going to add some tasks. There are two ways to create new todos. You can hit the plus sign and add a new task with all of the options, and there’s just about everything there that you need. Set start dates, end dates, and even review dates if you want to check in with a task. If the task repeats, this is the place to make that happen.

All of that may be too much for you right now and you just want to get your task into Organize:Me. That’s fine. You’ve got stuff to do, we all do, and spending a lifetime organizing your todos before you actually go out and do them may not be a priority. If that’s the case, take a look at Quick Add. There are only a few fields to fill out, and bam, you’ve got your task into the app. When you do find the time to get really particular about all of Organize:Me’s specifics, you can go back and edit the task.

There are a couple of different ways to add your tasks, and I like Quick Add.

There’s an inbox that will catch all new tasks. Your tasks will sit there until they’re completed, so they’ll be easy to find. If you need more organization from Organize:Me, though, check out the Focus categories. They’re sort of smart lists for all of your tasks, and your tasks will make their way there if they are flagged or are priority tasks.

Maybe that’s not enough organization for you. Maybe you’ve got to have all sorts of projects and categories for all of your tasks. Okay, then. You do you. Organize:Me has got this. You can create projects and “contexts” for your tasks. Context, as far as I can tell, is just a fancy word for category, but you can use projects and contexts to subcategorize all of your tasks to your heart’s content. Highlight your tasks with different colors to make them stand out, and use some rich text editing to fancy them up, too.

Change the context of your task to slot it into a category.

Does It Sync?

For my money, todo apps are really only useful if there’s a way I can see my tasks on other devices. I’m constantly checking in and checking things off my lists, and most of this happens away from my desk. I need my tasks on my iPhone, and lack of at least browser support so I can take a look at what I need to get done on the go is a dealbreaker. Luckily, Organize:Me has native apps for iPhone and iPhone. There’s also a Windows version if you’re using a Mac and a PC to tackle your massive task list.

There’s cloud sync available, and that’s what’s going to make all of those apps on different platforms work together. It’s not iCloud, though, is being handled by the developer, and is in “preview” right now. Even if you’re not planning on accessing your tasks on any other apps, syncing isn’t a bad idea. If anything ever happened to your Mac, your tasks would be one less thing you’d have to worry about losing.

Sync your tasks so you can access them on the go in the other Organize:Me apps

Final Thoughts

I really liked the ability to set review dates for tasks, something I’ve seen in super complicated apps before but is often absent from more easily accessibly apps for getting things done. Organize:Me does look like it’s got a lot going on, and that’s not to say it doesn’t, but it’s manageable. You won’t have to learn a whole new language of task management to use Organize:Me.

Take on board as many of Organize:Me’s tools or as few as you want, it’s up to you. It’s free for a 14-day trial, and then it’s $39.99 after that. While not inexpensive, you do get a chance to try it out and see if Organize:Me is the app to get you on track. With syncing, this is one of the most customizable todo apps I’ve seen. It works great, too, and has lots of options to make your workflow work better.