Since 2004, I’ve used Skype for free calls and instant messaging between friends, clients, and loved ones abroad. And because of brand loyalty, it took a while till I was convinced to try other communication apps, particularly mobile-based VoIP software like WhatsApp and Viber.

Between the two, I leaned towards Viber for its smooth user interface, the fact that it’s free to use with no ads lurking around, and how it works similarly to the way we’d call or SMS everyday. Unlike Skype’s mobile app, using Viber is like using a phone bumped with free calls and texts forever. And with over 200 million users and counting, it’s certainly becoming a strong contender against big names like Skype.

Well, that impression didn’t take long to seed as Viber announced its release of desktop versions (OS X and Windows) of the mobile app, both of which bring its best features to the desktop, along with video calling (still in beta) and call transfers from desktop to mobile. With this, Viber has taken another big step to becoming a potential alternative to Skype and many other desktop VoIP software.

How Viber Works on Your Desktop

To be able to use Viber on your desktop, you should have the mobile app installed on your phone. Once that’s done,  you’ll be issued an activation code after installing the desktop app. Type that in to activate your account and wait till your contacts sync and appear in your Contacts list. Mine took less than 10 seconds to complete.

Your Viber contacts synched to the desktop app.

You have four main options on the lefthand side of the app: Conversations, where all your chat conversations are stored; Contacts, which is your contacts list; Recents, which saves recent activity on Viber; and Dialer, the dial pad. The first three sections all have a search bar to make it easy for you to locate and retrieve your messages, recent activity, and contacts.

To chat, you can either search through your Contacts list or dial the number using the dialer. For the latter, you can directly call or start a conversation using either of the two green buttons found below the dial pad.

Conversations are pretty straightforward. Your chat bubbles are coloured blue, while the other party is white. Each has its own time stamp, with separators to indicate the date of each conversation. Similar to the mobile app, Viber also indicates if your messages have been delivered (double check marks) or sent (single check mark). Finally, below the avatar are the Call and Video (Beta) buttons. You can call anyone using Viber on their desktop or phone, while videos are limited to desktop-to-desktop connections.

Viber’s settings

Opening Viber’s Settings shows a series of options to adjust or change how Viber works. You can adjust the app’s audio input and output volume, set Viber to launch on system startup, select notifications and where they are positioned, and more. You can also deactivate your Viber account from your computer and share and connect it via Facebook and Twitter. Email invitations to join Viber can be done in a click of a button too.

You can’t call or SMS non-Viber users.

There are a few limitations. Besides desktop-only video calls, Viber only displays contacts registered on Viber, which means you can’t SMS or call a non-Viber user, and you can’t invite him or her to use Viber directly using the app. You’ll have to use the Invite by Email button and have him or her set up Viber manually.

With features, you can’t send video messages, stickers, or files from Viber for Mac. You can only receive them on your end. Emoticons aren’t supported either, so every message sent is rendered in plain text. You can, however, send photos and view them easily using Preview.

Using Viber on the Mac

Reading TechCrunch and GigaOM’s take on the new releases, both have only good things to say about Viber’s desktop app. True enough, it’s communication technology that is slowly moving away from traditional instant messaging (think Yahoo! Messenger) with the ability to transfer calls from desktop to mobile, sync messages between devices, and the fact that the user experience is closely integrated to how you would use Viber on your phone.

Chatting with my sister on Viber for Mac

This may be so, but I have mixed feelings about the desktop app after testing it out for a couple of days. On one hand, I really like how tightly integrated the desktop is to its mobile counterpart, which pretty much eliminates any learning curve when testing the app for the first time. I can sync my contacts and messages, and the ability to transfers my calls to my phone without dropping is pretty impressive. On the other hand, I’d say it stands in between instant messaging apps like Apple’s Messages and sophisticated VoIP software, falling behind the latter in terms of sound and video quality, plus features.

We Need More Ammo

Viber tends to rise and fall in terms of audio and video input/output, even on a stable internet connection. There are days when sound is excellent, and there are days when voice lags, echoes, and trails during a call. Static can also be heard at times, but it isn’t too heavy. This may or may not be the case for other users, of course, but I hope work to improve the quality of voice and video calls will continue, especially when on a weak or average wifi connection.

On its own, Viber for Mac does its job in that users can call and chat for free over the internet. But, unless its aim is solely to bring the mobile experience to the desktop, the possibility of Viber standing as a worthy contender against Skype and other VoIP software can happen with a couple more features, such as conducting group calls, sending video messages, inviting more than one person into the conversation, and file sharing.

This is certainly possible, seeing that Viber cares deeply about maintaining the success of its user experience. It’s only a matter of time before we see newer features added to the app that will further enhance its usability. As for stickers and emoticons, I can do away with those since I like Viber’s simplicity and straightforward approach to chat. I prefer to see the more important aspects of the app in the works, especially sound and video quality for calls and videos.

Free, High Quality Communication

In spite of its limitations, there’s no denying that Viber’s desktop apps are a sound addition to the available platforms. Users can enjoy free, high quality communication on the Mac and Windows while being able to switch between the desktop and mobile easily. In short, you can jump right into the app without drowning or feeling lost. That, in my opinion, is the best thing about this app.

For sure, Viber has plenty of support to further improve and innovate, and part of this may happen once the company begins to monetize the service. Viber CEO Talmon Marco confirms this in GigaOm’s article, so expect stickers and other add-ons to go on sale anytime this year.

Cloud storage is anything but a panacea for small SSDs. You might have 25Gb of iCloud storage, or 100Gb in Dropbox, but you’ll need that much space free on your Mac to take advantage of it. Run out of local storage, and cloud storage will stop working for you too. On a mobile device, sure, you can use Dropbox without it taking up tons of local space, but on your Mac or PC, it’s either store everything locally too, or resort to using cloud storage from your browser.

It’s the failure of cloud storage, one that’s surprisingly not talked about that much. Evernote, Dropbox, and iCloud — even your email if you use a native mail app — all take up local storage, something that can become quite an issue if you have a 11″ MacBook Air with a 64Gb SSD, or even the more spacious 128Gb SSD that’s rather standard across the board these days.

The freshly released ExpanDrive 3, though, is at least a partial solution to this problem. It lets you mount Dropbox and other online storage services, and treat them like an external HD. All the cloud storage goodness, without taking up extra local storage on your Mac.

ExpanD your Mac

ExpanDrive’s been around for quite some time; our former editor David Appleyard reviewed it back in 2009, and we even looked at it again just last month. In essence — until now, at least — ExpanDrive let you connect your FTP accounts to Finder, so you can quickly upload files to your site without having to switch over to another app. Nice and useful, though a tad geeky and something that just everyone wouldn’t necessarily need.

Fast-forward to today, though, and ExpanDrive just turned into something that almost anyone might want to use, since the new ExpanDrive now lets you connect to Dropbox, and will also very soon let you connect to Google Drive, Skydrive, and Box.net. That’s in addition to supporting more of the techie cloud storage services — sFTP, WebDAV, Amazon S3, Rackspace Cloud Files, Dreamhost DreamObjects, and OpenStack Swift — than ever before. If you use cloud storage to do anything — share documents, backup photos, or host your website — ExpanDrive is the app that’ll make cloud storage as simple to use as an external HD.

Your cloud drives in ExpanDrive

You’ll just authenticate ExpanDrive with your Dropbox account, connect, and then open Finder. You’ll see a new “removable drive” on the bottom of the left sidebar with your full Dropbox ready for you to use. You can browse through folders, open files, drag-and-drop files between folders or upload files from your Mac, and anything else you’d expect. It’s just like an external hard drive, except it’s in the cloud.

And you’re not limited to just one, either. You can add multiple Dropbox accounts, something you can’t do with the official Dropbox app. You can also add your FTP and Amazon S3 storage accounts, and soon, you’ll be able to connect to Google Drive and Skydrive the very same way.

The cloud, a touch closer than before

It’ll be a bit slow — it took around 2-5 seconds to show the contents of a folder the first time I opened it, in my tests — and the contents of your Dropbox won’t show up in Spotlight search (again, at least not in my tests). Apps also won’t be able to save previous versions of your files as they would with local storage, so you may end up with some warnings. That’s not such a bit deal, though, especially with Dropbox since it stores previous versions online itself.

…nearly perfect.

Beyond that, it worked great. Accessing Dropbox in ExpandDrive was faster than accessing files on my server via FTP, and with it integrated in Finder, it is just as easy to use from any app as the normal Dropbox folder. You can even see how much free space you have on Dropbox through Finder’s info pane, but oddly it showed the wrong total size of my account even though the free amount was correct.

So… Dropbox Without the Dropbox App?

With FTP and Amazon S3 storage, ExpanDrive makes obvious sense if you want to access your files without resorting to opening Transmit or another file transfer app. But with Dropbox — or Google Drive and Skydrive — it’s not quite as obvious of a solution, especially since using those services’ native apps would let you access the files with no delays, and you’d be able to find files via Spotlight.

But let’s assume you have a 100Gb Dropbox Pro account, and a 128GB SSD on your MacBook (like me). If you’ve got, say, Photoshop, Office, and a dozen App Store apps installed, plus a couple movies and a vacation’s worth of photos, your SSD will start feeling cramped pretty quick. That 100Gb of Dropbox storage won’t all be useable, since by default Dropbox will store all of your Dropbox files in the cloud and locally on your Mac. You can selectively sync folders, keeping some in the cloud only, but then your only way to access them is through your browser.

Choosing what folders Dropbox syncs

ExpanDrive gives you another option by letting you use Dropbox as pure cloud storage directly from Finder. All your Dropbox files are only stored online, so you’ve got extra free space locally, and can still use Dropbox shared folders and other features. And, you can use more than one Dropbox account at the same time, which is great if you have a work and personal account.

That makes it worth trying out, especially if storage space is at a premium for you, and you’re working online most of the time.

And a Special Discount

Best of all, we’ve got a 50% discount for our readers. If you buy a copy of ExpanDrive 3 this month, you can use the coupon code APPSTORM to get ExpanDrive 3 for just $19. Or, you can download the free trial for a week and see if it’s what you need to tame your cloud storage.

You’re the oddball. There’s that one built-in Mac app that everyone else replaces, and yet, you love it. It’s built-in, works great, and you can’t figure out why everyone else doesn’t love it. But they don’t. They rave about the alternate apps, and act like Apple didn’t even include any app that could possibly do that thing.

All the while, you’re being productive each day with the built-in app you got for free, and you’re wondering why everyone else is wasting their time and money on alternates.

For me, the built-in amazing app is Preview. Everyone’s always looking for a great PDF app, or simple image editor, or annotation app … and here’s one of the best, built-into OS X for free. For our writer Pierre Wizla, it’s Mail.app, and he’s showed us how to turn it into the best email app.

So what’s your favorite built-in app in OS X, one you love more than alternates and think is a hidden gem in OS X? Looking forward to the discussion below!

There have been good things happening in the world of screen capture apps, with new apps becoming available for Mac and old favorites updating with new features. In the giant sea of screen capture apps, though, it can be hard to find just the right one for you, the one that has all the features you need and not too much of the stuff you don’t.

We’re going to amble through seven great apps for creating and annotating screenshots. They run the gamut of price and features, and hopefully at the end of it all, you’ll have a better handle on what’s out there and what’ll work for you.

The Apps

Acorn 4

Acorn in an image editor, but it does screenshots, too.

Acorn was just updated, and while it’s not, strictly speaking, a screen capture app, it can create images of your entire screen using a keystroke. That’s pretty much what a screen capture app does, so it’s got the chops. The new screenshot will open up in Acorn, and you’ll have all of the usual image editing tools at your disposal.

A good screen capture app is going to help you create annotations without making you work for it, and Acorn’s got that down. Create shapes and outlines to draw attention to sections of your image; even arrows are standard. Easily add text to explain what’s going on and let your recipients know what’s important. While all of this is pretty standard for a screen capture app, you’ve got everything else that comes with a great image editor, like adjustment filters, fancy brushes, and lots of ways to select your image.

Price: $29.99
Requires: OS X 10.8 or later, 64-bit processor
Developer: Flying Meat

Clarify

Clarify lets you add notes to your screenshot.

More than just screenshots, Clarify lets you add note-like text to your images. Before or after capturing an image, add a subject and title for your screenshot. You can also write out a few notes below the image, too. If you need to include several images, that isn’t a problem. Just add them to the Clarify document, giving each its own image title and description.

Stacking images with a single subject within a project is really useful if you’re sharing your screenshots with someone else. Organizing them in Clarify ensures they won’t appear out of order and each has the proper context. Because Clarify saves in a weird, Clarify-specific file format, it may not seem like that does you a lot of good, but you can export your notes to Evernote or share them via the Clarify website.

Price: $29.99
Requires: OS X 10.6.6 or later
Developer: Blue Mango Learning Systems

Voila

Voila creates screenshots with personality.

Voila is something really special. Sure, you can take screenshots, and you can even make video screencasts or grab pages from your browser. That’s cool, but there are other tools that do that and will give you the annotations you’ll find in Voila. Text, shapes, and arrows are all here and will help you create more informative screenshots.

What’s so special, then? Everything else. Voila includes lots of stamps and stickers to really personalize your screenshot. I can definitely see the use of adding stamps that mark your screenshot as “private” or a PDF as “paid.” Even the “pow!” and “bang!” would be nice touches if you want to call out great work. I’m not sure the sparkles, lens flares, and bling jewels do a whole lot productivity-wise, but I sure do like having them available to give my screenshots that something extra.

Price: $29.99
Requires: OS X 10.6.6 or later
Developer: Global Delight Technologies Pvt. Ltd

Napkin

Napkin was made for explaining things to your colleagues.

The aim of Napkin is to make it easier to communicate with images. While you don’t have to use screenshots to do this, it’s certainly a good option. There’s more going here than just annotating a single captured image, as your Napkin workspace is really meant to accommodate several images, allowing you to create diagrams and mark up your images as much as you require.

One of my favorite features is the Call-Out. This allows you to select a section of the image and pull it out to annotate separately. If there’s something super important going on, that’s the part of the images that’s going to get hit up with the Call-Out tool. Drag the PNG pip onto your Desktop or into any folder to save your napkin file or share it via all the usual suspects. You can even upload your napkin to iCloud and share it with your colleagues using a link that expires after a couple of weeks.

Price: $39.99
Requires: OS X 10.8 or later, 64-bit processor
Developer: Aged & Distilled, LLC

Skitch

Skitch has neat stickers to call out important elements.

You already know about Skitch. Chances are you’ve tried Skitch, and you may be using it to take screenshots of this roundup right now. Even if you’ve looked at Skitch before and passed on it, there are reasons to look again. A recent update brought new annotations for everybody and PDF collaboration for Evernote Premium subscribers. If you haven’t figured it out, Skitch is an Evernote app and integrates with the notes giant.

The standard annotations are on deck. There are arrows, shapes, and text, but a white outline and drop shadow around everything makes it all look a bit more polished. The blur is nice, if you need to keep something private, and there are a couple of markers you can use, too. What Skitch does that really makes it stand out are stamps. There are a handful of different stamps, and you can use them to call out elements of your screenshot and add short clips of text.

Price: Free
Requires: OS X 10.7.4 or later, 64-bit processor
Developer: Evernote

Glui

Glui is simple, but it integrates nicely with Dropbox.

Glui is a pretty simple screen capture app. It takes screenshots, and then sticks text, arrows, and other shapes on your image. You can crop and freehand draw, too, but unlike some of our other apps listed, it won’t snap your freehand sketch into a pretty shape, instead leaving you with the scribbly mess we all make when we draw with a mouse or trackpad. Still, it’s a good little app, and I’m a big fan of simplicity, especially in my screen capture tools.

Something Glui has going for it that the other apps don’t is that it will save your screenshots directly to Dropbox. There’s a big blue button with a box on it–you know what to do with that. Uploading to Dropbox is awesome if you want to be in control of your screenshot links but don’t actually have your own server for this sort of thing. You can also share and save the normal ways, too, and if you hold down Option, you can drag your image to the Desktop, too.

Price: $2.99
Requires: OS X 10.7 or later, 64-bit processor
Developer: Sebastian Razola

Monosnap

Monosnap has great annotations and easy uploads.

I sort of love this one. It’s replaced the default Mac OS X screen capture tool as my go to for all screenshots. Not only does it have all of the annotation tools you’re looking for, there’s a bonus you may not be expecting. You know how most of the time you only create an arrow so that you can stick some text at the other end of it? There’s a tool for that in Monosnap, so you don’t have to click back and forth. It’s also super easy to change line thickness and object color, as well as remove drop shadows and outlines and change your line style.

There are plenty of ways to get your screenshot saved, too. Drag the handle of the Monosnap window to place your image on the Desktop or in a folder. You can also save it in your default editor–set that one in preferences–or open it in any of several applications. Share it to your social networks, too. The best, though, is Monosnap’s upload function. With an account, you can upload to Monosnap’s site and share the link to your image, but if you have your own server that will accept the image, Monosnap doesn’t discriminate. Pop that info into the preferences and do what you need to.

Price: Free
Requires: OS X 10.6 or later, 64-bit processor
Developer: Farminers Limited

Final Thoughts

There are a lot of great apps for creating and annotating screenshots out there. There’s a huge range of prices and options, too. It’s hard to tell what’s going to work for you until you’ve played the field, but there are some important things to think about before you jump in feet first. What do you need from a screen capture app? Do you just want a quick image or are good-looking annotations important? Will you be uploading or sharing your screenshots and does it matter how that gets accomplished? Keep your priorities in mind as you wade into the screen capture deep waters.

I tried to hit some of the best and brightest of the screen capture apps out there. Do you have a favorite I missed or are you happy with good old Command+Shift+3 and Preview? Let us know in the comments!

If there’s one thing that consistently impresses me about my iPhones, iPads and Android devices, it’s how fast they are. My iPhone 5 in particular whizzes through web content, churning out video like butter on cellular or WiFi networks with ease. My 2008 iMac and 2012 15″ Retina MacBook Pro are both slower than I’d like when it comes to Internet use, sometimes slower than the iPhone at this point. And I’ve been looking for ways to speed them up.

Going Flash-less seemed to be the easiest answer. I’ve wanted to get Flash under control on my Macs for a while, to the point where I avoided installing it for months on the MacBook Pro. I find it just bogs up the whole system. That being said, Flash can be a necessary evil for many of us. So I’ve set out to find the best Flash alternatives for your Mac, and I’m happy to share some of the results with you now.

First Things First

The first thing you need to know is that you’re not deleting Flash Player from your Mac here. As great as that would be, I’ve spent many hours combing through tons of different ways to do this and completely eliminating Flash from your main machine is possibly the least efficient way available.

This is what you’ll see if you uninstall Flash, constantly. You don’t want to do that.

Most of what we’re going to do involves plugins or extensions, but they still require your Mac to have some sort of Flash architecture. So keep Flash on your computer. It’s not worth the hassle, and you’ll spend most of your time tearing your hair out.

Fixing Video Playback

First of all, let’s take care of the biggest and most obvious Flash problem: Youtube. We all know how much time we waste there. Don’t worry; I’ve got you covered: Google has an HTML5 trial available for Youtube, and you might already be enrolled automatically. (If you’re not, you can sign up here with one click.)

The HTML5 trial is great. It works with every modern browser and takes care of a lot of Youtube videos. There are a couple caveats: The first is that fullscreen videos aren’t technically supported and the second is that ads won’t play (oh, bummer!). In my testing though, I came to a quick realization: Vevo videos don’t play in the beta.

This is more like what you want to see. And ClickToPlugin does this trick.

So what we’re going to do is another easy fix. You will want to install ClickToPlugin by either shopping for Extensions or grabbing it here. You’re not looking for ClickToFlash, but instead looking for ClickToPlugin. Installing it should be as easy as running the quick installer (or letting Safari do the work within the Extension Store web app).

The settings can be a little complicated for beginner users, but most people will never have to give these a second (or even first) thought.

Technically speaking, installing ClickToFlash would accomplish the same thing, but ClickToPlugin lets you control every plugin in Safari. It’s a fantastic little interface that really speeds up the web process on a whole, and quite simply, it works. The settings are a little complicated for beginners, but advanced users will love the extensions flexibility. Personally, I’m a big fan of the Set It and Forget It mantra, and this extension lets me do just that.

Bucking the System

There are going to be occasions where, no matter what you do, having a stable and running version of Flash is going to be a necessity. I’m taking some distance education courses right now, and the online lectures require Flash. I can run them on Safari with ClickToPlugin, but in situations where an entire website is dependent on Flash code (and not just certain elements of a page), running Flash natively does feel a little faster.

For that, I recommend Google Chrome. I know what you’re thinking, especially if you’re a dedicated Safari user, but hear me out. This isn’t as complicated as it sounds, since Safari ships with an “Open Page With” button. All you need to do is enable the Develop menu, which is under Safari/Preferences/Advanced. You’ll see a checkbox that says “Show Develop menu in bar.”

Ta-da! It’s like magic.

Check off that box and you’ll have a new menu option right in between Bookmarks and Window. If you ever want a fully-flash capable version of whatever web page you’re on, make sure you have Chrome installed and select Open Page With Chrome. Chrome has a built-in Flash player that doesn’t take up as much CPU as the competition as a result. And when you’re done, you can just close Chrome.

Temporary Bandaids

For some people, trying to find Flash alternatives is going to be more pain than its worth. I’ve spent many hours scouring the web for the best options and trying out more than I care to count just so you don’t have to. And not everybody needs to go so far as to try and eliminate Flash (or get close to eliminating it).

But for some people — maybe people with older Macs or people who are noticing slower Internet performance than they used to — controlling Flash can make sense. This has really helped speed up the Internet on my five-year-old iMac. Less to load on a page means less bandwidth to worry about consuming every time I read anything.

But the problem isn’t going to go away. Right now, we’re in a time of transition away from Flash. Three years ago, I would have been fortunate to write an article like this (and maybe people would have thought it was presumptuously timed). Today, getting Flash off your Mac feels as normal as keeping it away from an iPhone.

A few years ago we got the opportunity to review an awesome platforming-rhythm game called Bit.Trip Runner. We found it pretty amusing and gave it an almost perfect score: it’s a type of game we’re all familiar with, but it’s done in such a way that it feels very fresh and fun.

Now, from the creators of Bit.Trip Runner comes its successor: Runner 2. It has everything that we loved about the first game, but it builds on it and improves pretty much every aspect of it, graphics, mechanic, story, and much more.

Bit.Trip Presents Runner 2: Future Legend of Rhythm Alien

A lot has changed since the first time we checked in with our friend Commander Video, he’s now trapped in a crazier world and he has a few more tricks under his sleeve. Runner 2 won’t be unfamiliar to anyone who played the first installment of the game, but it will provide some much needed improvements to the game to keep it fresh.

Runner 2

For once, it’s out on Steam, which means it has accomplishments and all the other cool social features that come along with the platform. There’s also now a narrative and a more solid storyline, as well as some gameplay tweaks like checkpoints. Let me elaborate on all of this.

Gameplay

Checkpoints

The mechanic of the game remains pretty similar to the first Runner game: you have to sprint your way through a level while avoiding obstacles and finding goodies along the way. What changes, though, is the difficulty level. In the first Runner, there were only a few movements you could do to avoid obstacles, such as jumping, sliding and kicking.

New Tricks

Runner 2, on the other hand, continously introduces new ways for you to interact with the level, such as a shield for blocking incoming objects and a command for using rails as zip lines. Then there are special obstacles, such as loop ramps, that call for particular actions like key tapping in order to get extra points. Something else that’s new to the game are checkpoints, which are usually found mid-level and make the game more fluid and much less frustrating than its precessor.

Music, of course, remains at the core of the game, and every action you make blends with the soundtrack of the game, creating a beautiful interactive soundscape of retro gaming nostalgia.

Replayability

Runner 2 is a pretty big game, especially compared to the first Runner. The game consists of five different worlds, each containing a number of regular levels (around 15) and a few extra ones. Each level also offers a ton of rewards for playing it in different ways. Some levels require you to come back to them after you’re finished just so that you can unlock certain things like coffins or extra levels. There’s stuff hidden all over, and if you want to collect everything the game has to offer, you’re gonna have to spend some considerable time with the game.

Different Paths

Most levels reach a point where you’ll be forced to choose between two paths: a difficult one marked with a red sign and a green one representing the safe road. The difficult paths sometimes do get pretty challenging, but they’re the ones that offer rewards such as alternate endings.

Extra Mini-Games

Retro Challenge

Completing a level with all coins will get you to a minigame where you can score extra points by catapulting your character into a bullseye. Finding a cassette hidden on certain levels will bring up a new “Retro Challenge” as well, which is an old school sprint level where you’ll only get three attempts at finishing it.

Collectibles

Collectibles

Runner 2 also counts with a few unlockable items that you can earn by completing the extra levels or finding the keys and coffins spread around the worlds. Some are different playable characters, and a few others are different goofy costumes for each of your characters.

Good Old Fun

There’s something to this type of platformers that just grabs you from the first time you play them. I’ve made the argument in my review of the first Runner that it’s due to how they don’t give you a moment to think: they just throw you back running again as soon as you fail a level. This challenge makes it hard to quit playing, and even though it can get frustrating at times, for the most part it just provides a fair challenge and it makes you kick yourself for not being able to press the space bar on time.

Characters

As far as overall gaming mechanics go, Runner 2 is no different than the first installment, but the goofy characters, new challenge elements, rewards and improvements on graphics make it feel like a completely different game. I’ll have to admit it makes me smile everytime, even when it’s kicking my ass.

Conclusion

For casual gamers, Bit.Trip Runner 2 could be one of the most amusing games you’ll find these days. It’s just good old innocent entertainment, it doesn’t take up too much of your time, doesn’t require much of you to play it, and it’s really easy to get into it. Once it gets to you, it will be very hard to shake it off, as it is quite addicting.

Gaijin Games might have steered away from their 8-bit concept here, but it’s only for the best. Runner 2 is with no doubt the best game they’ve released, and every thing that they’ve added in this installment will surely bring you endless entertainment. It’s as good as a platformer can get.

I sincerely believe that one of the reasons for the slow descent of information managers, or anything buckets, has been the absence of modernization. Opening an application of this sort is often a strike from the past. A visit to old design trends and a user experience that didn’t catch up with the evolution. We ended up with powerful applications with plenty of features, without a reasonable way to manage them.

Among them all, Together stood up on their previous versions, overcoming as one of the better thought-out information managers for the average user. Yet it held its share of issues. The new version is a wave of change that came out of nowhere to improve our data library organizations. This refreshing update covers several disabilities and lights up the path to the use of iCloud sync, a long expected getaway card from the Evernote servers.

Let’s talk about buckets

Anything buckets are often criticized for attempting to cover way too many functions, not focusing on any of them and offering a shallow experience. I won’t deny the veracity of that statement. Yet, the goal of these applications is not to be everything; instead, they simply pack many resources to cover any gap from your workflow. I tell you that because if you use it as a replacement for Finder, you’ll become frustrated and be blinded to the real benefits that an anything bucket may bring.

Ok, time to cut the nonsense and talk about Together. As you open the app, you’re welcomed by an intro and quick access to the release notes and help documentation, but let’s skip that. What comes next is an application designed up to the standards of modern OS X. Everything is cleaner, plenty of the icons without much text — which may actually encumber some new users, although if you’re familiar to the previous version, there’s no surprise here.

The new interface brings Together to the new decade.

Navigation is divided in three panels, as in almost every other app these days. In the first one, the Source List, you have access to your groups, smart groups, folders. You can switch between groups and tags on the bar above the panel. One thing that’s new here is the Inbox, where unclassified files lay, waiting to be organized. Unfortunately, nothing’s changed on Together’s tags library, and you can’t narrow down your results by selecting more tags.

The biggest surprise comes from the second panel, the Item List, where you find the items from the selected folder or search results. I praised Evernote for its thumbnail view, as the best way to visualize files nowadays; now, Together comes with Thumbnails and Lists as displays, with the option to visualize in Portrait or Landscape. You can resize the thumbnails as you wish, which moves Together one step forward on this field.

Something that bugged me is that every tab besides the first one doesn’t have access to the library.

The third panel, Preview, where you can visualize your selected item is where they got most inspiration from Evernote. Name of the file, tags and a button to add as favorite on top. The Info field, which used to be a whole panel for itself, became a bubble, just as in the green elephant. Items can be opened in tabs, which stay above this main screen, just like Safari. Then there’s the Tab Exposé to show all your tabs on a screen of thumbnails, which is a pretty neat new feature.

Filling your library with all your stuff

Honestly, by this section solely you can say if an information manager is good or not. At first, items can be created within Together, besides the usual suspects you may have in mind already, Together 3 comes with Stationeries, which are templates based on kind. It comes with simple picks at start: plain text, rich text with attachments or without, still you’re free to create your own.

The truth is that no one actually wants to see an anything bucket unless we’re doing a deep search through our files, most of the time we’ll be importing stuff from outside apps. As expected, items can be included via drag and drop, Bookmarklets and the Services menu. You can configure a global Import Hot Key to send files straight to your Inbox. I tried several times and I couldn’t upload any file through this method, a problem I hope will be fixed in the next update.

To use the Import Hot Key on the Mac App Store version you must first download and install the proper Import Scripts.

Don’t forget to tweak Together’s Preferences, where you can set to organize items added to the Shelf before archiving them.

The hot shot is definitely the Shelf, most buckets have one of this sort, but Together is the only that nails it. It is a tab on the sides of your screen where you can drag files onto and organize them in your library. Together revamped their shelf and kept most of the features which made it great in the previous version. Besides including new files, you can navigate through your favorites, search your library or even create a quick note.

Searching through your files

Last time I wrote about Together it was for the round-up of information managers here at Mac.AppStorm, I listed three bad considerations about every application and all of them for Together were related to its search features, so, yes, I was quite excited to see what they did to this section.

Together’s main issue from the past version is fixed on the new release.

Besides the aforementioned search through the Shelf, which is pretty basic and doesn’t offer any control, the search within the application now allows you to search exclusively by name, label, tags, comments or contents, between all groups or only inside a selected group. You can select as many parameters as you wish to improve your search results. Put that together with Smart Groups and you can dig through your library as much as you want.

iCloud sync and so much more

The most exciting news about the new version of Together is the viability to store your library on iCloud, leaving us all hopeful to get a iOS version soon, which is on plans with no timeframe. Of course, using iCloud comes with its own share of restrictions, such as not being able to reveal the files on Finder, nor importing old libraries into iCloud. Still, it is nothing that may come in your way unless you have a very specific workflow.

It is worthy to suggest that, if you’re familiar with the previous version, to check the full release notes, where you’ll find every little bit of information about saved versions (it is kinda buggy as I tested, but Together promises to store past versions of your modified files), file encryption, creation of multiple libraries and other features.

Together has always been a heavyweight among information managers, still most of its most complex resources were hidden on the simplicity of the interface. The major improvement of Together 3 is the new organization of items and how everything feels accessible. And, of course, the spark of a future method to access our libraries from iOS.

Back in the day when Apple was still the underdog, I wanted a nice VAIO, mainly because I’m a Sony person and those things have cool fingerprint scanning stuff… but I also wanted OS X. Ultimately, because of my design and creative tendencies, I choose a MacBook Pro – my first OS X machine. I quickly feel in love with the OS and the apps available for it; their gorgeous UI and their simplistic yet extremely useful nature make them so nice to work with and look at.

So today, I get the chance to share with you guys some of the apps that I use on my Macbook Pro. Some of these are obvious choices, but hopefully there will be one or two apps that you’ll be interested in. Check out all the apps I use after the break.

Browsers

Development

Adobe Creative Suit

Mostly everyone here at AppStorm has – at one point or another – played around with one of Adobe’s toys – with good reason, too; they are awesome.

For the task that I do (and the ones I plan on learning), I use Photoshop, Illustrator, After Effects, Audition, and Edge Animate. These are paramount for anyone who is serious about their work with vector or raster images, video after production, and HTML5 animation.

Coda

My first code editor was Coda (the first one). It was and it still is a great piece of software that has helped me do a lot of FTP and SFTP work as well as edit code. I’ll admit is kind of a nostalgic relationship since that is where I learned how to code, but anyone will tell you that coda is a great tool.

SublimeText 2

This is what I use now. This is probably not a surprise, but what can I say, SublimeText 2 is pretty sick. With all the plugins people have come up with and all the cool little things you can do with it, SublimeText 2 is inevitably a must have for developers.

SourceTree & Github

I’m not gonna lie, I’m scared of Terminal. I honestly don’t want to do something wrong and mess up with my baby’s brains (AKA, my computer). At the same time, I love Github and other services like it, so in order for someone who wants to use these services but who doesn’t want to deal with Terminal, you have the Github app or SourceTree.

SourceTree isn’t as sexy as Github, but it has a lot of options that can certainly rival those of Tower (another Git application that would probably be here if I had it.)

MAMP

My world wouldn’t be complete without MAMP. What kind of developer would not want to develop websites locally, right? Well, yeah, you could work on a website that is live right on the server, but doing it locally is more practical, and faster. For example,if you need to have a local WordPress installation, MAMP will be your best friend hands down. MAMP comes in two flavors (I personally use the standard one), but in case you need more control, you have MAMP Pro.

Cyberduck

There are a gazillion FTP/SFTP apps out there, but Cyberduck happens to be the free alternative that has pretty much all I need. Sometimes when I need to upload a huge amount of files, I will use Cyberduck instead of Coda’s built-in FTP feature. It can be faster and easier to navigate, as well.

ExpandDrive

This is another little FTP client that I use. I use ExpanDrive when I want my files to feel like they are on an external hard drive rather than an FTP client. ExpanDrive and SublimeText 2 work great in conjunction.

Smaller

I actually won a copy of Smaller here at AppStorm (this was before I started writing here, so don’t worry; I’m not taking your stuff!)

Smaller is a very little but very handy app that’ll minimize your files be it CSS, JavaScript, or HTML. Useful if you aren’t using something like CodeKit.

Structurer

Created with love by the guys at Nettuts, Structurer is another small app that allows you to quickly create a set of files and folders with just a few keystrokes. You know, instead of creating a folder then another one inside that one, then a CSS file, etc. Instead, you can type in a set or parameters and it’ll automate the process for you. Note to self: I should use this more.

CodeKit

CodeKit is awesome. I can work with LESS, my browser refreshes every time I save a file, and every file I write gets compressed/minimized. It is a great tool for your web development workflow. (Alternatively, you can try LiveReload.)

Codebox

I don’t use CodeBox as much as I’d like to, but it is a great app to keep all your handy snippets organized. It even comes with a menu bar item that’ll expand snippets; however, if you have a good text expanding app, you’ll most likely stick to that one.

Xcode (iOS Simulator)

I only use Xcode for the iOS simulator. If I knew how to develop other things, I would probably use it for those other things, though. In any case, the iOS sim is really awesome for checking websites on Mobile Safari. You can also use Safari’s developer tools to check your code.

Parallels

Yes, Windows on a Mac. I’m highly against installing Windows on a Mac, but as a gamer, developer and tech enthusiast, I can’t help it; plus, Windows 8 looks kinda cool. I went with Parallels because I wanted to run Windows side-by-side OS X.

Video & Audio

Final Cut Pro 7

No matter what kind of video project I’m working on, FCP7 is always my editor of choice. I don’t care if iMovie can do something faster, I like having complete control. I also have Premiere Pro and I will probably get FCPX, but for now, this is my pick.

Game Capture HD

We actually reviewed El Gato’s Game Capture HD gaming recorder peripheral and the accompanying app here at AppStorm, and we were really pleased with it. It is the best video game recording peripheral and app combo out there.

Audacity

Audacity is a free alternative to something like Audition. If you are on a budget, I highly recommend getting Audacity. The app is a very complete audio editor that’ll help you create just about any sound effect or soundtrack you can think of.

Social

Skype

I had Skype before it was cool. I was making free calls to everyone back when they offered a year of free calls to the US and Canada. In any case, as a social app and a very important business application, Skype should be somewhere in your list, too.

Adium

I’d be lying if I said I use these as much as I would back in the day; however, Messages and Adium are my favorite picks when it comes to instant messaging.

Entertainment

Onlive

Onlive is so ahead of its time, it is not even funny. If you are a gamer, you’ve probably heard about the PS4. I haven’t heard anyone say this, but Onlive has many features that the PS4 will allegedly have. Things like spectating and recording a 15 second clip. Those features are all available on Onlive. Sure, its a cloud service so your internet needs to be powerful, but even if it isn’t, it is extremely cool to have.

I also use Steam, of course. Mac.AppStorm has its own Steam Group by the way; check it out.

Shadow Era

Since Magic: The Gathering Online has never made its way to the Mac, this game will satisfy your trading card gaming needs. We also reviewed this game, so give that review a look if you are interested.

Minecraft

I hated Minecraft before I even played it. I don’t know why, possibly the graphics. Once I played it though, I fell in love. It is like a Lego game done right. I love Legos, so it’s probably that, but you can unleash your creativity while fighting for your life – a simple and neat concept.

Productivity

iA Writer

You knew this app was coming! As a writer, it is extremely imperative that I have a good text editor; moreover, the fact that I can use markdown to compose my articles is extremely handy. Styling without using your mouse is really nice.

Alfred 2

I have a this goal of one day using my keyboard for every single task on my computer. I want to drop the mouse/trackpad for good, and Alfred has helped tremendously with this goal. Alfred is an incredible application launcher, file searching behemoth that anyone should take a look at. Sorry Spotlight.

Dropbox

My favorite cloud service is Dropbox. (I also got this before it was cool.) With the updated or the old Dropbox app, keeping my cloud files sorted is extremely easy and intuitive. If you must know, I keep HTML websites, notes, images, and a copy of this article, too. Fun stuff.

1Password

I can’t live without 1Password. No, really. I don’t remember any of my passwords without it. I don’t know if thats bad, good, or both, but 1Password has my back every time. I can let it pick good passwords for me, and the browser extensions/add-ons help me log in super fast.

Keyboard Maestro

This is yet another nod at the whole “let’s drop the mouse usage” goal. Keyboard Maestro is and awesome application that’ll do a lot of automated task for you. Just record whatever you want it to do, and then give it a keyboard shortcut or a specific stoke and it’ll do it for you. I’ve use Keyboard Maestro as a text expanding application as well as automatic downloads of WordPress.

Evernote

Evernote is my favorite note taking/info collection application that I can use across all my devices. The only thing I’ve complained about is the fact that I can’t use it with a different cloud service. I like things to be ubiquitous and in one service, but that’s just me.

Pocket

Pocket has saved me many times. It allows me to save an article or webpage so I can read it later. What makes this app for me is that I can export everything to Evernote after I’m done reading. Before I would try to keep all those pages open in various tabs, and you probably know how horrible that was.

Text Expander

Text Expander is one of my favorite apps to use. It is helpful in so many situations. You can use it when you are coding, or when you write an article, or a simple invoice, maybe? My only difficulty with this app is remembering all the little abbreviations.

The smaller Apps

MPEG StreamClip – This is a free video converter that has served its purpose when others have failed (like Miro at times).

PS3 Media Server – Streaming songs and movies from my Mac to my PS3 is extremely easy with this app.

Typist – I want to improve my typing skills. I know I don’t use all my fingers and that’s bad, so Typist will help with that. All I need is some free time.

App Cleaner – Simple and non-intrusive, App Cleaner get’s rid of unwanted files whenever I delete an app.

Clip Menu – this bad boy remembers some of my clipboard items and allows me to easily get to them and paste them wherever I need them.

Desktop Curtain – This app simply hides my desktop. If you are going to do a screencast, and your desktop is a mess, check this guy out.

CCleaner – CClearner is a free cleaning application that’ll get rid of cache and other unwanted junk on your computer.

CCC – Carbon Copy Cloner is a must if you want to keep things backed up. It has a broad range of parameters.

Memory Clean – This app purges your Mac’s inactive memory, so if you just finishing playing a nice game, use this to get your RAM back and possibly shut those noisy fans up.

VLC – Lastly, I’d like to mention VLC. It plays pretty much anything, so it is good to have. I still use Quicktime, though.

Conclusion

Those are the apps I use, guys. I have more apps on my machine, of course, but these are the ones that stand out. I can’t live, nor do I want to live without these apps.

If you have any suggestions for my “no mouse” goal, or any apps you think I may be interested in, leave your comments below!

Unit conversion has always been a task I would delegate to the web, since Google handles it so well. Whenever I need to convert kilometers to miles, inches to feet, and Philippine peso to any other currency, I would simply type the units in the search bar and wait for the results to appear.

There’s tons of unit conversion apps out there (we even have a roundup of calculators and converters for the Mac), but it didn’t seem like a necessity to buy or download one. I then came across Converto, one of FLIPLAB’s newer and free Mac utilities, and decided to give it a test run.

Could Converto finally break the ice and stand as the best unit converter for the Mac? Read on to find out.

Easy Conversion on the Mac

Available at the Mac App Store.

Converto is a unit conversion app that sits quietly on your menu bar. Just summon the app using a keyboard shortcut (default is ^C), select the units to convert, and watch the numbers appear in the boxes below.

On the surface, the UI isn’t bland or stiff. It’s simple and pretty straightforward in terms of how it works, which is all I need for a unit converter. Top that off with the fact that it’s free to download, making it one of the more noteworthy free utilities on the Mac App Store.

But what’s impressive is how prolific Converto is in terms of the number of units available. With over a dozen units segregated into categories, you can easily convert meters to parsecs, milliamperes to electromagnetic units, kilograms to scruples, and more. Thanks to this app, I’ve gotten acquainted with new units for mass, energy, bytes, and temperature.

Accuracy and Speed

Besides the fact that it’s free and it looks good, Converto converts fast and accurately.

Results go as far as the millionths, and they appear as soon as you enter the value under the beginning unit. I did a quick conversion between 24 months to years, and what appeared was 1.9385766373 instead of just 2 years. And even if you switch the direction of the conversion, it still converts at the same pace and accuracy.

Finally, I am happy to see that for a free app like this, there are no intrusive text ads anywhere. You can also take a look at the Preferences panel if you’d like to alter the default settings. You can change the default shortcut, activate start at login, change window opacity, and more.

More Work to Be Done

Converto does its job, and it does it well; however, I see that it still has plenty of room for improvement. Let’s break it down:

1. Long Drop Down Menus

To use Converto, you would have to select the categories, the beginning and ending units by looking through three drop down menus.

Depending on the number of units available, these menus can actually reach across the desktop. It’s a little intimidating and time-consuming when looking for the right unit to convert.

A long list of units available.

I think Converto would be even more impressive if it utilizes the same natural language engine similar to apps like Fantastical and QuickCal. This way, it would operate the same way as how you would use Google’s search bar to make a conversion. You only have to type which units to convert, and the app would do the rest.

The developers may want to consider allowing Converto to convert to more units of measurement, instead of just limiting it to pairs. For instance, I can choose to convert seconds to days, months, and years all in one go.

2. Currency Rates

You can convert currencies using Converto, saving you a couple of bucks from buying a separate currency converter app.

However, I wonder just how up-to-date the conversion rates are since there is no date or time of checking indicated anywhere on the app. As a user, this makes me feel a little wary using it as the numbers could be misleading.

It’s certainly a small issue that the devs over at FLIPLAB can take care of easily, so I hope to see an update for this in the next version.

3. Favorites

Being able to save particular conversions for later would really give this app an edge, considering that other converters like Converter Plus.

With favorites, you won’t have to waste time selecting the category and the units to convert. I can picture a Favorites menu on the lefthand side of the app where you can click on the kind of conversion you’d like to do based on category.

A Great Free App

Looking at the app at where it is today, I think Converto is a great free app to have for the Mac. You save yourself from the hassle of searching online for values for each unit of measurement, and can easily and quickly convert from your Mac’s menu bar.

Of course, there are still plenty of things that needs to be ironed out (e.g., an alternative to long drop down menus), so I hope that updates to make the app even better will arrive soon. In fact, I wouldn’t be surprised if an iOS version of Converto would be available on the App Store soon.

What do you think of Converto? Would you consider using this for your conversion needs? What do you use to convert values of measurement? Let us know in the comments!

You do a lot of searching. You can’t even try to front that you don’t, because we’re all searching all the time. Even simple calculations and unit conversions are getting done in a search engine. But you could be doing it better. The folks who made search utility Phlo knew that and wanted to make internet searching awesome.

Did they succeed? We’ll test this tiny searchbox app and find out!

Go With the Phlo

You can access Phlo from the Dock or the menu bar (or both), but you’ll probably want to use a hotkey to get to it most of the time. Set something easy to remember but that won’t get in the way of your other shortcuts. I have Phlo sitting pretty at Control+Space, which is close enough to my Spotlight and Alfred shortcuts for my need for keyboard organization, but it doesn’t seem to coincide with anything else. If that doesn’t work for you, set a shortcut you like. You do you.

Enter your query, and if your site isn’t already listed, select it from the list.

Whatever you settle on, hit your shortcut to bring up the Phlo window. The default search engine is Google, and that’s great. Lots of people do lots of searches in Google. Type whatever you’re looking for into the text field and hit Enter. Your search will be opened up in a new active tab in your default browser.

Google isn’t all that’s on offer, though. There are a ton of searches here, including shopping sites, image searches, lyrics, and weather sites. Phlo even includes some, I’m going to guess here, Russian and a few Chinese language sites right at the end of the list.

There are lots of sites to choose from.

There was absolutely everything I wanted included, but let’s pretend Phlo didn’t have absolutely everything you wanted. If you need a bunch of really specific searches, site searches, or use non-English sites, Phlo may not as useful for you as it is for me. In that case, you can add your own searches or even remove sites that don’t do you any good. You could go crazy and just add, like, your favorite websites to Phlo and use it as a quick bookmark launcher, but that would be crazy, right? Crazy like a fox.

Add you favorite searches to Phlo if they aren’t already there.

Do All of the Searches!

I can hear you asking, “So what?” You’ve got Quicksilver or Alfred, and you can already search and launch websites from those apps. Why would you need another, separate app to do something you can already do elsewhere. I’m going to level with you, kids, you don’t. Wait, hear me out on this one. Sure all the functionality of Phlo exists in your other launcher apps, but it isn’t built in.

Hold the phone, what does that even mean? It means that I can stick searches for Pinterest, Quora, or Dribbble into Alfred–my preferred app, but high fives to the Quicksilver users, too–but I have to do that manually. For each site I want to create a quick search for in Alfred, I have to get the search URL, substitute Alfred’s {query} placeholder, and create a shortcut that doesn’t get in the way of all of my other shortcuts. If I’m having a particularly perfectionist day, I’ll need to track down an appropriate icon for my search, too.

There are a ton of sites to search, already built right in.

There’s just so much already built into Phlo, you may never have to add anything to its list, and even if you do, you’ll probably have to add a lot fewer sites. This might not seem like a big deal, but when I was setting up Alfred, I spent a lot of effort adding a ton of sites I use all the time, almost all of which are already in Phlo. I could have saved myself buckets of effort with a tool like this.

Things to Consider

There are a couple of downsides to Phlo. The first is that you’re running another application where just one really could do the job, even though you’d have to put in some more effort on your end. Yeah, that’s true. If you’ve already got Alfred, Quicksilver, or anything like them, and you go for Phlo, you’re essentially doubling up. I’m okay with that. Out of the box, Phlo does this one thing better and doesn’t put the onus on me to create a really usable product. For users who just want their apps to work without having to get into lots of settings and customizations, Phlo may be what they’re looking for.

The second downside to Phlo is less easy to dismiss. It costs about four bucks. That’s not bad, and less than I paid for coffee on Saturday, but a lot of users are going to be turned off by the price. I’ll admit that I may have even thought twice about Phlo if I hadn’t gotten it as part of a weekly app deal. It’s just one of those things where you’ll have to weigh how much use you’ll get out of the app against how much use you’d get out of that $3.99 elsewhere.

Final Thoughts

I absolutely love Phlo, and I wish I’d found it before I put in tons of effort to get all of the extra sites I search into Alfred. It’s not at all a replacement for that sort of application, but it certainly is a nice complement. That’s my experience, though. How much use you’ll personally get out of it is going to depend on how much searching you do (probably a lot) and whether that searching happens at sites that aren’t Google, YouTube, or Amazon (maybe). If you do a bunch of searching other places, Phlo’s at least worth a look, and if you’ve never been able to see the use in all the other features of an app like Alfred or Quicksilver, Phlo could be just the thing to speed up your search workflow.

It’s old news now that Google Reader is being shut down on July 1st. It’s also old news that finding the perfect news reading apps for your Mac and iPhone is a bit harder than you’d think at first. There’s a ton of options, but if you just want an easy way to get your news fix and keep your read status and subscriptions synced between your devices, it’s not so simple.

Most of the best options today are new web apps, some of which sync with native iOS apps but few of which have native Mac apps. Stalwart Mac RSS apps like NetNewsWire and Reeder are working on their own syncing solutions which will hopefully come before the July 1st deadline.

But NewsBar, a simple Mac and iOS RSS reader, has its own native RSS engine and can keep your subscriptions, read state, and favorited articles synced between your Macs and iOS devices via iCloud. Today. We’ve looked at NewsBar before, but let’s take another look and see what a year — and iCloud sync — has brought to the equation.

A Notification Center for News

For a news reader that keeps you updated without making RSS feel like yet another email inbox to keep up with, NewsBar is a great option. It lives along the left side of your display and is pinned to your desktop by default, so other windows will always float over it. You can tweak that, too, letting it sit on any of your monitors (if you’re lucky enough to have more than one), put it on the right side of your screen, or even put it in a more typical floating window. It’ll also let you tweak the colors and transparency so it’ll fit right in with your wallpaper.

A decent reading experience that’s tweakable

What’s important, though, is how it works as a news reader. First off, syncing works great, quickly fetching updates for the dozen of sites I’m subscribed to. You can read articles right in the app, either by clicking on them or by hitting your spacebar if you turn on the keyboard shortcuts in the settings. The read view isn’t the nicest you’ve ever seen, but it gets the job done, complete with images and clickable links.

Then, NewsBar is deeply integrated with the latest OS X features. There’s an option to send links to Safari’s Reading List, as well as options to share links via iMessage, email, Facebook, or Twitter with native sharing. Beyond that, though, there’s no support for any other bookmarking, reading later, or sharing services. Then, NewsBar looks much like its own Notification Center for news, but you can also set the app to send you push notifications in your OS X Notification Center whenever any new articles come in, or just ones that contain the keywords you’re watching (more on that later). With that, you could possibly just keep NewsBar running without having it open, and use Notification Center itself to keep up with what’s important.

…with a Side of iCloud

If you only needed a nice way to keep up with your RSS feeds on one Mac, then there’s plenty of tools that’ll do that today. The old NewsBar worked for that, as would more popular apps like NetNewsWire and the minimalist Leaf. But today, NewsBar has a leg up on both of them — and most other Mac RSS apps — thanks to its iCloud syncing. The RSS sync engine itself is native to your Mac, but then iCloud is used to sync your feed list and folder structure, starred items, and each item’s read status.

iCloud sync is nice to have even if you only read RSS feeds on your Mac, since it’ll keep your feed list and more backed up in iCloud automatically. It’d also come in handy if, say, you have an iMac at work and a MacBook for on the go, as it’ll keep your feeds and more synced between them both. But, it’s most handy when paired with NewsBar’s $3.99 iPhone app.

A flat & clean iOS news reader

iCloud has become somewhat notorious for not being the most flaw-proof syncing service out there. I use iA Writer iCloud-based document sync daily in my workflow, but for many, database based syncing in iCloud has been so bad that it’s had to be cut from may apps from sheer unreliability. NewsBar seems to have avoided the worst of those problems, though, by bypassing Core Data sync and using their own data format for synchronization. NewsBar’s developer, Andras Porffy, told me via email that “There were some minor difficulties related to iCloud, but this is to be expected because sync is never an easy task.”

He’s apparently done quite the good job with tackling the syncing nemesis because, in my tests, NewsBar’s iCloud sync has proved perfect — if perhaps a bit slow. It’s kept new feeds and read status synced between my Mac and iPhone within several minutes of changes on either one, which is definitely nice.

More than Just News

Keep tabs on the most important stuff

NewsBar has another unique feature in its Notification settings. You can add keywords for topics that are most interesting to you, and when NewsBar syncs an article that contains that word in its title or article content, it’ll both highlight the article in your reading list and will send you a push notification. That feature’s not in the iOS app yet, but when it’s added, the developer promises to add keyword syncing to the default iCloud syncing so you’ll keep up with the most important stuff everywhere.

Then, there’s keyboard shortcuts you can turn on to browse your feeds with your arrow buttons and preview articles with your spacebar. There’s also options to organize your feeds into folders, or import an OPML file of your feeds. You can finally tweak everything in the app’s appearance, from its placement as mentioned before to the colors and fonts used in the app.

A way to move off of Google Reader

And before we forget, NewsBar is perfect for moving away from Google Reader. If you use it today, you can sign in with your Google Account and import all of your RSS feeds and favorites (folders, unfortunately, aren’t synced over). Then, you can turn off Google sync, and everything will be kept in NewsBar, synced via iCloud and ready for Google Reader’s demise.

Conclusion

NewsBar isn’t particularly aimed at RSS power users, or those who are the most demanding of their news app’s features or UI style. It’s rather aimed at getting you a stream of news from all of your RSS feeds, notifying you when really important stuff comes up, and keeping your feeds synced on your Mac and iOS devices sans Google Reader. And for that, it performs admirably.

It’s definitely an app you should try out if you haven’t yet found the perfect Mac alternate to Google Reader, especially if you want one that doesn’t require signing up for yet another web service.

Ever wanted a great way to keep track of your family’s heritage, with all the info, pictures, locations, and more that touched your relatives? How about all of that in a beautiful interface you’ll want to show off to your family and more? Family Tree, our sponsor this week, is exactly what you’re looking for.

The Family Tree app has everything you need to keep track of everything you know about your family, and more. You can include personal info about everyone in your family, complete with photos, documents about them, and more in an intuitive interface. You can track where everyone lived on a map, connect everyone’s relationship in a beautiful tree view, or switch over to the chart view to see your family info in a circle graph.

Best of all, the Family Tree app is designed for Retina Displays, so everything will look great no matter what Mac you’re using. It also includes iCloud support, so you can sync your family data between all of your Macs and perhaps work together with your family on collecting data. Then, starting with the next version, it’ll support GEDCOM import and export, so you can import data from other family tree apps or share data from your family tree with others using different apps.

Go Get It!

Ready to get started plotting your own family tree? Then head over to the App Store and get your own copy of the Family Tree app for just $11.99, and enjoy discovering more about your family and keeping track of everything you find!

It seems we’re always looking for ways to keep our hands on our keyboards and away from the mouse. From application launchers to apps that create extra productivity shortcuts, there’s a big market for tools that help us use our computers more efficiently.

Shortcat is just such an app, giving every element within an application window its own shortcut. I’ll take a look at Shortcat and see how good of a job it does at keeping my hands on my keyboard and me on task.

The Anti-Mouse

With Shortcat running, you’ll launch it using a keystroke shortcut. I didn’t like the default shortcut, so I set my own. Choose one that’s going to work for you in Shortcat’s preferences. When you launch Shortcat, you’ll get a text entry field. I’ll admit, it takes a little while to really get the hang of using Shortcat, but there are some good tips included in the application help file and on the website. Before getting started with Shortcat, remember to enable access for assistive devices in Accessibility in System Preferences.

After bringing up the text entry field using your shortcut, type in the first couple of letters of whatever you would be clicking with your mouse. Shortcat will start highlighting clickable sections of the active window. If what you’re looking for doesn’t have any obvious text for you to enter, type a period into the Shortcat into window, and everything will be highlighted.

Punch in the first few letters of the element you want to click.

The element Shortcat thinks most closely matches the text you’ve entered is going to be highlighted in green. Everything else is painted yellow. If you want the green element, just hit Enter, and Shortcat will effectively click it for you. To get at one of the yellow highlighted elements, hit space after whatever you’ve already entered, and type the black text Shortcat has superimposed over the element. Hit Enter to “click” it.

You may want to do more with an element than just click it using the Enter key. Keystrokes you would use to modify a click, such as Command+Click, will work the same with Shortcat, substituting the Enter key for a click. So to right-click on an element, hit Command+Enter, and double tapping Enter is the same as a double-click. Tap Control to hover over an element. This will be the same for the other keys you would use to modify a click, combining them with Enter, instead.

Typing a period will highlight all of the clickable elements.

Making the Most of It

Shortcat isn’t compatible with all applications and won’t do everything everywhere. While I had a great time with Shortcat, and it did a bang up job finding stuff for me, there were apps it just couldn’t do anything with and parts of apps it couldn’t get to. Shortcat does better with some apps than with others, and you can read all about its compatibility in the help file.

What Shortcat did, what it did a really good job of, was keep my hands on the keyboard and off of my mouse. Rather than leaving what I was doing to navigate to other parts of my application window, Shortcat kept me where I was and saved me more than just time by allowing me to remain focused on the work at hand.

There isn’t much to Shortcat’s preferences, but you’ll want to make sure you’ve visited the Accessibility preference pane.

I imagine Shortcat would provide the greatest benefit when teamed up with other apps that extend the functionality of your keyboard. If you’re doing a bang up job with Shortcat but then you have to constantly go for your mouse to open or switch to a new application, you’re likely losing a lot of the added productivity you gained with Shortcat. Combine Shortcat with a tricked out application launcher and a healthy knowledge of an application’s shortcuts, and you may never touch your mouse again.

Final Thoughts

While I hesitate to speak for anyone who uses the Accessibility preference pane for legitimate reasons and not just to make their display look like it’s nighttime, I could imagine Shortcat would be really handy for folks who are even more dependent on their keyboard than I am. While I avoid my mouse and try to get everything done with keystrokes because I’m lazy, some people really need to do everything with their keyboard. I bet there’s better and fancier stuff out there for those who need a lot of assistance, but Shortcat could be useful for someone who’s recovering from hand or wrist surgery or suffering from carpal tunnel and doesn’t need to invest in pricier accessibility apps or devices.

For my needs, at least, Shortcat worked great. It didn’t catch everything I could possibly want to click with a mouse, and Shortcat is upfront with the fact that it’s not universally compatible. All the same, though, I was able to keep my hands on the keyboard a lot more of the time using Shortcat. It saved me a lot of time and made me more productive, and that’s all I need.

We’ve all been there: you copy a link or an image that you wanted to share with someone, but then you forget about it and accidentally copy something else over it. Sounds familiar? Yeah, that’s why you need an app to remember what has been in your clipboard.

There are plenty of apps that do just that: keep a history of the contents of your clipboard. Seriously, just search the App Store for “Clipboard” and see for yourself. That’s why today we decided to bring you an update to our previous clipboard roundup, with some of our newer favorite options for improving your clipboard. Want to check them out?

Your Clipboard History and Not Much Else

A Different Type of Clipboard App

The Do-It-Alls

Conclusion

There’s certainly no shortage of apps that keep a history of your clipboard’s contents. You can easily find a prefectly functional free alternative like ClipMenu, or if you’d like to enjoy a few more premium features, there are some reasonably priced alternatives such as CopyLess, Collective or even the Alfred Powerpack.

With today’s roundup we wanted to expand on our previous clipboard roundup and show you some of our favorite newer alternatives for improving the clipboard. But what do you use? Do you have any recommendations you’d like to throw out? Let us know in the comment section below!

Long a favorite on iOS, Instacast is now in beta release on the Mac. More than just a complement to the version you’ve got on your iPhone or iPad, Instacast for Mac is a fully-functional podcast app built with usability in mind.

But will it be able to supplant iTunes as your go-to iTunes podcast app? We’ll see if the Mac app stands up to its iOS predecessor.

Hear It First

Click the plus sign at the bottom of the window to start adding subscriptions. Browse through the different genres, or search for what you want. I found absolutely everything I was looking for, but it wasn’t always easy. When I tried searching for the Global News podcast from the BBC World Service, pretty obvious keywords like “BBC” and “World Service” didn’t do me any good, but I did find it when I browsed the News & Politics podcasts. Other podcasts were tracked down right away, and like I said, I did find everything I wanted, eventually.

Browse for podcasts or do a search.

Once subscribed to a ton of podcasts, you might be thinking, “Okay, now what?” Sure, you can just start listening to all of them in succession, but mixing your news, lifestyle, and tech podcasts up probably doesn’t make for the best listening experience. That’s why Instacast gives you Lists. Click over there to start organizing your podcasts into more manageable chunks. There are lists automatically created to handle unplayed episodes or your most recently updated stuff, but you can also create lists of similar podcasts to listen to together.

You may be used to downloading podcasts before you listen to them, and you can certainly do that with Instacast, but if you don’t want tons of podcast episodes that you only plan to give a single listen crudding up your hard disk, that’s okay, too. Instead, stream what you listen to. Even if you plan on downloading everything, you can still use Instacast’s streaming function to skip ahead in the currently downloading episode, saving you the trouble of waiting for it to finish.

Lists are great for organizing your podcasts.

Instacast will share just about anywhere, right from the app, and enabled services include App.net, Pocket, Readability, and Twitter. I was disappointed to see Facebook was left off of the list, but this is only a beta version after all. Support for additional sharing services may be coming with a future release.

But Will It Sync?

I know what you’re thinking. It sure sounds great to get your podcasts out of iTunes. Even Apple is moving podcasts out of iTunes on iOS with their Podcasts app. But if your subscriptions are in iTunes, how are they going to sync to your iPhone or iPad? I hear you, iOS users. Instacast has long had you covered, though. With the Instacast app for iOS, you can create an account that will allow you to sync your podcasts among your devices running Instacast. It’s too bad for Android users, though. Vemedio, the people who make Instacast, have said there are no plans for Android support.

You can sync your podcasts via your Instacast account if you have the iOS app.

If you don’t have Instacast for iOS or even own an iOS device, you’re out of luck for now. Instacast is in beta, and there’s no account creation in the beta Mac app. That’s all going to change though, so you’ll be able to sync up your podcasts to your Instacast Cloud account. You’ll still need an iOS device running the Instacast app to get your podcasts to play on the go, though.

Take Control

There are lots of great ways to take control of your podcasts. In the applications preferences, you can set how often you’d like Instacast to check for new episodes, but you can also tailor update frequency to each podcast. For instance, if most of your podcasts are weekly, let Instacast know not to look for podcasts more than once a day; that way you’ll get each new podcast as it rolls in throughout the week. Your news podcasts that get updated a couple of times a day, though, need to be checked more frequently, and you can edit that in the individual podcast.

Instacast’s preferences let you decide how and when your podcasts are downloaded.

Set a limit on how much storage Instacast can use. If you want to stack your podcasts to the ceiling, go for broke and take on 50 GB, but if space is at a premium on your Mac, keep things under 1 GB. You can maximize Instacast’s allotted space by only downloading the most recent episode from each podcast and not downloading video content, options available in Instacast’s preferences. On systems where storage is at a true premium, auto-delete old episodes, as well.

Final Thoughts

Instacast is a nice change from iTunes, especially for those of us who are always looking for an alternative to the resource-hogging behemoth. To make it really worthwhile to anyone who likes to play their podcasts on the go, though, you’ll need to invest in the $4.99 iOS app, too. Since we’re talking about costs, it bears mentioning that while this is a free beta, Mac licenses are available for purchase for $14.99 right now, and the price looks to go up with the full release.

Instacast is simple to use and a breath of fresh air for podcast addicts. For anyone already on board with the popular iOS version, it will likely be an easy decision to pick up the matching Mac up. For everyone else, it’s a question of whether the easy functionality is enough to make it work the price. Definitely check it out while it’s still free and in beta, and get a firsthand look for yourself.