Category: Mac

9 years ago, the Mac gained something that has graced buildings since humans learned to write: bookshelves. The original Delicious Library featured a digital faux-wood bookshelf as its main interface — one that’s instantly familiar to anyone who’s used iBooks or Newsstand, but that was brand-new when it was released. Fast forward a few years to 2007, and Delicious Library 2 brought a fluid interface powered by Core Animation, with pop-over inspectors that look vaguely like a preview of the pop-over menus that would become so common in iOS and later on the Mac.

The Apple Design award winning app to catalogue all of your stuff seemed to be abandoned, going 6 years without a new release and over a year without an update of any kind. But the Delicious Monster team is back with the freshly released Delicious Library 3. It’s shiner – and more animated – than ever, and it’s certain to be the most fun way to catalogue all of your stuff in 2013.

Can it push the future of Apple interface design forward again this time, though?

It’s Sure Delicious

If you love natural-looking skeuomorphic interfaces, you’ll love Delicious Library 3. It’s more skeuomorphic than ever, and it’s proud of it. There’s incredibly realistic looking 3D animations on each individual item you’ve added. Music albums will look like they’re CDs, complete with a plastic cover, and movies will look so much like real plastic DVD cases you’ll think they’re real. Books look nearly as good, and will try to approximate the real length of the book with the thickness of their icon, though they oddly have more artifacting in their animations.

Now, the neatest effect: click between items and shelves, and the shadows will follow your “vision”. It’s fun and unique, though it sure would be more realistic if, you know, it could track your eyes with your Mac’s camera and move the lighting and shadows around based on where you’re really looking. One can wish.

The animations in the interface are something that’ll have to be experienced to see what is the peak of interface animation today outside of games. So watch this quick video of the animations in Delicious Library 3 to see it in action before continuing. We’ll wait.

Pretty, right? Though it does come with a penalty: Delicious Library 3 used just under 1Gb of ram on average while I was testing it, and used around 3% of my CPU time when the app was idle, spiking at around 60% when playing with the animations in the app on my 2012 13″ MacBook Air. That’s rather punishing for an app just for cataloging your stuff.

If you like pretty, skeuomorphic interfaces, you’re destined to fall in love with it. If you’re more of a fan of functional interfaces, or prefer the newer flat UI style that’s rumored to even start creeping into Apple’s own designs, you find Delicious Library 3 to be far over the top.

All of Your Stuff

Delicious Library is more than a UI showcase, though: it’s arguably the most popular app, ever, for cataloging everything you own. The sample library you’ll be able to try when you first download the app includes books, movies, video games, and power tools. And actually, it works best to track physical items; its site lists cataloging so you have a record in case of theft as one of its use cases.

There’s a number of ways to add stuff to your library. You can simply scan barcodes from your stuff with your Mac’s camera — another Delicious innovation that’s reminiscent of the sign-documents-with-your-camera feature in Preview. You can also scan barcodes with a linked USB/Bluetooth barcode scanner, though you’d have to be really dedicated to cataloging to go that far. Or, you can use your iPhone as a remote barcode scanner with the free companion app if you can get it linked; I couldn’t get my iPhone to save items to my Delicious Library no matter how much I tried.

Beyond that, there’s Amazon. Delicious Library is deeply integrated with Amazon, so adding anything that can be purchased from Amazon will only take a quick search. If it’s not in Amazon, you can add items manually: CMD+N opens the new item inspector, which you can fill out quickly and tab through info sections, or add what you know and press CMD+R to auto-fill in the rest of the info. Though do note: CMD+R again goes to Amazon for info, so the first entry for what you enter seems to be more likely to be the movie version of books, and the Android app version of Children’s books, so you’re almost just as good entering everything manually.

And if you’ve got a lot of stuff you want to track, there’s enough options to keep anyone happy. You can track just about anything you can think of: a book’s quality or rarity, theatrical debut day of a movie, audience a piece of media is aimed at, and so much more. You can then export the data to use elsewhere, in an easy to read printed list, a spreadsheet, or as bibliographical data to use in your research works.

But you might not need to export your data, since Delicious can actually do quite a bit with it itself. Tap the graph icon above your shelf, and you’ll see a breakdown of your stuff, including its value, the artists and authors you like the most, how many pages of reading material you have, and more. It’s a fun instant infographic about your stuff.

There’s more, too. You can organize your stuff in your own shelves, or have Delicious Library automatically organize based on criteria you put in place. That makes it especially useful if you’re storing info about, say, books you’re using in a research project: Delicious can automatically find them all if your criteria are selective enough, and then you can export the bibliography from that shelf. You can also add lists of things you’ve loaned to friends to make sure they get returned, and you can create an online library of all of your stuff with the web publishing option (you’ll need an FTP connection to your own hosting account or server to use this, though). And you can get recommendations from Amazon of things you might like based on what you have, and turn those into wish lists.

There’s also an interesting voice search option, which uses the built-in voice recognition in your Mac — not the new Siri-style voice recognition but local, native voice recognition. It works surprisingly good, recognizing it when I said “Wall-E”, when Siri can never figure out what I say when I say that one movie name.

Wait: What About Digital Media?

If you’re keeping up with physical stuff, all’s good so far. With digital stuff, though, Delicious Library is surprisingly anemic. You can import your iTunes library’s music and movies, but the option is practically hidden (hint: open the Library sidebar, click Edit, then switch on the faint iTunes bubble switch near the top). It’ll bring over your album art and info, but won’t find any prices to fill out your value graphs as you’d have in your normal library.

Beyond that, Delicious Library 3 feels like it’s living in the pre-digital media age. You can’t add, say, all of your PDFs and ePub eBooks to Delicious to showcase, though you could add entries for each book with data from Amazon. You can’t add software easily, if it’s not sold in a box at Amazon, and app icons look rather ridiculous in Delicious.

It’s frustrating, because it comes so close to something that could really be great for keeping up with your digital stuff, a way to give a “place” for the things you own but can’t touch. Imagine if it could scan your Applications folder (and perhaps your iPhone/iPad backups), import the apps you own and include the developer info and price automatically. Imagine if it could do the same for your Kindle library, and if it could also let you import your eBook folder of PDFs and ePubs and add their info automatically. And then, what if you could open eBooks, movies, apps, and more, right from Delicious, while also using it to keep up with the info about each of them?

That could be a very valuable tool for the digital age. For now, though, Delicious Library 3 can do part of this — manually — but it feels stuck in the era of physical stuff.

Conclusion

Delicious Library 3 is shiny — fun even — but ultimately feels more like a toy than an important app you’ll use all the time. If you really are serious about cataloging your stuff, you’d likely be better off with a database like Bento, or even a spreadsheet. And if you think iCal’s redesign in Mountain Lion is over the top, then you’ll recoil from the skeuomorphism in Delicious Library 3.

I wanted to love Delicious Library 3, wanted it to find a home in my Applications folder, but ultimately I don’t think it’s an app I’d really end up using. The animations bog the app down enough that it felt slow, frustrating even to use at times, and parts of the interface, such as the license section, look like dated older versions of OS X rather than Delicious’ tradition of pushing the UI forward. It’s still nice for cataloging physical items, and uncannily good at recognizing barcodes, but somehow, I can’t help but shake the feeling that it’s stuck in the past. That, and that it’s mostly a shiny wrapper for Amazon.

Aloha!

Another week with the selection of the coolest stuff around the web about Mac Apps is up.

Here you’ll find out about the last Skitch update, the release of Essential Anatomy and Twitter #music app and Delicious Library’s rise from the dead. Also, don’t miss our curated list of awesome deals and cool articles to improve your productivity and your reading list.

News from the World of Apps

Jony Ive Named One Of Time’s 100 Most Influential People In The World

Ive is the head behind Apple’s design and the only company member to be included at Time’s list of influential people. From brushed steel to polished glass, he’s responsible for most of the simple, yet revolutionary, design that hits the stores. “It takes a unique alchemy of form and function for millions of people to feel so passionately about the robot in their pocket.”, said Bono about Ive.

Skitch update includes PDF annotations and stamps

Little by little, Skitch is trying to regain the confidence we’d all placed in it prior to its purchase by Evernote. Now you can annotate PDF’s and use stamps — special overlaid graphics — to your editing. The first is exclusive for Evernote Premium subscribers and as you open a PDF in Skitch, you activate a 30-day trial of this feature exclusively.

Twitter releases its official #music app

It was announced in the last few weeks that Twitter would be releasing a music app. As Vine, it begins as an iPhone app with a web counterpart. It can automatically plug into Rdio or Spotify, or otherwise it’ll use iTunes to play music. Turns out it is more like a place to find new music rather than actually listening due to its dependency to other services.

Delicious Library 3 is here!

Delicious Library 2, the media and gadget cataloging application, was praised upon its first release and its design has influenced a generation of developers — even at Apple. However, last time it has seen an update was May 2012, almost a year ago. Users were already flagging it as abandonware, until the announcement of the upcoming release optimized for Mountain Lion. It’s now here, 5 years after v.2 came out, and is better than ever.

iTunes Store adds ‘buy now, download later’ option for video and music

Finally! Downloading large files was often limited by the data plans for users around the globe, so now Apple has added new download options, allowing you to choose if you want to download the content now or later. Doesn’t seem like a world changing feature, yet a necessity that will make the download bill lighter for many users. This feature is exclusive for countries or regions where Apple supports iTunes in the Cloud for video and audio.

Essential Anatomy now available for OS X

Essential Anatomy is a hit among health students on the iPad and now the anatomy application comes to the Mac. It packs all the features from the iOS version where users can explore several systems using the “most detailed digital anatomy tool ever created for desktop”. So if you’re pretending to be a doc, don’t miss it.

Apple offers 150 student scholarships to WWDC 2013

If you feed a reoccurring dream to become iOS developer, there’s no better place to be than the WWDC. Still, the ticket is above $1000, shattering the dreams for many of us. Unless, of course, you win a scholarship offered by Apple to attend to the event. The application requires the student to create an app to display their skill. Apple will be giving away up to 150 tickets and applications must be sent until May 2 at 5pm PDT.

Oh, and one more thing: if you’re a registered Apple developer, you can watch streams of WWDC sessions online during WWDC this time. That’s a first, and pretty awesome.

iTunes is a Decade Old

Seems like it hasn’t been nearly that long, but it has: the app and store that practically launched the future of Apple’s mobile future is now a decade old. Take a moment to stroll down memory lane and see how the store — and pop music — has evolved through these past years.

The Best App Deals for Your Mac

Just Type (NEW) – $2.99

Snail – Time and Task Manager  $6.99 > $4.99

Essential Anatomy (NEW) – $24.99

Leaf RSS Reader  $4.99 > $1.99

Slugline (NEW) – $39.99

Glui  $2.99 > Free

My Files  $1.99 > Free

CameraBag 2 – $14.99 > $9.99

MacPilot  $19.99 > $5.99

MacCleanse  $19.99 > $9.99

CloudJot  $7.99 > $4.99

Armadillo Audio Notes – $19.99 > $4.99

Solar Walk – 3D Solar System Model  $9.99 > $2.99

Vinoteka – $54.99 > $49.99

Cobook  $19.99 > $14.99

Collective  $3.99 > $1.99

Ultralingua Dictionary  $39.99 > $29.99

Delicious Library 2  $34.99 > $9.99

Maxthon (NEW) – Free

Metropolis – $19.99 > $11.99

Fantastic Bundle – $164.99 > $19.99 (7 apps including Voila and Snapheal)

Spring Bundle – $690 > $49.99 (9 apps including Camtasia and TextSoap)

MacHeist Bundle – $314 > $9.99 (9 apps including Little Inferno, Path Finder, Totals, Fantastical, CleanMyMac 2, and more)

Interesting Reads for the Week

The market for paid iOS apps isn’t dead

You don’t need every customer

Quality over Quantity

How Large Will the Paid Feed Reader Market Be?

Cloned at Birth: The Story of Ridiculous Fishing

You are not Steve Jobs

Apple’s In-Car Siri Integration Hits a Roadblock

What is like for designers at Adobe to design the UI for the same program you’re using?

Did We Miss Anything?

That’s all of the news, deals, and interesting links for this week, but if there’s anything you think we missed, be sure to let us know in the comments below.

It’s finally my turn to give you a small peak inside my treasure trove of apps. Keep in mind that this is in no way an exhaustive list, but rather a compendium of those most essential for a frictionless workday.

I’m a lot like Superman or Spiderman in the sense that I lead a double life. By day, I’m a quiet and bashful systems administrator, keeping the machines gears greased and the wheels turning. By night, I’m a fearless writer, reviewing perilous apps with total disregard for my own personal safety.

Ok, so maybe that was a little far fetched. After all who’s ever seen a bashful sysadmin… The point I’m trying to make, is that I have apps vital for each role in my life and then apps vital for both. So sit back, relax and enjoy the tour.

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The Day Job Apps

iTerm2

For any person spending a reasonable amount of time in the Terminal, iTerm2 is a must have. Support for tabs, split screens, seamless tmux sessions and a visor mode are just a few of the things that make this one of my most used tools throughout the day.

While not really an app, I’d be remiss not to mention fish, a modern command line shell which adds some great features.

Remoter for Mac

Unfortunately, not all my remote access is via a shell and for those rare occasions that I need to access a Windows machine, Remoter is my weapon of choice. It supports RDP, VNC and even SSH and Telnet, but it’s best feature by far, is Dropbox sync. This allows me to create a list of all the Servers I need to access and have that sync with Remoter on my iOS devices.

Chocolat

While Sublime Text 2/3 may be all the rage, I tend to prefer Chocolat. It’s a beautiful app, with minimal chrome. It has all the features you’d expect to find in a modern editor, such as Code completion, split and block editing, web view, folding and much more. It’s perfect for my humble coding needs. You can read Jorge Rodriguez’s excellent review here.

The Night Shift Apps

Writing Trio

I was a big fan of Byword and wrote just about everything there. I still use it on ocassion, however after reviewing MultiMarkdown Composer 2, I was hooked. Everything from documentation to articles and blog posts have taken form in this app.

Then along came Ulysses 3, and although I tried to resist it, the allure was too great and I ended up buying it. Truth be told, though, it has yet to crush a few bugs and add some features before it dethrones MultiMarkdown Composer 2.

Staying Informed

Having a day job means that I have to “timeshift” most of my reading. I rely on Pocket for the service, but when the time comes I use Readkit to consume the content. Another advantage of Readkit is that it supports multiple services, meaning I have access to my Pinboard bookmarks too.

As for keeping up to date with my RSS feeds, I’ve been a long time fan of Reeder, but after reading Jacob Penderworth’s review, I find myself using Leaf more often (especially after the latest updates).

Working With Images

I work with images almost on a daily basis. Whether they’re screenshots for documentation or a review, or my latest feeble attempt at photography, there’s no escaping them (not that I’d want to, though).

For screenshots and annotations, I use LittleSnaper. Phillip Gruneich reviewed it a while back and agrees it’s an excellent app.

For everything else, I’ve found no better tool than Pixelmator. It’s perfect for touching up my photographs or composing an image for a blog post. Not only is it shamelessly cheap, it’s brimming with excellent features. Don’t believe me? Then read Julia Altermann’s review and decide for yourself.

Pixelmator’s team has been teasing some of the upcoming new features and it’s looking good.

The All Day Apps

Alfred

This has to be without a doubt the most used app on my Mac. It’s the central hub of all my work. I use it to open apps, lookup words, access sites, install updates, manage mail… The list goes on. I was a huge fan of the previous version, but Alfred 2’s workflows have brought this to a whole new level!

As some of you may be aware, Phillip and I have switched launchers, all in the name of research. While Launchbar is insanely powerful I have yet to explore it in-depth and try replicate some of my workflows. Until then my Mac just feels broken.

Storage

I have most of my digital content stored in Dropbox. It’s features such as versions, sharing and ubiquitous nature make it the perfect companion for my files. There is however a new kid on the block to looks to steal Dropbox’s thunder and that’s Copy. After reading Paula DuPont’s review, I quickly jumped on that bandwagon too.

For sharing a small file, video or screenshot, CloudApp is currently my choice, although I often debate whether it’d be worth getting a pro account and if so, would droplr be better?

If you’re interested, you may use this referral link to signup for Copy. You get an extra 5GB of free space, as do I.

Notes and Stuff

I’m a huge proponent of plaintext, so it should come as no surprise that I store a large number of plaintext notes in NValt. Everything from short lived notes to snippets and techdocs live there.

I also use Evernote heavily for my paperless workflow. It’s where I store clippings of interest from around the web, receipts, warranties and even owners manuals have a place in this everything bucket.

Staying Organized

Anybody leading a double life such as mine needs an intricate, well thought-out system for staying sane and organised… and if I ever figure one out you’ll be among the first to know. For now though, I like to keep things simple – and plaintext based of course.

For that reason, I entrust TaskPaper with my projects and tasks. TaskBadges integrates nicely with it, providing visual cues for tasks yet pending. Since TaskPaper doesn’t have an alarm system, I rely on Due for time sensitive reminders. It’s text parsing capabilities and iOS sync make it a great choice.

As for calendaring, Fantastical is the only way to go. Quick access, excellent text parsing and it’s down right sexy looks make it a no brainer.

 Staying Safe

Seldom does a day go by that we don’t hear about some online security breach, or somebodies account being hacked. The tales are true and frightening and I for one take no chances. I trust all my critical information to 1Password. Never mind setting the standard for safety, these guys set the standard for online support too.

Spending a great deal of the day surrounded by network security experts, it would stand to reason that some of their paranoia would rub off on me… and it did. That’s why I have Little Snitch 3 installed. I feel safer know that few things go by undetected and without my permission.

Automation

In an ongoing effort to make my daily workflow as efficient as possible, I try and automate as many menial and repetitive tasks as I can. Hazel has proven to be indispensable in this endeavour and Keyboard Maestro is quickly following suit. Actions, although an iPad app has also started gaining some traction in my daily workflow.

It’s the Little Things

Next up are small utility apps, seemingly unimportant yet when they’re not there, the whole system feels awry.

• Bartender – Allows me to maintain some illusion of minimalism, keeping my otherwise unwieldy menubar in check;
• Moom – Managing all my windows would be an utter nightmare without this little gem. I just love being able to fling a window onto the second screen from the popover, or use any of the already many saved layouts via a hotkey;
• PopClip – This little app was bought on a whim, but quite surprisingly has grown on me and become a productivity booster. I find it’s plugins rather useful;
• Yoink – As with PopClip, I didn’t give this app much thought, yet now it’s a key part of my setup;
• Trickster – This app has freed me from constant worrying about where I saved something. Quick access to recent files and apps is something you don’t know you needed, until you experience it;
• Palua – Working a great deal in remote machines, be it via RDP, VNC or Parallels, it helps to have Palua map the function keys to the F keys when in Windows systems;
• F.lux – Spending as much time in front of the screen as I do, it’s essential I take care not to strain my eyes too much and this app helps me do just that.

Final Thoughts

There are so many apps that I’d like to list. Apps without which work would be possible yet clunkier and less efficient. Unfortunately, I have to draw the line somewhere and here is a good enough place as any.

Which apps do you find vital? Share any of my current favourites?

Despite the prevalence of services such as Dropbox, Flickr and Photo Stream, email is still the most popular way of sending photos to friends and family. It’s something we take for granted, yet many of us don’t tend to save the photos once we’ve seen them in our mail app.

Lost Photos is a rather unique utility that searches through every single email you’ve sent or received and extracts any photos it finds, ready for you to archive and preserve. Does it work? Read on to find out.

Simplicity

Lost Photos has just one feature – go through your email account and extract any images it finds. It works with a number of email services: AOL, Gmail, iCloud and Yahoo. Unfortunately, there’s no support as of yet for other email accounts. That means if you’re using an email account hosted with a company like Hover then you’ll not be able to use the app.

As soon as you launch the app, you can’t help but notice how pretty the rather sparse interface is. The only noticeable interface elements are the email address and password fields, as well as a noticeable button to start the process.

The options section is designed to be quite muted so as to not detract from the app’s ease of use. You can select if you want to skip photos smaller than 8k (thus avoiding small logos and icons), ignore gifs if you know someone who always used to send you memes or cat pictures and even ignore images before a certain time period.

Lost Photos remembers each account you’ve imported from so you can run it again and again, avoiding duplicating photos as it will ignore all images already imported.

The rather small number of options that are available are completely optional and although hiding them is a nice design touch, they can be easily missed.

Going Back in Time

Lost Photos operates in a similar way to your typical mail app such as Mail or Microsoft Outlook. The app logs in with the username and password, then begins to comb through your emails to find any photos. For your peace of mind, the app doesn’t save your email password so don’t be worried that your password is being saved on a server somewhere.

Depending on how large your email account is, it can take some time to go through every email you’ve sent or received. You’re kept informed on the progress by a progress bar and images will be displayed as they are found, all of which you can start browsing through whilst it continues searching.

Once Lost Photos has completed its search, app will provide options to then either import all the photos into iPhoto or just show them in the Finder.

Buried Treasure

One unexpected feature that the app has is that it can certainly give you a swift kick to the nostalgia! Before reviewing the app fully, I ran this through my primary email account that I’ve been using for about 8 years and, boy, were there some forgotten memories there! It makes the app’s icon truly fitting as there’s a whole wealth of treasure in the photos you’ll find.

Alas, like most treasure, you’ll have to find where it’s buried first. Lost Photos makes no attempt at any sort of organisation when imported, not even distinguishing between photos sent or received. This means whether you’ve found ten photos or a thousand, they’re all placed in the same folder.

Although Lost Photos creates a folder for each email account you search in, there’s no way to determine who sent you the photo, or even if it was a picture you sent or received. The filenames are preserved but other than that, it turns into a bit of a guessing game. At least you can use face detection in iPhoto to do the majority of the work in cataloging the photos, just don’t expect to know whose holiday snaps without people in that you’re looking at.

Socialising

The developers of Lost Photos seemed to have the nostalgia effect in mind when they added social sharing features. You can tweet, send to Facebook or email photos that you’ve found. Trust me, you’re going to inevitably find that one truly memorable photo of you and your friends from years ago that you just have to post on Facebook. Other apps have social integration and it’s nothing new, but when you’re potentially looking at photos long forgotten, it makes perfect sense.

Conclusion

Is Lost Photos worth purchasing? Definitely. I’ve found hundreds of photos from over the years that I don’t even remember seeing when they first hit my inbox, so being able to easily extract these and save them made the small cost worthwhile. If you’ve been operating an email account for a long time then you’ll have a lot of fun seeing some of the photos you’ve sent and received over the years and I’ve no doubt that, despite it’s lack of organisation, Lost Photos will be something you’ll enjoy.

Maybe you’re the kind of person who can’t leave well enough alone and are always customizing OS X. Or maybe you’re the opposite, maybe you want to have that same sort of devil may care attitude but are afraid of digging a hole so deep, even Spotlight can’t find you.

I’ve been in both camps, and while I definitely prefer to be in full control of the experience on my Mac, I don’t want to get myself into a bad situation either. MacUtil, a neat little OS X tweaking app, can help both groups: those who love to personalize their OS and those who don’t know where to start.

A Custom Job

The first tab in MacUtil is for the Dock, and there are as many Dock features to toggle on and off as for any of the other components. Make your Dock 2D, which I have to admit is probably my favorite Dock tweak. There are lots of other options here that are actually useful, though, like adding a recently used apps stack or placing a separator between Dock apps for organization.

The Finder tab has lots of great customizations, like making Finder quittable, searching the current folder by default, or disabling warnings when changing file extensions. I already had a lot of these tweaks implemented, and they can be a lot more useful than they might seem at first blush. OS X is great, but it brings with it a lot of little Finder nuisances, nuisances you may be able to rid yourself of at last.

User Interface and Misc are catchalls for everything else that doesn’t really fit into the Dock and Finder categories. Change how the scrollbars act (and occasionally disappear), disable Dashboard, and rid yourself of the crash reporter. Some of these options are actually pretty easy to find in System Preferences, but it’s nice to have them here.

Slow on the Uptake

That said, some MacUtil options seem a bit superfluous and even counter to increasing productivity. An example is toggling menu bar transparency. That’s easily changed in System Preferences, and if you don’t know where to look, you can use the System Preferences search function. However, you’ll find it in MacUtil, too, which would be fine if you didn’t have to log out every time you wanted to use MacUtil to change your menu bar’s transparency, completely unnecessary in System Preferences.

MacUtil takes a few moments to implement each and every tweak. Yeah, every tweak is implemented individually. There may be a great reason for that and it’s keeping my Mac from breaking in two, but it would be stellar to be able to toggle four or five tweaks on and then hit OK or authenticate it or something, so I didn’t have to wait for MacUtil to do its thing after every single mouse click.

Maybe that’s something the developer can fix, though. He’s open to suggestions. There are requests for comment on the application website and a place for feedback right in the app. If there’s anything you don’t like or think is missing, let him know, because he’s actively developing MacUtil.

Making Things Easy

Pretty much all of this is available somewhere, somehow, in OS X already. It’s just not all as easy to get to as menu bar transparency. What MacUtil (and other apps of this type) does is make all of those OS X tweaks accessible for even the lay user. So if you’re not comfortable digging into Terminal and changing things you may not remember how to put back later, you can really make OS X what you want with MacUtil.

I’m not someone who can leave a hornet’s nest unpoked, so OS X tweaking apps are old hat for me. I’ve been around the block a few times and done some wonderful–and terrible, funky–things to my Mac. MacUtil doesn’t have the most features I’ve seen, and in fact there’s not a ton here. That said, fewer features is okay. Most people aren’t going to need to customize the thousand and one things you can with a more robust app. In fact, too many options can be a turnoff for the uninitiated or even people who just want to get in and get out.

Final Thoughts

So MacUtil doesn’t have all of the features of, say, previously reviewed MacPilot. That’s probably okay. There are other tweaking apps that go way beyond the OS, but MacUtil keeps it pretty simple. Sure, there are people who want access to everything those over-the-top apps offer, and I’ll admit I’m one of those people, but lots of users will be intimidated by too many options.

Everything you really need is right there in MacUtil, and there’s just enough that you’ll never be overwhelmed. If the app’s missing something you want, though, just drop the developer a line and let him know. Still, as MacUtil stands now, it has plenty of great features, it’s easy to use, and it gets the job done.

If you live in an apartment block or make a living in IT support, then you’ll know the pain and heartache that can happen when there are a number of neighboring WiFi networks all trying to compete with each other! It’s a common frustration shared by many and usually we just put up with it or, worse still, assume it’s either an internet connection issue or hardware fault.

WiFi Explorer, by Adrián Granados, aims to make the process of tweaking your wireless network as straightforward as possible by providing you with detailed information about all the wireless networks your Mac can detect. Does it succeed? Let’s find out.

WiFi Wizardry

WiFi Explorer can provide you with detailed information about all the currently available 2.4GHz and 5GHZ wireless networks that your Mac can detect as well as providing useful graphing information about their signal strength and channel selection. It’s the swiss-army knife of wireless network management.

It’s important to note at this stage that WiFi Explorer doesn’t manage your network, nor does it make any changes to it or your Mac. It’s a completely informative app that serves only to provide you with as much information as possible for you to then make any changes. It’s a passive app that has no configuration features beyond some of its own preferences, so you really can’t break anything by using it!

When you launch WiFi Explorer, you’re presented with all the current information regarding currently detected wireless networks. WiFi Explorer constantly scans and updates every few seconds.

The main window displays all the nearby wireless networks that your Mac can detect. As the data is provided within a table, you’re then able to organise the list by whatever criteria you’d like, such as signal strength or network name.

Information Overload?

You’d be surprised at how much information you can gather from just detecting a wireless network, to the point it can look a little overwhelming. The information displayed ranges from the network name, the signal strength, the brand of wireless access point, and more. Thankfully, we can hide some of these columns via the apps’ preferences so you can focus on the parts you need.

WiFI Explorer also features a filter and search facility in the toolbar so you can narrow down the networks you’re interested in if the list has a large number of networks displayed.

If you’ve used WiFi scanners (such as KisMac or iStumbler) before then you’ll probably feel right at home. If not, then the lack of on-screen descriptions and a rather sparse help guide does make understanding it a little bit of a harder process. This is certainly a tool that’s primarily developed for those with previous knowledge of wireless network troubleshooting, which means for novice users there’s a steeper learning curve. Don’t let this stop you getting to grips with it, however. As I mentioned before, this is a passive app that has no controls or settings that could cause your Mac to stop working: its only function is to detect and inform.

The information panel below the network list lets us view even more information regarding the network we’ve selected. For more experienced users then this information will no doubt be useful. For novice users, it might be a bit overwhelming.

Thank Goodness for Graphs!

Thankfully, the wide variety of information is limited to the main window. Along the top of the information are a number of tabs you can select and the only information they have are easy to read graphs. If you’re wanting to get the most out of your wireless network then these are the only tabs you need since they can provide you with a visual reference of how your network is performing against neighbouring ones.

WiFi Explorer overlays all the selected networks together on the same graphs to give you a much better idea of how they are all operating together. It’s this feature that lets you troubleshoot your own network and if it shows you have a lower signal strength than your neighbours then you can start moving your access point’s location until you get a signal strength that is much stronger.

As you can see in the example above, most of the networks are on channel 1 – this means more interference and unreliability, not to mention slower speeds. If I had a network operating on channel 1, WiFi Explorer has already provided me with some useful information and I can then change my wireless network to a different channel.

Wrapping Up

For users having trouble maintaining a good wireless network who often find your Wi-Fi menu bar shows a large number of neighbouring networks then WiFi Explorer might be the app that helps you fix them once and for all.

Its lack of any comprehensive documentation and interface descriptions may leave some users scratching their head. Despite this, it’s still an app I would recommend as the benefits it can provide (not to mention the headaches it can prevent) mean putting in the time to understand the app well worth it.

Every new app and service these days dangles the promise of nearly unlimited free “cloud” storage in front of us. It’s a tantalizing promise in a day when smaller SSDs are the norm. After all, when’s the last time, prior to the MacBook Air’s coming out, that you would have considered a computer with 64Gb of storage? Right, I thought so.

Cloud storage has failed us, though, if freeing up our hard drives was what it was supposed to do. Instead, every document you add to iCloud, Dropbox, or Evernote takes up extra space in your cloud storage and on your hard drive.

My Files is a new app that aims to fix this problem, giving you a way to easily store files online and find them again quickly, all without having to take up extra space on your Mac. Let’s see if it lives up to its lofty goal.

Saving Local Storage

See, there’s actually one way to use cloud storage without using up storage on your Mac: only use the cloud service through its web app. If you only use Google Drive in your browser, and don’t install the Mac sync app, then it’ll never use up extra storage space beyond a tiny bit of web cache you can clean up. With Dropbox and Skydrive, you could either use them solely from your browser, or you could selectively sync only certain folders, leaving others residing only in the cloud to save local storage.

The problem is, that keeps your files stored but not very accessible. You’ll need to remember where you saved them, and will need to login to the cloud storage service’s site to search for files or download them. It might work for archival – I use non-synced Dropbox folders to store old eBooks and photos, personally – but isn’t the nicest for stuff you might need on a semi-regular basis.

My Files aims to fill the gap by bringing your non-synced cloud storage files closer to your Mac. It lets you sign in with your Dropbox, Google Drive, Skydrive, SugarSync, and Box accounts (only one account per service, though) and view all the files and folders you have stored online in each of those services. It sounds perfect, but the app is buggy and basic enough to keep it from really shining.

A Glimpse of the Cloud…

There are great things about My Files. First off, it has you access each storage service through the service’s own app authentication, so you don’t actually put your passwords directly into My Files. You instead authenticate My Files with the storage services, much like you would authenticate a mobile app with Dropbox on your iPhone. That way, you don’t have to trust the app itself with your accounts.

Once you’ve added your accounts, you can browse each storage service and see every file and folder in them. You can also search across all of the services through the search bar at the top of the app, though it’ll only search for file and folder names. Once you’ve found the file you need, you download it to your computer, double-click to open the file, or share it via email or iMessage. Or, depending on the service, you can copy a public link to the file to share directly, without having to download anything.

You can also create new folders and upload files, though you’ll have to do that through the menus in My Files as there’s no drag-and-drop support for now. There is also no way to quickly go back to the home screen to see all of your services, but there is two-finger swipe to go back and forth, which makes it decently easy.

…That’s Slightly Foggy

So far so good. You can upload files and get a link to share them online, find files you’ve already saved, and search across multiple services together. Not bad at all.

The problem is, My Files is buggy enough that it crashed at least once a day while I’ve been testing it. It’d occasionally have trouble logging in with one of the services, and you can’t use the app at all until it’s logged into everything you’ve authenticated.

Then, it gives you no way to sync changes. If you double-click on a file in My Files, it’ll open in the default app on your Mac (unless it’s a document in Google Drive; then it’ll show an error, since you can’t open Google Docs files locally). But, the file you’re viewing is just a copy saved in your Mac’s cache folders, and any changes you make won’t be saved to the cloud. You’ll need to save the file as a new copy in, say, your Desktop, then re-upload it via My Files to get the changes saved to the cloud.

Conclusion

My Files is a neat concept, one we’d love to see done well, but the current version falls far short of what you’d need from a mission-critical app. If you are using non-synced Dropbox folders, say, to save your old eBook and music library that you don’t need that often, My Files might be worth downloading to give you an easy way to search for files when you need them. It even gives you a decent way to add new files to those non-synced folders.

Beyond that, though, it’s far from the best way to use cloud storage, and for the most part, you’d be better off just logging into the cloud storage websites to find files you’ve saved there. It’s a niche app as-is, but one that could be useful to most of us if it was improved.

Imagine drag-and-drop uploading and downloading, synced file changes, multiple accounts per service, and a nicer interface that tied together cloud storage like this. That could be a game changer. It’s yet to be seen, though, if My Files will be the app for that task, or not.

Looking for a way to keep your finances managed this year, perhaps to make next tax season a bit less frustrating? Then you need to check out Money by Jumsoft, our sponsor this week.

Money by Jumsoft presents a powerful, comprehensive, and intuitive system designed to help you keep control of your financial life. Oversee your account balances, track investments, keep budgets, and manage your bank accounts, credit cards, loans, investments, assets, and cash. And do it all in a straightforward and stylish interface.

Money’s key features include:

• Convenient income and expense tracking
• Easy budget planning
• Scheduled transactions
• Multiple options for reports
• Investment tracking
• Sync with Money for iPhone and iPad via Wi-Fi
• Multiple data files
• Password protection

Money was first released in 2003 and has won wide popularity among small businesses and home users of Macs since then. Fans of Money appreciate the combination of its high usability and the effectiveness of finance management that it provides.

Go Get It!

Ready to get your finances under control on your Mac? Then head over to the App Store and grab your own copy of Money for $38.99. Or, you can download a free trial of Money from Jumsoft’s site to make sure it works for you before buying a copy.

The Cave was recently released by the same people who did Monkey Island and Maniac Mansion and some other people who did Psychonauts. That’s some pretty impressive video game chops, so it’s no surprise that adventure game-cum-platformer The Cave has been met with high expectations.

How does it perform on the Mac, and just what is the mystery of the Cave? We’ll try to find out!

Welcome to the Cave

The Cave introduces itself to you right at the beginning. It knows you’re there to go inside of it, and it’s ready. You’re not the first and you won’t be the last to seek answers inside the Cave. You can choose among seven playable characters, and the Cave will introduce you. Each harbors a shady secret and has come to the Cave to discover something about themselves. You get to choose three characters, and you’ll switch among them as you make your way through the Cave.

Combining aspects of point-and-click adventure games and platformers, your characters move through the Cave using the mouse or arrow keys–or game controller, if that’s how you roll–discovering and collecting objects to solve puzzles and unlock the next section of the Cave. You’ll find your team hopping from ledge to ledge and running up and down stony corridors, but without a lives system, the Knight’s fall to squished death doesn’t have the same sting; he’ll just respawn somewhere close to his last pre-dead location.

The characters are more than just a replacement for a cursor and a means to fetch the stuff that’s going to make it possible to keep moving forward. Each has his or her own special ability, and while you can absolutely complete the game with any combination of the seven, for every three characters you choose, you get a different play experience. Not only does everyone have their own story to reveal as you move deeper into the Cave, but entire areas of the Cave may be made inaccessible if you don’t have the right power on board.

While you’re learning about each character’s clouded history, finding out what was so important that they’d throw themselves into a big hole in the ground, it’s not all sadness and woe. The game has an incredible sense of humor, and even the darker parts of the story are funny. The Cave makes great use of black humor, though it never gets scarier than its 9+ App Store rating.

Taciturn Heroes

For a giant rock formation, the Cave is pretty talkative, serving as the narrator and commenting on the events occurring within itself. Early in the game, you’ll learn that as long as you’re inside of the Cave, you’re effectively immortal, or at least your characters are. They’re in a liminal state, somewhere between what they were before they entered the Cave and what they’ll be when they finally emerge. The Cave will cause your characters to change, because it’s special, and the Cave wants you to know that.

There’s at least one other voiced non-playable character, incidentally voiced by the same guy as the Cave, and he’s the one who sends you on your first quest. For a guy you don’t see a whole lot of in the game, he’ll talk your ear off if you let him. The Cave’s NPCs are a loquacious bunch, especially when compared to the player characters. They don’t make a peep. With those guys, it’s all about mystery and discovery. What are their stories and what are the hiding? Though they won’t ever speak up, you’ll run across special symbols, cave paintings, that when activated will reveal a bit more about each character’s past.

Point-and-Click Puzzle Play

While The Cave sure is a lot of fun to play, some of the puzzles are just dumb. Even simple puzzles that are are easily deciphered require one or more of your characters to run back and forth over the same section of the Cave, over and over again. After the first few times of retreading the same ground, it becomes almost boring, especially if you got the puzzle figured out a while ago.

If you want to learn the stories for all seven of the characters and see everything that’s in the Cave, you’ll need to play The Cave three times. That’s means you’ll be doing the same puzzles three times! Okay, so with different characters, you may come up with new solutions, and no two playthroughs will be identical, but that’s still a lot of spelunking. I can’t help but think that the third time through with two characters you’ve already used, just so you can find out what’s up with the Hillbilly, is going to feel pretty stale.

Climb Your Way Out

Being honest, I probably won’t play it three times in a row just to see every single thing that happens in The Cave. What I’ll do is play it, love it immensely, and then set it aside until I get that itch again. While on the surface, The Cave wouldn’t have a ton of replay value once you made it through and figured out the mystery, being able to create a new experience with a new mystery definitely makes it a lot more appealing to go back later.

It’s funny, the graphics look great, and the animations are okay on my three-year-old Mac once I’ve adjusted some of the settings. Some running back and forth is inherent in adventure games of this type, and while it certainly feels The Cave got more than its fair share of to and fro, the characters will be doing interesting and hilarious things while they’re running around. And throughout it all, the Cave will be revealing its secrets, but only if you can prove yourself worthy.

You’ve got AirDrop, and that’s pretty cool, but what if you’re not a single OS household? You have a Mac, but your significant other has a PC. How is that ever going to work? What are you going to do, email files back and forth? Pshaw!

Well, you could do that, but it sure would create a lot of inbox clutter, or you could try Filedrop, a nifty little app that acts like AirDrop but works on Macs and PCs, allowing you to share files across platforms. There are even some forthcoming mobile apps to sweeten the deal. How reliable is sharing with Filedrop? Let’s find out!

Drop Me a Line

Open up Filedrop, and it will start looking for other computers on the same network that are also running Filedrop. It’s important to remember that Filedrop has to be open on both computers; it doesn’t run in the background. When Filedrop finds your friend’s machine, just drag a file (or more than one) onto the image of his desktop. Green fireflies will swirl around the Filedrop window while you wait, and when everything’s done, you’ll get a confirmation that the upload is 100% complete.

It’s just as easy to accept a file via Filedrop. When someone sends you a file or folder, you’ll get an incoming transfer alert. Accept or decline the transfer, and choose to save to your default folder or elsewhere. When the transfer’s complete, you’ll get the same 100% confirmation as your friend sending the file.

Click the downloaded files button to take a look at all of the files you’ve received. My default folder is Downloads, so that’s what my button says, but if you’re using Documents or Desktop, the name of the folder that receives your Filedrop downloads will show up on the button instead. Your most recent files will show up there in a list. Click the filename to open the file, or hit the spyglass icon to locate the file in Finder. If the file’s been moved, though, it won’t appear in the list.

Filedrop’s Features

There aren’t any settings or any kind of options for Filedrop. It does what it says on the tin and that’s it. Not that it isn’t a great app, because it sure can shift those files around, and it doesn’t miss a beat when it’s trying to locate other computers running Filedrop, finding them instantly.

It’s just that it always has to be open. That’s sort of a bummer, and if you accidentally close the application window, it also exits the app. That means if someone wants to send you something, they can look all night and all day, but your Mac isn’t going to show up until you reopen Filedrop. It really is too easy to quit this app when it’s the kind of thing you likely want to keep running all the time.

It also sits in the Dock, and you can’t get rid of it. Sure, I want Filedrop to be “always on,” but that doesn’t mean I want to be looking at it the 90% of the time I’m not using it. It’d be great if I could just run it from the menu bar and only bring up the Filedrop window when I needed it. Filedrop might work even better if I could bring it up with a hotkey and just let it run entirely in the background the rest of the time.

Mobile on Its Way

There are some mobile apps on the way to complement Filedrop. Easily move files to your phone and then back again. Stream photos and music to any computer running Filedrop, as long as you’re on the same network. There are going to be iOS apps for iPhone and iPad, with an Android version to follow, so everyone should be covered.

That’s going to be great, but it’s not out, yet. I can’t tell you how well it works with iOS, because the iOS apps don’t exist. (And I wouldn’t be able to tell you about the Android app at all, ever, because I’m not that cool.) The developer promises we won’t have long to wait, though, only a few weeks, at most. Filedrop is just so good and the features in conjunction with the mobile apps are so promising, I don’t mind waiting. Much.

Final Thoughts

AirDrop is great if you’re only ever around other Macs, and while that’s great in fantasy land, most of us interact with PC-users regularly. We’re long past the days of wondering if our files are Mac- or PC-compatible, and we want our computers to get along with each other just as well. Filedrop bridges the gap, and does so nicely.

It was so simple to use, I was amazed, and each time I tried sending or receiving a file, everything went off without a hitch. The couple of times my computer couldn’t find its friend, I thought, “Aha! Gotch, Filedrop!” But instead of Filedrop’s discovery failing, someone had closed Filedrop on one of the other computers. That’s perhaps the only failing of Filedrop, that’s it’s too easy to close and thus stop receiving files. Otherwise, Filedrop’s a cinch to use, and the promise of mobile apps to come means things can only get better.

Delineato is a beautiful new diagramming and mind mapping app, but in order to appreciate this app, you will need to forget what you know about apps in this genre. Forget the loaded toolbars, tons of options, and feature laden apps.

Delineato is the OmmWriter of brainstorming apps, complete with a track of Zen music to help keep you focused. In my recent comparison of several mind mapping apps, I divided the apps into two categories — minimalist and power user. But this app is in a category of its own.

Look and Feel

Apps can’t make you more creative, but the design of this app definitely forces you to get your ideas out with no visual interference. There is no toolbar and only one button for fullscreen mode. Clicking on the the title brings up the standard OS X document management options such as Duplicate, Move To, and such.

Other than, there is not much to the UI unless you right click, double click on a topic (more on that in a minute), or use the menu bar. All you get is a blank, unlimited canvas to start mapping out ideas. The default theme colors are pleasing, but selecting a different theme only changes the background if you begin your mind map using a different theme (a possible bug?).

So, while many mind mapping and diagramming apps are daunting because of the plethora of features, Delineato might just intimidate because you don’t know how to get started.

A New Take on Mind Mapping

Delineato provides a completely unique user experience among all of the diagramming and mind mapping maps I have tried. The first thing that is clearly different is the input method. There are no shortcuts for adding topics, notes, or any other type of input. For me, this was a little unsettling at first. I am used to entering and tabbing my why through a mind map, usually using Xmind or MindNode Pro. Instead, all input in Delineato is through the mouse either right clicking to add a new topic to the map, or double clicking to edit an topic.

Delineato’s website has a neat instructional video on getting started with Delineato

After my initial scorn at the lack of keyboard options for input, the experience of using the mouse started to grow on me. Sure it’s slower, but the experience was more immersive and required more focus on the task at hand. In a way it was more thoughtful. One thing I actually liked more in Delineato than other mind mapping apps is how connections between topics are made, it’s as simple as dragging lines between shapes and you can create as many connections as needed.

All in all, Delineato is like a free form diagraming app and not a pure mind mapping app. There is no predetermined structure, and no options for automatically organizing the topics. It does, however, provide guides for moving topics around and there is an option for a grid background. Users of traditional mind mapping tools might also miss some other features such as task management options, packaged images, no import or export of OPML files, and no hidden notes for discretely adding additional information to topics.

Final Thoughts

Delineato’s lack of common mind mapping / diagraming features will turn away some users — especially the lack of OPML import and export and the lack of keyboard input. However, you are a mind mapper who can accept an app a little outside of the normal paradigm, this app definitely rethinks the mind mapping app category in a good way.

Despite its lack of features, Delineato’s low price point (compared to other mind mappers) and the great minimalist experience it creates leads me to recommend this app.

I need more cloud storage, but I have commitment issues. I always want to try something new, and I’m always looking for more gigabytes. New service Copy has my storage woes covered. Free users are sitting pretty and will do even better with a generous referral program.

We’ll take a look at the Copy app and see if it has the features to match up to all that space they’re tossing around.

Make It Rain Gigabytes

Copy is the new kid on the cloud storage and sharing block. You start off with 5 GB of free space, and while I think five free anything is pretty good, 5 GB might not sound like much. Still, it’s at least as much as I got free with either Dropbox or Google Drive and almost as much as SkyDrive gave me.

Here’s the kicker, though: with every friend you sign up, you get another 5 GB. The referral scheme is only good for a limited time, but while it’s going on, you can rack up some serious space. If you do decide to go pro, you can get 250 GB of cloud storage for just under a hundred bucks a year.

Now that you’ve got just an embarrassing amount of storage with Copy, you need to put it to use. Install the Copy application, and you’ll need to create an account on your first launch if you haven’t already. You’ll choose where you place your Copy folder; the default location is your user folder, which may not the most convenient, so choose wisely, because if you change your mind, you have to move the folder from within the app.

Once you’re set up, all files you stick in your Copy folder will be mirrored on the Copy website or accessible on other devices running Copy and logged into your account. If you don’t want everything synced, though, click Manage My Files in the application preferences, and deselect anything you don’t want Copy to mirror anymore.

There are two great sharing features in Copy. The first is the ability to invite other Copy users to shared folders. The folder is added to their accounts and mirrored on their machines, and they can edit the folder’s contents, making it a great way to accomplish group collaboration.

The second–and equally cool–way to share files with Copy is right in the Finder right-click menu. Select any file or folder in your Copy folder, and then right-click on it and choose Copy Actions. Not only can you see the history of the file, handy if it’s ever been shared with other users, but you can send a public link through the Copy app or copy the public link to your clipboard. Unlike folder sharing above, which requires sendees be signed up with Copy, public links make it really easy to share files with anybody.

The Need for Speed

I’ve read some user reviews complaining about Copy’s upload speed. I didn’t have a problem there, but I also didn’t try to upload a ton of stuff at one time, either. I noticed even after my files were all synced, they didn’t necessarily show up in my Recently Changed menu for a while, though. But just for sharing a few files, the speed was good. Still, if you can get three friends to sign-up and install the Copy app, you’ll have a full 20 GB, so maybe you will want to move a ton of stuff over, after all.

Copy makes it really easy to manage your bandwidth, so if you’re trying to get other stuff done while syncing files, you can tell Copy to cool it for a while. Check the upload and download rate boxes and set your speed. Uncheck them when things open up and you want to let Copy do it’s thing unhindered. If everything just becomes too much for Copy, though, you can pause syncing from the menu bar.

Final Thoughts

Copy’s first job is syncing, which works perfectly. It’s the easy sharing that makes the app so great, though. I like being able to share files with collaborators; that function has a ton of uses, not just for coworkers but among family and friends, too. If I want to share a recipe with my mom, I can stick it in our shared folder, and I can keep a household folder with my husband for all the boring but important stuff we both need a copy of. Equally useful is the ability to share public links, via email, messaging, or social media. It would be nice to share right from the menu bar icon, but I guess you can’t have everything.

The amount of space you get for free can’t be overlooked. 5 GB is definitely respectable and an additional 5 GB for every person referred is amazing in itself. You can rack up some serious space doing that. It’s only for a limited time, though, so you should probably jump on that deal if you’re interested. The app works great and the service is solid, not giving me any problems while I was syncing and sharing. With all that space, Copy’s hard to say no to.

Another week is close to an end here at AppStorm and we gathered the top headlines, articles and deals from all over the web that may interest you.

Do you want a sneak peek? Mailplane is out of beta, Adobe releases public beta of Lightroom 5, Wunderlist announcing their Pro plan and Pocket’s first birthday.

Have a nice reading!

News from the World of Apps

?After 10 Years Apple Continues Music Download Dominance in the U.S.?

This is expected news, as iTunes is definitely the better known place to purchase music. However, what is really interesting about these statistics is the rise of Amazon. Apple has a 63% market share, but it used to be 68% in 2011, meanwhile, Amazon had 15% back then and now holds 22%. That’s a lot. Reuters went on in detail about Amazon’s growth, check it out.

?Mailplane 3 is out of beta?

It doesn’t matter what is your desktop email client, you probably have a Gmail account, and its web app has had several improvements after the Sparrow team joined them. Mailplane’s new version is for those who prefer the typical web interface and it now supports Gmail’s new compose mode, Quick Look previews for attachments, integration with Notification Center and much more.

?Adobe launches free public beta for Lightroom 5?

Lightroom is Adobe’s answer to Aperture. The upcoming version’s beta just got released for anyone to give it a shot and help improve the photo workshop. It kept the core editing barely untouched but brought a new feature called Smart Previews, built to save photographers on the field using lighter computers like a MacBook Air. There is much more to check and you can read a bit more on The Verge.

Pocket introduces Send to Friend feature to celebrate 1-year of service.

I love Pocket and I salute them for their first birthday since changing the brand, and now we’re the unwrapping the gifts with this new feature. Pocket isn’t getting a social networking side, but rather the updated Share Menu makes it easy to send articles to recently used contacts. Don’t miss the video that Pocket shares with you after the update.

?iSteve, the Steve Jobs mockumentary is available online?

Comedy site FunnyOrDie released its 78-minutes comedy about Steve Jobs’s life featuring Justin Long for free to watch online. There are two ‘serious’ Jobs’ biopics in the Hollywood queue, the one starring Ashton Kutcher and the other penned by screenwriter Aaron Sorkin (The Social Network). This one, though, is more of an alternate-reality parody of Jobs’ life, one you’ll likely not terribly enjoy.

?Wunderlist announces upcoming Pro plan?

I always found out pretty strange that Wunderlist offered no paid subscription for additional features, but that’s all changed now. Wunderlist Pro is coming soon, and will be focused on teams and comes with long-desired features like assigning tasks, add accountability to shared lists, smarter task management, etc. Subscriptions will be priced at $4.99 (monthly) and $44.99 (yearly). We’ll have more info when it’s launched.

?Evernote CEO: “We want to build hardware”?

Seems like the note-taking service will join the fight with other major companies and start developing hardware in the soon future. Instead of the regular market, Phil Libin states an investment into “new and magical” devices. You should check the whole interview up in our link to read what Phil has to say about Evernote’s security issues, market competition, and more.

The Best App Deals for Your Mac

?Mail Stationery? $19.99 > $1.99

?SnapNDrag Pro?   $5.99 > $2.99

?Horus News Dealer? (NEW) $7.99

?Tadam?  $3.99 > $2.99

Mailplane 3 (NEW) $24.95

?Bluenote? (NEW) $9.99 (you can buy it for $6.99 ?here?)

?Fasten? (NEW) $1.99

?Solar Walk – 3D Solar System model?  $9.99 > $4.99

?Boom?  $7 > $4

?Writedown? $5.99 > $2.99

?VirusBarrier Plus? $9.99 > $7.99

?Moneydance? $50 > $33.49

?Priority Matrix? $20 > $11.99

?Papers?  $79 > $54

?Name your Price Mac Bundle 2.0? $399 > Name it, beat the average to grab all apps, including Crossover, Gemini and Paperless.

?The Corporate Bundle? $20 Contains more than 50+ design resources for your business.

?MacHeist nanoBundle 3? $260 > $9.99 For this price you can have up to 8 apps. The basic set already includes Fantastical, CleanMyMac 2, Clarify, xScope and Totals. After a number of bundles sold, every bundler also acquires PathFinder and Little Inferno.

Interesting Reads for the Week

?Some thoughts after recovering from a hard drive failure?

?OS X’s Most Underestimated Feature?

?How To Price and Sell Your Startup’s Product?

?An ode to iTunes DJ, a beloved feature that died before its time?

?Where No Search Engine Has Gone Before?

?Readerpocalypse – The Players?

?This is why Apple wants to launch iRadio?

Did We Miss Anything?

That’s all of the news, deals, and interesting links for this week, but if there’s anything you think we missed, be sure to let us know in the comments below. Otherwise, check back next Thursday for more Mac news, deals, and more!

City-building games got complicated really fast after SimCity 2000 released nearly 20 years ago. They remain a joy to play, but the best ones tend to come with steep learning curves.

Not so for the Virtual City series, however, as it adopts a more casual tilt on the genre. Virtual City 2: Paradise Resort offers a compact city-building experience and a lengthy scenario-based campaign to dig your mouse into. Whether you’re waiting for the new SimCity to drop on OS X or looking for an alternative city builder with a different approach, it’s worth a closer look.

Cities and Supply Chains

Virtual City 2 has a different emphasis to SimCity; it’s mostly about building and managing transit routes for people and industry. Some of you might recognize this as a hallmark of the Transport Tycoon and Railroad Tycoon games, but Virtual City is both far less complicated than these and confined to a smaller scope.

You complete missions — 52 of them, to be precise, spread over four picturesque regions — by meeting a set of goals. Usually these goals are to build certain industries, deliver a set number of goods to a given destination, and reach milestones for population, tourism, office workers, income, or environment.

You don’t often get much say in shaping your cities, with large chunks of the layout being preordained; the appeal lies in keeping the wheels turning. Your cities usually progress from broken to well-oiled machines over the course of a scenario, building up a smooth supply chain and tourist racket, with the best missions requiring you to then shift gears and refocus on a different industry.

There are three types of transport vehicle — bus, truck, and dump truck. All need a source and a destination to establish a route, although both buses and dump trucks can travel to multiple stops. Buses collect (and sometimes drop off) people at bus stops, airports, railway stations, and from out of town, then drop them at entertainment buildings (boosting happiness), offices (boosting the number of workers), and hotels (boosting tourism).

Trucks transport a single material from one building to another. Each manufacturing industry is composed of several buildings. Some, like a Steel Mill or Oil Derrick, simply produce a material, while others, such as a Plastic Factory or Fabric Factory, both consume and produce materials. You end up with a lot of trucks.

But you have to be careful, because there are only a limited number of vehicle slots. You can upgrade the garage, allowing more vehicles, but it has a hard limit on its maximum capacity. Some scenarios actually require more vehicles than this capacity, requiring a constant juggling of assignments for trucks ferrying materials around the city.

Manage More, Build Less

Virtual City 2 is a game of resource management as much as it is one of city building. You can plonk down all the buildings you want, but your city will stand still until you set up transport routes and you’ll find yourself broke. Money is one of your most precious resources — it may be infinitely replenish-able, but you’re boned if it disappears before you build the infrastructure you need to have an income.

There are four locales in all, each with a different visual aesthetic and type of tourist attraction. Despite the Paradise Resort part of the name, you don’t always work toward a resort town — many scenarios are totally focused on industry, while several others ask you to raise the number of permanent residences.

Success hinges on upgrading buildings and vehicles. You can find yourself stuck in a level if you choose the wrong upgrades at the wrong time (don’t worry, it’s easy to restart, and a typical level takes 10-30 minutes). Virtual City is far more strategic than it at first seems, and you can sink hours into tweaking your supply chains and finding inefficiencies.

I had one city in which I was a few hundred dollars in income and around a dozen happiness points short of the goals. There was no room to build new things — buildings or vehicles — and everything was fully upgraded. But it turned out I had major inefficiencies in my supply chain. I needed to bulldoze and rebuild several buildings in different locations, so that buses and trucks had less distance to travel on critical routes.

This kind of thing pops up often in the latter stages of the game, if you don’t think carefully about not only the distance related buildings are away from each other but also the layout of roads. In most cases, buses, trucks, and dump trucks all block a lane in the road when doing pickups and drop-offs.

If you don’t create double-width roads in the busy thoroughfares, you get regular backups in traffic — which hurts your supply chain and consequently the local economy. If your entertainment/work/tourist destinations are far away from population hotspots, or if the parts needed for one element of a product chain have to travel across town, your economy will slow down and happiness decreases.

It’s not the most sophisticated simulation, but Virtual City taps into the essence of urban planning and traffic theory. And it gets you thinking about all sorts of little things you’d never considered before. Don’t be surprised if you end up asking questions about the world around you based on the lessons you learn while playing.

Slowdowns Galore

Performance struggles when there are a lot of things happening in your city — even my quad-core late-2012 iMac struggles to keep the frame rate smooth, and the simulation slows to a crawl at times. Virtual City 2 isn’t a new game, nor is it especially demanding from either a processing or graphical perspective. This should be fixed by now, and it’s frustrating to see that it isn’t.

Satisfying Fun

Players of the first Virtual City game will be pleased that Paradise Resort is a deeper, more complex, and more satisfying experience than its predecessor, but it’s a bit of a head-scratcher why G5 left out the freeplay/sandbox mode — for building a city from scratch and making your own goals, a la classic SimCity titles. (You can at least play on indefinitely after achieving the goals for a mission.)

You get far more freedom for city building in the newer Virtual City Playground, but I’d advise you to steer clear of that game’s broken economy and free-to-play money grubbing.

As it is, Virtual City 2 represents the best in Mac city-building and management outside of hardcore series SimCity and Cities In Motion (and perhaps Tropico, if you consider its delightful simulation of a banana republic relevant). If you want a deep simulation, look elsewhere. But if you’re happy to click away at a more “gamey” take on the genre, you could do a lot worse. Virtual City 2 should be challenging and fun for all ages, and, performance troubles aside, it’s an improvement on the original.

Greetings!

I’m a brand-new Mac user, so to speak, as my MacBook Pro found its home barely 2 years ago. I’ve quickly grown quite an addiction to Mac apps. In the real world, I’m a born and raised in Brazil copywriter for an advertisement agency, so I’m always surrounded by creative people.

So, here’s the apps I use to get my work done on the Mac in my day-to-day work. Remember, this is not a magical workflow: my belief is that productivity comes from the person, not from the apps they use to achieve it. These applications help with my workflow, and I hope they can help you out to reach your goals as they do mine.

Ulysses III / Byword

It would be unfair to only list one application for my writing tasks, like this one. I’ve been using Byword  for quite a while and I love it. I’m not as adept to using iA Writer  as I often flinch with applications that give you no Preferences, yet I admire it for its Focus Mode and blue cursor.

Partially for the hype, but maybe also for its features, I’ve been using Ulysses  for my most recent articles. I still can’t decide if I’ll stick to it or return to Byword; only time will tell that and it would be unreal to tell you a verdict at the moment.

 

ReadKit / Reeder

Every thursday, I publish the This Week in Mac Apps News and Deals and to collect the best selection of articles, news and deals, I must keep track of many RSS feeds. I’m on the praying team, hoping that Reeder  finds a reasonable solution to the Google Reader dilemma as they’ve promised. There’s no better RSS reader out there in my opinion.

ReadKit  is a great client if you use more than one service to read articles later. Mostly, I use Pocket  to filter the most interesting articles I find on the Web for later reference when curating what goes on the weekly news post, and then read them later inside ReadKit.

LittleSnapper / Preview

I love LittleSnapper . It is not just a storage place for screenshots, but also a fantastic way to organize all sorts of images. I won’t deny that I often use it for its well-known features for screen-shoting. Don’t miss its embed web browser, either: it saves my life when I write for Web.AppStorm.

As I’ve pointed out in LittleSnapper’s review, its biggest flaw is the absence of a direct tool for resizing your screenshots. Preview covers that and, actually, is probably the best application that comes with your Mac. If you don’t already love Preview, you should dig a bit deeper and see how useful it can be.

Launchbar

If I could choose only a single application to include in this list, it would be Launchbar. I use it to append text, save ideas, navigate through everything, check my Pinboard bookmarks, and so much more. If I listed everything I do with Launchbar, our editor would chop this whole paragraph off.

The truth is that I miss Launchbar. I’ve been using Alfred 2  since its release for an upcoming article also featuring Pedro Lobo, an experienced Alfred user, where we exchange launchers and try to adapt to our workflows. Alfred 2 is a beautiful application, but Launchbar has the place in my heart.

Moom

You only notice how necessary a utility is when it becomes such a strong habit that working without it is simply uncomfortable. This is my experience with Moom . When I’m on a different computer, I certainly miss Launchbar, but I mostly miss how Moom makes it easy to manage my windows with my carefully selection of hotkeys.

2Do

I’m not a ‘Getting Things Done’ kind of guy, I’m more of a ‘Just Do The Damn Thing’ one, so the relevancy of a task manager is dubious in my workflow. Yet, I love how 2Do  manages everything I need, from the articles for AppStorm to my expired bills. I even have an recurrent alarm to take the garbage out at 7 pm.

With so many options, why did I pick 2Do? Because it has most of the features the most well-known task managers have for almost half the price. The funny part is that I’ve bought it on productivity week, as it was the first task manager to go on sale, if I had waited a few more hours I could have gotten Things  or The Hit List . Still, I don’t regret for a single moment on choosing 2Do, as it works for my needs.

Sketch

I have a particular interest in finding solutions to problems, which draws me towards applications since each one is created to fill a gap, to fix something. One of my hobbies is designing app concepts, mainily aiming to improve user interfaces in ways that could solve my virtual issues.

My tool of choice for that is Sketch , being a feature-rich vector editor with only the things you need for this kind of activity. It still crashes a lot, bugs a lot, drives me crazy and you may not be very happy with it at the moment. However, its potential and usefulness makes me keep hanging there, dedicated to an application that has still a lot to move forward. And I’ll be following.

What else?

I try to keep a minimal amount of applications on my Mac, so I’m regularly deleting stuff I find no further use for. A few of the following applications are brand-new into my workflow or old veterans that found their places into my hall of fame, though, and they’re not getting deleted anytime soon.

•  CloudApp – After a quarrel with Droplr, I’ve simply moved across the street. It’s a great way to share files, even though I’m still adapting to it.
• 1Password – I’m another fan of the “confidential information manager”, because calling it a “password manager” is kind of incorrect, considering all the features of this application.
• Dropbox – I’m no fan of iCloud, and still believe that it is a service with a lot of improvements left to be added before it’s usable. That makes Dropbox the home of my most important files.
•  Transmit – Brand-new to this FTP world (just got my own domain, yippie!), this application has already left a great impression on me.

Basically, this is what keeps me working on the Mac. Is that the best I could use? Definitely not, but it works. Should I change anything? What is missing in my workflow? That’s up to you to comment.