Category: Mac

Are you the kind of person that wears out the CMD, C, and V keys on your keyboard before anything else? Then perhaps you need a clipboard manager, an app that can help you get more out of copying and pasting on your Mac. That’s exactly what our sponsor this week, ClipBuddy, is designed for. And best of all, you can get ClipBuddy for free this week!

ClipBuddy remembers everything you’ve saved to your clipboard: text, images, and more. It then lets you quickly go back through everything you’ve copied, and paste exactly what you want into your apps. You can search through your clip history to find what you want, complete with info about when and where you copied from, so you’ll never lose anything even if you forget to paste it into your notes app. Then, there’s hotkeys and more to let you paste what you’ve copied easily.

The Ondesoft team continues improving ClipBuddy with updates, new features, and more. It’s recently gotten Dropbox sync, import and export options, settings to hide the dock icon, and more.

Go Get It!

ClipBuddy usually costs $29.95 from Ondesoft’s online store, but for this week’s sponsorship, we have a special deal. You can get a free copy of ClipBuddy just for liking it on Facebook or sharing it on Twitter. Head over to the Ondesoft ClipBuddy giveaway site for the info you need to get a free copy of ClipBuddy.

App.net is an up and coming social network and microblogging service that’s proving to be a worthy competitor to Twitter, with features such as being completely ad-free and an increased character count (256 characters compared to Twitter’s 140). Instead of generating revenue via ads, App.net users pay a small subscription charge to use the service. App.net user numbers have increased dramatically over the last few weeks ever since it launched a free tier service, allowing these paid subscribers to send out invitations for others to join the service with limited accounts, free of charge. Essentially, App.net became a freemium service.

Although the network is still fairly new, there has been active development of App.net clients for the Mac and in this roundup we look at five of the best apps currently available. And if you’re not on App.net yet, keep reading for a shot at some free App.net accounts we have to giveaway!

Appetizer

Appetizer describes itself as a concise App.net client and it really shows, with the app having very little to distract you from your stream. If you’ve used Twitter clients before then this app will feel right at home with features such as reposting (App.net’s version of retweeting) as well as being able to reply and star posts. You can also search within your current view (such as your stream and replies) and it’s amazingly quick.

Appetizer describes itself as concise, which shows in the app’s unobtrusive interface

It supports uploading photos, taking pictures with your FaceTime camera and even snapping screenshots within the compose window, as well as a quick shortcut to Emoji icons and special symbols to liven up your posts. Add that to Notification Center support in Mountain Lion and it makes it a seriously worthwhile app to consider.

Appetizer doesn’t support multiple accounts so if you do have more than one App.net account then you’ll need to log out and log in every time you want to switch between them. It also seems to be a little too minimal, and it can take a few moments to find out how to access each feature. You also can’t edit your profile within the app, meaning you’ll need to visit App.net to do so.

Price: Free
Requires: OS X 10.7+

Kiwi

One of the most popular (and recent) App.net clients is Kiwi, which we reviewed recently. If the name sounds familiar, that’s because it originally started out life as a Twitter client with features such as theme support. Rewritten from the ground up to focus on App.net, Kiwi is the first paid-for App.net client. It has a clean layout and includes features such as draft posts, photo uploads and cross-posting to Twitter with a clever App.net and Twitter character count to avoid truncated posts. It even supports private messages, something most App.net apps for the Mac don’t support yet.

Kiwi started out originally as a Twitter client and the interface still remains familiar to those who used it before

Kiwi also supports a range of keyboard shortcuts and trackpad gestures as well as being able to display an icon on the menu bar.

Kiwi doesn’t support multiple accounts and has no search functionality (but does support username autocomplete) and ability to edit your profile. It is, however, in active development with several updates already released in as many weeks. Being a paid-for app means the developer is able to continue supporting the app and providing many more great features.

Price: $10 / Shareware
Requires: OS X 10.8+

Wedge

Wedge is another lightweight App.net client that focuses on just letting you view and post to your stream. As well as being able to view your stream and post to App.net, Wedge can also cross-post to Twitter and Facebook (provided these accounts are set up in OS X) which means if you like to keep the same status updates across your social networks, you can do so easily without having to visit Twitter and Facebook.

Wedge includes some clever cross-posting support for both Twitter and Facebook

Wedge also supports keyboard shortcuts and trackpad gestures with the option to display a menu bar icon.

Wedge features a built-in search to find users and hashtags as well as a separate “Interactions” pane to keep track of reposts and your most recent followers. The app also supports Notification Center for new posts and replies. You are also able to edit your profile within the app, saving you from having to visit App.net to do so.

Like Appetizer, Wedge doesn’t support multiple accounts and Wedge’s chunky sidebar may not be to everyone’s taste.

Price: Free
Requires: OS X 10.7+

Mention

Unlike the other apps we’ve covered, Mention doesn’t have a separate compose window, instead having it permanently displayed at the bottom of the main (and only) window. For some, this means the app is less cluttered since you’re not needing a separate window to write a post. For others, it may be a minor annoyance since that occupied space means you’ll need to scroll through posts more frequently.

Mention has a number of unique font options that can be quite refreshing

There’s a search field to find users and hashtags though going back to your stream from a search result is a little unintuitive due to the appearance of the back button after searching (it appears just as text in the toolbar and doesn’t look like a button).

Mention features some great font options, including PT Sans, and supports notifications as well. You can also mute users which is a useful feature if you are following someone who might be posting a little too frequently.

Price: Free
Requires: OS X 10.7+

Fluid

Wait, what? Fluid isn’t an App.net client! Don’t worry, all will be revealed.

The App.net website is actually a great way to interact with the service. Whilst you may not have some of the features the rest of the apps here benefit from such as cross-posting or Notification Center support, you can still take advantage of all the core features such as viewing your stream, adding posts (with photo upload support) and reposting and replying to others.

Whilst Fluid itself may not be an App.net client, it allows us to transform the App.net site into its own app.

Fluid is an app that lets you turn any website into a standalone application. We’ve talked about Fluid before on Mac.Appstorm, with fellow author Jacob Penderworth writing “Why I Use Fluid for Twitter Instead of Apps”. We’re adopting the same idea and using App.net instead.

If you purchase Fluid then you’ll also be able to create a special Fluid version of App.net that sits in your menu bar all the time, ready to view and post.

Price: Free / $4.99 to unlock features
Requires: OS X 10.6+

Wrapping Up

App.net is still very much in its infancy, and this is easily noticed by the sparse amount of apps available. However, whilst the number might be small the apps themselves are very well designed and with Twitter taking the controversial decision to limit what developers can do to the point that it’s no longer feasible to write a new Twitter app, I see this as just the beginning of what will no doubt be a very healthy and rich ecosystem of apps.

If you’re not yet an App.net member, we’ve got 100 invites to give away. Visit our Mac.AppStorm App.net invite page, where you can become a free member!

There are plenty of screen capture apps, but they all seem to do too much or too little. If you haven’t found an app for creating and editing screen shots beyond what comes standard in Mac OS X, it’s likely because what’s available either gets in your way or doesn’t have enough features to make it worth a switch.

I’m right there in the same camp as you. I take a lot of screen captures and have tried a handful of different apps, but nothing’s ever stuck. Maybe Monosnap, a tiny screen capture app with a pile of features, will change all that. We’ll take a look at Monosnap and see if it has the chops to make me switch from the default OS X tools.

Capture Everything

There are a few different ways to use Monosnap, but the most familiar are going to be Capture Area and Capture Fullscreen. These are similar to the two screen capture methods already present in OS X and accessible via the Command+Shift+3 and Command+Shift+4 keyboard shortcuts. Capture Fullscreen, whether selected from the menu bar or initiated with the default shortcut, will just create a screen capture of everything on the display. Capture Area allows you to select a portion of the screen to capture, or you can click a window with the selection cursor, and just that window will be captured.

The Capture Area tool even has a nifty zoom so you can get exactly the shot you want.

Similar to the selected area and fullscreen capture, Monosnap also has a delayed capture. Choose the delay capture in the menu bar and then quickly get your screen set up. After ten seconds, Monosnap will grab the screen shot. This method is great if you can’t get everything into place before selecting the menu bar icon, for instance if you need to get a screen capture of a right-click menu.

Once you’ve got your screen shot, it will open in the Monosnap editor, though you can change this in the application preferences. Monosnap will save the screen shot, upload it, or open it in an external editor instead, if you like. The Monosnap editor’s pretty good, though, because it has just enough features to work without getting in the way. Annotate your image with shapes, arrows, or text. You won’t be able to go too far in customizing your annotations, but there are just enough options to keep the editor from feeling bloated. When you’re done, just drag the tab to your Desktop or a folder.

If a static image just won’t do it for you, and you instead need to share a video of what’s happening on your Desktop, Monosnap can help. While it won’t capture and save video, it will create a livestream of whatever you’re doing, accessed via a personalized URL on their website. The Desktop livestream definitely won’t be a solution if you need to create videos to save and upload elsewhere, but if you just want to quickly show one or more people something on your Mac that can’t be conveyed with images, this is a nice extra feature to have.

Yeah, I’m livestreaming my Desktop background. It’s that good. And Monosnap is making it happen.

Great Built-in Sharing

Monosnap will upload and share your screen shots and give you a URL to share. You’ll need to create an account, but it was a really simple process and worth it for the ease of getting my screen shots up and shared so quickly. Unfortunately, Monosnap won’t automatically shorten your URL, so if you want to paste it anywhere with character restrictions, you’re on your own.

Set your upload preferences, how you want your screen shot to be saved, and more.

When you’re done, Monosnap by default will copy to your clipboard the page link to your image. That is, it creates a sort of splash page to house your screen shot, and that’s the link that gets shared. Alternately, let Monosnap know in the application preferences you’d like the direct image link, and that’s what you’ll get.

If you’d rather upload your images to your own FTP server, though, Monosnap lets you do that, and there’s no account registration required. Just enter your credentials in Monosnap’s application preferences, and you’ll be all set to upload.

Snap It Up!

Monosnap is just a fantastically simple app for creating screen shots. While I admit it doesn’t have the complete lack of features a simple Command+Shift+3 keystroke does, it doesn’t have the same bloat that a lot of other screen capture apps do. All you need is there in the capture and annotation functions, and if you don’t want to annotate, you can just let Monosnap save your images to a default location.

These are some pretty sweet annotations, you’ve got to admit.

If you do want some extra features, Monosnap has some great ones, making it easy to create really good-looking annotations and simple livestreams. There’s a great upload feature, too, again, if you want it. If you don’t need any of that, it’s neatly tucked out the way. I was surprised at how much I got with a free app and how simple it was to fold Monosnap into my routine, quickly replacing other screen shot and editing apps.

How many hours do you spend in front of your Mac each day? The internet is where we find our entertainment and where we go to work. It’s easy to lose track of how much time you’ve spent sitting in front of the screen, and if that number gets to be a big number of hours per day, then you ought to change a few habits, don’t you think?

Today we’ll be showing you a few apps for minimizing bad habits with your computer usage. We’ve got it all: apps that remind you to take a break once in a while from your computer, apps that help you stay focused on your tasks so that you can have more time for yourself, and utilities for reducing eye strain. Let’s do this!

Take a Break!

Focus!

Be Kind to your Eyes

Work Smarter

If you want to maximize your productivity so that you can have more free time, you might want to start setting some boundaries around how you use your tools. This could be any kind of self-imposed rule for your workflow such as “No social networking until 8 PM” or “Only check email once a day”. Otherwise, you could adhere to a popular productivity method, such as Getting Things Done.

I’ve found that the Pomodoro Technique works well for me because of the way it’s setup: 25 minutes of work, and then a 5 minute break. This not only keeps me focused, but it also guarantees that out of every hour I spend working, 10 minutes of it will not be spent close to a computer. And with certain tools that I’ve recently reviewed, such as Tomatoes and Eggscellent, using this technique is quite easy and even a little fun.

Conclusion

At the end of the day, having the right tools will not immediately make you healthier or more conscious of how you’re using technology. There should be an effort on your part regarding how much you want to let your gadgets interfere with your life. These tools we presented to you today can help you be more conscious, healthy and productive, but ultimately what you do with them or with the free time you’ll save is entirely up to you.

So, what are you gonna do with them? Do you have any other apps that you’d like to share? Let us know in the comments below.

Managing a team of people, often from around the world, is no easy task. But these days, it’s become a reality for many. To help with this problem, group chat tools like Campfire or Hipchat have become popular options, but they’re not without their limitations. Namely, there’s a lack of good applications that interface with them.

Into that void, the developers of Kickoff stepped in to create a Mac and iOS app with the intention to give teams an elegant solution to their collaboration problems that goes beyond basic group chat. So, could Kickoff change the way your team works? Read on and find out!

Design

Kickoff includes nice touches like inline video previews.

Without a doubt, on both the Mac and the iPhone, Kickoff is a beautiful application. Conversations between groups look and work exactly how you’d expect, with sent messages on the right and received messages on the left. Kickoff also features that level of subtle tweaks I’ve come to expect from new Mac applications, with little touches like buttery-smooth animations that give the app an overall more fluid feel.

Much of the app’s design is similar to what you find in Apple’s own Messages app, and in fact, the whole app looks like a group collaboration tool Apple could have made. The developers also took the time to throw in quite a few little niceties such as inline video previews for links to sites like Youtube or Vimeo. The only thing I was disappointed to find, since it doubles as both a chat and todo list tool, is that you’re only able to hide your tasks to use it as a solely chat tool, not the other way around.

Functionality

Right off the bat, any potential users should be aware that Kickoff is a tool designed for teams fully invested in the Apple ecosystem. While their apps for the Mac and the iPhone are great, anyone hoping for a web, Android, or PC client will find themselves out of luck. But if you’re willing and able to work within their admittedly limited platform offerings, Kickoff is a relatively robust tool.

Functionality-wise, it’s not really in direct competition with any single tool, as it combines group chat with group task management. Both tools work just about the way you’d expect them to with only minor annoyances like the lack of any spell-checking capability, which the developers claim is actually a feature.

Kickoff combines task management and group chat.

As a group chat tool, Kickoff is superb, allowing you to move between chats with your whole team or individuals with ease. Moreover, since it’s distributed through the Mac App Store, Kickoff is able to take advantage of push notifications while the app is closed, which I found extremely useful in day-to-day use. You’re also able to start discussions based on a specific task, which seems to be a feature pretty unique to Kickoff.

Unfortunately, Kickoff is a much better chat app than it is a task manager, providing only the most basic options for managing your lists. You’re able to to create virtually unlimited lists and tasks, with the ability to assign a group member to each one, and that’s about it. There’s no way to assign due dates, set reminders, add task specific details, or perform any number of other seemingly basic tasks. Honestly, Apple’s own Reminders app is a far more robust task management tool, and with the ability to share lists, would probably be a better option for most teams. All-in-all, Kickoff feels like a wonderful group chat app with a pretty uninspiring todo list tool tacked on.

A Bleak Future

List making is limited in Kickoff and is unlikely to be improved.

Soon after its release, the developers of Kickoff announced that they’d been acquired by the popular developer-oriented payment platform Stripe. And with this news, the app moved to “maintenance” status, promising only minor bug fixes in the future. Upon hearing this news, I reached out to Kickoff cofounder, Benjamin De Cock, and received this comment:

Kickoff has been acquired by Stripe but the plan is to keep maintaining the app and to make sure the service stays running and responsive. However, we don’t plan to add big new features as Kickoff is exactly what we wanted to build: something light, simple and focused 🙂

While it’s reassuring that Kickoff will continue to be maintained, it still has a few glaring omissions such as the lack of an iPad app or due dates on tasks, issues which are unlikely to ever be addressed. So while competing tools continue to get better and better, Kickoff will likely find itself unable to compete.

Business Model

One area where Kickoff sets itself apart from the crowd is its unique business model. Instead of charging a monthly fee like most other group collaboration tools, Kickoff charges a single flat rate for each of its apps. The Mac app runs about $28, with its iPhone app priced at a more affordable $7. While this is pretty inexpensive, each user will have to buy a Kickoff license, making it a somewhat harder sell. It’s an interesting approach to selling a service, but at the end of the day, you’ll have to do the math to see if it makes sense for your group. But, if you are willing to pay a comparatively steep upfront cost, Kickoff offers freedom from the tyranny of the reoccurring subscription.

Conclusion

Kickoff might still be a compelling option for some.

Before it’s acquisition, I would have had no problem recommending Kickoff to anyone working in a group with only Apple devices. Now, though, without any real possibility of the app continuing to receive updates, Kickoff has become something a hard sell. Still, if it’s stellar interface and pay-once business model are important to you, Kickoff is a great tool for the time being. It would have gotten a much stronger rating if we had an hope for its future, but unfortunately, what you see is really all you’ll get in this case.

Did you wonder if we’ve forgotten about news this week? Worry no more, your weekly dose of news is here!

Is just that the holiday weekend is coming, and the city I live in becomes a jungle when it comes to finding a good gift. Also, we knew some really cool deals would be coming for Easter and we decided to hold off on publishing for a day.

The AppStorm team wishes you a Happy Easter — a few days in advance, because, you know, we love to anticipate great things!

News from the World of Apps

The Return of NetNewsWire

One of our favorites RSS readers been given a second life! The folks at Black Pixel stated they would be improving NetNewsWire and that its iOS version has already been rebuilt from scratch. You can also read about their attempt to use iCloud as a syncing tool between devices and how it has failed to help the developers. The best news is, NetNewsWire on the Mac will continue to be a great way to read RSS feeds, regardless of Google Reader’s impending death.

Reeder is getting Feedbin support

Yet most folks were not so worried about NNW, but Reeder, which until now had only a promise of survival. This week, the Reeder team informed the world via Twitter about their first choice for a Google Reader replacement, which is Feedbin, a RSS service that costs $2 a month. They’ve also promised to bring all of Reeder 2 for iPhone’s features to the Mac and iPad versions of their app, which should mean it’ll get support for Fever, the $30 self-hosted RSS app.

“Why not a free option?” you ask, “Like Google?” is my reply.

Feedbin is the first option for Google Reader’s replacement on Reeder.

Quicksilver is finally out of beta

In the shadow of Alfred 2′s recent launch, Quicksilver is out of beta after almost 10 years of testing. Honestly, there’s little I can say about Quicksilver that hasn’t already been said, seeing the huge history that precedes it. If you don’t know about it at all, Quicksilver was the first multi-use launcher for many, and it hasn’t lost the steam in the past few months. And the best thing? It is free.

After almost 10 years of beta, Quicksilver finally releases its 1.0 version.

nvALT 2.2? 104 comes with Simperium sync

If you love taking quick notes in plain text, nvALT is the fork for the already amazing Notational Velocity that takes the app to another level. The update replaces the Simplenote Sync for the Simperium API. Also, a command to Preview in Marked was added, to make your Markdown writing and publishing workflow even easier.

Recent OS X update adds 23 minutes of battery life to Retina MBP

After all the buzz around Mountain Lion and battery life, Apple seems to be improving the feature for its users in version 10.8.3. That is, if you have a Retina Macbook Pro, as the tests performed by The Mac Observer show no change in other machines. What’ll you do with these extra 20 minutes is up to you, but this improvement gets the Retina Macbook Pro into the advertised 7 hours of battery life.

Apple’s first quarter of negative income growth since 2003

So is Apple losing money? Is bankruptcy coming? Zombies!? Not at all (let’s hope not, anyhow). What this means is that Apple is having, for the first time since 2003, less growth on its income compared to the same period of the previous year. What drives that is a tough record to beat, as last year Apple had an outstanding 47.37% peak, while this year the margin has been between 37.5% and 38.5%.

Apple is losing revenue compared to last year’s first quarter.

The Best App Deals for Your Mac

Bioshock $19.99 > $9.99

Bioshock 2 $24.99 > $11.99

Archy $8.99 > Free

Archy is the must have app for Google Drive users.

StoryMill $49.99 > $29.99

Contour $49.99 > $24.99

Paperless $49.99 > $29.99

MacGourmet Deluxe $49.99 > $29.99

Montage $49.99 > $24.99

Mariner Persona $49.99 > $29.99

ReadKit $4.99 > $1.99

Textastic (NEW) $2.99

Textastic is the newest code editor to make its arrival on OS X

Trine $9.99 > $1.99

Trine 2 $14.99 > $3.99

RollerCoasterTycoon 3 Platinum $29.99 > $19.99

Nimble Quest (NEW) Free

Radium 3 $9.99 > $2.99

Wingman (NEW) $39

Wingman is a menubar app to manage your GitHub account.

Flow Annual Subscription (task management web app – see Web.AppStorm Review) $99 > $69

Interesting Links

Apple’s broken promise: why doesn’t iCloud ‘just work’?

The first apps on my new Mac, by Brett Terpstra

The power of the RSS reader

Patrick Welker’s Sweet Mac Setup

Apple’s March Quarter Madness

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!

As a web designer, slicing a mockup or exporting optimized images can be some of the most annoying and time-consuming tasks you must undertake. Granted, some designers and developers don’t do any “slicing,” but at some point, the need to allocate images becomes necessary. Whether that image is part of an element’s background or a slide for a slider, slicing it, exporting it, and optimizing it can take you a some time – unless you decide to get Enigma64, that is.

Enigma64 is a Photoshop plug-in that addresses not only slicing, exporting, and optimizing images, but it also gives you the ability to use Base64 as a method of exporting your optimized image. If your workflow includes some of these steps, follow us after the break to learn more about this incredibly useful plug-in.

Enigma64 Overview

Simple, clean, and effective.

As stated above, Enigma64 is a Photoshop Plug-in that can cut, export and optimize your selection (layer(s), or the whole canvas) and give you a PNG or JPG file in little to no time; however, what makes Enigma64 cool is the ability to encode said layers into Base64 with the click of a button. This allows for a seamless, hassle-free implementation of images from Photoshop right into your code.

Essentially, Enigma64 is designed to streamline your workflow. For example, you may use a different application or web app to optimize your image and possibly another web app to then encode that image into Base64… let’s face it, that is probably about a minute (more if you are dealing with multiple images).

Also, before getting images optimized you need to actually export them, which, again, would take a few seconds. Enigma64 eradicates the need for all these separate services and puts them all together in one package that lives right inside the app you are already using to create these images.

What is Base64

Base64

Base64, as explained by Wikipedia, is “a group of similar binary-to-text encoding schemes that represent binary data in an ASCII string format by translating it into a radix-64 representation.” Now how does that apply to you?

Let’s use a web design example to explain Base64. Say you have a lot of thumbnails or slides on your website, those images together represent many server requests. Server requests increase the time your page takes to load. By encoding these thumbnails into Base64, you can basically convert those images into raw code that you can then paste right into your HTML, thus making your website faster.

You can read more about Base64 on the links provided on this page – http://getenigma64.com/faq/

Working with Enigma64

The export UI.

Working with Enigma64 is effortless, and once you’ve set it up for the first time with the settings you want, it becomes even easier to use — much easier than CSS Hat, even.

Enigma64′s friendly UI is designed with the idea of saving time in mind, so don’t expect 100 different settings to choose from; instead, Enigma64 only consists of two main options. This can be a little difficult to swallow for some, but the current options work fine with what the plug-in is intended for.

In our test runs, exporting and Base64 encoding performed extremely well. The Base64 code is saved on your clipboard, so all you have to do is paste that into an HTML image tag’s source attribute and you are set.

Base64 encoding UI.

One thing to note is that if you are encoding a heavily-worked on canvas or layer, encoding may take a few seconds – nothing horrible or ridiculous, but it would be nice to get a little progress bar for the overall process.

Aside from that, Enigma64 is quite useful for someone that is going to be exporting images in this fashion. Encoding images is also very helpful in the development stages of a website; it’s also pretty cool seeing all those characters magically transform into an image.

Verdict

Go get it, folks.

Because this little plug-in is made by the same guys that brought us the amazing CSS Hat plug-in, you know it is going to work as advertised — if not better. With an extremely friendly UI, one-click encoding to Base64, and lossless image optimization, Enigma64 is a plug-in you are going to use often; mix it with CSS Hat plug-in and you have the perfect package when it comes to getting things done.

For the money savers out there, it is good to point out that both CSS Hat and Enigma64 have a rather high price. You can do some of these things for free with various different applications and web apps, but having the ability to do it all in one place with the click of a button is so useful, hassle-free, and time-saving that you may not even care how much they cost. After all, your time is money, too.

One of the many new additions to OS X in Lion was AirDrop, a simple way to share files between Macs over WiFi. It sounded like a great solution, but turned out to be a bit more complicated than it seemed at first.

For one thing, the Macs would have to be on the same network, and without tweaking, AirDrop only works over WiFi. You’ll have to head over to terminal and do some tweaking to get AirDrop working over Ethernet. Then, it doesn’t work between OS X and iOS, making it only useful for sharing files between Macs on the same network — which in all likelihood means you already have another file sharing system in place.

There’s apps that one-up AirDrop’s functionality, such as Instashare, which hope to take the idea to the next level by bringing cross-platform sharing and more to the idea behind AirDrop. And there’s always the hope that Apple will do more with AirDrop in future versions of OS X (and perhaps iOS).

But as it is right now, have you used AirDrop? Is it something you use all the time, or did you just try it out for the novelty of it, and then quit using it soon after? We’d love to hear your thoughts below!

HyperDock is a fantastic app that brings some great features from Windows to the Mac. HyperDock’s developer hasn’t been lazing around, though. Next down the pipeline is HyperSwitch, a sister app to HyperDock that relies entirely on your keyboard.

HyperSwitch puts a lot of the great features of HyperDock at your fingertips, quite literally. Though still in beta, this promises to be a great app if its predecessor is anything to go by. Will HyperSwitch manage to dethrone HyperDock? Let’s try it out!

Flip the Switch

All you really need to get HyperSwitch working is to open up the app. If you’ve ever used Command+Tab to switch between apps, you’re already on firm footing, and let’s face it, you’re trying out an app so you can use your mouse less, so you and Command+Tab are probably old chums. Normally, Command+Tab just lets you move among your open applications.

Your app’s open windows appear in a tray below the application icon.

With HyperSwitch running, though, tabbing over to an app with open windows will preview them below the application icon, similar to how HyperDock lets you take a peek at your open windows right in the Dock. Use your arrow keys to move around in the previews and select any of those windows, never once having to reach for your mouse. There’s more you can do with HyperSwitch, but everything else will have to be toggled on in the application preferences.

Option+Tab will allow you to move amongst all active windows. This is great because you won’t also have to be sorting through the three or four (or more) apps you have minimized to the Dock and aren’t using right now; you just get what you’re working with at the moment. The windows won’t be separated out by application, either, so it makes it quicker to get to what you want.

HyperSwitch also let’s you tab just amongst windows of the maximized applications.

There’s also an option to tab amongst the windows for just the active application, but the default shortcut requires you to tap a key that doesn’t appear on any keyboard I’ve ever seen. The only workable option becomes Control+Tab, then, which works nicely. The rogue special character that can’t be typed, at least not easily, may be due in part to the fact HyperSwitch is in beta, so hopefully that will all get fixed eventually and we’ll get better options for creating shortcuts.

Bonus Features

In the App Switcher tab in HyperSwitch’s application preferences, you can decide whether you want window previews to be automatically displayed when you hit Command+Tab or not. If you choose to have the previews, they’ll display on their own when you tab to an application. With this option turned off, you’ll have to use the down arrow key to get to your window previews. Set a delay if you do turn on previews; the default is 300 ms.

Control iTunes from HyperSwitch, too.

A great bonus is the ability to open a new window with the up arrow key. With the HyperSwitch app switcher up, highlight the application you need and tap the up arrow. Depending on which application it is, you may be able to do different stuff here; for instance, creating a new window in Google Chrome doesn’t just pop open a new browser window but gives me the choice of also creating a new tab or loading anything from my bookmarks bar. If I’ve got iTunes selected, I can play or pause my music and move to the next or previous track.

Surprisingly Customizable

While it may seem fairly superficial compared to all of the cool stuff you can do with HyperSwitch, there’s a whole set of appearance preferences, too. Change the size of the window thumbnail; small is best if you’re expecting a bunch, but stick to bigger if you need to actually see what’s inside your windows. Lower quality window previews will load more quickly, but you won’t really be able to tell what’s going on; high quality takes longer but you can really see the contents of your app windows.

Set a background color for your window previews, if you’re so inclined. The default is a sort of translucent gray that will match the Command+Tab tray nicely. If you want your preview background to be pink, though, that’s doable. Tap the background color icon and select whatever you want to use. The default is 100% opacity, which may look a bit harsh, so use the opacity slider to make your background more transparent.

There are some pretty great preferences to get HyperSwitch to work just how you want.

The final appearance preference is Dock and menu bar visibility. I’m not a fan of Dock icons, especially for apps I’m not going to be working in a lot or would prefer to have run in the background, so I shut the Dock icon off right way. It’s up to you whether you want the menu bar icon to stay up top or not. If you deselect both, HyperSwitch will restart with Run HyperSwitch in the Background selected. The app will stay out of your way entirely until you hit Command+Tab, but if you need to access the preferences again, you’ll have to launch it from Applications. Because it’s running in the background and you won’t ever see it, don’t forget to add HyperSwitch to your Login Items so it always opens when you log in to OS X.

Final Thoughts

HyperSwitch is just a fantastic little app. There are definitely some kinks to work out, but this is an app still very much in beta. It’s missing a few features of its paid sister app, HyperDock, most importantly window snapping, which automatically resizes windows dragged to the top of the display or either side. Without that, HyperSwitch can’t be a replacement, at least not for people like me who so depend on HyperDock.

Even so, HyperSwitch is still incredibly useful, and I can only imagine how much better it’s going to get. For now, it’s free, but no word on a price when it comes out of beta. We’ll just have to keep our eyes peeled and see what this great app has in store.

Barely a week after I reviewed the promising prototype release of Evernote viewing app Bubble Browser, we were sent code for its first major update. I’ve been playing around with it for long enough now that I can confidently say it’s a big step forward.

Bubble Browser 2 addresses many of my concerns with the previous version — with a more polished interface, improved filtering and navigation, and a few new features — but it’s not yet the app I hoped for. Let’s see what’s changed, what’s still lacking, and how the improvements stack up.

Gorgeous Presentation

Bubble Browser already looked good, but the update cranks its presentation up a notch, with lots of little touches that make the UI fly off the screen. The bubbles themselves — the menu system for navigating categories and tags — are no longer flat blocks of color; they now look more like bubbles on a surface, given volume by a concave visual effect.

Gone is the flatness; in comes depth and subtlety.

Pop-up elements and the information section displayed above a note’s content received similar facelifts, while the background and three-panel layout have been subtly re-tuned to improve readability and UI signposting. Bubble Browser 2 is one sexy beast, as far as apps go.

Streamlined Navigation

These fancy new looks thankfully come packed with improvements in more functional aspects of the app’s design. Foremost among these are new buttons, tweaked layout, and a swanky new universal search.

It’s now more straightforward switching between the three main category filters — Date, Notebooks, Tags — thanks to a little three-icon button alongside the bubbles. You could always swap quickly via keyboard commands, but this cuts down the number of steps required with a mouse.

Note information in the reading pane has been cleaned up for easy at-a-glance consumption, with better labels to illustrate what’s what. You can click on attachments to open them in their default app. Click on the blue date ribbon to see other notes created on that day. If you click on one of the tags or the notebook here, it shows in the search bar at the top of the window.

The app seems much better thought out now, with some much needed polish to boot.

Powerful Search

Search was sorely limited in the previous version of Bubble Browser, but now it’s a killer feature. The current filter(s) appear in the search bar, with a little x you can click to remove them. Start typing in this search field and you’ll get instant recommendations for tags, titles, and dates related to your term.

Combining filters and digging deeper with search.

It behaves oddly with dates, suggesting notes created in 2012 for the term 2013 or notes from February when I type “March,” but that should be an easy fix in a future update, and this issue belies the fact that the best use of search appears to be quickly finding notes by title or content.

Just by typing the letter “a,” I can see several titles and tags that contain the letter. Make that “ar” and bam! — it instantly adapts the recommendations. I found that I seldom needed to finish typing a search term before I had precisely the thing I wanted.

Search is responsive, powerful, and elegant.

You can even search within the body text (and images) of notes from the comfort of Bubble Browser, using the Remote Search option at the bottom of your recommendations. This calls the Evernote API and then a few moments later pushes out all notes containing your search term.

This includes also text on images — Evernote has fantastic text recognition capabilities, correctly identifying all words on book covers that I took photos of as a reminder to check out later.

I never realized how powerful Evernote’s built-in search is until I used it via Bubble Browser; here the term “write” retrieved notes with text, titles, tags, and even images that contain the word — across multiple notebooks, too.

Evernote Improved

All these changes, plus three big ones I haven’t mentioned yet — resizable text, auto-resizing images, and background sync — turn Bubble Browser from a neat way to visualize your notes to the best method of browsing them that I’ve seen. Evernote’s official Mac app seems old-fashioned by comparison. I just wish Bubble Browser had editing support so that I could stay in the app when changing, appending to, or creating notes.

If you’ve drifted away from Evernote, Bubble Browser might pull you back in. If you’re a current user like me, it could transform the way you use Evernote for the better — with more consistent tagging and descriptive titles that lend an extra layer of organization to your workflow, along with more frequent note taking, both of which make future cross-referencing so much simpler. Either way, the new version of Bubble Browser is impressive, and we can’t wait to see how it continues to improve going forward.

Living in a diverse world comes with consequences. It’s great to see people who are not stereotypical and actually go above and beyond what others consider normal behavior, but when it comes to languages, you can’t learn them all. It’s estimated that there are nearly 7000 different spoken languages in the world.

Since most people know only their native tongue, reading a bit of international writing on the Web can become tedious. People that often find themselves browsing foreign websites typically use Google Chrome for its integrated translation functionality. But why doesn’t OS X have that built-in?

OS X Supports Lots of Languages

Apple cares about international support, just not in a connective way.

If you look through your the Language tab of Language & Text in System Preferences, you’ll find around 140 options. In the Regions tab you’ll find proof that you can be anywhere in the world and use your Mac happily. Even the Input Sources tab shows how well Macs will hold up globally. There are all kinds of different options for nearly any language used in the world today, yet still there’s no way to translate them without a third-party app.

Integration, Starting with Dictionary

A small number of additional languages are supported in Dictionary.

I’d like to see some integration with the current OS X Dictionary. It’s currently very simple, yet powerful. In the long run, though, it’s capable of so much more. There are only 12 languages in the current version of Dictionary and it doesn’t offer a connection between them. You can use the All tab to search through multiple languages, but if you can’t read French then how are you supposed to know what the definition means?

I use One World Dictionary to translate foreign words in Safari. Problem is, it’s not as simple as tapping a word with three fingers. And cool features cost.

Ascendo’s One World Dictionary is the ideal solution to a bilingual dictionary in OS X.

OS X should have a bilingual dictionary option available. There should be some way to connect your language with the one you want to translate to, rather than keeping them separate. Just imagine how much more useful the app would be to students and even teachers. Apple would be praised for such a wonderfully simple way to understand a different language. To the same degree, a person who hasn’t studied any foreign language can be introduced to one.

Third-Party Plugins for Dictionary are Available

A simplified Chinese to English dictionary.

There are currently some great bilingual dictionaries available for the Mac’s Dictionary app, but they’re a big harder to find than they should be. Apple’s old downloads website was the place you could find extra dictionaries, but now you’ll have to resort to 3rd party websites to find, say, an English to Chinese dictionary, or the Thai to English dictionary our editor uses. There’s one very good thing: if you have a 3rd party dictionary that integrates with Dictionary, it does integrate very nicely, showing the extra language definitions in Dictionary or with a three-finger tap.

What the company needs to do is add a way for users to find these third-party Dictionary plugins. The Mac App Store won’t work because of its sandboxing limitations and submission guidelines. Instead, there should be a dedicated page, just like with Safari extensions, that guides users to what they’re looking for. Right now the only way to find something is Google, and still some of the results are found on the extinct Apple Downloads page, which is of no use.

Complete Support Throughout the OS

Why can’t translating something be this easy? Or even the whole page?

The overall goal for a translation service in OS X would be universal application for the entire operating system. It should be something that’s available on the right-click menu for all text. Apple could even take it a step further and pull text from an image — using technology similar to that of Google’s in Goggles — to translate it for you. This could be something available on mobile devices as well with synchronization between the platforms and the ability to add favorite words.

Many Possibilities with A Limitation

So much can be done with a simple translator in OS X. The problem is that Apple doesn’t currently possess a service like Google Translate. Language support is growing with every release of the operating system, but the company would need to build a database in order to provide live translation (and hopefully — someday — and offline mode). With all its money, Apple could acquire an app like the aforementioned One World Dictionary and turn it into something great. Then again, it could nearly start from scratch like it did with Maps — let’s hope not.

Translation doesn’t seem like something on its main roadmap right now, but who knows: Apple may just think that further connecting the world is a good thing.

There’s Always Alfred

When in doubt, use Alfred, right? If you’ve got version 2 or later of the utility, grab the great little Google Translate extension for it off GitHub. It will simply translate the text you’ve selected to a language you specify (during the setup process) and then copy it to your clipboard. Not the most useful in all situations, but it’s better than nothing.

Ok: So What do you think?

What do you think of the idea of translation built-into OS X, and if you like it, how do you envision it being implemented?

Dictionary icon by Susumu Yoshida

Hey, it’s Matthew, the editor here and on Web.AppStorm. Ever wondered which apps I use to get my work done each day?

For the past few weeks, we’ve been running a series of articles about the Apps We Use, letting you get a peek into the workflow of each of the writers on our team. I’m up this week, and here’s the apps that are most important to me — the apps I require to get work done, productively, on my Mac.

The Hardware

My MacBook Air, non-Retina Display and all

It may be the apps that really count, but it still takes an honest-to-goodness Mac to run all of those great Mac apps we write about. For me, that Mac is a mid-2012 13″ MacBook Air, with the default specs aside from a factory upgrade to 8Gb ram. It’s an awesome machine, getting 6-7 hours on battery easily, and the only problem is that my 128Gb internal SSD feels a bit too cramped. Cloud apps don’t help, but my USB3 500Gb external WD hard drive keeps me from going crazy. I run virtual machines off of it, which run great, and offload most of my movies and photos to it. I’ve also got a Nifty MiniDrive for extra storage, which has become my go-to place for downloads and other forgettable files.

Beyond that, I’ve got an AirPrint-enabled HP Photosmart 3-in-one printer, an iPhone 5 (black, if you must know), and an iPad 1 that my wife uses mainly these days. I’ve also got an awesome little Alcatel onetouch 3G USB dongle to keep me connected to the ‘net on the go. Oh, and a set of original Apple Earbuds and the newer EarPods; I still like the older ones better. That’s the entirety of my tech setup.

The Most Important Apps

Then, there’s the apps I rely on, which make my Mac my Mac. I have tons of apps, but there’s really only a (largish) handful of apps that I really couldn’t live without. Those would be:

Safari

My #1 most used app, hands-down.

For me, the browser I open every day is Safari. Why? OS X integration. It feels the most integrated, with swipe-to-go-back and pinch-to-zoom that works as you’d expect: beautifully. Also, I can keep bookmarklets in the bookmarks bar, then tap CMD+number to use them without ever having to go to my mouse. I switched back to Safari from Chrome after Lion was released, and haven’t really looked back. It’s great. I do keep Chrome around, to run sites that use Flash so I can keep Safari Flash-free.

Sparrow

It’s still how I send 99.9% of my emails.

I know, I know: I need to switch to a new email app. Sparrow’s the only dated and essentially unsupported app in my workflow, and I really should have switched to Mail.app way back. But Sparrow just works the way I want, with quick in-line replies only an alt+r away, and great integration with archiving and Gmail tags. With 3 Google Apps based accounts to keep up with, and easily over 3-4 dozen emails per day, I need an email app that’s fast and efficient, and Sparrow still hits the spot for me. Here’s to hoping that the upcoming .Mail app can fix my Sparrow addiction.

Dropbox

Sorry iCloud. You still haven’t won my heart.

Dropbox is where all of my files live. No joke. Ever since I went pro, I’ve used Dropbox to store just about everything, and have come to rely on it for my notes, pictures, password sync, website backup, documents, and so much more. It’s awesome, consistently works great, and since you can selectively sync folders, I even use it to keep some larger folders off my Mac.

1Password

I’d be more than lost without 1Password. Seriously.

Let’s just say that I have nearly 350 passwords in 1Password, and I couldn’t tell you more than maybe a half-dozen of them. Instead, I use 1Password’s password creator to make all of my new passwords as random as they can be, and just remember my insanely-long master password for 1Password. It’s the only way I can get into most sites, including all of my work sites, and is easily most important apps I have. Best thing is, I can check my passwords online from Dropbox, from my phone with the amazing new iPhone app, and even from a Windows PC.

Alfred 2

Soooooo much more than just search

Alfred 2 is one of those apps that you have to use daily to really appreciate — and you’d better have the powerpack when you’re trying it, too. At first I didn’t get the appeal of Alfred; Spotlight seemed to be plenty for my needs. Then, I finally tried it, complete with the powerpack, and fell in love. The latest version and its workflows are better than ever, and I use it daily for everything from searching my Mac and launching apps to custom-searching AppStorm sites, translating text, creating new plain-text notes, taking the formatting out of text while pasting, and so much more.

iA Writer

The place where almost every word I write gets typed

iA Writer was the first app I purchased on the Mac App Store — for $17.99, mind you — and it’s easily been one of my best purchases ever. It’s the writing app I use all day, every day, whether I’m writing on my Mac or iOS device. The beautiful Nitti Light font, clean interface, and lack of buttons makes it the perfect place to pen your thoughts, and its Markdown support makes taking your writing from idea to HTML as simple as it could be. I use it for writing everything from articles to my notes, now that I’ve switched from using Simplenote to using plain-text notes synced in Dropbox. A quick Alfred search, and I’m reading or editing my notes in iA Writer.

For coding, the incredibly popular Sublime Text 2 is my main app, and I’ve even switched to writing my Markdown/plain text stuff in it from time to time, but still come back to iA Writer every time. This past week, the new Textastic for Mac has become my main coding app, and it looks like I’ll be keeping it around. It’s really nice, too, for light coding.

OmniFocus

Where everything I need to do lives. Really.

There’s tons of things I need to do each day, and OmniFocus is how I keep up with everything. It’s the best productivity app if you’re really wanting to keep up with a ton of stuff, complete with due dates, recurring tasks (that are easy to setup), notes, with all of that wrapped in an interface that’s not tons different than a text editor. I can’t wait to get my hands on OmniFocus 2, but even OmniFocus 1 still beats every other productivity app on the Mac, hands-down, for me. And yes, I’ve tried most of them.

There’s two other similar apps I use as well: Clear and Fantastical. Clear is where I put quick lists: the store list, movies I’d like to watch, and so on. Fantastical is how I keep up with appointments and other calendar events. All together, they work out to make a pretty nice productivity solution that’s not too overwhelming.

Preview

The best feature in OS X: Preview

Now here’s the most underrated feature in OS X: Preview. That little app is awesome, and if you’re not using it daily, you should. You might notice I have no screenshot apps listed; that’s because the built-in screenshot tools in OS X are all I need, at least 99.9% of the time. I then can quickly open images in Preview and resize them for our site here, or just save them in another format. It’s also how I convert .icns files to png icons for our articles here, as well as how I fill out PDF forms, sign documents with my MacBook’s camera, merge pages in PDFs, and more. It’s awesome

I do also have Photoshop CS6 on my Mac, and use it tons as well, even for screenshot work. Another handy tool for the same purpose is Automator, another underrated built-in Mac tool that’s great, say, for bulk-resizing photos.

Fluid

My Fever feeds, in Fluid

I use tons of web apps, both in my work at Web.AppStorm and also just in the process of working online. I have separate Gmail and Google+ accounts for both AppStorm sites I edit, and signing in-and-out from Safari all day isn’t fun. That’s where Fluid comes in, giving me a way to turn each of those accounts into an app of sorts, so I can be logged into as many Google accounts as I need to be. Plus, it’s great for checking my feeds in Fever now that I’ve switched to it from Google Reader, since there’s no native Mac app for it yet.

Transmit

The way I publish to my own blog

I’ve self-hosted my own blog, Techinch.com, for years, first using WordPress and now using the flat-file CMS Kirby. That means I need a simple way to publish files via FTP, since everything I write on my site is in a plain text file that has to be uploaded. And, of course, whenever I want to change my CSS or tweak something else on my server (or install something like Fever), the handy FTP app is needed again. For me, that app is Transmit. It’s fast, simple, and works great syncing folders. Best of all, it works great for Amazon S3 too, so I can keep my photo archive there on the cheap.

VMware Fusion

Yup, it’s Windows 8 on my Mac

There’s one thing I really love doing just for the fun of it: running other operating systems in virtual machines on my Mac. That’s where VMware Fusion comes in. I keep a library of almost every semi-modern version of Windows and Office installed, as well as Ubuntu and a testing OS X machine, along with whatever else I’m playing with that week. It’s a fun way to push your hardware to the limits, stay informed about the other side, and have fun. That is, if seeing how little ram Windows 8 can run — or learning more about Linux — with is your definition of fun.

The Other Apps

That’s not all of the apps I use, but it’s the most important ones. There’s a handful more, though, that really should get a mention since I find them so handy. So here goes:

• TextExpander: I don’t use it nearly as much as I should, but even the amount I do use it is enough to keep it around. Great for speeding up typing for those repetitive things we all have to type.
• PopClip: The little, iOS style text selection popover that’s turned out to be quite the handy little tool. It’s one of my must-haves, even if it’s tiny.
• Boom: A little app that gives your MacBook’s speakers an extra boost, Boom is a rather essential app for me since my wife and I use the MacBook as our main way to watch movies. And it really does work great.
• CloudApp: Still the best way to quickly share files online, which I use daily.
• Tweetbot: The best way to use Twitter on a Mac, especially if you have a ton of accounts to manage for work (as I do). Also, a hat-tip to Wedge, a similar app for App.net that I use daily, though it’s a bit rough around the edges.
• Soulver: What a calculator/spreadsheet should be.
• Skype: It’s far from perfect, but it’s the way I make calls from my Mac, both to real phones and to other Skype users. It’s rather irreplaceable.

That’s about it for me. There’s a ton more apps I use from time to time, even weekly, but these are the main ones that get me through the day.

Any apps you think I should change out? I’d love to hear your thoughts below!

There sure are a lot of keyboard shortcuts to remember, especially in some of the bigger third-party apps. I’ve pretty much given up memorizing them all, and usually just look to the menus to find what I want. The problem is that always going to the menu, especially if I’m in an app that uses a lot of menu commands like an image editor, is that I’m being constantly pulled out of the workspace and away from what I’m actually doing.

MenuMate is a nifty little app that will sit in your menu bar or disappear altogether until its needed, but once triggered, it gives you all your application’s menu items to choose from, right where you’re working. We’ll try out MenuMate and see if it’s the timesaver it claims to be and really solves the shortcut problem … and then give you the chance to win a free copy of MenuMate!

Keep Your Hands to Yourself

MenuMate works great if you never want to take your hands off of your keyboard, and I know there are more than a few users out there who feel this way. If it can be done with a keyboard shortcut, that’s absolutely the way to go, right? I’m with you, but we all sometimes need to get into the options that are only available in the menu bar. At that point, you’ll have to drag your hand away from your precious keyboard and use your mouse to get at all those necessary commands.

Instead of relying on the menu bar, though, MenuMate puts your application’s menu bar items anywhere you want. With the application active, hit the Option+Z keyboard shortcut, and you’ll get the application’s menu bar options as a flyout wherever your mouse cursor is. You can then use your keyboard, including the arrow keys, to move around the menu. If you need to get rid of MenuMate, hit Esc, and you’re back to what you were doing before.

Those are a lot of options, right there in my workspace.

Maybe it’s not such an ordeal for you to use your mouse, though. It may actually take more effort to learn a new shortcut than to switch over to your mouse. In that case, you can set a mouse button as the trigger for your MenuMate flyout. Just remember you can’t use the left or right buttons, as that would just be silly and cause all sorts of problems.

If you don’t like the defaults for your keyboard shortcut or mouse button, you can edit either by clicking on the MenuMate icon in the menubar. Each will have to be edited separately, but that’s easy enough to do. It’s probably a good idea to check that your new shortcut isn’t already assigned elsewhere, though; try it out in the apps where MenuMate’s likely to get the most play before making the change (I learned this one the hard way).

Set a shortcut that’s easy to remember and won’t conflict with anything else.

Making the Most Out of It

MenuMate is likely going to find the most use in apps where you’ve got a lot of keyboard shortcuts but can’t seem to remember them all. There are just a ton in Photoshop, and while they can do a lot of good things and save a lot of time, I’m never going to remember them all. Everything I need to remember is up there in the menu, though, and I just have to take a trip up there to get to what I need.

But I don’t have to make the choice to either remember everything or pull myself out of what I’m doing and drag my mouse cursor to the top of my display. Instead, a quick keystroke or mouse click, and everything I need but always forget is right there where I’m working.

The menu changes based on which application you’re using.

The MenuMate flyout isn’t customizable like the shortcuts, but that’s okay, because it integrates well with OS X. I’m always worried that utility apps that have to assimilate into everything else I’m doing are going to stick out, but MenuMate fits in perfectly with pretty much all of my apps. It would be nice to bring it more inline with some of the third-party apps that make something like MenuMate so necessary to begin with, but the stark white menu against my various app workspaces doesn’t detract from what a great app MenuMate is.

If you want MenuMate to run invisibly, you can even hide its menu bar icon.

Final Thoughts

MenuMate is a great tool to have if you’re trying to get a lot done. Those of us who use our Macs for work often depend on applications that perform a lot of complicated functions in one place. Some of these bigger, feature-rich apps are almost entirely dependent on keyboard shortcuts or lots of options in the menu bar. MenuMate keeps you from having to leave what you’re doing to find it all.

A quick shortcut, and you have it all at hand. MenuMate is quick and unobtrusive, only popping into view when you need it. You can even turn the menu bar icon off, leaving MenuMate to wait quietly in the background until needed. It’s the sort of app that scratches an itch you didn’t know was there, and it does so elegantly and intuitively.

Last but not least…

Oh wait: we did mention a giveaway, didn’t we?

Yup. We’ve got 10 copies of MenuMate to giveaway this week. Just comment below, letting us know what apps you’re most looking forward to using with MenuMate, and you’ll be entered in the giveaway. Share the post on Twitter, App.net, or Facebook, and share the link to your post in another comment here for an extra entry.

Hurry and get your entries in; we’re closing our giveaway on April 3rd.

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

If you’ve ever written or edited code from your iPhone or iPad, chances are you’ve used Textastic, or at the very least heard of it. Textastic is a popular text editor for iOS that brings the best of code editing to Apple’s mobile platform in an app that is reminiscent of TextMate. With its built-in FTP integration, it’s one of the best ways to write or edit code on the go, and is the way I personally publish to my Kirby-powered blog from my iPhone.

Alexander Blach, the developer behind Textastic, has now brought the venerable code editor to the Mac, and it’s currently in the App Store for the low price of $2.99. I knew I had to try it out as soon as I saw it available, and I’ve come away impressed. Here’s why.

Code Editing for Everyone

Plain text writing apps, such as iA Writer and Byword, are far from the most expensive apps in the App Store, and won’t run you more than $5-$10 even if they’re not on sale. Coding apps are a totally different story. BBEdit costs $49.99 (a step down from its older price of $129), TextMate costs €39 (around $52), and Chocolat, one of the newer kids on the block, costs $49. Sublime Text, the venerable cross-platform code editor that everyone seems to be using these days, tops out the bunch at $70.

For someone wanting to get started with coding, those prices are rather inapproachable. Now, there’s another option: Textastic. At just $2.99 (the current launch price; after that, it’ll be $5.99), it’s an iOS priced code editor with features to play with the big boys.

Code completion? Check.

Textastic is  a great text and code editor, and you couldn’t ask for a more smooth experience. It launches fast, handles text just like you’d expect in a modern OS X app, includes Find/Search/Replace, works with Dictation and Dictionary, syncs with iCloud, and more. It includes code completion that works very well, at least for the web languages I tested it with. It’ll even add the extras to your code that it expects you to use (say, adding an “id=” section when you add a div), which you can fill in by tabbing between the sections, something that’ll be familiar if you’ve used Textastic on iOS. And, you can start out new documents with pre-made templates that’ll make it easy to start, say, writing a new HTML document.

Code Completion, taken to the next level

The Editing Extras

Textastic gives you more than just plain text editing and code completion. It includes a very nice symbol navigation that works great, giving you an easy way to jump around in your code. It worked great in every file I tested, even letting you jump between sections in a Markdown document as easily as you could in a CSS file. Then, in the toolbar, you’ll also find format and encoding options, as well as built-in line and column counts in the bottom toolbar (though sadly not word/character counts).

Symbol navigation and themes sweeten the deal

Textastic isn’t the most focused on keyboard shortcuts, which is frustrating coming from Sublime Text, though it does offer a few editing extras as you can see in the menu. Hopefully more keyboard shortcuts will be added in the future; they’d be especially handy for accessing the symbol navigation and encoding/code format options on the bottom toolbar.

A limited set of extra keyboard shortcuts

There are a limited set of preferences in Textastic, including a number of high-quality themes, ones you’ll immediately recognize if you already use Sublime Text. You’ll also find options to change your font and font size, as well as options to turn off line numbers, change the indention, and more. If you want a streamlined writing app, you can turn off the status bar in the bottom and the line numbers on the left, and it’ll be almost as clean of a writing experience as Byword.

Nice Markdown editing is the cherry on top

The Rest That’s Yet to Come

On its own, Textastic for Mac is already off to a great start, but it also has companion iOS apps already in use by thousands of coders. Today, Textastic doesn’t integrate with them, but the developer promises an update that’ll bring iCloud sync to the iOS apps, giving you a dead-simple way to edit the code you wrote on the go from your Mac — or vise versa.

Then, you can make Textastic what you want it to be, by adding your own TextMate-compatible themes and syntax, as well as your own file templates to Textastic. There’s also the promise of more features going forward from the active forum, including tabbed browsing, built-in file browsing, and more.

The one main thing I’m missing in Textastic is built-in FTP support. If the Mac had that — as the iOS apps do — then it’d be the cheapest and easiest way to edit files on your site from your Mac. As is, you’ll still need to keep you favorite FTP tool around to upload your files.

Why Choose Textastic?

If you’re already using Textastic on your iOS device, getting Textastic for your Mac is a no-brainer at its current price, since it’ll get iCloud integration with the iOS versions soon. And it’s nice enough you might even end up switching to it by default.

If you already have a code editor you love today, then you might not want to switch, since Textastic is very basic today. It’s fast and lightweight, though, and works great, so if you’re willing to try something new it’s definitely a great option to try out. It’s not the new Sublime Text, but then, it’s nice to have something so stripped-down and lean, too.

For Mac users without a favorite code editor, especially those that don’t want to spend much, there is one other code editor that is easily the biggest competition to Textastic for Mac-only users: Bare Bones Software’s TextWrangler, the free sidekick to BBEdit. It’s the code editor most Mac users would recommend if you’re looking for a free way to get started. But, Textastic already is easier to get started with, feels more polished, and supports code completion, something TextWrangler doesn’t include. Just that’s enough to recommend Textastic over it, especially as cheap as Textastic is.

Textastic is a great code editor for the Mac, one we can’t wait to see how it continues to progress going forward!

Every once and awhile I stumble across a game that is perfectly expressed by one word. In Ultratron’s case, the word would be chaos. Or rather, explosive, colorful, and awesomely fun chaos. From the moment you press the “play” button, Ultratron bombards you from every direction with bullets and enemies, constantly keeping you on the edge of your seat.

The developer, Puppy Games, has prided itself in creating this sort of retro-style arcade game, and the updated version of Ultratron certainly indicates they know what they’re doing.

Gameplay

The controls of the game are as standard as they get: the WASD keys control the direction of your cyborg robot, the mouse changes the aim of your weapon and clicking with the right or left mouse button either fires your weapon or triggers the boost (which you need to buy to enable). At first, Ultratron seems to be your generic frantic shooter; you dodge bullets and shoot back at the multitudes of enemies.

Triple Shot Powerup!

But as you continue to play, you notice all the tiny details that make this game (literally) shine: the background pulses, complimenting the feverish 8-bit music. Explosions are everywhere, and animations are clear, crisp and bright.

Upgrading your Bot

You won’t survive long without improving your bot. The profuse number of upgrades available are all unique and range from acquiring a powerful grenade launcher to gaining a number of mini pets that follow you around and fire bullets, lasers, and rockets in an attempt to aid you.

Shields! Plasma grenades! EMP shock! Gotta buy everything!

An interesting aspect of the game is that the type of upgrades you purchase will change your strategy rather drastically. For example, putting a bunch of points into “droid power” will make your own gun more powerful, while putting more points into your pets will allow you to focus more on dodging while letting your pets dish out damage.

I didn’t realize on my first playthrough, but upgrading the “speed boost” and “quantum shift” upgrades allows you to dodge right through enemy missiles and bullets. It makes you much harder to kill.

The Levels

The game is divided into four short sections or “acts” followed by unlimited number of rounds during which the quantity of enemies slowly increases until you finally succumb. At the end of each “act” is a boss fight: evade the hailstorm of bullets from the monster ship and fire away until it dies.

My Level Progress

Even though the first four initial acts are quite entertaining, the thing that really held my attention was the “endgame” where the only goal is to beat your highscore. Each time you complete a wave without taking any damage from enemies, you gain a score multiplier: as this multiplier rises, each round becomes more tense since taking any damage would mean starting back at the x1 multiplier.

The all-important highscore page. I’m 52nd!

After playing for awhile, you find yourself almost unconsciously flying around the screen, utilizing your amassed upgrades to reduce the enemy robots to nothingness  and almost impossibly dodging right and left in the nick of time to preserve your fragile self. I’m not usually one to play simpler games such as this, preferring more complicated or strategic games, but Ultratron is beginning to change my mind – it’s good clean action packed fun and I had an absolute blast experiencing it.

Possible Improvements

There really aren’t many things that Puppy Games got wrong in this game. I don’t have any big complaints, but there are a few small things I’d love to see addressed.

• First off, some of the powerups were so visually distracting that they would hurt the player rather than help. The bouncing bullets powerup would often fill the entire screen with careening projectiles that made it difficult to see anything at all. Especially at higher levels, it’s crucial to know exactly where at all times – reducing the brightness of these extra particles would help them from being quite so blinding.
• Secondly, it would be nice to know upgrades get unlocked – I couldn’t quite figure out if they were unlocked by advancing in levels or by choosing certain upgrades. Subtle connecting lines or arrows between related upgrades could possibly resolve this issue.
• Lastly, another visual issue I had was that it’s difficult  to distinguish the money fragments dropped after destroying an enemy in the midst of all the other things happening around the screen. I think changing the color of the fragments to something more unique would be a help.

Conclusion

This is a fantastic game. If you are into any kind of fast-paced action shooter, you should get it – even if you aren’t, it’s worth downloading the demo and giving it a go to see if it’s your kind of thing. I highly recommend if and I hope you have as much fun with it as I did. Also, I challenge you to beat my highscore. If you do, be sure to leave a comment below so I can try to beat yours!