Category: Mac

DevonThink Personal is an amazing piece of software to organize your notes, PDFs, bookmarks, articles, and anything else you can think of. It’s one of those apps you’re bound to have heard of semi-frequently if you’ve been using a Mac for any decent amount of time, most within articles about paperless workflows. But that’s not everything DevonThink is up to.

The Personal edition of DevonThink offers most of the features which made the application well-known for organizing your snippets of text, and the famous artificial intelligence to find references among your files. It’s time to do DevonThink some justice and see why you should be using it.

Want to check out other similar bucket apps for your files? Check out our recent bucket apps comparison article featuring DevonThink, Evernote, Yojimbo, and more.

Why DevonThink Personal?

You’ve likely read about every Professional version of DevonThink, but did you know they had a personal edition? It is the only product from the DevonThink family available through the Mac App Store, and it stands on a competitive price to other similar applications, close to Yojimbo or the annual plan of Evernote.

As a lower grade from the advanced editions, you may miss a few features you automatically assimilate with DevonThink as you hear the name, like OCR (the feature – like popularly used in Evernote – that reads text within images and scanned PDFs) and mobile Sync (DevonThink To Go is only available if you have the Pro Office edition). If you’re not looking for a business powerhouse, you may not even miss several of its features at all. You can check the whole comparison between the editions here.

Interface and Navigation

It doesn’t matter how much you love DevonThink, it still looks outdated. If you can get past the interface, though, the app itself is still interesting enough to check out. Seven views are available, but each one of them offers different resources. The best way to navigate through your tags is with the Tags view, where you may select multiple tags to refine your results. Not as good as Yojimbo or Evernote, but better than Together.

DevonThink seems like it expects you to navigate your files as a wiki, and often the views will force you into it. Some of the views display the same information in their multiple panels, like the Column or Three Panes views, as you select a folder from the sidebar, it will only display the files, not the child folders, in the second panel, so you keep relying on the wiki structure to go through my files. Analyzing the pros and cons of its views may require an article on its own, so I’ll stick with my favorite: the Split view.

Remove all the excess and you find a decent looking application behind.

Looking at the sidebar options, DevonThink offers you an Inbox to drop any file and organize later, a list of your Tags, a few Smart Folders already embed and, of course, the viability to create as many Smart Folders and Groups as you wish. You’re also allowed to keep a folder hierarchy just like in Finder, a feature amazingly missed by a few contestants.

Since I’m sticking with the Split View, I’ll also change the Toolbar accordingly, taking away the organization methods you can quickly access with a right-click to more robust options to perform editing on PDFs and articles you write on DevonThink. Actually, if you took a look at the Tour Guide video, DevonThink promotes itself as a word processor as well. Let’s tackle that next.

Writing

As you write on DevonThink, several of its features are available. You have styles, alignment and spacing options and a way to display your lists. Even though the options don’t justify the self-promotion, the quick access to your references is worthy. It may be not the place you choose to write your whole article, but a good start for your first drafts or outlines.

A simple text editor, enough to organize your thoughts.

You may easily share your text or lock it up to prevent further changes. Also jump between your highlights, add tags as you go from the status bar and use the magical features: See Also & Classify and Keywords. We’ll take a look on these two later.

But it also comes with many limitations: resources available for PDFs, like creating annotations, are not here. And if you’re looking for a good environment to write, it’ll only work good for you if you want to write in Rich Text, as that’s the only way to preserve, say, highlights and other DevonThink features. You may convert everything to plain text later, but will lose all formatting including highlights.

Artificial Intelligence

But let’s leave it behind, since you wouldn’t consider DevonThink for a word processor, would you? The artificial intelligence is what stands out in comparison to other information database. The Keywords feature analyzes your file to find, guess what, its keywords. Each keyword has a score of importance and as you click on them you’ll visualize the files which relate with that keyword.

Search by relevance and find similar files to enrich your research.

If you need a more abroad way to compare your files, you got the See Also & Classify, which will display recommended groups to place your file and similar items from your database. Everything with a score right next to it so you can see how close they actually are. If you use the Auto Classify feature, it will send your file into the group that gets the highest score of comparison.

This feature appears again whenever you use DevonThink’s powerful search, as the results are shown with their scores related to the search terms applied.

Capturing Stuff

It doesn’t matter how good an application is to organize the information within if there’s no easy way to add files into it. DevonThink Personal offers many ways to grab stuff. You got the basic things, like Saving as PDF from the Print window, the Services menu option or dropping a file onto the Dock icon. However, it stands out with its Browser Extension and the Sorter.

You can also pick between Rich Text, PDF, Plain Text and other formats.

I’ll put my neck on the line and say that DevonThink is the best information manager to store articles you find online. Its Browser extension offers several options to classify your files as you add them. It picks the URL and Title automatically and allows you to include notes and tags, choose a different format or placement. Yet it is the Instapaper checkbox that shine, which lets you save your articles using the Instapaper formatting for better reading, giving you a quick way to get rid of all visual distractions.

You can drop files into DevonThink even when it is closed thanks to the Sorter.

Then there’s the Sorter that doesn’t stay behind in DevonThink, but instead lives on as a discreet tab hiding by the screen border, no matter what app you’re using. There you can include folders to quickly organize dropped items and also take Notes fully featured with automatic title, URL and tags for reference. Among its preferences, you can customize its visualization and set up hotkeys. As an independent feature, you don’t need DevonThink open to use the Sorter, neither will the application open as you drop a file on it.

Web Integration

I consider this to be the main panel of DevonThink, as it gives you all the great aforementioned options to take advantage of its artificial intelligence, but also show a great responsiveness to deal with web content.

You got the browser-like navigation arrows which work for the whole database history, quick access to the source URL in the browser or at DevonThink and as you find more links within your article, you can just open them in new tabs and check them altogether, which is great if you’re writing and must keep your references close. Put that together with the See Also and possibility to create links to other files within your database and you got the game. And you can highlight these web archives.

You can add any references you find within your stored articles with a right-click.

But you can’t talk about web these days without discussing synchronization to mobile devices. DevonThink To Go is a mobile application that syncs some selected files to be viewed in the mobile, however, it is only available for those with the Pro Office edition. In its latest update, DevonThink can store your whole database on Dropbox, so every user can check their files on their phones someway.

Many Little Things

It is barely possible to cover everything DevonThink has to offer even in its lowest version without missing a few things. There are good features and bad absences this article couldn’t tackle without turning into a series. It has great annotation features for PDFs, but none for images. You can merge almost any kind of files, and we could go on all day.

Despite what the rumor says about DevonThink being a beast to learn, it is not entirely true. You can easily just open the application and start archiving your files, but it is inevitable that if you want to use DevonThink at its full potential, a peek at the Help files plus some exploring won’t harm. It’s a nice app that’d you should definitely try out, at least with its free trial.

From now until March 18th, 2013, you can get DevonThink Personal and up to 10 more apps in the PickABundle for $49.99 together. Be sure to check it out if you’re wanting to grab DevonThink Personal, so you can get a bunch of other apps together – essentially for free!

If you’re looking for a great deal on Mac apps this week, then we have quite the deal for you: the PickABundle! This all new Mac app bundle that lets you pick 10 apps for your own bundle, all for the low price of $49.99, no matter what you pick.

There’s 30 apps you can pick from for your own bundle in PickABundle, enough for everyone to pick from. There’s web development tools like Rapidweaver, Hype, Flux, and Lucid. There’s Mac tools like Awaken, Hands Off!, and Blu-ray Player. You’ll find Tembo for searching through files, DEVONThink Personal to keep your information organized, Swift Publisher to create beautiful publications, MoneyWell to keep your finances organized, Boom to make videos and audio louder on your Mac’s speakers, and more. Then, as a bonus, every bundle will get a free copy of NyxQuest, an adventure game to top off everything else you’ve already gotten.

If you’ve wanted to pick up a copy of any of these apps – and yes, a number of the apps such as Rapidweaver, Hype, and DEVONThink are worth more than the price of the bundle on their own – then you’d better hurry and pick up a copy of the PickABundle with the apps you want. The bundle is running until March 18th, so you’ve got just under 2 weeks to get your copy.

Best of all, we have a special for Mac.AppStorm readers. Everyone who purchases the PickABundle gets entered in a random drawing for a free copy of Pixelmator, Analog, My Wonderful Days, Scribe, and other great apps that aren’t already in the bundle. If you purchase the PickABundle after clicking the link in this article, you’ll be entered in the random drawing exclusively with other Mac.AppStorm readers, so you’ve got a much higher chance of getting one of the extra apps!

If you do buy the PickABundle, we’d love to hear what apps you got in the comments below.

We’ve collected the top four reviews, roundups and how-to articles from across the AppStorm network in February. Whether you’re interested in Mac, iPhone, Web, Android, Windows, or iPad apps, there’s bound to be something you didn’t spot over the course of the month. Now would be a good time to explore a part of the AppStorm Network you’ve never seen before!

Thanks for reading AppStorm, and I hope you enjoy looking over some of our favourite posts from last month!

Best of Android.AppStorm

Best of iPad.AppStorm

Innovative Task Management in Daily Routine

I work from home, and that requires a lot of discipline. Without a boss looking over my shoulder, it’s easy to check the clock and realize I’ve spent the day watching reruns of The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air. I need to stick to a schedule, and I’m the first to admit I need some help with that.
Enter Daily Routine, a time management app that’s all about customization, and I can create as many different routines as I need for all my different activities. Will all that customization, not to mention the very distinct Daily Routine interface, just end up getting in my way, or is this the thing to get me on track?

Best of Windows.AppStorm

Best of iPhone.AppStorm

Best of Web.AppStorm

Best of Mac.AppStorm

Share Your Ideas

Is there something in particular you’d like to see on the site next month? We’d absolutely love to hear your suggestions for articles, topics and giveaways. Just let us know in the comments. Thanks for reading AppStorm!

In a recent review of the WordPress blog editor BlogEasy, one of our readers, Siglist, had this to say about blogging apps on the Mac:

Having worked on multiple platforms/OSes… Mac/OSX is colletively the bottom of the barrel when it comes to blogware; no contest. …Why is this the case for the Mac world? There is nothing that can be done with basic “markdown” that can’t be done (and then some) with WYSIWYG.

This is a sentiment shared by many Mac users. While MarsEdit has enjoyed a fine history and following, many users are still on the lookout for the ideal WordPress (or other blog) editor.

There’s a brand new app, PixelPumper, that aims to fill this gap. It aims to let you graphically lay out your blog posts, offline, in an app designed around the latest OS X tech. Can it live up to all of that? Read on to find out.

Getting Started

Linking PixelPumper to an existing blog is a quick and easy process. The first time the app is launched, you will be walked through the process of linking the app to a blog. All you need to do is enter the site name, your username, and your password. Adding additional blogs can be done through the preferences menu. One thing I like about PixelPumper is the ease of switching between blogs.

The UI: Beauty and Puzzlement

PixelPumper’s UI is very eye-catching at first glance. The toolbar icons look nice, if a little big, and the interface is easy enough to figure out: a list of posts on left, the editor in the middle pane, and a few more options for the post in the right pane (category, tags, and main image). Pretty straightforward. But a closer look reveals some problems.

PixelPumper’s UI is quite attractive, but lacks customization, even window resizing.

First of all, with the current UI many actions require multiple clicks. For example, changing the paragraph style to a heading requires three clicks. This would not be so bad, but there is no keyboard shortcut. The same for bolding or italicizing text. Its going to take multiple clicks with no shortcut? Cmd-s doesn’t save a draft of the post?

This shot shows the drop down menu for selecting a heading for a post.

Then there is the window itself, which cannot be resized. Luckily, the default size is reasonable, but if you want to resize a window, you are out of luck. It probably goes without saying at this point, but the UI is also not customizable. No hiding of the toolbar, no separate window for editing, no resizing the window panes, no full screen mode etc.

Not for the Power User

When it comes down to it, PixelPumper is going to work for simple posts, but the power user will find the app lacking in several ways. All of the things Mac users are used to with the Cocoa text editing experience are lacking (as alluded to above with the lack of keyboard shortcuts). What about Markdown? Also not supported. There is also no text mode and no theming support, so any type of advanced editing is not going to happen.

A few other things make the app difficult to use:

• No support for dragging and dropping images into a post
• Bullet lists are limited only to one level
• No autosave function, and no warning to save your work when quitting the app

Here is what a post on my WordPress blog looked like. The default image did not show up on the post, but it looked fine in terms of the formatting.

Needs Some Work

Coming back to the question posed in the title, the answer is no, this app is not going to be the answer for most bloggers. If you have already forked out the money for MarsEdit, this app is not going to add anything you don’t already have.

However, PixelPumper has the potential to be a useful app for making quick, simple posts to your blog. Some bloggers likely don’t need a text mode, or theming. Others might like a slimmed down blog editor to get a quick post out. Currently, PixelPumper is not ideal even for a simple post. The UI is nice to look at, but overall very lacking. As far as creating a post goes, currently the experience is too cumbersome. Adding some UI customization and including some of the basics of a Cocoa text editing experience will make this app a viable solution for some bloggers.

It’s free right now, so it’s worth grabbing just in case it improves in the future. For now, though, it’s likely not the blogging app you’ll want to rely on.

Most of us need to use several productivity apps every day: one for todos, one for notes and files, and maybe another for your projects and more. Having to switch back and forth between these separate apps is a drag: it’s hard to make connections between dots, and your data is scattered all over the place. Pagico, our sponsor this week, is here to help.

Pagico is like GTD with data management capability – it not only manages tasks, but also notes and files. By neatly organizing everything by projects, you can have your vacation itineraries stored right next to restaurant menus, or action items right on top of meeting notes. Things can also be stored by contacts, allowing you to keep track of person-specific stuff. Best of all, since your projects, tasks and contacts are stored in one place, you can cross-link everything: task-to-person, task-to-note, note-to-files, project-to-project, project-to-person … you get the idea.

Even though things are organized in projects and contacts, deadlines won’t be overlooked as Pagico presents all your schedule data in a visually intuitive flowchart. It’s like having a bird’s eye view of your schedule.

Pagico also syncs via the cloud. You can have your data available on all your computers and iOS devices. Or, you can also set up Workspaces for your team and share data among your colleagues.

Pagico for Desktop 6 is a major update. It’s fast, Retina-Ready, GTD-compliant, and its built-in cloud sync is specifically designed for personal sharing (data sync across multiple computers and iOS devices) and small team collaboration.

Go Get It!

Pagico 6 is an incredibly exciting step forward for the app, and whether you’ve never tried it before or are already using an older version, you should definitely try it out. You can download a free 15 day trial of Pagico to try it out, then you can purchase a copy for your Mac for $50. Best of all, you can run it on your Windows or Ubuntu PC, too, so you can keep your info together with Pagico even if you’re away from your Mac.

Day after day of Internet downloads, creating memes, and adding to your music collection can take a toll on your computer. This normal usage adds up to forgotten files, duplicates, and programs you forgot you installed. Well, if you’re like me, at least.

Magician promises to make problems like these disappear, refreshing your Mac in the process. It also does a ton more, way more than you’d expect for an app like this. Let’s take a look.

Aside: Upon installing Magician I had to ask myself a question, and I hope I’m not alone: what is the icon for Magician supposed to be? My best guess is an umbrella covering some clouds. A friend suggested a whale with large teeth, and our editor thinks it’s an elephant. And now on to the review.

A Different Kind of Beast

When I first downloaded Magician, it was under the guise that it was an app for cleaning up your hard drive. Yet it seems to have a crisis of multiple personalities. Or maybe it’s the benefit of multiple personalities. Magician doesn’t just help you find chunky files, it will also tell you the weather for your locale, your current upload and download speed, and other system information.

Like the App Store, Magician tells you when your apps need to be updated but it also shows you apps you’re not using and how long it’s been since they’ve been opened.

The best news, though, is that it incorporates some of the best features of other products all in one place for the low, low price of free. The duplicate file finder echoes that of Gemini (another Mac app) and should frankly be built into the operating system. The log and cache cleaner is reminiscent of Hazel and other “sweepers”, but the fact that most of these features come packaged into this one app is a big plus. Did I mention there’s a virus scanner as well?

If you choose, Magician can serve as an Activity Monitor replacement and give you the important vitals of your Mac.

Here’s a complete rundown of what this app can do:

• Clear cache/temporary data
• Locate duplicate files (with an easy deletion process)
• Check for app updates and rarely used apps
• Uninstall apps
• Change default programs for system files
• Add/Remove login items
• Provide system information
• Provide weather, upload speed, download speed
• Locate files based on size
• Check downloaded files for viruses and trojans (though this isn’t as useful, since it’s rather out of date)
• Manage resources (RAM, CPU, temperature, etc.)

Needless to say, it’s fully-featured.

Using the App

Magician is a three column setup, but one column is mostly static, just describing the option you’ve selected in other columns. It looks and operates like a Finder window. In the leftmost column, a user can make selections about which of the features of Magician they want to run.

Additionally, Magician comes with an applet window that stay on top of all other windows (apart from apps you’ve set to full-screen) to keep you informed of the speed and quantity of Internet downloads and resource usage such as RAM and CPU. This applet can also be moved to the menubar which is a preferable location to a floating window, in my opinion. It took me awhile to find this, but the applet and menubar information can be hidden by clicking the Magician icon in the menubar and then selecting “Hide Monitor Window.”

The applet will either hover over open windows or it can be moved to the menubar. To turn it off, click the Magician icon in the menubar and then select “Hide Monitor Window.”

The features of Magician are all easy-to-use and most importantly, they work intuitively. That sounds like a “duh” moment, but I’ve interfaced with many similar apps and not all do what they advertise. For instance, you may find a duplicate file app that finds the duplicates but then makes the user select every other file in order to delete the duplicate. Magician selects them for you. Magician also gives the option of removing items completely or moving them to the trash in case you realize you accidentally deleted something you didn’t mean to remove.

You can see some system-level tweaks like locking your icon dock, reflected in the System Preferences just seconds after you select them.

There are some problems…

Magican worked fairly well, but there were several problems I hit. The first is that the app could not recognize my system information. The Hardware tab of Magician is meant to give a system overview very similar to Finder’s About This Mac selection. On my computer (a 2011 Macbook Air) the tab was blank. For some reason, it couldn’t glean the hardware information, but since About This Mac does the same thing, it wasn’t an inconvenience.

The other issue came when running the clean-up of temporary files and caches. I set Magician to move these files to the Trash, but when I later went to empty the Trash, some of the temporary files were in use. Had I closed all my open apps and/or logged and logged back in before I emptied the trash, I probably wouldn’t have encountered the problem, but it’s worth noting in case you run into the same problem.

Finally, it’s worth noting that the app has rather inflated claims, stating that deleting log files will speed up your programs and more. It also is a bit too aggressive, and we wouldn’t recommend using the Quick Cleaner option without checking what it’s removing, since by default it’ll remove extra languages from your Mac, and that can break some apps. It’s fairly user friendly, but you still need to use it with both eyes open.

The App that Keeps on Giving

On top of the features I’ve reviewed, Magician comes with a few tack-on applications: MagicianFile, MagicianDocument, and MagicianRest. I won’t talk much about MagicianFile because it equates to a Finder replacement that doesn’t offer much above and beyond the system application.

MagicianDocument gives you the ability to find files by type in a way that doesn’t bring back extraneous system files and other unwanted documents. For example, I selected “Microsoft Office” and it found some files from my college days that I hadn’t seen in a long time, even using Finder. Bear in mind, though, I’m not a Finder power user so I’m sure for others it won’t be as effective.

Lastly, MagicianRest operates in the same vein as Time Out, as an app that reminds you to take a break from your computer at regular intervals. All-in-all, they aren’t bad as free add-ins, but I thought MagicianDocument was the best of the three.

On top of managing your Mac, Magician will also tell you the weather.

Conclusion

I went in to the review feeling, both from the Web site and the look of the app itself, that Magician would be one of those ad-infested, resource hogs that didn’t deliver on its promises. I’m happy to say that I was completely wrong. Magician is chock full of quality features in a “everything and the kitchen sink” kind of way, though that can be both good and bad. It’s nice it does so much, but it’s a bit much at the same time.

The features work well, and it used less than 1% of my CPU (according to Activity Monitor) when it wasn’t in use, so it’s not to resource-intensive. While I was put off by the inability to exit the applet/menubar attachment, I can see myself using Magician on a weekly basis from now on to keep my Mac a bit more free of file debris, especially considering it didn’t cost a dime.

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

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

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

Ever needed to quickly convert a video or audio file into a different format, and searched around for an app to do it quickly? Perhaps you found an app, but wanted one with more options or that could handle the job better. If you own Adobe Creative Suite or have a subscription to Adobe Creative Cloud – as nearly 70% of our readers said they do in our poll this week – then you’ve got a great media converter ready to use: Adobe Media Encoder.

Let’s take a quick look at one of the least well-know members of Adobe’s Creative Suite family of apps, one that’s included in ever single edition of Creative Suite but that’s never usually mentioned alongside the likes of Photoshop and Illustrator. It just might be the best media tool you never knew you had.

The Tiny Adobe App That Could

If you have Creative Suite installed on your computer, press CMD+space and type in “Media Encoder”, then hit enter. Voilà. There’s the one Creative Suite app you usually never hear mentioned. It’s technically a sidekick to Premiere Pro, but Media Encoder is included with every edition of Creative Suite. It’s quite the nice little tool to have around, even if you won’t use it all the time.

Media Encoder lets you drag-and-drop files into the queue to convert them to another media format. Or, even better, you can drag a folder into the Watch Folders section, and every media file in the folder or added to the folder later on while the app is running will automatically be converted to your default preset without any extra action. It’s about the simplest way to convert your camera videos to something that’ll play on any device, downsize HD videos to take up less space on your phone, rip audio out of a video, or just get all of your video files in the same format and size before uploading them to your site.

Adobe Media Converter 6

There’s more features you can tweak if you click on the export format name, which opens the Export Settings window. Here, you can set specifics on how you want the video converted, and can even trim the beginning and end of the video or crop it down to the size you want. You can add a Gaussian blur to the video from the Filters tab, though that’s the only effects you can add to videos. You can also add any metadata you want to the exported media files, and add your FTP server info to automatically upload the converted video to your website.

Crop video, shorten it, tweak the output, and save or upload it automatically

The Formats You Need

Adobe Media Encoder is serious when it comes to media. It’ll almost take anything you can throw at it: files from other Adobe apps, dozens of standard video, audio, and image formats, and more extreme formats like RED video files. The formats it can output are a bit tamer, including standard .mp3 and h.264 formats, but still, there’s enough versatility in there to take almost any media file you want and turn it into almost any other media format you want. You can turn a video into still images, rip the audio from a Flash video, or just resize your video files into something that’ll play on any device and screen imaginable. The only thing missing is support for Windows Media files and open-source formats like OGG and WEBM.

Everything – even RED files – except for Windows Media

With all the formats it supports, if Media Encoder doesn’t have the precise settings you’d like to use, you can create your own new preset. It’s a mix-and-match media setup that can work just like you want. It can include anything and everything you’ll find in the Export Settings, giving you a way to, say, make a new setting for video with specific size and format specifications along with a unique FTP server to upload the files to. Then, you can make a new preset for a different site, with its unique needs and FTP settings. There’s no way to make a bulk preset – one that would export one video into multiple formats at one time – though.

Or, you likely don’t even have to go to that much trouble. Adobe regularly releases new presets on their blogs for various new popular screen sizes and formats, so you can now download presets for, among other things, 4k screens and the Kindle Fire and Nook.

Make your own presets to export just like you want

The Competition

Obviously, this is a space where Adobe is far from the only player in town, and it’s guaranteed to not be the only player even on your Mac since QuickTime has basic export options built in. You’ll need to go searching for another option if you want more than just a way to export for an older iPhone or Apple TV, or rip the audio from a video, but there’s a number of other options. There’s the free Miro video converter, which is a great free converter for doing simple format converts for different devices, and Apple’s own Compressor 4 media encoder which for $49.99 is even more feature-full than Adobe Media Converter, though at the expense of simplicity. But if you do have Creative Suite, Adobe Media Encoder likely is the best option you already own.

QuickTime

Conclusion

Adobe Media Encoder isn’t enough reason to go buy a copy of Creative Suite, or subscribe to Creative Cloud, but it is a very nice little extra if you already have Creative Suite. It’s especially nice that it’s included in the basic Creative Suite that doesn’t actually include any video apps (though, that said, Photoshop itself is a basic video app these days).

If you have Creative Suite and have never used Media Encoder, go give it a try. Almost anyone would be able to find a use for it sometimes.

SSDs are amazing. They’re so fast, once you’re using to using one in your day-to-day work, switching back to working from a traditional hard drive is painful. You’ll get so used to apps opening nearly instantly that everything will feel slow. It’s no wonder Apple’s switched its most popular laptops – the MacBook Air and the new MacBook Pro Retina Display – to SSD.

There’s only one problem: SSDs cost more per gigabyte than traditional hard drives, so instead of the roomy 500Gb hard drives you might be used to in other computers, a MacBook with an SSD will likely only have 128-256Gb of storage. With HD video downloads and retina display ready apps, it’s rather easy to fill that up.

If you’ve got a 13″ Air or a Retina Display MacBook, though, you’ve got an SD card slot. Now what if that could be used to add extra storage that felt integrated fully with your Mac? That’s exactly what the Nifty MiniDrive – a tiny microSD card adaptor that sits flush with the exterior of your MacBook – sets out to do.

Seeing a Kickstarter Dream From Start to Finish

A Kickstarter dream, turned into reality.

The Nifty MiniDrive started its journey with a Kickstarter campaign back in July, 2012. Kickstarter, the poster child for crowdfunding, has been the incubation place for so many new products of late, but quite a few popular ones have struggled to meet their initial expectations, and the process from idea to real, finished product is often far longer than originally expected. The Nifty MiniDrive team hit their share of bumps in the road along the way, dragging their initial delivery time from the originally anticipated late October all the way to the end of February.

But along the way, the team behind the Nifty MiniDrive kept backers up-to-date on how everything was going through their Kickstarter updates, letting us see the behind-the-scenes process of turning a dream into reality with anodized aluminum, PCB assembly, force testing, manufacturing in China, shipping around the globe, and more. It was quite the interesting journey, one that’d make me – for one – much more cautious about thinking I could make a real product.

The MiniDrive, and the nifty little hook tool

An Apple Quality microSD Adaptor

In essence, the Nifty MiniDrive is just a microSD to SD card adaptor, much like the one that you’ll likely find included in the package if you purchase a microSD card today. If you’re running out of storage space on your MacBook, and you own a newer MacBook Pro or Air 13″, then the SD card slot gives you a way to add extra storage. The only problem is, an SD card will stick out of your MacBook, so you’ll need to pull it out and store it before dropping your MacBook in a bag to carry. The Nifty MiniDrive solves this problem by being just as long as the depth of your MacBook’s SD card slot, so you can push it in and leave it, making the microSD card’s storage feel much more like it’s just an extra internal hard drive.

Pulling the MiniDrive out is simple with the hook, or a bent paperclip

Just pop a microSD card into the Nifty MiniDrive, then push the Nifty MiniDrive into your MacBook’s SD card slot, and you’re ready to roll. If you need to pull the MiniDrive out so you can, say, copy pictures from your camera’s SD card, you can use the included hook or a bent paperclip to pull it out. The MiniDrive doesn’t look quite as perfectly cut as it looks in their press pictures, but unless you’re looking really close, it’s close to perfect. Sure, it’s basically just a simple plastic microSD card reader with a piece of anodized aluminum attached to it, but the overall effect makes it feel like it was designed as a part of your MacBook, and hey, that’s got to be worth something.

The Nifty MiniDrive looks like it’s a built-in part of your MacBook

All That Extra Space

If you’ve been struggling to keep everything you need on your MacBook’s SSD, and have resorted to using flash drives and external hard drives daily, then the MiniDrive will certainly be a nice storage space buffer that’s a lot less trouble to use day-to-day than most removable storage. For now, the most you can add to your Mac with microSD is 64Gb, though 128Gb microSD cards should be coming out later this year (and there’s the eventual potential of up to 2TB microSD cards). I bought a new 32Gb microSD card for around $30 to use with my MiniDrive, and 64Gb microSD cards should cost around $55-60 right now.

My MacBook, now with 25% more storage

One thing you should make sure is that you buy the fastest microSD card you can, which should be rated Class 10 UHS-1 right now. Class 10 cards should get transfer speeds of at least 10MB/second, while cheaper microSD cards have as low as 4MB/second transfer speeds. Transfer speeds will also depend on your MacBook, as older MacBooks treat the SD card slot as a USB 2.0 connection, while newer ones use the PCIe bus to connect to the SD card slot. You can find your MacBook’s SD card reader speed from the System Profiler in OS X.

My MacBook shows a max transfer speed of 480Mb/second (or 60MB/s), though in real-life testing, I found I got about 10MB/second transfer speeds. Copying a ~600Mb file (VMware Fusion) took right around one minute. That’s slower than transferring files to my USB 3 external hard drive (copying the same file took around 40 seconds), but then, it’s not bad at all. It’s perfectly fine, say, for storing files – even your iTunes library – and I was even able to run an Ubuntu virtual machine from it decently.

Checking the speed of your SD card reader

Conclusion

The Nifty MiniDrive is indeed a nifty little solution to the MacBook’s limited – and non-upgradable – internal storage, one that’s a tad hard to come by. Right now, if you didn’t back the Nifty MiniDrive on Kickstarter, you’ll need to enter your email on their site and wait to get one. Presumably, sometime soon, they’ll be for sell again at around $25-$30 as they were in the Kickstarter campaign. Throw in a microSD card, and you can quickly add 25-50% more storage to your MacBook. You can get the MiniDrive in a handful of colors, though the silver option will look the most integrated with your MacBook.

Then again, for the price of the microSD card, you could pick up a USB3 external hard drive and get 4+ times the amount of storage. Only then, it won’t be so nicely integrated. I, for one, am glad I got a Nifty MiniDrive, and I’d recommend grabbing one if you want a way to add storage to your MacBook as soon as they’re available again.

App.net is a new social network that’s initial approach as a real-time platform offers a similar experience to Twitter. After the blue bird’s latest announcements regarding 3rd party apps, App.net has turned out to be the new favorite spot for people who appreciate the development of applications and Kiwi is the new kid on the block.

If you’ve got that dejà vu feeling, you must know that Kiwi is also the previous product from the same developers. After Twitter slammed the door on third-party developers, the creators of Kiwi simply packed their things and moved along. Kiwi for Twitter has been unsupported since then and its developers joined a new adventure.

Minimal and Objective

Time has made good Kiwi’s original aspirations, as a Twitter client it had the reputation for being a minimal application, characteristic that became clearer with their release for App.net. It gives you quick access to the general features of App.net, as your home timeline, profile, mentions, starred posts, global feed and direct messaging.

You need an App.net account to use this application, you can be invited for a free one or just subscribe to one of their plans.

Kiwi displays everything in a single column and permits you to refine your home timeline giving you the social experience you need. If you rely on Twitter, it makes it easy to crosspost between the platforms. But these preferences are there to tweak your experience, Kiwi is ready to use as you allow it to access your App.net account.

All kinds of shortcuts

Kiwi is fully featured with gestures and shortcuts to make navigation a breeze. You can configure two and three finger swipes to switch tabs and check the details of conversations. If you get there, you’ll find the whole list of shortcuts, which not only support basic functions, but also opening links in browsers or posts in Alpha (the default App.net web client).

Tweak the gestures and global hotkeys in the Preferences menu.

If you’re checking anything else and an idea you would like to post on App.net comes up, you can just hit a customizable shortcut to write a new post or even show up the client. If the keyboard is not much of your taste, you can reach out the same features through the beautiful green icon on your menu bar.

Navigation

This is the dividing point for Kiwi. Even though it is a really simple application, without any fat on its features, there is good and bad in its way to navigate among your tabs and it is your choice to get used to it.

If you’re checking a conversation (posts or direct messages), you’ll get into focus. This means that you won’t have any visual reference or access to the default timelines via shortcuts (you can still use the status bar icon). The backfire is that you won’t be able to see the highlights for your notifications. The status bar icon still highlights; however, you can’t configure its behavior to do it only for mentions or direct messages, it is all or nothing.

Check your conversations in detail with a quick swipe of fingers.

On the other hand, this is not essentially an issue since it comes to bring an alternative to a commonly seen behavior. Let’s picture a situation: you’re checking your home timeline and you check a random conversation, then you receive a notification and check your mentions, when you go back to the previous tab you still have the conversation opened instead of the timeline itself. What Kiwi does is focus your attention into a single subject, cleaning up all the breadcrumb trail.

Also remember that if you receive a mention, Kiwi is integrated with Notification Center and by clicking on the banner you’ll be led to the details of the post and the corresponding conversation. The detailed view for conversations is interesting on its own, since it not only indicates how many posts came after the one you’re checking, it also shows what the user from the selected post was writing previously to the conversation.

Enough for the Power User?

Kiwi is a minimal application which covers features necessary for most of the social networking on App.net, and it is probably the best client for OSX so far as it brings to the table image previewing and direct messages in a polished interface. However, the user who keeps track of multiple conversations and streams almost simultaneously may not be fully pleased by the way it moves through your tabs, even with all sort of keyboard shortcuts and gestures.

If you ever forget an username, Kiwi refreshes your memory.

If you’re aware of the iOS clients for App.net, you may already know that the competition in that scenario is rough and clients have more features available than their desktop competition. Certain features to be missed are certainly the integration with read-later services (Instapaper, Pocket, etc), the possibility to star hashtags and conversations and integration with the File API (recently App.net gave its paid users 10gb of storage, which many apps use to store images).

Of course, the last implications are made in comparison to apps that don’t dispute space with Kiwi, as its simplicity hides features which were still missing for OSX clients and if there’s a single App.net client to watch for in the upcoming updates, the one to pick should certainly be Kiwi.

Conclusion

App.net has recently introduced a free tier based on invitations, where an user may join the platform with a few restrictions. The release of Kiwi couldn’t come at a better moment since it is the best application for OSX by now to grab a feeling on the social network experience this service offers.

A few bold calls were made to keep the application as sharp as possible, such that may require some adaptation. However, Kiwi has a lot to offer with its focused conversations, unified timelines and friendly support for keyboard shortcuts and gestures. All wrapped up on a clean design that will never get in your way.

Our recent sponsor Live Wallpaper is a great way to make your Mac a nicer place to work. It comes with dozens of beautiful themes that can make your Mac even more beautiful than it already is, and it can keep you up-to-date on the weather and more without having to switch over to Dashboard.

At $0.99, Live Wallpaper is a rather cheap addition to your Mac, but if you’re really pinching pennies, we’ve got something you might like: 5 copies of Live Wallpaper for our readers! Want to win one? Here’s what you need to do: take a screenshot of your desktop (just tap CMD+Shift+3), then upload the picture (CloudApp and Droplr are great tools for this) and share a link of it in the comments below. Then, share the giveaway on Twitter, Facebook, or App.net, and add a new comment here with a link to your post for an extra entry in the giveaway.

We’ll close the giveaway on March 6th, so hurry and get your entry in!

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

There’s so many apps in the App Store and elsewhere for the Mac, there’s no way anyone could use them all. We sure don’t. Each of us on the Mac.AppStorm team has our favorite apps that we use for work and more every day, the apps that have stood the test of time for us. We thought you might like to see the Mac apps we each find most important, so we’re starting a new series. Jacob’s first, with his favorite apps, and check back next Wednesday for another of our writers’ favorite apps.

And now, over to Jacob:

Here’s my formulaic morning: Get up and eat breakfast, then open my MacBook Air and start work. What is “work”? That depends on the day. Sometimes it’s writing industry-related news, other times it’s reviewing the latest FarmVille clone, and once in a while I get to do a roundup. Today happens to be one of those roundup days, and I’m excited about it because I get to share some cool stuff with you.

Have you ever wondered what a writer here uses for his daily duties? It’s time to find out, starting with my personal Launchpad of top hits.

For Writing

First, I’ll show you what I use to get my reviews and other articles composed. Spoiler: I do not use any WordPress apps because I prefer the Web experience.

For Email

Every writer, businessperson, and responsible person checks his email daily. It’s not just a good habit, but a necessary one for most jobs.

For Performance

It’s good to keep your Mac running smooth. It’s better if you can keep it in like-new condition all the time.

For Browsing: Chrome or Safari?

Some dock icons.

This one has been quite the affair. I used Chrome up until Safari got iCloud tab sync, then I switched to Apple’s browser to use that feature on my three devices. I even forgot about Chrome and removed it from my dock, only using it once or twice a week for little things and maybe some different Twitter accounts here and there. Honestly, I didn’t see a need for more than one browser, other than the occasional extension.

Then Safari started to get sluggish. I cleaned it up with MacPaw’s software and scrubbed until there was nothing left but the original software. Still, it wasn’t working as well as it did when Mountain Lion first released. When I opened a new tab the browser would crash; there were some weird graphical glitches; and I just didn’t want to deal with it anymore. Since I sold my iPad last month, I thought it might be best to switch back to a Google browser.

The most visited section of Chrome.

Chrome has been a lot more stable for me whenever I’ve used it. In fact, the only time I remember it crashing was when I used the developer build. Well, that and the time I had a CR-48 (the first Chromebook). Regardless of the small issues, Chrome hasn’t failed me and Safari has multiple times. I liked the idea of using an Apple browser, but I just couldn’t get it to work well enough so I jumped ship.

One of my favorite features in Safari.

If things get more stable in a future update, I’d be glad to try Safari again. Right now, it’s just not ready for primetime in my world.

There are a few things that I miss from Safari. One of them is Reader, which I used daily. I’ve found that I can replace that with Readability though, so it’s not too big of a deal. The other is the browser’s Top Sites page. I really liked pinning things there for quick navigation and I wish Chrome had something like that, rather than “apps” and “most visited”.

For Reading

For Cloud Storage: iCloud or Dropbox?

Now the big one. Nowadays, everyone’s excited about this “cloud” business. But really, which one is best? Since there are too many choices outside the walls, I’ve decided to stay inside my confine and choose between Dropbox and iCloud. But I’m actually not choosing between them, because I use them both.

Byword’s iCloud sync.

When it comes to Byword documents, Dropbox is not my go-to resource because storing a file isn’t as quick as it is with iCloud. You have to navigate folders, and I don’t need to do that. So for this, I use iCloud. Yes, I could use Dropbox because it does work well and the iOS app supports it, but I don’t want to go through the hassle of navigating to my Dropbox folder every time I need to save a new document. If the developer were to add a nice simple user interface to it, or automatically save to a folder in my Dropbox account, I’d switch immediately.

The Dropbox menu.

That’s actually all I use iCloud for. Dropbox is my main storage facility for everything else, from invoices to old emails in PDF form to my source code for my websites. I keep everything in there because it’s a secure place that I can always access, whether I’m at home, on someone else’s computer (using a Web browser), or flying across the pond with only my iPhone. I like that iCloud has this versatile application as well, but I prefer the Dropbox approach.

For Scheduling

An event in Calendar.

I’ve always had a large problem with staying on task. Whether it’s writing an article or a message to a friend, I can’t always seem to pay attention fully. To keep myself on a sort of schedule, I plan my day out in Calendar. I add articles that I need to write, give myself a good amount of time to do them, and then move on to the next task. After a lot of practice, I’ve discovered that this is the most effective way to organize my day. I definitely get a lot more work done using Calendar with notifications than I would if I tried to remember it all myself. The app at least eliminates one area of procrastination.

For Notes

I’ll make this quick because there are way too many note-taking apps available for the Mac. I don’t use any of them. Apple’s Notes app isn’t bad, but I don’t prefer to have a bunch of stuff in it. Instead, Simplenote is my favorite scribble-pad. I throw ideas into it, make lists of cool things I find around the Internet, and even have my own font book (a list of fonts I like) going. Simplenote has been the most reliable notes service I’ve ever used and I don’t even need an app for it. I think it’s nice to keep things mixed up a bit. Why have all native apps when you can enjoy the fun of a Web one?

For The Dictionary/Thesaurus

A word to describe music I like.

A writer must have his tools at hand, and OS X’s Dictionary is actually the best thing I’ve ever used. Many people don’t even know it’s there. The little book gives you access to Wikipedia and even British English versions of the dictionary and thesaurus. I’ve found it extremely useful in my daily writing because its searching is instant, meaning that you can type a character and a result will pop up. I also enjoy having the Look Up feature in my browser and other apps.

Did you know you can tap a word with three fingers and OS X will define it?

There’s no reason for Microsoft to not include something like this in Windows.

For Entertainment: VLC or Age of Empires III?

Three good entertainment apps.

It’s the end of the day and I want to watch Skyfall again. Since I ripped the Blu-Ray I got from Amazon.com, I now have an MKV file, which iTunes can’t play. Besides, why would you want to open it in iTunes? Instead, I use VLC for all my video files. It’s a very light application that does everything you could ask for — even free Internet streaming.

One of my favorite games on the Mac is Age of Empires III. It’s a classic, I know. I really love conquering the world once in a while. I beat the campaign more than once and now I just do a few quick matches with the queen of England. It can get really hard, so at least there’s a challenge left. The strategy is to build walls, then a church, and then upgrade your walls to stone. That’ll keep them out!

For You

What are you using for your work on the Mac? Do you think my choice of apps is good; do you have a suggestion for me? We’d love to hear all about your collection in the comments.

I hope you enjoyed hearing about what apps I use and why. See you around!

Last year, Adobe launched their Creative Cloud subscription service along with the newly released Creative Suite 6. Creative Cloud lets you download every one of the full apps from Creative Suite Master Collection to your Mac or PC, and share creative files online for $49/month. That’s still pricey over time, but a huge savings over the initial cost of buying Creative Suite Master Collection outright for $2,599.

If you already have a copy of Creative Suite, though, upgrading to the latest version often still works out cheaper if you have a smaller edition. I had Creative Suite 5.5 Design Standard, and upgraded to CS6 Design Standard for far less than a Creative Cloud subscription would have cost me. Another option is buying a one-app version of Creative Cloud, which is one way, say, to get Photoshop for $19/month.

Creative Cloud apps get updates more often than their traditional Creative Suite counterparts, so Photoshop users especially already have new features over those of use with Creative Suite. It’s one of the many ways Adobe is trying to push us all over to the subscription side.

About 15% of you said you plan to get Creative Cloud in our poll last year, and more said you’d consider it. That’s why we’re wondering how many of you actually use Creative Cloud. Has it worked out good for you, or are traditional upgrades still your preferred way of getting Adobe apps?

Mac gamers always get shortchanged when it comes to big releases. We typically get blockbuster titles after everyone else, while the smaller commercial games rarely make it over at all. That’s been changing over the past few years, thanks to the impact of Steam, the Mac App Store, iOS converts, and cross-platform support from indies. But we still end up late to the party more often than not.

Here’s over a dozen recently-released (i.e., since 2011) Mac games that took so long to reach our fairer platform that the party’s already packed up and ended for Windows and console gamers. Don’t be fooled by their age, though — as the cream of the crop from the last decade in PC gaming, they’re more than worth your attention.

That’s All for Now

So there you have it. A dozen recent commercial game releases on the Mac that took more than two years to get ported. There’s no doubt that Mac users still treated as second-class citizens by the big publishers, but current signs indicate that our lot may be improving — most ports are happening faster, sooner.

Have you been holding out for a Mac version of any games, or did you hold out for one of these? I’d love to hear your thoughts in the comments below.

And if you’re after something a bit older, check out our roundup of Five Classic Games Re-Released for OS X.

If you have a small amount of storage in your computer, then you know what it feels like to constantly be running out of space and having to sacrifice certain files and documents in order to give space to new apps and other things. Have you ever wonder just where on earth all your precious space is going?

Today we’re presenting you an app that can help you easily find huge files that are hogging up all your space, maybe without you even knowing it. It’s a useful little tool for finding files by size in your storage disks called Broom, but that’s not all it does. Want to check it out?

Broom

Broom

Broom is the ultimate helper for your storage disks. Not only can it help you clean up your caches, trashes and other useless files, but it can also help you find the folders and files that are taking up a lot of space without you knowing it.

Broom goes for $2.99 on the App Store. It has two running modes: a menu bar mode, which will always be ready to alert you on the state of your disks, and a stand alone mode that will run only when you call it, with a few more options for you to explore. That’s where all the action is.

Standalone Window

Standalone

The standalone mode of Broom is the default one, and the one that will be brought up when you try to configure the menu bar mode. It can help you find big files and folders, as well as automatically delete folders used by apps for keeping things that might not be in use anymore. Let’s get deeper into them…

Places

Places

The “Places” submenu can be found in the toolbar of the app, and it holds all the default go-to places for quickly freeing up space, such as the trashes, logs, downloads and caches. Broom will automatically calculate the size of each of them everytime you run the app, giving you the option to clear them in a very easy manner.

Each of the places you can clean is very well explained to the user, but it might be useful to understand them better in order to know what you are deleting. Trash will evidently clear your “Trash” folder, same as “Downloads” with its respective folder. Caches are files that apps use to speed up things, but they might not always contain super necessary stuff and they don’t always get properly deleted. Logs are files that contain information of what you’ve done in certain apps, and they can sometimes get pretty big. But, Caches can help your apps run a bit speedier in some instances, and logs are nice to have around if there’s errors you need to report. So, you won’t want to clean out either of these too often.

The Places feature is similar to what CleanMyMac or any similar app might do: you just select the category or folder that you’d like to clean, press the “Remove” button, and that’s about it. But this app goes much deeper than that.

Folders & Files

Folders & Files

What initially jumped to my attention about this app is that it can tell you specifically where all your hard drive space is going, by finding the largest folders and files in your computer. This is a pretty customizable feature, as you can choose to search for either folders or files, and then filter the results through the buttons on the toolbar that specify the sizes of the files found. These range from 100-10MB, 1GB-100MB, 10-1GB, and more than 100 GB.

Searching might take a while, but Broom will sweep through every single place in your computer to find what you told it to. Once you find a potential target for deletion, you can then double click it in the app, and it will be brought up in the Finder for further inspection of yours or deletion. Broom itself won’t do anything with your folders and files, other than find them and bring them up in the Finder.

Menu Bar Mode

Menu bar

Menu bar mode won’t make things a lot more different for the app, but it’s a nice little extra. If you set it up, the app will restart and run as a menubar icon, which will display a bar graph of your free and used space. You can also set a usage percentage at which the app shall notify you of when it’s reached. That’s about it, the only other thing it will do is give you a quick acess button to access the main window of the app.

What It’s Useful For

If you have a mess in your storage disk like I do, and you have no idea where all your space is going, Broom will be of huge help to you. My hard drive has gone through so many backups, restores, OS migrations, partitions, and other terrible stuff, that I honestly have no idea what some files are doing in my hard drive disk. Broom helped me find folders that I had no idea were in my disk, especially the super-big ones.

That’s not to say that Broom will not be useful to you if you are a tidy, responsable person. Broom can also be useful to find files that “magically” take up space without you knowing it, and to find out which files are taking more space than you thought. For example, I found a folder called MobileSync with Broom that took up almost 20 gigabytes out of my 250 GB HDD. Upon further research, I discovered that it is used by iTunes to keep backups of your connected iOS devices. But 20 GB, seriously? I then went into iTunes and found a bunch of old backups for devices that I don’t even own anymore.

Be careful deleting any folder that you find through Broom. Some might contain important information relating to your apps or settings, as well as sensitive information. For example, I didn’t go and delete my entire MobileSync folder, I only deleted the backups I didn’t need directly from iTunes.

Conclusion

Broom is kind of split into two different apps: it searches and organizes files and folders in your disk like OmniDiskSweeper and DaisyDisk would, but it also automatically cleans caches and logs like CleanMyMac would. It might not give you as many options as CleanMyMac would for cleaning unused files, or give you nice graphs of what’s going on in your disk like DaisyDisk would, but for $2.99 I think it’s a nice middle point.

If you’re constantly running out of disk space and have no idea where your precious storage space is going, then you should give Broom a try. I found it pretty easy and fast to use, and much more convenient than hunting for huge files in the Finder. And with SSDs being standard on most new Macs, storage space is at a premium more than ever.