Category: Mac

Whether your work involves visually representing ideas to your co-workers, or you constantly have to give online visual assistance to customers, family or friends, sharing screenshots with annotations is something that we always do and that could always be done simpler.

Today we’re going to review a small app that lives in your menu bar and can help you take, annotate, and share screenshots over Dropbox the fast way. It’s called Glui. Let’s check it out and see if it’s up to the task.

Glui

Glui

Glui is as simple as an app can be. It only runs in your menu bar, ready for you to call it whenever you need to take a screenshot. When you do, you just take your snapshot, annotate it appropriately, and it gets uploaded to Dropbox automatically. That’s about it. Simple, right?

Dropbox

Glui goes for $2.99 on the Mac App Store, and it’s perfect if you don’t want to deal with a big overtly complicated app for taking your screenshots, like Skitch or LittleSnapper. Let’s get deeper into what it can do.

Screenshots

Screenshots

Glui works very much like Apple’s own Grab, except it lets you anotate your screenshots and it also uploads what you take automatically to your Dropbox account. Just like Grab, you can select if you want to take “Crosshair” (where you select an area of your screen for your shot), window (where only the selected app’s window gets in the shot), or fullscreen snapshots.

As soon as you take a screenshot, a window with the end result of it will pop up. You can choose to re-do it, anotate it, or just upload it as it is. As soon as you upload the screenshot, you’ll get a confirmation that it is now in your Dropbox, the link will automatically get copied to your clipboard and you’ll see a button to open it in your browser. If you instead want to save the screenshot to your computer, you can press the button next to the upload one and drag the image to where you want to save it or work with.

The menu bar drop down will always show a list of your recent uploaded screenshots. Clicking on any of them will bring it up in the Dropbox website. We’ll get more in depth with the annotations next.

Annotations

Annotations

The annotations that you can do with this app are pretty simple, unlinke other more complex competitors. At the confirmation window once you’ve got your shot, you’ll find a toolbar on the bottom with just three buttons: an arrow, a square and a text tool. That’s all you can do, there are no other shapes or configurations like color or font options.

This is both a shortcoming and an advantage. Removing unnecessary options makes the app stand out as clean and uncluttered, but it might make your screenshots look dull after a while, and it might even turn into an inconvenience if you are working with a red background (all the shape and text annotations are red).

That’s not to say that you can’t play around with sizes and position. Every annotation item that you put in your snapshot can be very easily scalable and positioned with just a few clicks. After all, the purpose of the app is not to remove every single useful thing out of the app, but to leave only the essentials to make the process of taking and sharing screenshots easier and faster.

Where It Fits In Your Workflow

Upload

You can do most of these things for free, with apps that come included in your computer. Grab (under your utilities folder) can help you take screenshots and Preview can help you annotate them and save them, so that you can then open Dropbox in your browser to upload them. But that’s not convenient at all, really. The whole process will take you a good couple of minutes.

Glui simplifies that whole process and brings it down to just a few seconds. It’s also a lot faster and responsive than Grab, which I have always found sluggish. I can see Glui substituting Grab as my go-to app for getting snapshots, even if it’s not for sharing them over the web. It just feels snappier.

Competition

The marketplace for screenshot apps is filled with options. There’s a little bit of everything and apps seem to come and go quite fast. We’ve all heard about Skitch and its disastrous update, but there’s also newer apps like Napkin and Clarify, and well-established alternatives like LittleSnapper. All of those are way too pricy and/or complicated compared to Glui. It’s just not fair to compare them all as they’re not on the same level.

Glui is meant to be a lot more simple and fast than any of those apps. Take a screenshot, do some quick annotations, and upload it. Apps like Lightshot, TinyGrab, and GrabBox might be more appropriate as direct competitors to Glui. They’re all relatively at the same price, and they’ve all got their own bells and whistles. If $3 seems like a lot, you might want to check out one of the free alternatives like GrabBox and see if they meet your needs.

Conclusion

Everything about Glui is set to work smooth and easy from the get go. It even automatically linked my Dropbox account without having to do anything but a simple authorization when I took my first screenshot. Taking screenshots is easy and fast, it felt smoother than Grab, which I’ve found to be sloppy and slow at times.

Glui still has some ways to go: a few keyboard shortcuts, a bit more customization, timed screenshots and resizing options will make it an impressive little app. Still, for a first release, it’s quite a worthy alternative to more expensive apps like the ones I’ve mentioned. But what do you think? Do you use any similar apps for your screenshot taking needs, or do you stick with the ones that came with your Mac?

Minimalist text editors burst on to the Mac app scene a few years back (actually the Soulmen were pioneers of this field back in 2002, but the truly minimalist apps came out years later). Since that time, there has been a proliferation of minimalist text editors—some would even say the category is too crowded. Many of these editors incorporate Markdown or MultiMarkdown syntax for formatting, with some even providing a live preview and standard keyboard shortcuts for applying syntax (see Byword).

I was searching for an app that would easily create HTML, but display the text as rich text, and stumbled upon Texts. I was in for a big surprise when I discovered just how powerful this “minimalist” text editor is. Read on to find out what I mean.

UI and Standard Features

At first glance, Texts seems to be just a stripped down text editor, but as I demonstrate below, looks can be deceiving. There is no toolbar and literally just a couple of icons (full screen button and the window sizing buttons), leaving you with just your text. This app is going to force you to use keyboard shortcuts, which is fine because there is a keyboard shortcut built in for almost everything, and the shortcuts are very easy to learn.

An example of the Texts interface from a recent post on Mac AppStorm.

Texts also includes the standard OS X document management features such as support for versions, full screen editing and duplicating documents. That’s of course as you’d expect in a modern text editor on OS X.

Texts in full screen view.

Copy to HTML and Paste MultiMarkdown

For the past few weeks, I have been using Texts to write articles and blog posts. I simply type out the text how I want it to look inserting hyperlinks, headings, formatting, block quotes and more where I need them, without even thinking about syntax. Once I am done, I simply select all of the text and then hit the key combo alt-cmd-c to Copy as HTML and paste it into the WordPress HTML editor. The formatting has worked every time.

These are the paragraph and text editing menu options. Notice you can also quickly format equations, code blocks, and references.

What if you already have something written up using Markdown or MultiMarkdown syntax? Texts can handle this too. Simply copy the text and then choose Paste as Markdown and then select MultiMarkdown format from the menu bar. The text is now displayed as rich text and you can continue to write and format the document as you please.

Importing and Exporting

The import and export options are what makes Texts a powerful text editor that clearly sets it apart from other minimalist text and Markdown editors. Although Texts stores documents as plain text, there are plenty of options for exporting your document as rich text. I have written a couple of shorter documents, about five pages, in Texts and then exported to RTF. I then opened the exported RTF in Pages to make some final adjustments to the document such as page numbers and line spacing. This process worked flawlessly for me. The formatting was spot on and I enjoyed writing the documents in the clean, ultra-focused Texts UI.

I also tested out exporting documents as Microsoft Word and PDF files. Again I had no problems, and the formatting was accurate. PDF and .docx files file exports also support any images you inserted into the document using Texts (simply right click and select Insert Image in Texts to add images to your document).

Exporting to PDF and RTF formats requires downloading Pandoc and Xelatex.

I had one issue with exporting to an HTML5 document. I emailed the developer and received a response within minutes. I sent him the document in question and he emailed me back explaining the problem along with the HTML file I was trying to produce. I was very impressed with the support to say the least.

As far as importing goes, I tested importing HTML and MultiMarkdown using Texts. Granted, I didn’t have any advanced MultiMarkdown syntax in the documents like tables, and the HTML documents were just simple blog posts, but in my testing the documents imported just fine.

Texts has a lot of import and export options. Many of which are not covered in this review.

Missing Features

Surprisingly, there is no word count function. This was the main issue I had with Texts. I actually had to copy and paste into another app to get word counts for articles and papers. There are also a couple of standard OS X text editing features that were absent—cmd-delete does not delete the current line, and there is no option to look up a word in the built-in dictionary. It would also be nice to have an option to change the default font, currently there is no way to change the font in your Texts documents. I was also surprised at the lack of an option to export documents as .md files. It seems reasonable that this would be included as an export option given that the app already works well with MultiMarkdown.

Final Thoughts

I am glad to have stumbled upon this app. It truly is a hidden gem. I don’t use the app to its full potential—for example, I have no need for the EPUB and XeLaTeX export options—but I have to say that it works great for what I use it for. I have always thought there should be an app that works like a rich text editor and produces HTML in the background, and as it turns out, Texts is that app. Adding in the powerful import and export options, Texts becomes a very powerful all around text editor.

Is your Mac running slow? Are your applications crashing? Are you running out of space on your Desktop? Get your Mac back in shape with an incredibly fast disk utility that will optimize and clean your hard drive, speed up Apple Mail, free memory, organize your Desktop, and more. That utility is MacOptimizer, our sponsor this week, which its developer describes as a “must have app for every home and business”.

MacOptimizer can clear your system of temporary files, unnecessary language files, and the extra files on your desktop: everything that’s eating up the precious space on your SSD. It can also optimize and repair your Mac so your OS and applications run faster, and run system maintenance tasks to keep your Mac running smoothly. Best of all, it gives you easy access to hidden OS X settings and other useful tweaks that make it easier to work on your Mac.

We found it to be a solid app that did what it said it would without causing problems in our recent review, and you’ll likely find your favorite use for it once you give it a try. It’s a polished way to get your Mac working the way you want.

Go Get It!

Ready to give MacOptimizer a try? It usually costs $29, but this week is on sale for just $19 for this sponsorship. It’s a great chance to grab a copy of MacOptimizer to keep your Mac fit and tweak it to work just the way you want.

I went for years not even knowing what a text insertion or text expansion app was, and when I finally did learn, I was so put off by the high prices of some of the big names on the market that it took awhile before I even found out what the big deal was. Once you’ve started using a text insertion app, though, it’s hard to imagine those days of yore, when you used to actually type things. The memories still haunt me.

But man, are those apps expensive, right? Not necessarily, and today we’re going to take a look at aText, a great text insertion app with a tiny price tag. But does that mean it’s also going to be small on features? We’ll check it out!

Getting Snippy

There are a few default snippets included with aText, and they’re fine. You probably type the date several times a day, and it’s nice to create a little shortcut for that or to be able to pull the time out of thin air, just by typing “%time.” As cool as it might be to hear the text insertion pop and see your snippet appear, though, this isn’t going to be your money maker when it comes to real time savings. For that you’re going to need to create your own snippets.

Click the new icon up top to get started. First, decide on the content of your snippet. If this is your first time using a text insertion or expansion app, you might not be sure where to start. The best place is probably with the sorts of things you type most and get really tired of, the phrases you can’t wait for your browser to autocomplete for you.

Create a snippet of text you’ll use often.

When you’ve decided what you want in your snippet, choose an abbreviation. You’ll want it to be quick to type, or else what’s the point, but you also want your abbreviation to be something you won’t ever type anywhere else, or you’ll end up inserting your name and email address all over the place unintentionally. Good ideas are brief codes like name% or email%. If that’s still too long, try pairing your initials with a number or special character.

Make It Work for You

So you can get your home address in the text of an email lickety split. So what? That’s still not going to make you work any faster or be any more productive. We need to go further with aText.

Let’s say you send almost the same exact email everyday. Maybe it’s a request for information or response to feedback. Sometimes you even copy and paste the text from the previous day’s correspondence into a new email window, just switching some stuff around or changing the recipient’s name. Wouldn’t it be easier to type “form-email%” and have all of that magically appear. Yeah, you know it’s easier.

Create templates to improve your workflow.

aText even allows you to insert blank fields to be filled in later. For instance, if you’re addressing an email, aText will pop open a blank field so you can type out the recipient’s name before it actually inserts your text. You don’t have to make your snippets bland and unspecific, nor will you be forced to hunt and peck for all the places you left blank and have to fill in. aText is also great to create templates for applications like Evernote, where you may be managing text files that at the end of the day look a lot alike, except for the details you change.

Create fillable fields to be completed before aText inserts your snippet.

Organization and Sync

Organize your snippets by creating groups. If you want to create a new group for your snippet, click that icon, and give your group a name, then drag your snippet to the right spot in the list. Groups are great for keeping your snippet list tidy, and I’m about to blow your mind, but you can add a snippet to another snippet from the Insert menu. If you’re using groups, it makes it a lot easier to find what you’re looking for in the menu when everything is organized.

If you’re already using another text insertion app, you can import all of your snippets from the other app. Click the Data icon at the top, and browse to the correct location of your synced data. aText will create a new group for your imported snippets and call out any that are in conflict by highlighting them in orange.

Sync your snippets to your Dropbox.

aText backs up to an Application Support subfolder in the Library folder, but that’s not the only way you can protect your aText snippets. Hop over to the Sync tab in Preferences, and choose any cloud storage folder on your hard disk, including Dropbox, Google Drive, or SkyDrive. Your snippets will automatically be synced to whichever service you choose.

Final Thoughts

Coming in a whopping $30 under TextExpander’s hefty price tag, aText is a real contender on the text expansion and insertion front. With added support for cloud sync and text insertion that works like a champ, aText can really move to the fore. What aText is missing, though, is a companion mobile app, and without that, what’s the point of syncing your aText snippets, anyway? Maybe you’re doing a bunch of text expansion on the three or four Macs you own, sure, but what you really want is to be able to create all these great snippets to use on your main computer, and then turn around and not have to type out a bunch of stuff on your iPhone, either.

Still, even without a mobile app, aText gets the job done on the Mac just as well as its more expensive counterpart, TextExpander. Create snippets, big or small, and aText will take it from there. It’s really one of those apps that once you’ve started using it, you wonder how you ever got anything done before.

Since the emergence of Dropbox, many cloud services have spawned all over the internet, and you probably use a few or all of them. From desktops and video games in the cloud to file-sharing, file-syncing cloud services, you are bound to have a membership to at least one – even if you didn’t intend to.

That isn’t a bad thing, though. As many of you may know, cloud services are extremely useful for school, work, or personal use, not to mention that the cloud will most likely be our future. Because of this, today we will cover the top cloud services and some applications that support them.

iCloud

iCloud, Apple’s venture into the cloud realm, is relatively new, but a lot of people use it (especially if you have an iPhone). Even though iCloud is somewhat new, there are quite a few apps that support it.

iA Writer

iA Writer is one of the coolest text editors available for the Mac, and as many of you may know, it supports iCloud. Paired with the iPhone and iPad versions, you can focus on your writing wherever you go. Check out our review here.

Todo

Todo is a relatively simple task manager for OS X and iOS. It has plenty of cool features and settings to play around with. With the reception of the OS X Reminders app, apps like this one are not needed as much. In any case, Todo support iCloud syncing as well as Dropbox, so give it a try.

Memo

Memo is an extremely simple sticky-note-like app that is available for OS X, and iOS. It syncs all your stickies with iCloud, so you will always have your little notes across all your devices.

Day One

Need to keep a journal of your life? Want it all to be tightly organized and synced with all your devices? Check out Day One. We gave it a nine out of 10, so you should give it a try. It supports both iCloud and Dropbox, so you can’t go wrong with this one.

iWork

You probably already know what iWork is, but if you don’t, it is Apple’s version of Microsoft Office. iWork supports iCloud sync, and you can access your files on your iOS devices via the Keynote and Pages apps.

PDF Pen

PDFpen is an awesome PDF editor developed by the guys who brought you Textexpander. With PDFpen, you can edit text, add images, signatures, and more text to your PDFs. It also supports iCloud so you can access your files through the iPad version of PDFpen.

Coda 2

Coda has been good to many of us, and when Coda 2 was announced, everyone was excited. When it was released though, it was received with mixed feelings. Whether you are team Coda or team SublimeText, you will probably enjoy Coda 2′s iCloud support. It syncs up your clips across all your Macs (this feature is only available to Mac-App-Store-bought copies). You can also give Diet Coda a try.

Plain Cloud

Plain Cloud was brought up recently to our app-craving eyes. If you want to know what you have in your iCloud folder and don’t want to deal with digging through weird folder or file names, give it a try.

Napkin

Napkin is a rather cool app that let’s you create visual notes. With plenty of features and settings, you have a nice app here. Check out our review if you need to. It supports iCloud, to sync up, so you are covered in the cloud front.

Clipboard iCloud Apps

Clipboard apps. Yeah, they are very helpful when you want to move links around and across all your devices with ease. We could have featured all three here, but here is a nice little app showdown we had a while back that you should check out.

Pocket Planes

Pocket Planes is a casual “airline sim” where you manage and grow your fleet of planes. While there are other iCloud-enabled games, this one uses iCloud the best. It does pretty much what PlayStation Plus’ cloud saves does for the PS3 and the PSP (or Nintendo Wii U with the 3DS, but, you know, simpler.

WatchCam

WatchCam is a surveillance application that detects motion and records video automatically. The videos recorded by the app are uploaded to iCloud, so if someone is trying to steal your computer, you will be able to see the videos on your iOS device via WatchCam’s app.

OS X Mountain Lion iCloud-supported Apps

You probably already know this, but in case you don’t, we will highlight the applications that you already have installed on your Mac that support iCloud. iTunes, Safari, Calendar, Reminders, Contacts, Mail, Notes, TextEdit, all support iCloud in some way and you can find their iOS counter parts already installed on your iOS devices as well.

Dropbox

Dropbox is the little start-up that took off and never looked back. Dropbox is probably the service everyone uses and what every other service in this roundup tried to copy. As such, many apps have backed it up by adding support for Dropbox.

Justnotes

Justnotes is a simple note taking app for OS X. You can use Justnote with Simplenote, Evernote to import or sync notes. Justnotes allows you to sync your notes to a local folder, so you can set it to back things up to your Dropbox Folder, Google Drive or Box Folder.

DropLink

DropLink – interestingly hosted on Dropbox – is a simple app that allows you to sync up any file or folder on your Mac with Dropbox. Pretty simple. Just give it a try and if you don’t want popups, consider giving the creator a donation.

MacDropAny

MacDropAny is like DropLink, but it syncs up any folder or file on your Mac with Dropbox, Box, Google Drive, iCloudrive, and SkyDrive. So you are pretty covered when it comes to cloud services.

TextExpander

You saw this one coming. TextExpander is one of the coolest productivity tools around, and since version four, TextExpander supports Dropbox sync. So, go on, take your snippets to the cloud.

1Password

Another favorite app of ours is 1Password. 1Password supports over-the-air sync as well as Dropbox sync and backup. So if you want to access all your passwords from all your devices you can’t go wrong with 1Password – and even then, you can’t go wrong with 1Password.

Notesdeck

Available for Mac, iPhone and iPad, Notesdeck is a nice app that gives you access to your Simplenote, Evernote, and Dropbox files easily. Of course, Dropbox isn’t a note-taking service, but you know it can be used as one, so have at it, if you aren’t already.

CloudJot

This is another clean and useful note-taking app that allows you to take notes easily and sync them up with Dropbox. It will always hangout on the side of your screen, so getting to it is extremely easy.

Servus

Servus is a menubar icon that’ll create a branded download page to whatever you drop into it. It will zip the folder or file up for you, too, and copy the link to your clipboard. Talk about a nice way to present your downloads, right?

Notational

Notational is a cool app that stores and retrieves notes from all your other note-taking apps like Simplenote, Dropbox, PlainText, Elements, iA Writer, and other iOS applications. It has many nice features, so give it a try.

Scrivener 2

Scrivener 2 (for OS X and Windows) is an application that gives writers of complex documents the ability to structure and compose their pieces with maximum control. Scrivener 2 can sync up to Simplenote, Index Card and apps that use Dropbox like Notebooks, and PlainText.

Dropln

Fast sharing, smart filtering, and file previewing is what Dropln is all about. If you are looking to streamline the way you use Dropbox, you might want to try this one out.

GrabBox

Want to share screenshots easily? Check out GrabBox. It reacts to the screenshots you take and atomically copies them to your Dropbox Public folder as it gives your clipboard the URL. You are now set.

Box

Geared towards that enterprising young go-getter, Box is probably not your first choice when it comes to cloud services, – you know, with names like Google, Apple, Amazon and Microsoft backing the other options – but it is certainly a good structured service. Not many apps for it on the Mac, though.

Box Sync for Mac

If you are not very familiar with Box, we added this one app because honestly, it is sort of hard to spot. This app is actually Box’s first party app that acts pretty much like Dropbox’s or Google Drive’s official app. It puts a folder on your Mac that you can drag stuff to and upload to your Box account.

Box SimpleShare

SimpleShare is another of Box’s official apps that will allow you to take screenshots and place them in your Box account for easy sharing. You can also use this app to add files to Box and share them with ease.

Google Drive

Odd that Google came to the party a bit late, right? Either way, Google Drive is solid, but honestly, it is better used with web apps than desktop apps. The official Google Drive app isn’t great either. But, hey, here are some cool apps that allow you to use your Google Drive service.

Archy

Coined as the “must-have Mac app for Google Drive,” Archy is by all means the better way to use Google Drive natively on your Mac. With a sweet and “familiar” design, Archy should come in handy to everyone who uses Google Drive and doesn’t want to use Google web apps as often.

Insync

Insync is another great way to use Google Drive on your Mac. This small, yet powerful app is great for sharing, editing, and using multiple Google accounts. It is available for Mac, Windows, Linux, and mobile devices, so you are more than set to go. At least until Google gets their stuff together and brings forward a better version of Google Drive – just saying.

Skydrive, Amazon Cloud Drive, and so on.

Found

I couldn’t find an Amazon Cloud Drive app for the life of me, so if this one doesn’t support it, it is probably not a horrible thing; however, if you are looking for something that supports Dropbox, Evernote, SkyDrive, and Google Drive, here you go. Found scored an eight out of 10 from us, so give it a try.

BoxCryptor

One more app that supports SkyDrive, but no mention of Amazon Cloud Drive. Maybe they just think Amazon Cloud Drive is too big of a name. In any case, BoxCryptor is an encrypting app that will secure your files as their go up to the cloud. Magic. Yes, please. You can also use this app with Dropbox, Google Drive, and possibly other cloud services.

Conclusion

As you can see, there are many applications that support (or exist thanks to) cloud services. There are many apps, web apps, and plugins out there that are unaccounted for in this roundup, so if you have a cool app that supports cloud services, let us know in the comments below!

It’s not every day a good game comes to the Mac. In fact, there aren’t many who consider the platform to be one for games. Thanks to the Mac App Store, some quality titles are slowly making their way to Apple’s computers. One consistent publisher has been LEGO with its editions of popular fiction — Star Wars, Pirates of the Caribbean, Harry Potter, etc. This week LEGO released yet another beautifully-built game, this time for fans of The Lord of the Rings. But the game releases for the week don’t end there. Let’s take a quick look at the top two games that just arrived on the Mac App Store.

LEGO The Lord of the Rings

Proof that Golum can get creepier.

First we have LEGO’s recreation of The Lord of the Rings in a brick-ified video game. It’s brought to you by Feral Interactive, developer of popular titles like BioShock and Mini Ninjas. This game will take you through J.R.R. Tolkien’s trilogy in a comical and unique way that you’d expect from LEGO. There are over 80 playable characters in the game, along with the three great weapons of the novels: Narsil, Aragorn’s sword; Gimli’s axe; and Legolas’ amazing bow. You can play with your friends, too, using the cooperative mode included with the game. Have them help you out with quests, recover buried treasure, and wreak havoc on the Orcs. (You will want to have an extra keyboard or two on hand for this.)

At $29.99, the 6.25 GB download is a steal. The whimsical storytelling should keep your attention and there are a good many hours of quality gameplay available. Just so things don’t get boring, put on the One Ring for added drama.

Another World – 20th Anniversary

“Die, fool!”

It’s one of the science fiction classics. The critically acclaimed French video game was known as “Out of This World” in the United States back in the early 1990s. Those names may sound boisterous now, but this title is one of the greats.

Another World is a platforming game, much like Super Mario Bros. The story revolves around a scientist, Lester, who mistakenly sends himself to a different planet that is filled with peril around every corner. He must confront the dangers of this new world, and hopefully get back home. The graphics may not look like much, but for its time the game was a masterpiece. With both cinematic and graphic appeal, the game excelled into a critically acclaimed classic.

Now, Another World is over 20 years old, and the developer has ported it to Android, iOS, and Mac, improving the graphics but keeping the best elements of the game in tact. In the 20th anniversary edition, all the old gameplay can be relived at a much higher resolution. It is now available on the Mac App Store for a grand total of $9.99.

SimCity Launches Sometime This Spring

Don’t forget that Electronic Arts’ SimCity will be coming to the Mac sometime this spring. The PC version releases on the 5th of March, but the Mac version is delayed. The developer wants to ensure that the Mac experience is as good as, if not better than, the PC one. With that said, EA will be releasing the game to Mac when its fully native version is available. It should be released sometime this spring, according to the official FAQ, which also notes that the Mac edition will only be available as a digital download. Though there is no mention of the Mac App Store, the title should be making its way to Apple’s marketplace.

Thanks for reading this brief update on the Mac’s gaming scene. Join us in the future for more just like it, and see you around town!

Working on your computer can be of huge help or hugely distracting. It’s very easy to get anything done on it, but it becomes less likely that you’ll get things out of the way when you’ve got a world of entertaining distractions one click away.

Some people might be mentally strong enough to keep interferences out of their way on their own, but for the rest of us weaklings, it might be a little harder to keep procrastinations out, and that’s why productivity methods like Pomodoro are so popular. We’ve already looked at one Pomodoro technique app this week – Tadam – which is a nice but minimal app, so let’s look at another app that’s more full-featured. It’s called Tomatoes.

The Pomodoro Technique

Pomodoro Technique

The Pomodoro Technique is a productivity discipline that works by making you divide your tasks into small time units of 25 minutes, taking a 5 minute break in between them. It was invented by Francesco Cirillo in the 1980′s and it has gotten a pretty big following since then.

You start by listing every task you want to complete, and setting a number of “pomodoros” (time units of 25 minutes) that you expect the task to take until it’s completed. You then move through your pomodoros, giving your full attention to the task at hand for each pomodoro. If you get interrupted by outside evils or your own demons, you should mark it in your Pomodoro sheet. Oh, and speaking of that “Pomodoro Sheet”…

Tomatoes

Tomatoes

Tomatoes is a beautiful and simple Mac app that helps you get rid of your physical time sheet and kitchen timer, integrating it all in one easy to use interface right there in your computer. Its entirely based on the Pomodoro Technique, so everything’s set to work with the method from the get go.

The app has a main window where you can see your list of tasks, timer, and where you can interact with everything that you might need: setting new tasks, completing older ones, marking interruptions, etc. Then there’s the menu bar component, where your current timer will always be shown ticking, reminding you where your attention should be.

Features

Menu Bar Tomatoes

At the center of Tomatoes’ main window is, of course, the timer, but below it are all the things you need to set your tasks up. The app supports everything that you could need using the Pomodoro Technique: an inventory which works as the trunk for your active tasks, a to-do section for tasks that should be completed later, and an archive for storing completed Pomodoros.

The menu bar component not only works for displaying your current timer, though. It can also help you start and reset your timers, as well as mark interruptions without going into the app.

Completing Pomodoros

Completing Tasks

Starting a new task is as easy as clicking the “+” tab, typing its title, and selecting the number of expected units it should take to complete. It will then be added to your inventory, where you can move it to the to-do category, or set it as the active task that you’ll be working on.

Once you’ve got an active task, when you hit the “On” tab your timer will start running, and when the time’s up, it will automatically notify you by playing a bell sound and bouncing the app’s icon in the dock. Take your break, come back, and hit the “On” button again.

As your Pomodoros get completed, they will appear under your task as little full circles. An empty circle represents an expected unit that has not yet been completed. You can mark a task as completed even if your expected units have not all been fullfilled, though, so you don’t have to worry too much about calculating precisely how much time a task will take.

Goodies

Goodies

There’s a few things where Tomatoes makes itself a lot more useful than your boring plain timesheet and your kitchen timer. Under the settings you can customize a bunch of things, including automatically running a timer for your breaks (so that you don’t go over them accidentally), marking a “long break” timer which will get activated once every 4 pomodoros, and tweaking the time of your units and breaks.

You can also set a “timer sound” that will always be heard, ticking away. This is recommended by the Pomodoro Technique, as that ticking sound will keep you reminded of what you should be doing. Personally, I can’t tolerate it, but I understand how some might find it useful for keeping them concentrated.

Stats

A new update recently came out with a new stats feature, so that you can see a relation of the tasks and units that you’ve completed per day, but I couldn’t ever open the stats without the app crashing on me.

Competition

As pointed out by our own Pedro Lobo in a recent review of yet another Pomodoro Technique app, these kind of apps are pretty abundant for the Mac. However, not all of them are as useful as the rest. Some of the most popular choices are Pomodorable and My Little Pomodoro, but for some strange reason they’ve been missing from the App Store for a while, and there’s no other way to get them.

This leaves Tomatoes as a pretty good alternative to either of them. It’s certainly very pretty and easy to understand, as well as useful for working with the Pomodoro technique even if you don’t know a lot about it. It may not be as simple as Tadam (which we recently reviewed), but if you are obsessed with getting deeper into your tasks, and keeping a concise list of everything you’ve done, then Tomatoes will suit you better.

Conclusion

With most of its competitors out of the way for the time being, Tomatoes presents itself as a very powerful Pomodoro Technique utility. It has every single feature that you might need if you stick to the rules of the method, and it even automates everything for you so that work and break timers flow without you having to interact with the app. This break timer is immensely useful so as to avoid distractions that run for longer than they should.

Tomatoes is a very complete, full-featured Pomodoro app, but will you use it? Do you subscribe to these kind of productivity disciplines, or how do you get things done? Let us know what you think in the comments below.

There are a lot of apps to make your Mac faster. At least, ones that claim to do so. Most of them are either a waste of time, hard to use, or completely unnecessary. The best “cleaning” app I’ve ever come across is CleanMyMac, but it has its area of expertise, and some areas are out of its reach.

Whereas cleaning is typically in one arena and tweaking is in another, some apps are hybrids, apps that take on both sides of the fixing-your-Mac equation. 128bit Technologies’ MacOptimizer is just that.

Quickly Clean Caches and Other Temporary Files

Scrub the caches with a few clicks.

MacOptimizer’s headlining feature is quick cleanup. When it comes to purging your cache, it gets the job done is a quick and quiet fashion. In three clicks, one of your three system cache folders can be cleaned, or all of them at once. The same goes for your font cache, which may also include Adobe and Microsoft elements.

Let me just say this about freeing the cache: it’s fast. I’ve never had over a gigabyte of temporary files removed from my system so fast. I was glad to see that I could continue my work within seconds of starting the cleanup process.

The app’s approach to optimizing things is, above all, user friendly. In the Free Cache tab lie two short paragraphs of documentation telling the user why they need the feature, how it works, and how to use it. Typically, that’s something the user has to infer or learn by a tedious tutorial’s means. And for cleaning the caches, MacOptimizer even warns that there’s no reason to run this cleanup too often. It’s nice to see that there’s another, less distracting approach to providing people with a way of understanding an app’s functions, rather than the scare tactics employed by most cleaning and optimization apps.

A Pleasant User Interface

The main screen is shiny.

When it comes to the looks department, MacOptimizer has it covered. It’s not skeumorphic, but rather a subtle light-and-dark theme that blends in nicely with OS X. The main screen has a pixelated speech bubble colored in orange and black. Its glowing “MacOptimizer” text is very attractive as well. Behind it all is a slightly illuminated grey noise pattern that allows for all the contrast you need in the design. Everything just flows well.

Elsewhere, you can find handcrafted gear and wrench icons with more glowing text in the function descriptions. The whole app isn’t as minimal as you’d expect for something designed like this, but it works so nicely that it’s hard to find a problem with the beautiful combinations the designer drew up.

Bring Back the Library Folder in Lion and Show Hidden Files with One Click

I, for one, was disappointed when I heard that easy access OS X’s user library folder had been removed in the 10.8 Lion. Sure, it’s recoverable with a quick hold of the Option/Alt button while in Finder’s Go menu, but what about a permanent reappearance? That’s just a click away, thanks to MacOptimizer’s System Tweaks.

Give your system a more advanced touch.

The most useful thing I found in this app was the “Open With” cleanup, which can be found in the Optimization tab. It finally removed all those other versions of VLC and similar apps – a task that can be accomplished in the terminal, but is handy to have in one click.

In this section of the app, you can set OS X to automatically empty the trash once its contents reach a certain number of megabytes in size. Or you could show hidden files, automatically clean Safari’s history after a month, and even hide the desktop. It’s a brilliant little collection of tools. Still, if you wanted to do any of this, it’s possible with Terminal or even a free tool like Fredrik Wiker’s Tweak Apps for OS X.

Organize Your Desktop with the Genie

Keep things looking nice so you can see your wallpaper.

While the tweaks tab lets you completely hide your desktop, there are those of us who prefer to keep it alive. Sometimes things just get a bit cluttered. For that, this app has a clever solution. Instead of manually reorganizing your whole desktop one file — out of, say, 100 — at a time, run the Desktop Genie. This feature pretty much pulls all your files into a single folder, with sub-folders if requested, and can organize them by date, type, or just move everything to the Desktop Genie folder.

This feature may not seem helpful to some people, but when you have a very full desktop it may prove to be a very useful one-click cleanup.

Do You Need It?

MacOptimizer is a cool app with a lot of useful features. That doesn’t mean you can’t find them in other apps, right? Sure, there are quite a few free alternatives out there — Onyx, to name one. However, most of them are bulky and complicated, plus their user interface is no match for MacOptimizer’s.

Optimization, the most advanced functions.

There’s no plausible reason for every Mac user to buy this app. If you’re one of those people who likes to keep his caches free, speed up your Mail.app, remove unnecessary languages, and clean unused RAM, this may be the perfect one-stop solution. But for the average Mac user, it doesn’t even seem remotely worth a download. This isn’t a exactly niche app, it’s just a good way to keep your Mac sparkling. CleanMyMac does that well too, as does Onyx. In the end, it’s each to his own — pick your set of features.

One thing I can say about MacOptimizer is that it’s solid and didn’t do a bit of harm to my Mac. That’s something the developer stressed when I spoke with them: it doesn’t touch any sensitive files and only removes the necessary items when cleaning.

If you were a SkyDrive user before April of last year, you probably got that free 25 GB storage bump, or if you’re an Office 365 user, you may have a chunk of storage sitting around. Even with a new SkyDrive account today, you’ll get 7 GB of free storage. Pony up $10, and you’ve got yourself an additional 20 GB for the year.

In fact, with a whopping 100 GB only running you $50 per year, SkyDrive is probably one of the least expensive cloud storage and file synchronization services out there. What do you get for your money, though? We’ll take a look at the SkyDrive app for Mac and see how well it compares to the competition.

Getting Started

You’ll first need a SkyDrive account, and with that comes 7 GB of storage. Don’t worry if you haven’t signed up, yet. We’ll wait, just let us know when you’re done. All set? Great! Now that you’ve got your account, the SkyDrive installation app is going to create a SkyDrive folder somewhere on your computer. You tell it where, but remember if you move it later, SkyDrive’s going to get bummed out and stop working, and you’ll just have to re-link everything.

SkyDrive will have thrown in a few catch-all subfolders during account creation, and when you set up your SkyDrive folder on your hard disk, it’s going to ask whether you want to sync those. If you want, SkyDrive can sync only the folders you designate, or it can sync everything within your SkyDrive folder. If you haven’t used your SkyDrive account yet, though, you won’t have any individual folders to sync up, beyond the empty defaults, but you can access these options later in the Choose Folders tab of your preferences.

Choose what to sync to SkyDrive.

There’s a catch, though, if you choose to sync everything. SkyDrive isn’t going to backup all the files on your computer. First of all, you can only upgrade to a max of 100 GB of storage, and most of us are living larger than that in 2013. Secondly, SkyDrive only syncs what’s in your SkyDrive folder, so unless you intend to move your User folder into your SkyDrive folder (Pro Tip: Don’t!) you’re never going to get everything in that one place.

SkyDrive isn’t intended to be a place to backup your files, anyway, or at least not all of them. Think of it more like Dropbox. It will store some, but not all of your files, and you can access them via an attractive and intuitive web interface. If you want to share your files, SkyDrive’s not bad at that, either, but it doesn’t make it easy in the Mac app.

Sharing with SkyDrive

Anything you pop into your Public folder is, well, public, and you don’t have to do anything else to files in your Public folder to make them freely available to the internet at large. You do need a URL, though, and the only way to get that is to head over to the web app. There’s no handy uploader that outputs a shortened URL here. You’re on your own.

SkyDrive creates a folder on your hard disk, and that’s how you’ll interact with the service on your Mac.

Once at the web app, though, it’s actually pretty simple to get the URL for a file or folder. What you see in the address bar is what you use. No clicking around for the public or sharing URL. SkyDrive will shorten your URLs in the web app if you need it to, and that take a few more clicks to get to, but it’s there. The ability to share files is great, and the ease with which I can get a URL is pretty nice, too, but I’m a big fan of sharing directly from the desktop app, and I wish that had been included here.

Pros and Cons

SkyDrive isn’t going to win any races. It seems to run a bit slower than both Dropbox and Google Drive. If you’ve sprung for the full 100 GB and are trying to fill that up over a weekend, you’re not going to have a good time. That’s a shame, too, because that’s a lot of inexpensive space. I don’t think Microsoft really intends you to upload at a gallop like that, though, since SkyDrive was included in the reboot of their online services last year and was since tied so closely to its Office productivity suite, particularly Office 365. SkyDrive is a place to hold documents and their assets, not your anime collection or all of your 1990s ska albums.

The SkyDrive app itself is very unobtrusive, and will mostly just hang out in your menu bar, if you like.

Unfortunately, if you’re not a Microsoft Office user, your documents don’t do anything in the SkyDrive webapp except sit there. This isn’t Google Drive, where even if I can’t edit an incompatible document, I can usually at least view it. Competitor Dropbox will allow you to preview documents, images, and media files. Even the widely panned Bitcasa makes a not-so-bad cloud music player in a pinch. With the exception of its pretty decent image viewer, all SkyDrive will do is upload your files and then download them again. If you’ve got Office 365 or one of the other newer Office products, the SkyDrive service itself, which includes cloud autosaves, seems like it’s a pretty sweet deal, but otherwise it’s lacking.

Final Thoughts

So, if you’re trying to decide if you should use SkyDrive, you’ll have to do your own math, adding up all the positives and negatives. The SkyDrive Mac client is a little on the slow side, but it’s certainly not the slowest. You can’t pause syncing without exiting the SkyDrive application, but SkyDrive will preserve the completed files of a partial upload. It’s definitely simple to get things into your SkyDrive – just drag and drop them into your SkyDrive folder – but it isn’t easy to share files directly from the Mac app. The web app looks nice and works well, but it doesn’t do a whole lot.

The SkyDrive service has been around in one form or another for years, so if you’re already a loyal user, there’s no reason not to download the accompanying Mac client. Even if you’re not a SkyDrive enthusiast, I wouldn’t wave you off entirely. While SkyDrive probably won’t replace whatever cloud storage you’re already using, it can certainly work as a nice complement to the online storage and backup system you’ve already got.

In the past few years, plain text has come back as a popular format. Instead of using full-featured word processing and notes apps, many of us are sticking to plain text for everything. It’s simple, works everywhere, and an increasing number of new apps are using plain text instead of their own proprietary formats, which makes it even easier to keep your data in sync.

From note-taking to task managers, most of the writing in our lives can be easily formatted from plain text files, with a system of simple syntax instead of proprietary formatting. TaskAgent for Dropbox enters the plain-text app market as a new way to manage your tasks in plain text.

Where does it fit?

Plain text files can be created anywhere, even in the built-in TextEdit app that comes free with your Mac. As long as you create a system for yourself, nothing stops you from creating lists in plain text, just like you can write notes in plain text. You don’t have to have a special app for using plain text for your todos, but one can be a nice addition to your workflow. TaskAgent – and other similar apps – keep the formatting and syncing out of the way, though, so you can really just focus on your tasks and nothing else, while the app keeps your plain-text to-do lists formatted and in-sync.

If you need a better view of your tasks, TaskAgent supports Fullscreen mode.

The first time you open TaskAgent, you’re introduced to all its features in a default list. It’s straightforward.

There are only three buttons in the app: create a new list, a new task and force synchronization with Dropbox if you have linked it. Every task comes with a checkbox for whenever you’re done with it and you can easily edit or delete your entries. Comments may be included to each task.

What else can be done?

Tasks can be easily included within a list as the New Task window won’t disappear as you add an item by hitting Return. As you right-click on a task, you may copy or move it to a different list. Copying will include the application-specific syntax and the latter is the only way to move your items to a different list as it seems unable to drag and drop tasks.

Don’t forget to record a shortcut to quickly add new tasks.

You may archive your lists instead of deleting them from your sidebar. This will keep the text files in your Dropbox folder, but not in your TaskAgent sidebar. You can restore archived lists by navigating in the Archived Lists window.

In the Preferences, you can apply different behaviors to your tasks as they’re created, as moving done tasks to the bottom and adding completion time as you check them off. You may also attach date and time of creation in the comments of the notes you create. If you choose to link your Dropbox account, you can control its details and synchronization intervals in this menu as well.

Learning the Syntax

What makes these applications accessible is an easy to grasp language. TaskAgent itself won’t require you to learn its parlance, but if you intent to expand its portability, then you won’t have much trouble. A hyphen preceding a sentence will create a task. A ‘x’ can be used instead to declare a task as done. Type your task normally and if you have any comment to add, write them inside parenthesis. If you have any trouble, check the app’s Help.

This knowledge doesn’t come in handy only when you’re at foreign destinations, away from your regular tools. You can add tasks to the plain-text file, even when you’re not using TaskAgent itself. It is also interesting to automatize your workflow. Applications like Launchbar allow you to quickly append text into a file readable by TaskAgent. Then, of course, the access given by the Dropbox integration permits you to modify your lists via the triggers available on IFTTT.

A recipe to send my App.net posts to my TaskAgent list.

As aforementioned, in a world where portability has become essential, exportability has become an issue that plain text easily solves. By using a simple format you’re allowed to send your lists to your work mates or store them anywhere. You’re never trapped by your own tools. If you prefer to keep it simple, there’s also a version of TaskAgent for iOS.

Where it falls short?

Probably the main concern towards TaskAgent are its sorting options. Lists can only be organized alphabetically and it lacks viable sharing options to manage them, as we’re talking about plain text, it should be easy to include the content of a list in the body of an email or even tweet your tasks. A checkbox for each list in case you plan to use them as projects would also be a welcome feature.

In the age of iCloud, it is strange to find an application that doesn’t give you the option to store your files in the Apple echosystem, however, that is understandable as iCloud doesn’t support much of the accessibility that plain text provides.

What are the other options?

If plain text doesn’t fit you and your need of list management requires a better looking application, Clear by Realmac Software might work better for you. It also features a way to create a priority among your items, a feature missed at the moment in TaskAgent. If you’re looking for a more robust method to deal with your lists, you should take a look at TaskPaper, by Hog Bay Software, which lets you attach tags, set a priority for your items and customize its looks.

Conclusion

As apps that deal with plain text become more common, TaskAgent joins the crowd by offering a simple function: it manages your lists. Thanks to its easy syntax and Dropbox storage, you can easily edit your tasks from many different tools. But even keeping enough features to handle your lists effortlessly, it still lacks some essential traits to deliver a better experience overall.

News started on paper, then it went to the television, and now we have digital print. People still read the daily local newspaper and some even request a print edition of The New York Times or Wall Street Journal. It seems to be only a matter of time until print newspapers are completely discontinued. When it is, we’ll all be reading digital articles. So you may as well start finding a nice RSS reader, because it gets awfully tiring visiting all your favorite publications when you wake up.

I was looking around in the news section of the Mac App Store the other day and stumbled upon Leaf, a straightforward approach to news reading. After a bit of usage, I’ve gathered my thoughts on the app.

The Simple Interface

A nice user-friendly interface.

Leaf is beautiful a beautiful little app, though colored more like its namesake in fall than the green you might think of by default. Leaf isn’t designed with skeumorphic or flat beauty, either. Instead, the designer has taken an OS X approach, keeping the app at bare minimum with a nice red bar at the top and round icons for the featured images of articles. I really like the way this design takes no focus away from skimming the titles of what you want to read.

Instead of cluttering your whole feed with author info and timestamps, Leaf puts them both in a nice light font color that draws no attention away from the bold title and featured image. It’s nice to see that the app isn’t trying to be a lot of things, but is instead focusing on one: being a news feed.

The Reading, Searching, and Starring

A short read in a tidy box.

From this “news feed” you can click an article and read it in a nice pop-out. Instead of moving to a separate window or transitioning to a new screen in the current one, Leaf’s reading pane is a lot like the small info boxes scattered throughout OS X, like the one you’ll find in the profile picture selection screen of the Contacts app. It’s a sort of micro-browser that Apple started using in Lion. The developers of Leaf have taken it a little further to provide minimal reading experience. When you click an article, the text pops up in a scrollable window to the right. All links will open in your browser. This is a great way to quickly go through the news without having to read each full article.

Leaf uses Notification Center to alert you when news has been posted. The tri-tone sound may be annoying, so just disable sound effects for the app in Notification Center’s System Preferences if you don’t like it.

Searching for news on that PlayStation announcement.

So say you read something earlier that you didn’t think about too much then, but later think of it and want to find it again. If you don’t remember what it was, how can you find it? Simply use the search function at the top of the app. It’ll go through everything in the past few months and hopefully you can find what you’re looking for.

Starring an article for reading later.

To avoid losing an interesting post, remember to star it either by hovering over the featured image and clicking, or by right clicking the text and selecting Star Article. You can easily access these by clicking the red star button in the top left of the screen.

The Settings

Since this is an app of minimalism and simplicity, there aren’t many options to name. The ones that are available include refresh intervals, the max number of items per feed and of start items, and even a way to automatically open new articles when they arrive. Sadly, there are no font size adjustments or different sound effect choices for notifications — like maybe the bird sound from Tiny Wings. It’s limited, but that doesn’t mean there’s not more to come.

The App

It’s a three-star app. (Out of five.)

As a simple reading app, Leaf is great. However, my one major complaint — and I’m sure many others will agree with this — is that it doesn’t support save-for-later services. If you wanted to, say, send that article to Instapaper for a peruse when you get home from work, you’ll have to open it in the browser and go from there. There’s also no support for sharing, or even copying a link to an article. The developer definitely took a minimal approach to things, and sadly, it hurts the app in some areas which it needs to be strong.

I really like the app for use in my daily reading, but what do you think? Let us know in the comments.

Microsoft Office is the one set of software you can almost guarantee will be on any computer you touch. It’s been out for the Mac since 1985, 5 years before it was on PCs (as hard as that seems to believe today), and has dominated the word processing, spreadsheet, and presentation market long enough that’s it’s the de facto standard.

There is competition, most notably on Macs from Apple’s own iWork, but also from open-source office apps. OpenOffice.org, a Sun Microsystem project, was the most prominent free office competitor for years, but was then forked into LibreOffice after Oracle bought out Sun. LibreOffice 4.0 was recently released, with native versions for OS X as well as Linux and Windows, so it seemed time to take it for a spin.

The new site is more polished than the suite itself.

LibreOffice 4′s website looks far more promising design-wise than anything we’ve ever seen from OpenOffice or LibreOffice in the past. It’s also now a native Mac app, where OpenOffice for years wasn’t directly available for OS X, and required X11. There were – and still are – other options, such as the OpenOffice fork NeoOffice, but we wanted to see how LibreOffice 4 held up on OS X today. It’s easy to try out; just download the DMG and install it as normal. After that, though, it might take some time to get used to the way LibreOffice works.

A Suite That Acts Like One App

All of the apps in the suite are really just one app

Rather than working as separate apps, everything in LibreOffice works as one app. You’ll launch the LibreOffice app, then select what type of document you want to create: a text document, spreadsheet, presentation, and more. Or, you can open a file on your computer. LibreOffice supports most standard document and spreadsheet formats, including all Microsoft Office files, but it doesn’t support Apple’s iWork app file formats.

Each of the “apps” in LibreOffice has its own name: Writer, Calc, Impress, and so on. But even when you’ve launched one of the apps to make a new file or edit an existing document, LibreOffice still acts like one application, so you’ll need to press CMD+` to switch between, say, a document and a spreadsheet open in LibreOffice, rather than CMD+tab as you would to switch between different programs.

Stark, basic, but usable.

Then, LibreOffice’s interface is dated at best, with an odd mix of old and new UI styles and a lack of support for most OS X features. It does support pinch-to-zoom, but precious few other OS X features are supported. You can’t three-finger-tap to check the dictionary for a word; for some reason, if you do this in LibreOffice, it’ll look up the definition of the first word in the paragraph, no matter which word you select. It uses its own spellcheck, and doesn’t support any of the text tools you’ll be used to in the right-click menu on most OS X apps. Pressing CMD+t will open its own Styles and Formatting window, rather than giving you access to OS X font tools. It does support most keyboard shortcuts, keeping them the same as in Microsoft Office, but otherwise, it’s one of the apps that feels the very least integrated into OS X.

In an odd addition that’s perhaps a nod to Office 2013′s themes, LibreOffice supports Firefox Personas, the picture-based themes for the Firefox browser (which oddly doesn’t feel very integrated in OS X, either). You can have LibreOffice use your current Firefox Personas, or enter the address for a Persona to have LibreOffice download and use it directly. The theme you choose will be used across all of your LibreOffice apps, and if it’s too colorful, it’ll make it hard to see all the toolbar buttons. Looks like it might be time for someone to make some more subdued Personas to work better in an office app.

You’ll want to add a Persona, though you might want to make one that feels nicer

In Real Life

LibreOffice does work decently well, if you can get around its many quirks and oddities. The Writer app imports Word files very well in most cases, as long as they don’t include images, and you’ll likely have a fairly easy time collaborating with Word users from Writer. Writing new documents isn’t too bad of an experience, if the differences in the way it handles text versus other OS X apps doesn’t bug you too bad. But then, Microsoft Word isn’t the most integrated – it uses it’s own dictionary, for instance – so it’s not that different. Page layouts in Writer definitely feel lacking, but with work, you can get passable results.

Word interoperability is quite good.

Calc, then, is also fairly good for a spreadsheet, and feels less different than the other apps from what you’d expect. It has a decent library of functions – comparable to Numbers, and feels much like using an older version of Excel. It’s not anywhere near as polished as Numbers, or as advanced as Excel, but then, for what most of us use spreadsheets for, it’d definitely suffice.

Spreadsheats work better, and might be the best app of the set.

If you’re doing presentations from your Mac, though, you should definitely just pick up a copy of Keynote. Really. LibreOffice’s Impress – the suite’s PowerPoint competitor – is easily the weakest offering in the suite. Just like the rest of the suite, it’d remind you more of Office 2000/2001 than a modern version of Office, and for anything aiming at visual design, that’s a definite problem, far more than it is for a spreadsheet app. But Impress has added some more modern, Keynote-style transitions that broke so bad when trying to test them, I had to restart the program to get the Impress slide editor working again. For many purposes, the Writer and Calc app would suffice, just like Google Docs works quite good for most writing and spreadsheet purposes. But for presentations, Keynote and PowerPoint really are still the only game in town.

Don’t even try using presentation transitions. Please.

That’s actually not all there is to LibreOffice. The suite also contains a drawing tool, which really is not much different than using Impress (or PowerPoint or Keynote) to create, say, a diagram rather than a presentation, though one pro is that it can – to a certain degree – import and work with Visio files. There’s also a basic database tool, and a few other bits and pieces you might be interested in exploring.

Conclusion

LibreOffice is impressive for a free suite; after all, even iWork runs $20 per app, making the whole suite cost $60. Microsoft Office is even more expensive, with the recent pricing changes coming in at $140 per computer, or $99/year for up to 5 computers.

But today, LibreOffice isn’t the only free option in town. There’s also online solutions: Google Docs and Microsoft’s own Office Web Apps on Skydrive are surprisingly capable tools for most office type work, and they’re 100% free. The only catch is that you’ll need to be online to use them. But if you only need to, say, occasionally edit Microsoft Office files that others send you, then Office Web Apps likely is plenty for your needs, and it’s free.

There’s other free options, too. Preview gives you quite good options for previewing most Office files and doing basic edits, while TextEdit could compete for a simple word processor, complete with spell check, rich formatting, and options to save in Microsoft Office formats. NeoOffice, the venerable fork of OpenOffice for the Mac, is also still around, and its latest updates include retina display, full-screen, versions, and services support, as well as Apple Core Text support to make font rendering and text editing feel the same as it does in other OS X apps. It’s still stuck with many of OpenOffice/LibreOffice’s problems and oddities, but if you’re wanting to use a free office suite on your Mac, it’s likely the better option just because it’s going to feel much more integrated than LibreOffice does today.

If you read Mac.AppStorm yesterday, you likely saw Pedro’s review of Tadam, a new minimal tool staying productive with the Pomodoro method. It’s a simple little menubar app that helps you time your work and breaks, elegantly.

Tadam is a rather cheap utility, at just $3.99, but we’ve got something better: 5 free copies of Tadam to giveaway to our readers. Just enter a comment below and let us know what other Pomodoro method apps, if any, that you’ve used before. You can also share the giveaway on Twitter, Facebook, or App.net, and share the link to your post in a new comment for an extra entry.

Hurry and get your entry in; we’ll close the giveaway a week from now on Wednesday, February 27th.

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

Adium has long been a favorite for instant messaging on the Mac. With support for more services than you can shake a stick at and plugins to take care of the rest, Adium pretty much does it all. More than that, though, Adium is infinitely customizable. With a vast library of crowd-sourced Xtras, you can pretty much make Adium look and sound however you want.

We’ll take a look at some of the best Adium Xtras – not just all the awesome Dock and menu bar icons, but also the plugins and AppleScripts that can really boost Adium’s functionality.

Loving the Duck

Every user who downloads Adium can ultimately customize it to be whatever they’d like. We’re going to create five separate Adium “builds,” with different uses and even personalities in mind. While these are a great start, they by no means close the book on Adium Xtras. Mix and match the ones you like, and if you find something that strikes your fancy, try searching the Adium Xtras site for more. There really is no end to what you can do in Adium with a little perseverance.

Final Thoughts

Adium is great as is, but what makes this instant messaging app so special, besides support for tons of services, is that you can make it your own. Beyond just colors and icons, AppleScripts and plugins can improve Adium’s functionality. Do you have any favorite Adium Xtras to share? Let us know in the comments, and don’t forget links!

Sometimes it feels like a day doesn’t go by without the release of another app in the over-saturated to-do list category. I’ve used Things to organize my life since it was first introduced, and I’ve stuck with it through the years, even despite the developers’ embarrassingly long delay for proper cloud syncing. My loyalty to Things has always been shaky, which has kept me experimenting with it’s many competitors.

I recently tried out Cheddar to see if it could replace Things as my go-to organization tool on my Mac. Here’s how that worked out.

Getting Started

Unlike its powerhouse competitors like OmniFocus and Things, Cheddar was born as a web and iPhone app, and has since rolled out a Mac client. Consequently, Cheddar requires that you create an account to use it.

You’ll need to create an account before using Cheddar.

Fortunately, you won’t have to enter any information beyond your account name, an email address, and a password. Once you have your account set up, it will automatically sync all of your activity across the web-version, your Mac, and your iDevice (should you decide to go that route).

Cheddar gives you a quick list of tasks in place of a tutorial slide.

Rather than have any complex tutorial slides, you’ll be presented with a few pointers about how to use Cheddar in the form of individual to-dos. They are easy to understand, but are inherently less-effective than a tutorial that allows you to view again.

Interface

The window is a minimalism-enthusiast’s dream: A side column that shows your lists and the main column shows tasks. That’s it. To get started, you’ll want to create a new list. There is a lot of room for you to decide how you want to use Cheddar, and lists are a fundamental part of that decision. As it doesn’t give you pre-defined groupings like “Today” or “Next” or “Scheduled” or even a pre-sorting inbox, Cheddar starts to resemble the built-in Mountain Lion Reminders app.

The window is clean and simple, but also not very intuitive if you haven’t learned the shortcuts yet.

It didn’t take long to run into a roadblock as I tested Cheddar, as I couldn’t actually find anywhere in the window that would allow me to create a list. This “problem” actually just reveals how the interface has been designed to heavily depend on shortcuts. While this is undoubtedly a selling point for power-users, it will result in some head-scratching for beginners. Shortcuts are nice but it still would have been better to have an icon that would allow the creation of a list.

There’s no buttons in the main window, so you’ll need to either right-click or head up to the menubar for most functions.

Across the top of the main window is a text-entry bar that asks “What do you have to do?” Type in your to-do and it hit the enter key. I discovered that if you don’t have any lists created, nothing happens when you create an item. It seems like an odd oversight to not at least have a prompt alert you to that fact, or allow you to create one on the fly.

Checking off an item grays it, but you’ll have to right click to remove it or use a shortcut.

Once you have completed an item, checking its box will gray it out. If you want to completely clear your checked items, you have the option to “archive” them. I put “archive” in quotes because the developers seem to have some completely different definition of that word than the rest of us. I assumed it meant that those checked off items went into some sort of folder of completed tasks. When I couldn’t find where they went, I consulted the website, where the developers explain that “currently, you can’t see the stuff you’ve archived.” So, their version of an archive is actually a landfill full of irretrievable stuff.

Cheddar allows you to use it in fullscreen if you want, but that immediately negates the benefits of having such a pared-down design.

Features

Cheddar makes use of tags to help you organize tasks. These tags work much like they do on Twitter; just throw a hashtag in front a word and it becomes a clickable link. I liked the idea of using tags on an app like this, but was disappointed at the implementation.

When you click on a tag that you’ve created, the results are limited to the list that you are working with. So if you tagged #broccoli in your grocery list and in your list of foods you want to eat today for your diet, clicking that tag will only show broccoli-tagged items from the list you’re currently looking at. Furthermore, you can’t search for tags, so you’ll have to find an item that actually has the tag you need. Tags are yet another instance where not having access to your archived items negatively affects usability.

I wanted to like the tag feature, but it doesn’t work very well, especially when you consider the poor implementation of the archives.

You have a few formatting options when it comes to your text via simple markdown language. For instance, if you want to make some text italicized, you just enclose it in asterisks. There is also full support for emoji, if that’s your thing. Cheddar for Mac syncs with the web app, which you will automatically have access to using the same login information you provided to use the app. In my experience, syncing was lightning fast, and changes were pushed very quickly to both the web and my iPhone.

Pricing

You can download Cheddar for free from the Mac App Store, but the free edition limits the number of lists you can create to two. If you are just planning on using this as a simple reminder app, two lists is probably one more than you need. But if you want more flexibility in organizing your items, you may want to upgrade to the pro version. You can either pay $2 monthly or $20 for yearly access. Comparing that pricing structure to other to-do apps is challenging, as most competitors are one-time purchases rather subscription services. Obviously, having the option to try out Cheddar for free can help you decide if having multiple lists is worth the decidedly modest fee of $20 a year.

Conclusion

At this point, it’s rare that a new productivity app introduces a feature that’s completely groundbreaking. Now, all that’s left for developers seems to be improving the user-experience by finding the right mix of features to appeal to specific types of people. Cheddar doesn’t do anything I hadn’t seen before I tried it, and I honestly am not sure what sort of user it is marketing itself for. On the one hand, it is very dependent on your use of shortcuts, as the main window has no controls outside of the checkboxes and the ability to drag items up or down in a list or to another list entirely. This makes it speedy, but many users looking for a simple to-do organizer won’t bother to learn shortcuts. It has a clean interface, but the lack of even the most basic features like recurring tasks and due dates makes it perhaps too simple.

It wouldn’t be fair to compare this to apps like Things or OmniFocus, as their lists of features blow Cheddar away. I think a more direct comparison would be either to Clear for Mac or OS X’s Reminders app. Cheddar does offer tags and markdown, which those two don’t, but that is the extent of it’s advantages. Clear has great gesture-support, and Reminders is free if you own Mountain Lion. Both Clear and Reminders also sync with the cloud, with Reminders even offering web access via iCloud.com. At $7, Clear costs as much as a few months of Cheddar, and I think that makes it a far superior choice.