Category: Mac

Reading is a topic that a lot of us get fired up about, mainly because we all do so much of it. It’s a field many of us are very experienced in. When people make decisions about buying a hardcore or a softcover book, they’re using their experience to make that choice. That’s why talking about the perfect reading experience is so tough — no two people have the same tastes.

That’s my word of warning as I enter into this: the following article, even more so than usual, is nothing more than my opinion. But let me be the one to tell you, and I hope you’ll agree, my opinion is certainly the most correct one. I’ll start by saying that the new iBooks for iOS 7 is terrible. Whereas before, choosing between iBooks and Kindle was tough, the decision just got a whole lot easier. Quite simply, I’m about to tell you why I prefer the Kindle experience over iBooks.

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The Design

When it comes to the iPad and iPhone, I’m of the earnest belief that Kindle has a much more interesting design than iBooks now has. With iBooks, Jony Ive and his software team have focused on reducing the software to its barest element: the words. While I admire their attempt to do that, and the typography is beautiful and the words look great, I’m pretty sure every other part of the app — especially how it works, which we’ll get to shortly — is atrocious.

The Kindle Library makes half-sense. At least there’s a List view.

Take, for example, the Library view. On a Kindle, this has only ever made half-sense. Your book covers can either appear in a grid, which is odd because they look like they’re just floating, or they can be sensibly displayed in a list with an icon of the book’s cover beside it. At least lists make sense.

iBooks for Mac lets you organize your books a la iTunes in a list format.

iBooks offers nothing of that sort. Now, books are presented the same way in iBooks the same way magazines are presented in Newsstand. They float on sort-of-visible shelves that don’t look anything like real shelves. Instead, the shelves look eerily similar to the bead-blasted aluminum Jony Ive’s industrial engineering team is obsessed with throwing onto every product Apple makes these days. But we don’t put books on aluminum shelves — well, we usually don’t.

iBooks for Mac looks a little different than its iOS counterpart.

iBooks for Mac has a slightly different story. The iBooks app is, for the most part, beautifully designed. The books still look like they’re floating, but the option to display them in a list is available (and there are no gaudy faux-shelves anywhere in the Mac app). Kindle on a Mac, on the other hand, is abysmal, unless you use the Kindle Cloud Reader.

The Kindle Cloud Reader is pleasant enough and accessible from anywhere.

The Kindle Cloud Reader is a web app that works great in any modern browser, and it looks very similar to the mobile apps. (This comes with the added perk that if I ever lose my mind and decide to purchase a Chromebook, I can still read my Kindle books there.) I don’t necessarily prefer the Kindle Cloud Reader over iBooks on the Mac, but I personally don’t read too often on my Mac. It’s a handy-to-have, but not a must-have for me. So it doesn’t bother me as much. If you’re a Mac-exclusive reader, then I’d strongly consider iBooks.

Design: How It Works

Of course, Apple taught many of us that design isn’t just about how it looks — it’s about how it works. So far, I’ve been talking mainly about the experience in choosing a book from a Library, but I haven’t spoken much about the functionality of the apps while actually reading.

This is where there are a ton of differentiators. iBooks uses a nicer font, I think, than Kindle does, where your best font choices on modern screens are Georgia and Palatino. iBooks doesn’t have any font options, but it doesn’t need any. (The Kindle Cloud Reader doesn’t allow you to pick a font either.)

Kindle for Mac, though, is more than a little ugly.

Their features nearly match each other: highlighting, note annotation, bookmarking — the list goes on. (The Kindle app has some inconsistent behaviour regarding its bookmarking, but that’s an issue for another article entirely.)

There are some additional features that Kindle users have access to. Most of them are social, and if you’re like me (and you hate how social networking has pervaded our entire lives and feel like you can’t read a book on the toilet in peace), you’ve probably turned those features off already and have long since forgotten about them.

You can’t change the font in the Kindle Cloud Reader, unfortunately.

For the most part, though, this means that the little things really add up. iBooks’ lack of an interface makes it difficult to navigate on an iPad, while the Kindle app feels more intuitive. Page flips are a great example.

If you’ve got page flips turned on for the iPad or iPhone Kindle app, you can place your finger anywhere on the screen and move it to the left or right. You’ll see the page begin to turn. This interaction lets you know what you’re doing. If you move your finger back to its original starting point, the page will return to its original position. If you don’t, or you complete the flipping motion, it will flip. When you’re flipping a page, all the Kindle’s controls disappear. It’s just you and your book. Better yet, the page follows the movement of your finger. You can pull a page towards the bottom or top of your device and watch it curl.

iBooks for Mac looks beautiful, on the other hand, and has a great reading experience.

The iBooks app used to function similarly. Markedly, it wasn’t the only difference between the old and new iBooks app. The app used to come with a background that, while reading, looked like book pages and a book’s back cover. Now, the stark white of the app is so dull as to be completely uninspiring.

Tapping on a page flips to the next one, but the only way to flip a page like you can in the Kindle is to drag from the margin of the page. You can swipe in the middle of the page, but unlike the Kindle app, that won’t appear to do anything. When you release your finger, the page will flip. This is supposed to replicate the print experience. Reaching for a margin on your phone or tablet is supposed to be like reaching for the margins of a paper book to flip the page. That being said, the experience doesn’t translate well. It’s a skeuomorphic interaction, and I think it’s far worse than skeuomorphic visual design.

That doesn’t sound like too big of a deal, but it gets really annoying if you’re reading a book with breakfast with your iPad in landscape. It means that you can only swipe on approximately 5% of the screen to turn a page, or you won’t be sure you’re doing it properly. There’s no way to understand that iBooks knows what you want to do.

Finally, the other thing that’s really irritating: when you do manage to flip a page in iBooks, the status bar doesn’t flip with it. It doesn’t disappear. Your page flips over it — or beneath it. I don’t know which it does, but the status bar remains static, and it doesn’t look natural. It distracts you from the experience.

The Little Things

This all doesn’t sound like much, I know. In fact, I have no complaints about the Mac app in this regard. It “just works” exactly how you’d expect, and if Apple could achieve the same sterling result on an iOS device, it would be a far better reading suite. But the Kindle app seems to have a better eye for details. And when you’re reading a book, nothing matters more than the little details.

The little details are what set great print jobs apart from poor ones. It’s why some people prefer to buy a hardcover over a paperback, and vice versa. The little details mattered in print because they tangibly affected readers — you could touch a book and feel the difference.

The Kindle for Mac and iBooks for Mac app, side by side.

Reading on a screen isn’t entire similar, but it should feel like a similar experience. It requires the same attention to the minor details. All you want to see is the content on your page. You don’t want to be distracted wondering how page flips work, or if you’re going to be able to easily find the book you want to read next. Book-reading apps should be focused on making it as easy as possible to find what you want to read, and make the reading experience as close to print as possible. With high-resolution devices like modern iPads and iPhones (and even MacBook Pros with Retina displays), that goal is possible.

Now, I don’t think either app has the experience perfectly right. The Kindle app’s menu is a little too dark for my liking, but at least it isn’t drenched in whatever aluminum-coloured Kool-aid Jony Ive adds to his protein shake in the morning. Choosing a book to read in the Library in both apps could be a better experience.

But if there’s one thing that Jeff Bezos and his team understands, it’s readers. Amazon started as a bookstore. Those people are obsessive about making the best-quality reading devices on the planet. It shows when you’re actually using a Kindle app to read, and not just to stare at the draperies. I think Apple could learn a thing or two by using their apps.

Final Thoughts

I didn’t mention Kindle cross-compatibility with other operating systems (or the e-readers) because it’s largely irrelevant. I’m sure that most people reading this article, especially you, will be aware of Kindle’s proprietary format and its limitations. Many of you will probably already own a Kindle device, whether you ever use it or not. You’re all smart people, so it shouldn’t come into play.

It used to be that iBooks was a serious contender on iOS, and now it’s a serious contender on Mac. But just as Apple finally brought the experience to Mac, they forgot to take care of the reading experience on iPads and iPhones. iBooks is representative of everything that’s wrong with iOS 7 and nothing that’s right, which is a shame because there’s a lot of potential here to do something great. Kindle has leap-frogged ahead, and it’s not because their iOS 7 update was amazing (although it was excellent). Kindle has leaped ahead because Apple has stumbled. For now, I say without hesitation there is almost no drawback to using the Kindle lineup of apps, and I highly recommend them.

It’s US Thanksgiving today, the day we set aside to eat turkey, play (or, more likely, watch) American football, and hopefully spend at least a few minutes of reflection about what we’re thankful for from the past year. And so, why not think about the Apps you’re most thankful for at the same time? After all, they’re the tools that have freed you up this year, made your devices come to live in new ways, and perhaps helped you acquire new skills. Why not be thankful for them too?

The app I’m most thankful for this year won’t come as a surprise to faithful Mac.AppStorm readers: Ulysses III. That writing app — especially with its new full-library search — has changed how I write and save text, and holds everything from article drafts to notes to archived published writings. It’s awesome.

There’s so many more great apps that I’ve started using this year or become better acquainted with, from the newly-updated-but-notnew MailMate and Pixelmator to brand-new apps like Ember and ReadKit, it’d take forever to list them all. But then, that’s what our upcoming roundup of the very best apps of 2013 is for.

So today, we’d love to hear what brand new apps you’re thankful for in 2013. Tell us why you love the app, and how you use it – and it just might end up being featured in our best of 2013 roundup.

And while we’re taking about being thankful, hey: thank you for being part of our community!

Ever since Steve Jobs passed away and Walter Isaacson’s Steve Jobs was published — and then turned into a mediocre film — there’s been a constant onslaught of new books about Apple, its founders, its strategy, and more. There’s some great stuff that’s been published, but for Apple fans who’ve soaked up every bit of Apple trivia and folklore they can get over the years, most books end up just being repetitive.

There’s two authoritative books anyone who wants to learn more about Apple and its founders should read: Isaacson’s Steve Jobs, and Steve Woz’ iWoz. The former is obviously the most detailed book on Apple’s most famous cofounder, while the latter is a surprisingly interesting look at the life of Apple’s more recluse other Steve. And then, for more company lore, you can’t beat the incredible Folklore.org website that tells the stories of the development of the original Macintosh.

That’s obviously far from the only books on Apple out there, but they’re the most authoritative with first-hand accounts you’ll see elsewhere — and none of the hindsight analysis that fills so many other books on Apple and makes them seem more like university business course material. But that’s far from the only great material on Apple. In fact, there’s two new books about Apple that have surprised me with their access, in-depth coverage, and lack of preachy business analysis. They’re just stories about the people behind the Apple products we love.

Here they are, and here’s why you should add them to your collection:

Jony Ive: The Genius Behind Apple’s Greatest Products

by Leander Kahney

Apple’s known for complete secrecy until it’s ready to let something out — and then, it’s time to parade all of the executive team on stage to let the world know how insanely great the new products are. All, that is, except Jony. The famously reclusive designer who’s singlehandedly influenced the post-’98 Apple more than anyone other than perhaps Steve Jobs, Jony Ive has never liked the limelight. He’ll appear in a FaceTime call or a premade video during an Apple keynote presentation, but seldom walks on stage to gush over the ways Apple has crafted its aluminum and glass gadgets.

That secrecy made me seriously doubt any book that claimed to be about Jony Ive. We only know scarce bits of info about Ive — how could any other Apple outsider know that much more. Every other book that mentions Ive and his work ends up retelling the things we’ve already heard. But not this time.

Kahney’s book on Ive digs far deeper into his live, work, passions, and values than I ever would have imagined. The author first met Ive while reporting for Wired.com at the Macworld Expo of ’03, and their meeting turned into a friendship that spilled over in the most authoritative tale on Apple’s design knight to date. It draws heavily from interviews with his colleagues, instructors, and early employers, as well as public bits of info you may have already heard from Ive himself, and turns it into a detailed history of Ive’s life.

It’s not Ive’s equivalent of Steve Jobs’ biography, but it’s easily the closest we have today. You’ll likely find it dry at times, but there’s enough new info on Ive and Apple’s design work that it’s a fascinating read for any Apple fan.

Length: 321 pages

Price:: $11.99 on iBooks and Kindle

Design Crazy: Good Looks, Hot Tempers, and True Genius at Apple

by Max Chafkin

Design Crazy dumbfounded me. At just $1.99 and released as a Byliner Original — an imprint best known for modern long-form journalism pieces and short fiction — by Fast Company, I assumed it’d be yet another business-focused book that tries to distill Apple’s success into an MBA-ready formula.

I was wrong. Dead wrong.

Design Crazy is an — to borrow an Apple phrase — insanely great new style of book about Apple that’s 90% just quotes from people who worked at or with Apple through the years from 1980 to the present, tied together by brief commentary by the author about what was happening in Apple at the time. It sounds crazy, and is a tad tough to read at first. Once you get into it, though, it actually flows, and you feel like you’re sitting around a table with the best and brightest that have walked through the doors at One Infinite Loop, just talking about Apple.

It’s a magical little book that’s packed with quotable quotes and real insight into what made Apple and Jobs tick — and those same people’s hopes and fears for Apple’s future. You’ll hear them worry about Apple’s recent struggles in the software front, then close the book hearing them excited about Apple’s new Mac Pro which shows the same innovation is still alive and well at mothership.

Length: 91 pages

Price: $1.99 on iBooks and Kindle

There’s More, of Course

That’s obviously not the only books on Apple that you can pick up today, but these 4 books — the two detailed here along with Jobs and Woz’ books — are the ones, in my opinion, give the best view into what makes Apple tick and what got it to where it is today. I’m so often disappointed with supposedly new books about Apple that lend little to know truly new info about the company and the people that work there, I was genuinely surprised by both Jony Ive and Design Crazy. And I happen to think you’ll enjoy them as well.

But perhaps I’ve missed a gem — or overlooked genius in other Apple books I’ve read. If you’ve got a favorite book on Apple that you think should be considered an official must read, then be sure to share it in the comments below!

Doxie's range of scanners have enjoyed immense popularity, especially amongst those (like me) who have moved towards a paperless workflow. Their award-winning mobile scanners provide a truly portable scanning solution that makes digitising letters, photos and documents amazingly simple. The Doxie One and Doxie Go are paper-feed scanners, much like how a fax machine (remember those?) works as you feed paper into it, one sheet at a time. This ability to continually feed page after page of content without constantly changing the page on a flatbed scanning surface makes it far easier to quickly scan documents, as well as dealing with multiple pages.

While the Doxie scanners are great for single page scans, anyone wanting to digitise notebooks, fragile photos, books or magazines were out of luck. That is, until now.

Doxie have now released the Doxie Flip, a portable flatbed Doxie scanner, squarely aimed at those wanting to digitise physical media that, otherwise, just won't fit into one of it's paper-feed siblings.

The Hardware

The Doxie Flip is a huge break from the norm for Doxie and is the first flatbed scanner that they've released. The first thing you'll notice is that this is tiny, measuring just 10.23 x 6.46 x 1.34” (26.0 x 16.4 x 31.4 cm) and weighing just 1.26 lbs (570 g).

The Doxie Flip is a small, portable flatbed scanner.

It comes in a dark plastic casing with contrasting white lid. A small colour LCD screen and controls sit on the right side, whilst the SD card slot, large scan button and power switch are all located on the right-side edge of the scanner.

As you'd expect, the hardware is well put together and feels solid, yet surprisingly lightweight. The LCD screen provides feedback about how many scans you have remaining on the SD card you're using and is also used when making changes to the settings.

The small, low-res display provides useful information about the number of scans and a quick preview of the image.

Unlike the rest of the Doxie family, the Doxie Flip doesn't feature a power supply, instead solely relying upon AA batteries to power it. Speaking of which, powering up the scanner takes a matter of seconds, at which point it's ready to start scanning.

Unlike other Doxie scanners, you can control the quality of the scans, selecting either 300dpi or 600dpi. A sleep timer is also accessible, which is especially useful for keeping your battery life extended as much as possible.

Scanning

Scanning items with Doxie is not much different from a traditional flatbed scanner, simply place an item on the flatbed and press the large green button. Once powered up, there's no warmup period for scanning, no previews or pre-scan, the Flip simply scans whatever is on the flatbed, letting you make any adjustments later.

You can easily scan notebooks without having to squish them onto the flatbed’s glass.

To ensure your scans require as little adjustment as possible, the LCD screen displays a preview of the item you're scanning as it is digitised, also allowing you to scroll through previously scanned documents to preview them. The screen is quite low resolution, making it more for checking that the scan generally looks like it has worked ok. After scanning a few items, you'll likely neglect the screen altogether, occasionally using it just to make sure you've scanned everything you needed.

Doxie know how bad scanners are in general, especially when dealing with orientation and page positioning, and makes it very easy to know with clear iconography along the scanning glass. A singular arrow denotes where the scanned item should be placed, keeping scans as neat and straight as possible.

Party Trick

So far, the Doxie Flip just sounds like a small, portable flatbed scanner. All this changes when you remove the lid and turn the scanner upside down.

Scanning can be done just like a traditional flatbed or, quite uniquely, turn it upside down to scan pages from books and magazines directly.

The Doxie Flip has a transparent plastic base, letting you see right through to the other side. This lets you place the scanner on to notebooks, magazines, fabrics, pretty much anything that you can think of. The transparent base ensures your scans are easily lined up and prevents the often-troublesome issue of trying to fit a book into a flatbed scanner.

In practice, this works really well and you avoid the light bleed that occurs when the spine of a book exposes the scanning element. By swapping the roles of the item you're scanning and bringing the scanner to it, you're effectively removing any of the inconveniences that occur when trying to scan something that is far too big to fit on the flatbed.

This isn't something just for frequent notetakers, graphic designers will likely love the fact that fabrics and textures can be easily scanned, providing a great way to use them in artwork and design. In addition, Doxie even go so far as to say you can scan almost anything you like, just remembering that the glass surface is susceptible to scratches.

In some ways, it's a similar feature to apps for the iPhone, such as Evernote and Scanner Pro, both apps that include the ability to take a photo of a notebook and adjust for perspective. While these methods might be somewhat more convenient for note taking, the Doxie Flip makes it far easier to capture consistently higher quality scans.

In addition to just scanning notebook pages and magazines, Doxie have announced a new AutoStitch function to allow for the scanning of items far larger than the Doxie Flip's scanning surface itself. At time of writing, the feature is still awaiting release and is scheduled to be available sometime in December, at which point the Doxie app will include the ability to automatically stitch individual scans together, making one larger scan. It sounds similar to how panoramic photos are created, using a number of photos taken to create one larger one. It's certainly a shame the feature wasn't available at launch, especially as it's a touted one, but it isn't too far off.

Doxie App

One of the best feature of the whole Doxie experience is its simple to use import app. Once launched, you can simply insert the SD card into your Mac (or use the included USB to SD card reader) and Doxie will detect the scans, giving you the option to import them for you to then rename and save.

The Doxie app works across the entire range of devices and is easy to use.

Doxie integrates with a wide range of cloud services, from Dropbox to Evernote, and includes many one-click solutions to send your scanned items to various online services or other apps on your Mac. For multiple pages of a notebook, you can simply select all the pages and click "Staple" to create a multi-page PDF document.

Despite the Flip advertising a feature called “autostitch”, it’s not yet available which is a little disappointing.

Unlike other Doxie scanners, the Doxie Flip always keeps to the same dimensions of scanning, meaning you'll likely need to edit scans to crop them accordingly.

Wrapping Up

The Doxie Flip and Doxie Go/One have very little overlap when it comes to providing a scanning solution. The Doxie Flip isn't something you'll find useful if you're wanting to reduce paperwork clutter and ensure all letters, documents and anything else that would normally sit in a filing cabinet is digitised.

What the Doxie Flip offers is something for avid notetakers and graphic designers to easily digitise work that would otherwise be cumbersome, difficult or even impractical to scan. By, quite literally, turning the flatbed scanner upside down, Doxie has presented a neat solution to anyone wanting a permanent digital archive of notes.

At $149, it's the same price as the entry level Doxie One and is inexpensive for what is a portable, high quality scanner. The small LCD screen is somewhat of a disappointment and the lack of auto-stitching at launch does mean it can't be used to its full potential straight away. Nonetheless, for anyone using notebooks and wanting to scan photos or any other physical item, the Doxie Flip is a great way to do it.

When in the flow, concentrating hard and making progress (or not), I, for one, find it difficult to quantify the passing of time. When I’m messing about, tweeting and generally procrastinating, it’s even harder. And that can be frustrating; for the freelancer or pro rata worker, the slipperiness of the seconds, minutes and hours can be very costly.

As always, technology is ready and waiting to help. But time-keeping apps so often fall by the wayside because we just can’t be bothered to use them. And even if you can be bothered, remembering to start and stop the digital timer at the precise moment you begin work, or put down your tools, is a task of nagging tedium.

Maybe that is why nulldesign (aka Lars Gercken), the developer of freshly hatched time-keeping app Tyme (retailing at $4.99), feels the need to entertain users with snazzy graphics and in-depth analytics. But are a few pretty bar charts really enough to keep you focused on your time management?

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Outer Skin

The feel of Tyme is very much akin to that of a classy to-do or list app, such as Things or Clear. Although it is an app which has very obviously been optimized for menu bar usage, it is in Tyme’s small window that the administration of tasks, and the viewing of those oh-so-gorgeous graphs, happens.

Tyme has the look of a classy to-do app.

The look is a combination of darkroom greys and vibrant colour for the highlights, and clutter is kept to a minimum. The controls on offer are given plenty of space on the frame of this window, either at the top, or bottom.

Projects and To-Dos

There’s good reason as to why Tyme looks like a to-do app — it works like one.

Projects can have a colour and a due date assigned to them.

The time you spend is split into overall Projects, and each of these contains individual Tasks.

New Projects require that a name and a colour be assigned to them, but there is also the option to add a due date and include pre-existing tasks.

A new task may be given its own due date and an estimated duration.

New Tasks also require a name, but they inherit the hue of their parent project. That said, the shade given to each task within a project is fractionally different, meaning that each task has a visual uniqueness to it. This is particularly useful when you come to look at your analytics graphs (see below).

Tasks can also be assigned a due date, as well as an estimate of the amount of time needed for their completion. This, and all other recorded time periods can be rounded upwards, downwards, or to the nearest 1, 5, 10, 30, or 60 minutes.

Menu Bar

The best thing about Tyme, though, is its presence in the menu bar.

The menu item helpfully shows information and provides access to task timers.

Clicking on it produces a drop-down list of your recent tasks, and each of these may be clicked to toggle recording. Additionally, the menu bar item can display the task on which you are working, the length of the current session, and the total time spent on the current task.

Idling

One other thing I must mention is Tyme’s attention to inactivity. After a certain period of inaction — an amount of time decided by you — Tyme will stop any running timers, and assume you’ve gone AWOL. Clever.

Graphics

But what about those beautiful graphics I promised you? Well, they’re…um…beautiful.

The analysis of your work can be split into weekly or monthly segments, and split by Project, too. Whichever combination you go for, you’ll have several types of data at your disposal.

Mouthwateringly gorgeous, aren’t they just?

At the top is a bar chart. Each bar represents a day, and is made up of sections which are coloured to match the tasks that were worked on, in representative portions. Below this chart, for even closer scrutiny, Tyme also lists the amount of time spent on every task (in figures).

Further down the dashboard are three circular charts. The first illustrates the total tracked time and the time each Task has taken; the second illustrates exactly when you’ve been working; the third shows the average amount of time you’ve worked per day, displaying it as a percentage of the “working day” (you can adjust this to suit your daily workload).

Blocks of working time can be added manually in this view, as well — handy for when you forget to start the timer.

Export

Helpfully, the data that Tyme collects can be exported, and three formats are available — CSV, HTML and Print/PDF.

Conclusion

Time-tracking is a simple task, and only poor development can make it otherwise, a fact that nulldesign seems to have noted. Tyme is visually sleek, easy to use and cannily constructed.

In fact, the only negative of using Tyme to count the hours and minutes of your working day is that it is, in essence, a dumb stopwatch, and no matter how much you like the graphics, you’re going to need enough persistence to keep starting the timer, in order to gain any benefit.

If you really are determined to keep track of your progress, Tyme represents a very good time-tracking assistant.

You can’t run iOS in a virtual machine, and you can’t run iPad apps on your Mac. But thanks to AirPlay, you can have the next best thing: iOS apps mirrored on your Mac. And Reflector, our sponsor this week, is one of the most polished ways to do that.

Reflector turns your Mac into an AirPlay receiver so you can mirror your iPhone or iPad on your Mac’s screen. You can stream videos and audio to a Mac, use your iMac’s large screen (or a Mac connected to a projector) to wirelessly stream a presentation from Keynote or other presentation apps, or just demo your new apps to your investors in the boardroom on the big screen, complete with the real look of the iOS devices they’ll run on. You can even mirror multiple devices at the same time to show off multiple apps, or differences between two versions. And if your company happens to run on PCs, you’re still in luck: there’s Reflector for PC as well that’ll give you the same great features.

Reflector then makes it simple to record your iOS devices in action. Whether you’d like to show off your skills in an iOS game or record a demo video for your next app, Reflector gives you simple iOS recording that’ll leave you with beautiful footage of your iOS apps. And it works great with both iOS 6 and 7, so you can get the same features regardless of which version of iOS you’re using.

Get 25% off Reflector This Week!

Reflector usually costs $12.99, but from now until December 2nd, you can get 25% off Reflector, AirParrot (the Squirrels’ app for mirroring your Mac to your Apple TV with advanced features), and their t-shirts and other mercy in the Squirrels Store with the coupon code macappstorm25. That’ll let you pick up a copy of Reflector for just $9.74 — a great deal for mirroring and recording your iOS devices on your Mac or even a PC.

No matter how much developers and users alike have hoped Apple would bring traditional upgrade pricing to the App Store, it’s not going to happen. Traditional upgrades — where you get a discount on version 2 if you already own version 1 — have been deemed too complex. In a world where simplicity rules and everyone is supposed to be treated the same, that’s one confusion too many for Apple.

So, they’ve opted to slash the prices on their own apps — all the way to free for most of their consumer products — and charge full price for new versions. 3rd party developers have been left to do the same, making the App Store the place where apps like Pixelmator get seemingly endless upgrades for free while other apps get full-priced new versions as we’ve seen with so many iOS 7 apps this year.

But that might not be the only way. The Omni Group has been the most bold at trying to find ways to offer traditional upgrade pricing with their OmniKeyMaster, a short-lived attempt to offer App Store customers upgrade pricing on their own store. And now they’re fighting again, with the most brilliant use of in-app purchases yet.

Using In-App Purchases for Good

The likes of Candy Crush and practically every other freemium game on the top of the App Store have given many of us a distaste for in-app purchases. I personably consider consumable in-app purchases (say, paying for extra time in a game or to clear a level) as rather scammy, since few would seriously pay money for such things if they stepped away and honestly thought about it.

And yet, in-app purchases don’t have to be bad, something I expounded on further earlier this year. The best example on the Mac so far this year was Byword 2, a free update to the paid app Byword that added publishing posts to WordPress and more as an in-app purchase. Essentially, you get an updated version of the core features you originally paid for in v.1 for free, but can choose to pay extra for new features. That’s something that Paper for iPad had already successfully embraced, and I happen to think it’d be cool if more apps could be cheaper with base functionality and then let you pay for more features. In-app purchases are perfect for that.

But that’s not nearly as clever as what the Omni Group has done with OmniGraffle 6. After their original idea to offer upgrade pricing to App Store customers on their own store was thwarted, they turned to in-app purchases to recreate traditional upgrade pricing on the App Store — and amazingly it worked. If you owned the previous version of OmniGraffle, you can purchase OmniGraffle 6 Standard from the App Store and then verify your original purchase in the app to unlock a free or discounted upgrade to OmniGraffle 6 Pro in the app.

It’s almost surprising Apple allowed this — and equally surprising that no one else has done it before — but it works perfectly. So perfectly, in fact, it’d almost be surprising if more apps don’t take advantage of that in the future — and we can almost assume we’ll see something similar in the anticipated OmniFocus 2 and OmniOutliner 4. It’s a move that’s made Apple geeks like Thomas Brand and myself feel save making large pro app purchases on the App Store again.

Perhaps We Should Begin Again

But then, sometimes what’s really needed isn’t a new version of an app — it’s a new app. Adding new features and tweaking the old ones can be great, but there’s also a place for disrupting your own app and starting anew before your market’s taken over by younger, fresh apps.

That’s the strategy that many developers — Apple included — have taken this year, one that’s proved as controversial as the lack of upgrade pricing itself. We’ve seen the Realmac Software team scrap LittleSnapper in favor of the brand-new Ember, and The Soulmen start fresh on their Ulysses app with Ulysses III, a remake that shares the older version’s name but starts its own version numbering over at v1.0. Bohemian Coding has done it twice, with the new Fonts app replacing Fontcase, and Sketch being rebooted in Sketch 2. The latter upgrade removed functionality and change the UI but laid a better foundation for the future that’s made Sketch a buzzword in design this year, and they’ve promised that Fonts is a similar new start.

That’s anything but a typical app update.

Evernote’s done the same thing twice as well, making their namesake app drastically different in Evernote 5, a reboot that made many of us love Evernote again, and turning the beloved original Skitch into something that was universally hated until they, too, added back features to the rebooted app. And now Apple’s done the same thing with its new iWork Pages, Numbers, and Keynote, starting over from scratch but then promising to add features back soon — and they actually started the remake-instead-of-upgrade trend with Final Cut Pro X.

It’s not a bad trend, per se — sometimes a new start is the best thing, and paying a lower full-price for each version isn’t terrible in the long run either. And maybe it’s a trend that’s easier to accept if the old app is killed in name, too, and the new app is marketed as a brand new app — though the comments on our first review of Ember would say otherwise. Change is tough, and reboots even tougher — if we wanted to learn to use a new app, we might as well go try out the competition.

And yet, change is good. You could still use Office ’97 on an aging PC — it would still get stuff done — but you’d likely be more efficient with modern tools, ones likely not made by the Office team. Someone else was innovative, tried something new, and made brilliant apps like Scrivener and iA Writer, Keynote and Prezi, MailMate and Sparrow, Google Docs Spreadsheets and Soulver and Calca. That’s why there’s an indie alternate to everything in Adobe’s Creative Cloud.

Here’s to the Next.

Apple rebooted iWork, much to the horror of existing users

Disrupt, or be disrupted. Apple and a ton of developers have decided to take the first route instead of waiting for someone else to disrupt their apps — and that route doesn’t always look like new versions of the same old app. Sometimes you have to go back to the drawing board, and perhaps the App Store’s lack of upgrade pricing has prompted more people to think of new ways to solve a problem through software instead of just adding patches and features to increasingly bloated apps.

Even if in name the app is unchanged, if new versions of apps — or reboots of the original idea — aren’t really new, there’s nothing to really pay for. The Omni Group is solving the paying part through ingenious in-app purchase upgrades, while still reinventing their apps in the latest versions. Others are making fully new apps. Either way, the App Store’s restrictions seem to have pushed developers to think different in a very good way.

If, perhaps, some of the new apps could manage to pull off what the Omni Group has done with upgrade pricing for OmniGraffle 6, we might have the perfect thing to counter every argument against rebooted apps. And hey: if you still happened to love the old version and aren’t willing to change yet, the new-app-instead-of-updated-app model makes it easier than ever to use what you’re used to while you’re waiting for the new app to become full-featured.

Now, here’s to the updates that build on the promises held by this year’s rebooted apps. That’s the excitement 2014 will hold.

As a photographer brought up in the digital age, the taking of photos, to my mind, has always been inextricably linked with computing. And my computing has always been done on a Mac, and Macs have always had iPhoto to keep pictures neatly organized. Okay, so iPhoto hasn’t been around for ever — it was introduced 11 years ago, alongside OSX 10.1 — but as a child of the OSX period, it’s hard for me to imagine what photo handling looked like, pre-iLife.

However, as the versions of OSX have rolled by, iPhoto has grown and grown, adding more features and a heavier CPU workload along the way. In some respects, this one-time light, nimble, agile photo library is now too large for its own good.

Which is where an app like Unbound ($9.99, beta release free) has an opportunity. It doesn’t edit, it doesn’t let you create cards or calendars, but it does claim to give you quick-time access to your photos. But does Unbound’s simplicity and speed outweigh iPhoto’s heavyweight functionality?

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Simplicity Itself

For those who have been using iPhoto up until now, Unbound may look and feel a little spartan.

The UI comes in two styles — light and dark (both shades of grey). Browsing consists entirely of navigating around albums and the images they contain. There is no sidebar, and there are no smart folders, out-of-five star rankings, or label colours. It is a purely hierarchical system.

Instead of providing its own library, Unbound uses a pre-existing folder on your hard drive, with sub-folders being recognized as albums. These albums are represented by a stack of their photographic contents, and opening an album takes you through to a grid of the images it contains, with your other albums listed in a vertical column on the left.

The layout is spartan, but practical.

Single-clicking selects an item; double-clicking an album opens it into the grid view mentioned above; double-clicking an image opens it in a window-filling lightbox. From this lightbox view, you can flick through the images within an album using the left and right arrow keys (or the on-screen controls), and access Unbound’s functions, as well — more on that later.

Flat-Out Speed

I don’t know whether this simplicity has an effect on speed, but whatever Unbound has under the hood, I can tell you that it is a fine engine. This thing is blazing-quick.

Flicking from image to image at high speed, as is my way of working, doesn’t seem to stress Unbound or my Mac in any way, and each click triggers a response without any discernible delay. And that includes when working with Raw files, by the way.

Even loading up images is a rapid procedure.
As a test, I pointed Unbound in the direction of a folder containing 600+ megabytes worth of JPEGs. Between 10 and 15 seconds later, Unbound was ready for me to start browsing.

Organization

To replace iPhoto, though, you need organization — which just happens to be Unbound’s weakest area. Whilst it would be harsh to describe this app as a dumb image browser, the filing options it provides are really poor.

The hierarchical system, as mentioned above, is two-tier only, so the idea of an album-within-an-album is a non-starter. Albums can be ordered alphabetically or by date of addition, and there is also an album search, although you’ll need to give every new folder a name for this to work properly.

Unbound’s browsing interface is purely hierarchical, although there is an album search.

You can also give individual images a name, and a caption, too. Unless you name every image and turn on A-Z sorting, though, this has little benefit, especially given that there isn’t an image search provided.

If you are happy just to use Unbound as a time-ordered dump for your snaps, and you have no need to track anything down in a hurry (or ever), then this system of “click-and-look” will probably suffice. It is also true to say that the rest of us can carve marginally better organization out of Unbound by thinking of albums as categories, and being diligent with our sorting of incoming images. But none of that mitigates Unbound’s lack of organizational competence.

Showing Off

Despite trying to avoid describing Unbound as a simplistic image browser, I have to say that when you return to the presentational side of this app, things return to being really quite nice.

A large array of metadata is on display in the single image view.

From within the single image view, a comprehensive list of metadata is on display (including geolocation, presented on a map). A nice slideshow feature is also included, sporting seven transition effects, five preset slide time lengths, and the options to shuffle and loop the displaying of pictures within the album.

The slideshow feature is simple but adjustable.

This view also sports a pop-out sharing menu. Your photo can be sent via Apple’s in-built AirDrop and Messages, or uploaded to Twitter, Facebook, or Flickr, directly from your library.

Verdict

The developer of Unbound, Pixite, describes its creation as “a faster, simpler photo manager.” Faster, it certainly is. Simpler, without a doubt. Photo manager…hmm, not so much.

The thing is, I actually like Unbound’s approach, of speed and bare bones necessity. But the problem with any minimalism is that if it is executed incorrectly, it just looks empty. Unbound is literally an image search and some keyword functionality away from being a brilliant photo manager; without these, though, I simply can’t recommend it as a stripped-back iPhoto alternative, which is what it wants to be.

As a photo browser, though, Unbound works nicely. It is fast, unbelievably easy to operate, compatible with pretty much any file type, and it offers a nice slideshow option. Is that enough to warrant a $9.99 purchase? That is entirely your call.

There’s people who know that using Comic Sans is an invitation to mockery and that Helvetica Neue is the official designer font of record, and then there’s people who have meticulously curated libraries of hundreds and thousands of fonts. For the former, the built-in Font Book app has typically been enough — there’s the tools to add and preview fonts that most people need. There’s more advanced font management tools, but they’re simply too much for most of us.

Bohemian Coding, the team behind the incredibly popular design tool Sketch and the now-unsupported font management tool Fontcase, has just released a beautiful new font app aimed at the casual user and designers alike: Fonts. It’s the first font app that’s designed for the vast majority of Mac users, with a UI that’s reminiscent of what we can only imagine an iOS 7 inspired OS X redesign would look like.

Fonts is a brand-new font organization app that’s most closely like Font Book. It’s nothing like the more advanced font management applications, like its older sibling Fontcase — there’s no options to activate/deactivate fonts, print out a font specimen, edit font metadata, or anything else. Instead, it’s focused on giving you the very best font preview experience possible, with a few extras thrown in, all for the low price of $9.99.

Fonts shows all of your installed fonts along with your Collections from Font Book in a beautifully clean interface that’s focused on your fonts. You can browse through your library of fonts in Fontcase-style preview squares or a more detailed list view as seen below, with live previews that show the typeface name and a larger preview of the first two letters of its name rendered in the font itself. Mouse over the preview square to see a quick preview of each of the weights, or select the font to see a full preview on the right, one where you can type the text of your choice and see it automatically reused when you select the next font. Every weight is still available from a hidden drop-down menu that appears when you mouse over the weight under the font name in the preview.

Fonts is designed first and foremost to make it easy to compare your fonts and weights, and that’s most apparent in the list view. Here, you’ll see a full line of text as the font preview, one that again you can edit and see automatically reused by every font. By default typefaces will be shown together with a listing of how many weights they contain, but you can double-click and see all the weights individually as well.

That’s where organization comes in. There’s a Fonts-only star option that lets you mark your favorite fonts, and then you’ll also notice your collections brought over from Font Book on the lower left column, including the smart collections. You can drag whole typefaces or individual font weights to collections you want, or make new collections in Fonts that’ll show up throughout OS X. Any app that shows the normal OS X font picker will show your Fonts collections just like it shows your Font Book collections. The only frustration here is that there’s no way to add new smart collections or edit existing ones — though perhaps that’s not so surprising, since Fonts is designed to make it simple to look at your fonts, compare them visually, and then categorize them. And for that, Fonts is great.

There’s one final feature that’s awesome, and yet needs fleshed out a bit more: Glyphs. Fonts lets you browse every glyph in all of your fonts in a beautiful list, and copy the character or HTML/UTF code to your clipboard. It’s the nicest way to look through everything each of your fonts offer, and is a great option just for an easy way to copy hard-to-type characters without having to know what they’re called. But, it’s not perfect. Oddly, copying the character only copies the raw character itself, not a formatted character with the font you were using — unlink Font Book, where the similar feature doesn’t have fancy copy options but does copy the formatted character from that exact font if you tap CMD+C. Then, I couldn’t get the HTML option to work, though UTF did work great each time.

The Glyphs pane obviously needs the most work, but it also underlines one other problem: it takes more taps to see the individual glyphs in each font than it would in Font Book. I’d love it if the glyph preview in the main library view would also let you copy characters — or at least would keep the same font selected when you switch to the Glyph view. And, obviously, it’d be nice if it could copy the formatted text of the character to make it easy to copy and paste any font’s character into any other app.

It’s hard to miss the other major part of Fonts: its beautiful iOS 7-style UI, complete with outline icons and faint text close and minimize buttons in the top left corner. A trend first started with Simplenote for Mac, Fonts takes OS X flat design to its only logical conclusion if iOS 7 style design is the goal — and it’s beautiful. Maybe that style isn’t for everything, but it sure looks great in a type-focused design.

In Conclusion

Fonts is a tough app to classify, since really it’s in a class of its own. The simplest way to think of it is an experiment in redesigning Font Book with a light UI that’s focused around seeing your fonts in action. For anyone who loves fonts and enjoys comparing them, organizing them, and seeing everything each typeface has to offer, it’s absolutely great — and at just $9.99, it’s not a huge purchase like most professional font organization apps are.

But then, it’s not everything those who seriously need advanced font organization might want. It’s really a new app, reimagined for today’s font needs. For that, it’s a great first version, one that’ll be interesting to see develop further in the near future. It’s a simple and beautiful way to compare your fonts and enjoy what they have to offer, and that’s nice. But a new Fontcase it isn’t.

There’s Droplr and CloudApp for simple file sharing, Minbox for large private file sharing, and Dropbox for rather complex individual file sharing and simple folder sync. They’re all well know, and you likely use at least one of them already — and you’re likely convinced you don’t want to switch to another file sharing app.

Get ready to want to switch. The new Jumpshare is the nicest file sharing app yet, ready for both private and public file sharing, with features that no other file sharing app has. And it’s still dead-simple to use.

A Late-coming Winner

We first looked at Jumpshare last year when we reviewed its beta version, and were already impressed with its support of so many file formats and its nice folders for sharing sets of files together. The other popular simple file sharing tools had a 3-year headstart, and so many web-only file sharing services come and go that, despite our interest in the service, one couldn’t help but feel that it was fighting a loosing battle. Nothing could be further from the truth.

Jumpshare instead leapfrogged the other services, building on its incredible online file previewing to offer support for over 200 file formats, including most recently the addition of AutoCAD file support. You can share practically any file you want, and guarantee that others will be able to preview the file in their browser without downloading anything, whether it’s a document, eBook, video, or even a more obscure work document.

Then, it’s got the expected Mac app — only this Mac app is faster than any other sharing tool you’ve ever used. Drag a file (or a group of files to share together in an online folder) to the app, and it’ll immediately copy a link to your clipboard to share online while it’s uploading the files themselves in the background. In the time you’ve posted your status update or composed the email, it’ll likely have finished uploading the file — if not, your recipient will see the file upload progress from their end and the file will immediately show up in their browser when it’s finished uploading.

You could use the normal uploads for sharing files privately as well, or you can use Jumpshare’s built-in private sharing option. Just hold the alt key down while you drag a file to Jumpshare, and the files will upload while you type in the recipients’ email addresses and a quick message. The email will be sent as soon as the files have uploaded, which may happen while you’re writing the message if the files were small, since they start uploading as soon as you drag them to the app. It’s insanely simple and dumbfoundingly fast. There’s even an option in the online file preview to save files to your account — a nice Dropbox-style feature that ensures you won’t lose the shared files you receive via Jumpshare, something that’s easy to do with CloudApp and Droplr shared files.

That’s only one of the many nice features in the Jumpshare web app that take it far beyond typical simple file-sharing tools. The free accounts come with 2Gb of free storage space and a built-in email, Facebook, and Twitter sharing tool, but with the new Jumpshare Plus for $10/month, you can get even more. It includes 50Gb of file storage, an option to schedule sharing gives Jumpshare a Buffer-style scheduler to tweet or email a file on a specific time, and an option to have files/folders delete themselves automatically on a certain time. There’s also the option for custom domains, as you’d expect, and a very nice password protection option to make your files even more secure. That’s a surprisingly nice set of extra features for the paid account that make far more sense than the regular pro accounts on sharing services that mainly just let you get more storage.

Absolutely Worth Trying

It’s always easier to just use what you’re used to, and when you’ve got a one-click file sharing tool you’re already using, there’s little incentive to ever switch. You just can’t get simpler than one-click. But Jumpshare did the impossible: they made one-click sharing faster than ever, and added in smart features like background, multi-threaded uploads, private sharing, and scheduled posting that make it far more feature-full than the other sharing apps. And they did all of that without making it any more bloated or confusing to use.

Its free version is very nice — you can’t beat 2Gb of free file storage and online file preview for over 200 filetypes — and the pro version adds far more than just extra storage for your money. It’s odd declaring a new king of simple file sharing, but if I hadn’t already pre-paid for a year of Droplr Pro, I’d be switching today. The new Jumpshare is that good.

It’s been quite some time since I’ve used Firefox on a daily basis. It simply hasn’t felt that Macish in a while, especially since Apple gave us the minimal scrollbars and multitouch gestures in Safari with OS X Lion. And if you want the latest apps and extensions, Google Chrome’s the browser with the most action these days. Firefox seemed left to being the default browser on Ubuntu, and not much else.

Yet, Firefox — the descendant of Netscape — was the original alternate browser for most of us back when Microsoft’s Internet Explorer was king of the land. In today’s Webkit-dominated landscape, it’s still the leading alternate that’s paving its own path to rendering the web. It’s hard to want to lose that.

That’s why Australis, the new Firefox redesign that’s coming in Firefox 28, is so exciting. It’s got UI innovations that keep Firefox unique and exciting, along with more OS X integration that ever that make it feel a perfect part of your Mac. And it’s ready to use today if you’re brave enough to rely on nightly alpha releases of a browser.

The Same Old Fox, in a Brand-New Skin

The first thing new thing you’ll notice in the new Firefox is its redesigned tab bar. Gone is the blocky from current versions of Firefox, along with equally clunky menus. The new tab and menu bar look far more suspiciously close to Chrome than ever before — and yet, they’ve done far better at maintaining a unique a unique feel than I would have imagined. The new tabs are round and bubbly — a design technique that spills over into other parts of the new Firefox – with the animated playfulness when moving them around that feels more like Safari than the relatively stiff-feeling Chrome. And while still ever so slightly thicker than Chrome’s tab/menu bar (which itself is slightly thicker than Safari’s tab bar), the new Firefox UI is far slimmer than it’s ever been before.

Firefox now, for the first time in forever, feels almost just like a native OS X app, with only a very few lapses. It’s now got the full disappearing scrollbars and smooth, bounce-at-the-end scrolling, but also surprisingly has full Safari-style two-finger swipe to go back and forward with peek previews of the page you’re going back to. A small enhancement, sure, but one that gives it an edge over Chrome on OS X now. There’s still no pinch-to-zoom, but the CMD+ zoom is full-page zoom like you’d expect in Safari and any touch-centric browsers — something Chrome for OS X oddly still doesn’t have. Firefox still relies on its own spell check instead of the default OS X spellcheck, which is unfortunate, but you will at least find 3-finger-tap dictionary support working better than before.

Then, there’s customization. Firefox used to be the only browser to consider if you wanted great extensions, and it’s still got tons of powerful extensions like DownThemAll that can’t be beat on other browsers. The only problem was that your browser UI would quickly get bloated with all the extra buttons. That’s finally been solved in a rather nice way with Australis’ new customization features. Right-click on the toolbar and select Customize, and the whole UI will shrink a bit to reveal a core canvas underneath the UI, and all of the buttons you can have in your toolbar. You can arrange them as you wish, or move them to the browser menu — an ingenious option that makes it easy to have a minimalist browser experience while still having a ton of extensions. The redesigned menus and popovers look slick, and with the customization options, you’ll likely be opening the menu more often than ever.

Firefox, even with its current UI, still has some features that put the other browsers to shame, from its nice download tool to its incredibly nice web inspector and console. Sadly, though, its selection of more modern extensions like Evernote and Buffer are often dated, more limited versions of their Safari and Chrome counterparts. That’s something we hope will quickly change if the new Australis UI reboots Firefox’ popularity as much as I happen to think it will. There’s still other rough spots — default drop-down menus in websites like WordPress’ admin look like they were ripped out of Windows 95, and it feels rather odd to have an address bar and a search bar in 2013, but overall, Firefox feels more modern than it has in a long time.

An Alpha You Might Want to Run by Default

Running beta — and especially alpha — software is always a risky bet performance-wise, but the current Firefox Nightly’s are slick enough that it’s a risk worth taking. Overall performance in the latest Firefox feels great, and in general usage today as I’ve used Firefox Nightly as my main browser, it’s felt as smooth as you’d expect from a modern browser with sites and web apps. If anything, it feels like it loads pages faster — but that’s tough to pin down, and obviously isn’t fully optimized right now in daily builds so detailed testing is pointless right now. You will notice in OS X Mavericks that your battery meter will say FirefoxNightly is using significant energy, and it does seem a tad CPU-hungry right now, but that’s where the upcoming optimizations will need to come in.

At the very least, the new Firefox right now feels great for normal use, and if you’ve been itching for a new Firefox for Mac experience, I’d recommend trying it out. You can download the Firefox Nightly builds from nightly.firefox.com and install it alongside your normal Firefox install to try it out. If you’re a Firefox fan that’s wished for a more native Mac feel, I happen to bet you’ll be hooked.

Firefox has sure come a long ways from its original version, and it’s nice to finally be excited about the next Firefox again. Here’s to hoping this restarts the neck-to-neck browser competitions that have all but died out over the past year.

At the end of the week, creative people often wonder how much they actually accomplished. They tell their friends they only spent 40–50 hours on the computer working when, in reality, it’s more like 60–70 hours. Staring at a screen most of the day isn’t great for your eyes, so why not lessen the amount of time you spend using a computer? That’s not as easy as it sounds, because you first have to find out how much you are spending on Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube each day.

There’s now a different type of time tracker available. It’s called RescueTime. Rather than requiring that you manually clock in and out, it monitors everything you do and sends you a report at an interval you choose. When I first heard about the service, I was cautious about the privacy implications and whether it even did a good job. After using it for nearly two months, I have a bit more to say about it.

Effortless Setup

Setting up the app takes just a few minutes.

RescueTime takes minutes to install. The app comes in a DMG and takes a quick drag and drop to Applications to start using. Once you open it, the app will ask for your permission to use OS X’s accessibility options so it can track what you’re doing. If you’re unable to give the app access to your Mac, head to System Preferences > Security & Privacy > Privacy > Accessibility and check the box beside RescueTime. After that, you’ll have to sign in or create an account, with only takes a few seconds.

Effective Tracking, Lousy Automatic Filters

Categories in the Dashboard.

The main problem with something like RescueTime is you’re always conscious of it being there, and until you forget it’s monitoring your every move, you may use your computer differently. I had so much to do when I first installed the app that I forgot about it after about a day. At the end of that week, I received an email summarizing how productive I was based on the automatic categorization of the websites and apps I had been using.

Unfortunately, it had most of the important things in “uncategorized” or “very unproductive”. This meant that I had to visit the Dashboard, a hub that lets you configure everything in your RescueTime account. There you can change a task’s category and productivity level. I’ll talk more on this later, but for now lets just say it isn’t convenient to configure everything manually. I’d be much happier if the app actually knew whether or not an app was productive right away.

The entertainment category.

This is a very present issue with RescueTime, too. It doesn’t learn what a good or bad task is in an intelligent way. Rather, it seems to use a limited database for reference and add it to one of three lists. If it at least read the name, queried Google, and then added it based on some keywords, that’d be nice. But no, not even my math homework at mathxl.com was interpreted as productive. It simply threw it into uncategorized.

Worse, the service thinks that iTunes, Rdio, and Slack, a messaging service we use for the team at AppStorm, are not productive. I listen to a lot of music while doing work, as do many people, so the app should monitor what I’m doing while iTunes is open rather than saying I use it too much. Speaking of apps being open, the only time RescueTime monitors activity is when an app is active. This is much better than simply assuming all the apps running are open because it provides a more accurate number.

Pause, Scheduling, and Focus

RescueTime in the menu bar.

You probably don’t want tracking on all the time, so naturally there’s a way to disable it. In the menu bar app, you can pause RescueTime for 15 minutes, 1 hour, or 1 day. This is nice if you’re taking a quick lunch break, but what if you want monitoring off when you’re watching Netflix in the evening? In the Dashboard’s privacy settings, you can set what time you would like the app to start and stop tracking your activity, making room for personal tasks at the beginning and end of work days and maybe eliminating weekends entirely. It’s very useful.

If you just need to focus on a task, RescueTime offers a way to help you, but it’ll cost. The service is free to use with basic features, but premium ones, like Focus, will cost you $72 a year. What does this fancy feature do? Block distracting websites, like Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Reddit, and anything else you’ve marked as unproductive. It’s very handy, but there open-source app SelfControl offers this functionality for free. If you buy RescueTime Premium, it should be for one of the other features, which I’ll discuss later.

Organizing What You’ve Done in the Dashboard

Back to the Dashboard, RescueTime’s control center. Here you’ll find all the pie graphs and charts detailing how productive you’ve been lately. You can switch between the day, week, and month view, and the service’s history goes back 2 months. On the main screen, there’s a helpful list of the 5 top categories. Mine for this week is 14 percent entertainment, which could use some improvement. Then, when you scroll down, you can look through what apps and services are in your top categories for the time period. Further down yet are your lifetime totals and top days.

The main Dashboard graph.

The main screen is very easy to navigate and I never had any trouble with it. The app’s pitfall, as I mentioned earlier, is revealed when you start to look at individual categories, especially Uncategorized. To find these, hover over the Reports button and click Categories. You’ll probably see Uncategorized on the graph since it’s often filled with “everything else”. Click it to begin organizing. Here’s where things get interesting.

Adding a goal.

Everything in Uncategorized has been given a a neutral productivity level. Changing it isn’t as easy at it should be. First, there’s no bilk categorization, which is something the service needs, especially with a user as heavy as me. Second, changing the category on one thing is more clicks than it should be. You have to hover over the item, click the pencil icon to the right, click the productivity level, and select a new one. It’d be much easier if you could just click Neutral and select a new one, but no. Due to the way RescueTime automatically organizes things, you’ll be spending a lot of time in Uncategorized. It’d be nice if that weren’t such a tedious task.

Milestones tell you how you’ve done.

On to Goals, which are designed to help you do work or other projects that demand completion. There’s a “Set a goal” button in every page of the Dashboard, so it’s pretty easy to get started. The one downside of goals is their alerts. They aren’t free. As with Focus, alerts is a Premium feature that you probably don’t need. After all, you can set reminders within OmniFocus, Calendar, on your phone, or just in OS X’s Reminders app. It doesn’t make sense to pay for this feature unless you believe it will convince you to work more effectively.

The Dashboard has a bunch of other features, but I don’t have time to go over them all here. It works well to keep you up to date on how your work is going, for the most part. I just wish it was smarter.

RescueTime Pro Isn’t Really Necessary

Selective monitoring is free.

This is one of those services that keeps running using monthly payments from users. If you really enjoy it, they expect you’ll pay eventually. I haven’t found the need for any of the fancy Premium features though. It includes more detailed reports, time tracking when you’re not at the computer, website blocking, notifications to help you focus, “daily highlights”, faster access to monitored data (3 minutes instead of 30), and access to your entire history. They’re all very useful, but only if you’re a very heavy user who doesn’t already have ways of organizing his digital life. Even then, traditional to-do lists or OmniFocus reign superior.

Privacy

Before I started using the app, I made sure the developer had a solid privacy policy. Their six-point summary gave me confidence in their integrity.

1. We will never sell, rent, or share your personal information without your explicit consent, with or without personally identifying information.
2. We may share information about user behavior in the aggregate only. For example, we could share information like, “which day of the week do people spend the most time in front of their computer?”
3. You can delete your data at any time — all of it, or just a slice of it. You can also delete your account at any time. Deleting your account deletes all your data from our database.
4. We won’t spam you, ever. We might occasionally send one-time messages about important RescueTime news. We will likely continue to introduce ways that you can optionally have RescueTime contact you with data that you care about, but you will always be able to turn this on or off.
5. For individual accounts, no other user can see any of your data or personal information. In the future, we may introduce features to allow sharing of data, but this will be voluntary and opt-in only.
6. For team accounts, sharing of data is controlled by the administrator of the account. No one outside of your organization will have access to any of your data.

A Helpful Way to Look at Time

The basic interface of RescueTime.

I’ve found RescueTime very enlightening in the days I’ve used it. I receive reports on Sundays and typically aim to spend less time on the computer the next week. I like that the app has lots of notifications available in the Premium version, but none of the other features seem necessary. The best part of this app is the way it shows you what you’ve been up to. That may seem creepy, but their privacy policy clearly states they will not sell any of your information. If you put trust in RescueTime, you’ll be surprised how much time you spend doing unproductive things or “thinking about doing things” while watching a YouTube video, commenting on Facebook, or aimlessly browsing. The app gives you confidence that you can overcome these obstacles.

Got a library of DVDs you want to back up to your Mac? There’s no built-in way to rip a DVD to your iTunes library, so you need to get a DVD converter app that’ll take care of everything for you. This week, you can get a copy of MacX DVD Converter for free to make ripping and converting DVDs as simple as it can be.

MacX DVD Converter makes it simple to convert your DVD movies into DRM-free video files in the format of your choice. It’ll rip any DVD, even DRM-protected DVDs, and can also download online videos from YouTube and more to your mac. Then, you’ll be able to save the video files in the format and resolution of your choice, and can even trim away the parts of the video you don’t want and remove extra subtitle languages you won’t use anyhow. Then, for even more fun, it’ll let you grab screenshots or small video snippets from your favorite movies.

Normally $39.95, MacX DVD Converter is currently free for their Thanksgiving promotion. You can get a full copy for free, with the license key included in the download, and convert all your DVDs before you have to travel for the holidays. This year, instead of having to buy iTunes movies to keep the kids happy during a holiday road trip, you can rip all of your DVDs and take them along for free.

Get Your Copy of MacX DVD Converter for Free!

Hurry and get your free copy or MacX DVD Converter — or a discounted copy of MacX DVD Ripper Pro or MacX Video Converter Pro Pack — before their promotion ends on December 6th!

Videos can be annoying to view from all of your devices, since there’s so many different formats and aspect ratios in use. If you want all of your videos to look great on the devices you use most, you’ll need a tool to make it simple to convert all of your videos to the format you want. This week, you can get a copy of MacX Video Converter Pro for free to converting your videos as simple as it could be.

MacX Video Converter Pro is designed to help you convert any video you want into the formats you want. You can convert videos you’ve downloaded, ripped from DVDs, or from your phone or cameras into any format you want, complete with the quality and aspect ration settings you’d expect if you want to tweak the settings. You can even download YouTube and other online videos and convert them to the formats you want, record video from your Mac’s FaceTime camera, and turn your photos into a beautiful slideshow, all from MacX Video Converter Pro.

Normally $49.95, MacX Video Converter is currently free for their Thanksgiving promotion. You can get a full copy for free, with the license key included in the download, and convert all your videos to the formats you want and download online videos for your offline viewing pleasure before you have to travel for the holidays. Then, when you get home, you can use it to convert your videos into the formats you need for sharing, and turn your holiday photos into beautiful photo slideshows to share with your family and friends.

Get Your Copy of MacX Video Converter Pro for Free!

Hurry and get your free copy or MacX Video Converter Pro — or a discounted copy of MacX DVD Ripper Pro or MacX Video Converter Pro Pack — before their promotion ends on December 6th!

Your Mac and iOS devices include the oddly named “Find my iPhone” service that’ll let you track and remotely wipe any of your Apple devices from your iCloud account. It’s a great service that’s already helped many work with law enforcement to get their devices back, and many more protect their data even when their device isn’t recoverable. But, of course, you’ve invested hundreds and even thousands of dollars into your devices, so it’d only make sense to do the best you can to make sure you can recover your devices if they’re ever stolen.

Hidden is a device tracking service we’ve reviewed several years ago, and found that it worked really great for tracking your device and more if it ever happened to get stolen. It automatically takes pictures of the thief and screenshots of what they’re doing on your Mac, and lets you see them online from anywhere along with a map of where your device currently is located. And now, with the just-released Hidden 2, it’ll track keystrokes and active processes on your stolen Mac, and works great on OS X Mavericks.

Most interestingly, it also works on iOS devices, so you can track your Mac, iPad, and iPhone all from the same Hidden account. On the Mac, of course, Hidden can run as a background process, but on iOS it doesn’t have the same freedoms. Instead, it uses the background location service on your iOS device to track your device if you report it as stolen, and then triggers a fake alarm notification on the device. When the thief tries to turn the alarm off, it’ll launch the app and take a photo of the thief, just like it would on the Mac. It’s an ingenious solution to track all of your devices with a bit more features than you’d get from Apple’s Find my iPhone.

And, this month, you can sign up for Hidden for 15% off — that’d let you track 1 device for just $1/month, or 5 devices for $3 month. Just sign up for the free trial, and use the coupon code NOVEMBER15 to keep your devices safe on the cheap. That’s a great way to keep your devices a bit safer.