Category: Mac

Information managers, or Bucket apps, are applications that store and organize the notes and text snippets (and more) that we’d like to keep up with. They’re versatile apps that can work to organize pretty much any type of data you want to store in them. There are plenty of them to choose from, however, in this article we’ll narrow this list into five contestants: DEVONthink, Eaglefiler, Evernote, Together and Yojimbo.

Each one is packed with exclusive features and some missing when compared to the other options. In this review I’ll highlight the pros and cons of the Buckets keeping in mind a criterion that could bring them all together: how they add, organize and search through your files. Then, we’ll try to help you find the best one for your needs.

DEVONthink

DEVONthink is mostly known as a powerhouse in paperless workflows. However, there’s lighter versions of the application that should please all kinds of users. DEVONthink is also known for its Devonian design. Even with several viewing options, the screen is always cluttered with information and some resources are only available in specific views.

If you forget about its unfriendly interface, you’ll find that DEVONthink is filled with great features. You can drag files into the Sorter even if the application is closed (and it won’t open when you do so). The Browser Extension is possibly the only one close enough to compete with Evernote, as it imports in several formats and allows the inclusion of metadata right on the spot. You can also choose to import text as in Instapaper.

DEVONthink comes with several templates, like task lists or web browsers, for a more specific approach into the files you’ve created in the application.

DEVONthink considers tags and groups as the same thing displayed differently, so you can convert a Group into a Tag (or vice-versa) and it will preserve all its info. It shines when you use the See Also, Classify and the Keywords features, which analyze and compare your files for similarities among them. After you include a few items, you may as well let DEVONthink automatically classify your files based on their contents.

Search is fast and uses the built-in features aforementioned to sort your files by relevance. You may also refine your search by selecting a specific criteria, like tags or URL.

Pros

• Analyzes your files and relates them with others alike
• Many ways to visualize and export your library
• Remove all the clutter from web articles saving like Instapaper

Cons

• Clumsy interface;
• Locks your database with a password, but you can still open the files in Finder
• It’s really tough to learn without checking the Help file

Price

$49.95 from the Mac App Store or as DEVONthink Personal directly from their team. DEVONthink Pro and Pro Office are $79.95 and $149.95, respectively.

Eaglefiler

At first, Eaglefiler looks like it could make fine use of a redesign, since there are barely no options of layout customization and the initial package consists of a few smart folders (you may recognize them inside the ‘Search For’ group), the Trash and Records folders, plus a few tags.

There are many ways to add files into Eaglefiler. The application comes with the Drop Pad, which is a little window that will most of the time stay below your windows. What stands out is the Quick Capture key, a keyboard shortcut to import files, you may also capture with options, which allow you to index your snippet before it moves to Eaglefiler. It only works with some applications, which turns out as an issue: you can’t always apply the same method of importation to your files.

There’s also a “To Import” folder, where you can send files from anywhere to be synced later into Eaglefiler.

You can create several Libraries, so you may keep your work and personal things in different storages. As Eaglefiler keeps your files in their regular format, they’re navigable through the Finder. There are plenty of ways to categorize your files: tags, folders, labels, notes and marking as flagged. Folders and tags can be nested to keep your Library tight. You may also include Actions to Smart Folders, which will be applied as you drop a file into it.

Eaglefiler stores the metadata of your files within a SQLite database and it’ll search your files through it. Turns out Eaglefiler has one of the fastest searches among the applications listed in this article. You may also navigate through the tags, as the more you select, narrower becomes the search results.

Pros

• Great integration with applications like Mail and Contacts
• An unobtrusive way to add files with a keyboard shortcut
• Multiple Libraries

Cons

• Outdated design
• The Drop Pad is a non-intuitive way to add files
• The importing methods don’t work for every kind of file

Evernote

Evernote stands out in features others don’t have, and as I compare these applications, it stands out that Evernote seems to serve a completely different purpose instead of being a contender. The newest version has a clean design, though complete with the last skeuomorphic tendencies, and it has four different ways to visualize your files, notes, and more that you’ll have stored in Evernote.

Everything you import to Evernote is wrapped on a HTML structure as a Note. You can send files by creating a Note and dropping items inside. You can also send files from clipboard, take screenshots or record an audio file. The most common way to use Evernote is with its Web Clipper, which gives you control of the web content you want to add to your Notebooks.

Most of these applications attempted, but Evernote is the only one to nail syncing your files between devices.

Evernote stores your files online, but it keeps a SQLite alias in your hard drive for Spotlight indexing. Your files can only be categorized by tags and organized within Notebooks. You may nest your Notebooks, creating a Stack. It also recognizes text within images and PDFs (this one only for Premium), meaning that you can search for words inside photos.

Searching within Evernote may not be the most effective among them all, yet it is very intuitive. Evernote suggests notes as you type and offers several options to refine your search.

Pros

• Access your data from a large number of devices
• Share your notes and notebooks with others
• Find the words merged into your images or PDFs

Cons

• Doesn’t support Smart Folders
• Doesn’t export your data naturally
• You’ll always have an upload limit, regardless of your plan

Together

Together has a polished layout, and may be the prettiest of the applications evaluated here. It has a Portrait Preview for widescreen monitors and packs several Smart Folders to organize your files by kind.

There are two main methods to import files: an Import hotkey and the Shelf. Unlike in its competitors’ apps, the Shelf is actually a great method not only to import files, but also to navigate your library. You may drop your files in a folder, as usual, but also search your library. There’s also access to files marked as Favorites and a field to write Quick Notes. You may include metadata as you import the files. The Import hotkey is intuitive and will import according to what you’re seeing or selecting.

Together keeps your files in a hierarchy of folders in the Finder, so you may keep track of them when the application is closed. You can catalog them with tags, labels, comments and ratings. There’s also Smart Folder support and tags can be assigned to Folders. You have fast access to your tags in the left sidebar and they can be organized within Tag Bundles. In case you’re not a big fan of tagging, you can enable Automatic Tagging after your library grows a little. Together will compare your imports and tag them accordingly.

Together also supports the creation of multiple Libraries and opens your files in tabs within the application for easy comparison.

Compared to the others, searching is not as fast. It is Spotlight without any fanciness. You can’t reduce your search as you browse your tags: selecting more than one will expand your results.

Pros

• Encrypt your files individually
• Search and access through the Shelf
• Save articles from the web as Rich Text

Cons

• You can’t refine your search by selecting more tags
• Search is not as fast as compared to the others
• You can’t narrow your search per metadata

Yojimbo

Yojimbo has a clean and sharp design, with beautiful icons jumping out of a lean structure. It starts with several “Smart Folders” by default for the kinds of files it supports, however, Yojimbo’s coverage of Smart Folders doesn’t go beyond those and Tag Collections.

You can add files into your Library using the Drop Dock and the Quick Input. The former allows you to drop a file on a Folder or a Tag Collection, doing the latter will assign all its tags to the file. The Quick Input is a keyboard shortcut to add items from your clipboard. Yojimbo identifies the file and classifies it accordingly. You may include tags, labels, comments or flag it before importing.

You can also use a bookmarklet in your favorite browser to send files to Yojimbo. There’s even an option to tag them as you do it.

Yojimbo shares the same single view mode of Eaglefiler and besides the aforementioned organization methods, you may also encrypt your files individually. Due to the absence of smart folder configuration and nested folders, Yojimbo relies heavily on tags, but it has the Tag Explorer, which is the best place to navigate through your tags as it displays your most used ones right on top for easy access.

Search is fast since Yojimbo stores your entire library within a SQLite database, compressing into a smaller size, although this means you won’t be able to access your files directly from the finder (they’re indexed by Spotlight, but will open only in Yojimbo).

Pros

• A compressed library won’t clutter your hard drive
• Easy to use: just start and go
• Navigate through your tags smoothly

Cons

• Doesn’t nest your folders
• Doesn’t support creating smart folders
• Only operates over specific file kinds (accepts most within notes)

Conclusion

Bucket apps are great to have as a place where you can safely store the little things you stumble upon. Each of these apps has its strong points, and several of the issues considered in this article may be solved with Applescripts or Hazel. If one app seems like the perfect app except for an issue we mentioned, you can often find the info you’ll need the applications’ own support forums.

In the end, it comes to picking the information manager that fits your workflow naturally. If you see yourself needing to access your files from your mobile devices, Evernote might fit you best. If you want a simple solution for your desktop, then Yojimbo might have everything you need. Not enough? Then perhaps you should try Together’s additional features. Looking for a way to store emails and contacts? Eaglefiler is probably your most suitable candidate. But if you’re a writer/researcher, just like me, you might as well be pleased by DEVONthink.

Turns out, there might not be the perfect bucket app for everyone, though Together and DEVONthink might be the closest.

It can be a bit of a nightmare trying to manage a Kindle with a large ebook collection. You can organize them into categories on the device, but that’s frustratingly slow. You could use the official Kindle app, but that’ll only cover you for Amazon-purchased ebooks.

Enter Scida, a new app for organizing your ebooks and putting them on your Kindle(s). It makes managing Kindle ebooks a breeze, but this initial release is a bit light on features. Let’s take a look.

Kindle Management

Scida’s easy to set up and get running. Just tell it where to find your ebooks and it’ll sort through for the three formats it supports — MOBI, AZW, PRC. When you plug a supported Kindle in for the first time, it prompts you to give it a name and import an books on the device to your library.

From there you’re faced with a management interface that should be like second nature to navigate if you’ve ever used iPhoto, iTunes, or any of their ilk. A panel on the left lets you move between the main library, your collections, and — if it’s connected — your Kindle. The main area is split between a list of ebooks and information about the selected book.

You can also get great at-a-glance information about the contents of your Kindle, similar to the Summary tab on each iOS device in iTunes. This is probably my favorite part of the app, even if it is mostly aesthetic.

Creating new collections gets tedious quickly, since there’s no way to auto-populate a collection with titles by particular authors, and the app doesn’t grab any metadata beyond title and author. You can sort the list of all books by author or title, and filter it by a search term, at least, which should make the process of selecting ebooks and popping them into categories slightly less painful.

Only title and author can be modified, too. If you’re hoping to import cover art, you’re out of luck — unless you do a bit of hacking around outside the app.

To add your own cover art, you’ll need to navigate into the bowels of OS X’s Library folder. Your local repository of Scida books is stored at ~/Library/Containers/com.clapsol.scida/Data/Documents/Scida Library. Each book is in a folder according to its author’s name. In that folder, you need to place a .jiff file with the same name as the book. To create a .jiff, just take a JPEG file and change its extension under the Get Info Finder command.

Where’s the Functionality?

Scida does just three things well — copying books from your library to your Kindle, importing your Kindle books to your library, and looking nice. Everywhere else, it falls short. Besides title and author (and occasionally cover art), it neither displays nor allows you to edit metadata — which means no publisher, publish date, or tags.

Calibre, a free open-source alternative, handles all this and more automatically — provided you’re willing to put up with its awful interface. Without touching a thing, I had it showing tags, publisher, correct cover art, and publish date for the majority of my books — including even the ones that I made from web pages with the Push to Kindle browser plugin.

Scida doesn’t need to replicate even half of Calibre’s features to be great for Kindle ebook management, but it would do well to appropriate the parts that are relevant to its vision as a sort of iPhoto for ebooks.

If you want to organize your books into collections, and have those collections synced across devices, you’re in for some headaches. There is no syncing at all. To reproduce your library’s collections on your Kindle, you have to create them again, then select the source collection, select all of the books, and finally drag them onto the relevant Kindle collection label.

If you’re really OCD about your organization and you have a large library, the whole process could take hours. Why can’t you drag the collection labels between library and devices, at least? Why does right-clicking on a book in the list not bring up a contextual menu for that book, rather than whatever was last selected? The longer I used Scida, the more I questioned its design. What seems on first impression to be intuitive turns out to be far from it.

I hope future updates not only add the features you’d expect, but also fixes these odd interface issues.

A Promising Start

Scida just came out. For a version 1.0 release, it’s showing great potential. The app is snappy, beautiful, and — aside from those few aforementioned interface quirks — easy to use. But this beauty has yet to blossom into a great tool.

It lacks syncing, metadata (beyond the absolute basics), custom cover art, other Kindle-supported file types (PDF, plain text), and reading/previewing ebooks, among other things. And I’d hesitate to call it ready for most users.

What it does offer is a clean, simple design, coupled with the right ideas for a killer ebook management app. Keep your eye on Scida; it’s destined for greatness. It’s just recently been released, and the developers have told us that they have a number of new features planned in the future, including potentially adding the option to read eBooks directly in the app. That’d make it a nice eBook library for the Mac itself, too. For now, though, it’s a nice app for managing your Kindle, and little more.

There’s so many things we all need to remember. That’s why you need a robust notes app that works the way you do. NotesTab Pro, our sponsor this week, is a great notes app that runs in your menubar and has enough features to make it terribly useful but not enough to get in your way.

NotesTab Pro lets you quickly take notes and sync them to all of your devices, right from your menubar. There’s quick editing buttons and keyboard shortcuts to let you add formatting to your notes and quickly create and find the notes you need. Want more editing space? You can even take NotesTab full-screen to have more space to see your notes. When you’re all done, you can save them to view later, or share the with others online with OS X’s native sharing options.

We called it “The Best Note-Taking App in Your Menu Bar” in our recent review of NotesTab Pro, and it keeps getting better with new updates, most recently adding indenting and auto-hyperlinking support.

Go Get It Today!

NotesTab Pro usually costs $4.99 in the App Store, but it’s on sale today only for just $2.99! That’s why you should hurry and get your copy of NotesTab Pro before the sale ends! Then, you can also get NotesTab for your iPhone, iPad, or Windows 8 tablet as well, to keep your notes with you everywhere.

When all the breaking news is on Twitter, it seems as if there’s no need for audio streams or radio stations any longer. NPR and BBC are still listened to by many, but how long will it be until they are no longer needed?

A new app called Hourly News wants to make sure radio reports stay around for a bit longer by putting them in your menu bar for a nice streaming experience. Shall we see what this app can do to keep us listening to radio news?

Listen From the Day’s Start

When you sit down at your office chair in the morning, you may want to launch your RSS reader to catch up on the latest in celebrity gossip. Instead of that, though, why not have Hourly News open when you start up your computer? That little black play button will sit in the menu bar waiting for you to click it, and when you do you’ll get the morning report almost instantly.

The app doesn’t require much bandwidth to stream audio — only about 80 kbps, in fact. So while you read your emails and drink your morning coffee, this is the perfect companion. If you look closely, the date and time that the report was published is shown right below the station title. You can even drag the slider to return to a previous segment if you missed something. Also, don’t forget to press that refresh button in the top right to check for the latest report; you’ll lose access to the old one.

It might be annoying, though, that every time you click the app, it starts playing automatically. To stop this quickly, use the spacebar.

Change Up the Sources with Four Clicks

If you’re looking to add a new source or switch off one that you already have, click the app’s icon, click the gear in the top left corner, and click Sources. From there you can enable or disable whichever source you prefer. You can also drag them to reorganize the order in which they appear on the main screen. The included sources are ABC, BBC, Bloomberg, CBC, CBS, ESPN, FOX, NPR, SRN, VOA, and WSJ. All can be enabled if you wish.

Starting with a Tutorial is Good, But This One Isn’t

I typically like to see an app that helps users along from the start with a small tutorial or tour. Urban Apps didn’t implement this well in Hourly News though. Instead of a simple two or three-step tutorial, they used one that took a good ten clicks to complete. Every pop-up must be acknowledged with a click, and for someone who just wants to get started listening, that’s annoying. Besides, the app is very user-friendly as it is. There’s actually no need for a tutorial at all.

What About Sharing?

News on YouTube or a blog is nice for a lot of people because they can quickly share it by copying the link to the story. This app doesn’t have anything like that, though. Since the BBC and NPR both have audio streams available, it might be nice to obtain a link to those using the app. This is just a feature suggestion for a future version.

Focused and Handy

Hourly News is perfect for the user who likes those quick roundups from popular sources like the BBC or CBS. For those in search of in-depth reports, it’s best to use the sources’ websites rather than this app. Overall, Urban Apps’ little menu bar utility is the best thing you can get for the job. They’re not asking much for it at $2.99, either.

MacTuts+ is the superb new site dedicated to teaching people how to use their Mac, and OS X, more effectively. We’ve got you covered for apps, but combine that with an in-depth knowledge of OS X and you’ll be unstoppable, limitless!

This is a quick roundup of the best tutorials from MacTuts+ in January, from 5 Quick Fixes to Common Mac Problems to Taming the Elephant: Awesome Evernote Tips and Tricks.

Best of Mactuts+

Whether you are at school, work, or home, locking your screen can help you keep your apps, documents, personal information, and passwords safe from unwanted intrusions. You can rather quickly lock your Mac screen by pressing Ctrl+Shift+eject (or power on newer MacBooks), but that’ll only turn off your screen and then let you see the login screen when you tap a key.

Today, we will look at Lock Screen Plus, a screen locking application that looks amazing when in use. But, is spending money for a feature your Mac already has worth it, even if the Mac’s implementation is basic? Let’s find out!

Overview

On the surface, Lock Screen Plus is a, um, screen-locking application that would, for all intents and purposes, replace the already existing OS X feature. If you look past the generic name, though, you’ll actually find more than just a screen-locking application – why would anyone pay for it otherwise, right?

Lock Screen Plus allows you to have more control over the way you lock your screen, the way your locked screen looks, and the way you unlock your screen. That flexibility is what makes Lock Screen Plus worth the asking price.

Before we start explaining why Lock Screen Plus is cool, we would like to point out that you are not actually using OS X’s screen-locking feature. Lock Screen Plus does things separately, so technically, you can have two locks on at the same time.

Lock Screen Plus’ Locked Screen

Even though you have a sizable list of settings to mess around with, you will spend most of your time on the appearance tab. This is due to the fact that Lock Screen Plus is all about the way your locked screen looks and behaves.

Once you pick one of the many beautiful themes (and, yes, they are all significantly different), you will have the ability to change lock and unlock sounds, weather location, and in some cases, the theme’s background image.

Because of the minimalistic and stunning nature of these themes, Lock Screen Plus will possibly replace your screensaver (if you use one). The themes display time, date, and weather in a very elegant and eye-catching way, you will want to lock your screen whenever you are not using your computer just to see your pretty locked screen at work.

Lock Screen Plus becomes more about the way your locked screen looks than actually securing your computer. This is not a bad thing, of course. Your computer is quite secure with Lock Screen Plus on, but there are a few things Lock Screen Plus could do to create a balance between securing your computer and displaying a stylish curtain over your screen.

Unlocking Lock Screen Plus

In the Security tab of Lock Screen Plus, you will find three different unlocking methods: keyboard, trackpad, and mouse. Each method allows you to unlock your screen with the respective hardware manipulation. For example, you can left-click your mouse, swipe your trackpad, or swipe your keyboard in any direction to unlock your screen – the latter being the most interesting.

Unlike some locking applications, Lock Screen Plus doesn’t let you use or set any crazy gestures to use with your multi-touch trackpad. And actually, they note that “in some rare cases, the trackpad will be unusable.”

It would be cool if Lock Screen Plus took the keyboard method and allowed us to set a pattern of connected keys. For example the “MKJHN” keys could be swiped to unlock the screen. This would of course be a bit hard to do with some keyboards, but Apple keyboards are flat enough to take advantage of this. They could even take a “draw-on-the-picture-to-unlock” approach with the mouse or trackpad methods ala Windows 8 – they do have a “Metro” theme, after all.

Conclusion

Lock Screen Plus is not free, and at 99 cents, it isn’t expensive either. You already have a default screen locking feature built into OS X, so you don’t need this app for that; however, Lock Screen Plus does much more than just locking your screen. While there is a lot of room for improvement, Lock Screen Plus proves to be a rather sexy and elegant way to lock your screen.

Controlling music on an iPod has always been easy. The buttons are right there — there’s nothing more to it than that. When you look at most computers these days, that’s not the case. Some have media control buttons, some prefer to go with a special extra row of touch buttons, and others just don’t implement the idea into the keyboard well. Apple did it right with volume, play, pause, and skip buttons on the function row of its keyboards. The thing is, you can’t use those for, say, Pandora radio or YouTube because they’re in the browser.

Or can you? Tube Controller gives you full media key support for Google’s video website. Now let’s see how well that works compared to clicking and dragging.

Play Some Videos, Pause Some Videos

Tube Controller is a 0.1 MB menu bar app that takes up about 12 MB of RAM on average. It’s so lightweight that you won’t even notice it’s there. Pressing the media keys while you’re listening to a song in iTunes simply pauses the song and starts the YouTube video you have up. It’s compatible with both Chrome and Safari, though unfortunately it doesn’t work with Firefox.

You’re probably thinking, “Well, this probably isn’t good for multitasking. I don’t want all my videos playing at once!” That’s not a problem, though, because the app only controls the video that’s in your current tab. You can have 20 parts of a Conan episode loaded and nothing will start playing in the other 19 tabs.

Now, though, if you open both Chrome and Safari, that’ll really confuse the app, even if you do have one window active and the other behind it. Try not to multitask in that league.

And What Does the Skip Button Do?

With music apps, the skip buttons play the next or previous song, but with Tube Controller they seek by about 17 seconds. I tried it multiple times and it seemed to range from 15–19 seconds skipped each time. Regardless of how exact it is, this is a good way to jump through a lyric video if you’re search for something, but I don’t recommend using it for anything else as there’s really no reason to.

That One Drawback

As some users have pointed out in the reviews on the Mac App Store, this app does have one slight issue: it doesn’t work in fullscreen mode. One user also noted that the app would be even more useful with support for Apple’s EarPods’ media buttons, but there’s always the future for that. As for the fullscreen mode issue, that seems like more of a bug than left out feature.

Perfect for What It Does

Let me be short: there’s not a simpler way to control YouTube with your media keys. All this app needs is a fix for the fullscreen mode compatibility and it’ll be set. Headphone support is optional, really. And for free, there’s really no reason you shouldn’t get Tube Controller.

I wasn’t one of those people who hated iTunes 11 right off the line, and was even fairly generous to it in my review. After a while, I just got used to the idea of a new — and improved, from Apple’s perspective — iTunes. All seemed well, until I started paying attention.

A few days ago I downloaded a new album from the iTunes Store on my iPhone: Daniel Bashta’s “The Invisible”. Since he’s one of my favorite artists, I purchased the album on the release date while on lunch break and listened to half of it. When I got home that night, I went to my Mac to transfer the music purchase so all my devices would be in sync. Of course, when I opened iTunes it wanted to download the LP and the entire album, but I paused it to shorten the process. To my surprise, the album did not transfer. My iPhone synced “successfully” and the album didn’t appear in my library. I then headed to the artist on my iPhone to find out what happened. The whole new album thing was gone.

But that was just the beginning.

From One Album to Ten Apps

I assured myself that it was just a temporary issue I had created by dismissing a prompt from iTunes. Sadly, that wasn’t the case, as I soon found out after resetting all warnings in the app. I then took to my iPhone and began searching for other things that may not have transferred to my Mac. There wasn’t any other music, but boy did I find a lot of apps.

Ten, to be exact — I know that sounds too perfect, but it’s the number. What was causing this sudden disconnection? Well, I soon found out that it wasn’t sudden, because Fantastical wasn’t on my Mac and I had downloaded it on my iPhone the day it released: 29 November 2012. Now I absolutely had to know what this issue that plagued my Mac and/or iPhone was.

Searching For the Answer, Then Googling For It

I began by preparing for a full restore of my iPhone, followed by reinitializing my iTunes library. I was getting ready for the worst scenario, really. Thankfully, I discovered shortly after beginning my contemplating that Apple’s Support Communities held logs of similar experiences.

DanKell on the Apple forums posted an inquiry about a new issue he had discovered in iTunes 11 that prevented purchases from being transferred automatically. He was “trying to minimize the number of downloads” so as to preserve bandwidth. After all, everyone’s internet isn’t so fast, and some of us have bandwidth caps. DanKell wasn’t satisfied with having to manually transfer purchases, especially because the option was hidden deep within menus and even the grandfathered iTunes sidebar.

After much discussion with other members on the forums, it seems that there is actually no viable solution to the automatic transferring of purchases in this new iTunes. JDThree remarked, “I hope Apple returns that functionality.” He was “getting frustrated” with such a feature removal, and it’s not surprising that more users haven’t by now.

It’s Forcing You Into the Cloud

Darkness was widespread at first. Now you’re becoming more accustomed to the grim Seattle-like atmosphere because Apple and other companies have proclaimed it a standard. This is the cloud, the future of computing. Having everything in one nice place takes a load off your mind, but it also poses a few other problems, like the one with iTunes 11.

Apple is trying to promote use of iCloud and iTunes Match for all the necessary operations with in its media management app. The problem with this is that sometimes users don’t need to waste bandwidth re-downloading an app when they already have it on their phone or tablet. After all, wouldn’t it be more conservative of resources to simply transfer it when you sync your device? Apple doesn’t seem to think so.

With this new feature removal, Apple has increased the average user’s bandwidth usage by a bit too much. Not only will you be spending time downloading all your purchases again, you’ll have to ensure that iTunes doesn’t delete them off your phone as well, else it’ll automatically start the process all over. It’s like a giant game of duck duck goose in which the chase goes on for what seems like ever, and you never get to sit down. This isn’t how it should be — this isn’t Apple’s philosophy. Just like iCloud document syncing, media management should take place in the background, seamlessly.

What Does It All Mean?

It’s really hard to see a feature you rely on get taken out of an app without a thought. For Apple especially, why would replacing an automatic feature with a manual one be better? Not everyone likes to drive stick, you know.

It could be that the company is finally taking the better route for monetization, but since there’s no direct promotion of iTunes Match, that’s not the case yet. Apple definitely does not support local sync as much as it did before. There’s a larger movement now — one that’s taking place in the cloud. Case in point: when you first get an iPhone and download a purchase on your computer, you’ll get a push notification on your iPhone asking if you’d like to enable automatic downloads for certain purchases. The question is, why should Apple sell this to users when it’s sometimes better to save bandwidth? Not everyone has unlimited data plans while mobile, and a there are still people without fast Internet.

It’s not just about apps and music, but also updates. Why waste time downloading a 300 MB update to Need for Speed: Hot Pursuit when you already have it on your iPhone?

Will Apple add back this lost functionality? One can only hope so, because it’s something to be missed. There’s no reason you should go download something two or three times just to get it on a few devices. It’s one thing if that’s necessary due to the lack of a cable, but when you actually sync with a computer, there’s no need for such disconnection. Little things like this aren’t always noticed by people until they really need them. And then it’s too late, because it’s gone.

Streaming music apps are definitely in vogue these days, and with Spotify, Rdio, and other services’ slick Mac, mobile, and web apps, it’d seem that you wouldn’t need anything more. There’s plenty of companion apps in the App Store so you can get exactly the music experience you want. It’d seem that you’d never need anything more.

That is, unless you live somewhere that doesn’t have access to the most popular streaming music services, like in Asia. Then, Grooveshark is your best option, and it’s only available as a web app, albeit one that works globally. So if you’re a Grooveshark fan but want a nicer way to play music on your Mac, what are you to do?

That’s where Shiny Groove, a new beta app from the folks behind Pixa and Delibar, comes in.

Grooveshark, finally a first class Mac music service

Grooveshark’s music library isn’t nearly as complete as other services, it’s been beset with legal challenges, and it doesn’t have native apps on iOS, much less the Mac. It has an experimental HTML5 mode, but for the most part still requires Flash Player for the best experience. There’s not tons going for the service, except for the fact that it’s stayed around this long, and that it works almost everywhere around the world. That’s quite the differentiator, especially when most of the best streaming services only work in the US and Europe.

Grooveshark has kept plugging away, with a new web app and an honestly not-half-bad service, one I use fairly regularly in Thailand since I can’t use most of the other services. But now, there’s another reason you might want to give Grooveshark a try, even if you’re in a country that has more streaming options: Shiny Groove. It’s a delightful little Grooveshark player for the Mac that makes Grooveshark fun to use.

Hey wait, that’s the web…

First, though, you’ll still have to use Grooveshark’s web app. Fire up Shiny Groove, and you’ll see the familiar Grooveshark website open in Shiny Groove’s mini-browser. There’s a few differences: a Grooveshark logo on the left, and a iTunes 11-style miniaturize icon on the right. You’ll need to have Flash Player installed, as there’s no way to switch it to the HTML5 player, and you’ll still need to queue up your own songs or turn on radio stations just like you would in your browser.

Once your music is queued up, though, Shiny Groove is ready to work its magic. Tap the miniaturize button, and Grooveshark’s web interface disappears into a small player that’s reminiscent of iTunes’s new miniature player, or other 3rd party apps like Bowtie. All you’ll see is the cover art with a slight window glare added on top – and surprisingly, your music will be far more likely to have cover art in Shiny Groove than in Grooveshark itself.

That’s a nice surprise, as is how nice Grooveshark’s like and save features are built into the play/pause/next buttons. You’ll be able to use your keyboard, Apple remote, and earbud controls to switch tracks as well.

There’s a couple of other nice things. The mini-player stays on top of all of your open apps, but you can click its menubar icon to hide it. Or, you can shake the player and – poof – it’ll disappear in a puff of smoke, just like when you remove an icon from your Dock (or erase something on the Newton, if your Apple experience goes back that far). Then, try switching to a new track, and the flipping animation is a skeuomorphic but cute way to switch songs.

Making Shiny Groove shine

There’s not much more to the app; it’s just a simple player for an online streaming service, after all. But, you can choose to remove the dock or menubar icon, turn off the animation, and pick what song info and remote options you want to use. It’s worth nothing that the Apple Remote and earphones track changing features won’t make it into the final App Store release of the app, due to sandboxing restrictions. You’ll need to buy it directly from Shiny Frog for that.

Conclusion

So, if you’re already using Grooveshark, or are considering giving it a try, you should definitely download Shiny Groove. It’s free right now in beta, works great, and even has a few surprises up its sleeve. That’s more than you can expect from most simple apps.

Microblogging has become very popular thanks to Tumblr. The social network/microblogging service was founded in early 2007 by David Karp, accompanied by Marco Arment of Instapaper as the company’s lead developer. Since its launch, more than 86.8 million blogs have been created on Tumblr (as of late December 2012). It’s been going strong, and many people are happy with the service, but there’s always been one thing missing for some Mac users: a native app.

Now that’s no longer a problem, thanks to Yunseok Kim’s TumbleKit.

A Minimal Interface of Monochrome Delight

The app is impressively simple, offering only three main tabs for browsing — dashboard, favorites, and followings — and a “new post” button for telling the world about your day. Instead of the typical Lion scrollbar, TumbleKit employs an even slimmer one that measures just three pixels wide to ensure your browsing experience is not interrupted by something so superfluous.

Browsing The Feed

As you scroll through your dashboard, you’ll be reminded of the Tumblr web app in that everything is very simple and straightforward. You still have all the posts from people you follow, along with the tags and other data, but there’s something new: pictures don’t have to be clicked to be expand. Tumblr’s dashboard page has always loaded the full size image that someone posted, but it takes a click to show the full-sized picture. Instead of wasting a lot of time browsing thumbnails, TumbleKit makes this process much simpler by giving you the full size image right away.

Sadly, some media formats aren’t supported in TumbleKit, including videos from YouTube or Vimeo. In the screenshot above, you can see that I follow Michael Flarup, a designer and photographer. When I went to my followings tab and clicked his profile, a new window popped up with his full stream — it loaded fast, too. The first time I went to his blog, though, a film from Vimeo didn’t show up at all. After a few more tries, I got it to show me a thumbnail, but if I clicked it I was taken to the webpage to view the video.

Hopefully the developer adds support for videos so users don’t have to leave the app to watch them. A good way to do this would be inline support along with a fullscreen mode. Also, I’d like to note that sometimes the images on blogs don’t load, including the profile picture for person who posted on Tumblr. It may be a bug, or it might just be that my Internet connection, at 1.5 Mbps, isn’t fast enough to pull the data fluidly.

Save Things for Later with Your Favorite Service

TumbleKit’s coolest and most useful feature is support for Instapaper, Pocket, and Readability. You can sign in with any one of these save-for-later services and then send any post to the account for reading or viewing later. That is possible in the browser, but you do have to install an extension or bookmarklet. Having it right at hand makes things simpler.

Posting is Quick and Easy

Want to reblog something? Just click the same button you would below any post on Tumblr’s website, and it’ll work the same in this app. It even gives you the option to add some commentary before publishing the post.

Of course, if you want to jot down your own thoughts, you can make new posts from + in the top right corner of TumbleKit as well. The editing screen is full of all the tools you could ever need, from Markdown support with realtime previewing to image uploading, quotes, link posts, and even video embedding. There’s an option to send the post to Twitter when you’re finished, too.

Some Settings for the Advanced User

If some of the things you’ve heard so far haven’t met your superuser standards, don’t worry — there’s a fix in the app’s Preferences. You can change the default post type to something like video, automatically send posts to Twitter, change the font, add a double-click shortcut for liking or reblogging a post, and even add more than one account. It’s everything you could ask for, really.

Is It Worth $6.99?

In the end, the real question is whether or not this app is worth the price. If you use Tumblr a lot and love browsing and posting, then yes, it’s perfect for you. It’s even pretty good for pro blogging in Tumblr, with Markdown and scheduling support.

The only problem I see with TumbleKit is its lack of support for exploration. You can click a tag on a post and use that to look around Tumblr, but there’s really nothing more to it than that. You can’t look up a user or search for something, nor can you open a Tumblr profile in the app. That’s holding this app back, but I’d still say it’s worth $6.99 for what it offers now. There’s not another app out there that offers what TumbleKit already offers for Tumblr.

And hey, if you’re starting a new Tumblr blog, check out our sister site Web.AppStorm for a roundup of creative ThemeForest Tumblr themes that might inspire you to make the web part of your Tumblr blog look even nicer.

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

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

Best of Mac.AppStorm

Best of Android.AppStorm

Best of iPad.AppStorm

Best of Windows.AppStorm

Best of iPhone.AppStorm

Best of Web.AppStorm

Share Your Ideas

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

The Dashboard seems in many ways to be a ghost of OS X past, but the version in Mountain Lion has enough iOS-style tweaks to make it seem like Apple’s going to keep it around. There’s a number of ways you can still put Dashboard to use, even today, and the built-in widgets and Safari web clips can make it quite useful.

Back in 2011, Josh asked if you still use Dashboard, and just under half of our readers said they don’t use it. I’d figure less of us use it today in 2013, but was curious to see.

So: do you still use Dashboard? If so, what widgets do you still use? I’m still using it for the Stocks and weather widgets, as well as Safari web clips myself.

iCloud promises much. Apple build the service not only to store your content, but to ensure that content is available on whatever device you’re using at the time. It gives you an easy way to keep app settings and the documents you’re using synced between your devices using the same apps, but since iCloud syncs files specifically for each app, it makes it hard to use documents in other apps.

This can be frustrating to experienced users used to moving between apps for different elements of their work. Here, the simplicity of iCloud can frustrate more experienced users by hiding some of the complexity of cloud storage. Some apps allow ways to move files out of iCloud and to your local device, but it would be nice to be able to do this from Finder directly. Plain Cloud is a simple and free app that promises simple access to your iCloud in Finder. Let’s see if this is the solution we need to solve iCloud’s complexity.

Installing and Using Plain Cloud

Plain Cloud is a simple app that shows you all of your iCloud files from all of your apps, so you can easily open them in any app of your choice. It’s actually just providing easy access to the iCloud information already on your computer.

When you turn on Documents and Settings Syncing in the System Preferences for iCloud on your Mac, the data from iCloud is stored locally on your computer. Your Mac keeps the files and data in a folder under your home directory at ~/Library/Mobile Documents/. The files aren’t apparent in Finder by default, but if you open Finder, click the Go menu and then select Go to Folder and enter ~/Library/Mobile Documents/, you can see the data for each of your iCloud enabled apps. The names of the folders can be a bit obscure, but the iCloud data is here.

What Plain Cloud does, then, is makes this data easy to access and understand, in a way that seems a bit more iCloud style than searching through obscure folders in Finder. It shows a list of all of your iCloud enabled apps, and the number of files they have saved in iCloud on your Mac.

The interface to Plain Cloud is simple, but effective. You’ll find all of the apps that can support iCloud (including built-in OS X apps), even if they don’t have any files stored in iCloud. You can then click on the app’s name to open its files in Finder. Do note that some of the files may not be ones you’ll be able to easily use, such as settings files that are being synced by iCloud, but if you have, say, text files in your notes app that you want to open in another app, you’ll find them here easily.

If you want to copy or move a file from iCloud to another folder on your Mac, then you can do so by moving it from here. You Mac will provide a warning that doing so will remove it from iCloud and no longer allow it to sync to other devices. You can also move files from your Mac into the appropriate folder and they will then be available through iCloud on other applications. Right now there is really no way to share files between applications within iCloud other than manually moving them between folders in this manner, but this does give you a lot of ways that you can make iCloud files feel a bit more useful.

Conclusion

Overall, Plain Cloud is simplifying something you can already do on your Mac. It’s handy to have a quick interface to the folders, and since it’s free, it’s worth a download if you’d like more control over your iCloud experience.

There are limitations, though. It only works with Documents and Data items and you cannot see anything that is not synced over to your Mac. For instance, there are several folders in my iCloud that are only available on iOS devices and the folders are empty on my Mac. If a program stores nothing in documents and data, then it will not appear in this list.

iCloud makes working with documents across devices easier, but can be frustrating when you want to work outside of the limitation. Plain Cloud eases the access to the files on your computer and can help with this frustrating. Now Plain Cloud only lets you more easily access data on your computer and only Documents and Data in iCloud. This application is a nice start, but I’d like to see more functionality added to work better with Photo Stream and other iCloud data. But for that, we might have to wait for Apple to open up iCloud a bit more.

Macworld has always been a great place to network with your favorite app developers. There were even times when apple attended the conference and announced its own products. Now that those days have come and gone, it’s important to focus on the smaller companies, like Smile Software.

While at Macworld 2013, I spoke with Greg Scown and Jean MacDonald about the company’s history and latest developments. It’s the perfect follow-up to our previous interview with the company.

How has Macworld been for your company this year?

It’s been good. It’s busy at our booth and that’s what we really care about. We’re happy with the event this year from that point of view. I haven’t had much time to go around and look at the floor, but they’ve changed things up a lot since last year. The conference has definitely shrank a lot since Apple was here, but it’s still going strong for us.

The Mac App Store has become the standard for software distribution on the Mac. Why does Smile not use it to sell TextExpander 4?

We like the Mac App Store and we participate in it, but we also have to live within the rules that Apple has for it. As you know, Apple introduced the requirement of “sandboxing” one’s app in order to have it approved in the Mac App Store. We spoke with the folks who are involved in that and worked with them, but it was determined at the time that TextExpander was a key-logger. (It reads every keystroke, but does not retain them all. In fact, it only retains the last 15–30 keystrokes, depending on the circumstances.) Since it is easy to create a malicious type of keylogger, Apple has decided that they will allow no such apps into the store. It’s good because they’re protecting users.

I respect Apple’s opinion about what they choose to allow and not allow into the store. At the same time, I’m grateful that they introduced the Apple ID system for developers. With that, we can sign our apps with an identity that’s provided by Apple and is trusted by Gatekeeper. So, when you install our non-Mac App Store TextExpander app, the system knows that it comes from a trusted vendor and allows you to install it without complaint. I think they made a good accommodation there.

PDFpen and DiscLabel are on the Mac App Store and we expect them to remain there. PDFpen is sandboxed as of version 5.9. It took some work, but it’s done now, and future updates will be easier.

How has not selling TextExpander 4 on the Mac App Store impacted business?

Interestingly, we have still been allowed to sell TextExpander 3 on the Mac App Store. We even upgrade those users to version 4 once they’re ready or when they so desire it.

So why are you keeping TextExpander 3 in the Mac App Store for now?

I don’t know why TextExpander 3.4.2 is still on the Mac App Store. Apple doesn’t pull stuff and it’s still grandfathered, until the day they decide to remove it. There will come a time when they say they will only carry sandboxed apps in the Mac App Store and when that happens, it will inevitably be removed.

And did you submit version 4?

No. We had already worked with people at Apple and we knew that it would be rejected out of hand. There’s no point in antagonizing Apple and we felt that’s what such a move would do.

If a new developer asked you which would be the best way to distribute his creations, what would you recommend and why?

I would say to distribute through as many venues as one can manage. You certainly are wise to have a distribution mechanism that is under your own control because at least you can satisfy your customers in the event of some unforeseen circumstance. But I would certainly also encourage them to put their app on the App Store. It’s convenient for end users and the developer can be fortunate enough to get featured.

What are the good and bad things about each method of distribution?

Well, the App Store is convenient, it’s right in the dock, it’s trusted by users, and updating is integrated well into it. However, we use Sparkle to provide users with an automatic updating mechanism, which makes updates not an issue with our apps. But the one-spot “update all my apps” feature is nice. It’s simple and users like it.

One of the challenges of the App Store are that reviews take time. You can be well tested and ready, but end up waiting half a month for your app to be published. Another issue is that the cut is high: Apple takes 30%, which is something you wouldn’t have to pay if you published the app yourself. Of course, the argument for the App Store is that an affiliate fee can be 20–30%, so in a way you’re paying Apple for both hosting the app and promoting it.

The upsides of direct distribution are that we’re in control of it, so we know we can distribute a release to our customers right when it’s ready. If we’re adding something of value, at least they don’t have to wait for it. Overall, we control the experience. While the App Store has a very nice experience, there are some things that we can do which you cannot do on Apple’s venue. We can provide users with information about updates in a way that we prefer and we can emphasize something. You can’t even bold things on the App Store descriptions, which makes sense because developers could easily abuse it, but it is a frustrating limitation.

As developers, we’re quite confident in our ability to provide information for our users in a well-designed form. It’s a trade-off. We can balance things better on our website than we can with the App Store. Everybody is different though.

While Smile is centered on Mac apps, it does have some interest in iOS. If Apple agreed to add any feature you requested to iOS, what would you want to see?

Greg Scown: I would love to see core event filtering on iOS. That would allow us to develop TextExpander for the platform. Our customers would really appreciate this kind of an experience on an iOS device because typing is much more awkward than on a Mac. The problem with the built-in keyboard shortcut feature right now is that the interface to manage the shortcuts is very flat. You can really only have a few of them, they can’t be multi-lined, and they can’t have intelligence, so anything like TextExpander is impossible.

Jean MacDonald: I want developers to be able to respond to reviews on the App Store. Right now, a good half of the reviews on almost all apps are complaining about something that’s wrong with the app. The problem is, the users don’t know that the feature is there sometimes. We, as developers, are not given the ability to moderate any comments. The only thing we can do is report it, but even then it must be libelist or very harsh.

It would help people if we could speak with them. It would be good for us as developers to talk to the users, but mainly it’s about helping them out with their problems. Even though they can get in contact with us using our website, it’s more likely that they will leave us a lower-star review complaining about something.

Somebody made a suggestion that when a user submits feedback for an app, there would be a checkbox that says “Allow the developer to respond.” That would be perfect. Then, of course, the user could choose not to let the developer respond, and that’s perfect for those who just like to rant.

How do you get inspiration for new features on your apps?

It depends. It’s a little bit of what’s possible, what people want, and how much pain can we take in terms of trying to get something done. With updates, we take a look at a chunk of the interface on a product we have and say “Gosh, do you think we could orient this in a way that’s better for users?” We don’t have pitchforks and torches saying “This is so hard and we need to change this.” But we know that if we make this better it will make the experience better for our users, and for us — we use the product all the time. That particular one came out of “we can do better”.

Another one is a realization. Sometimes we’ll say “Wow, we’ve been asked about this for so long and we’ve finally found a workable way to do it.” Then there’s the “People have been asking us this for so long and there’s no excuse for us not to do it, so we’ll take the time now to get it done.” We have a prioritized list of what our customers ask us for, alongside a list of where we’d like to see the product go. You can’t do all one and all the other; you have to blend the two in order to be successful.

As an example, we do get a fair number of requests for Japanese optical character recognition in PDFpen. It’s not surprising, but it does have a couple of challenges. For one, the licensing on the character recognition is more expensive than Roman language. We might have to make a Japanese version, which makes things more complicated. The other thing is that Japanese text can be columnar and single-letter columnar text is not something that’s PDFpen’s forte. We could spend some time and become a lot better at that, but it’s a very limited item to spend that amount of time on. That’s a case where the user requests are high and the chance of fulfilling it are low.

While we’re on inspiration and stuff, what caused you to start Smile?

Historically, Philip and I (Greg) were independently working on Mac software. I shipped a piece of software called PageSender which is fax software and I was exhibiting that at Macworld in 2004 when I met Philip. The reason I built PageSender was that I was living abroad and didn’t really like the way eFax had worked — it just didn’t fit my needs. Instead of using something I didn’t like, I built my own solution to the problem and after a while, I thought I must not be the only person who needs this.

So I released PageSender to the public and immediately people said “that’s great, now make it drive my modem and get fax from my computer.” It wasn’t really my plan to get in that area. I thought it was more printer dialog, but that’s not where it went. As soon as I got fax modem sending, they wanted fax modem receiving. By the time I met Philip, the list of requests was pretty long and it was clear that I would be working on PageSender for the next year or two just to get through another major version with at least a portion of what customers wanted. Unfortunately, I also had another idea and I really wanted to work on that.

Then Philip came and met me at Macworld and we talked a bit about partnering. Philip was excited about my idea, which ultimately became DiscLabel. Over a period of three months of insanity, we wrote it, shipped it, and released it at Macworld New York. Our drive for that was to build a very specific product. I wasn’t a huge disc maker or anything, but I watched people using Microsoft Word to create their disc labels and it aggravated me, so I made something better.

It’s a good thing that I met Philip when I did because there’s no way I could have released DiscLabel when I did, but I didn’t know that at the time. Also, meeting him taught me that there was no way I could build everything on my own. I needed expertise in graphics, which is what he had. The end combination was very good.

In 2006, we acquired Peter Maurer’s tool TextPander, which we renamed TextExpander and made one of our main products. Maurer created the little utility with a lot of potential, but he was really busy so we thought we’d ask him about acquiring it. It’s significantly evolved since 2006 and Peter is still a good friend of ours. That’s the basic history of our company.

Thanks to the Smile Software Team!

Many thanks to Greg Scown and Jean MacDonald for taking the time at Macworld for some quick questions with us. I hope you enjoyed the interview.

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