Category: Mac

If you’re looking for a great new way to take notes on your Mac, there’s a new app you might want to check into: Noted. Our own Stef Gonzaga recently found it to be a simple but powerful note-taking application in her recent review of Noted. With a touch of Things’ design, bright icons, and Markdown support, it sure looks nice.

There’s so many notes apps, it’s terribly hard to choose between them. That’s why it was interesting to get a chance to talk to Allen, the developer behind Noted. Stay with us after the break to learn more about the inspiration behind Noted and what’s next for the app!

Allen from BlankDesk

The notes app space is incredibly crowded, with free and paid apps that are popular enough that they’ve become household names. Why’d you decide to make a notes app?

We are big fans of Evernote and Notational Velocity. In the past few years, we have been using these two applications. We love the simple philosophy of NV as well as the powerful features of Evernote. We have been trying to find a product that combined with the simplicity and functionality, but could not find a perfect one. Then we decided to build the application by ourselves.

Is there a story behind Noted’s cute panda icon?

We want make an easy to remember and identify icon for Noted. There are a lot of note taking apps using a notebook with a pen as logos. In order to make Noted’s icon special, we had tried a lot of designs and eventually decided to use this icon combined a notebook and a panda. So when I tell people about Noted, I could say: “Look, the panda face notebook is Noted!”.

iCloud sync has seemed to be a mixed bag for developers, with some apps working great with it and others seeming to have trouble. How has developing with iCloud been for you?

Syncing is a challenging work no matter what solution we took. We did have some problems during the development of iCloud sync. For instance, strange problems often occurs when we try to using CoreData with iCloud sync. Later on, we had tested the iCloud sync for over a month and decided to use Document sync instead of CoreData in the end. We are very happy that Noted’s iCloud syncing is now stable.

Many other notes apps are designed just to have you search for any notes you need, while Noted has strong organization built in. Why do you think this is important?

Well, in my opinion, organization and search function can complement each other, just like the left hand and right hand. Some people are right-handed while others are left-handed. So my complete solution has both organization and search function.

Most markdown notes apps are aimed at text-only, where Noted allows for attachments, too. Why did you add attachments to Noted, and does this affect its speed versus a text-only notes app?

Noted did not support attachments in the very beginning, but we found attachments is a “good to have” feature during alpha testing. They’re especially useful when taking research notes, as some images, PDFs, and even videos may need to be added. There is not a strong connection between attachments and markdown, but they’re still very useful.

Why’d you go with color icons instead of the more common monochrome ones you tend to see in Mac apps these days?

The use of color scheme is mainly due to the usability considerations. It will be very easy to recognise different notebooks with different colors. Between design trend and usability, we prefer the latter, so we went with color icons.

Hello, Noted!

What’s the most unique feature in Noted that we’d be likely to miss?

As mentioned in the first question, note-taking app space is crowded with various features. What’s unique in Noted is not providing more new features but keep a good balance between simple and powerful, which is the most challenging part in the whole project. We plan to add import, export, tags, password protection and full-text search feature in the following updates, and we will still keep it simple.

What Macs and Mac apps do you use in your daily work?

Hardware: Aa 21.5-inch iMac and a 13-inch MacBook Air.

Apps: Photoshop, XCode, Byword, Things, Espresso, Chrome, MindNode Pro, GitHub, Transmit, Alfred, Noted, and more.

It all started here…

What notes app did you use on your Mac before you made Noted?

Diigo Quick Note, Apple Notes, Evernote, Notational Velocity.

Your website mentions that you make simple apps, but you only have one app for sell right now. Any chance you could share some info about the next apps you’re working on?

In 2013, we plan to release 2-3 apps. Noted for iOS is under development right now. Also, we are planning to do an app for bloggers in the near future.

Thanks, Allen!

We’d like to say a special Thank You! to Allen for taking the time to do this interview with us. It’s always neat hearing how developers build their apps, and the inspiration behind them.

Do you have a developer you’d love to have us interview? Let us know, and we’ll see if we can line it up!

In an earlier Mactuts+ article, “Picking Passwords: Pitfalls, Practicalities and Protection”, we examined the requirements and problems of modern passwords and why they are hard for humans to remember but easy for computers to crack. We also touched on how we can manage this conundrum. In this article, we will have our cake and eat it; we will use complex, secure and unique passwords for everything. All of those passwords will confirm the specific requirements and rulesets of each service – even if that means that the criteria differs between services. And we will remember just one secure password to do this.

Head over to Mactuts+ and read more!

Having trouble finding the right app for the job? Or are you having trouble getting your favorite app to work the way you want?

The world of apps can be rather confusing. There’s dozens of similar apps that make it tough to decide which one is really best, and then there’s things that seem impossible to do with any app out there. We’re trying to help with our reviews and app comparisons articles, but we just might be missing that one category where you need more info.

That’s why we’re restarting our Ask the Editor series. If you’ve got questions about the best app for the job, or want to find an app for a specific purpose, fill out the form below, and we’ll find the best answers and round them up in an article next week. Or, if you just have an app you want more info about, or some ideas about things you’d find useful for us to write about, send them in, too!

We’re looking forward to seeing what answers we’ll have in our Ask the Editor post next week!

Online Form – AppStorm > Ask The Editor

In our modern interconnected world we are growing used to the idea of information in the cloud and access to our stuff from any device, be it a smartphone, a desktop, laptop or tablet. Though it is easy to forget that this is a relatively recent development, a whole industry of “Getting Things Done”, or GTD, has emerged.

An innovative company, 6Wunderkinder, produced what was perhaps the first OS X to-do list app that allowed you to synchronise information wirelessly between your Mac, iPhone and the then newly-launched iPad. That was Wunderlist. Now they’re back with Wunderlist 2 but the landscape has changed. How has Wunderlist faired?

History

Back in the heady days of OS X Snow Leopard (2009-2010), there was no Apple Reminders app, there was no iCloud synchronisation and though there was MobileMe — for cross-device syncing of information — it was only good for notes, calendar and contacts.

As little as three years ago, we were not routinely synchronising our tasks data — wirelessly — across devices, GTD apps could be expensive and our digital hub was the Mac not the cloud.

With Wunderlist, 6Wunderkinder came along and shook up the GTD category with an app that let you create to-dos on your Mac, iOS device, and more, and keep them in sync with the cloud. It was something seldom seen in competing apps, and quickly caught on.

Development

6Wunderkinder, the developers behind Wunderlist, had imagined a tool, a product that would reinvent project management. Knowing that the development would take a long time, they introduced a task-list manager — Wunderlist — to demonstrate their capabilities and give an idea of what their project management tool could be.

Wunderlist itself has, to date, been downloaded in excess of 5.5 million times and 6Wunderkinder claims it has almost three million users creating more than 100 million tasks in less than two years. This is a phenomenal achievement.

Meanwhile, work continued behind the scenes on the project management tool: Wunderkit a tool to merge business and personal projects allowing tasks, notes, comment and collaboration. For one reason or another, crystallising their thoughts into code was not, by their own admission, straight forward and Wunderkit never enjoyed the wildfire success of Wunderlist.

Despite visits back the the drawing board, 6Wunderkinder realised that the development of the two products was unrealistic.

Wunderlist was already providing management of business and personal projects for many users, so 6Wunderkinder took the brave decision to cease development of Wunderkit and instead concentrate on a new version of Wunderlist, completely rewritten with the experience of the Wunderkit project.

Wunderlist 2

That brings us to today, with the new version of Wunderlist that brings much of Wunderkit’s goodness to the original popular Wunderlist. The new app is a fully native Mac app, unlike the original version, and you can install it directly from the Mac App Store, or download it from their site.

If you’re new to Wunderlist, you should check out our older reviews of the previous versions in December 2010 and September 2011. Once you’re up to speed, here’s what’s new and exciting about Wunderlist 2.

It’s all About You

6Wunderkinder has drawn on its experience in developing the (now defunct) Wunderkit team management tool and evolved Wunderlist into a to-do manager that is social in enabling the easy sharing of lists with friends. If you desire, you can connect to your Facebook account.

Activity Centre

The Activity Centre is located in the middle of the top bar of the app. This helps you to keep track of your Wunderlist notifications.

If someone adds you to a list, or if they add or complete a task, you will find the notification here.

Activity Centre notifies you when collaborators perform actions.

Recurring Items

Some things that we do we don’t just do the once. Some times we needed to be reminded of something on a regular basis – such as invoicing customers, perhaps.

Wunderlist 2 adds the ability to set recurring tasks within any list. Tasks must be set individually to recur and you can choose daily, weekly, monthly, annually or a custom period.

The custom period takes the form of every n time period, which does not afford as much flexibility as the custom recurrence function in iCal, for example, which would allow you to specify the second Wednesday of every month.

Setting up recurring tasks. It doesn’t have quite the same flexibility as iCal.

Subtasks

Wunderlist 2 introduces subtasks – tasks within a task. This effectively gives three levels in lists, tasks and subtasks. Tasks containing subtasks are indicated by a map pin symbol.

This allows for even more details if there are a number of elements to a particular task.

Alternatively, it could be argued that if a task requires subtasks then it becomes a list in its own right and therefore only two levels — lists and tasks — are required.

Subtasks. These are tasks within an individual task within a list.

Reminders

Wunderlist 2 enables you to set a specific date and time to be reminded of any individual task. Selecting the time and date is done easily enough but every tasks for which you want a reminder must be set individually.

Setting a reminder. Be reminded of the task on a specific date and time.

Notes

A new addition to Wunderlist 2, Notes allows you to detail more information about any given task.

Notes can be detached from the main Wunderlist 2 window and moved, separately, around the screen. It is even possible to select a different task and open a new note for that task. Any notes that you detach will remain on your screen until such time that you close them or close the Wunderlist 2 application.

Adding notes to your task. Notes can be detached and moved around your screen.

Smart Lists

Smart lists are useful, separate lists that appear at the top of your list of lists. Any task to which you assign a star is given a red ribbon and ascends to the top of its list.

There is a smart list for starred tasks and, by clicking on this smart list, you are shown all (and only) starred items from across all of your lists. This is useful if you want a quick overview of all the tasks that you have prioritised.

There is another smart list for all tasks that are due today. The list is simply marked “Today” and lists all tasks, including those that are starred, for a quick overview of what is immediately due. It also lists, in red, any tasks that were due before today!

Smart lists. A smart feature that allows a quick glance at tasks due today and/or prioritised tasks.

Collaborate and Share Tasks With Friends

Sharing lists with others was already possible in Wunderlist. In Wunderlist 2, the functionality remains with the addition connecting Wunderlist to Facebook ostensibly to share lists with your friends.

Sharing a list with a friend.

Email Reminders

Wunderlist 2 will send polite emails to remind you of certain tasks… if you want it to. A reminder email is the sort of thing that helps some people, but if that’s not for you then the app can be configured to suppress the emails to avoid email overload.

If it is your preference, the Wunderlist icon in the dock can display a badge so that you can keep an eye on the number of tasks due to be completed.

What’s Uncool?

There’s a few things that aren’t quite so awesome in Wunderlist 2. Aside from some sync and update issues, there’s a number of little things that can make it not as usable as we’d like. Here’s some of them:

• The “Welcome to Wunderlist 2” screen is useful in that it introduces you to the new features of version two, but the gently pulsating semi-transparent circles are all too easily missed before clicking continue.
• The only way to move the Welcome window around the screen is to click and hold the bar at the bottom of the window which is not a convention in OS X. This is an unnecessary designer’s indulgence at odds not just with OS X but with the rest of the Wunderlist 2 app.
• Subtasks can be awkward to deal with. Be aware of the rubbish bin icon – clicking on that deletes not just a subtask but the original task as well.
• Once you start scheduling recurring reminders or a due date, the task is appended with an icon and a date. You’ll end up needing to use a larger window to show your full tasks
• If you add people to collaborate from your address book, you can’t add them via their name, as Wunderlist will crash if you do so. You’ll need to enter their email instead.
• An old feature of Wunderlist, the ability to print a list of tasks — useful to carry around with you and tick off when done — has inexplicably been removed from Wunderlist 2.

Conclusion

The original incarnation of Wunderlist shook up the GTD landscape in that the application worked not only across Macs and iOS devices, but also on other platforms including Windows, Android and Linux. Oh, and it was free. And free of advertising. It was, at the time, incredible.

The landscape has changed, however, as Apple now bundles its Reminders app that syncs across iCloud – a solution that will remain the default for many. That said, Wunderlist 2 has the advantage of providing cross-platform synchronisation of tasks not only to iOS and OS X devices, but to non-Apple devices including Android, Windows and a web-browser based interface. This gives Wunderlist 2 a clear advantage over Apple’s bundled Reminders App, especially for people who are required to use PCs as well as Macs.

With this update, 6Wunderkinder has tried to improve on a near-perfect app. Whilst the addition of subtasks is questionable, recurring tasks is welcomed. Sometimes the beauty of an app is its simplicity; less is always more.

Want to start the year out on a productive note? We’re already almost a full month into 2013, but it’s never too late to get more productive. The App Store has an official Get Stuff Done Sale this week, starting with apps that help you prioritize what needs to be done. Unlike other app deals, where there’s a few apps that we like and a number we’re not too terribly excited about, this one is full of apps that we’re very excited about and really use in our own daily work. Most of them don’t go on sale often (or ever), so this is a great chance to pick up these apps for 50% off.

The sale includes such great apps as:

• Clear
• Things 2
• 2Do
• Due
• TaskPaper
• The Hit List

If you’re needing a new productivity app, and perhaps have been eying Things or Clear for some time, now’s the time to go pick up a copy on the cheap! We’ll be excited to see what else goes on sale over the next two weeks with the Organize and Utilize specials.

It’s hard to consider yourself a true Mac power user until you’ve got a project management or todo list app that can handle anything you throw at it. Historically, that’s meant picking between a few big-name tools like Things or OmniFocus, and while those are undoubtably great options, I never stopped my search for something that could fit my workflow just a little bit better.

Enter Doit.im – a Getting Things Done app that promises a beautiful interface and incredible cross-platform compatibility. But wide compatibility often comes at the expense of the end user experience. Does Doit.im offer an experience on-par with the best or has it’s broad focus relegated it becoming a jack of all trades, and master of none? Read on to find out.

User Experience and Design

The first thing I noticed about Doit.im was it’s icon, which actually grabbed my attention in the Mac App Store. Without a doubt, its bright blue color and slight sparkle make it stand out from the crowd. Unfortunately, once downloaded, the icon actually something closer to nightmarish.

It’s rounded edges look like they’d be better placed on iOS and it was bigger than everything else in my dock. Using an iOS icon on a Mac just doesn’t work and it’s especially bad when you consider it’s downright awkward sizing. Moreover, due to it’s size and shape, badge notifications end up looking like a last-minute hack.

You’re probably wondering why any of this matters, and the answer is simple; when up against such fierce competition, the little things count. If you do decide to use Doit.im, do yourself a favor and replace the icon. So, with my complaints, about the icon aside, and with somewhat lowered expectations, I was ready to see what Doit.im had in store.

The main interface was a pleasant surprise.

Upon first opening the app I was shocked to see what a beautiful interface it really had. As a new entrant into the Mac application space, the developers of Doit.im were able to take full advantages of many of the newer design elements in OS X. Where I was expecting little more than an Adobe Air app, Doit.im actually proved to be one of the best user experiences for a web service ported to the Mac that I’ve seen in awhile.

Everything feels “right” with design touches taken from it’s best-of-breed competitors. From spacing to scrolling, your tasks will look beautiful just sitting there in the inbox. In terms of user interface, Doit.im is really just like any other Getting Things Done app, if you’d used one, you’ve basically used them all. While it’s far more complicated than a simple todo list, if you take some time to get used to the GTD way of life, you should feel right at home. In short, Doit.im looks and feels like a more refined version of Things with all the high-end trimmings you’d expect from a native Mac app.

Functionality

If there’s something you want to do with GTD, chances are, Doit.im does it, and exceptionally well, at that. The app is divided into four groupings: Collect, Focus, Projects, and Contexts. Again, any experienced GTD user will feel right at home here, and each group works as expected. Collect acts as your Inbox for tasks waiting to be sorted down by date (Focus), Projects, or Contexts.

In my daily use, I’ve found that Projects work the best for long term goals, like a home renovation or anything involving a long process, whereas Contexts provides a nice way for to view my tasks at a specific place like work or the bank. Focus sorts tasks into either Today, Tomorrow, Someday, or Waiting folders; each working as expected. When you schedule a task further in advance, though, there’s no way to view it in Focus mode.

The window for adding a task.

It should be noted that these options for organization aren’t mutually exclusive. For example, you can have a task in a Project, with a Context, and with a Focus all at the same time. It simply depends on how organized and specific you’d like to get. There’s also a “Smart Add” window which can be brought up system-wide which allows you to quickly enter a task while still being able to apply the aforementioned sorting options.

Other functionality of note includes the ability to customize shortcuts for just about everything, arrange your inbox by Context, Priority, or Deadline, and an “Add from clipboard” tool which works as expected, but annoyingly enough, doesn’t give you any confirmation that your task has been added, often leading to quite a few duplicates.

Competition and Conclusion

As I mentioned before, Doit.im has its fair share of competition. If you’re just looking for something to handle simple todo list management, chances are this is overkill; I’d suggest looking at tools like the built-in Reminders app or Cheddar. If you’re ready to commit to the full GTD system, though, Doit.im can easily handle it’s own against OmniFocus or Things.

While it doesn’t quite have the community support of those two, it more than handily makes up for that in features, interface, and value. On that note, Doit.im is priced like a subscription service rather than a standalone app, with a Pro plan (required to use the Mac app) priced at $20 a year or $2 /month. Compared to $140 for all the OmniFocus applications or $80 for full suite of Things applications, Doit.im is a winner on price, hands down.

Finally, it’s worth mentioning that all data from the app is being stored on Doit.im’s servers in Mainland China, which may be a turnoff to some who want to maintain control over access to their data. If you’re ok with that, then everything else about the app makes it definitely a solid contender to the Mac GTD wars.

It has been a while since we reviewed Pear Note and several readers have requested we take another look at the app. When we looked at Pear Note back in 2010 it was a 1.x version, but is now into version 3. Pear Note is not your all around note taking app, but for certain note taking uses it’s the best option available.

Read on to find out how this note taker has evolved and if it can be useful for your note taking needs.

What Pear Note Is and Is Not

Let’s actually start with what Pear Note is not. Pear Note is not a note taking / information manager app. It does not have an integrated file system and is probably not going to get the job done as an information manager / storage app like Evernote or the DEVONthink apps. Using Pear Note as a quick way to get some thoughts down is also probably not the best use of its strengths—apps like NValt or NotesTab Pro are probably better for that.

However, in certain situations Pear Note can be a go-to app. Any setting where a speaker is present and it is very important that you take accurate notes is when you should use Pear Note. So it’s great for meetings, lectures, and presentations. It also handy for taking notes on imported audio or video files.

New Goodies

One thing users undoubtedly wanted to be improved in Pear Note 1.x was the design and UI. Pear Note 2.x delivered on this front completely revamping the UI and changing the design to look more like an OS X app.

A look at Pear Note’s new interface with lecture slides in a separate window.

3.x brings Pear Note up to speed with the latest versions of OS X (Lion and Mountain Lion). Because Pear Note does not store notes in a proprietary database, notes are simply files on the hard drive and useful document features like versions, autosave, and full screen mode are available.

Those of us who require an iOS version of any note taking app we use are in luck, Pear Note now has an iPad app. The iPad app includes the most essential features from the Mac App including audio recording, syncing text with audio, and rich text editing. The iPad app also syncs with the Mac app through Dropbox.

Features Dropped From the App

I found only one feature no longer available in Pear Note: the system wide search feature. In the past, Pear Note allowed users to search all of their notes from within the app. This feature had to be dropped due to sandboxing rules.

The lack of a system wide in-app search is not as big of a deal as it seems. Notes are indexed by Spotlight and so you can use a filtered search with Alfred to quickly find the note you are looking for.

Pear Note in Action

I recently used Pear Note in two situations — during a meeting and in conjunction with a Keynote presentation — and I am very impressed with the outcome.

Meeting Notes

So you have that important meeting and you need to capture everything that’s said. The problem is meetings rarely follow a structured path, people tend to talk fast and meeting notes often end up incoherent. With Pear Note this is not a problem; just start recording and keep up as best you can. When the meeting is over, go back over your notes and clean up the parts where your notes need fixing. I was pleasantly surprised at how accurately Pear Note synced my text notes with the audio. I was taking notes all over the place and adding bullet points out of order, but it kept up just fine.

Meetings notes with a trimmed down version of the interface.

Check out the Useful Fruit website for a demonstration of how the text syncing works

Slide Presentation

Powerpoint or Keynote presentations are easily imported into Pear Note, although you have to change the format to PDF first. The PDF can live in the same window as the text editor or it can have its own window. In the Keynote presentation I took notes on, all of the bullet transitions were retained in the PDF, making it easier to follow along and take notes.

Pear Note with slides in the same window. Bullet transitions are retained in the PDF.

Final Thoughts

Our readers seem to be split on reviews of note taking apps. Some of you think “enough already”, others want the search for the perfect note app to continue. I am beginning to think that just one note app may not be enough — maybe the goal should be to find the best note taking app for different situations. I realize this creates a problem for having all of your notes centralized, but it is something to think about.

Having said that, in my opinion Pear Note is the best app  for taking notes in meetings and presentations. What do you think? Is Pear Note the best note taker for meetings and presentations? How does (could) Pear Note fit in your workflow?

If you’ve been looking for a great way to keep up with all of your passwords on your Mac and your iPhone or iPod Touch, then PassLocker is a slick new app you should check out. It’s not as advanced as some of the more popular password apps, but then, if you don’t have hundreds of secure accounts to keep up with, it just might be what you’re needing. It’s slick, runs right from your Mac’s menubar, has AES 256-bit encryption, auto-fill, and can keep your passwords in sync between your Mac and your iPhone via iCloud. Sounds like quite the handy app.

PassLocker for Mac usually costs $4.99, while PassLocker for iPhone usually costs $1.99, but we’ve got 5 sets of PassLocker for Mac and iPhone to giveaway to our readers. This time, you’ll need to have an iPhone or iPod Touch as well as a Mac. Just leave a comment below and let us know what Mac and iPhone you have, and you’ll be entered in the contest. You can also share the giveaway on Facebook, Twitter, or App.net and share the link below for an extra bonus entry.

We’ll close the contest on Wednesday, January 30th, so hurry and get your entry in!

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

It’s really easy to get out of control with your menu bar apps. There are just so many cool apps out there that make it really hard to decide on just a few apps to use so that your status bar stays uncluttered. If I could, I would have my menu bar filled with dozens of handy utilities, but that’s clearly not an option.

That’s why I recently started up on the task of getting rid of as much clutter as I could in my menu bar. It wasn’t easy, but I managed to do it with a simple and free app called Broomstick that allows you to hide menu bar apps that you wouldn’t normally be able to. How about we get to it?

Dear Menu Bar Apps,

One of many…

I’ve been called out dozens of times by our readers when they see a screenshot of my menu bar and they see tons of app icons stacked up there in the corner of my screen. It’s not very attractive aesthetically to have them all cluttered up in there. It gets pretty nasty too, and it’s hard to find something that you’re looking for when you have another billion things in the way.

Icons

Recently I made it a task to clean things up a little. I started by trying to leave only the most crucial apps that I use in my menu bar. My goal was getting my items to less than 7, which leaves plenty of space for the menus of each app without getting my screen too untidy. But when I was closing up on the number of desired apps, I realized that there were a lot of them that I wasn’t able to hide through the usual ways. There just weren’t any settings for hiding them: if I wanted to run them, their menu bar icon had to be there. And then…

Broomstick

Broomstick

Broomstick works by letting you hide icons that would normally be un-hideable. Most apps have some sort of setting to turn off their menu bar components, but if they don’t then there’s not much you can do about it. One alternative is to hide those icons with an app called Bartender, but at $15 it might be a little too expensive of a solution if you’re only going to use it to hide icons that you don’t use.

Broomstick is free and it’s compatible with a big list of popular apps. It won’t kill the apps that it hides, it will only forbid them from getting access to your beloved menu bar. This way, you just have to tell it one time to hide them and it will remember to hide them forever, while still having them run in the background. You hide them once, and they stay like that until you tell Broomstick to show them again. That’s it.

Some examples of apps that I love but don’t have any use for in the menu bar are Dropbox and f.lux. You have as well an extensive list of apps to choose from, even Apple’s own Spotlight if you’d rather work with something like Alfred.

Broomstick Compatibility

Support

There are some things that aren’t supported yet in Broomstick, and that I really wish were. I’ve been using this new cross-platform messaging service called LINE as a replacement to other similar services like Whatsapp and Apple’s own Messages. The service is great because I can keep in touch with anyone who has an Android device right from my Mac. But unfortunately, the Mac app for it is not that great for a number of reasons that I won’t get to here. One of them is that its menu bar icon is pretty much useless, and there’s no way to remove it from the actual app, nor from Broomstick since it’s still not supported.

The developer of Broomstick is pretty cool about it and states that he has all the intentions to get Broomstick to be as compatible as he can, but it’s pretty hard when there’s so many requests. You can help him out by doing this.

What Should Be There and What Shouldn’t

End Result

Broomstick is amazing and all, but hiding app icons is not at all amazing. You still must choose what should be in your menu bar and what’s out. I found some items in my menu bar that I didn’t really get much use out of, even though they seem “critical”. For example: I only use Bowtie once in a while to disable Last.fm scrobbling when I’m listening to something embarassing or watching a video (don’t mess with my scrobblings, my library must remain clean). I realized it’s actually easier to bring up the settings of Bowtie and shut down scrobbling whenever I need to (once a week at most), than keeping the menu bar component of the app up all the time just “in case I need it”.

What works for you or what doesn’t is all up to you. Broomstick is no Bartender: it won’t help you organize your apps in folder-like stacks, it will only help you “hide” the ones that you normally wouldn’t be able to so that you can free up some space in your menu bar. Getting rid of the things that you don’t use is your job.

Building with blocks is in these days. Ever since the release of a certain little game, Minecraft, building structures on your computer screen has become a delightful and time-consuming pass time that, in all honesty, is addicting beyond belief.

Long before that game came into our lives, there were Legos; you remember Legos, don’t you? Today, we will review a rather obscure application known as the Lego Digital Designer. With plenty of bricks and pieces to play with, this official Lego application isn’t a game, LDD is only a create-your-own-lego-thing app. Does the app warrant a download, though? Let’s put the pieces together and find out! (Pun definitely intended.)

Lego Digital Designer Overview

A small sample of what you can build with LDD.

Released in 2004, Lego Digital Designer, or LDD, is a free application designed to let you create your own custom Lego models with virtual Lego bricks. Since then, the application has received a wide variety of updates like the ability to choose from every Lego piece imaginable and the power to create your own MINSTORMS and Technic robots.

LDD’s coolest feature used to be Design byMe, though. The Design byMe service gave you the ability to buy the real version of your creation. Unfortunately, Lego axed the service earlier last year. Having said that, Lego has promised that they will come up with a new way to do this in the future, so until then, one has to use the Pick a Brick service.

Lego Digital Designer Presentation

The app is simple enough for any age.

At first glance, LDD looks like a rather old application compared to some of the latest, more sleek-looking apps we are use to. Don’t let that discourage you. LDD has a very simple and easy-to-learn UI that’ll get you started from scratch (or from templates) in no time – don’t expect the bricks and pieces to have amazing graphics though, they don’t look like Lego’s recent video games at all, sadly.

Blocky graphics aside, LDD’s UI is divided in three simple areas: the upper header where all your tools are, the left-hand tabbed area where all your bricks and pieces are located, and the main center area where all the fun happens. This simple layout allows you to concentrate on building your masterpiece.

Designing with Lego Digital Designer

Lego shuttles are awesome.If you don’t particularly like one of the current models sold by Lego, build your own!

Once you build up your confidence with LDD, you will learn that designing with LDD is simple; albeit, not as intuitive or fun as a certain first-person video game, but robust and easy enough to be used by anyone.

The first thing most people will do is pick a brick; bricks can be rotated in all directions with your arrow keys and then placed anywhere on the canvas. When you get into it though, placing bricks on top of other bricks can sometimes be a little hard to do. This probably gets easier as you get use to designing models, but until then, you will have to play around with your brick in a 3D space to get the brick right where you want it, specially if they are darker in color.

Rotating the 3D space is very simple and not disorienting at all, so when you are building your models, getting the perfect angle is easy. It is good to note that there is no panning tool that you can use to, well, pan your view. This makes it tricky to focus on something you really want to work with. You can double right-click on a piece to center it on the canvas, though. Still, a panning tool would make life much easier.

Unfortunately, you can add custom backgrounds.

Once you have finished your first project, you have the option to put your creation on View mode. View mode places your 3D creation in a different background. You can cycle through backgrounds and then take a screenshot. These backgrounds aren’t very pretty; they look very low-res, but they do make the bricks stand out.

This mode is paramount to the LDD experience. Otherwise, how would you build your model again in real life?

As you work on your model, a third mode will become available. This mode is called the Building Guide mode. As you may imagine, the Building Guide mode creates a building guide (shocker, I know) of your model. This guide can be used when you receive your pieces. The guide is animated, so recreating your model would be a piece of cake. You can also save an HTML version of your guide. Pretty neat, right?

Note on Design byMe and LDD’s Relation

Lego’s Pick a Brick service is good, but not idea.

Although the Design byMe service is no longer available, it is possible to order bricks through the Pick a Brick service. That seems like a lot of hassle, don’t you think?

We know Lego has said that they are working on a revision of the service to make it better, but there should be a better, less-complicated way to buy the pieces you need to build your model. They could simply have a code generated by the application that you can then input into the Pick a Brick service and get all the bricks you need.

Not being able to currently do this, does take away from the overall experience of the application. While Pick a Brick is available, If you have the pieces needed to create your model laying around, why would you build your model in the computer in the first place?

The Verdict

Perfect for a family project that kids and parents can enjoy.

Lego has created a simple application that you can use to create just about anything you can think of. Even though there is no Design byMe service at the time, this can help those Lego enthusiast out there create something beautiful, and know exactly what they need to buy in order to assemble the real version at home. The app is free, too, so there is no reason why you shouldn’t give it a try.

Want more Lego fun? Then try out the Lego web app that we reviewed on our sister site Web.AppStorm recently!

I know there are Mac users out there who still have hurt feelings, even after all these months, over the most recent iTunes redesign. Let me tell you, you’re among friends here, and I want to help. While it’s hard to replace iTunes, especially if you have to sync any iOS devices with your Mac, you can find alternatives to lessen the iTunes sting.

Music player app Pinna works with your iTunes library so you won’t have to give up iTunes altogether, but it’s a far sight better looking and easier to use. Will it have what it takes to displace iTunes, at least for pumping out your jams?

Playing with Pinna

Pinna will have already grabbed all of your music from your iTunes library when you launch the app, so you should see your playlists displayed for you. If you’re missing some, like I seemed to be, they might be saved Genius playlists. Pinna doesn’t seem to snag those, but you can copy the tracks from a Genius playlist into a regular playlist if you want to get it into Pinna.

Add the music from your playlists to your play queue, in an iOS app-like interface

The easiest way to play your music is to click the Play icon when you hover over a playlist. All the songs in the playlist will be added to the play queue automatically. You can do this with an artist or an album, too, adding all the associated songs to the queue at once. You can also double-click on any individual song to get it to start playing.

Clicking the radio icon will bring up the Trending on Exfm tab. Here you can listen to the most popular music on Exfm or pick a specific genre. This will be updated periodically, so it serves as a great music discovery service right in your desktop music player.

Listen to what’s trending on Exfm to hear the latest popular tracks.

You can’t edit your playlists or really anything in Pinna, unfortunately. If you want to create a new playlist, add songs to an existing playlist, or just edit the information associated with a song, you’ll have to do that in iTunes. Pinna is pulling all of your music from your iTunes library, but it can’t update your library for you.

What you can do, though, is create a music queue. Though it’s not the same as a playlist, your music queue is saved when you close the app and will be there waiting when you reopen Pinna. You can add music to the queue by adding entire albums or dragging individual tracks from the Artists, Albums, and Songs tabs. You can even reorder the Pinna queue to get just the right mix.

Pinna can display album artwork, too.

Social Listening

Pinna scrobbles to Last.fm, which can be a dealbreaker for some people when it comes to third-party music apps. Not only will it let your followers know everything you’ve listened to, but it will keep your Now Playing status up-to-date, as well. If you put on a really embarrassing album, you can turn on Private Listening, so no one, not even your Last.fm followers, has to know.

If you have an Exfm account, you can log in to that, too. Exfm is a music discovery service, and if you’re signed in via Pinna, you can search for new music and favorite whatever you like. Anything that rubs you the right way will be added to your library so you can listen to it later.

Log into Exfm and Last.fm to make the most of Pinna.

Final Thoughts

With Pinna pulling from the iTunes library, I can hear readers asking why they’d want to use it in the first place. Well, it looks really cool. I know a lot of people are still smarting from the most recent iTunes facelift, and I certainly think there have been iTunes incarnations that were easier to use. I work at home on my own computer, so I’m a big fan of apps that do what I want them to do but get out of my way while they do it. iTunes is very much in my way, but simple-to-use Pinna is just so much easier when all I need to do is switch playlists or albums.

The Pinna miniplayer looks pretty sleek, and Pinna minimizes to just the album artwork when in the background.

Plus, with a support app you download from within Pinna, it will work with the Mac keyboard’s media player function keys. While I wish Pinna just worked, it promises the support app is teeny tiny and absolutely won’t get in the way of anything else, and it didn’t seem to. Third party media players that work with the media player function keys are really about as good as it gets for me, and while I admit I have a simple life and am a girl easily pleased, that’s still pretty great. Will Pinna replace iTunes completely? Absolutely not. But it’s certainly a great little music player that works as a nice complement to iTunes.

One of the many cool new features that we got with Mountain Lion was native integration from the OS to services like Twitter, Facebook, Vimeo and Flickr, as well as Apple’s own Messages and Airdrop. Haven’t checked them out? Try pulling up the Notification Center and check out those “Tweet” and “Post to Facebook” buttons, or right click anything inside the Finder and go to the “Share” submenu. Cool, huh?

Unfortunately, sharing to those services is kind of limited to a few places in the OS, like the ones that I mentioned. If you want to share something from your browser (if you don’t use Safari) or any other place, then you’re out of luck. Wouldn’t it be cool, then, to have an app that implemented these sharing dialogs system-wide? We’ve got it, and we’re checking it out today. It’s called Wrap.

Wrap

Wrap

Wrap is a fairly simple app and it takes about no time to explain, but the idea behind is great and I’ve found it immensely useful in the short time that I’ve been using it.

Wrap lives in your menu bar, always ready to pop up when you command it. When you do, you’ll find a small window that contains links for sharing content to services like Messages, Facebook, and a few more, as well as the latest item that you’ve copied to your clipboard (any kind of item, although we’ll get to this next).

Mail, Contacts & Calendar

In order to exploit the full potential of Wrap, you might want to set up your social network accounts in Mac OS, if you haven’t. You can do that under the “Mail, Contacts & Calendars” menu inside the System Preferences.

Supported Items

Wrap handles text and images primarily, although it works with pretty much any kind of file. If your most recent copied item is a string of text, it won’t be sent as a text message, but as a .txt attachment. This is useful when you’re sending over long pieces of content, but it’s a little weird when you’re only sharing a few words (like the name of an app that you want to share).

Clipping Text

I should point out, though, that clipping a combination of types of files (for example, both text and images) won’t work with Wrap. Links also only get treated as text, so if you want to share an interesting article to Twitter, Wrap won’t work for it as it will only give you the option to send it to that service.

If what you’re sharing is an image, Wrap will let you send it over to a few more services, and how your image gets sent depends on the service that you choose. Sharing text only works with Mail.app, Messages and Airdrop. If you’re sharing an image instead, you can send it over to those services as well as Facebook, Twitter, and Flickr. Videos work with Messages, Mail, Airdrop and Vimeo. Pretty much any other kind of file that you try to send will only work with Mail, Airdrop and Messages.

Services

In my time using Wrap I could never get the app to work with Mail properly, but everything else works pretty well, and most of the services even take advantage of Mac OS’s native integration of them.

Facebook

Facebook sharing, for example, will bring up the same sharing window that you get when you try to share something through the Notification Center. Your image will already be attached to your publication and you can tweak a few settings about it, like the privacy settings (who can see it), the album where it’ll get published, the location, and you can as well send it over with a caption.

Flickr

Twitter sharing works similarly, except here you’re limited to only sharing the image, your location, and the contents of the tweet, as well as mention some other users. Flickr and Vimeo sharing just as well use the native integration, letting you share your images and videos with a title, description, tags, and the “access” level (privacy).

Messages and Airdrop sharing are pretty simple. You just have to select the user or computer that you’d like to share with, and that’s it.

Why Use It?

Droplr

I’ve used apps like Droplr in the past to quickly upload things and share them with people, but I believe Wrap might be a step above those kinds of apps if you intend to use it this way. Sure, Droplr lets you upload any kind of file that you’d like for easy sharing, but if your content is a picture or a long string of text, Wrap is a lot more direct.

With Wrap, instead of having to upload your content and then go running to your mail or social network account to share your generated link, you can just directly post it to the service of your choosing, saving yourself a step.

Conclusion

Wrap is a super simple way to share whatever it is that you want directly to the service of your liking. Having it work with the clipboard isn’t really as convenient as having it work as a drag-and-drop, but it gets the job done and that’s just a minor detail.

If you’re only going to be sharing content from Finder, then you don’t really need this app as what it does is already built in there (by right-clicking any item and going to the “Share” menu). All this app does is implement those same dialogs in a more universal environment, outside of Finder. This way, you can share content from anywhere, like your browser or your RSS app.

What do you think about it? Do you use the Mac’s system integration with external services often? Would you use an app like this? Let us know!

You’re a computer user, which means you likely are fairly deft at the keyboard. You even made it to this site to read app reviews by inputting a few keystrokes. Perhaps, though, you feel like you’re a slow typist, or you know a “hunt and peck” user who prefers their indexes to the other four fingers. I have an app for you (or your friend).

I first came upon Type Fu because I’m trying to broaden my typing horizons by learning the Colemak keyboard layout. Whatever the case, Type Fu can help you tickle the chiclets with a bit more gusto.

Channel your Inner Stenographer

Kids live for trophies, and I was no different. So when I brandished my Little League trophy for 3rd place in the local tournament like it was the end all, be all trophy to rule them all, my mom dug into the closet to find a trophy of her own: 3rd place in the state in typing speed. Later, after I had passed Computer Skills 1 in middle school, I would challenge my mother to a race on my Mavis Beacon software. I was sure my words-per-minute (wpm) rate in the mid-thirties was miles ahead of anything an old-timer could put forth.

Boy, was I wrong. My outcome: 33 wpm with 5 errors. My mother’s: 75 wpm with 3 errors. I was flabbergasted. 75 words. per. minute. How in world is that possible, my middle-school self thought. How?

Now that I’m a computer-literate adult with thousands of hours of Internet surfing under my belt, I can thankfully crank out a respectable speed, closer to the upper-60s in words per minute. It could be faster, but the QWERTY keyboard was never built for speed anyway. It makes your fingers reach farther than they should to access some common letters in an attempt to slow the user down so the typewriter can keep up. Or at least that’s what it was meant to do. In reality it strains your hands, especially if you spend a lot of time behind a screen.

Type Fu provides a helpful keyboard map that helps you know what finger to use for a specific key.

Ease your (finger) Tension

Enter Type Fu. There are better keyboarding layouts in the world; you may have heard of Dvorak or Colemak, two layouts designed to increase typing speed and decrease hand stress. Computers are smarter than typewriters, and thankfully the keyboard layout can be swapped with a trip to your personal settings. The Dvorak layout is even installed by default in OS X and some other operating systems. It’s also a selection option in Type Fu, an app designed to help you learn new layouts with the tried and true process of practicing.

The list of keyboard layouts supported by Type Fu consist of QWERTY, Dvorak, Colemak, Workman, Qwertz, Azerty, and Bepo. If you haven’t heard of some of those, you’re not alone; I had to look up a few of them. They are all English layouts so if you’re interested in using Type Fu to learn the keys of a foreign keyboard, you will currently need to look elsewhere.

When you type an incorrect letter, the letter will be highlighted in red. Correct letters become grayed out as you pass them.

Using the App

When you open Type Fu, you’ll instantly be greeted with a keyboard, a hovering set of hands designed to show you what fingers to use, and some words to type. If any of this setup doesn’t meet your feng shui, you’ll be happy to know that it is all customizable. For example, you can test your memory by not having the keyboard layout map on the screen while you type.

Additionally, Type Fu gives you a few options about what you want to type. There are lessons designed purely around letter practice for the layout or you can choose to write famous quotes or proverbs for some added fun. The breakdown of the different lesson types is as follows:

• Letters: 23 difficulty levels*, “infinite” exercises
• Numbers: 9 difficulty levels, “infinite” exercises
• Words: 10 difficulty levels, infinite exercises created from a pool of the 5,000 most common English words
• Proverbs: No difficulty levels, 250 randomly displayed proverbs
• Quotes: No difficulty levels, 250 randomly displayed quotes

Want to see your performance over time? Type Fu charts speed and accuracy for each exercise.

Data Driven

One of my favorite features of Type Fu is all of the statistical data. Data gathering is definitely becoming commonplace, but the type of data presented by Type Fu is immediately helpful. First, it charts the wpm scores for each exercise on a line graph so you can see your improvement (or decline) over time. It also logs your most-typed letters and the letters you’re most likely to make a typing mistake on. I’m extremely unreliable at typing “w” on a qwerty keyboard for instance; in fact, I mistyped it while constructing that sentence.

Here’s a Type Fu diagram showing the keys you mistype most often. I make the most errors on semi-colons and the letter “w”.

The only addition I could ask for on top of those provided is some sort of mini-game (or a few if I’m making wishes). Typing games like where completing a word kills a baddie or faster wpm count gasses a car around a track are welcome pleasantries to the trials of learning the keys.

You can have the cursor stop on mistakes as you type or have it allow you to continue typing in error. The latter is more realistic to day-to-day typing, but if you hate continually backspacing your errors–especially when learning a new layout–then remember the option is available.

Audience

If you’re wondering what brought me to Type Fu, I want to learn the Colemak layout. Unless you, likewise, want to learn a new keyboard layout or just hone your current skills, Type Fu would probably not be on your radar. I originally found the app in the Google Chrome Web Store because of its good reviews, I wanted to review the Mac version, expecting some added features; there aren’t any. What’s even odder is that the Mac version is $4.99 in the App Store, while the web-based Chrome Web Store version is free. The only difference I found was a Mac-only option for full-screen mode.

Conclusion

Type Fu is clean, simple, and helpful if you’d like to learn a new English keyboarding layout. That is a narrow category, though. Luckily, you can test it out to your hearts content on the Chrome Web Store. If you find yourself using it on a regular basis, it may be fitting to buy it from the App Store in support of the developer, but at $4.99 that may be a hard decision to make as it feels overpriced. Since I haven’t found anything better, though, I’ll be practicing my Colemak on Type Fu for the foreseeable future.

What’s the best way to quickly annotate a picture or sketch out an idea graphically on your Mac? A couple years ago, most of us would have quickly responded “Skitch“, but after Evernote bought out the popular image annotating app and redesigned it last year, it’s not quite the exciting and useful app it used to be. There’s always Preview, but it’s a bit too structured (and limited) for free-form idea sketching.

Aged & Distilled has entered the fray with their new app Napkin.  It’s a totally new way to communicate visually on your Mac – using the old metaphor of sketching an idea on a napkin – that’s good enough to already be listed as the Editor’s Choice in the App Store.

The Napkin, Reinvented

Launch Napkin, and you’ll be greeted with a blank workspace, complete with a Mac-style toolbar (one with color icons, which is a special treat in 2013) and a skeuomorphic napkin background. For once, we’ll forgive the app for being skeuomorphic, since for the most part it’s just a well designed app that makes it easy to sketch your thoughts.

Ready to get started? You can drag-and-drop any image into the Napkin, or take a photo from your camera or a screenshot of any app or portion of your screen from the built-in options. Or just click and drag to draw an arrow, or keep going to select a part of an image for a call-out, or hold CMD while drawing to make a shape. Click anywhere and start typing to add your thoughts; a cursor won’t show on the page until you start typing, but Napkin will start typing right where you last clicked.

You’ll have full control over how your words look, too, with all of your Mac’s font and color options right in the app, and can set iWork-style borders and shadows on text boxes and images. You’ll even be able to keep your stuff organized with standard arrangement and grouping settings that you’d expect from an image or office app. Want your images the exact same size and lined up? Just select them together, and a quick tap on Arrange will get you the options you want.

A picture’s worth a thousand words? Well, a few extra words won’t hurt, either.

Explaining how to do things on the computer, or trying to point out what you want changed in a design, can be an exercise in frustration sometimes when the text in screenshots turns out too small to see. Napkin makes it simple, however, with easy-to-use call-outs that let you zoom in on just what you want to show in a screenshot or picture. You can move the call-out over the part of your image you want to focus on, then click to lock it, and move the call-out anywhere you want on your napkin. You can even change the shape of the call-out or change the zoom level. And if anything doesn’t make sense with the call-out or any of the other tools, just tap the purple question mark to get a quick description of what you can do with that tool.

Learn by doing … and just get your points across quickly

Napkin is designed for sharing info, but sometimes there’s info that you don’t want to share: private emails, unreleased app names, pictures of random people that were behind you at Starbucks when you took that nice Camera shot in Napkin. Napkin is ready for the challenge. It can automatically hide faces it detects in images, if you want, and you can double-click on any image to be sent to an editing screen where you can mark out sensitive info. Tap done, and your sensitive info will be hidden – even in call-outs you’ve already made.

Away with sensitive info!

Saving and Sharing Was Never Easier

Your idea’s now down on (virtual) paper, and you’re ready to share it. You’ll just need to save it, then export it in the correct format, and choose how to share…

Wait. Not anymore. Napkin makes it a ton simpler to save and share your ideas. There’s a PNG button in the top left that you can drag-and-drop to anywhere on your Mac to save a picture of your sketch or open it in another app. Really: you can click-and-drag that button to, say, your desktop, or into a new Mail message, and the file will be saved or attached as you’d expect, as though you were dragging it from a folder in Finder. Sharing is equally easy, thanks to the Mountain Lion-style sharing – with a twist. You can share to Twitter, Facebook, Email, and more, as you’d expect, but you can also share to iCloud. This gives you a short nap.kn link where you can see your napkin for 14 days in a CloudApp-style share page, and is the easiest way to quickly share the things you’ve sketched up.

Napkin’s iCloud sharing is one of the most unique iCloud uses yet

Being a Helpful Little Napkin

Typically, I get frustrated by welcome screens that automatically open when you first run an app. Even the iCloud Open window gets rather old when you see it for the dozenth time in a day. But Napkin actually did a good job with their welcome screen, enough that I thought it was worth mentioning. Their app is a bit unusual, so they need to make sure people know how to use it, and the welcome screen does just that.

With a quick video explaining how to use Napkin’s most important features, small pop-over hints in the app that help you know what each feature does as you’re using it, as well as extra video tutorials linked in the app’s Help menu, Napkin includes just enough to get you up and running without feeling like the app is too complicated. That’s far more than you can say for the Help manuals for most apps.

A getting started screen that’s actually useful

That Idea Might Cost You…

Napkin is a polished app that’s great for graphically explaining what you’re talking about, and is just about the best Skitch alternate you could ask for. With the innovative iCloud sharing, slick interface and animations, the best Call-out feature I’ve ever seen, and more, it’s quite the fun and useful app to have around. I’d wholeheartedly recommend it for anyone that ever needs to explain what they’re talking about with images, screenshots, quick diagrams, and text. I’ve already found it useful for explaining how to redeem codes from a recent AppStorm giveaway while using the review copy of Napkin.

However, it is on the expensive side for an App Store app, coming in at $39.99. That’s right in the middle of, say, the price of Keynote and 1Password, and is definitely not too expensive for an app that you’ll use in your daily (or even weekly) work. I’d personally say it’s worth the price, but it’s enough to make you stop and make sure you’ll use it before impulsively downloading it from the App Store. If you have to annotate images, make simple diagrams, share multiple screenshots together, explain how to do anything, or anything along those lines, though, you’re bound to find Napkin an indisputably useful part of your workflow.

Creating detailed, highly realistic 3D models from your Mac doesn’t have to be difficult or expensive with Cheetah3D, our sponsor this week. At just $99, it’s far cheaper than most 3D modeling apps, but includes the features you’d need to create 3D artwork for your next iPhone game or make your first animated character.

With a full set of polygon, subdivision surface and spline modeling tools you can focus on creating, safe in the knowledge that Cheetah3D has a breadth of features for the task. Cheetah3D makes modeling in 3D a breeze for new and experienced users alike. It then smoothly integrates the industrial strength Bullet physics engine to simulate rigid body and soft body dynamics. No matter if you want to spill a bowl of marbles on the floor or simulate a waving flag in the wind. Cheetah3D can handle it with just a few mouse clicks.

Raytracing, Global Illumination, HDRI, Caustics and much more means Cheetah3D can produce stunning images and animations using advanced techniques. In fact, from looking at the gallery, you’ll find examples of beautiful building renders, cartoon art, and more that were created with Cheetah3D. Everything you create can be exported in a variety of industry standard formats for animation (fbx, stl, 3ds, obj, and more), images, and movies (png, jpg, mov, and more). Your models can be exported to be used in iBooks Author or many popular game engines as well.

Go Get It!

Cheetah3D costs just $99, and you can download a free trial of Cheetah3D to see if it’s the 3D app for you. You can try out all of the features, then if you want to save or export your designs, you can get a license for the app.