Category: Mac

Remember when being able to use Apple’s iLife suite was almost enough to convince you to buy a Mac? Editing videos in iMovie with a simple user interface; uploading content to the Internet with iWeb; and instantly improving pictures of your friends with iPhoto. Those days have come and gone, but of those apps, iPhoto still had the biggest hold on me. That is, until I found Lyn, a photo library app for Mac.

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What About iPhoto?

Before I sing the praises of Lyn, let me wax nostalgic about iPhoto. Since being included with the standard iLife suite that Apple provides to new Mac users, I’ve enjoyed the simplicity and styling of iPhoto. Making small tweaks, crops, and red-eye corrections is a breeze and requires little more than a couple clicks. When your mom can understand how to use an app with little guidance, you know it’s user intuitive. The problems came along when I upgraded my Macbook to a Macbook Air.

I had done all the calculations on hard drive space before officially taking the plunge, so I knew I would have enough room if I cleaned up my file storage a bit. And, after tossing some old unfinished video editing projects and archiving rarely used items, I was in the ballpark of making the 128GB Air SSD hard drive work for me. That is, until I butted heads with iPhoto.

iPhoto puts all of your photos into a big zipped file called “iPhoto Library”. And while you can technically extract it to get to your pictures, finding them is not exactly easy without the viewer that iPhoto has. Furthermore, I came to find that whenever an edit is made to an image in iPhoto, a copy of that image is created to preserve the original. In theory this sounds like a great idea, until you realize it’s taking up double the hard drive space.

After that frustrating experience, I started searching for a better photo management app. I stripped all of my files from the clutches of the iPhoto archive and put them into named folders, hoping for an app to come along that would fit my needs of simple editing, cost-effectiveness, and straight-forward organization. Luckily I found Lyn, a light, organized photo library tool that didn’t break the bank.

Using the App

If you’ve used any sort of photo organizing app in the past few years, you’ll likely understand the setup of Lyn–photos are laid out in a grid or list style and double-clicking them brings up a larger view and a some options for rotating, changing properties, etc. First, though, you’ll want to find your images. Lyn does work with the iPhoto library if that’s what you’re currently using, but the folder hierarchy within the iPhoto archive isn’t user friendly; I recommend dragging your photos out to named folders. I know it’s a bit time-consuming but you only have to do it once and a little housekeeping never hurt anyone.

There are a few viewing options, from thumbnails to list view, but there’s also the option to pin your photos to a global map. It adds a new dimension to your photo characteristics. The list view is handy for seeing all of the properties EXIF data of your photos.

If you plan on making a full conversion from iPhoto to Lyn, you’ll need to create folders for all of your iPhoto images and then drag them there so Lyn can manage them. Lyn can open the contents of the iPhoto and Aperature library but it won’t see the sorting system employed by those apps.

There’s no denying the impact of photography on social media. Lyn has you covered with native plug-ins for Facebook, Flickr, Picasa, 500px, SmugMug, Dropbox, and of course e-mail. Having these as built-in tools makes uploading and sharing images a seamless experience because you don’t have to go out to the Web to upload your photos; you can do all from within the app itself, just by logging in to the respective account.

Features

Lyn is swift and smooth, but most importantly it packs a long list of powerful user features for organizing your images. For much of my amateur photography career, I’d just accepted that all of my photos would be named by the convent the camera used: something to the effect of DSC… followed by a string of numbers. There would be no “Science Fair 001″ or “June 2012 001″. Lyn, however, allows you to batch rename your files, meaning you can title your images the way you wish.

Also in the camp of batch processes is the ability to batch convert your photos from one filetype to another. Need a GIF instead of a JPEG? It’s just a menu-click away. Need to convert 90 GIFs to JPEGs? It’s just as easy. Lyn also allows you to color-code, flag, and rate your photos; small, but notable features found in Apple’s $80 Aperature application.

Criticism

If I had to fault Lyn for something, it would be the lack of editing tools. Even a basic set of color correction or cropping tools could go a long way, but the features are not currently there. Thankfully, though, the developer of Lyn, allowed me to preview a beta version of the app that does have photo editing and, while I can’t promise a miniature Photoshop, the editor covers a lot of ground and is user-intuitive. The best part is, the edits are stored in data inherent to the photo, instead of making a duplicate version of the original.

So yes, this criticism is short-lived, but that’s a good thing right?

Conclusion

The Lyn photo management app can be had for a reasonable $20. If iPhoto isn’t your bag, then Lyn is the next best thing. It takes up less of your hard disk space, allows you to run batch property changes, and is far cheaper than its nearest competitors; Adobe Lightroom, Adobe Bridge, or Apple’s Aperature. It’s only negative quality — the current lack of editing tools — will likely be remedied once the next iteration (currently in beta) is released publicly. Ultimately, Lyn is a wonderful app to organize your images. On a final note, you won’t find Lyn in the App Store so you’ll need to visit the Lyn site to buy it there.

Outer space is big. From our vantage point, it’s mostly just dots in the sky that we see at night. But there are billions of stars, asteroids, comets, and planets out there. You can see of them when you look up on a clear night, more if you use a telescope, and more still if you use SkySafari, an app that shows 46,000 stars and many of the best-known galaxies and nebulae with images from NASA and other expert star-gazers.

SkySafari isn’t the prettiest app around, but it more than makes up for it with the majesty of the stars and reams of encyclopedic information. It’s deep enough that serious astronomers can use it as a reference tool, and suitable for the rest of us to explore and learn about outer space.

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In-Depth Astronomy

When I reviewed Cosmographia earlier this year, I noted with some disappointment that for all its beauty and supposed accuracy there was very little information available in the app. You could marvel at the majesty of our solar system, but you couldn’t learn much from, or about, it.

SkySafari takes the opposite approach; it’s packed with detailed descriptions and data about thousands of objects — stars, planets, constellations, asteroids, and more. But it offers an unwieldy, comparatively ugly interface that makes it hard to explore without either clicking things at random or knowing precisely what you want to look at.

A few tweaks will turn your field of view into something prettier.

If random clicking is your modus operandi, however, you’ll have a splendid time learning about the known objects in the universe. Zoom out and crank up the settings for number of stars and deep space objects to display, and you’ll be hard-pressed to not click on something. The universe may be infinitely huge and mostly empty, but when you compress it all down to a small 2D plane it’s hard to find the darkness.

If you’d rather not click randomly, and you don’t have good enough knowledge to search for objects by name, there is one other option — but it’s not immediately obvious. The Search menu (that’s the one in the menubar, not the box in the top-right corner) can be used for quick access to objects and planetary bodies in 14 categories — Tonight’s Best plus the 13 types of object included.

Double-click or right-click and select Object Info to bring up the info pane. For most objects this is just whatever technical information is known — such as celestial coordinates, temperature range, luminosity, diameter, visibility, and so on. But many — we’re talking in the hundreds — also offer written descriptions about their properties, discovery, history, and significance to us humans. The description for a star called Altair, in the Alpha Aquilae galaxy, for instance, includes trivia about the meaning of its name (the flying eagle) and use in a science-fiction film, along with five paragraphs contextualizing its place in relation to us.

Better known objects — like, say, Mars — include long, detailed descriptions, which are both interesting and highly-readable, and images. Unfortunately, the images are low-resolution, which means they look blurry when enlarged. Still, you get a feel for the painstaking research that must have gone into creating the app. You’ll walk away from SkySafari knowing much more about astronomy than you did to begin with.

Over the Horizon

SkySafari’s default view has you looking up to the sky from a specified point on the Earth. You can choose different latitude and longitude coordinates, and alter the date and time. The Horizon menu lets you toggle elements of the Earth’s atmosphere and land mass — the horizon, sky, daylight, and an overlay image. The view is beautiful, if a little odd (thanks to a wide-angle lens).

You can zoom and pan as though looking through a telescope, but unlike a real telescope SkySafari lets you change the color intensity of stars, see the names of stars and constellations, marvel at filled-in visuals of the constellations, and lookup information about any object you see. Each of the buttons at the top of the window brings up a bunch of settings that add or remove information or tweak the general appearance of the display.

No matter what you’re looking at, however, or how much you zoom in or out, you’ll be looking at it from the perspective of our home planet. You can turn the horizon and sky off completely, so that it looks like you’re floating in space, but you’re still going to be floating about a relatively fixed point. That’s okay — this is an astronomy app, not a space flight simulator — but keep in mind that you won’t be getting any glorious shots looking back at the blue marble that we call home.

You can, however, try to display the names of every object included in the app’s charts, along with guidelines and color assists. It looks a little something like this when you do.

There’s not much surface detail anywhere in SkySafari, actually. Neighboring planets get a texture applied to their service, if you zoom right up close, but everything else is just a colored ball with a bit of a glow.

You Spin Me Right Round

You can travel forward or backward through time at whatever speed you like, either in incremental steps or one big jump. It has a hypnotic beauty to it when you turn on the animation, sit back, and watch the seconds, days, months, and years tick by. Your view rotates and moves through space in conjunction with the Earth, proving a 360 degree tour of the heavens. (Keep in mind that certain settings result in repeated disorienting jumps in perspective, though — so you may need to experiment here.)

SkySafari has everything I wished Cosmographia would include, minus all the things that make that app great to play around with. It has much better bang for its buck — you’ll have every reason to keep coming back after an evening, to learn more about the stars that dot the sky — but none of the style and flair you need to really make the subject engaging to newcomers.

Compare it to the sleek lines and gorgeous visuals of Cosmographia (pictured), and SkySafari’s presentation seems woefully inadequate — even if its depth is top-notch.

A Dwarf Star

SkySafari shines, but not as brightly as it could. The interface is fluid and responsive, as the developers claim on the app listing, but it’s badly organized, unnecessarily complicated, and beginning to look rather dated in the face of the sleek minimalism on show elsewhere. All that extra information comes with a higher barrier to entry, and SkySafari will likely confuse and confound many astronomy or computer novices.

My search for the perfect (non-expert-level) astronomy app continues unabated. It would contain the best bits of Cosmographia, SkySafari, and Solar Walk (which we reviewed in November), together with some features I probably haven’t thought of, and I would rave about it to everyone.

For now, the state of astronomy apps on the Mac is thus: Solar Walk is a great beginner’s guide and educational tool. Cosmographia will get you excited about our solar system with its stellar 3D recreation, but it’s light on the explanation and documentation side of things. Both show little more than the planets and key satellites in our Solar System, however. SkySafari shows much more detail, but with an inferior interface, from any place on Earth (rather than as a floating body in space). There’s also Redshift, SkyORB, and several others that I haven’t yet tried. If you have any suggestions or requests, please let us know in the comments.

Hardcore astronomy buffs can always step up to SkySafari Pro ($49.99), which boasts wired or wireless telescope controls and a massive data set including 15.3 million stars, while casual astronomers looking to step up can take the intermediary option SkySafari Plus ($19.99), which offers 2.5 million stars (20 times the number in the basic version) along with telescope control. If you want to learn more about space, you could do a lot worse.

Taking down notes, whether by hand or on my computer, has always been an integral part of my workflow. Capturing information wherever and whenever, notes always in handy considering that I have such a short memory span to work with.

As such, note-taking apps like NotesTab are of great interest to me, and since version 3 of FLIPLAB’s note-taking menu bar app is available for download, I thought I’d take a look at what has changed and what features were added since reviewing it a couple of months back. Likewise, the pro version offers several additional features to make the note-taking experience even better, which I will touch on later in the review. If you’re hesitant to spend an extra $4.99 for the upgrade, but would like to know what you’d receive if you do, read on.

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NotesTab 3

FLIPLAB have certainly invested a lot of time and effort in rebuilding and improving NotesTab. Dubbed as “Note taking finally done right,” the Mac version is redesigned from ground up with a handful of changes to its overall UI.

NotesTab now has a much better-looking icon and retina support, perfect for those working with the latest retina-display MacBooks. Text is much bigger in size and easy to find, the dashboard itself is wider with more room to work with, and its core features remain intact, such as dynamic search, favorites, share via email, the anchor button, and keyboard shortcuts.

The note itself is a welcoming refresh of its older design. The lighter background color works well with the text, plus you get to export to RTF and TXT and delete notes via right-click. Ads have been removed from the bottom portion of the app, giving it a nice “pro” feel to it.

Overall, as a tool to capture sudden bursts of creativity, reminders, and things that you shouldn’t forget, NotesTab 3 makes the note-taking experience much more interesting while maintaining its core functionality.

NotesTab Pro: A Huge Difference

While I believe the free version is enough for day-to-day note-taking, the real difference is in the additional features that come with the Pro version.

Priced at $4.99 on the Mac App Store, NotesTab Pro brings you a set of new features to enhance the note-taking experience in various ways. Apart from these key feautres, NotesTab Pro allows you to summon the app or create a note using keyboard shortcuts, provides an ad-free service and many other useful options. Let’s break each feature down.

Real-time Cloud Sync

NotesTab 3 made its comeback alongside two new versions: iOS and Windows 8. With NotesTab Pro, you can sync all of your notes using the app’s real-time cloud synching service and make them accessible on any three devices.

As such, having cloud sync enables you to create and read notes even when you’re away from your computer. You can have your notes on your iPhone, iPad, and/or Windows 8 devices, and so can take them with you with ease. If you’re the type who’s always on-the-go, this will definitely come in handy.

Full-screen Editing

The second notable Pro feature is full-screen editing. The app completely transforms into a desktop-like app, filling up the screen to get you to focus solely on your notes. You have your list of notes and the search bar on the left and the wide notes editor on the right.

Once on full-screen mode, you’ll see several of the basic features at the bottom of the window—formatting options, share/delete a note, and sorting options to name a few. To add a new note, simply click on the plus button at the top rightmost part of the app.

Detachable and Resizable Window

NotesTab Pro has the freedom to move around your desktop, as compared to the free version in that it is tied to the menu bar. You can drag NotesTab to a spot on your desktop where it sits and runs silently. To call it out, use the keyboard shortcut Ctrl+N or click on the app’s menu bar icon.

You can also resize the NotesTab window depending on how large or small you want it to be. Just hover your cursor to the corner of the app and drag.

Styles, Themes, Opacity Control

NotesTab Pro brings to the table more customization for both notes and the user interface as a whole. It comes with two themes, Wood and Dark, and allows you to control the opacity of the app when set against everything else on your desktop.

You can change the font face and size of your notes by going to the app’s Preferences. You’ll see various options that you can tweak to suit your needs, and at the bottom of the list is the note font (6 different fonts to choose from) and size (i.e. 12, 14, and 16).

Lastly, you have three basic note formatting options to add emphasis to your notes. You can bold, italicize, and underline important information or words. you can select and use basic keyboard shortcuts (Cmd+B/I/U), or use the bold, italicize, and B, U, and I buttons found at the bottom of the window.

Distinct Improvements

Compared to how NotesTab was when I reviewed it back in March, the latest version is a leap forward with pro features that enhance the user experience. Moreover, the guys at FLIPLAB are definitely on the right track, so much so that a user who desires flexible and a dynamic note-taking experience would have to try NotesTab Pro out.

Of course, on its own, NotesTab 3 is a breath of fresh air with plenty of room to grow. As such, users can rest assured that the app is under active development and taken care of with great dedication.

Your Thoughts

What do you think of the latest updates to NotesTab? Would you be willing to upgrade to the Pro version? I’d love to hear from you in the comments.

If you’re like me, you should have noticed that Mac screens are really bright. This is especially obvious on my early–2007 iMac where, even during the day, I set the screen brightness to the minimum. Since I’m already at the minimum, at night, it is definitely too much bright.

Staring in front of a computer screen that bright is a bad thing for your sleep. OS X provides a built-in but often underused way to adapt your monitor, called the Night Vision Mode: simply press Cmd-Option-Ctrl-8 to invert screen colors. If you’d like to experience more subtle ways to manipulate your screen brightness, read on to find out some clever apps.

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The “Mainstream” Dimmers

The following apps each share a unique purpose: put an opaque overlay on your screen(s) to make them darker. I call these paid apps “mainstream” as they all are distributed through the Mac App Store, thus easier to access without finding a needle in a haystack.

Dimmer Than Dim

Dimmer Than Dim is the most basic of all apps featured here. When launched, it sits both in your menubar and your Dock, but the Dock icon is useless since it provides absolutely no action. You can’t even turn on/off the app with the Dock icon, making me wonder why there even is a Dock icon.

When you turn the dimmer on by clicking on the app menubar icon, it simply dims your screen, to an extent you define by dragging the slider towards ‘Dark’. If the slider is set all the way to the right, ‘Light’ position, it is as if Dimmer Than Dim was turned off.

The menubar icon has a different colour whether the dimmer is turned on (red) or off (blue).

To me, this tiny app is largely overpriced: $4.99 for such basic functionality is hard to justify, especially when compared with other apps in this roundup. There are cheaper apps that apply the same dimming effect to your screen but with (a lot) more options (see below).

Price: $4.99
Developer: Zhen Liu
Requires: OS X 10.6+ (Snow Leopard with Mac App Store)

Work At Night

Among the paid screen dimmer apps, Work At Night is one of the cheapest. It also has two unique features:

• Just after launch, you can brighten/darken the applied opaque mask using respectively the Up/Down arrow keys.
• You can choose to exclude the menu bar and the Dock from the dark overlay, making it easy to reach these zones even if the darkness is set to the maximum. This is a unique workaround for a common problem found with dimmers: when the screen is completely dark, it is often hard to find your way through the UI.

Price: $0.99
Developer: Raj Kumar Shaw
Requires: OS X 10.6.6+ (Snow Leopard with Mac App Store)

myPoint Shade

myPoint Shade is another cheap screen dimmer with some twists:

• You can choose the color of the overlay to be applied.
• It is, to my knowledge, the only one app featured in this round-up that supports up to six monitors, each one with its independent settings.

This app also has extensive keyboard support. All of these features probably makes it the biggest bargain among paid dimming apps available on the Mac App Store.

In myPoint Shade, the maximum darkness is limited to 90%. But there is another, more extensive version of this app, myPoint Heavy Shade, that offers fine-grain control over this, including 100% darkness and a timer that decreases the maximum brightness over time.

Price: $0.99
Developer: Code Race
Requires: OS X 10.7+

Screen Dimmer

Screen Dimmer can support up to three monitors independently. That means you can dim one, two or all three of your monitors, whenever you need it too. This is done on the fly and quite easily by clicking on any of the three monitor icons that appear when you click on the app menu bar icon. This original and well-thought feature makes the app useful even during the day. The dev explains for instance on one of the Mac App Store screenshots that dimming all your monitors except the one playing a video could help you focus on the video.

Another original feature is the ability to reverse the slider direction. The default direction seems unnatural to me (but your mileage may vary), as you move the slider to the right to make your screen darker. Fortunately, if you hold Option when the menu bar app is activated, a checkable ‘Reverse slider direction’ option appears.

It is also noteworthy that clicking on the help (‘?’) button gives you one of the best, most extensive descriptions of how the app works I’ve ever seen, especially for such a tiny app.

Price: $1.99
Developer: Atlas Wegman
Requires: OS X 10.6.6+ (Snow Leopard with Mac App Store)

Midnight

At first launch, Midnight shows both its main window and its menu bar icon. From the main window, you can choose the current mode: ‘Day’ lets your screen unchanged while ‘Night’ dims your screen, the ‘Darkness level’ being set with a slider, like in Dimmer Than Dim and Screen Dimmer.

The General tab of the main window of Midnight lets you access options not available from the menu bar icon.

You can also set some options, for instance choose to apply the night mode to all your monitors or only the one the window is currently located in.

The app can also be accessed from the menubar or in a ‘faceless’ mode, where you are supposed to access Midnight from its Dock icon. Problem is, in my testing on Mountain Lion, the Dock icon never appeared, making it impossible to access the app in faceless mode. Fortunately, I left the ‘Display this window when launching as a menu bar app’ option checked, so I only had to quit Midnight, relaunch it, then choose to Run it as a menu bar app to make it usable again.

Beware! Due to this bug on Mountain Lion, if you uncheck the previously described option and run the app in ‘faceless’ mode, you might be completely unable to interact with it and have no other choice than force quitting it with Activity Monitor and completely uninstalling/re-installing it (including wiping out its .plist file).

A second tab on the main window of Midnight lets you set various keyboard shortcuts so you don’t have to reach the menubar icon. These shortcuts include the super useful ‘Emergency brightness restore’ also found in Shades (see below).

The menu bar icon gives you access to a vertical slider, a night/day mode icon-based switcher (representing a sun icon during the day and a moon crescent at night) as well as red cross you can click on to quit the app.

The menu bar of Midnight gives instant access to its most used features, all in a handy vertical pop up bar.

Price: $2.99
Developer: Ollix
Requires: OS X 10.6.6+ (Snow Leopard with Mac App Store)

Brightness (dimmer / tint control)

If you overlook, Brightness will appear priced as much as Midnight but shows less features. You won’t find keyboard shortcuts, for instance.

However, it has a unique turn that makes me think about this app as a combination of a basic screen dimmer with F.lux (see below for the description of the latter). Indeed, you can turn on an option that, when reducing the brightness, will make the colors warmer, which is said to be easier on the eyes.

Price: $2.99
Developer: Alaric Cole
Requires: OS X 10.6.8+, 64-bit processor

Sunset

Sunset is full of contrasts (no pun intended). While providing the most basic dimming functionality, its interface is unique and refreshing. When clicking on its menu bar icon, a nice window pops up, showing a landscape full of clouds where the sun is high in the sky. The more you drag the sun down (closer to the horizon), the darker your screen will become.

By clicking on the ‘More’ button at the bottom of the popup window, you get access to some options as well as keyboard shortcuts.

Sunset is priced a bit higher than the previously described apps. It remains cheaper than Dimmer Than Dim, though, for a much added value.

Price: $3.99
Developer: Falo Apps
Requires: OS X 10.6.6+ (Snow Leopard with Mac App Store), 64-bit processor

The Outsiders

I consider the following three apps to be outsiders because they share some common traits that distinguish them from the previously described screen dimmers in several aspects:

• They are distributed outside of the Mac App Store.
• They are all free.
• They have a more original approach, regarding their functionality and/or interface.

F.lux

This tiny app tints your screen along the day and night, to follow natural sun light. During daytime, your screen looks unchanged. But when sunset approaches, it tints your display with a warmer, less aggressive nuance of white/yellow. It is much more comfortable to look at your screen at night. When sunshine chimes in, your display is put back to a normal, default tint. In both cases, the process can take up to as much as an hour.

f.lux is also really easy to set up. All you have to do is choose which nuance of tint you want (from an almost imperceptible ‘fluorescent’ tint to a really warm, yellowish ‘tungsten’ one). Thanks to geo-localization, F.lux finds where you are and automatically sets itself up with your local sunset/sunshine times.

You can also disable F.lux for an hour if you wish, or set the ‘Lightning at night’ option to ‘Daylight’, which has the same effect as not using F.lux at all without any time limit.

The special treatment F.lux applies to your screen, its set-it-and-forget-it approach and the really smooth transition (when set to spend one hour) all make it my personal favorite over all the apps presented here. Of course, your mileage may vary and, especially, graphic designers might not like that F.lux alters colors.

Price: Free
Requires: Mac OS X 10.4+
Developer: f.lux software

Nocturne

Nocturne pushes the Night Vision Mode of Mac OS X to the next level. It won’t activate itself per se, unlike F.lux. Instead, the app will sit in your menubar, and a click on the icon and then on ‘Switch to Night’ will have, by default, the same effect as pressing Cmd-Option-Ctrl–8.

But you can also configure in details what Nocturne does by having a look at its preferences. Among interesting others, you can avoid that somewhat unpleasant infrared-mode look that goes with the OS X’s default Night Vision Mode. For this, you can:

• Either switch on the ‘Monochrome’ option if you like to live your life in black and white.
• Switch on the ‘Invert hue’ option that explicitly inverts the hue of colors on your screen to make them look like less ‘strange’ and stick more to their original tone.

Another original option is the ability to tint colors. The best is to try it for yourself. By experimenting with it, you can even completely redefine the look of your general Mac OS X UI. For instance, if you’re really nostalgic about the look of old machines, you can switch on these options: Invert Screen, Hide Desktop, Disable Shadows, Monochrome, Tint Colors (and choose the Clover color for the White channel). This, combined with a minimalist text editor, will totally give your screen an early 90es look!

A annoying drawback with Nocturne (at least on Lion/Moutain Lion) is that there are some inconsistencies and bugs making that, sometimes, after switching options on and off, you need to ‘Switch to day’ and then ‘Switch to night’ back again to have these options take effect.

Price: Free
Developer: BlackTree
Requires: Mac OS X 10.4+

Shades

Unlike others, Shades installs itself as a Preference Pane.

Once started, a sunglasses icon sits in your menubar and a slider appears on screen. The on-screen slider stays on top of all of your windows, which can be frustrating and space-wasting. Hopefully, in the Shades preference pane, in the ‘Color LCD’ tab, you can either make it vertical (which could be a nice compromise on wide screens) or toggle it off completely.

Shades shows some great attention to details in the customization options, as for instance you can choose between two different appearances for the on-screen slider and even between two different menu bar icons.

Once activated, Shades apply an overlay to your screen, thus making it another dimming app. If you’ve kept the default black tint color, this will apply an black opaque filter (whose opacity is controlled by the sliders) to your screen. Should you have disabled the on-screen slider, another one is still available by clicking on the menubar icon. You can choose whatever color you want, of course.

If you choose a black tint color and set the slider to the minimum, your screen could appear almost completely black, making it quite impossible to see what’s on your screen and then find your mouse cursor to inactivate Shades! Hopefully, the developer came with two really well-thought workarounds:

• First, there’s an “Emergency brightness restore” hotkey that is set by default to Alt-Esc. If you’ve turned your screen completely black, don’t panic and simply press Alt-Esc: this will restore your screen brightness to the max, regardless of where the slider is set to.
• Second, by default, the sliders do not really go from 0% to 100% transparency. Even if you’ve set down the slider to the minimum brightness, the real minimum value applied is not necessarily 0%, but instead the value set through another “Min brightness” slider found in the “Color LCD” tab of the Shades preference pane. By default, this slider is set to 10%, so even if you’re at the minimum of the on-screen/menubar slider, you still have 10% transparency through the opaque mask. Really clever.

Price: Free
Developer: Charcoal Design
Requires: Mac OS X 10.5+ Leopard

What’s Your Favorite?

As you can see, there is a plethora of apps that help you tame your monitor at night, thus making it easier to work at night while reducing dazzle and eyestrain. I only mentioned apps that I consider worth it, but might have missed some others.
Jump in the comments to let us know which is your favorite one!

There are a lot of ways to manage how you interact with coworkers and people who are helping you with a project. Before the days of computers, you had to fax them a daily plan, call them up and discuss things, or even mail them a letter containing details. And if they lived next door, you could always walk over there. Now, however, things have been modernized and we have wonderful tools like Basecamp at our disposal. It was one of the best, until Kickoff 2.0 went into public beta.

Released in the first half of the month, the app is a completely revamped version of its collaboration predecessor. From the design to the features and way you do things, the app has been changed. We reviewed the original one back in 2011, but now design has become more important and developers are distinguishing their user interfaces from what Apple sets as a standard. The question you probably have is, what’s so different about this app that makes it worth upgrading?

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Beginning Collaboration

Since it’s currently in public beta, Kickoff 2.0 is free to use. So, if you have a team of friends who you plan to work closely (yet far away from) with, it’s the perfect solution. Of course, the public beta will not last forever and eventually things will get priced. We’ll get to that later on though. For now, let’s discuss the process of signing up for a Kickoff account and starting your first project.

You can click the Register button once you open the app to create a new account, or the Log In one if you already have credentials from the previous version. In the Register option, the app will pull information from your contact card (with your permission) and help you sign up faster. All you have to insert is a password, which doesn’t even need to be confirmed. (This will end up being a problem if you hit the wrong key because resetting the password is never convenient.) When you’re finished, click the Register button and you’ll be whisked off to the main screen.

Now you can create a new team. Click the Team menu, click New Team, and type in the name of the team and your coworkers’ email. Not to worry: you don’t have to include coworkers at first if you don’t want to. Click Create and a new project screen will appear. You can then add tasks in the right pane and discuss the whole project in the left one. There’s also a button on the right of a project that’s shown when you hover. It will open a discussion for that particular project — useful for the little things.

Managing Tasks and Lists

Next you’ll want to manage some tasks, so right-click one to begin. A menu with an Edit button, Assign To and Move To buttons, and a Delete button will appear. (You can also select the task and press the delete key on your keyboard to remove it from the list.) Click the Edit button to change the name, or just click the title twice. Hover over the Assign To menu and select a name to give that person the task. The person will be notified if a comment is posted or the task is completed. If the task takes more than one person to be carried out, select the remaining participants as well. Lastly, the Move To menu allows you to move the task to another list.

Drag a task into the chat box to discuss it.

As for lists, they can be created by clicking the All Tasks button in the center of the top of the screen. The default lists are All Tasks and Completed Tasks, but you can add as many as you want to organize things. Once you’ve created a new list, drag a task down to it or use the Move To menu to change its position.

The User Interface

On to the section of beauty. This app really is nice to look at and a pleasure to use. The user interface as a whole feels thoroughly polished, especially for a beta. I have yet to see a graphical glitch or transition that I’m unhappy with. From adding a task to sending messages, this app’s transitions and little animations make it natural, and even the messaging is better than Apple’s iMessage service in terms of appearance. It shows most when you’re typing something: the little blue cursor has a subtle feel to it rather than the plain old black one you see in other apps. It’s the little things like this that make the user interface more alive than other apps out there.

URL Embedding

Say you’ve uploaded a picture or video to Droplr and you want to show your team. Instead of them clicking the link and heading to a browser, it will load right in the chat pane. YouTube videos related to your discussion can also be shared with a simple paste — no extra formatting is required. This is extremely useful for those of you who share lots of links and don’t wish to bother with switching apps.

You can even embed Tweets. The full list of supported services will be available at launch, but the developer told me that some of them right now are Droplr, Twitter, CloudApp, Vimeo, and YouTube. I’m really looking forward to this unified integration. In fact, a built-in browser would help the experience all the more by keeping the user inside the one app and not constantly pressing CMD + Tab.

No More Monthly Plans

The best part about version 2.0 of Kickoff is that the developers are no longer going to be charging a monthly fee to use the service. Instead of competing with the likes of Basecamp in a monthly pricing structure, the developer has decided it’s better to charge a one-time fee. There’s no word on exactly how much that’ll be yet, but the app will be available in the Mac App Store to keep things modern and easier to find. Regardless of the cost, it’s sure to be much better in the long term than the previous version’s subscription.

A Beautiful Solution

Need to organize a protest? Maybe you need to rally with your neighbors to get something done. If anything, your significant other has been begging you to complete a project that requires more people than one. Whatever the case, this app is a great way to manage it. Right now, it’s free, and in the future it will be “affordable”, according to the developer. There’s also an iPhone app in the plans — it will be released at the same time as the Mac App Store one.

With its combination of apps and more features coming in the future, Kickoff 2.0 is going to have a fantastic launch. Right now, everything is very solid and usable, and in the future it’s likely this will be kept the same. It’s nice to see that the developer is keeping things simple, yet functional. There aren’t a lot of features and some of them don’t even matter to users, but overall this is a great desktop alternative to Basecamp. As for WunderKit, its user interface may be better, but it’s definitely not as user-friendly.

Our sponsor this week is Ondesoft Audio Recorder, a powerful audio recorder that’ll let you record any audio from any of your apps. With a brand-new interface and tools to help you crop, trim, cut, and split any audio file, it’s the recording solution your Mac is missing.

If you’ve ever wished you could record audio directly from your Mac apps, Ondesoft Audio Recorder is the app you need. From recording a Skype conversation to saving a broadcast from your favorite internet radio, you can record anything you hear on your computer with this app. It can grab the audio from any of your apps and record it in the formats you want, individually, at the same time. You can even plug in a mic and record your own audio with all the audio controls you want.

When it comes time to save and share your audio, Ondesoft Audio Recorder has you covered. It can record to any of the most popular audio formats you want, at any of a wide range of sampling rates. You can even edit the audio in the app to make sure it’s perfect before you save. And don’t worry if you won’t be at your Mac at the perfect time to record; the built-in scheduler lets you schedule recording exactly when you need it.

Go Get It!

Ready to start recording audio from your Mac apps like a pro? Then this is the time to get a copy of Ondesoft Audio Recorder with the Ondesoft Christmas 2012 Promotion. You can get Ondesoft Audio Recorder half off for just $14.97, and can also get a free copy of their iTunes Converter for Mac in addition to discounts on most of their other apps.

If you test anything on the internet, and you have to do it in multiple browsers, you know what a pain that can be. You have to have a couple of computers on hand or be running Windows on your Mac. There are tools that make it all a bit easier, but nothing makes it entirely painless.

Sauce is trying to take the edge off a bit by adding support for nearly 100 browsers right on your Mac. How can this be? Devilry? Magick with a K? Maybe. We’ll find out and see if it weighs the same as a duck.

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Internet Explorer on My Mac?

It’s important to understand first that Sauce is a service that provides you with a set of tools for testing on the web. Sauce for Mac is the Sauce client for Mac. There are some resources provided to free users, but power users are going to need a paid subscription. If you want access to more than just a few browsers, you’ll need a free account, at least.

You can do some pretty fancy things with Sauce, and test all sorts of stuff. I used to work in quality assurance for a web developer. I had to make sure everything looked good and worked correctly for the user, and I had to do it in just about every browser. I really could have used something like this back then.

When you open up Sauce, you’re going to need to start a new session. Input your URL and choose your OS and browser. There really is a lot on offer, and you’ll probably want to narrow it down a bit unless you have a specific reason for testing every version of Firefox ever released ever.

Browsers Having Browsers

Once you’ve told Sauce what to do, it’ll spin up your own virtual machine, which may take a minute. You’ll get something like a browser window inside a window. You can scroll, click, and perform whatever function you need to. When you’re done, you can close the window, and the session will be logged in the Previous Sessions tab.

If you run into any problems, click the bug button up top. That will save a video of the active session, with all associated information, like what time you were working and what browser and OS you were using. All that will go up in your account on the Sauce website, and you can share it with your fellows for future debugging.

If you’re looking for Firebug, Chrome Dev tools, or the IE Developer Toolbar, all that’s in your Sauce browsers, too. Right-click inside the browser window to bring up the menu and select the tools you need. There doesn’t seem to be a way to install Firebug for Chrome or add any extensions, which is unfortunate, but sometimes you have to give a little.

Sauce will test just about any programming language you would expect, and they have a list up at their site. They also make it easy to test local and firewalled servers without having to expose your data. To be honest, I didn’t have any firewalled data to test, so I wasn’t able to hold their feet to the flame on this one, but they’ve got a pretty thorough FAQ on how to get it done right if you’ve got any questions.

Virtues of Virtual Machines

Sauce ran pretty slow for me, but I’m betting that was more my fault than theirs. I have a three-year old MacBook Pro with upgraded RAM, certainly not a dinosaur, but not the youngest kid on the block, either. It’s something to be aware of, though. When Sauce spins up that virtual machine and gets those legacy browsers going, things may start slowing down.

You can only run three sessions at a time, so if you want to see what your site or web app is doing in Chrome, Firefox, Internet Explorer, and Opera all at the same time, you’re out of luck. The funny thing is, Sauce only ever let me open two browser windows at a time before I’d be chided that I can only have three. I never did get that third window.

After All, It’s a Service

There’s a tiered pricing structure that goes from, well, free for very limited access, to pretty expensive really quickly. If you just need to make sure your forms and maybe a bit of javascript are working correctly on Macs and Windows machines, you’re probably going to do okay with the free account. If you’re doing a whole lot more, though, you might want to look into a paid plan.

There are nearly a hundred browsers on every platform available, so there really is value for money here. For the lay designer/developer, there may not be enough, though, at such a hefty price tag. However, there is a special plan for open source developers that allows them some of the features of the big boy plan at no cost.

Final Thoughts

With so many browsers in one place on my main machine, it’s easy to see the appeal of Sauce. There’s no need to go looking for a Windows computer to run tests when I have it all right here. Sauce did run pretty slow, though, just opening some pretty basic websites on what is an otherwise smooth running computer. Your mileage may vary on this one, of course, and when you can try it for free, there’s not really a reason you shouldn’t take a peek.

All that being said, there are a lot of resources here. The ability to create video snapshots of what you were doing is so big; if you’ve ever had to verbally describe a bug to the people who were going to fix it, you know how much easier it would have been to just show them a video and say, “Here, look!” The customer support is on the case, even for free users, and there are lots of community forums and meetups if you have questions. Sauce was just so easy to use and filled so many holes, there’s no reason not to recommend it.

We’ve previously reviewed Miro Video Converter, but the people down at the Miro mines have recently released a big update, and we thought it was worth another look at this tiny powerhouse of a video conversion app. Not only did they give it a brand new image, but they’ve added a slew of new features to match and that serve to make this app more than just a pretty face.

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The More Things Change

Miro Video Converter still does pretty much the same job as it did before. It still converts videos into lots of different formats for lots of different devices. The interface is still streamlined and simple. But if you dig deeper, there are some pretty great changes.

The first change is fairly obvious, though. The already sleek interface has gotten a facelift. Gone is the raspberry and red color scheme, in favor of graphite and gray. The previous version of Miro Video Converter relied on a single dropdown for device and format selection, and while that did lend itself to a clean look, the list of formats was itself a bit cluttered.

You have to look a bit closer to see the next and more substantial change, the addition of several new output formats, and I had to open up the previous version of Miro Video Converter side by side with the latest release to match them all up. While you’ll still find all the formats from version 2.6 in the new version 3, you’re going to find brand new video formats compatible with the new retina display Apple devices, more Android devices that you can shake a stick at, and the addition of the Kindle Fire, among others.

As soon as you start working with your videos, you’re likely to notice you can convert several videos at once. Batch processing is another new feature with this release. Whereas in previous versions you could only convert a single video at a time, now you can queue up as many as you like. As they complete, you’ll see a green check appear next to the video. A progress bar will let you know how much longer the other videos are going to be.

As Simple as It Looks

Even if you’ve never used Miro Video Converter, you’ll have an easy time processing your videos into whatever format you need. The interface is intuitive and the learning curve is fairly small. Just select your original file. If you want to convert several videos at once, that’s cool, too, but they’ll all be exported with the same options, so keep that in mind.

Next, choose your conversion options. You’ll first have to decide what sort of device your video is intended for, whether it’s an Apple, Android, or something else. Next you’ll pick the specific device; it can be an iPod Touch or an HTC Sensation, whatever you’re going to be watching your video on. There are also some video formats you can use instead if you’re less concerned about the device and more concerned about the specifics of your output file.

Some settings, accessed by clicking the gear icon, will let you choose whether you create thumbnails and how your video is resized, if at all. If you select a custom size, you can also toggle whether you have a custom aspect ratio. There’s a clickable link to the output folder in the settings, too.

When you’ve got everything just how you like it, click the big green button to start the conversion process. If you’ve done something horribly wrong, click the red button to halt the whole shebang. Clicking the graphite Clear and Start Over button will get you back to square one. Your completed videos will output to a special Miro Video Converter folder in Movies, but clicking on the link in your completed queue will get you there, too.

Final Thoughts

Miro Video Converter was already a gem of a video conversion app, especially for users like me who don’t need a lot of fiddly options. I’m not working in video production and I don’t need any professional or even semi-pro level tools. I just need a way to get my cat videos off of my camera and into iMovie, which wasn’t always easy. The simplicity of Miro Video Converter was exactly what I needed to get my incompatible videos into iMovie.

This update adds a host of compatibility to an app that was already doing a really great job. Now it just knocks it out of the park. Along with the sexy interface update, this new Miro Video Converter is a real winner.

It’s worth noting that the older version 2.6 is still up at the Mac App Store. If you want the new version 3 with all the added compatibility, you’ll have to look to the official website for the direct download. Not to worry, though; Miro Video Converter is free, though the developers do ask for a donation. So you won’t be purchasing the same software twice just because it hasn’t popped up on the Mac App Store yet. Miro Video Converter is such a solid app, so easy to use, and so nice to look at, I really wouldn’t want to wait anyway.

Photographers and designers merely create. It’s up to the consumer to enjoy what these creators have prepared for them. Now, there comes a time when people would rather steal images than purchase them rightly. There’s also the moment the creator realizes he’d much rather have his name on what he’s made so that the world knows. This is why artists sign their work and photographers and designers add copyrights and watermarks to things. Doing so in iPhoto isn’t possible (though you could download Picasa for free). What you really need, though, is a dedicated app.

Watermarker, developed by Reactiv Code, is a nice-looking solution. It’s simple, has all the features you need, and doesn’t cost nearly as much as Digimarc. Sounds promising, right? Let’s find out if it really is that good.

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A Simple Drag and Drop

There’s no setup process for this app. All you have to do is drag and drop your image into the window, or just drop it on the icon in your dock. Give the app about a second and it’ll load the image into the left pane. It’s nice to see such a quick start, and things look good so far.

Fast Watermarking

After loading an image, the real task that the app was meant for comes into play: adding a watermark. By default, whatever you type into the text box in the top right will be your watermark. It displays in the bottom left of the image by default and will automatically appear as you type the text. I prefer my watermarks in the bottom right, so I changed it by clicking the drop-down menu and selecting that. There are also options for the top right and left and middle.

As you’re typing it might be a good idea to put a copyright symbol beside your text so people know who the image belongs to rather than who created it (sometimes the two can differ). To do that, click the text field, move the cursor where you want the symbol to be, and click the copyright button below.

For the more advanced user, the app offers a strikethrough, which has the same appearance as images on iStock Photo and other Web sites of that type. This is a very useful feature if you want to host the image somewhere and don’t want to worry about someone stealing it. You can even click the color button beside Strikethrough and change its appearance to better fit your image.

The other two advanced features are Custom Image and resizing. The first allows you to bring your own watermark in from Photoshop or another tool you created it with so you can give each of your images a unique feel. It’s very useful if you have a company logo to put on an image, or if you want something more elaborate than Comic Sans and Chalkboard. The second feature simply resizes the image’s width to the number (of pixels) you put in the text box. The ratio is also changed and a live preview is rendered in the photo pane. It’s pretty handy for live-bloggers to optimize upload times.

Customize Your Watermark

The default font for this app’s watermark is Helvetica 24. You can change it by clicking the A button beside the watermark text field. Every font your computer has is on this list, so feel free to change things up to suit your taste. Also, if the font isn’t large enough, just change the size to something that looks better on the image. Sometimes you have a photo of 5000 pixels or wider and the watermark is too small to even be there. You can also change the font and background color (that transparent layer behind the text) if you want to keep things very custom.

Speaking of transparency, it’d be nice if the app had a slider for how opaque your font is, because not everyone wants their watermark to look like it’s plain text. There should also be a slider for the background. If you head to the font’s settings, there is a dimmer, but it blacks things out and it’s not easy to get to, which is a good reason to add one to the main screen.

Little Improvements

My only major complaint about this app is its lack of batch processing. If I were to upload a collection of my images — not just one — to a stock photo Web site, it’d be easier to run them through a batch processor like the one Photoshop employs rather than loading each image individually. The current standing of things actually isn’t that bad, though. It’s nice that the app saves all your font settings for the next image so you can still process things quickly.

While there is only one complaint, I also have a feature suggestion: WordPress uploading. It’d be nice to have this app connected to my blog so I don’t have to manually upload all my images after watermarking them. Such a feature would eliminate a step in my workflow and speed up a live-blogging process. For some people it can be very useful and I’m sure they would be grateful if the developer added something like this to keep things more productive and unified.

Final Thoughts

Watermarker is a fantastic way to put your name on images, whether it be with a pre-made image or a nice font. Photographers, live-bloggers, and creators of beautiful paid PSDs alike will enjoy being able to slap on their emblem or name so easily. The only problem is that they won’t be able to do it on a lot of images at once. If the app gets batch processing, it will be worth paying the price of $7.99. Right now, though, it seems a bit expensive. $4.99 is a more realistic cost for what it offers.

I’m pleased to let you know that we’re kicking off a competition to win two copies of The Ultimate Music App Bundle. This amazing bundle contains 8 Top Music Applications Including TuneUp, for a mere $39 (normally $355).

Read on to find out how to enter!

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Head over to StackSocial to read more about The Ultimate Music App Bundle.

How to Enter

To enter, simply follow us on Twitter and leave a comment on this post with your username. We’ll choose the winners at random in just a few days. Good luck!

We recently reviewed Camtasia for Mac and I’m pleased to announce that we have one copy to give away!

I gave it a strong 9/10 in my review and had this to say:

Camtasia for Mac is an excellent application that allows you to make professional screencasts with relative ease. The selection of effects and processes is good, while the options for recording cover every possible need.

Read on to find out how to enter!

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How to Enter

Entering the competition is really simple – all you need to do is leave a comment on the post. That’s it! Let us know why you’d like to win, what you want to make screencasts for, or describe the feature you’re most excited about using!

I’ll pick a winner at random in just over a week.

These days, it seems like people want to share just about every little detail of their life with others online. In a world where few brunches go un-instagramed and few complaints about the DMV go un-tweeted, its nice to see personal journaling experiencing something of a resurgence.

I’ve kept a paper journal for about ten years, and while it will always store entries about the more important events of my life, I recently started keeping a daily digital journal for recording the less momentous ones. I’ve spent a few days playing around with Memories from Juicy Cocktail. Can it handle my digital journalling needs?

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Interface

When you first load the app, you are presented with an entry that serves as a simple tutorial slide. The main window uses a dual pane interface, with a listing of your entries in the sidebar and your main journal entry in the main body. Across the top bar are controls to show and hide the sidebar, add and remove entries, add pictures and video, controls for color and font, and the search field. The color and font controls are the standard Mac popups that most people will already be familiar with. While Memories can go fullscreen, I found the app to be rather efficient with its layout and therefore was happy using it as a small window.

Hitting the “new” button gives you a blank entry to work with. You can name your entries, though I wasn’t particularly interested in coming up with a title as if each one was a blog post. Oddly, when you click in the title field, the placeholder text doesn’t disappear, so you have to manually delete it (which is a frustration). Next to the title entry box, you’ll find a cloud icon. If you grant Memories access to your location, it will tag each entry with the local weather at the time of your writing. Clicking on the cloud won’t give you any new controls, but will display what weather information is getting tagged to your entry.

Next you’ll find an arrow icon, which has become the standard mark of location services for apps. Clicking on it displays a map that pinpoints your location using your WiFi connection. Next is a small emoticon. Click it, and you get four options for which there are no titles, but I would describe them as ecstatic, happy, indifferent, and “what a terrible day I’ve had.” It’s an interesting touch, if not a bit gimmicky. Lastly, there is the date display, which you can control if you need to record an entry for a day that you missed.

Features

Anyone who ever grew up with a nosy sibling knows how important it is to keep your secrets hidden from others. Memories allows you to password protect your journal, and set it to automatically lock at user-defined intervals.

If you are hoping to get into keeping the journal regularly, you may need to be reminded to write. Memories integrates with Mountain Lion’s Notification Center to alert you when you need to fire up the app. You can set whatever time you want, and choose the frequency (as frequently as every 15 minutes to weekly). I found that the alerts work well.

For those who are a bit too lazy to type – or perhaps a bit narcissistic – you can record video for your journal. Clicking on the camera icon activates your iSight camera. After you’re done, the video gets embedded directly into the entry with playback controls available. Having the controls isolated within the app means you won’t open up Quicktime and leave a potentially embarrassing trail for others to uncover. This is good for privacy, but also means you can’t access the video elsewhere for your own use (such as iMovie for editing).

The search feature works well, and you can also use the calendar icon to filter which entries are displayed based on a time frame you specify.

Competition

For me, Day One for Mac and iOS has become the gold standard of journaling apps thanks to its clean design, expansive features, and quick syncing between devices. It is hard to try out an app like Memories without comparing it to Day One.

Perhaps the most glaring disadvantage for Memories in such a comparison is the lack of companion apps for you iDevices. My laptop stays at home while I bring my iPad out with me all day. I like being able to make a quick entry about a meeting I just had or phone call I just made. With an app that exists only on your Mac, your options for entry-creation are limited.

The lack of companion apps also illustrates another limitation: A lack of cloud syncing. Even without apps for iPhone or iPad, it would be nice to have access to backups. Apps like 1Password let you change the location of the library in a cloud-connected folder like Dropbox, while maintaining privacy. Even if iDevice support never comes, it would be nice to be able to change the library location, if only for syncing between Macs.

Day One offers tagging of your entries. As this is a personal journal, you aren’t using tags the way you would for something like Twitter, but instead for your own organization. If you take a trip to Hawaii, you can tag those entries to help you easily find them again later. Memories’ search function works well, but having tagging enabled would make finding a specific entry much easier.

Conclusion

Overall, Day One is a cleaner looking, more fully featured app. Having access to iCloud-synced companion apps for iDevices is a huge plus. However, the ability to add video directly into an entry in Memories makes it more attractive to anyone interested in keeping a video journal.

Memories currently goes for $9, which is a buck cheaper than Day One. I think the extra dollar is worth the sync-capabilities and cleaner layout, but if you want dead-simple video recording, Memories will serve you well.

It’s no secret that I’m a big fan of resource management sims. I like buying cows with just the wheat I can grow in my flash-based farm and building entire cities out of the wood my tiny computer minions chop themselves. And boy, do I like Christmas. Put the two together, and I’m sold.

That’s how construction management simulation Trade Nations: North Pole found its way onto my computer. Not only do I get to build Santa’s home town, but since developer Z2Live has teamed with Child’s Play, I can also help out a good cause. There’s nothing like doing a good deed at the holidays, and hopefully the gameplay of Trade Nations: North Pole will leave you feeling just as warm inside.

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Living on Top of the World

Santa will welcome you to the North Pole, and guess what? You get to be the mayor! It’s like every dream of my six-year-old self has come true. Santa lets you know that you’re going to have to finish up all the presents this year. He doesn’t seem overly concerned, but unless everyone wants to receive ill-fitting handknit sweaters, he and I should probably have a word before he lays this much responsibility on me.

Except for Santa’s house, there’s not really any place for the elves, your labor force, to live. So you need to get on building them some homes. The elves won’t go inside their houses, though, presumably because they’ve all still got that fresh paint smell, and the elves are trying to avoid breathing in the VOCs. Instead they just wait around outside their houses for you to give them something to do. You are the mayor of the North Pole, after all; can’t you feel the power you wield?

As the mayor, one of your primary goals is job creation. You create jobs by building small businesses, like logging camps, cobblers, and bakeries. Your elves go to work at the shops and start producing things that can be used to make presents. The elves don’t ever seem to get paid, though. They just work and work incessantly, for no compensation.

The elves create more stuff, you collect more stuff, and you ship off more presents to Santa. Along the way you can upgrade your facilities, build more shops to employ more elves, and expand your town to hold all that prosperity you’ve brought to the the North Pole. You might be the best mayor ever.

Keeping Up With the Clauses

If you’ve got friends playing Trade Nations: North Pole, that will probably make it a lot more fun, because you can go around to each other’s towns and get bonuses when you do. Otherwise, Santa is your only friend. I mean, Santa’s a good friend and all, but as you can imagine, he’s that friend who always does too much. He’s that friend who’s always just a bit better than you and always has to one-up everything you do.

Santa is the king of one-upsmanship. Just check out his town. I could play for years and my town would never look like Santa’s town. It’s like a real life winter wonderland, right there on my computer. How can I compete with that? I can’t.

If I really wanted my town to look like Santa’s, though, I could probably make it happen. You can use “stars,” one of the many magical resources in Trade Nations: North Pole, to get a more magical-looking town. You won’t have that many on hand by just playing the game, though. If you want to get fancy, like that Santa over there, you’ll have to spend some real money. Yeah, you can buy some stars if you want to really make your town shine.

Frankly, I didn’t really feel the need for any extra stars or any other game currency. I didn’t hit any big walls and the game went along just fine, if a bit slowly, if I played without any in-app purchases. That said, Trade Nations: North Pole is free, and if you like a free game, it’s not a bad idea to show the developers some money love. There were also some tasks that didn’t move as quickly as I would have liked, and as this is a standalone game that you have to startup and shutdown whenever you want to play, speeding up a 60 minute task with some stars isn’t a bad idea.

What Would Santa Do?

There are some tasks that move gameplay along right at the beginning. These tasks work effectively as a tutorial. You’re taught how to buy houses and shops and put elves to work. Once that’s over though, there aren’t anymore goals. You’re just sort of on your own to play as you like. Some people may like being left to their own devices and be happy to finally be free of a nagging resource management sim goal system.

I missed it, though. Before I fully had my feet about me, I was left to navigate my own little town, and I wasn’t 100% sure what to do next. Besides repeating the same tasks from the tutorial over and over again, I was at a loss. Eventually in all of these sorts of games, I begin to ignore the task system and play how I want, but I like that guidance in the beginning, and I wish it had gone on for a bit longer.

Final Thoughts

Despite my personal feelings of abandonment at the end of the tutorial, Trade Nations: North Pole is a really cheery game to put you in the Christmas spirit. I was somewhat worried it would be the sort of game constantly trying to push in-app purchases, and while that was present, it wasn’t overwhelming or oppressive. I could easily play on at my own pace, creating my little Christmas town, pressing my elves into labor, and spending my own money as I saw fit (or not).

And Z2Live has pledged to donate $15,000 to Child’s Play, a charity improving the lives of children in hospitals with toys and games. You just have to play the game, make packages, and send them on to Santa. If I can help out someone who really needs it, just by playing a game, well that’s pretty cool, too.

In the previous instalment, I covered quite a few topics. Ranging from search and working with URLs to the various little neat features that make working with your Mac all the more pleasurable. As overwhelming as it all may have seemed at the time, I did warn you that there was still more to Alfred. Much more in fact.

So without further delay, let’s continue on our quest and wake this beast from its slumber once and for all.

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Why not start by reading the first part of this series – Awaken The Productivity Beast In Alfred – Part 1

System

When it comes to dealing directly with your system, Alfred has a few neat tricks up its sleeve. Once again it comes to the rescue, aiding us in performing menial everyday tasks with grace and ease, all with just a few keystrokes.

System Commands

Alfred allows you to perform system actions simply by typing their respective keywords. As one would expect, not having to reach for your mouse to perform any of the following actions is a huge timesaver:

• Activate the screensaver;
• Show or empty the Trash;
• Logout, Sleep or Lock your System;
• Restart or shutdown your Mac
• Eject one or all mounted drives;
• Hide or quit apps.

The last two are particularly useful. At the end of the day when you want to quit out of all your apps and eject all your volumes and drives two simple queries and you’re done!

1. Open Alfred, type quitall to quit all your apps;
2. Type ejectall to eject all your mounted volumes safely before shutting down.

You can place any volume in a blacklist. That way it won’t appear in the list of Volumes to be ejected and will also be ignored when issuing the ejectall command.

Although there isn’t a hideall keyword that would come in handy sometimes, you can use another little trick to accomplish something similar. Alfred allows you to action all visible results thus allowing you to hide up to 9 apps simultaneously.

1. Open Alfred preferences, navigate to Advance>Keyboard and near the end you can choose which modifier to use in order to action visible results;
2. Next, navigate to Appearance>Options and choose how many results you want to see, max is 9;
3. Now you can type hide and hit the modifier to action all visible results which will effectively hide up to 9 apps at once.

Terminal / Shell

With Alfred you can quickly open a shell in your terminal of choice and execute a command, all in one go. Open Alfred Preferences and under Features>Terminal / Shell choose which terminal app you want to use and the desired prefix (default is >).

• Running low on memory, simply type:
  >purge
• An alternative method to start remote access to a system:
  >ssh remote_hostname

File Navigation

A personal favourite is file navigation. You can quickly access and navigate any folder structure on you Mac with this gem of a feature. With the advent of OS X Lion, Apple hid the Library folder, which for most users was a nuisance. Having to go the the menu hold down ALT to access the library was tedious and for many, unnecessary. Fortunately with Alfred it’s a breeze to access it.

Access The Library Folder

• Open Alfred’s Preferences and in File Navigation>Advanced, choose which key should be used to identify your Home Folder (default is ~)
• Now summon Alfred and type ~ followed by the letter L and hit enter and as quickly and easily as that you’re in the elusive Library Folder.

Quickly view and access a hidden file

• Summon Alfred and navigate to the desired folder;
• Type . (period) and all those pesky invisible files should appear;
• Choose the file you want and action it

Easily Navigate Nested Folders

You can easily navigate the folder hierarchy from within Alfred. By default ?? goes into the selected folder and ?? goes to the parent folder. Alternatively you can use ? to go to the parent folder too. While navigating the folder hierarchy you can also type to filter files and folders. There are 3 other methods of quickly getting to a desired file or folder.

1. Using the already familiar find and open keywords, start typing a folders name and then navigate the folder with ?? and ??;
2. Choose the file or folder in finder and then trigger the hotkey for Finder Selection (default is ??\) This will open Alfred with the chosen file or folder. In the case it’s a folder you can continue to navigate it;
3. The Previous Path hotkey (set this in Features>File Navigation>General) will open Alfred on the last path you navigated to.

Actions And Buffers

I’ve alluded several times to actioning an item but have yet to expand on that concept. Hitting ? will action an item. The result will vary greatly depending on what type of item is selected or if a keyword was used. There are however alternatives to the default action that can be accessed by hitting ? or ?. This will bring up a new list of options such as Copy/Move, Delete and Get Info to name just a few. However, additional options will be available in accordance to the type of item you selected.

Files

• Open With – Useful to open a file with an app other than the default;
• Copy Path to Clipboard;
• Browse Folder In Alfred – This will open Alfred on the files path allowing you to navigate the folder structure from there.

Folders

• Open Terminal Here – Opens your default Terminal App at the folders path;
• Copy Path to Clipboard;
• Open With – Another way of opening the terminal at the selected location or opening in another app other than finder.

Apps

• Recent Documents – Summon Alfred, type an apps name and hit ? twice to quickly see the most recent documents opened in that app;
• Show Package Contents – This will show the package contents in Alfred so you can keep navigating in Alfred or open it in finder.

Remember, as with about everything else in the results list, you can also filter actions by typing a few letters.

Extensions

Extensions are Alfred’s utility belt of sorts. They allow you the expand on Alfred’s already vast array of possibilities. Basically, if you can script it, Alfred can do it. It’s possible to break Alfred’s extensions into two main groups.

1. Scripts – where you can use AppleScripts, Automator WorkFlows and finally shell scripts. Shell scripts in turn allow you to call other scripting languages such as python, perl, ruby, etc. So no matter which scripting language you prefer, odds are you’re covered.
2. Files and Filters – Filters were discussed in Part 1 (Search Scopes And Filters) so I’ll skip it this time around. Files and Groups however are worth mentioning.

Now, if you don’t have any scripting skills you may immediately dismiss this, thinking that it would be of little use to you. While that may be a sound assumption, it couldn’t be farther from the truth. There are already a vast number of user submitted Extensions that cater to a wide variety of needs. All you need do, is peruse the site, download an extension that seems interesting and install it (double click the extension).

If however you do want to create your own extensions, it’s a rather straightforward affair. Click +, and choose the type of extension. Give it a name, and optionally an icon, author and URL. Finally you will be presented with the screen to edit your new extension. Title, Description and Keyword are common fields to all extension types. Now depending on the type of extension chosen, there will be a few differences so let’s break those down.

Shell Scripts

Apart from the previously mentioned fields, shell scripts also have:

• Options > Silent – checked makes your shell script run silently in the background. If you don’t have this checked Alfred will open a terminal window in which the command will be executed.
• Options > Action – when checked, your extension will appear in the list of item actions, thus allowing you to action an item from the results window. This field is also present in AppleScripts and Workflows.
• Command – This is where you place the command that will actually do something when the extension is triggered. Just above the text entry window you will see a button, Advanced. Clicking it will present you with additional options pertaining to the execution of your command:
  • Escaping – Escape any special character so it won’t mess with your script;
  • Debugging – Script output can be logged to console making it easier to analyse;
  • Output – If your script returns some type of information, this can be passed to Growl or Notification Centre. To choose which of the two Alfred should use, navigate to Advanced>Notifications.
  • Files – If you have the Action flag active, you can pass multiple files to your extension.
• Parameter– You can optionally pass parameters to Alfred (should appear in your script as a variable {query}).
  • Auto Detect – Alfred will attempt to determine if there is a parameter by checking to see if there is any text after the keyword and use that as the {query} parameter.
  • No Parameter – Alfred expects no parameter and therefore any text placed after the keyword will tell Alfred that you’re not using the extension. Instead it will probably show some fallback search.
  • Optional Parameter – If you place some text after the keyword, Alfred will use that. If you place nothing {query} will simply be blank.
  • Required Parameter – Alfred expects a parameter for this extension and until it receives some text after the keyword, nothing happens.

AppleScripts

The fields and options available are very similar to those in shell scripts. Notable differences being:

• Options > Background – When checked, Alfred “spawns a background osascript process, otherwise it uses NSAppleScript to run internally”. (Thanks Andrew for the clarification)
• AppleScript – As the field’s name implies, this is where you will place any AppleScript that is to be executed. When creating a new extension, Alfred will pre-populate this with lines needed for your AppleScript to use an optional parameter. If you don’t need it then feel free to delete this text.
• Parameter – Similarly to Shell Scripts, you have Auto Detect, Optional and Required. This field will only be active however if you have your AppleScript wrapped in on alfred_script(q) handler.

Workflows

A workflow extension lets you use Automator Workflows to accomplish tasks on the actioned item. It has most of the aforementioned fields so no need to go over that again. What I would like to draw your attention to is the Workflow field. It has a browse button allowing you to locate your workflow file. However, there is a cleaner way of doing this.

Right click on the extension name and choose Show in Finder. This will open a Finder window showing you the contents of your extension. You can save your workflow to this folder and then simply type in the workflow’s name (include the extension). This way, if you export your extension to share with the rest of the Alfred community, your workflow will be included in the extension package.

Filters

Now, although I briefly skimmed over search filters in Part 1, there were some important aspects I omitted. As already explained, you can define a Scope, to limit the results to a certain folder structure and limit the File Types to search for. I also previously mentioned you could pass the actioned item to an extension.

What I didn’t go into at the time was what is hidden under the Advanced button just above the File Types list.

• Date Range – search for files from Today, Last 3,7, or 30 Days, Files older than 30 days or Any Date.
• Metadata Fields – Since Alfred uses spotlight’s metadata index, anything spotlight can see, Alfred can also see. You can add additional Metadata Fields (such as OpenMeta Tags – kMDItemOMUserTags). You can negate certain fields, and choose whether Alfred searches for word boundaries or splits each word into a separate query parameter.
• Accuracy – when checked, Alfred will search from the first character. This will produce more accurate results with greater performance. When unchecked Alfred will prefix your query with a wildcard allowing for greater flexibility.
• System Files – Whether or not to ignore system files, reducing unnecessary noise and clutter in the results list.

As you can see, search filters allow for great flexibility and customisation. You can tweak them to suit the needs of a very specific search or keep things broad.

File Or Group

The final extension allows you to setup a group of files, folders or apps that will all be opened simultaneously once you trigger the extension. Create it, as you would any other, give a name, description and keyword. Then simply drag any file, folder or app onto the Files list. Drag to reorder and remember that Alfred takes a top-down approach, so the last item in the list will be the last item opened and thus, the frontmost window.

Use File or Group to quickly setup a working environment, opening up all apps and files you may need for a specific task.

Hotkeys

Hotkeys allow you to bind almost any action possible in Alfred to a keyboard shortcut. You can launch files or apps, perform actions, run system commands, activate extensions and much more. Creating a hotkey is easy enough. Simply navigate to Hotkeys click + and choose the desired action

Selected Text

• Show Alfred – This will summon Alfred and optionally pre-populate the query with selected text. You can also add a keyword and choose where the cursor will be placed. I use this with DuckDuckGo’s !Bang search. I created a hotkey that would summon Alfred with duck as the keyword. Now I just need to add the !Bang I want followed by the search query and I have quick search across hundreds of sites.
• Web Search and Custom Search – These two options will immediately trigger a search with the selected text. This is also a great and quick way to translate selected text. Just create a web search and choose Translate.
• Large Type– This option will simply show any selected text in Large Type. You can either have it occupy the whole screen of fit to your text. You can use this in many scenarios:
  • Search for a file, folder or anything really, trigger Large Type and the full path will be shown;
  • Lookup a contact, choose any of the details and trigger Large Type. The email, phone number, etc will be shown;

Apps And Files

You can bind a hotkey to any app or file you desire. This is a great way of quickly opening a very common app or file. Click + choose Apps and Files>Application or File. Choose the keyboard shortcut you want, browse to the file or application and you’re done.

Paths and URLs

If you recall, in the previous instalment I mentioned how adept Alfred was at navigating your folders. I also spoke about how well Alfred handles URL Schemes and URLs in general. Hotkeys provide an excellent shortcut to these powerful features.

• Paths – Click + choose Paths and URLS>Folder Path. Choose the desired keyboard shortcut, the folder you want and then finally choose if you want that folder to open in Finder or alternatively open in Alfred’s File System Navigation. The later will allow you to continue traversing the folder hierarchy from within Alfred. If you adhere to a type of workflow that uses some sort or inbox of action folder, then this is an excellent timesaver.
• URLS– This is a personal favourite. It’s more powerful and flexible than you could initially imagine. You create this as you do any other hotkey. Then you can give it a name and start adding URLs. Bear in mind that you can leverage the full power of URL Schemes here.
• Setup Your Working Environment – An alternative and more versatile method of setting up a working environment, is to use URL schemes. You can open any file, folder or app with file://. This method while not as easy to setup as the File or Group Extension, has the added benefit that you can also add URLs to any website or remote host.


All apps, files and sites I need, a keystroke away!

• Extensions – You can bind any of your extensions to a hotkey. For extension types that accept parameters, you have a field in which you can type the argument. Alternatively you can check Selected text in OS X and any selected text will be passed as an argument to your extension.
• System Commands & iTunes – Bind a hotkey to a System Command to easily perform any of the actions available to Alfred. Set hotkeys to control iTunes, from Play/Pause, Next/Prev Track, assign ratings and randomise albums.
• Clipboard – Here you can configure a hotkey to paste the contents of the clipboard as plain text or use a hotkey to trigger a snippet. The downside though is that you can’t use an already existing snippet and have to recreate it.

Fun Stuff

Being Mac lovers, we tend to place some value on aesthetics. And while it may be difficult to have a default theme that will please all users, Alfred allows you to tweak it’s look to your heart’s content. Navigate to Appearance>Theme. Choose from the various themes that come pre-installed or create a new one.
Clicking on the area you want to change will popup the colour picker. Tweak the colour and opacity and watch your changes live in the preview. Alternatively, head on over to http://alfredthe.me and build your theme there. There are a few more things you can tweak appearance wise so look around the other two tabs.



Can you tell weekends from workdays… 🙂

Alfred tracks its usage and presents this information in an attractive chart, broken down by usage types. While you could contest that this is a great way of seeing whether you’re getting your money’s worth… lets be honest… It’s all about bragging rights! So just click the little twitter icon to tweet your stats.

Conclusion

As I said in Part 1 – “Alfred is one of the rare apps that you can get by just fine using the bare minimum” – but the truth is that when you delve in there is a world more to discover. There is a great community behind it creating wonderful extensions, churning out innovative workflows and sharing them with the rest. There are many great resources out there to further your knowledge of Alfred and bring your productivity to all new heights.

There is plenty more that could be said about Alfred, it’s just that good, and I’m sure I missed a few things. So sound out in the comments with any tips, tricks or workflows you may have.

GeekTool is a small, yet remarkably powerful application that some neglect because of it’s steep learning curve. Thankfully for uniquely useful apps like GeekTool, there is always a community of users that make the app even better — and in this case simpler.

From basic to exceedingly complex, the following is an assortment of very useful, powerful and fun Geeklets and scripts that can help you get started with GeekTool. From weather, power consumption and productiveness to social, music and Internet, there are plenty of great Geeklets to try and enjoy. Just remember not to use too many Geeklets at once; your RAM will thank you.

On Mac.AppStorm we occasionally like to highlight awesome posts from our archive that are still relevant now, this is one of those.

For the Weather Geek

For the Math Geek

For the Productive Geek

For the Music Geek

For the Social Geek

For the Artistic Geek

For the Internet Geek

For the Themed Geek

Need more inspiration? Check this link to see how others use GeekTool and start creating your own awesome Geeklets and themes!

Share Yours

Geektool is a great gadget to take advantage of your creativity and the empty space on your desktop. These are just a few Geeklets and scripts that can be found all around the web. If you have any awesome Geeklets that you use or scripts you have come across recently, let us know in the comments below. We would love to check them out!