Category: Mac

With Christmas just next week, developers are starting to decrease the prices on their creations. From Boom to N.O.V.A. 2 to Sketch to Dropzone, the prices continue to drop across the board. There will be a special edition of the weekly deals with all the great apps you need for your new Macs next week, but for now let’s check out what’s on sale at the moment.

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See You After Christmas

That’s all for this week, but be sure to tune in next time for what are sure to be some fantastic sales. You can also check out Two Dollar Tuesdays on Christmas for some quality apps at a bit more than two dollars. Have a merry Christmas and I’ll see you next week!

A few weeks ago I reviewed ScreenFlow, a superb app that’s marked out as one of the best screencasting apps available. Today I’m going to review the other app that stands out as one of the best, Camtasia 2.

Camtasia is more well-known as a powerful screencasting app for the PC, but Camtasia for Mac is its almost fully featured counterpart built to run seamlessly on OS X. If you’re looking for a professional screencasting app, hopefully I can help you choose the right one for you.

Let’s take a look at Camtasia!

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Dealing with Prejudice

I’m going to get this out of the way right now, sometimes it’s difficult to give an app a fair hearing when something about its design doesn’t match your expectations. Camtasia is a well-designed app that happens to have a strong Windows aesthetic, it doesn’t look especially at home in OS X but that’s perhaps more to do with my preconceived notions of what a Mac app should look like than anything else.

Nonetheless, Camtasia is powerful professional app that deserves a blank slate, so here it is!

Editing a screencast in Camtasia.

Recording

The one thing that does strike you when you open up Camtasia for the first time is how simply intuitive the initial screencasting menu is. It very quickly allows you to set exactly what you want to record, giving you a handy drop-down that offers you standard size options and the option to select a Custom Region.

Tip – Camtasia also allows you to record video from a camera simultaneously, be that a built-in FaceTime HD camera or a more professional external camera you have connected.

Camtasia’s recording menu, it couldn’t be easier!

The audio options for recording a screencast with Camtasia are also intuitive to set up, it quickly recognises when you have a microphone connected via USB and offers a neat drop-down to switch between the built-in microphone and any external microphone. In addition, Camtasia gives you the option to record the system audio, either on its own or alongside the microphone. This is extremely useful for certain types of screencasting where hearing the computer audio makes everything that much easier to understand — such as a screencast that takes you through using reverb in Pro Tools.

You do need to install a small plug-in to set up recording system audio, but that’s par for the course.

Once you’ve set your options, recording a screencast with Camtasia is a simple as hitting record and waiting tentatively for the countdown to expire. To finish a recording you can simply hit Stop Recording in the menubar drop-down or use the keyboard shortcut (of which there are many, I know you’ll be pleased to hear).

Editing

Much like in most screencasting apps I’ve tested, once you finish recording the edit window immediately jumps open with your screencast ready to be tinkered with. At first launch it shows you some options for getting started and how to access any help you may need — a useful touch.

Camtasia’s helpful help menu.

The Edit window is reasonably intuitive and will look familiar to anyone who has used a video editing program before. There is a plethora of options and features available to help you make the slickest screencast possible; from basic editing of the clip itself and adjusting the volume level, to adding transitions, animations, and FX.

As in ScreenFlow, use Ripple Delete (Command+Delete) to remove sections and bring the remaining sections together.

One thing that I immediately noticed was just how light Camtasia appeared to be on audio options, until I realised that you can simply drag and drop the processes you want from the Audio FX menu onto the audio track to give you more control. This works for Video, Audio, and Cursor FX, simply drag and drop the desired effect onto your clip and edit the details in the right-hand panel. The processes you can add to the audio track include:

• Clicking Reduction
• Clipping Reduction
• Dynamics Processor
• Noise Reduction
• Pitch
• Lower Volume
• Raise Volume

These allow you to easily increase the professionalism of any screencast, audio is often vastly under-edited but it makes a huge difference to the end result.

Using the Audio FX in Camtasia.

In addition to Audio FX there is also a decent range of Video FX, such as:

• Colour Adjustment
• Colorize
• Device Frame
• Drop Shadow
• Glow
• Mask
• Reflection
• Sepia
• Remove a Color
• Spotlight
• Window Spotlight

Effects such as Window Spotlight allow you to easily add focus to the window you are currently using and avoid viewer distraction.

Using Camtasia’s Video FX.

As with all good screencasting software, Camtasia also comes stocked with some Cursor FX to highlight exactly what you are doing throughout the screencast. These are particularly helpful when you’re moving quickly or teaching technical aspects of an application. Camtasia includes Cursor Highlight, Cursor Magnify, and Cursor Spotlight.

In addition to the cursor effects, you can also add effects for different mouse clicks in order to differentiate them for the viewer.

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. It could use a little more polish on the interface, but as a practical tool for making screencasts, Camtasia is a great choice!

Camtasia vs ScreenFlow

So you’re in the market for a screencasting application for the Mac and you want it to be professional? I’ve got two options for you; Camtasia for Mac 2 and ScreenFlow 4.

Here’s the difficult part, deciding which one is right for you.

Price

Let’s start with price, seeing as that’s high on anyone’s list. Neither of these apps are cheap, but what do you expect from professional tools? Both Camtasia and ScreenFlow are pretty evenly matched on price, currently retailing in the Mac App Store at exactly the same price.

Functionality

Both apps have a wealth of functionality, and are perfectly matched on what they allow you to record – they’ve got everything covered. As for editing options, both offer some depth but I believe that ScreenFlow has the edge. Still, they both offer extremely useful editing features such as chroma keying and large selections of callout and cursor effects.

Design

Camtasia and ScreenFlow are both very intuitive and have manageable learning curves. If I had to decide between them I would probably say that I prefer ScreenFlow’s design, mostly due to the fact that Camtasia uses both a left and right sidebar where ScreenFlow uses just one (on the left) — I like ScreenFlow’s efficiency!

Overall I’m left with the feeling that Camtasia for Mac 2 just isn’t quite as polished as ScreenFlow 4.

Here at AppStorm, we love games! Why not relax for a minute and find a fantastic new game to enjoy – hopefully these roundups will help you out.

Mac.AppStorm:

• 35 Quick-Fix Games That’ll Help You Take a Break

Web.AppStorm:

• Top 20 Chrome Web Store Games

iPhone.AppStorm:

• The 12 Top Racing Games You Need To Play
• 50 Incredible Sports Games
• 10 Awesome Board Games for the iPhone

iPad.AppStorm:

• 50 Awesome iPad Games

Android.AppStorm:

• 50 Deeply Addictive Android Games

Windows.AppStorm:

• The AppStorm Holiday ’12 Video Game Giveaway

The holidays are upon us and ’tis the season for giving! And giving we most definitely are!

We have a stunning array of award-winning games up for grabs! Head over to Windows.AppStorm and get a chance at winning one of three award-winning games — Black Ops 2, Assassin’s Creed 3, or Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3.

Go to Windows.AppStorm and find out more!

Who needs cover when you can go in guns blazing?

Winners will be chosen randomly and will receive a digital copy of the game through the Steam service.

Getting into any hobby is bound to be expensive. That’s especially true about getting into music: it’s cheap and easy enough to get an acoustic guitar and learn your way around it, but if you want the full experience and go the electric way, you have to make a pretty big investment in equipment, and even worse, once you start with a few pieces of gear, it’s hard to stop looking for more new additions to improve your sound.

That’s where AmpKit comes in. It started off as an iOS app that allowed you to plug in your guitar and gave you access to a lot of cool amps and pedals that would otherwise be really expensive to own. Well, recently AmpKit made its way to the Mac, and today we’re going to take a look at it. Interested?

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Getting Started

Getting started.

AmpKit is a pretty complete app that can simulate a number of amps, mics and pedalboards with your plugged in guitar. AmpKit will pretty much work with any input signal it gets, whether its your guitar being directly connected to your audio line-in or through a more complete USB or FireWire audio interface. If you don’t have a guitar around and want to work with the app, AmpKit also provides a few samples that you can loop in order to get the feel of how your amp setup might turn out.

Setting it up.

Under the settings you can select the input and output of your preference as well as set their gain and configurate a noise filter. Once you’ve setup your guitar appropiately, you can start jamming out with the many amps that the app has.

The Sound

Perfecting your sound.

AmpKit comes with an impressive number of preset setups, which range from a simple “Rock and Roll” sound to a weirder “Wahmatronix 6000″. If the preset amps don’t cut it for you, you can create your own setups and choose everything from the amp, to the cabinet, pedals, and mics to get the sound you are looking for.

AmpKit puts at your disposal 22 different amps, 28 pedals, 28 cabinets and 8 mics for you to setup in huge number of combinations. You can also of course get into each of your active devices and play around with the settings to increase the gain, volume, effect level, color, depth, speed or whatever your gear lets you adjust.

Gear

A wide selection of amps.

The AmpKit devs say that each piece of their gear is meticulously modeled after real-life equipment. They even used some well-known brands like Fargen and Peavey to model and name some of their amps, although you might also find a few other fictional brands that resemble well-known amps like Marshalls, Mesa Boogies and Fenders.

The selection of pedals.

As far as pedals go, there’s a little bit of everything around. Some are also modeled after real-life equipment, such as Rocktron, while others resemble pedals of brands like BOSS. In the 28 pedals that AmpKit includes you’ll find some normal ones for wah, distortion, vibrato, chorus, reverb, overdrive, as well as some others for noise filtering, reduction and removal; and everything in between.

The cabs and mics.

Just as well, the variety of cabinets and dynamic and condenser microphones that the app has, can make up for some very interesting combinations in sound, making it much easier for you to find the adequate sound that you’ve had spinning in your head for days.

Tip. If you’d like to check out more of the gear included in the app and the inspiration behind them, you can check out this link.

Creating

Getting stuck into recording.

If you want to record with your setups, AmpKit gives you a number of tools to do so. You can import songs to back you up, and with the help of those backing tracks along with the tuner and metronome included, you have the necessary tools for recording your tunes right inside the app. And if you don’t like how your setup ended up once you are done with it, you can even re-amp it with pretty much zero effort.

Backing tracks.

When you are happy with your finished work, you can export it “dry” or “wet” to a .wav file. Wet means the recording will be saved with all of the AmpKit effects, while the dry export will save the recording as it is.

Conclusion

AmpKit has truly impressed me. I am by no means a proffessional musician, and I don’t work with fancy and expensive professional tools, but from my experience with lower-end DAWs (and similar) like Garageband, I can say that this app has proven to be very easy to use, fairly cheap and tons of fun to play around with. The sounds that I can achieve with it are beyond surprising, especially since my interface is quite cheap and I could never get the same sound with other similar apps as I did with this one.

For any aspiring musician on a budget, AmpKit gives you access to some of the coolest equipment around for a moderate price.

I already have Caffeine installed on my computer and it’s pretty great – no more computer going to sleep while I’m watching a movie or reading a long article. Unfortunately, the problem with Caffeine is that I always (ALWAYS) forget to turn it off. That means sometimes I leave my computer open for hours and it just never goes to sleep. That’s not too good, so I decided I definitely needed to check out an alternative.

I recently heard about this cool new Mac app called Should I Sleep. It does the same type of thing as programs like Caffeine (keeps your computer from going to sleep while you’re using it), but rather than always staying on until you manually turn it off, Should I Sleep uses different sensors to prevent your computer from going to sleep. The sensors do things like detect sound and movement, to make sure your computer stays on where you’re around, but automatically goes to sleep when you leave. It seemed like a pretty novel idea, so I decided to check it out.

The Five Sensors

Should I Sleep currently comes with five sensors available for in-app purchase. You can purchase sensors individually or make one purchase which includes all sensors as well as any future upgrades and additional sensors. Use the preferences menu to check the different sensors you’ve purchased and to make adjustments as needed.

The catalog of the various sensors available for purchase.

The facial detection sensor is first up and comes with the standard app download. Facial detection uses the camera app to take a number of pictures, seeking out eyes, nose and mouth. There can be multiple faces present, just make sure that the lighting is decent. You can adjust the accuracy of this sensor to choose between less images/lower accuracy and less memory/power used or more images/higher accuracy and thus more memory/power used.

The camera motion sensor takes short video clips. The clips are then compared to a threshold for variation in movement. If movement is detected, Should I Sleep prevents your computer from going to sleep. You can adjust the sensor for an environment with more or less movement for better accuracy.

The settings for the camera motion sensor.

The sound activity works under the same principle as the other sensors. Your computer’s microphone is used to check for sound around you. It records short audio clips and compares them to a threshold. If sound is heard, it prevents your computer from going to sleep. As usual, you can adjust the sensor based upon your environment, whether it’s extremely loud or library quiet.

It’s worth noting that you can test any of the sensors from the preferences screen. Just click the “Test it now!!” button to see if the threshold you selected is appropriate for your environment.

The last two sensors are quite simple. The external monitor checks to see if any secondary displays or projectors are plugged into your computer. If there are, it prevents sleep. The download monitor prevents your computer from going to sleep if the network usage is above a certain threshold, indicating a download of some sort.

Testing out the download sensor.

Using the App

So now it comes down to actually using the app. The first step is to go into your preferences and make sure that any sensors you have installed are configured for the environment you find yourself in. Adjust for noise and movement accordingly – a coffee shop is much different than your home office, for example.

After the sensors are configured, make sure the rest of the app is set up to your specifications. Under the “general” section of the preferences section you can choose whether or not the program starts at startup. If you have it set to not open up, you can choose whether the program displays a welcome message or not.

The general preferences menu.

You can also access other preferences from the dropdown menu accessed through the menubar icon. Here you can choose which sensors are active – you might need to disable sound or camera in certain situations, for example, so easy access is provided here. You can also choose how long it takes the app to keep your computer awake. Choose from half an hour, an hour, two hours, four or simply set it to always keep your computer awake.

The menu from the menubar icon.

Once it’s all configured, you just have to wait around. The app runs automatically in the background if you have any operating system prior to Mountain Lion installed. If you have Mountain Lion installed, you can choose whether you want a notification or not when Should I Sleep takes effect. This notification just states that the app is utilizing its sensors to determine if your computer actually should go to sleep at that moment or not. If you notice that your computer is sleeping when it shouldn’t, you need to go back and tweak the sensors.

A Valid Replacement?

At first, I didn’t know if I was going to be able to recommend Should I Sleep I downloaded all of the sensors immediately upon purchase and was quickly overwhelmed with making tweaks to the sensors. It took me a while to get the hang of it – I was having to constantly make minute adjustments. After using the program for a few days though I’m happy to announce that it works really well! I’ve gotten the hang of the needed adjustments and I’m able to easily adjust to familiar settings based upon the environment I find myself in.

Should I Sleep is definitely replacing Caffeine on my computer. It offers the same functionality and works really well, and now I never have to worry about forgetting to disable the app. I’ve left my computer alone several times now and every time it has gone to sleep just as it should, without me having to remember to turn off an app.

So I’m a big fan of the app. What about you? Have you tried? Are you planning to try it now? Do you have another alternative you prefer instead? Share your thoughts in the comments below.

There are a lot of ways to extract archive files, but if you want to see what’s inside of them first, you’re options are going to become more limited. And if you want to see inside something like a RAR, the field is going to narrow considerably. There are plenty of ways to do it from a command line, but for those of us who want to preview archives with a GUI, we haven’t had a lot of choice. Now The Archive Browser, successor to the popular extraction application The Unarchiver, let’s you do all of that with just about any archive file you can name. Is this just a rehash of its predecessor app or can The Archive Browser hold its own?

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Old Dog, New Tricks

As soon I downloaded The Archive Browser, it had already associated itself with all of my archive files. I had a bunch of ZIP, TAR, TGZ, 7Z, and RAR files on my desktop, waiting to get the special treatment from The Archive Browser, but I thought I was going to have to tell the application which filetypes to be on the lookout for. That’s how it was in The Unarchiver, Dag Ågren’s previous file extraction star. Not so with The Archive Browser, though.

The contents of a TAR archive in The Archive Browser.

After that, all you have to do is double-click an archive, and it’ll open up in The Archive Browser. The nifty thing is, it’s not going to automatically extract. Instead, you’ll get a sort of file browser window. Everything inside the archive is going to be listed in this browser, which is pretty spiffy if you don’t want to extract everything in the archive or aren’t even sure what’s in there to begin with.

Navigating and Extracting

The browser window is broken down into three panes. The far left pane just gives you a bit of information about the archive itself. You’ll see the filename and the kind of encoding used on the archive. The Archive Browser also lets you know how compressed the archive was and the total number of files contained. It’s over here that you can choose to extract all of the archived files or just some, and whether they should go into the same folder as the original archive.

The center pane displays the list of files that live in your archive. You’ll see their individual filenames, the size of each file, and what kind of file you’re working with. This is a pretty spiffy feature, because until now archive extraction apps that allowed you also to browse some of the more obscure archive types before extracting were thin on the ground. Specifically, RAR archives, less well-traveled than the ubiquitous ZIP but still fairly prolific, were almost impossible to see inside of until you’d actually gotten them extracted. If you wanted to pick and choose what to pull out of a RAR or other similarly less pervasive archive, you were out of luck. But it’s all laid out for you in The Archive Browser.

Looking inside a RAR archive with a GUI like a boss.

The far right pane gives you some great drill down information about each file. You can again see the name and size of the file, along with when it was last modified. The Archive Browser also gives you the chance to preview the files inside the archive. We’re not just talking about looking at a list of the filenames, but viewing a preview of an image or listening to an MP3, right in The Archive Browser.

The Archive Browser let me listen to the song inside the archive before I extracted it.

It Can Do Everything

Because The Archive Browser will find all your compatible archives as soon as you download the app, before you even launch it for the first time, there’s not a lot of startup. Just download the app, and you’re ready to go. Let’s say, on the other hand, you don’t want The Archive Browser handling every archive type that’s ever going to land in your Downloads folder, and, boy, it really does seem to handle every type. Well, that’s easy to change. Just launch the The Archive Browser and open up the application preferences.

Every compatible archive type is going to be checked. You can just go through and uncheck all the archives you want other applications to handle. If you only want The Archive Browser to handle a few types, click Deselect All, and then check the few that you need to app to be in charge of. When you exit the preferences, your settings will go into effect.

If you ever want The Archive Browser to take back over, just open up its preferences again, and click Select All.

Let The Archive Browser handle whatever archive files you want.

You can decide what you want The Archive Browser to do with extracted files here, whether you want the application to create a new folder for the files or not and if it should modify the creation date on extracted files. If you’d like, The Archive Browser will navigate to the extracted folder in Finder, or close the browser window, and you can choose how and when these actions happen.

Final Thoughts

The Archive Browser goes a step further than its predecessor, The Unarchiver, giving users the option to view the insides of archives before extracting them. I’d been burned by The Unarchiver, though. It was a great app, but it didn’t play nice with Mountain Lion’s Sandbox feature, causing all applications extracted by The Unarchiver to be permanently “sandboxed” for some users. This meant that OS X would think your perfectly fine app, downloaded direct from the developer, was malicious software. I thought my still youngish MacBook Pro was on its way out when it seemed to stop launching any new applications at all.

So I was understandably wary when I launched The Archive Browser for the first time. No need, though. Everything I’ve extracted so far seems to be working a-okay. I’ve sought out apps in ZIP archives just so I could assure you that there’s no rogue sandboxing happening on Mountain Lion.

What The Archive Browser doesn’t do is compress files. You can browse them and you can extract them, but you sure can’t create an archive. The ability to browse archives, especially when it’s every archive I can personally imagine, is certainly a huge skillset addition for an app like The Unarchiver. That doesn’t change the fact, though, that I still need two applications to work with archives, one to compress them and one to extract them.

If the developer of The Archive Browser could get together an app that does everything we already have in this app with some simple compression features, he’d really have something on his hands. That said, it’s still a great app for browsing and extracting just about every archive type out there, and it’s not a bad looking way to do it, either.

Our sponsor this week is Pixelmator, the beautifully designed, easy-to-use, fast, and powerful image editing app for the Mac. It keeps getting better, with new updates that added soft proofing, new effects and an effects browser, alignment guides, iCloud support, and more!

Best of all, the latest updated added CMYK support to Pixelmator, so you can now work in CMYK colors and print your pictures while making sure they’ll look the same on everything: your computer, your mobile devices, and in print. It even now has advanced PSD support so you’ll be able to work even better with Photoshop files.

That’s in addition to the great editing features that users already love in Pixelmator. With advanced layer support, drawing and retouching tools, file versions, web export features, and more, there’s something for everyone to love. Best of all, it’s built on the best OS X technology, letting it take advantage of your GPU to speed up your work and helping you work faster with Automator integration.

Go Get It!

If you’re ready to get started editing photos and creating beautiful digital art on your Mac in an app that’s designed to make the most of OS X, head over to the App Store and pick up a copy of Pixelmator! Pixelmator usually costs $59, but it’s on sell for the Holidays for just $14.99 right now. You can even download a free trial from their site to try out all of Pixelmator’s features for free for 30 days.

It’s been a busy one this week with app updates and the launch of Apple’s Best of 2012 for the best Mac applications in the store so read on for our full weekly news roundup!

‘Day One’ and ‘Deus Ex: Human Revolution’ crowned as App and Game of the Year

Apple have crowned Day One and Deus Ex: Human Revolution as App and Game of the Year 2012 for the Mac in their annual Best of 2012 roundup, just like they did for the iOS App Store (which looked at the top apps in each individual category). Looking at the winners: Day One is a popular journalling application for Mac (we reviewed it back in March 2011 and gave it a very commendable 9 out of 10 rating) that synchronises with iOS via either iCloud or Dropbox and allows you to keep track of all your daily thoughts. You can also add the current weather forecast, locations and places and reminders and the app also supports Markdown for quick and easy text editing. The runner-up to Day One was CameraBag 2, a popular photo editing and filter software.

Day One has been crowned the Mac App of the Year for 2012.

Deus Ex: Human Revolution, the popular cyberpunk-themed action/shooter game, was crowned Game of the Year, with Splice: Tree of Life coming in a close second. You can also check out Apple’s top 20 apps and games for Mac for the whole of 2012 by heading over here (link to the App Store).

Adobe Creative Suite goes (partially) retina

For those of you waiting for the retina update to Creative Suite, your time of waiting is (partially) over. Adobe has pushed updates to Photoshop, Illustrator and Lightroom which bring retina support (or HiDPI, as they call it) for the new MacBook Pro range, along with a few other features (such as improved 3D effects in Photoshop and a load of bug fixes and new camera and lens support for Lightroom).

To grab the updates, head over to the Adobe Application Manager where they should be ready and waiting for you. There’s unfortunately no word of retina updates to the remaining Creative Suite applications, however given these updates we can be fairly sure that they will be arriving shortly.

Upcoming Alfred 2.0 will feature Workflows

According to a sneak preview on their blog, the new upcoming version of Alfred, version 2.0, will feature easy-to-manage workflows, without a line of code in sight. Workflows are, put simply, an easy way to automate processes on your Mac using a set of triggers, inputs, outputs and actions.

Alfred’s new, upcoming Workflow feature in version 2.0.

So, using the example shown in the screenshot above, typing the keyword movie into Alfred triggers three actions:

1. Load YouTube
2. Load IMDB
3. Load Rotten Tomatoes

This can be really useful for certain things and Alfred 2.0 will let you simply drag and drop items onto the canvas and connect them together – you don’t need a single line of code!

Currently there’s no official release date for Alfred 2.0 however it’s already generating interest, especially among the Mac AppStorm team! We will, of course, keep you posted on any updates to this great piece of software.

Apple fixes yet another Trojan on OS X

Apple has patched up yet another security hole in OS X after it was revealed at the start of this week that a trojan, detected as Trojan.SMSSend.3666 by the Russian security company Doctor Web, was mimicking a typical application installer and trying to get the unsuspecting user to enter their mobile phone number.

The trojan mimicked a typical OS X installer and prompted the user to enter his or her mobile number, causing a costly subscription fee.

The trojan, which up till now only existed on Windows, requires that the user “activates” the program via SMS and prompts him or her for their mobile number. Once entered, the user is charged a subscription fee which is debited from their calling credit (or added onto their monthly bill) on a regular basis. What’s worse is that the installers often either mimic legitimate (and free) software or simply contain useless, random data.

Apple has, however, responded to this threat extremely quickly and has added the definitions to its blacklist, according to MacRumors, meaning that OS X users are no longer under threat from the software. However, it does reiterate the thought that no system is 100% safe from internet threats, and users should always exercise caution (and use some common sense!) when it comes to using the Internet.

iTunes 11.0.1 released, Show Duplicated Items now restored

After the big launch of iTunes 11 a couple of weeks ago, Apple has pushed a minor update to it which fixes a couple of issues. Version 11.0.1 fixes a problem with iTunes Match where purchases in iCloud sometimes did not show up properly and also restores the ability to show any duplicated items in your iTunes library, which was a major gripe to some users. The new version can be grabbed by going over to the Updates section of the App Store, where it should be ready and waiting for you.

Tweetbot 1.1 is out

Tapbots, the developers of the popular OS X Twitter client, Tweetbot for Mac, have pushed out a minor update, bringing the app to version 1.1. The new version brings a new “All Notifications” feature to owners running Mountain Lion, whereby you are notified every single time someone you are following tweets (of course, this could become a little excessive if you are following loads of people, however if you are only following a few this could be quite useful). There is also the usual array of bug fixes and improvements, including better “pin to top” for non-streaming columns and improved Moom compatibility.

Like iTunes 11.0.1, the update can be grabbed via the App Store. And if you haven’t got Tweetbot yet, you can grab it here for only $19.99.

Heard Anything Else?

If you’ve heard anything else exciting that’s happened this week then go ahead and post a link to it in the Comments section below for the benefit of our other readers!

With the new year coming up, Mac AppStorm wants to make sure you get introduced to apps that will make you more productive in 2013. Mind mapping apps just may be the type of tool you need to boost your productivity in the upcoming year. From project management to presentations to brainstorming, mind mapping apps are flexible tools that assist users in storing and processing information of all types.

This review includes two apps that take a more minimalist, simplistic approach to mind mapping—MindNode and SimpleMind—and two apps that take a more power user approach—XMind and NovaMind. Read on to find out which app may best fit your needs.

Continue reading “The Mac AppStorm Mind Mapping Apps Showdown”

There are tons of reasons you might need to make a photo collage. Maybe it’s for a work project, a presentation at school or you simply want a good way to cherish some special photos. You can always choose to print out the photos and glue them to a surface, but that’s so old-fashioned (and who even has a glue stick anymore?) If you’re looking for a digital alternative to sticky fingers and glue smudges, Choco is a newer collage making program that is perfect for a variety of uses.

In Choco you have a lot of options to choose from. You can take the easy way, importing your photos automatically into one of the more than 100 existing templates. You can work a bit more, adding images yourself and editing the basic template. For the most ambitious among us, you can even choose to make your own collage, entirely from scratch. I took Choco for a test-drive, so stick with me after the jump to learn more about the program and what kind of collages I was able to produce.

The Easy Way

The easiest way to get started using Choco is to take advantage of the many templates that they have included. Within the templates, there are three different types available. The classic category consists of templates which utilize similar photo shapes and a standardized layout. Shapes in these templates are typically rectangles or added rectangles. For a more exciting collage, you can try the freestyle category. Here, templates are laid out seemingly randomly and utilize a much more diverse array of shapes. Last, the shapes category uses rectangular image shapes to make larger images in the shape of another object, e.g. a cat.

Starting afresh – note the template options on the right.

After your template is selected, the next step is to add images. Start by clicking the plus button in the left border. You should go ahead and add any pictures you want to use at this time. Once your pictures are imported you have two options. First, you can individually add images to the available frames on the template. If that seems like a bit too much work, click the “shuffle” button and Choco will intelligently fill in the frames using your photos of choice.

Adding photos is easy (and works well) just using the shuffle button.

Intermediate – Editing Photos

The “shuffle” option is pretty nice – Choco usually manages to do a pretty great job of matching up image size to the frame’s aspect ratio. Unfortunately, it’s not always perfect. Sometimes its the computer’s fault, sometimes it’s simply that your images don’t match up well with the template of your choosing. There are a few things you can do to make sure that your collage looks as good as it can, without ever having to edit the layout or template itself.

First, you can always adjust the photo. Simply right click and choose “edit inner frame.” This allows you to freely resize, rotate and transform the photo within the frame. It’s an easy enough fix that can get most photos looking good.

Another big fix (that’s all the rage these days) is to add some filters to your images. Simply click on your image of choice and click on the water drop icon below the collage. You can choose from several Instagram-esque filters, with options including lomo, cappucino or simply black and white. These effects are easy to add, and used sparingly and within the realm of good taste, they can add some fun effects to your collages.

Advanced – Creating and Editing Templates

Using the premade templates is all well and good, but what if you can’t find a template you like? Or what if you want to make some heavy modifications to an existing template? Luckily, all this is possible with Choco. I’ll walk you through making a template from scratch, but all these options are applicable to any template you might need to edit.

Get started by clicking the plus sign under the template list. Go ahead and name your template and choose the category it falls into. Once you’ve done that, go ahead and select the size of your collage. You can choose height, width, units and DPI based upon your specifications.

Setting the size of a new template – step 1.

You should also go ahead and choose a background. You can find this option under the shadows menu – simply choose a solid color, linear gradient or a texture. If you choose a texture you can use one of Choco’s provided textures or import any image file of your choosing.

Choosing a background – Celtic or simple linen?

Once your scene is set, you have to add the frames. Frames are image and text objects which you can fill in with the content of your choosing. Simply right click on the background, choose the appropriate object and create it in the size of your choose. To further customize frames, you can use the frame tool to adjust size and color. You can also add drop shadows as needed or use the advanced editor for greater control over shape and placement of the object.

In addition to text and image objects, you can also add sprite items. Sprite items are decorative pieces – things like corner embellishments, pins and stickers. You can choose from Choco’s included objects or import your own custom sprite items.

Adding various images – some sprite item options are shown.

If you’re creating your own template but don’t feel like individually placing each frame, you can take advantage of the tile generator. Simply choose the object type, columns, rows, spacing and margins and Choco will do the work for you in terms of placing frames. Not only can you generate a traditional layout, you can also create asymmetric layouts and layouts that fit to the shape of an image of your choosing. This offers you an incredible selection of layouts to generate at your choosing.

Here I used the tile generator to produce a nice, simple layout.

Final Thoughts

Choco was an interesting program to use. I’ve tried a variety of collage-making programs in the past, and Choco offers you a degree of control that you don’t often find in similar programs. You can control most details of the look of the collage, allowing you to create the best-looking products for whatever your project is.

On the other hand, Choco has some negative aspects. First, it’s pretty slow at times. Templates often take seemingly forever to load, and it gets really laggy when you try to add or edit a lot of objects at once. Another note – you can’t move multiple objects at once. Seriously?

Also, the program is a bit on the pricey side. If you’re planning to make a lot of collages, it might be a good investment, especially if you like to have a lot of control over layouts and plan to invest time into making customized layouts. On the other hand, if you aren’t quite as picky or just want to make a couple of collages, then it’s probably not for you. Either way, you can download the free trial and check it out for yourself before you pay for anything. Unfortunately, all trial collages do come with a watermark.

So really, my recommendation for or against Choco depends on your collage-making situation. If you’re picky or plan on making a lot of collages, Choco is probably worth $18. Otherwise, I’d look into a free or significantly cheaper alternative (or just use a program you already have installed). What do you think about Choco? Would you try it or have you already? Share your thoughts in the comments below.

Good evening, folks. It’s Thursday, the 13th of December, and The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey‘s release is just one day away. (Unless you have the luxury of a 10 p.m. or midnight showing near you.) I’ve been listening to the soundtrack, and in fact it’s been with me during the composition of this entire deals article. So, if you see some old-English, remember why it’s there. Now, on to the deals of post boxes, healing things with a snap, and so many languages, evening an translator can’t help you. Don’t worry though, Elvish is not among them. Let’s be off!

Anything Else?

That’s it for this week’s deals, but maybe you’ve stumbled upon something great. Whether it’s a bundle or little app, we’d love to hear about it in the comments. If not, see you next week!

Looking for a new indie game to try out? Released this September, Subset Games’ FTL: Faster Than Light is an indie spaceship simulator/RPG that has garnered a lot of praise among the indie game community. FTL’s fresh take on old strategy games is finishing out the year at the top of several Best Of lists. Does the gameplay stand up to the hype?

These Are the Voyages…

The Galactic Federation, made up of a variety of alien races, is under attack by a massive rebel incursion which threatens to destroy peace. In FTL: Faster Than Light, you are the commander of a lone ship carrying vital intelligence to this Federation. Your mission is to outrun the rebel fleet, jumping from sector to sector using faster than light travel, until you reach the Federation homeworlds.

It’s going to be a long journey.

The player represents a single ship in the Federation fleet. The ship’s crew are just tools that help the ship complete its mission. You’ll begin by choosing a ship and warp-jumping to the nearest FTL beacon. From there, you are faced with a series of random encounters which nearly always force you to make a difficult decision, such as beaming down to a planet to save survivors of an epidemic or passing them by to avoid infecting your crew. Think of it as an interstellar Oregon Trail, only with warp drives instead of oxen and particle cannons instead of dysentery.

A good part of the game focuses on resource management. Scrap (space currency) and fuel are in short supply and you’ll never have enough of either. That fancy laser weapon may be powerful, but you’re more likely to hock it for a quick hull repair and extra fuel just to get to the next sector. The game also discourages lingering in one spot for too long, as the rebels are hot on your trail, as indicated by the spreading red area of rebel control inching across the beacon map.

Whenever your vessel is parked in a star system, your ship is represented by a grid, with each of your Star Trek-style primary systems and subsystems clearly marked. You can control where power is routed by clicking on each of the systems in the simple and intuitive HUD at the bottom of the screen. There is limited power, so there will be situations where you have to choose to shut down the life support to keep the ship afloat for a few more minutes while you blast pirates to oblivion. There is a bit of a learning curve in figuring how to manage all of these systems at once, but the interface is so simple and easy to navigate that even casual players will have no trouble becoming accustomed to FTL’s management system.

Mantises Only Understand Force

The meat of the game is the combat, which will occur often and with increasing difficulty. Combat occurs in real time, but you can pause the action at any time to ponder your next move. All weapons have charge times, so you’ll want to stagger your attacks, hitting different systems with different weapons. Each weapon has its own pros and cons–for instance, missiles can bypass shields, but are in limited supply. The bad guys can also target your systems, too, so you’ve got to order your crew to run around and put out fires, patch up hull breaches, and kill enemy down boarding parties.

The Battle Screen

Once combat is through, you can upgrade your ship by boosting its power capabilities and systems, which gets increasingly more expensive. Shops are also available along your way to provide you with hull repairs, new crew members, parts, and fancy new weaponry and gadgets to prepare you for the next big battle.

I Hope You Packed Your Zoltan Ale

It’s worth noting that this game is hard. Really hard. Although FTL is rather short and can be beaten in a few hours, you’ll likely die dozens of times before reaching the final sector, even on Easy Mode, drawing out your play time. If your ship is destroyed, it’s game over and you’ll have to start from the beginning. There’s no extra lives or loading up a more forgiving save.

Those red blinky lights are bad.

Hull damage can usually only be repaired at shops for a fee, and if you’re out of cash, you can easily end up in an impossible situation. The items you’ll receive at the end of a battle or come across in shops are random, and so are the enemies you encounter. This means sometimes you’ll be left underpowered and outgunned. Sometimes you’ll die because you made a mistake. Other times it’s just the luck of the draw.

Conclusion

FTL is more about replayability than simply winning. Each death teaches you something about the game’s mechanics and the risk/reward nature of the game. The game also rewards you for taking different routes and using different play styles by making different alien ships for you to choose from. Since the encounters are all random, each playthrough is completely different.

The graphics and sound are very simple and are reminiscent of the 16-bit era of gaming. The developers obviously went for functionality over flash. In this case less is definitely more. The interface is incredibly easy to use for such a deeply complex game and adding any additional layers of modern graphical glitz to it would do little to improve it. Overall, FTL is an incredibly addicting game, and with perserverance, it’s a lot of fun to come back to over and over again.

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

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

Best of Android.AppStorm

Best of iPad.AppStorm

Best of Windows.AppStorm

Best of iPhone.AppStorm

Best of Web.AppStorm

Best of Mac.AppStorm

Share Your Ideas

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

“I didn’t think Macs got viruses.”

A friend told me that as I helped her clean off a spyware program from her Mac computer last year. While the Mac user has less to fear than a PC user when it comes to the dark side of the Internet, the days when a Mac user could just assume they had nothing to worry about from malware are over. It’s not just viruses causing damage and data loss to be concerned about, but also programs that want to steal your data or personal information. These applications send your info to someone with malicious intent, track what you do and where you go notifying you, and otherwise invade your privacy. Being careful about what you install can do a lot to protect you. Even then, security flaws in software can let software such as the Flashback Trojan that took advantage of a bug in Java to silently install and begin sending your personal information back to remote servers.

It’s just good to see for yourself what’s running on your computer and connecting out. Overall a program that shows you what your computer is doing will help you better understand what’s running and notice when something is amiss. Private Eye from Radio Silence is a free network monitor for the Mac that gives you a real time view into the network connections to and from your computer. Let’s see how well it works and if it can help keep you safe online.Like the article? You should subscribe and follow us on twitter.

Using Private Eye

When first started Private Eye displays an empty window that will fill as applications make network connections.

Private Eye runs on Mac OS X Lion and Mountain Lion. It’s a free application that you can download from the Radio Silence web site. When initially run the program will present a blank list and a few options. As applications on your computer make connections or connections come back to your computer from the network, you will see the list show those connections in real-time.

As Private Eye runs the list will show connections to and from your computer and a list of the applications that have been involved in network connections.

For each connection, Private Eye will show several items. The first column shows the time of the connection. The next column tells you the application making the connection and the third column tells you the the direction of the connection by an arrow along with the IP address or hostname of the other end of the connection. For outgoing connections this arrow points to the right (toward the hostname or IP address) and tells you what the application connects to. For incoming connections the arrow points toward the application name and shows you the source of the connection. The program only tracks connections that occur while running. You therefore can’t use the program to go back and see a connection made while not running. When exited, the program does not continue to run and takes up no resources.

Here I’ve filtered to only view connections to and from Firefox.

As you let Private Eye run you’ll likely see many connections from your computer. To help filter down to just the connections that you’re concerned about, Private Eye provides several filtering options to the left of the list. Under the Connections header you can choose to view only incoming or outgoing connections in addition to the default all connections. Unless you’re running a server, you’ll likely find the majority of connections will be outgoing from your computer to other sites. As applications make network connections, the list under applications will grow to include each application. You can click on the name of an application to filter the list to only the connections made to or from that application. You cannot combine to two to for example only view inbound connections to Dropbox for example.

Limitations

As a tool designed for simplicity, Private Eye omits some features that more network savvy users might wish to find. Private Eye will display connections as they happen, but it is not a firewall and can do nothing to stop or block connections. That functionality is available in the company’s paid Radio Silence application. Private Eye also cannot display detailed information on the connections. You cannot see what data was sent over the connection or the ports involved in the connection which can indicate what type of traffic is being sent or received. You also cannot save the list of connections to review or compare later.

It would be nice to be able to see a bit more about the connections that are shown. If you see an application that you are not familiar with, a good first step is to search for the application’s name. Having the ability to do this from the program would be a time saver. Another feature that would be nice is the ability to look up more information on the remote connection point directly. In both cases you can do these searches manually, but being able to select an entry in the list and do them from a menu would speed up the process.

What is Private Eye Telling Me?

Some applications are obvious, but others are more obscure and might require research to determine what they do.

You might wonder what this program really tells me and how does it keep me more secure? Private Eye is providing a list of all programs on your computer that are sending or receiving network traffic. This is a starting point as it tells you nothing about what the program is doing or if you should be concerned about it. Taking the list shown in the screenshot above, some of the programs are obvious. Firefox is my browser and Dropbox is the client for the Dropbox syncing program. Some of the other items in the list might look less familiar such as usbmuxd. For any application a web search on the application name will often be enough to tell you if the program is a normal, but usually unobserved, part of the system or something to be concerned about. Running the program over time will also show if and when new applications appear in the list.

Another thing to watch for are links to sites that you would not expect. A program that provides no network functionality connecting to the vendor’s web site could just be seeing if an updated version is available. It could also be sending something back that you don’t know about. This tool will only tell you about the connections going on. Research on the program in question or more detailed research on the traffic being sent could be required to determine if there is something to be concerned about.

Conclusion

Private Eye is a simple network tool, but does a good job at what it’s designed for. It aims to be a simple tool and does a good job of presenting information that would otherwise require a trip to the command line to see. It also is accurate and showed all traffic coming through my system while I tested it. The ability to know what’s on your computer and where it connects to can help you learn what’s on your computer now which will make finding the unusual easier in the future if needed.

I would like to see a little more functionality. I feel that what Private Eye shows is useful, but being able to go just a bit deeper would increase the usefulness of the program without increasing the complexity much. Overall Private Eye is a useful tool to add to your computer and run once in a while just to keep an eye on what’s going on.