Category: Mac

Editing pictures can be such a hassle, especially if you rely on a professional image editing app. While applications like Photoshop are great, they can be overkill when I just want to share my weekend photos from the beach. Still, I want those pictures to look good, or better than they do now, so I need an image editor that’s just enough for social sharing.

Polarfox may be that app. With some great presets and fun filters, image editing is easy while still making some great pictures. Integrated sharing lets me put all those pictures on display, too. But is this tiny image editor enough or will I end up wanting more?

Easy Image Editing

Polarfox, though quite a good looking app, doesn’t exactly point you to what you’re supposed to do. It’s really not immediately obvious how to open an image in Polarfox, and it took me a few tries of poking the up arrow icon to figure out the “upload to Polarfox” window I got meant that I was opening the image and not actually uploading anything anywhere after all.

All the editing tools are to the left, with sliders to adjust each preset.

Once you do have an image open, though, Polarfox is a pretty nifty, if not feature-rich, image editing application. The shapes that appear on the right side of the image once you’ve finally gotten it open are your editing tools. Less than tools, really, they’re presets. Click each preset to adjust the colors, brightness, contrast, etc., for your image. If you find a preset you like but it isn’t quite perfect, you can fine tune the image using the preset’s sliders.

Beneath the image presets are ten colorful filters named after world cities. Click a filter to apply it to your image. Again, each filter has a set of sliders you can use to adjust each attribute. There’s even a “filter strength” slider, which works more or less to tune the filter’s opacity. It’s a nice one to have so the filter doeesn’t overwhelm the underlying image.

Filters can really change the look of your picture.

That’s really all there is to image editing in Polarfox. You can’t crop or sharpen or adjust the noise. There’s definitely no opportunity to remove blemishes. That’s not the point of Polarfox; this app is just for some quick and fun image editing.

Saving Your Picture

You’ve gotten this really cool looking image, so now what do you do with it? Well, first, you can save it to your computer. The downwards pointing arrow on the left side gets you into the save menu. You’ll notice when I listed the things I said you can’t do, I didn’t say you can’t resize, and you’ll be able to resize in the save menu.

Saving a picture also lets you resize the final image.

Your resize options are limited, though. There are really only four; you get the maximum, which seems to be the original image size, medium, small, and thumb. Depending on which size you choose, your image’s filename will have a suffix appended to help you keep them straight.

It’s good to note that Polarfox only saves in JPG format, no matter the file’s original format. So there won’t be any PNGs or GIFs coming out of Polarfox.

Social Sharing

Polarfox has some really great sharing options, and sharing is probably the main reason for using an image editor of this kind. To get sharing, though, you’ll need to set up your sharing settings, first. You can get there by clicking on the gear icon and then selecting Upload Email Settings.

You won’t be logging in to your social networks via Polarfox, which is a pretty nice thing, actually. What you’ll do is paste your personal upload email for each service into the appropriate field. Remember, this is not your login email. Lots of services give you a randomized email address attached to their own domain and visible only to you. You can use this email address to upload or post to their site. This is what you’ll need to use.

You’ll enter your service-specific email addresses into the sharing settings.

If you don’t know what your email address is with each service or how to get it, Polarfox has you covered. Just click the service icon next to the email field, and the app will direct you to a mini tutorial with screenshots on how to get each email address. Once you’ve got them all entered, click save and get out of the settings.

Now you’re ready to click the sharing icon, the one that looks like a square speech bubble on the left side of the Polarfox workspace. Some services will allow a title, all allow a message, and some allow tags. If you’re not sure what the service you’re sharing to allows, click the message and quote icons in the Share window for a hint. When you’re ready to go, click on the sites you want to post your image to, and click Send.

Conclusion

Polarfox is a really great application for doing some quick, fun image edits before sharing the pictures on social networks. Once you’ve figured out what the icons mean, and it’s not obvious, there’s very little learning curve. Because you’re just going to be sharing these pictures with your friends, there’s nothing to lose, so it really is a lot of fun to play around with the different settings, and you can turn out a cool looking picture lickety split.

This isn’t going to be an app for everyone, though. My husband’s a professional graphic designer, and he’d laugh his face off at something like this, because he needs so much more than Polarfox can offer. To be honest, sometimes I do, too. But if I just want to get some pictures from last night at the club up on Facebook, Twitter, or Flickr, I don’t need all those extra features. Polarfox keeps social image editing from being a chore and makes sharing pictures really a fun thing to do again.

Last year, one of the newest features Apple announced for the iOS and iPhoto was Photo Stream, a simple way to get the pictures you take on the go on your Mac. If you have an iPhone and take pictures all the time, but want to keep them on your Mac, it’s a great service … provided you don’t take more than 1000 pictures before syncing with your Mac.

It’s an interesting way to keep your pictures synced along with the rest of your files with iCloud, but most of us have many different ways we sync data already. From Dropbox and other online storage apps to social networks where we usually share photos directly already, there’s a ton of ways to get your pictures off your phone without syncing or using Photo Stream.

More interesting, though, is that Photo Stream could work just between two Macs, or a Mac and a PC with iCloud installed. That way, your most recently imported photos are on all of your devices, even if you don’t have an iPhone.

So do you use Photo Stream on your Mac? Do you find it very useful, or could you just as easily use something else? We’d love to hear your thoughts below.

In 2002, a book entitled Getting Things Done was published by author David Allen, to widespread critical acclaim and quickly began to amass an almost cult following. In it, the author set forth a method for improving the efficiency of work processes by employing time management techniques, task prioritisation, and concentration on the most important tasks. Ten years, and many improved work-flows later, Allen’s theory remains as prevalent as ever, but not necessarily in the state he first imagined.

Despite being the title of Allen’s book, Getting Things Done, or GTD, has since become the byword for any method of improving productivity, regardless of relevance to the author’s original. Allen’s paper-based method has become outdated in the ten years since its publication, and, largely in response to technological advance and the Internet, other more relevant GTD theories have emerged, such as David Sparks’ Paperless.

With the myriad of electronic devices that now dominate many work flows and work places, making distractions easier to come by—ahem, Twitter—new ways of boosting productivity have come about. However, not everybody has time to read, implement, and stick to a special system. So, how do we bridge this impasse? It’s simple: take away the Internet, or at least part of it. Intrigued? Find out more after the break.

Always Connected, Always Distracted

Despite the influx of tablets and so-called smartphones into both personal and working lives, desktop and laptop machines are still the dominant work device for the majority of people. In terms of the Mac, a strange evolution is underway. Owners of an iPod, iPhone, or iPad will have noticed the ever-increasing interoperability between their work and mobile devices—no longer are OS X and iOS entirely distinct platforms. With each new version of OS X comes further integration and commonly held features far beyond mere aesthetic parity. Perhaps one of the standout features of the recent Mountain Lion release is the incorporation of Notification Centre, taken directly from iOS.

Notification Centre is one of the latest iOS inspired additions to OS X.

The array of bleeps emanating from phones and tablets are a sure way of hindering a productive day, hence the popularity of silent and aeroplane mode; one switch and distractions are gone. The addition of Notification Centre on the Mac however, has added yet another hurdle to the distraction-free day, making disconnecting from the world increasingly difficult. Sure, notifications can be disabled but the temptation to procrastinate cannot—Facebook is always just one bookmark click away. The solution? Take away the Internet.

Freedom to Work

Take away the Internet? Ordinarily, such a phrase would warrant some stern posturing and elicit an emotional defence of our online liberty, but, rest assured, this particular proposition bears no evil intention.

By taking away the Internet I of course mean singular connections, not the entire World Wide Web. Further yet, routers need to be destroyed and nor do any broadband contracts need cancelled; such measures are a tad extreme. On the other hand, merely disabling WiFi is too susceptible to temptation and can easily be changed. The solution is the epitome of oxymoronic—temporary permanence—a temporary Internet connection block, with no workaround, for a set period of time before returning the connection. Luckily, I know just the thing: Freedom.

Freedom can block an internet connection for anywhere between 15 and 480 minutes.

Freedom can block a connection for anywhere between 15 and 480 minutes depending on how long a particular task will take. Freedom exemplifies the temporary permanence I spoke of earlier by preventing users getting around it for the set period of time before re-enabling the connection; the block may be temporary, but it has a permanent effect when set. The timer runs via active computing minutes only to prevent sneaky users putting a Mac to sleep in the hope the timer will run its self down. There really is no way out.

Avoiding the Internet and concentrating on tasks with shear willpower would of course be the easier option but, for some, such an ability is not held. The proverbial Internet rabbit hole is all to easily fallen into, and drastic action can help prevent taking a trip. By blocking the entire Internet connection there is no way to spend hours archiving and filing email, scrolling through Twitter, or looking up 2012 doomsday predictions—no, just no—leaving you free to get on and get things done.

Access to local networks can be left open if needed.

Access to local networks does not necessarily need to be infringed upon by Freedom as it gives the option to leave those avenues open, leaving the app open to those who need local access. All in all, Freedom is fairly simplistic and minimalist in terms of features with only one goal: enabling productivity. However, the Internet is not an enemy, nor need it be a distraction. In fact, the Internet has almost become an absolute necessity in the 21 century with many dependent on it for work.

Personally, having used Freedom for months, having complete and unadulterated access to the Internet when at work is something that happens very rarely, and every time the same old habits return. There are occasions when such access is needed for research and reading purposes, and, as such, the utmost discipline is required to stave off procrastination. However, there is yet another solution: take away some of the Internet.

Let’s Be Anti-Social

It doesn’t take a behavioural scientist to work out that social networking, email, and IM are amongst the biggest distractions faced today. Escaping those distractions and getting things done can be a difficult task, and, for those who need an Internet connection, Freedom can’t help. However, fear not, there is always Anti-Social.

Similarly to Freedom, Anti-Social can be used for anywhere up to 480 minutes.

Anti-Social works in an almost identical manner to Freedom with only a couple of fundamental differences. Rather than blocking the entire connection, Anti-Social asks for individual websites to be restricted allowing users to retain access to the Internet. Facebook, Twitter, The New York Times—you name it, Anti-Social blocks it.

Anti-Social remembers listed websites after every use but stops short of allowing several lists to be saved.

The app can prove to invaluable for those susceptible to procrastination but require the Internet for research purposes, as I found out when writing my dissertation! The process of selecting websites to be restricted can be cumbersome at times with each domain needing to be typed out individually; however, each new session automatically remembers the previous list used to be added to or altered negating the need to select them all again.

Email access can also be maintained whilst still blocking listed websites.

By default, Anti-Social also prevents email from pushing to Mail.app or any other dedicated client. However, there is an option to allow email to flow whilst still blocking specific sites if needed; an option I never entertain given the hours that can be spent sorting email. Perhaps the only downside to Anti-Social is the lack of a lists feature that allows for multiple lists to be created containing a different selection of websites to be alternated depending on browsing requirements.

Conclusion

Productivity is not a commodity that can be bottled and sold, nor does it possess a universal meaning. Special methods and philosophies can be a great help for some, but for others simple tools like Freedom and Anti-Social can help deliver instant results. It can be easy to scoff at the need for such apps, and if some have the resolve to remain concentrated for hours that’s great, but for those who don’t there is nothing to lose. At $15 for Anti-Social, $10 for Freedom, or $20 as a bundle the money spent is more than made up by the work the apps can help get done.

I work at home and can go days at a time only seeing my cats and my husband (occasionally confusing the two in my otherwise solitary existence), so social media lets me keep in touch with my friends and keep my sanity, such that it is. Besides being a fan of social media, I’m also a big fan of the Mac menubar, and I have lots of little apps up there that put me in contact with my friends. I’ve got Messages and an instant messaging app, I’ve got an email app, and I’ve got all my social network apps.

That’s a lot of apps, and only today my husband (or was it my cat?) asked what’s going to happen when I run out of room on my menubar. It’s time I consolidate, and SocialButterfly is going to help me do that. Four social networks in one, SocialButterfly is a menubar app that can replace at least a few of my icons up there. Does SocialButterfly have the features to replace the apps, though?

Keeping in Touch

SocialButterfly is, in essence, a collection of mobile apps. Hold the phone! What’s that? That’s right, SocialButterfly is bringing the mobile version of some great social networks to your menubar. Included are Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and Pinterest. Each service looks pretty much identical to the iOS version of each app. SocialButterfly is so similar to the mobile apps that when Facebook notified me of an unauthorized login (by SocialButterfly on my MacBook), it was logged as a mobile device.

Up top are the service icons that let you switch among the different social networks.

SocialButterfly doesn’t do anything the Facebook and Pinterest menubar apps I’ve been using don’t, but it’s nice to have them grouped together with LinkedIn. Whereas the standalone apps I use, like many available on the App Store, offer both desktop and mobile functionality, SocialButterfly offers only the mobile app. Which is fine, really. It’s a menubar app, combining four services in one; it’s not necessarily going to give you the same thing you’d get it you just logged into the website or used a single, dedicated app. That’s to be expected.

I’m conflicted, however, on the mobile Twitter app included. I love the mobile Twitter app on my phone. It’s just the best. It’s at least twice as good as the Twitter for Mac app. I’ve repeatedly bemoaned the fact that we got such a good mobile app but such a clunker for OS X. Sure, I could find an alternative in the App Store, but the free Twitter apps aren’t any better, and the paid apps, well, I’d have to sell a kidney.

Because I was logged into Twitter, my cat was left out in the cold.

And then here comes SocialButterfly, flaunting its mobile Twitter app, right there in the middle of my OS X. It’s so much easier to update my profile and settings. The search function makes sense and is more attractive. Tweet threads are easier to access and don’t ultimately force me onto the Twitter website. I really couldn’t be happier. Except that I can only login from one Twitter account; no account switching. How is my cat supposed to tweet if I’m the only one who can log in? He can’t, is the answer to that question. When asked via email, SimpleRocket, the developer of SocialButterfly, assured me they’re looking into making multiple account logins a reality, but until that happens this may be a dealbreaker for me and my cat.

Looks Matter

This is a good looking app. I mean to tell you, SocialButterfly looks nice. The biggest part of that is the mobile apps, so very little of the design kudos goes to SocialButterfly. However, the window framing each service looks good, better than some of my other menubar social network apps, and the large buttons that control the menus are attractive. Just getting all of those disparate apps into a cohesive whole is nice, and SocialButterfly does a good job of making it seem as if all four services were always meant to be together.

I’ve never used the social network aspect of LinkedIn, but bundled with the other apps, it gives me a reason to poke around more.

Unfortunately, though, SocialButterfly comes with a truly ugly menubar icon. For an app that is otherwise so well designed, I really don’t know how it happened. Now, I know how to change that icon, and I bet some of you do, too, but a lot of you don’t or won’t feel comfortable messing around in the application resources. I hear that. Hopefully this icon gets fixed in a forthcoming update.

Pros and Cons

One of the big pros of SocialButterfly is that it’s not constantly lighting up that butterfly icon in my menubar or making a dinging noise or throwing something up in Notification Center. SocialButterfly is silent. It sits there quietly until I’m ready to check in with my friends on Twitter or Facebook or wherever, no browser window needed.

I had no way of knowing George Takei posted this cat picture. Is that good or bad?

The biggest con, though, is that it doesn’t ever notify me of anything! There are people who don’t participate in social media. They get it, they know what’s going on, but they just don’t feel the need to get involved. I am not one of those people. I want to get involved. When I have a new @reply or someone tags me in a picture, I want to know about it. Being a grownup person, I often choose not to load every single update as it happens; I can wait. But give me something, even just the ability to toggle notifications on and off!

Conclusion

Whether a lack of notifications is a pro or a con is up to you. Some people need quiet time, and I get that, but some want constant updates. And again, whether the lack of multiple logins for a single service is a con depends on the user. Unless you’re secretly running @chicken_ebooks or are in a power struggle with your cat, you probably only need to login with one account anyway.

The ease of having all four of these services in a single app, though, may make up for any other deficits in SocialButterfly. I was personally able to knock out three menubar icons while using the app, some pretty major screen real estate. That’s where SocialButterfly finds its wings, as a snazzy replacement for your other social network apps.

Meet the Holiday Bundle – the latest bundle from BundleHunt. It features 12 of the best-selling Mac apps available today. At AppStorm we’re excited to offer you the chance to win one of two bundles up for grabs!

The Holiday Bundle features an awesome selection apps that collectively retail for $1,150, with BundleHunt you can get them for a mere $49.99, with AppStorm you get the chance to walk away with one for free!

Enter below for a chance to win a free bundle!

The Holiday Bundle includes a variety of top-quality apps and design goodies, including;

• Billings – Professional time billing for everyone.
• MacFlux – Powerful Mac web design made easy.
• Hydra Pro – Easily create stunning HDR images, either artistic or photorealistic.
• Disktools Pro – Mac defrag, Mac disk repair and more!
• Courier – Share files, images, photos, movies, and more with all your favourite online services.
• iDocument – Smart document management for Mac.
• Art Text – Where text becomes an art.

Head over to BundleHunt to read up on the details!

Read on to find out how to enter!

The Holiday Bundle

How to Enter

Entering the competition is really easy. All you need to do is:

1. Post a link to this competition on Twitter, mentioning @macappstorm.
2. Leave a comment below with your username.

Best of luck, and I’ll be picking the winners in a week – giving you a few days to get your hands on the bundle if you don’t win one!

I’m just going to lay it out here: I’m a reformed PC-user. I had a lot of PCs for a long time, and though I’ve have my succession of Mac systems longer than I allowed PCs in my home, I do miss some of the customization I could do on a Windows machine. I could fiddle. Sure I got stuff wrong sometimes, but I could eventually fix anything I’d broken too badly.

A Mac doesn’t really give you that option. So many of the really cool settings are locked away from the lay user. Mountain Tweaks draws back the curtain, at last, and is giving all of us, not just Mountain Lion users, maybe the easiest way yet to get at some of the best OS X tweaks.

Make OS X What You Want it to Be

The first tab you see when you open Mountain Tweaks is the General Tweaks tab, this is a bunch of tweaks that will work on most versions of OS X that users might still be running, back to 10.5. There’s a lot here I’m already familiar with from tweaks apps I’ve used before, but this is maybe the best and easiest layout I’ve seen.

These tweaks are good for just about everybody.

Some of the standouts are the ability to enable the 2D Dock, highlighting Stack items on mouseover, hiding the Spotlight search in the menu bar, and showing hidden files. You can even disable the Crash dialog popup, so you won’t always be asked to send Apple error reports every time Archive Utility or some other application has a hiccup. It’s easy to turn all of this on and off, so if you just need to get to your hidden files for a few minutes, you can select that in Mountain Tweaks and then turn it right back off when you’re done.

The next tab is Lion Tweaks, and most of these should work in both Lion and Mountain Lion. You can disable Autosave for all applications, turn off spelling autocorrect, and other similar Lion annoyances. If you find they weren’t annoyances after all, just hit up Mountain Tweaks again to turn the tweak off.

Most of the Lion tweaks will work for Mountain Lion users, too.

The Mountain Lion Tweaks tab is really going to only be for Mountain Lion users. If you haven’t upgraded to Mountain Lion, you’re going to want to pass this one by. There’s some pretty nifty stuff in here, though. You can (finally) remove the “leather” from Calendar and Contacts, which is maybe the best thing an app has ever done for me. You can also disable a bunch of other stuff, like Gatekeeper and “Go To Folder” in Finder. Mountain Tweaks also lets you change the background in Notification Center by launching a workflow.

These tweaks are only really going to work for Mountain Lion users.

How to Undo

If you ever start thinking you’ve gone too far, it’s simple to Command-Z all this. If you only want to undo a single tweak, locate it in its tab and click No. That’s it. The tweak will shut off. There are a couple of tweaks that run installers, so you may have to uninstall something if getting rid of the tweak requires it, but clicking No will launch the uninstaller for you. That’s rare, though, and most tweaks will disappear with a single click.

Things may have really gone off the rails for you, though. You may have clicked Yes next to just about every tweak, and now your Mac seems to be doing some pretty weird stuff it wasn’t doing a few days ago. There are .DS_Store files all over the place, and you have no idea where they all came from, but they just won’t go away. Don’t worry, because Mountain Tweaks has you covered. Click over to the Restore tab and select “restore to system default.” When the process is done, everything on you computer will go back to how it was before Mountain Tweaks ever darkened your door.

It’s super simple to do a full restore and just back out of all of the tweaks you made.

Making Things Easy

I’ve used a few tweaks apps before this one, and while they could do pretty much all the same things, they weren’t anywhere as easy to use. It was never so obvious how to turn a tweak on and off. It doesn’t get much simpler than big, friendly buttons marked Yes and No. The layout of the tweaks tabs is also really nice. Despite being called Mountain Tweaks, the tweaks for Mountain Lion are buried on the third tab. This is actually a good thing. Most users are going to be able to use the tweaks on the first tab, including Mountain Lion users, so the app was laid out with the idea of serving as many users as possible, whatever version of OS X they might be using.

With the simple layout and no nonsense Yes/No selection, there’s never a question as to what’s going on. I’m going to be frank and let you know that I’m somewhat fearless when it comes to customization on my MacBook Pro, but not everyone is as dumb as me. People usually want to know they have a backup plan if something goes wrong, if a tweak doesn’t have the intended effect. That’s precisely what Mountain Tweaks gives the user. There’s no need for trepidation because you know from the moment you open the app that you’ve got a safety net.

Conclusion

Mountain Tweaks is an incredibly useful app. There are some great tools here for users of all levels. Everything from basic design customization to what can be necessary adjustments to how the OS works are at your mouse click. If you find you’re going to your Library folder a lot but don’t want to dig for it anymore, you can make it easier to get to. If you need to see your hidden files, they’ll suddenly become visible. And if you need all of that to suddenly go away, Mountain Tweaks can make that happen, too.

Useful doesn’t always mean well-designed or easy to use, though. I’ve downloaded my share of useful apps, only to stare dumbfounded at my screen until I figured out what I was supposed to be doing. Mountain Tweaks is absolutely not that kind of application. It’s an easy setup and easy takedown. The different kinds of tweaks are laid out nicely, so you’re never confused as to whether what you’re trying to accomplish was really meant to work on your computer anyway. It’s really just a great, easy, useful app, that I’d recommend to anyone trying to get more out of OS X.

I try to automate as much as possible, both in the real world and on my computer, as I find myself staring at my screen for more that ten hours a day. My house lights turn themselves on and off, my outlets power down to save energy, and the files on my MacBook Pro are doing all sorts of things while I’m not looking.

Why, you ask? Because if not, my Downloads folder would take over my hard disk, all of my MP3s would be on my Desktop instead of in iTunes, and my MacBook Pro would be 73% cat gifs. I need something to automatically manage all of my files while I’m doing real work. Sorter is just such an application. It monitors folders for file changes and then takes the actions you want to keep your Mac fighting like a champ.

Rules Were Made to be Broken

To get started with Sorter, click the plus sign in the upper left to start creating rules. As you create more rules in different folders, you’ll see them sort themselves out in the sidebar. When you have a lot of rules created, toggle each folder open or closed to interact with its rules and update, edit, or remove your rules.

Sorter’s going to hold your hand through the process, introducing the anatomy of folder and dile monitoring.

But first you have to create some rules. Clicking the plus sign brings up a blank rule. The folder to be monitored will default to whichever folder you’ve last worked with in Sorter, so make sure to change that if you’re looking for something else. You can choose a new folder by clicking Select in the center of the window and browsing in Finder. Remember, this is the folder from which the action will begin.

Next you’ll want to choose what the action does and the criteria for the action. Sorter allows you to set as many criteria as you’d like, and the action can occur either when all of the criteria only a single criterion are met. These criteria include things like whether the filename begins with, ends with, or contains X, or whether the file was created before or after a certain date.

Here’s where you set up how your rules work and create triggers.

After that, you just need to choose the target action for Sorter to complete. The actions are pretty limited but run the gamut of what you will likely need. You can move and delete files and run shell scripts and automator workflows. Sorter will perform more than one action per rule, so if you need a file moved before you run a workflow, it can do that.

Once you’ve completed your rule, make sure you give it a name and then turn it on by clicking the checkbox next to Rule is Active. Though this is the first thing you see, right at the top of your Sorter rule, I wouldn’t recommend making your rule active until you’re done. Until you have everything in place just how you like it, you may start affecting files unintentionally. For instance, I accidentally moved the entire contents of one folder into another and had to sort through about thirty files, because I activated my rule before it was ready to go.

There’s not much to an action; choose what you want a rule to do and where you want it to do it.

Stuff That Didn’t Go So Well

I’m disappointed that I can’t choose a filetype for my rule to perform its action. I listen to a lot of Asian music, and that’s not always available from places like iTunes and Amazon, even when I download legitimately. I end up with a lot of MP3s in my Downloads folder that I have to import into iTunes. I’ve been using Hazel, a preference pane for watching files and performing actions according to cues, to automatically import those MP3s into iTunes based on their filetype.

That’s just not available in Sorter. I have some videos I moved over from my camera in my Downloads, and I wanted to get them all shifted to my Movies folder. Sorter couldn’t recognize “.avi” as being discrete to those videos, and moved the entire contents of my Downloads folder. When I updated my rule to look for files with just “avi” in their filenames, Sorter didn’t do anything.

Your rules should look like this when they’re all done.

The developer’s readme at GitHub says Sorter’s great for automatically archiving PDFs, but I don’t see how that’s the case. If Sorter is looking for something inside that PDF, sure, but that would be true of any file. The lack of filetype support within actions is a real bummer.

Conclusion

While Sorter is lacking some of the functionality of other apps that monitor folders and create rules for files, Hazel chief among them, Sorter is free, saving you a cool $25. There’s something to be said for free, and while you’re not getting all the bells and whistles of a slick paid app, you are getting the core utility.

With Sorter you can still create a lot of the same rules as a more expensive and, let’s face it, user friendly app, you’ll just have to put in a little extra elbow grease. Whereas similar apps may come with predefined rules and more specific actions, you have to build those from the ground up in Sorter. You’re still getting the same functionality, though, at a significant bargain.

Is Sorter going to be the right choice for everybody? Probably not. It’s certainly not as easy as other, similar apps, but it is as customizable, if you’re willing to put in the effort. If you’ve found yourself unwilling to part with cash for one of the more steeply priced apps of its kind, you may be willing to put in that work to make Sorter work for you, and you’ll definitely get out what you put in.

More indie developers are showing up on the games market, and with that we’re seeing more and more retro-inspired and 8-bit style games available. While their graphics may not look like much at first glance, these games can pack a surprising visual punch. Often partnered with invented gameplay and exciting soundtracks, these games can be a nice change from the mainstream console games we’re more used to.

That said, it’s not always easy to find the good stuff for the Mac. It’s no secret game developers have long shied away from the Mac, and we’ve often had a long wait for ports, if developers even ever got around to us. That’s all changing with a new generation of game developers who value their Mac fans and are producing OS X releases earlier and more frequently. We’ve pulled together six retro-inspired games for the Mac, both old and new, that you may not have played yet and should really give a look.

McPixel

McPixel

Software, especially apps from indie developers, is finding its way into the marketplace in all sorts of inventive ways now. This is especially true for indie game developers, who are looking to self-publish their games or get backing from projects like Steam Greenlight or Kickstarter. I first downloaded McPixel via The Pirate Bay, a controversial bittorrent site that nonetheless receives special mention on the McPixel site as being an early (and, I stress, 100% legal) distributor of their game.

After playing McPixel, it’s not surprising they decided to release their game in a less than conventional way, because there’s nothing at all conventional about McPixel. Laid out as a series of minigames, the player has twenty seconds or so to defuse a bomb, or you’ll lose that stage. There is absolutely no clue as to how to defuse the bomb. It makes zero sense. That’s not really the point of McPixel, though. In adventure game style, you’ll click on everything in the stage until you hit on the one thing that works. The insane joy of McPixel comes of seeing the crazy things that happen when you choose wrong and the just as crazy things that happen when you choose correctly.

Price: $4.99

Barkley, Shut Up and Jam: Gaiden

Barkley, Shut Up and Jam: Gaiden

Just to be clear, the full name of the game is Tales of Game’s Studios Presents Chef Boyardee’s Barkley, Shut Up and Jam: Gaiden, Chapter 1 of the Hoopz Barkley SaGa. Just to be clear. Barkley, Shut Up and Jam: Gaiden was developed by Tales of Game’s, a group of several members of an amateur game development forum. The year is 2053, and Charles Barkley, along with his son Hoopz, is a fugitive, on the run from Michael Jordan and the B-Ball Removal Department, as Barkley is suspected of being in violation of anti-B-Ball laws. That’s right, basketball is illegal, and it’s all Charles Barkley’s fault.

Ostensibly an unofficial sequel to the movie Space Jam and the SNES game Barkley Shut Up and Jam!, this JRPG-style game is everything you’d expect just from its amazing title. Not only can you play in English, but you can also play in Al Bhed, the language of the heretics in Final Fantasy X. And if you knew who the Al Bhed were without me telling you, we’re best friends now.

But the developers aren’t done, yet. They have a doubly funded Kickstarter to produce The Magical Realms of Tír na nÓg: Escape from Necron 7 – Revenge of Cuchulainn: The Official Game of the Movie – Chapter 2 of the Hoopz Barkley SaGa. That’s right, there’s going to be a sequel about the kid, and it looks amazing.

Price: Free

Super Hexagon

Super Hexagon

Even before Terry Cavanagh’s Super Hexagon had been officially ported to Mac and PC and was available in the Steam store, it had already been cloned by a teen developer and released as open source freeware. While indie developers are absolutely choosing indirect routes to get their games on players’ screens, usually they want some say in how it happens. There can be drawbacks to being too open, and when Cavanagh encouraged players to create their own games inspired by his, this was taken as blanket consent to clone and distribute his newest game.

Super Hexagon began as just regular Hexagon, an insanely difficult browser-based game release. Hexagon was created during a game jam, a creative weekend for game developers to produce as many complete and playable games as possible. That was about nine months ago, and Super Hexagon, the more fleshed out version, has just been officially released for Mac (and PC) on Steam, following an iOS release a few months ago.

The goal of Super Hexagon is to not die. That’s it. Death comes when some part of the hexagon closes in on the triangle, representing the player. If the triangle is caught, your game ends. Make it to sixty seconds without dying, and you’ve really hit a milestone. Super Hexagon is that kind of game. It’s not all painful and gut-wrenching setbacks, though. The pulsing graphics and colors are a perfect match for the action, and the chiptunes soundtrack is a work of art unto itself.

Price: $2.99

Bit.Trip Runner

Bit.Trip Runner

Bit.Trip Runner comes right in the middle of the Bit.Trip series, developed by Gaijin Games. Like all Bit.Trip games, Bit.Trip Runner is a rhythm game. If you can follow the rhythm of the music and the game itself, you’ll be just fine. If you lose the rhythm, you’re going to have a bad time.

In contrast to the other games, though, Bit.Trip Runner is a platformer, meaning it’s a Mario Bros. style game, requiring the player, as Commander Video, to run and jump through a stage full of obstacles and other perils. Your character is constantly running forward; there’s no stopping in place or going backwards. All you can do is jump, slide, kick, and bounce. Miss a step, and it’s back to the beginning of the level for you, no matter how close to the finish you had gotten.

It’s all about the music, though, in Bit.Trip Runner. You’ll hop and kick in time with the music, and as you move through the level, the music gets more interesting and more intense. This is another great chiptunes soundtrack, one that I was lucky enough to score for free with a download bundle. It’s stayed on my iPod, long after my most recent rage quit in Bit.Trip Runner.

Price: $9.99

Super Meat Boy

Super Meat Boy

Super Meat Boy is another impossibly hard game, but it’s won the devotion of players who love retro platformers. Fortunately, the levels are very short, and after you’ve been through the same stage a few dozen times, you’ll pretty much have memorized how to make it back to the spot where you just can’t seem to not die.

There’s an incredible sense of satisfaction in beating a level, though, so while playing Super Meat Boy may seem like an exercise in masochism, or at least futility, there’s a big payoff when you do finally progress to the next stage. There are literally hundreds of levels, too, with increasing difficulty, so a really committed player can find good times aplenty in Super Meat Boy. It’s something I’ve put down and come back to over and over again, because I can play the game for hours and know that there’s still more to play.

Price: $14.99

Wizorb

Wizorb

Imagine if Breakout and a JRPG had a fantasy-based baby. That offspring would be Wizorb. The game starts off similarly to an old fashioned Japanese role playing game. Think the beginning of a Pokemon game, wherein something happens causing you to leave your home and set out on an adventure. In this case, the kingdom of Gorudo is threatened by an evil force, and the wizard Cyrus sets out to defeat the enemy and save the kingdom.

Cyrus, controlled by the player, uses a magic called Wizord, which is where the Breakout part of the game comes into play. Cyrus can cast spells using MP, magic points, a familiar trope of JRPGs. The spells are similar to power ups. There are flaming balls, blasts of wind, and you can even teleport your balls. Collect coins to purchase items such as keys, extra lives, and MP refills.

Wizorb manages to tick a lot of boxes for me. I’m a big fan of JRPGs close to the hearts of harcore gamers, but I also love casual puzzle games, too. Wizorb bridges that divide nicely. There’s also an element of absurdity, common to so many indie RPGs, that’s really endearing. Though Wizorb can be challenging, it’s hard to take a game that uses the mechanics of Breakout to save the world too seriously. And while this is the only game on this list available on the Mac App Store, like most wacky games in wide distribution, it’s also available on Steam.

Price: $2.99

Conclusion

These six games are only a few of the amazing 8-bit and retro-inspired games available for OS X. Many of these games are only one in a series or are a single representative of a developer’s work. If you’ve found anything here you like, I encourage you to seek out more. Do you have any favorites I missed? Let us know in the comments!

Our sponsor this week is Ondesoft Screen Capture, the screenshot tool that lets you take a screenshot any way you want, just the way you need. The latest version includes all the great screen capture features you’d expect, along with the brand-new scrolling capture and menu capture tools that make it even more powerful than ever. Now you can grab screenshots of everything, including menus and full-length documents and websites.

Ondesoft Screen Capture lets you use a number of tools to capture anything on your screen. You can capture scrolling areas, individual items, shapes, and more, and then you can edit the screenshots with its built-in editor. You can organize all of your screenshots to keep up with everything you’ve captured, or export your shots in all the standard image formats you could expect. It’s the screenshot tool that can handle everything in one package.

Go Get It!

Ready to start taking screenshots like a pro? Then head over to Ondesoft‘s website to download a free trial. You can then buy a copy of Ondesoft Screen Capture for $29.95 so you can keep capturing everything you can see on your Mac.

Think of a typical task on your to-do list, and I’m sure there’s an app that can help you accomplish it. You’ve got Mac apps designed for a plethora of purposes, each designed to solve or complete different kinds of tasks in a number of unique ways. In fact, there are apps that are made to bring different standalone apps and services together to easily manage and keep track of. Off the top of my head are Words for save-for-later articles, MarsEdit for publishing to different blogging platforms, and Favs for all your social favorites.

For today’s review, I’ll be taking a look at Notesdeck for Mac, a relatively unique app that consolidates all of your iCloud, Dropbox, Simplenote, and Evernote notes into a single dashboard to view, edit, and sync in real time. Developed by Michael Petruzzo of Dark Heartfelt, it’s an app where notes—whichever service or note-taking app used—are editable and available at a click of a button.

With this concept in mind, can Notesdeck assist the everyday note-taking Mac user? How does Notesdeck fair in the productivity circle? Let’s find out.

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Overview

Notesdeck (a.k.a. Notella) is a universal notes app that stores digital notes created with some of today’s most popular note-taking and file storage services: Dropbox, Apple’s iCloud, Simplenote, and Evernote (read-only). Because it is also available on iOS, you can take all of your notes wherever you go and access them whenever you need to.

The notable selling point, however, is having all your notes stored and displayed in one interface. It’s designed to enable you to view, edit, and sync changes made to your notes regardless of its origin, and so saves time and effort from doing so on each individual app or service. While you can create and save notes on Notesdeck, you can think of it as your go-to app for cleaning and organizing the hundreds of notes you’ve already created and, perhaps, momentarily forgotten overtime.

Notesdeck boasts of a couple of other features well-worth looking at, such as global search, customization, live Markdown preview, and drag and drop. We’ll get to these features later in the article.

How It Works

Welcome to Notesdeck for Mac

Fire up Notesdeck and a quick tutorial window welcomes and walks you through the basics of the app. Behind it is the actual dashboard itself with the list of apps/services on the left panel. You can go through the tutorial (it’s short and easy to breeze through) or close it to begin using the app.

Your first move would, of course, be to sync to your Evernote, Simplenote, and Dropbox accounts. This will bring all of your existing notes together on Notesdeck. By clicking on a particular service, a drop down window appears to prompt you for the username and password of your account. If, however, you’d like to create new notes on Notesdeck, they would automatically be saved on your iCloud account.

Signing in and synching to Evernote

Once you have synched Notesdeck to your chosen app or service, their respective notes are then stored in folders. Default folders are created the moment you’ve successfully synched Notesdeck to the service, and you can create unique subfolders right after. In the case of Evernote, default folders are labeled according to your existing Evernote notebooks.

Create a note directly on Notesdeck

To begin creating a note, click on the Create button at the top right of the app. It will then open the grey-colored text editor from the far right column where you can begin writing your notes. The notes list in the middle column updates as you edit the note, bolding the first line to indicate the presumed title of the note.

If you have existing notes stored in a particular service like Simplenote or Evernote, Notesdeck lists these notes in the middle column. Click on a note and the text editor opens up automatically. If you’d like to rename or delete a folder, just right click the folder. To delete a note, hover the cursor over a note and click on the small grey delete button.

Features

Notesdeck is a pretty straightforward app in terms of its functionality, but it does have a couple of features that enhances the note-taking, note-saving experience. Here are some of the most useful and interesting features so far.

Global Search

Search through all your notes using the global search bar.

You’ll first notice the global search bar where you can locate specific notes from Evernote, Simplenote, Dropbox, and iCloud via a single search bar. Just type a word or phrase and all related notes will appear immediately.

This is handy when you have a handful of saved notes and all you can remember are a couple of unique words to fish them out. Tags are nonexistent on Notesdeck though, which is actually a necessary feature since the app deals with different services and notes containing all kinds of content.

Live Markdown Preview

Another interesting feature is the live Markdown preview, which enables you to take a look at your Markdown-formatted notes as applied HTML. You can activate the live Markdown preview by clicking on the M magnifying glass at the bottom of the text editor.

View Markdown-formatted notes on Notesdeck.

While the Markdown preview window is detached from the app, it does update in real time, making it a potential contender to Marked, a popular Markdown preview-only app.

Custom Hotkeys

Custom hotkeys are keyboard shortcuts you assign to a specific folder. Once you use a custom hotkey, the app activates its distraction-free fullscreen view and lets you focus on writing that new note. To create a hotkey, go to the left panel, click on the square button beside the plus sign at the bottom, and type your desired shortcut.

When returning to the normal view, the note is already created and stored in its specific folder as per the shortcut assigned to it. This is another useful feature for users who have multiple folders and would like to skip that extra step of selecting and saving a new note to a particular folder.

Drag and Drop

Sifting through your trove of notes, you may decide to move a note or two from Simplenote to your iCloud account, or from Evernote to Dropbox. Whichever may be the desired destination, Notesdeck’s drag and drop feature allows you to easily move notes from one account to another. Just click and drag the note to the desired folder to move it.

Moving a note from my Simplenote account to iCloud took just a few seconds, as if I was simply moving a file from one folder to another on Finder.

Further Customization and Flexibility

Finally, you can modify Notesdeck’s look and feel through customization options, particularly the font face and size of the different aspects of the app. You can also switch from regular to fullscreen view, or hide or reveal the Notesdeck overview.

Share your notes in different ways.

Sharing is also possible in Notesdeck. Click on the share button at the bottom of the text editor and a variety of share options will appear: email, Message, Twitter, Facebook, Squarespace, and Tumblr.

The Good and the Clunky

Notesdeck has a lot of good tricks up its sleeve. With its unique concept and existing features, it is certainly an app worth looking at if you’ve got a ton of notes saved on different services and would just like to get everything in one place.

For instance, global search, custom hotkeys, and drag-and-drop are features that can help save time and effort when managing and organizing your notes. Likewise, it’s easy to create and edit a note since the app switches views and opens up the different areas fast and smoothly.

You’ve also got real time synching to and from the different apps connected to Notesdeck. I’ve tried editing notes in Simplenote online and the changes appear on Notesdeck immediately. In the case of Evernote, text and image notes can be synched and viewed on Notesdeck, although downloading image notes will take some time depending on the size of the note.

There are, however, areas that Notesdeck needs work, especially since it’s got a relatively high price point ($21.99 for the Mac version). I’ve experienced some sluggishness when opening the Preferences and when I’m about to sync Notesdeck to a service like Dropbox or Evernote. Moreover, there are options in the preferences in which the terminology needs to be clarified, such as “Center on Horizon mode” and “Screen to run.” How do I create and run different screens then? What is Horizon mode and how do I activate it?

What I find problematic though is how the notes are displayed. There is no option to see all notes on Notesdeck nor can you see notes saved in a specific service without clicking on a folder. To see notes saved on Dropbox, for instance, you have to click on the folders synched to Dropbox to view and edit them. Simply clicking on Dropbox will only display Dropbox’s logo.

All we’re seeing is Dropbox’s logo.

Design-wise, the default fonts are not as appealing, especially in the list of services where every service and folder is displayed on all caps and at 30-40 points. The text editor needs a fresh coat of paint as well since the grey colors cause the words to blend with the background, making it difficult to read.

Looking Forward

I’m quite confident though that improvements are underway that could help fix these loose strands. The developer has made it clear in the official website that the app is under active development and that any problem, feedback, or suggestion can be sent his way via email.

With that said, I suggest waiting till the app is updated and the bugs found in the current version eradicated before purchasing. But overall, Notesdeck is a promising app catering to a niche audience; that’s where it’s got the upper hand. I look forward to seeing additional features and improvements in the coming versions that would make the app even better. It’s definitely got power to grow into something that could help note-taking fanatics in need of an organized dashboard for notes.

What do you think of Notesdeck? What other features and capabilities do you think would work well with an app like this? Share your thoughts in the comments.

We’d like to say a special Thank you! to our weekly sponsors from November for sponsoring our site and for the great apps they make. If you would like to feature your app on our site with an advertisement, be sure to check out our available slots on BuySellAds or register for a weekly sponsorship for your app.

If you haven’t already checked out our the great apps and products that sponsored our site last month, be sure to check them out now!

And a special thanks to you, our Mac.AppStorm.net readers, for reading and sharing our articles. We couldn’t do it without you!

“This is proof of extra-Tennesseean life,” says Rochard’s main character John Rochard, Skyrig employee number 90210, after learning that aliens do indeed exist. His wise-cracks are a special highlight of what at first seems a fairly generic — if well-executed and humorous — side-scrolling shooter/platformer-hybrid game, which soon bends you to its will. Rochard doesn’t take itself too seriously; it’s silly from start to finish, making no attempt to dress its ridiculous plot in fancy clothes, and this filters through to the light-hearted, entertaining action set-pieces.

We’ve got free download codes to giveaway to two lucky readers. Check out the review, then see how you could win.

Polished Presentation

Rochard looks and sounds great. A full voice cast that deliver their lines with aplomb, while the sound effects have a satisfying boom and ting and rattle. The visuals are a stylized pseudo-3D affair, rendered on a 2D plane. It won’t set your graphics card on fire (even on older MacBooks), but it looks nice. There’s a fine level of polish here; the developer’s clearly paid attention to many of the smaller details. If you look carefully, you can spot a number of clever or silly references to pop culture painted right into the environments.

The graphics are polished and reasonably detailed, with some nice touches. Rochard is very self-aware, too.

Rochard started life as a downloadable console game, and it shows. Recoil Games had help from Sony in getting it onto the PlayStation 3, where it won Editor’s Choice awards at several outlets. It doesn’t seem to have lost anything in the conversion to Mac OS X. Controlling Rochard with the keyboard and mouse feels both natural and sensible, and it adapts easily to the lean-forward vibe to gaming on a computer (as opposed to the more lean-back console style). You could be forgiven for thinking that it was originally conceived as a computer game.

Manic Miner

The basic plot goes along the lines of John Rochard being the captain of a mining expedition on an asteroid. Things start to go haywire, and you need to fix them. Then a conspiracy emerges along with intrigue, betrayal, evil villains, and incompetent henchmen. The cookie-cutter storyline is executed well enough, with good pacing and an emphasis on ridiculousness over all else. Most key plot points seem to have been concocted specifically to show off a few great one-liners and joke setups. Rochard entertains where it fails to move or intellectually stimulate.

Rochard has something of a dry sense of humor, but it works for the characters and setting.

All this is mostly an excuse to run around levels with a very cool gun. You click with the left mouse button to shoot, taking care not to overheat the weapon, press the G key to fire grenades (of which there are three types, unlocked progressively), and use the right mouse button to send out a gravity beam that picks objects up. For most of the game these objects are small boxes and switch plates, although others emerge later on.

When you get the gravity generator online, you can use the shift key to reduce the gravitational field. This enables longer/higher jumps and picking up of heavier objects. You’ll also get the chance to swing around on an anti-gravity grapple tether, a la classic arcade and console game Bionic Commando.

Grappling on large crates and swinging around feels great, and is a cool way to get around some levels.

Puzzles and Goons

Picking up and moving/propelling objects has two functions: To solve environmental puzzles, and to more creatively eliminate enemies. You could just shoot the bad guys — who are a mix of dudes with guns and small flying drones — but that would be boring.

Rochard gives you the opportunity to drop or fling crates on/at people, to hit them with turrets ripped off the wall, or to use crates as shields (which has the added bonus of deflecting shots back at the bad guys, killing them with their own laser fire). Toward the end of the game, you gain the ability to pick up people. The goofy way in which this happens was the highlight of my experience. I only wish it were introduced sooner (although that would probably make the game a bit easy).

Using people as shields and weapons is immensely satisfying, although it won’t always work to your advantage.

Puzzles are fairly straightforward. Most of them involve some combination of three different kinds of force-field walls. There’s one that people can pass through, but not objects, another that only objects pass through, and a third that nothing can pass through. You need to turn these on and off to unlock doors and move through the level. Transitions between levels are smooth, and you only have to worry about loading times when changing to an entirely new environment (say, a different ship’s interior).

Completionists and explorers are rewarded with extra health — from the health-boosting machines that aren’t on the main path — more chances to refill their Explosium (grenade fuel), and collectibles. There are seldom any multiple pathways, but extra rooms and hidden areas are common — and they tend to require more skill to reach than the relatively easy main game.

There a lots of collectibles and hard-to-reach rooms with Explosium or health boosts.

Old-School Fun in a Modern Package

Rochard packs a lot of personality into every part of the game. The characters shine for their well-delivered dialogue and stylized appearance, while the 2D visuals offer an economical beauty — they aren’t lavishly detailed, but they’re polished and colorful. There’s more variety in the environments than you might expect, too. The core run and gun, grapple and swing, puzzle and fling mechanics are fun and easy to learn.

Rochard is in many ways a throwback to late-80s Bionic Commando or Spiderman-style platform games, but it feels decidedly modern at the same time. If we could get more games of this calibre on the Mac, people might stop complaining about the sorry state of the platform.

Win a Free Copy!

As mentioned at the beginning of the article, we’ve got two free copies of Rochard to giveaway to our readers! Just leave a comment below telling us the game you’ve most recently played on your Mac, and optionally share the giveaway on Twitter/Facebook/App.net and share the link to the post below for an extra entry. We’ll close the giveaway on Tuesday, December 11, so be sure to hurry and get your entry in!

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

Optical Disks are rapidly going the way of cassette tapes, zip disks, floppies, and every other form of removable storage we’ve used over the years. Yes, CDs, DVDs, and Blu-ray disks are still important, but they’re far from the most important thing for computer users today. We watch movies and listen to music online or download them from the iTunes store, we download programs from the App Store and games from Steam, and we backup and share files with Dropbox, iCloud, and dozens of other online backup services.

CD and DVD drives are annoying at best. They break more often than not (yes, I’ve seen over a half-dozen DVD drives break over the past several years), and keeping your disks scratch-free is an exercise in futility. Then you have to keep the disks around just in case you ever want to rip that song or install that program again.

That said, DVDs are still rather useful, if for nothing else than watching movies. Downloads are great, but when your internet connection is slow or the discount section at the store beats iTunes prices, the trusty old DVD still serves its purpose. That’s why I own a Samsung external DVD drive to use along with my MacBook Air (I know, Samsung and Apple, sitting together on my desk…).

How about you? Do you use an external DVD drive, or have you kicked disks to the curb as Apple has started dropping DVD drives from its latest Macs? We’d love to hear your thoughts in the comments below!

Back when I worked in quality assurance, good screenshotting applications that did anything more than what you could already do with Command+Shift+3 were few and far between. I ended up pasting together a lot of screenshots, wishing I could just hit a button and capture the whole webpage at one time.

Those days days are over. Web Snapper, with its range of tagging features and ability to snap an entire webpage, is a pretty useful tool to have. Add to that it’s multiple export formats, and is there anything this app can’t do? We’ll find out!

Snap to It!

It’s really simple to take a screenshot of an entire webpage in Web Snapper. First, make sure you have Web Snapper open, because you’re going to need the app going if we’re meant to get anywhere on this project. You have two ways to get the webpage’s URL into Web Snapper: drag the URL from the Address Bar onto Web Snapper, or select Open URL from the File menu and copy and paste it into the field.

Tip: If you’re dragging the URL onto Web Snapper, make sure you grab the favicon to the left of the “http://”!

After you input the URL, Web Snapper starts creating the screenshot.

There’s also a handy browser extension and bookmarklet you can install from the Web Snapper menu. With either of those, you won’t actually need to have Web Snapper open to start screenshotting or worry with all that URL dragging and copying. The extension is only for use with Safari, though, and the Web Snapper FAQ makes it clear the developers aren’t eager to add Chrome or Firefox support any time soon. The bookmarklet gets around that, though, but when I tried to install it from the Web Snapper menu, it bypassed my default browser and opened in Firefox. I’m a smart cookie and did eventually get everything squared away in Chrome, albeit with a few extra steps.

When you’ve got your browser set up, and Web Snapper takes a webpage screenshot, it’s not only getting what’s visible on your display, as you would get tapping Command+Shift+3 or Command+Shift+4, but it’s also grabbing everything you’d have to scroll to see, too. All of it ends up in one continuous file, more or less, depending on your preferences when you save.

You do have a few different formats to which you can save, but the default is PDF. With a PDF, you’ll have the choice of creating one continuous page or separate pages in a single document. Web Snapper also lets you choose, GIF, BMP, PNG, TIFF, etc., to export your screenshot, but of course those aren’t going to support multipage files, so you’ll just get one giant image.

There’s lots you can do when you’re exporting, including choosing a new filetype.

When you’re saving your screenshot, there are a few options on offer from Web Snapper you may find handy. You can choose to include the original URL, add headers and footer, create your own tags, and compose notes, all to be included in the final screenshot file. If you just want to save images from a page or need to read an article later, some of this may be extraneous, but when I was doing quality assurance on live websites I absolutely needed the URL on each screenshot I made, and the ability to add headers and footers, along with notes and tags, would have been phenomenal.

Things That Didn’t Work

I had a great time screenshotting entire webpages as multipage and single page documents. I was screenshotting everything. And then I hit on a webpage that didn’t look right in the PDF. All the text was cut off on the right and I couldn’t read any of it. I tried again, and then it happened on another page. Web Snapper was cutting off the right side of the webpage.

This by no means happened on every page I tried, and it seemed to happen more on blogs than elsewhere. I’m assuming it was a problem with themes, that Web Snapper didn’t like the themes it was was looking at. Still, it was a big disappointment, and the screenshots I got from the affected pages weren’t usable at all.

Oh no! Web Snapper wouldn’t play nice with Sparrow.

Another issue I ran into was the buttons on the Web Snapper interface itself. I should be able to email my screenshot right from the app, but I guess that only works if I’m using Mail as my default email program. It’s possible it would have worked had I been using any other application than Sparrow, my preferred application, or had the Gmail web app set as my default, but I couldn’t find anything in the FAQ or support section on the developer’s website to back that up.

To the right of the email button is the magnifying glass/Finder button that should locate my new screenshot in Finder. It never once did that. I tried sticking my screenshots all over the place, thinking Web Snapper was refusing out of some anthropomorphic insistence that my requests for it to find things for me on my otherwise empty Desktop were acts of laziness on my part, and it was going to make me work for it. So I put the screenshots in Downloads and in Documents, anything starting with a D, but no luck. That little button never worked.

You can switch a lot of stuff up in your preferences, too, including the default filetype and export settings.

Conclusion

Where Web Snapper worked, it worked really well. I got really good looking screenshots I could easily control. The interface is uncluttered and a breeze to use. With the Safari extension and bookmarklets for everything else, it really is so simple to make full screenshots of entire webpages.

There didn’t seem to be a workaround for the sites that would be cut off in the final screenshot, though, and if you really needed a screenshot of one of those sites, you’d have to either paste it together out of lots of Command+Shift+3 images or find another app. Which is unfortunate, since Web Snapper is otherwise so nice to work with.

I loved the ability to add notes, tags, and headers/footers. I could easily choose how my screenshot was output, and whether it was multipage or not, if I went with a PDF. There is a lot of good here, but there’s also a lot to think about before you buy the app.

A few weeks ago the trackpad of my Macbook started acting funny. The bottom right side of it stopped working when being clicked, and since then it’s only gotten worse as the problem seems to be expanding to the rest of the trackpad.

This got me thinking what I would do if all of its clicking functionality eventually stopped working, and that’s how I came across the app that we’re reviewing today. It’s called DwellClick, and it’s a pretty unique app that lets you click and drag without using any buttons in your mouse or trackpad. It’s kind of hard to explain, so let’s get deeper into it!

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DwellClick

DwellClick

DwellClick is kind of an expensive app, as it goes for $15.99 on the App Store. What it does is it implements some extra functionality into your cursor, so that you can automatically click without pressing any buttons. DwellClick tracks your cursor’s movement, so that when you are moving your cursor and then stop it for a certain amount of time, it will automatically click wherever you stopped the cursor. Then the next thing you point at will also get clicked and so forth.

But that’s not all. If you move your cursor to the title bar of any app, DwellClick will automatically start dragging it until you set it in one place. Then there’s the pop-up menu, which looks and works quite similarly to the one that the Popclip app has (as they are both made by the same developer). We’ll get deeper into it next.

Pop-Up Menu and the Panel

Popup and the Panel

You can bring up the pop-up menu by clicking the Fn key. It will appear next to your cursor and it will have three buttons: one for double-clicking, one for dragging, and another for secondary clicking. Activating any of them will make it so that the next thing you point at gets secondary-clicked, double clicked or dragged.

So, in order to work with any of the options that the menu has, you have to hit the Fn key, move your cursor to the button that you would like to hit, and then wait for the auto-click to do its thing; but I’m not sure how much more efficient that whole process is compared to just double clicking or dragging like you normally would with your mouse.

Another way to do this is with the panel, which is a floating menu that will always be visible, showing some customizable buttons for doing tasks like double-clicking, secondary clicking, dragging, and activating keys like CMD, Alt, Shift and Ctrl. Accessing these buttons with auto-click might be a lot faster than bringing up the pop-up menu everytime you want to drag or double-click. And if it bothers you visually, you can even tell the app to hide and show the panel automatically.

Tweaking the App

Preferences

One of the best things about DwellClick is that it’s highly customizable and therefore it’s not limited to just being an auto-clicking app. You can actually get it to work in many ways if you are willing to get creative with it, like setting it up so that it’s dedicated to specific apps that might require a lot of continuous clicking, or using it for setting up universal keyboard shortcuts for tasks that you would normally do with your mouse. Under the settings you can tweak things like:

• The amount of time the app will wait to click when you have stopped moving the cursor.
• The sound the app will make when clicking and/or dragging is activated.
• Turn off and on the animations that the cursor does when it’s about to click (if activated, a colored circle will appear when the cursor is resting, and begin to shrink as the set delay time for clicking gets closer).
• The placement and size of the pop-up menu.
• Activating and tweaking the panel.
• Selecting apps where DwellClick will not work or will only work with (for example, I deactivated it with Byword since it always switched out the line I was writing in).
• Activating and de-activating auto-click, auto-drag, and quick-drag (a feature that makes activating the dragging feature faster).
• Setting keyboard shortcuts for clicking, double-clicking, dragging, turning Dwell Click on and off, and showing the pop-up menu.

Keyboard Shortcuts

Getting Used To It

While DwellClick is pretty cool, it is also quite inconvenient until you get used to working with it. Using Dwell Click pretty much makes me think faster, because if I don’t move my cursor quickly enough and I leave it at one place for too long, it will click and undesirable things might happen.

To name a few examples: say you’re reading an article and you accidentally click on a bookmark or another link just because you moved your cursor slightly. Or you’re typing in a text box somewhere, and as you’re pulling the cursor away from the text box, another element in your screen gets clicked, deactivating the text box and leaving you typing at nothing.

I guess it’s a matter of getting used to it and seeing if you can incorporate it with your workflow, but in the time I’ve been using it I’ve come to the conclusion that it’s not for me, although it might come useful while performing certain tasks, or when my trackpad’s clicking eventually stops working (I think it’s only a matter of time, unfortunately).

Conclusion

The first word that comes to mind when you hear about or start using DwellClick is “confusing”. It certainly is hard to get used to working with this app, but if you can manage to get past the few days of using it, you might just find it pretty useful, especially if you can find a special specific use for it, like only using it for dragging windows and items, or for using keyboard shortcuts for accessing mouse commands.

When it comes to clicking this might actually save you some time if you learn to use it quickly. As far as the pop-menu and its functions like secondary and double clicking, I think they might actually slow you down, unless you find some way to adapt them to your workflow. I don’t see myself using this app as it is intended a lot, but I might put to use some of its features on occasion. What about you?