Category: Mac

It’s so easy to lose track of your stuff. Sure, you’re unlikely to actually lose your fridge — if so, you’ve got bigger problems than an app can solve — but what’s the odds you’ll forget when your warranty’s up or how much everything in your office cost originally? When a spreadsheet doesn’t cut it, you need an app that makes it simple to track your stuff. That’s exactly where the new Compartments 2 excels.

Compartments 2 is a new OS X Mavericks-focused upgrade to one of the best Mac apps for keeping track of your stuff. It can keep track of everything you own, remind you when your warranties are almost up, and make it easy to print out a list of all your stuff organized by room. It’s great — and this week, we’ve got 5 copies to giveaway free to our readers!

All you’ve got to do to enter the giveaway is leave a comment below and let us know why you’d love to get a copy of Compartments 2. Then, you can optionally share the giveaway on your social networks and leave a second comment below with a link to your shared post for an extra entry.

Hurry and get your entry in — our giveaway closes on Friday, November 22nd!

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

As our lives become more digital, we are always on the lookout for something to enhance the way we organize tasks, wishes, and many other thoughts. Thankfully, there are a lot of apps for this. The problem with having a lot of apps is you have to sort through them to find the one you’re willing to use daily. That’s why we’ve gathered the ten best apps for the job. In this roundup, we’ll detail the pros and cons of each app and give you a chance to decide which is best for your personal needs.

Text-Based

Minimal GUI

Powerhouses and Getting Things Done

What Are You Using?

Those are just some of the the best apps to organize your life in list form. There are some cool ones releasing each month, so we’d love to know if we missed one of your favorites. Let us know what you prefer in the comments.

The original way to share files online is to FTP them to your server and share a direct link. That has fallen by the wayside in recent years, replaced by far simpler tools like CloudApp and Droplr. But if you have your own VPS or shared hosting powered site, you likely have to use FTP semi-frequently to upload files, and you can’t just use existing sharing tools to hook into your own server.

But you can pick up a copy of the brand-new FTP Dropper, a simple menu-bar FTP uploader tool that costs just $0.99. It makes FTP simple enough that you might just start sharing files directly from your own server again, too.

Menubar Simplicity, Meet FTP.

FTP Dropper brings the simplicity of drag-and-drop menubar uploading to sharing files via FTP. After quickly entering your FTP server credentials, you can drag-and-drop individual files to the app window itself or just to the menubar icon. There’s no upload progress indicator on the menubar icon, but as soon as the file’s on your server you’ll here a familiar ding letting you know that the file’s uploaded and its path has been copied to your clipboard, Droplr-style.

It just about couldn’t get much simpler than that, and it worked great every time we tested it. You can’t drag a folder of files to FTP Dropper — something I’d happen to have liked to have for a simple way to publish to my Kirby powered site — but individual files large and small all worked great. And, you can set the upload folder of your choice in FTP Dropper’s basic settings, making it a great way to quickly upload images to your CMS’ upload folder or random files for sharing to a dedicated sharing folder.

Copying the link to your clipboard directly is nice, too, but you’ll likely need to edit the URL before sharing since it will be an ftp:// link by default — and, depending on your server settings, may show your server’s IP address instead of your domain name as well as an extra folder or two that’ll need shaved from the address. So, remove any folders from the address that aren’t publicly viewable — say, the public_html folder name, which is likely your site’s top folder — and swap in http:// and your domain name, and you’ve got a direct link to your file to share. Sure, it’s not as pretty a way to share files as using Droplr or CloudApp, but if you’ve already got space on your server, this gives you a simple and cheap way to share files.

Or hey: just use it for uploading files to your site. At its low price of just $0.99, it’s worth it for just that. And you can always change the folder path on demand to upload files to other folders when you need to do so. It’s easily the simplest way to upload files for a simple site, and also the easiest way to share files via FTP — and just happens to be something I’ve wanted for quite some time.

I’ll say this about my iPhone: it’s a lot easier to connect with people with it than it is while using a Mac. My Mac doesn’t have anywhere near the messaging options: there’s no Whisper or Facebook Messenger available for Mac, and iMessage is often a lukewarm offering at best (although I am grateful it’s there). Google Hangouts is abysmally bad in Chrome and my iPhone — much worse than Gmail Chat ever was, in my opinion — so I’ve rarely used it.

But it’s hard to simply swear all these apps off — after all, some people might not have my number, and for them, Facebook or Hangouts is the easiest way to get in touch. That’s why I was glad to try out Flamingo, a Mac app built from the ground up for Google Hangouts, Facebook messaging, and even XMPP. Is it worth the purchase? Read on to find out.

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Unified Design

Chat apps like Flamingo are luxury products. They aren’t necessarily needed, but they’re desirable and, just as often, easily attainable. Some will argue Flamingo’s $9.99 price is expensive, and it is. Not unlike Tweetbot, you’re paying for the undeniable luxury of using a native app with a beautiful design instead of using a set of web interfaces.

Flamingo looks great.

And yes, Flamingo is exceptionally beautiful. This is first-class app design of the highest standards. The developers talk about a unified design that brings together all your accounts into one window. Your contacts, which the app calls Buddies, are all available for access in a single pane. Likewise, a list of current conversations is always accessible in its own pane.

Even chats are available in a single window. In this sense, the design reminds me very much of Tweetbot. You can detach these chats and move them around your desktop, even putting them onto different Spaces. I prefer to keep everything in the unified single-window view, though, which simply appeals to my OCD.

You can drag conversations into separate windows, and the avatars look fantastic.

There are other parts of the app that I really like. It’s visually obvious. Closing a chat window does not end the conversation; it simply closes a window. You knows when somebody is typing a response. The app makes beautiful use of user avatars from Facebook and Google, and makes great use of Notification Centre.

There’s also inline media. This is pretty cool stuff. Let’s say somebody wants to such are a picture with you on Facebook. They attach it to their message, and instead of forcing you to go through a series of windows to get to the picture or making you view it on Facebook’s website, it appears right in your conversation. This also happens with video.

Inline media is a huge feature that makes the whole experience really nice.

What makes it really neat is that you don’t need to send your media through Facebook too. You can use a direct connection in the app to send whatever you need. If that fails, or you just want to be a little more organized with your files, you can send them with CloudApp for Droplr. More or less, this looks just like inline media in Twitter. It’s great, easy to use, and made seeing pictures from a friend’s travels to China and Prague a beautiful experience.

The app also offers built-in search. Not only is it insanely fast, but it’s also really accurate. It makes iMessage’s search looks like a joke, and for many people, it will be worth the price of the software. Sadly, the app only searches through conversations you’ve had on Flamingo, so it won’t search through any conversation history from the past few years. That being said, it works wonders for everyday search needs.

Opinionated Software

Of course, software designed well is just another way for many of us to describe incredibly opinionated design. Fair warning: Flamingo is opinionated. Of note are the in-app Preferences, which have very few options. It’s interesting, at least to me, because it’s easy to set up some preferences in other places in the app.

The Preferences are pretty straightforward.

Of particular importance is typography. The app makes it easy to change fonts, kerning, and even the writing direction of your text (no doubt a great for international users). It’s great to see these settings, but it’s also odd to me that they weren’t simply given a space in the Preferences pane.

That’s it, though. There are no options to change the visual layout or modify the way conversations are presented, apart from dragging them away from the unified timeline and giving them their own window. There’s no colour choices, which will make some people cringe, and there’s no way to modify your personal information (apart from your profile pictures) in the app. I like opinionated software — especially when it’s designed as well as Flamingo — but I know it will turn some users off.

Lovely Accidents and Bizarre Happenstance

There’s one feature that I believe is an accident on the developer’s part. For me, though, I think it’s a huge perk. While chatting with friends in Facebook, Flamingo does not send read receipts. For me, this is a big deal that makes it worth the $10. Philosophically, I loathe read receipts. I think they create an imposition upon people to respond immediately to messages. I love that Flamingo doesn’t send them.

The Search function is fantastic.

I also saw no easy way to initiate a group chat, which is a huge feature to be missing. I hope this one is on Flamingo’s list for updates.

Also worth mentioning right now is that Flamingo is still in its early days, and there are bugs and the occasional slowdown. The app often hangs when it’s refreshing your contacts list (which it doesn’t seem to do constantly), and will sometimes show an ellipsis in a conversation even if the person on the other end has gone offline. (To be fair, that could be a problem with Facebook or Google, since this happens in their respective web apps as well.)

I love the unified Buddy List on the left.

Finally, the app uses more memory than it should. Flamingo is the sort of app you’re likely going to want open all the time, just in case somebody wants to reach you. It’s unfortunate, then, that it misbehaves with its RAM usage and CPU threads. Mavericks constantly alerts me that it’s taking up significant energy. It also seems to take longer than it should to activate App Nap. I have every confidence that these bugs will get sorted out in the next couple updates from the team, but I’m not sure Flamingo will work well without drawing considerable power from batteries on a MacBook. It seems to be a 50/50 chance.

Final Thoughts

Flamingo isn’t perfect, but for an app that’s only been around a couple weeks, it’s certainly a strong contender. I love it because it keeps me off Facebook’s web interface and gives me one less reason to use Chrome (which I use for Hangouts). Its seamless integration with OS X’s Notification Centre makes my life easier, and its beautiful and modern interface keeps me feeling sane.

In short? Flamingo is a luxury app if I’ve ever heard of one, but if you can afford it, I’d highly recommend it. I use it every day and I think it’s a fantastic addition to my Mac’s arsenal. In the future, I’d love to see stronger support for group chats and better memory usage, but if you’re willing to overlook those issues in favour of early adoption, I think you have a lot to look forward to in Flamingo. It stays open in my MacBook constantly right now.

There’s a lot of great email apps for the Mac coming out right now, but if you want one that’s fun and simple — and ready to use today — Airmail‘s easily one of the best options. It’s the top paid app on the Mac App Store right now, and for good reason: it’s just $1.99, but gives you the most customizable email experience on the Mac today.

It’s not as simple out-of-the-box as Sparrow, but it’s the closest option to it on the Mac today. If you’ve been looking for an app to simplify email without making it too geeky, it’s the app for you.

And it’s cheap at $1.99, but we’ve got something even better: 5 free copies for our readers! Just leave a comment below letting us know what email app you currently use and why you want to switch to Airmail to enter the giveaway. Then share the giveaway on your favorite social networks and leave another comment with a link to your post for an extra entry.

Hurry and get your entry in — the giveaway closes on Friday, November 15th!

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

It would take a cold heart to write off the night sky as merely sparks of light in the blackness. Yes, gazing upwards on a clear evening provides a beautiful show, but it also offers a perspective of our location in the middle of everything. So, it seems bizarre that astronomy is often thought of as a niche hobby of knitwear-clothed nerds, but perhaps that perception can be attributed to the depth of mind-stored knowledge that has traditionally been required to fully appreciate the heavens.

It seems to me that this perception is due an update. Information about the stars has never been more accessible, thanks to technology and, in particular, apps. One of the first generation of standout iOS apps was GoSkyWatch, which utilized the iPad’s accelerometers and compass to allow users to pan around a virtual sky filled with information. But sometimes, you just want to digest information in the light, warm surroundings of your sitting room.

Hence, there seems to be a place for OSX apps like RedShift Astronomy. Packed with information, and brimming with 3D visualizations, this $18.99 offering should be a hit with anyone interested in exploring the universe. But does it do the magnificence of space true justice?

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Browsing the Heavens

After providing RedShift with your timezone and your nearest city (even modestly populated towns are included in the database), the initial view of the sky is “from the ground.” A stock photo of a city faintly illustrates where the real-world horizon is located, and above the visual hemisphere, the stars shine brightly — 2.5m of them are included in this app, not to mention the 75,000 other deep-space objects that can be toured.

RedShift is simple to operate, and it doesn’t suffer slowdown.

From this position, you can click-and-drag yourself around the sky, and scroll to zoom towards objects. It’s the kind of control setup you might expect, but it works well, and graphically, RedShift never misses a beat, no matter how enthusiastically you rush around the virtual sky.

RedShift provides plenty of helpful visual aids.

By default, RedShift doesn’t present a truly realistic version of the sky. Instead, it makes objects which are visible with the naked eye bigger, and everything else smaller. This does make distant or faint objects a little tricky to click on, but conversely, it also make the planets and stars you’re most likely to look up easier to select. You can change these settings, though, and plenty more visual aids are available, such as pole indicators, orbit paths and orientation grids.

As you pan around, the azimuth and altitude of your virtual scope are helpfully displayed, aiding the outside re-creation of a particular view via a real-life telescope. This is one of many clear hat-tips to stargazers — more detailed information of this type (magnitude, rise time and azimuth, and the angle and time of maximum elevation, etc.) can be found by double-clicking on celestial bodies.

There are several hat-tips to real-life astronomy — this info panel is a clear example.

There’s plenty to see for the desktop stargazer, too. As the cursor wanders over constellations, lines form the image of whichever creature or character gives its name to the group of stars in question. The names of standalone celestial objects also flash as you scan across the sky, and double-clicking on any of these produces more than just nerdy telescope-related facts and figures.

Learning the Stars

To get a more detailed description of the selected object, you’ll need to head for the next two icons in the object menu. The first link takes you to the celestial body’s Wikipedia page. The second opens the relevant entry in RedShift’s all-encompassing in-app glossary (“Dictionary“). These object biographies are factually informative, but in most cases, they are not quite lengthy enough to be an engrossing read, nor are they written well enough to be greatly engaging.

RedShift’s Dictionary is very deep, but the entries make for dry reading.

For interaction with the universe that is a little more stimulating, RedShift offers 3D flight. You can rocket off towards any object larger than one metre, and even take in the view from its surface (requires an in-app upgrade: see below).

The 3D graphics are not groundbreaking, but they are respectably detailed.

With a (free) download, spacecraft can be seen, as well.

Comparison

When I review apps, I don’t usually compare them directly with the competition. However, the more I use RedShift, the harder I find it to ignore my previous positive experiences of using Celestia and Stellarium, both of which are open source apps in the space genre. RedShift is definitely a more well-rounded product than either of these, but I think it is worth pointing out that most of what can be done in RedShift can be replicated by one free alternative, or the other.

Whether the all-in-one convenience of RedShift is worth shelling out for is very much a user-by-user decision.

Calendar

RedShift’s calendar provides a comprehensive celestial itinerary.

Note, however, that I wrote that most of RedShift’s features are matched by other apps.

RedShift’s best features, by far, are its celestial calendar and observation planning areas. The former provides very detailed commentaries of eclipses, conjunctions, meteor showers and other space events, while the latter (requires an upgrade) allows you to make a note of upcoming happenings, and plan accordingly.

Upgrade

If the calendar functions are RedShift’s zenith, then its restrictions — which can only be lifted with a $8.99 investment in the “Feature Pack” — are its nadir.

Although purchasing the app gets you most of the features mentioned above, if you want to view historical skies, see space from the perspective of other planets, view objects of less than one metre in diameter, use the event planner, control your telescope, or access Harvard’s USNO-B1.0 space encyclopaedia from within the app, you’ll need to fork out for the add-on.

This is something of a bitter pill to swallow when you’ve already coughed up $18.99 for an app, and I suspect most users would rather pay the full cost up front than be presented with limitations in a premium app.

Verdict

Most of the features that have made RedShift Astronomy so popular on iOS have the same, positive effect on this Mac version. Although the graphics aren’t world-beating, they do offer a nice view of the solar system and beyond, aided by the useful orientation and orbit guides. The in-built events calendar is also great for staying informed.

In fact, outright negatives in this app are rare — but there are several irritations. The in-built encyclopaedia is huge, but it feels like RedShift is leaning too heavily on the links to Wikipedia for the provision of extra information. In addition, the graphics on offer do not really surpass the views you might achieve in Google Earth, and in terms of planetarium-type use, my preference is for Stellarium. The pricing system will win RedShift no fans, either.

To give RedShift Astronomy its due, though, I must say that it is a polished, easy-to-use product, which will work perfectly well for any Mac owner with an interest in the night sky.

Imagine, for a moment, that the apps bundled with OS X — Preview, TextEdit, Safari, Mail, and the rest — along with the iWork and iLife apps were the only apps that could run on the Mac. There’d still be a lot you could do with a Mac, and some would still buy them — but in all reality, if there were no 3rd party apps for the Mac, we’d all end up switching platforms.

Apps make or break our computing experiences. They’re what make a thousand dollar slab of aluminum turn into something that can do whatever we want. The lack of indie apps on Windows is one of the sharpest contrasts with the Mac’s vibrant 3rd party app market — and that’s what keeps our Macs being amazing machines, far more than the core stuff in OS X.

But apps are tough to make, and take serious time and money to develop and design and support. And it’s getting harder — the race to the bottom in app pricing has made it tough for developers to keep making amazing apps. It’s time we started helping developers out.

Here’s how:

It All Starts with a Rating

Quick question: When’s the last time you reviewed an app you love on the App Store? If you’re like most of us, you download apps from the App Store and — love them so much you start using them daily, or hate them so bad you delete them 5 minutes later — you never even think to review the app on the App Store. iOS apps have the annoying habit of asking for ratings, but even there, it’s hard to make yourself take the time to review apps.

And yet, we all at the very least take note of the star ratings on apps before we hit Buy, and I’d venture a guess that most of us read through the text reviews on the App Store at least on occasion — especially if the app we’re looking at isn’t famous already. So why not contribute yourself if you love an app?

Now, don’t go use the reviews page for tech support — it’s not the place for that (more on that later). If an app is truly broken or falsely advertised, and you can’t get a fix from the developers, then sure — feel free to leave a bad review to warn others. But just like so often happens in all public forums, most notably in YouTube comments it seems, people love to fuss and complain. It’s perhaps more fun to take out your frustration on an app by reviewing it — but why not take a minute to praise the apps you do like, too.

You don’t need to sound like a PR shill, and you don’t need to write a thousand word review. There’s people paid for both of those things elsewhere. All you need to do is honestly let others know what you think of the app in a few sentences. Tell them what problem it solved in your life, and why you’d buy it again if needed. You don’t have to do it with everything, but if there’s a half-dozen apps you rely on in your work or just love using in your downtime, take a minute a piece and review them on the App Store. It’ll help others find apps they’ll love, and gives you a tiny way to give something extra to the devs that made apps you love.

And then, if you find it in yourself to want to spread the word about the app more, all the better. Don’t go nuts, of course, but even one simple Tweet ever about an app you love is a huge help to developers in getting the word out. No one would trust your opinion if you shill apps, but if you occasionally mention when you find an app really useful, your friends won’t mind and likely will find it helpful. Win win.

Pay for Quality

The most obvious way to support developers and make sure great apps keep getting made is to buy apps. That sounds simple enough, but obviously it’s not — paid app sales are going down on iOS, and while the sky’s not falling on the Mac App Store right now, we see enough complaints in the comments here about app pricing to know that everyone’s not happy forking over money for apps.

Apple gives away so much high-quality software for free these days (from OS X and iOS to every app in the iLife and iWork suites), it seems that it’ll be harder than ever to convince people the value of software. But Apple makes money from hardware — those apps aren’t free, they’re just subsidized by other things you buy from Apple. For developers to make great apps like Pixelmator and OmniFocus, Airmail and TextExpander, and so much more, they’ve got to charge to make money. That’s the only way they get paid.

So don’t pirate apps, and don’t sit around complaining about how expensive they are. Think of what you’d pay for a decent case for your MacBook, or for a tool to complete a weekend project at your house, and then think again about the price of the app you’re wanting to complain about. If it’s a professional tool, think of what a similar physical tool might cost for another job. That software will likely not seem nearly as expensive anymore. If it can help you save that much money or time, or makes your life a bit better (insert the all-too-common price of coffee or movie night analogy here), then the app’s worth it at that price.

But then, there’s the other side. You can find cheaper alternates to apps you can’t afford, and support those developers and still help the ecosystem overall. If you can’t afford Photoshop, why not support an indie dev with one of their far cheaper alternates. Same goes for every other app: SublimeText and OmniFocus and practically anything else over $30 will often end up being called expensive, but there’s alternates that, while not as feature-filled, perhaps, can meet your needs. And if some day those apps have proved their value and you want more, you’ll feel a lot more like paying for something better then.

Either way, please don’t complain over what apps cost. People are notoriously cheap when it comes to software, even on devices that are quite expensive up front, and it’s simply illogical. I get that Creative Cloud is quite expensive over time, and even a handful of $10 app purchases add up. So make them wisely, pay for quality, and don’t be cheap. If you can’t afford one app, that doesn’t make that app bad — it just means you need another instead. Save the complaints, and instead lavish praise on the apps you can afford and do love.

Support Costs, too.

Then, there’s another problem, one that’ll be all too familiar to anyone who’s ever worked in support (yup, I have too). People buy a $10 app, then expect free upgrades and unlimited support forever. I hate to overgeneralize, but in my experience we always got the most support requests after a sale — meaning those who paid the least for the app took up the most support resources.

It’s great when developers can support customers, and awesome when they can ship updates and even full new versions for free. But support and developer time cost. So try to be reasonable with your expectations. Try to solve your own problems first, and if you still need to contact support, be kind about it. They’ll appreciate it, and your odds of getting a solution are far greater.

But whatever you do: don’t post support requests in an App Store review. Developers can’t reply to you there, so your chance of getting help is zero, and you only make the app look bad to other potential buyers. Instead, give the developer’s support a shot — reach out on Twitter, even, if you can’t get ahold of them — before posting a public complaint. It’s only fair to give them a chance first, really.

And then, it’s only reasonable to expect bug fixes to apps for free, but if an app’s been out for several years and a new version comes out with extra features but costs again, there’s no reason to complain. You could keep using your current version if it’s still working, just like so many of us kept using Sparrow long after it wasn’t supported. And if you want to upgrade, just weigh the purchase like you did the first time around. If the new features are worth it to you, go for it — if not, there’s nothing to complain about. You’ve still got a great app that works, regardless of the version number.

Just a friendly PSA

Of course, you can still write support requests in App Store, neglect to review apps you love, and even pirate apps to save some pennies. It’s your choice. But if you want the Mac app ecosystem to continue to flourish, please take these thoughts to heart. It’d help everyone out.

And while I’m writing a public service announcement anyhow, here’s a shoutout to the great developers that make apps for the Mac. Thank you for your hard work, and keep on keeping on. We really do appreciate it!

It’s a great idea to keep track of everything you own, one of those things you likely remind yourself of when you’re walking through IKEA trying to find a new bookshelf. Then you go home, pull your hair out trying to setup said bookshelf, and promptly forget to record your purchase anywhere.

There’s a number of tools designed to help you keep track of the stuff you own, from the lauded Delicious Library that we found too memory-hungry and feature-lite for much good to the now-discontinued Bento database app. You could even keep a spreadsheet of stuff you own, but that’s not very fun or simple.

Or, you could use the new Compartments 2, an inventory app that’s perfect for cataloguing everything you own without too much fuss — and with some OS X Mavericks only features, too.

The Simple Way to Track Your Stuff

Apple Maps-powered maps right in Compartments 2

Compartments is a home inventory app that’s been around for several years now, but its new v.2 is far more polished than the first version. It’s lost some of its old skeuomorphism in favor of a more polished, Mavericks-style interface that fits right in with the new iBooks and such. And, it’s one of the first 3rd party apps on the Mac that integrates with the new Maps API, which makes its locations listings come to life with beautiful interactive satellite views of your location.

A streamlined interface with less skeuomorphism

There’s no fancy iPhone-powered importing or barcode scanning here — it’s all about entering the data yourself that you want to keep up with. And that’s simple enough in Compartments. There’s beautiful retina-ready icons to categorize your stuff and the rooms in your house where you keep said stuff, and enough info sections to save anything from warranty info to serial numbers from your products.

Speaking of warranty info, Compartments has a nice Warranty Guard feature that’ll show you the products you own with active warranties and those whose warranty is about to expire. Combine that with instant search and the smart collections feature that’ll automatically group items based on their type, tag, name, or attribute, no matter what building or room they’re in, and you’ve got the perfect way to find info about your stuff anytime you need it.

Reports just might be the best feature.

The nicest feature, though, in my opinion is the Reports tool. Add all your stuff to Compartments and press CMD+R, and you’ll get a printable list of everything you own, complete with a thumbnail picture and quick description of the item, and the total value of everything in that house. It’s a nice quick reference you can print out or save to PDF and keep it on your other devices to always know what you own.

If you’ve already bought a copy of Compartments 1, you’re in luck: Compartments 2 is a free upgrade on the Mac App Store. Otherwise, if you’ve been looking for a simple way to catalogue the stuff you own, something a tad nicer than a spreadsheet but not too expensive or complicated, you should pick up a copy of Compartments. It’s nice, and at $11.99 won’t cost more than the stuff you’re cataloguing.

Half of the world assumes that Email is dead or at least dying, while the other half of us desperately search for the Next Best Email App™. Mail.app’s a pretty great email app — especially for power users — now that its Gmail integration got fixed, and Airmail’s winning acclaim as the Sparrow replacement everyone’s been waiting for with its customizable UI. There’s also the new Unibox that aims to simplify email even more where you’ll never need to archive or file messages, and old standbys like Postbox and Outlook.

And then, there’s MailMate, a power-user email app that’d I’d managed to not notice until it was mentioned in a recent AppStorm comment. It’s lightweight, insanely fast, and is packed with keyboard shortcuts, advanced search and smart mailboxes, Markdown support, and more that make it the ultimate power-user email app. And now, its developer is raising funds on Indiegogo to make v2 better than ever.

Building an Email App for the Pros

Developed by Benny Nielsen, a Copenhagen, Denmark based developer, MailMate was surprisingly released in early 2011 — around the same time Sparrow was first released. But rather than focus on trimming down features and making a beautifully simple email app, MailMate was designed specifically for email power users. It’s lightweight — the app itself is only 12.7Mb and takes only around 50Mb of Ram — and yet it’s lightening-fast. It downloads new messages faster than Mail.app, and has incredibly impressive search that’s equally fast. You can look for anything in a message — from the app it was sent with to the time it was received — and turn these detailed searches into smart mailboxes that’ll automatically find the messages you need.

To top it off, you can write rich emails in Markdown, browse through your email conversations with the unique Thread Arcs view, encrypt your messages, use Gmail style tags, and access almost everything in the app with keyboard shortcuts. There’s even a delayed send option that can send a message anytime you want based on your real-language commands. There’s no native notifications, but there is Growl support — and, better yet, menubar integration that’ll let you reply or archive messages without switching back to the app. And, if you enable its experimental features right now, it can send messages to OmniFocus or Reminders.app so you can follow up on them later. It’s a power-user’s email dream come true.

It’s tough to make groundbreaking new apps, though, and MailMate isn’t currently making enough to let its developer continue to focus on it full-time. That could change, though, if its current crowd-funding round for MailMate 2.0 is successful. Nielsen is raising $25k to develop the next version, which — in addition to keeping the app up-to-date, and possibly seeing a visual refresh — will add support for bundles, which are described as “a set of commands, smart mailboxes, various settings, and anything else which forms a natural group of functionality, for example, anything related to a particular type of emails, a particular application, or some company/organization.” The new OmniFocus/Reminders integration is the first example of Mailmate bundles, but there’s more coming, including ways to integrate with support systems and use MailMate to manage your email lists.

The campaign has already raised nearly half of its goal, and if you’d like to see it succeed, head over to Indiegogo and back MailMate 2. I’ve already fallen in love with the current version of MailMate, especially with its fast search, OmniFocus and Markdown integration, and — surprisingly enough — its sparse UI, and will be excitedly looking forward to seeing v2.0 get released. It’s a great power user email app, one we sincerely hope stays in active development for a long time to come.

And yet, MailMate isn’t for everyone. It only supports IMAP, has a rather dated interface that’s reminiscent of Mail.app of old, and doesn’t include any fancy features like Dropbox uploads or a slick new redesign of how email should work. But if you love traditional email and want to speed up your workflow the geeky way, it’s an email app you’ll love — and one you’ll want to support. Go download its trial and try it out, and if it lines up with your vision for the future of email, go back MailMate 2.0. You can get a license for the current version cheaper just by backing the next version, and ensure that MailMate will live on — hopefully for far longer than just one more year.

I’ve written this review twice now. The first time was in the heat of the moment. I was excited about Knock — a new app that was getting a lot of hype from the usual tech pundits, and I was enjoying it after just a few minutes of use. I was typing wildly like I was on a bender.

But then I told myself to calm down. Knock was cool, yes. But did it deserve my excessive praise? I figured I should let it soak in for a few days and see how it goes; analyze the app and see what solution it solves. And now that I’ve cooled off a bit, what’s the verdict? Well …

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Nuts & Bolts

Let’s get this right out of the way: Knock is a gimmick. A party trick of sorts, meant as something you could show off to your friends and impress them with your iOS/Mac wizardry. There’s nothing wrong with that — lots of successful apps and products started as a gimmick, and they’ve continued to make millions. I just want you to be aware of what exactly Knock is before you get your hopes up.

There’s not much to the iPhone app, and it displays on your lock screen when your Mac’s lock screen appears.

Basically, Knock is a way to pair your iPhone with your Mac to enter your lock screen password quickly and easily. After installing the free Mac app and then purchasing the iPhone app from the App Store, you pair the two devices using Bluetooth LE — the low energy version of Bluetooth that doesn’t cause your battery level to drop at dramatic rates. Then, after entering your Mac’s password into Knock on the Mac, you’re ready to go. The next time you go to wake up your Mac, Knock prompts you to knock on your iPhone — literally, rap on the screen with your knuckles — twice in short order. The result is that Knock unlocks your Mac and you’re free to use it per usual. Yay!

What It’s Not

Knock is not a replacement for your password, nor is it a fancy form of two-factor authentication. No, Knock is just a fancy way to avoid typing in a key string. For example, let’s say that your password is 20 characters long and contains a mixture of capped words, digits, symbols and punctuation marks. Well, Knock is a great way to get around that because you don’t have to type it all in, just knock on your phone.

Knock is pretty easy to setup, so that’s a plus.

But it’s not a password replacement, because you can still type in your password anytime you want. Knock doesn’t take away the usual login procedure, it just gives you a quick out if you want it. Assuming your Mac and your iPhone aren’t stolen at the same time, there would be no other way for people to get your Mac unlocked (other than a brute force attack). And since Knock sets up the computer to lock more regularly, it could deter a thief from trying to get into the Mac. But it’s not a password replacement, so don’t think it makes you safer.

A Gimmick with a Purpose?

That said, Knock is useful. Because it adjusts my sleep settings to require a password, it makes my Mac more secure by default. Yes, I could just adjust those settings myself, but I’ve been lazy in that regard; maybe you have been as well. And the knocking action does seem like a secret code to those who don’t know about Knock, which also gives you a bit of a James Bond feel.

You’ll have to enter your password to use Knock. If you don’t trust the app, well then you might not want to buy it.

It is not, however, perfect. There were a few occasions where Knock and my Mac didn’t connect fast enough, or my knocks didn’t register. Several times, the act of placing my iPhone on the table triggered Knock and unlocked my Mac automatically. And, as of right now, there is no way to adjust the frequency, duration or timing of the knocks. Two quick raps and you’re in — if that were adjustable, I could see it adding some level of security to your Mac, which would definitely be worth the price. Granted, it does seem like the type of thing that could be tweaked with a bit of code, but I’m neither a programmer nor a psychic.

Is It Worth Your $4?

Contrary to popular belief, us writers don’t make Scrooge McDuck levels of money. So for me, $4 is a lot of money to spend on an app that doesn’t do much more than help my Mac unlock like a parlor trick. You may feel the same way.

I do like Knock, and I will continue to use it. Were I to have to purchase it again, I’m not sure I would’ve made the same decision, as $4 seems a bit steep for something that doesn’t add specific functionality to my workflow or improve my state of being. Yes, it’s cool, and it is convenient, and I know it seems stupid to complain about $4 in a world where developers should be paid substantially more for their work — but I can get a lot in the App Store for four bucks.

At the end of the day, Knock is a solution in need of a problem. It’s clever, inventive and neat, but it doesn’t add anything to your Mac/iPhone combo other than the “That’s cool” factor. Maybe that’s enough for you, and that’s fine. But for me, I’d like a little bit more. I just hope the developers beef it up a bit sometime soon.

Email’s the original way to privately message online, and it’s still the way most of us communicate with our colleagues online. It works, but it can be overwhelming and take up far more time than is necessary. That’s why you need a lightening-fast email app that works the way you want, and Airmail is the Mac email app you need for that.

Airmail is the email app that works the way you want. It can look as clean as Sparrow, as professional as Mail.app, or anything in-between — your choice. It can use Gmail shortcuts, or your own favorite shortcuts, can send attachments with your favorite upload tool (Dropbox, Droplr, Google Drive, CloudApp, or even your own FTP server), use the language you want, and so much more. Everything in Airmail is configurable so it can be exactly the email app you want it to be.

Then, it’s everything else you’d expect an email app to be. It’s fast, supports every email service you’d expect including Exchange, IMAP, and POP3, and integrates great with your Mac. It even includes the new OS X Mavericks interactive notifications so you can reply to messages without leaving your work in another app. It’s a great, modern email app.

Get a Copy of Airmail Today!

For just $1.99, you can get your own copy of Airmail from the Mac App Store and start making email work the way you do. It keeps getting new features and more so fast, it’s bound to be the email app you love for months and years to come.

We’ve each got favorite new features in Apple’s new OS X Mavericks and the new versions of iLife and iWork. The renewed focus on the Mac this year is refreshing, especially in light of the sweeping changes in iOS 7, and the new Mac Pro and power users features in Mavericks yield hope that Apple still is focused on making the very best personal computers, not just touch devices.

And yet, all is not perfect. The new iWork has suffered sharp criticism over its lack of power user features, something Apple is now working to rectify. Mail.app initially had problems with Gmail, though those have already been patched. But there’s been more frustrations, from the seemingly weak implementation of Tags in Finder to battery issues and persisting multiple display frustrations, that we’ve heard complaints about. The dock, of all innocent things, has met complaints over the inability to make it 2D in the bottom position now, combined with complaints from others who don’t like the new side dock.

We’ve already helped out with some issues in the comments on our Mavericks review and more, but are wondering what other issues you’re facing with Apple’s latest software? Leave a comment below, and we’ll try to see if we can find solutions or workarounds for you.

We’ve each got favorite new features in Apple’s new OS X Mavericks and the new versions of iLife and iWork. The renewed focus on the Mac this year is refreshing, especially in light of the sweeping changes in iOS 7, and the new Mac Pro and power users features in Mavericks yield hope that Apple still is focused on making the very best personal computers, not just touch devices.

And yet, all is not perfect. The new iWork has suffered sharp criticism over its lack of power user features, something Apple is now working to rectify. Mail.app initially had problems with Gmail, though those have already been patched. But there’s been more frustrations, from the seemingly weak implementation of Tags in Finder to battery issues and persisting multiple display frustrations, that we’ve heard complaints about. The dock, of all innocent things, has met complaints over the inability to make it 2D in the bottom position now, combined with complaints from others who don’t like the new side dock.

We’ve already helped out with some issues in the comments on our Mavericks review and more, but are wondering what other issues you’re facing with Apple’s latest software? Leave a comment below, and we’ll try to see if we can find solutions or workarounds for you.

It must be the season again for simple RSS reader apps. There’s the new native Mac-style Dayspring feed reader, and the new Dropbox-powered web app JellyReader. And now, we’ve got another new simple feed reader, this time a node-webkit powered Mac and PC app: Sputnik.

Sputnik’s light on features like the other aforementioned apps, but makes up for it with a beautifully unique UI and a silky-smooth performance that makes it delightful to use. And with a low, low price tag of free, it’s absolutely worth checking out.

Cross-Platform Done Right

The best Mac apps are almost always designed exclusively for the Mac. Ported, cross-platform apps typically never exactly feel right — there’s always something a bit off, whether it’s the UI or the scrolling or keyboard shortcuts. And yet, a recent change has made some of the newest cross-platform apps feel native everywhere: they’re powered by web tech. The apps are still fully native apps that run offline without an internet connection, but under the hood, they’re powered by Webkit and much of the same code you’d find in normal web apps.

We’ve seen this with Pagico, the project management app that runs on Windows, Linux, and the Mac, and have also seen it with offline Chrome apps like Caret. Now, the new Sputnik RSS reader has done something similar. Truth be told, though, that doesn’t actually matter — run Sputnik, and you’ll never guess it’s powered by web code. It’s just an app that works great, and happens to run both on your Mac and on Windows PCs.

Sputnik works just like you’d expect, though with a UI that’s a tad surprising at first. You can add feeds individually or import them from an OPML file, then sort them into lists if you’d like. Then, you’ll be able to read all of your feeds in a single page view, an incredibly nice option that’s surprisingly not more common. Articles render beautifully in Sputnik, and you can use the 3-finger tap to define words just as you’d expect in any other Mac app. The only thing that’s any bit odd is that right-clicking jumps to the next article, though you can still select text and use keyboard shortcuts to copy, if you want.

Tip: Sputnik isn’t a signed app, so if you have the default security settings on your Mac, you’ll need to right-click on the app the first time you launch it and select Open. After that, it’ll run the same any other app.

Tags offer a neat yet under-realized plus in Sputnik

There’s no social sharing, no reading later services, and no sync to mobile apps — it’s just Mac-native RSS syncing on its own. That much should be expected from the most basic RSS apps. But there’s one extra — and one missing thing — that you’ll find surprising: tags, but no search. You can add tags to any article to make it easy to find again, but there’s no search or simple way to see every tagged article together. Instead, you’ll need to open the All Feeds view and filter by tags to see the stuff you’ve tagged. It’s a nice way to categorize stuff you’ll want to come back to, but needs an option to keep tagged articles indefinitely and an easier way to surface tagged articles to be terribly useful.

Overall, though, for a free RSS reader, Sputnik is very nice. You can download and try it out for free — and if you haven’t found a feed reader you love yet, I’d recommend you do so. Then, if you like it, you can chip in to support its development — a great way to guarantee the app will continue to improve for everyone.

Also: whether it’s Chrome offline web apps or apps like Sputnik that run as standalone apps, we’re excited to see web-powered cross-platform apps taking off. It’s a great thing for Macs and PCs alike, since these new cross-platform apps feel so much more native than their ported counterparts.

With more Mac users than ever before using a portable Mac and Apple’s adoption of SSD storage, apps that specialise in finding ways to free up space and generally “tune-up” a Mac are becoming ever more popular.

The latest offering in this ever-increasing space is MacBooster, an all-in-one app that includes some additional features and functions that aren’t found in similar apps.

Overview

MacBooster has a number of functions that it offers Mac users who want to better control over performing maintenance on their Mac. There’s the expected functions of an app uninstaller, large files locator and system cleanup of old log files and superfluous language packages that can take up considerable space. Additionally, MacBooster also offers internet security and scans not only for viruses, malware and nefarious ad cookies, but will even check your browser to determine if the settings currently enabled are a potential security risk.

Déjà vu

MacBooster bears a striking resemblance to CleanMyMac 2, an app we’ve previously reviewed on Mac.AppStorm, though appearing more OS X-like than CleanMyMac’s more unique interface. Still, the similarities are rather obvious, nonetheless, in both form and function.

MacBooster would benefit from its own look and feel to escape the shadow of more well-known Mac cleaning utilities.

This feeling of déjà vu is usually a cause for concern as many less-than-favourable apps out there that are designed to do more harm than good often copy, quite closely, the appearance of more respectable apps in the hopes that novice Mac users might not notice the difference between them. To avoid being seen as one of these types of apps, MacBooster would certainly benefit from having its own unique look and feel to set it apart.

Turbo Boost

MacBooster offers two wide-reaching sweeps, Clean and Boost and Performance Boost, each providing a different function according to its name.

Clean and Boost offers to “fix” problems affecting performance and safety. How? Well, it doesn’t say.

Clean and Boost performs a one-click scan that covers Internet Security, System Cleanup, System Optimisation and Disk Clean. While each section is provided with a brief summary of what is being looked for, once a scan is complete then very little information is provided about what it is MacBooster is actually going to do.

For example, under Internet Security, I was provided with a single warning. After viewing the results, it was stated Safari had an option labelled “SafariGeolocationPermissionPolicy” that was set to a value of 1, whereas MacBooster recommended a value of 2. This lack of any kind of explanation isn’t really excusable in an app that can be used by any Mac user. Worse still, I checked Safari’s privacy settings for location services, both before and after I clicked Fix, and nothing changed.

Most users will have absolutely no idea what this means.

Lack of explanation is more widespread within MacBooster, unfortunately. System Cleanup is described as “Clear history and protect your privacy”, yet no additional information is given about how exactly it will do that. As it displays various caches, logs and internet history information, I know from experience that the app is going to clear this, but nowhere does it actually state it.

While a large button labelled “Fix” might make it easy to start, MacBooster doesn’t explain what it’s actually going to do.

Performance Boost doesn’t fair any better, either. One of its potential useful functions is the ability to disable processes and services that might be using a fair amount of CPU power or memory. Unlike Clean and Boost, you don’t need to perform a scan first and can view the processes and services currently running, select what you want and then simply click the Boost button to stop them. Each kind of process and service is clearly separated so you can determine what’s being run by the system and what isn’t.

Performance Boost lets you disable some processes or services that might otherwise be using a lot of processing power or memory.

MacBooster continually recommends stopping both autofsd and ntpd system services on my test Mac. Both of these services are pretty necessary and are using no CPU power and less than 1MB of memory, each. Why MacBooster is recommending me to stop them is anyone’s guess.

Quite why MacBooster believes that shutting down two fairly important system services will help is baffling.

MacBooster does allow you to toggle the options first, before you stop the services, and also provides a useful one-click way to toggle certain functions of Mac OS X, such as animation effects and disabling Dashboard.

Toolbox

MacBooster includes a function to clean memory, releasing inactive memory as free for other apps to use. Mac OS X handles this on its own and will reallocate inactive memory as and when needed, so it is a function that is largely redundant. It’s a function that often splits the Mac community, with one side adamant that these types of “memory cleaners” do nothing while the opposing side argue that it is a genuine help. No matter what your belief is, MacBooster includes a simple way of freeing up memory in a single click.

The Toolbox continues with other functions, such as an app uninstaller, that will remove apps and their associated preference files which works great, even allowing the removal of preference panes and widgets.

The uninstaller works exactly as you’d expect, removing apps and any associated preferences.

A function for finding large files lets you easily find items that might be taking up far too much space, such as app installers or temporary downloads that were never completed. In this SSD age where space is, once again, at a premium, this function can prove invaluable though there is no option that I could find to select what size is classed as “large”.

A Startup Optimiser also allows for the toggling of startup services, scripts and applications for faster load times and you can also add new ones, should you want to.

Lastly, Duplicates Finder promises to find duplicate files that might be wasting precious storage space. Unfortunately, it doesn’t deliver on that promise as it refused to find any duplicate files and consistently reporting no duplicates were found, even though I duplicated the same file multiple times across various folders within my home folder.

Conclusion

MacBooster is an app full of promise that misses the mark by some distance. Instead of trying to make it on its own in this app category, MacBooster has tried too hard to provide much of the same functionality of CleanMyMac 2, and with the app bearing a close resemblance to it also, it exists less as an alternative and more of an underwhelming tribute act. As this is the first version of MacBooster, it will be interesting to see how the app matures and, hopefully, bring something more to the space that will really set it apart from the crowd.

Look and feel aside, some of MacBooster’s functions simply failed to work as described for me, and its lack of descriptive information and explanation of its processes makes it an app that I just can’t recommend yet.