Category: Mac

If you live in your calendar, chances are you’ll want more than the built-in Calendar app offers. Calendar in OS X isn’t bad, per se, but it’s definitely not as powerful or productivity-focused as many wish.

As many people are aware, BusyCal is a very commendable iCal replacement. Since the release of BusyCal 2, though, it’s fair to make the bold statement that BusyCal is an exceedingly commendable iCal (or, as with OS X 10.8, Calendar) replacement. It has the potential to make you more productive and efficient with the addition of some very well received and welcomed features. Let’s take a look.

Interface

Although BusyCal 2’s interface resembles that of the first version, it’s interesting to look at the fundamental changes to the functionality of BusyCal.

Firstly, you have the ability to display your calendar in either week, month, day or year view similar to the current interface of Calendar.app. What makes BusyCal unique is that you’re able to customize the how many days/weeks/months are shown at once, and can also make use of intelligent, useful mouse gestures that give you the ability to quickly move forward or back in time. When adding an event, simply click the ‘+’ in the corner to quickly add an event, BusyCal uses an intelligent engine to decipher what you type and then turn it into an event.

BusyCal also makes it easy to manage your todos and reminders. You can create single or repeating todos and are displayed directly in your calendar view along with the handy menu bar applet and carries on to the next day automatically if they’re not completed. This may sound minor, but it truly does help when the application does this without any additional work or effort.

What’s more, in this new version, there’s now a handy little menu bar applet that gives you an overview of your day, along with the weather and the ability to quickly add new events to your calendar. Similar to Fantastical but without all the bells and whistles that come with Fantastical: it’s simple, elegant and handy, allowing you to glance at what your day holds for you.

Accounts and Syncing

With BusyCal, you’re not just limited to the calendar configured on your Mac, with version 2.0, you can sync directly to iCloud and now Google Calendar, in fact any other CalDAV service is supported. You can also easily share you calendar over your local area network and push events and requests to an inbox.

As expected with iCloud and Google Calendar, any changes make within BusyCal will instantaneously be pushed your iOS and OS X devices via iCloud or Google Calendar, same with events and reminders.

Extras

With 2.0, there’s a useful info panel that allows you to directly edit event details and also customize various aspects of your events including the location, time zone, tags and the last edit time, amongst others.

Although this next thing is slightly gimmicky, it is a nice thing to be included: adding sticker-like graphics to your calendar. For example, during the holidays, you can add a pumpkin graphic to October 31st and a santa hat to Christmas day – minor but fun to have.

Something else which has proven useful is the integration of the week’s weather into the calendar, as well as the phases of moon. They are simply added to your day either as the tile background or in the foreground, and are indeed useful and nice to have included.

As most people like to add their own personal feel to a calendar, BusyCal is great in respects to customizability. You can modify the font face, size and color of your calendar.

A major part of many calendar apps it the ability to add todos, reminders and alarms. iCal’s to-dos were rather weak, and have been split out into the Reminders app in Mountain Lion, but BusyCal maintains deep support for tasks and alarms built-in. It supports alarms almost flawlessly, fully integrated into Notification Center. You can set alarms to go by default, for example birthdays and anniversaries.

Alternatives

One thing that’s certain is that iCal alternatives are a popular genre. For instance, Fantastical is a popular calendar app for OS X that sits nicely in your menu bar. Fantastical’s menu bar applet is a lot more refined and feature-rich compared to BusyCal’s menu applet, but that can only be expected seeing as that’s the whole app for Fantastical.

BusyCal stands out with one of the most full-featured Mac calendars on the market, combined with a handy menubar app. It gives you everything you’d need from a calendar app, and more, so you won’t need to resort to using multiple apps to stay productive.

Overall

In conclusion, BusyCal 2 is what iCal really should’ve been. Since Apple decided to make the controversial move to make iCal’s interface resemble that of a leather bound calendar, BusyCal’s interface has been welcomed by many. It’s more powerful than iCal, too, and the more I use BusyCal, the more useful I find it.

You can get BusyCal from the Mac App Store for $29.99, or you can try out the free trial from BusyMac’s website. Either way, it’s a great calendar app you should try out if OS X’s default Calendar doesn’t cut it for you.

When Google acquired Sparrow, the most popular Mac email client of the day, back in July, it seemed all hope for email on OS X was lost. People thought they’d have to resort to Apple’s stale Mail app because Sparrow’s support may end. Mail all that bad, but it really isn’t the simplest thing out there and trying to do little things is often arduous. So that gave independent developers another chance to do something big: build a great new mail app for the Mac.

It all started with .Mail, or the “Dot Mail App” as some have referred to it. This appeared to be the most beautiful mail client ever on a Mac, but it was only a mockup at the time it was first shown off. It’s now in development, but it’s still a ways off, so people are constantly searching for a Sparrow alternative. An interesting little app by the name of Inky came across my desk the other day and it looked promising. After all, who doesn’t want to try out an app that has an icon nearly identical to Pearl from Finding Nemo?

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Setting Things Up is Slightly Complicated

The screen that appears every time you start the app, not just when setting it up.

Anyone who has used Sparrow knows it has the easiest setup process of any email app ever. Alas, Inky’s setup is not such an easy task. It begins with a sign-in screen, and since you probably don’t have an account, you’ll have to create one. Like Mail Pilot and TweetDeck, this app is an account hosting service more than an email client at first. This seems unnecessary, but the developers insist.

Once you’ve created an account — simply a username and password, thankfully — you must log in to your email. Things can get tricky here. Instead of automatically setting up the incoming and outgoing mail servers for you like every other email client does — when you’re using a large service like @me.com and @gmail.com — this app makes you go through a manual server input process. It can “guess” the server’s address for you, but that’s still one step too far for an app that’s goal is to be simple. When you’re all done with that, it offers to take you on a tour of the app and you’re finally ready to check your email.

Focused on Three Elements: Composing, Reading, and Sending to Contacts

The welcome email from Inky.

It has become the main goal of every app lately to be simple. Whether it’s an iTunes alternative or a journaling app. Simplicity is a good direction for apps to take since users will be pleased that they’re easy to use, but sometimes users respond harshly, asserting that their intelligence has been insulted. Yet still, the minimalist developers continue their efforts.

Writing an email in Inky.

Inky isn’t one of the most simple email clients out there, but it does have a clear focus, which is good. The app’s main concentration is on writing emails, checking your inbox and reading emails, and browsing your contacts. In a way, it doubles as a contacts app, if that has any value. Interestingly, the contacts function isn’t like you’d expect: it includes all the people you’ve contacted via email (with all the accounts in Inky), not all the people in your Mac’s Contacts app. In fact, there are no Mac contacts at all, just people you’ve emailed.

The Little Things

Apparently, Inky’s team offers no support.

As always, there are the small parts of apps that get to you. Inky has quite a few of these, even though the app says it’s in version 1.0. (Interestingly, the Web site says it’s in beta. Maybe the developers are not sure what stage the app is in yet.) Through the usual testing procedures, I’ve found all of Inky’s experience-affecting issues.

Unnaturally Fast Scrolling

Spotify is one of those apps that doesn’t fit well with others on a Mac. Some say it’s because the user interface is ugly, but the most annoying factor I’ve encountered is its lack of bounce-back scrolling, that fun new feature Apple included in OS X Lion. Without such functionality, the app feels like a piece of legacy coding. The scrolling jumps from here to there without any real personality and smoothness. It’s incoherent.

It’s simple: Macs have smooth scrolling and Inky doesn’t.

Inky has this problem as well, but it’s far worse than Spotify. Its speed is not unlike that of a first person shooter, just with more verbosity. If you want to scroll down just a bit, that’s not possible. You must go at least 25 pixels — that’s the least I could get it to move. This isn’t smooth scrolling like OS X has, it’s jittery madness. Scrolling is one of the most important aspects of an email client, and it’s usually one you don’t need to talk about because it’s a given, but here it’s been tweaked out of functioning properly.

Lastly, while I’m on the topic of scrolling, there’s the matter of the scrollbar itself. Now this is an interesting bit. It’s as if the developers thought they’d add a Windows 8 scrollbar to an OS X app. Maybe it was just something to keep the experience similar on both platforms. The only problem is, this is not Windows 8, and there’s also no touchscreen Mac on the market, so it looks and feels out of place.

No Fullscreen Mode

Windowed mode really squeezes things.

I personally don’t use fullscreen apps a lot, but some people prefer them for focused productivity. Apple’s default email application, properly enough titled Mail and included with OS X, for instance, has a great fullscreen mode that really uses your whole display. Some people like to throw around the window, which is fine, but fullscreen allows you to focus on an email using your whole screen — no status bar or anything.

Unfortunately, Inky doesn’t support fullscreen mode. This is probably because it’s a beta and the feature may be added in the future. Regardless, it won’t be a complete mail client until this is added. Right now, things feel restricted and the main window has to be maximized in order to read basic emails. In its default form, the app’s email preview screen — or reader: whatever they want to call it — is a diminutive 400 pixels wide. You may as well be receiving mobile-optimized emails to use it. “Of course, you can always double click the email,” I thought. But no, that does nothing.

A Good Effort; Far From Success

The app wants to help, but it gets complicated.

Inky tries to impress, almost too hard in some areas. The problem is the app’s presentation: it feels like a Web app in a window — like a Fluid app. That’s simply poor development. Nearly everything about it reminds me of Mail Pilot, a Kickstarter app that is available in the browser. Even the settings screen feels like a jumpy Web page rather than a native app.

I wanted to like this app, but it’s hard to do that, even objectively. Its user interface isn’t a bother, nor is its core functionality. But if you want to move on to what the app is really about, there’s nothing to be found. It’s an uninspired squared Windows 8-esque design placed in an OS X window frame — it just doesn’t work. If the whole app felt like it was built for Apple’s OS, that’d be one thing, but it’s so very far from it.

You’re probably aware of Tiny Tower, a tycoon and management-style game from developer NimbleBit that recieved strong reviews and some pretty strong attention when it seemed Zynga blatantly ripped them off. Earlier this year, they released a new game, Pocket Planes, for mobile platforms which also received critical acclaim (scoring a full 10/10 in our iPad review) and got me seriously addicted.

When browsing the Mac App Store recently, I came across an interesting discovery. NimbleBit has brought the insanely popular game to the Mac in a port that even boasts syncing with its iOS brother. Let’s take a look and see how it stacks up to the well-recieved experience on your iPhone and iPad.

Preparing for Depature

Pocket Planes is all about building your own airline, by buying and commanding a fleet of planes to transport passengers and cargo between the airports you’ve invested in. There’s a little strategy involved too: by choosing your passengers and the exact route your plane takes, you can maximise profit and upgrade your airline faster.

Starting a new game, you’ll get to choose an area of the world to start out. Due to financial constraints, this is probably where you’ll spend a considerable amount of the time so you may want to choose strategically. Opt for Europe to take advantage of all the continental traffic or start off on the East Coast of the US and take over North America’s airspace.

Starting Pocket Planes, you’ll choose an area of the world to establish your first routes.

Your airline will start off a few nearby airports and some small planes, with a small sum of money in the bank. You can get started right away, shuttling passengers and cargo between these short differences by boarding some traffic, scheduling a flight manifest and authorising takeoff. The flight will takeoff and take some time to arrive — starting at about one or two minutes for nearby airports, and increasing depending on the distance — which allows you to sit back and wait, or begin scheduling other flights.

A secondary currency, “Bux”, can be used to instantly move these flights to their destination. Bux can be earned through special opportunities in the game, or purchased with real money through the App Store if you’re not one to wait.

A flight in progress. Note that you can speed up the flight with the payment of one “Bux”.

Naturally, multiple planes can be flying at a time so the more you have in your fleet, the more can be flying. Additional planes can be purchased in the Market, again for Bux, either as fully assembled aircraft or in parts, which you can then construct. As you progress, better planes will become available to buy. Better planes can also fly further distances, without needing to pass through non-necessary airports.

The other area for upgrading is by extending your reach, achieved by unlocking additional airports with payment of in-game coins (earned by completing flights in game or by exchanging your Bux for them, allowing you to buy them with real cash too). The better, higher-traffic airports cost more but the potential for more, potentially better jobs is there.

Presentation

Pocket Planes retains the style of NimbleBit’s other apps, with graphics purposely pixelated. It has a nice charm too it, and allows you to play the app even at very small resolutions without having any issue making out what’s going on or using the interface.

Scheduling a North American flight.

The controls are largely a mere port from iOS. They certainly work, but the game is designed for touch rather than traditional mouse-and-keyboard, which does make for some awkward moments. There isn’t that much of an issue and the app is still controllable, by all means, but it doesn’t seem much specific thought has gone into the control system for OS X.

iCloud Sync

One very notable feature of Pocket Planes is the inclusion of syncing with iCloud, allowing for games to coexist and work together on both OS X and iOS. So, it’s a seamless process to simply pull up the app on your Mac and continue the exact same game that was played on your iPhone, and vice versa.

With a lot of games taking their cross-platform players for granted, this is a very nice inclusion.

Special events in Pocket Planes can effect your airline, for the better or the worse.

Final Thoughts

Pocket Planes is a fun game — even addicting for a lot of players, including myself — and having it on the Mac, for free, is a great advantage. The gameplay is fairly simple and the presentation is charming, but the controls don’t seem like they are designed with Mac users in mind.

However, iCloud syncing is a great feature that allows this to be a game you’re always playing, even if you’re not actually playing it. Take the app on your commute to work and then keep a tab on your flights when you’re there.

The best and worst thing about Gmail is that it’s web-based. Keeping a browser tab open for it is both convenient and annoying. You can set it up with your desktop mail client of choice, of course, but that comes with its own baggage and issues. I like the idea of something in between the two — an app that I can install on my computer that isn’t overloaded with features I don’t use and segregated from my web browsing. MailPop Pro is just the ticket.

It lives in your menubar, is instantly accessible at all times, and improves upon the Gmail web app in a multitude of ways (with one big caveat). Let’s dive in.

Easy Access

MailPop Pro lives in your menubar. It pops out into a floating window when clicked on, offering quick and easy access to your inbox. You can move this floating window around, resizing it at will, and the app remembers that size and position for next time. There’s also a standard OS X full-screen option, which is slightly wonkier than usual because of the nature of menubar apps (you can’t Command-Tab out and then back in again, for instance).

It’s Gmail, but it’s floating in a window toggled on and off from your menubar.

If you switch focus to another window, the MailPop Pro display disappears. You can prevent it from doing this by clicking on the Lock button, which either makes the MailPop Pro window behave like a regular window or floats it above all windows. You can drag and drop attachments from the Finder or other apps regardless of whether this lock is on or off, though.

This is an elegant way to handle three core use cases. Over the course of the day, you might want to have the app take on each of these three behaviors. Perhaps while composing emails you want the window to stay visible while you quickly switch apps to check something. Or you like to multitask with social networking and email active simultaneously. Maybe you’re swapping to and fro between email and web browsing. All of these can be set up to work naturally and intuitively with MailPop Pro, just by tweaking a single setting.

A button on the bottom right lets you toggle between the desktop, tablet, and mobile Gmail interfaces. I eventually settled on the tablet interface as my default, for its clean and uncluttered two-column layout. You may be surprised how well the mobile view works as a drop-down menu on your computer, though — it’s perfect for at-a-glance email viewing.

Mobile view is surprisingly robust on a desktop or laptop computer, but the tablet mode is where it’s at. (The rest of my screenshots will be of the tablet view).

Notifications for new mail come in Growl or Notification Center flavors, with a corresponding sound of your choosing (within the set of system sounds) and a red menubar icon. The icon also has a number to indicate how many new messages are waiting since you last looked at your mail. Clicking on a notification will automatically open the app and load the message — just as you’d expect with a traditional mail client.

Shortcomings

My biggest gripe with MailPop Pro appears to be a common one. It currently lacks multiple-account support, which means that users with more than one Gmail account have to log out and back in again every time they want to switch. Multiple accounts is supposedly being worked on for an upcoming update (hopefully sooner rather than later). If you need that feature, don’t bother buying the app until it’s ready — it’s too much hassle to workaround the problem.

While the app does support offline caching, it does so in the same manner as your web browser — no surprises there, since it’s loading the web app. This means that many messages will not be readable without an Internet connection. Pretty much anything unread, along with most older messages and even some recent emails will show up blank except for the text “This conversation is not available offline.”

Losing your Internet connection may cause considerable frustration. Note, also, the weird rendering bug — that blank space two messages up from the blue-highlighted one should not be blank (i.e., a message loads if you click on it).

Improvements

Some Gmail shortcomings are elegantly handled. Composing emails through Gmail involves either losing the ability to browse emails as the new message takes over the screen, or popping it out into a new window by clicking on a tiny and ill-placed button (a third option is currently being rolled out, whereby you can compose in a floating pane much like the old chat function). In MailPop Pro, there’s a dedicated button for composing in a new window — and it’s brilliantly integrated.

In the bottom left of the MailPop Pro window, there are six icons. From left to right, they’re Compose, Compose in New Window, Refresh, Back, Forward, Lock/Unlock. That second one offers something you don’t get with Gmail — a media browser. This is broken into three sections: Images, Audio, Movies. Each section offers quick access to default folders, and can be customized to include whatever folders and devices you need. This saves the need to go searching through the Finder or a standard file browser pop-up window.

Adding media attachments to a new message is super easy with help from the media browser.

Even better than these is the ability to bring up your inbox or compose a new email from anywhere, with a simple keyboard shortcut or click of the mouse. This is a powerful feature, sorely lacking in any browser-based email setup. If you’re reading something and want to share or discuss it with a friend, just hit Option-C (you can change this) and write them an email without leaving the page. Right-clicking on the MailPop Pro menubar icon also opens a new message window. There’s an Opacity meter, too, which lets you make MailPop Pro more transparent — enabling more of the background windows to be seen.

There aren’t many preferences, but all of the options available make a big difference.

The default keyboard shortcuts Option-W (for showing the inbox) and Option-C (for composing a new email) may cause headaches for anyone who uses the special characters (? and ç) normally invoked by this macro. I suggest changing this to Control-Option-letter via the app’s Preferences (the gear icon), although you can use whatever you like.

Just One Big Issue

At this point, the only thing keeping me from ditching both traditional desktop clients and the browser-based Gmail offering for MailPop Pro is multiple account support. I have three Google accounts; it’s a dealbreaker if I can’t sign in and use all three interchangeably at any time. I suspect I’m far being the only one in this position. If and when MailPop Pro gets multiple accounts working, though, it’ll be my default email app (unless something superior comes along first). It’s Gmail made better in all other respects. I’ve never felt so limited by Gmail in my web browser as I do now.

If you’re on the fence and aren’t concerned about multiple account support, check out the free version before you buy MailPop Pro. It’s the same app, minus full-screen support, some viewing options, notifications, opacity controls, and the ability to set as default mail app. And it has ads.

It’s the first of November, and app deals are in, well, let’s say decent supply, as usual, and I’m here to greet you with this week’s specials. The apps on today’s agenda include WriteRoom, the original distraction-free text editor, Crow, a game about pitch-black avians and other creatures from Skyrim, something of adventurous nature, and the usual bundles and such. Join me after the break for all the good stuff.

MacLegion Halloween Game Bundle

The Mac App Store has a lot of games at a fair price, but nothing will match this year’s MacLegion Halloween Bundle. It lasts for 11 days and offers $194.95 of software for a mere $29.99. “Oh, but it must all be rubbish,” you think to yourself. But it’s not, at least if you want LIMBO, Civilization V, Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare, And Yet it Moves, and Company of Heroes: Complete. This is a full pack of real games that’ll take you a good amount of time to finish, so get downloading while it lasts.

Others?

Is that all? Really now? I’m sure you’ve managed to scrape up some extras from the week. Tell us about your findings in the comments and we’ll be sure to post them in next week’s edition of the deals if they haven’t expired. Have a nice week.

The simply superb djay for Mac has recently been updated to include Retina Graphics, I though it the perfect opportunity to look at what makes it so great — and give three readers the chance to grab a free copy.

Read on to find out how to enter…

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We reviewed djay back in May 2011 and loved it, but algoriddim have improved the app by leaps and bounds since then! While djay can’t replace the most expensive type of DJ setup, it’s an incredibly polished and professional app that’s surprisingly powerful. Here are a few of the best features:

• Seamless iTunes integration — iTunes may be unwieldy, but djay handles it well.
• Multi-touch trackpad control — which, alongside a simply daunting list of keyboard shortcuts, enables you to make quicker, slicker changes.
• Harmonic match — helps you find songs that are in the same key as the one you’re playing, and allows you to transpose whole songs.
• Gorgeous Retina graphics — you can’t fault djay on its looks.
• Record your performance — for the proud amateur, you can record your performance and show off to your friends.
• iCloud integration — it’ll remember cue points and other metadata created while using djay on your iPad or iPhone.

It’s pretty, right?

It’s a superb app that is not only a useful tool, but also endless fun for any aspiring DJ. Read on to find out how you can win one of three copies!

How to Enter

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

1. Post a link to this competition – either on your website, or via Twitter
2. Leave a comment, letting me know where you posted the link!

Best of luck, and I’ll be picking the winners in just over a week.

There surely isn’t any shortage of apps for viewing and interacting with your Instagram feed right from your Mac. We’ve even presented a comparison of a few of them to you not so long ago.

Today we’re going to present you yet another newcomer to the Instagram Mac client market that is a bit different from the rest, in that it lives in your menu bar and is considerably simpler (and cheaper) than the rest. It’s called Instabar, so would you like to take a look at it?

Instabar and Instabar Pro

Instabar

Instabar comes in two versions, a free and a “pro” one. The free one only allows you to see the popular photos on the service and it doesn’t provide any options for you to login to your own account. The paid version goes for only $1 and allows you to do much more like login with your account, view your timeline, favorite pictures, and view comments.

Interface

Tile View

One of my favorite things of Instabar is definitely its interface. Unlike most of its competitors, Instabar runs in the menubar and provides a cool vintage-looking interface that goes along with the Instagram app (much like Carousel, although not as good). The app consists of a main scrollable window where the pictures are shown, a navigation bar on the bottom, and a title bar on top with a couple buttons for switching views and refreshing the timeline.

Pictures can be displayed in a tile view that shows nothing but the pictures, and in a list-like scrollable view that will display each picture bigger and with more details. This view is in fact similar to how you view pictures on the official Instagram app. Each picture will have on top the user, his profile picture and the time it was uploaded at, and on the bottom the number of “likes” and comments it has received.

Features

Comments

Instabar’s functionality is pretty basic, besides viewing and liking photos there isn’t much else you can do with it. If you click on a picture you can see the comments it has gotten, but you can’t leave your own unfortunately. Then if you click on the name or picture of a user, you can view his profile along with all the pictures he’s taken recently and you can even follow or unfollow them from there.

The app’s scrolling is kind of weird to get used to at first, but it’s actually very functional and I haven’t seen it applied yet to any other Instagram clients. See, Instabar has some sort of auto-adjust scrolling thing so that everytime you stop scrolling while viewing pictures, it will accomodate the view so that it always fills up the screen with a picture and not half-way through them. It’s difficult to explain, but you can think of it as a more intelligent way to scroll and I’ve found it massively comfortable to use, now I wish every app had this.

The Bad

Bugs

My problems with Instabar are mostly because of the things that it lacks, rather than its bugs or flaws. Especially when compared to similar apps, Instabar lacks a few vital features for an Instagram client. For example, it won’t show who loves any picture, it will only tell you how many likes it has gotten. Likewise, you can’t copy or open the photo’s URL so that you can share it with someone or view it bigger. And even worse: it won’t show you the titles of the pictures.

There is also something a little off about the looks of the app. The fonts, buttons and the backgrounds all seem to be blurry or badly rendered. It’s not something that makes the app unusable but it is noticeable. I also noticed a few bugs with the logins. I accidentally logged out once and when I tried to login again I got stuck on the credentials screen. I restarted the app and it worked well again.

Competition

Carousel

Just because of its price, Instabar has a somewhat big advantage over all the other popular Instagram Mac clients like Carousel ($1.99), Instaview ($4.99) and Instadesk ($4.99). It might not compare with any of them in terms of features, but if you’re looking for something simple just to occasionally browse through your feed without too much of a hassle, Instabar might be just perfect for you.

Conclusion

For $1 buck I’d say Instabar is pretty cool. I’ve been a user of Carousel (whose price isn’t so far off from Instabar’s) for the longest time, but I don’t really open it that much since it isn’t always as easily available as Instabar is in the menu bar. With Instabar I can take quick breaks to see what’s new in my Instagram timeline without having to open any apps.

Sure, it still needs some features like a few improvements to the UI, notifications when new pictures arrive, auto-refresh, titles on pictures, and the ability to comment on photos, but for the most part (and especially because of the price) I can’t complain about Instabar. In fact, in the few days that I’ve been using it, I haven’t really missed my old Carousel app that much except for being able to copy photo URLs.

What about you? Is Instagram an exclusively mobile app to you, or do you check your timeline on your Mac too? If so, what app do you use, and what do you like about it? Let us know what you think in the comments below!

Going on vacation is good for anyone. It can relieve the stress of work, give you insights to a majestic piece of the Earth, or even inspire you to paint something you’ve found along the way. The process of going on a vacation is different for a lot of people. Some prefer to drive, while others take a flight, mostly when they’re going abroad. On the road, it’s common for folks to stop in a hotel to rest for another day’s drive. Even if they end up flying, a hotel comes in handy when they’ve landed.

Most people use services like Kayak.com or Expedia, which are handy tools for finding affordable and decent places to rest. All these services have iPhone apps, but you don’t often come across one for the Mac. Bellhop is changing that. The app, developed by Conceited Software, aims to make your hotel-finding process on the Mac effortless. Sounds promising, but is it any good?

Start Searching

The search screen with some suggestions for San Francisco.

When you first open Bellhop, you’ll be greeted with a simple search screen containing a bellman’s outfit, a text field for the location you’re going to be staying, check in and check out date fields, and a drop-down menu for the number of adults and children you are bringing to the hotel. Once you’ve filled those out (the date fields have pop-out calendars that appear when clicked) and clicked Search, the app will make sure the city you searched for is in the country you’re traveling in. There’s also a suggestions drop-down to assist you.

Browse the Map

Searching for a hotel leads to Bellhop’s map, powered by Google. This alternative to the list layout that most Web sites have is a lot more user-friendly and makes finding things easier. For instance, if you’re looking to stay close to the coastline but don’t know your way around the city, you can easily find the closest hotel to the ocean using the map. Likewise, this would be useful for other attractions and helps the user visualize proximity.

Pins on the map are hotels.

One annoying thing about the map is that there’s no way to zoom in and out with the scroll wheel on your mouse. A two-finger swipe up or down also does nothing. This would make navigating a lot faster than it is now — clicking the + and – buttons in the top left just to zoom in and out: it’s inconvenient — and wouldn’t be at all hard to implement since Google Maps already supports it in the browser.

Once you’ve found a place you like, clicking its red pin will open more information on it. If the selection has free wireless Internet or the number of rooms available is limited, the info screen will show this, the latter in red. There’s also a picture of the location at the top of its listing along with a virtual tour that pops up when the picture is clicked. Please note that this feature is only available on some hotels and I wasn’t able to get it to function on smaller ones.

Add Amenities

Selecting an amenity from the menu.

Not everyone is looking for a basic place to put up for the night. Sometimes it’s nice to have a pool, fitness center, or restaurant — continental breakfast is, though often under par, also a plus — within the walls of the inn. And when people really want luxury, there’s always the one hotel that has an opulent room with something as outlandish as a kitchen or private spa. Bellhop can assist in finding such amenities with its more advanced search.

First, of course, you’ll need to begin a regular search. After that’s all sorted out, click the Add New Filter button below Amenities and select whichever benefit you’re looking for, from free breakfast to conference rooms. There’s even a Pets Allowed option for canine and feline lovers, though it’s going to be hard to find that specific benefit in a lot of areas.

Make and Organize Reservations

Making a reservation.

Oh, you thought that this app was only good for finding hotels, eh? No, there are some other features as well. The developers thought it’d be better to not leave the app to reserve a room, so they built this feature in to the app. You can click a hotel, select a room, and click Book Now to reserve it for a future trip to a far-off land. Bellhop even asks you if you’ll allow it to access your Mac’s contacts so it can fill out all the fields for you. Well, except the payment information, of course.

Once you’ve booked a hotel, it’ll be added to the Organizer (CMD + O or File > Organizer). You can then print the receipts and even cancel the reservation. There’s also a Refresh Status button that’ll give you the assurance that everything is going according to plan. Not many iOS apps do this, do they?

Needs List Sorting

As I explained earlier, using Bellhop’s map view to find a place to stay is great. I have no complaints about locating a hotel that way, but the flip side is list view, a more dull experience. Everything still looks nice and there’s still — unusually — a pop-out for the hotel’s information when you click it, but there’s no way to sort by price, number of rooms available, or rating.

Search results in Bellhop’s list format.

Now I’m not just talking about looking at certain ratings because that can be achieved by applying a reviews filter with either the stars or TripAdvisor rating in the left sidebar. Instead, there should be a way to sort the hotels by highest to lowest rating. Right now, you can search for a range of one to five stars and then add a price range to that as well, if you wish. Even then, the price range will only do you so much good if there’s a large list of hotels to look through, especially since rooms start at the price shown on the right.

Handy and Nicely Designed Travel App at a Price

Many features of a room.

Bellhop is the epitome of finding, booking, and organizing your hotels. It’s going to come in especially useful if you’re a businessperson who takes many trips, whether it’s abroad or in your homeland. The organizer will keep all your bookings in a tidy list that you can bring up any time on your trip. Of course, an iPhone or iPad app would be nice for this, wouldn’t it? That’s just another suggestion to add to the list sorting.

With the little issues and lacking features aside, this app has a lot of benefits to offer. It costs $9.99 though, and that’s going to be an instant turnoff for many people. The price would be perfect at $4.99 or even $6.99, but its current cost is making it hard-to-sell. Most people are still going to resort to Kayak.com or another favorite if this competition comes with such a price.

If you’re an audiophile like me, you probably know the pain of trying to use high-quality music files with iTunes. Even though iTunes does a pretty good job of playing your lossless sound files, you’re always left wondering if you’re missing something, not to mention the fact that iTunes doesn’t support FLAC files.

If these things bother you on a daily basis, we’ve found an application that might be able to help you: BitPerfect. It’s an app that’s designed to help you squeeze the best possible audio quality from your sound system, according to its developer. Let’s take that claim for a test and see if it’s worth the price.

Is BitPerfect an iTunes Replacement?

BitPerfect isn’t exactly an iTunes replacement. On the other hand, it is, in fact, just an addition to iTunes. When running BitPerfect, you’ll still use iTunes to create, manage and listen to your music library. BitPerfect will also interface with your existing music, so you don’t have to go through the trouble of transferring your extensive music collection to an audiophile grade iTunes alternative for OS X. Not to mention you can still use iTunes to sync your music and other content to your iPad, iPhone or iPod.

So, What Does BitPerfect Do, Anyway?

Alright–enough chit-chat–what does BitPerfect even do? Simple: it gives you more control over iTunes’ audio playback. You can change a ton of settings which iTunes doesn’t allow you to change by default like upsampling, buffer sizes and dither. You can also control your volume more intimately with BitPerfect, which is perfect if you often find that your music distorts when playing at high volumes. If you’re an audio expert and know what to do with those controls, BitPerfect may help you achieve higher sound quality on high-end audio setups.

BitPerfect is also perfect if you would like to have your iTunes audio play through different speakers other than your default input. For instance, if I’m running headphones through a USB amplifier or DAC but still want my Mac’s system audio to play via my headphone jack on the back of my Mac, I can do so by launching BitPerfect from my task bar and clicking on the “Preferences” button to be taken to my audio output selector. Once I’ve selected an output, my iTunes audio will be streamed through that source while the rest of my system audio streams through my default set of speakers. It’s that simple.

Does BitPerfect Even Work?

BitPerfect lives on your task bar.

That’s a tough one. While I’ve experienced very minor sound improvement when using using the application with 256kbps files in iTunes and, I had to take my time working with the settings. And while configuring these settings may be a breeze for the pro, the rest of us are in for an hour of browsing the web for definitions and optimization tips. I wish that BitPerfect had some sort of audio configuration tutorial for us audio newbies, but unfortunately they don’t yet. BitPerfect’s website isn’t of much help either when setting up the app for the first time. The addition of audio presets could also help with this issue, but they seem to be absent as of now.

The app can make your lower quality music sound pretty good once you have it properly configured. However, it wont help your lossless files. Even though the change in sound quality was minor, I could definitely tell the difference when BitPerfect was disabled. If I had used better audio equipment and was more experienced with the settings, I’m sure the sound difference would’ve been even greater with BitPerfect enabled.

The User Interface

BitPerfect’s UI is pretty minimal, though it doesn’t have too much to present.

So, if you’re up for the challenge of learning new audio terms, you’ll be happy to know that the application itself is very minimal and lives in your Mac’s task-bar. When you have the application open, you’ll notice a tiny BitPerfect icon on your task bar. You can click on this icon to bring up BitPerfect’s configuration options. Everything in the application is very clearly presented and is pretty easy to access, so you don’t have to dig through layers of menus to find what you’re looking for. BitPerfect lives on your taskbar, so once you’ve set the app to your liking, you don’t have to worry about it floating around your desktop or keeping it open when you want to use it.

Should I Buy BitPerfect?

After “properly” configuring the application to my liking, I have to admit that the sound was pretty good, though I’m not sure it was worth an hour of my time and $10. However, if you’re an experienced audio enthusiast who wants to squeeze every last bit out sound out of your iTunes music, this app is perfect for you. I’d also recommend this app to anyone who wants a small task bar app to control their iTunes sound output, however, it may be a bit pricy for that function alone.

Disclaimer: I tested this app with lossless music files via iTunes 10. I used my custom built home stereo, Sennheiser PXC450 headphones and Palo Alto Audio CUBIX USB speakers to test the audio quality. 

I rely on RSS feeds as my main source of news and interesting stories on the Internet. But I don’t have time to go through every single story blurb to see what I’d like to read in full. I know I’m not alone in my awful noise to reading time ratio. The developers of Cream, a new lightweight RSS reader, seem to get this, and so they baked a recommendation engine right into their app.

Cream sports a modern, clean interface and design, but I’m not sure that it’s quite ready for the prime time. Let’s explore what it does well, and where it falls short.Like the article? You should subscribe and follow us on twitter.

Creamy Stories

Cream takes note of the stories you read, analyzing their language and metadata to find keywords and common themes. It then builds a kind of ranking system called Creaminess. The Creamiest stories are the ones the app thinks you will be most interested in. If your eyes glide over a recommended story, it notes this and tunes the algorithm accordingly. Similarly, if you often read stories from the same website, stories on that site are likely to be pushed up to the top. It also manages to figure out who your favorite writers are on a website, highlighting all of their work.

The Creamiest stories get highlighted; you can sort by Creaminess.

This part of the app is fantastic, and it manages to consistently draw out stories that I missed on my more full-featured RSS reader of choice. The longer you use Cream, the better its recommendations get, and after just a week I’m already impressed.

Sweet Design

You can sort by Creaminess, date, or feed, and stories are color-coded according to how Creamy they are. There are also filters for showing only unread or unseen stories (the latter refers to stories that haven’t appeared on screen in the main Cream window). All functionality (except for Preferences, oddly) is visible on the main Cream window, with a great layout that likely takes its cues from the likes of Twitter for Mac.

Visually, it’s a beautiful app. A coffee-colored sidebar and buttons join a pleasant cream-colored highlight on Creamy stories. It’s very easy on the eyes. If something has been read, a little open book icon appears on the right-hand side above the date of publication. Stories expand in a floating grey box, with a link to the full article and buttons to send to your preferred read it later service (Instapaper, Pocket, Safari Reading List, and Readability are all supported). These larger previews are sadly text only, so you’re not going to see any images contained in the blurb until you click through to the actual story.

Cream is a beautiful app, although the functionality doesn’t always match up. Stories pop up in a floating window when you click on them, and disappear when you scroll or switch apps.

Feeds can be added manually, or imported from Google Reader, another app, or an OPML file. It’s a one-time sync, mind you, so you might need to import on a regular basis. You can also export your feeds as an OPML file. Unfortunately Cream does not play nice with other apps when it comes to keeping an accurate list of what stories have been marked as read. If you use another feed reader — and if you’re a habitual RSS subscriber you’ll have to — there’s going to be a lot of doubling up, where stories that catch your eye have already been read in the other app.

The Taste’s a Little Off

The unfortunate irony of Cream is that its algorithm for recommending stories works best when you follow lots of RSS feeds, yet its interface and design is wholly unsuited to more than a handful of low or medium-volume feeds. This issue could be offset by syncing with web-based RSS services such as Google Reader, to help you keep track of read/unread stories, but that would not solve the problem — only mitigate it. Cream, for all its individual strengths, is fundamentally flawed in its current design.

A lack of organization and filtering makes Cream wholly unsuited to use as a replacement for a conventional RSS reader, yet this is what it must do to get full value out of its learning and recommendation algorithm.

If you want to use only a small number of feeds, and to quickly skim for the most relevant or interesting content, it’ll serve you well. But piling on more feeds in hopes of Cream filtering out the crud doesn’t work as well as it should. Cream’s recommendation algorithm seems fairly robust, but the app is just not designed to handle several hundred new stories a day. Power users should not even think about installing the app in its current state — when it calls itself lightweight, it means lightweight.

Needs Refinement

Cream enters a market crowded with excellent RSS readers. Reeder, Caffeinated, Mixtab, NetNewsWire, NewsFire, Vienna, NewsBar, Pulp, and several others all do a great job. It has most of the qualities to compete against these more established readers — gorgeous design, easy to use interface, and a fantastic recommendation algorithm. But it just doesn’t handle the core element of being an RSS reader well enough.

I’ll be watching closely to see where it goes from here, since Cream has all the makings of a great app. The cream rises to the top in both the apps market and Cream itself, and with that hook it could do very well. But it needs to decide whether to emphasize the algorithm for learning what you like, transforming your RSS experience with top-notch recommendations, or to keep the focus on being a secondary RSS reader, which you glance at when you’re strapped for time.

Right now, it tries to do both —failing to fully execute on either concept — and suffers as a result. Consider Cream for its beautiful interface and excellent algorithm, but keep in mind that this initial release is flawed.

With our always-busy, always-committed-to-something lifestyle, it might be hard to keep track of all your duties. That’s where todo list and project management apps enter the stage. I’ve tried four of the most popular Mac apps in this category: OmniFocus, Things, The Hit List, and Wunderlist. But because I’m really bad at being organized, all of these apps were all too much of a hassle for me, despite being relatively simple to use.

My way of adding things to my todo list must be absolutely frictionless. Only plain text and the awesome plain text todo list app TaskPaper can satisfy my needs. If you’re like me, stay after the break to read in details about a workflow I developed to actually do things instead of just spending time fiddling with my tasks.

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What you’ll need

At the bare minimum, you will have to have the three following things to do everything in this tutorial:

• TaskPaper ($24.99)
• LaunchBar (€ 24.00)
• a Dropbox account (free)

The core of the system: One and only plain text file opened with TaskPaper

To me, plain text is the only true frictionless, portable, light and reliable format. That’s why I prefer to use a plain text version of my todos. I use only one file simply named ‘todo.txt’. Apart from the name, it has not really much to do with Gina Trapani’s ‘official’ Todo.txt app.

I set up my Macs to open that specific .txt file with TaskPaper. By replacing the default .taskpaper extension by .txt, I benefit both from the very powerful features of Hog Bay Software’s app and the flexibility of plain text.

Let’s start by creating a new file in TaskPaper. Right after creating it, save it as a plain text file, by simply typing “todo.txt” in the Save As dialog box.

When saving a TaskPaper file as plain text, the Finder will prompt you for confirmation. Use .txt, it’s harmless.

Alternatively, if you’d rather use another TaskPaper file you’ve already started to fill with tasks, “converting” it to a .txt file is really easy. Just locate the file on your hard drive, Control-click on it and choose ‘Get info’ in the contextual menu.

You can use the Cmd-I keyboard shortcut to get the Get Info window open as well.

In the Get Info window, go to the Name & Extension field and replace .taskpaper with .txt. The Finder will prompt you to confirm that you really want to modify the file extension.

Mac OS X does not want you to mess things up. Choose ‘Use.txt’ and don’t worry, we’re safe here.

You now have a plain text version of your todo list. However, since todo.txt just became a typical text file, Mac OS X will open it with TextEdit or whatever app you told your Mac to open .txt files with by default. The trick is to click on the “Open with” button in the Get Info window, and choose TaskPaper on the list (if TaskPaper is not listed, choose ‘Other…’ at the end of the list and select TaskPaper in the Applications folder that the Finder just opened for you).

The most clever part of this workflow: having a plain text file opened by TaskPaper.

You now have a todo.txt file that is editable with any text editor but will be opened with TaskPaper by default.

Adding new items to your todo list: where you’ll thank Dropbox and plain text

The great benefit of using a plain text file is that you can modify it whenever you want, with whatever app you want. In fact, my todo.txt file is located in a Dropbox ‘Notes’ subfolder where I store all of my notes as individual text files. Also, this is the folder that nvAlt reads and all iOS text editors I own are also linked to that same folder.

LaunchBar and its Append Text feature: Christmas throughout the year

When I’m in front of my desktop Mac (at home or at work) and I need to add an item to my todo list, I don’t even launch TaskPaper, I use the Append Text feature of LaunchBar. Remember we’ve just changed the default .taskpaper extension to a more common .txt one? Here follows the first benefit from that change.

LaunchBar is a… well I don’t even have a proper word for how much easier this app makes my digital life. Working with text files is such a breeze with it, and one of its very handy features for our current workflow is its Append Text action command. This makes for a lightning fast, non-obtrusive way to add some new items to your todo.txt file.

To make a fast process even faster, you can assign the letter ‘T’ as an abbreviation to your todo.txt file and use the Shift-Space keyboard shortcut to Append Text.

To assign the T shortcut to your todo.txt file, first select the file in LaunchBar, then press Cmd-Alt-A (or choose the Assign Abbreviation action command in the dropdown menu you open by Control-clicking on the file name) and type T in the Assign Abbreviation field.

This way, all you have to do to add a new task at the end of your todo list is:

1: Press Cmd-Space or whatever keyboard combo you have set to invoke LaunchBar
2: Press T (selects the todo.txt file wherever it is located on your hard drive)

The power of LaunchBar: with three keystrokes (Cmd-Space then T), your todo.txt is ready.

3: Press Shift-Space or Cmd-Shift-A (invokes the Append Text command)
4: Type your new task preceded by a dash followed by a space

Adding a new task to your “todo.txt” file is as easy as appending a few words.

5: Press Return, and you’re done.

All of this might seems a bit tricky to explain, but with muscle memory, you can add a new task at (almost) the speed of light.

(I know TaskPaper itself has a special popup window with a general system shortcut you can invoke to add a new todo, but you have to keep the document you want to add a task opened in TaskPaper in the background, which I don’t do.)

A little extra: Edit your plain text todo list anywhere with TextDrop or Simplenote

If you’re not in front of one of your Mac and don’t have any of your iOS device at hand, but your todo.txt file is located in a Dropbox folder, you can use the TextDrop web app. For a few dollars a year, it allows you to edit, within your web browser, any text file located anywhere in your Dropbox, in an interface that looks really similar to Notational Velocity.

Alternatively, you could also synchronize your Dropbox Notes folder with Simplenote. I don’t do this because my plain text files in Dropboxd are read by nvAlt and I’ve had some problems in the past (mostly multiple identical copies of the same files) when using both Dropbox and Simplenote sync with nvAlt.

Reviewing your todo list: intensive use of labels in TaskPaper is the key

I only effectively launch TaskPaper when I need to review the things I have to do.
Remember that:

• We assigned the letter T to the todo.txt file in LaunchBar
• We asked the system to open todo.txt with TaskPaper

Thus, you just have to hit Cmd-Space (to invoke LaunchBar), then T, then Return, and your todo list opens in TaskPaper.

All of my tasks are in the same, unique todo.txt file. This might look like a big file that you can’t deal with efficiently. That would be forgetting that:

• you can add as many tags as you want to any task, project or note in TaskPaper
• and that this software also has a very powerful yet really easy to use natural language-based search mechanism

Thanks to that, you can have a huge list of tasks within your file while having displayed on screen only a few tasks.

In TaskPaper, just head for View > Search… (or, faster, hit Cmd-Shift-F) and the tiny search window pops up. Type your search terms and hit Cmd-Shift-F again to dismiss the little window.

Labels and logical operators can be used as search terms in TaskPaper.

In our example above, TaskPaper now only displays tasks that should be done today at work. No need to keep multiple, separate todo files or even use multiple tabs in TaskPaper.

Pressing Esc when the Search window is open clears its content. As the content displayed in your TaskPaper window is updated live while typing search terms, you can then press Cmd-Shift-F again after Esc to make the search window disappear and get back to your full list of tasks.

Dealing with due dates, contexts and projects

When some of my tasks have due dates, I simply put these in the Mac OS X / iOS built-in Calendar app. All of this is synchronized via a Google Calendar account, making that available for any device, not only Apple devices. This way, I can have reminders of things to deal with on my Macs, my iPad, and my phone.

Of course, if you want to keep track of your due dates in your todo.txt file, don’t forget that you can use the @due tag within TaskPaper and enter some defined date, or some other word(s), between brackets — @due(2012-10-31) or @due(tomorrow), for instance.

True GTD adopters will need to add contexts to their tasks. I see tags in TaskPaper as a perfect use for that.

TaskPaper lets you also group tasks into projects and sub-projects, and you can focus on a particular one. So, I can follow a rather strict GTD method only with TaskPaper and plain text.

Conclusion

All of this workflow might seem complicated, but this is the only flawless way I have found to be completely free about where to have things at hand, whenever I am, without having to use specific apps other than the built-in ones (except for TaskPaper, of course, but you might have noticed that I didn’t mentioned the iOS version of TaskPaper: that’s because you don’t need it with this workflow).

When defining and experimenting with a workflow, always follows some simple key concepts:

• Never use a proprietary format when a more common format lets you do the same
• Maximize data portability, synchronization and interoperability
• Find the quickest way to do things
• Always have things backed up (thanks so much, Dropbox versioning!)
• Always make sure an action can be done by several ways

What’s your workflow for adding tasks and reviewing your todo list(s)? Feel free to join in the comments and ask more questions about my workflow. By the way, I’m pretty sure you can adapt this workflow by replacing LaunchBar with Alfred or whatever ‘launcher’ you prefer. If you’re using a different launcher for the same effect, we’d love to hear about it in the comments below!

With the release of Windows 8, Microsoft has been far from subtle in its vision for the future of operating systems. Opting to radically change the default desktop to the same style as Windows Phone and the Xbox 360, Microsoft have changed up some of the fundamental aspects of Windows, as well as adopting new features like an App Store.

On the strike of midnight, October 26th, I bought my copy of Windows 8 and got it up and running on a MacBook Air. In this article, I’m going to share some of my initial impressions with the rival operating system, and compare it feature-by-feature to Apple’s latest OS, Mountain Lion.

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If you’re planning on installing Windows 8 on your Mac, treat this as an experimental release. Upgrade from a previous version but don’t do a clean install. Try and have a backup mouse and keyboard connected prior to installation. Some drivers are incompatible with Windows 8 at this time and parts of your computer, even including the built-in trackpad and keyboard, might not work until Apple releases support. Be careful and proceed only at your own risk!

Desktop

The most notable change in Windows 8 is the most visual: the introduction of the UI formerly known as Metro, now dubbed Windows 8-style Modern UI. Replacing the old-style desktop and Start Menu as default, Windows 8 opts for a dashboard of tiles more akin to that of the Xbox 360 and miles away from both OS X and previous iterations of Windows.

On the other hand, Mountain Lion continued the tradition of Apple not changing the fundamental setup of OS X. We, of course, still have our dock, our Applications Folder and the fairly new Launchpad, the full-screen, iOS-style homescreen of apps on Macs. In fact, the basic idea of the Windows 8 Dashboard is very similar to Launchpad, but the latter is certainly more tucked away in OS X.

The Windows 8 dashboard.

Most notable to any Mac users trying out Windows 8 is the one-at-a-time focus in apps. Much like we’re used to on iOS, Windows 8 really centers users on a single app at a time, rather than having an extensive amount of windows open at once. This is the big change that will likely turn off most long-time OS X (and Windows) users from giving it a serious go.

Design

I’ve always felt that OS X had the edge in design, having a polish to everything on show, especially text. Windows, in comparison, always felt like some sort of prototype with no real finish to it, where text often looked ridiculously bad.

That’s something remedied in Windows 8. The underlying fundamentals of the Metro design language are to be admired, and the whole OS feels polished for the first time in, well, ever. And of all things, it’s incredibly text centric.

Windows 8 looks so much better than previous versions.

App Stores

Of course, soon after the announcement of OS X Lion, Apple launched the Mac App Store, its digital distribution platform for Mac apps. It’s been significantly adopted in its near-to-two years of life and is already the most prolific storefront for OS X apps.

In Windows 8, Microsoft brings their own native storefront for apps to the table. In a way that’s very similar to the way iOS handles app downloads, users browse the Windows Store for software, buy and download it and then see it appear on their dashboard as a tile. The store is in its mere infancy at launch, with few apps available, however. This feels much more like buying apps on an iOS device than on a Mac, thanks to the full-screen-only view, and many of the apps feel much more like the lite mobile apps than the apps we’re buying from the Mac App Store.

The Windows store for software.

Ecosystems

I think we can all agree that, at least until recently, Apple was the leader in creating a cohesive, all-in-one ecosystem for their devices. Apple provides a solution for email, contacts/calendars, document storage, media and more under one roof. It’s something every other technology company wants to create, but no-one else is quite there yet, though Google and Amazon are sure trying.

Microsoft hasn’t suddenly jumped up to an iTunes-size catalogue of content, but the integration of their ecosystem and services is very apparent in Windows 8. Upon setup, users input their Microsoft account details and all the stock apps will use this. The stock music app works off Microsoft’s Xbox Music service (providing an awesome free, ad-supported music streaming service) while the games app is deeply integrated into Xbox LIVE. Then, Microsoft already has other solid online services in the form of Skydrive, Outlook.com (formerly Hotmail) email and calendars, Office 365, and more.

Xbox and Windows games sit alongside each other in the Windows 8 Games app, much like iOS and OS X games in Game Center.

Windows 8 is a very guided experience, much like iOS; you feel like you’re in a curated, walled garden. Windows 8 is kind of like iOS with a different UI and a different master, since everything in the Metro side somehow utilises Microsoft’s services. I love being in the Apple ecosystem, having everything work together, and Microsoft is doing the same for its Xbox and Windows users. It’s yet to be seen, however, if Microsoft can entice even their own users to be that fully dedicated to their ecosystem.

Time for a Switch?

Windows 8 is the first version of Windows that I could actually seem myself switch to from OS X. Of course I’m not switching; I’m completely happy with my Mac’s default OS and have no motivation to look to alternatives. But, no longer would I automatically condemn Windows to new PC buyers. Windows has had some beauty sleep and started working better together with its friends.

Windows 8 also has a Desktop mode that essentially puts you back in Windows 7, albeit one with a much nicer, polished UI.

Windows 8 is, honestly, more like iOS than OS X. It approaches desktop computing like a mobile operating system, with a more focused, guided and minimalist user interface that dumbs down a lot of the more technical features of Windows. It also fully indoctrinates Windows users into the Microsoft way of life. This new setup won’t be for everyone and there’ll be customers who’ll be far happier sticking with Windows 7. However, the “steep” learning curve is over-exaggerated and, in general, this is the best operating system Microsoft has pushed out.

Apple doesn’t have to be scared of; it’s Google who should be watching their backs on the tablet front. If anything, they should be proud of how their rivals are finally creating products and building ecosystems that start to match the quality and finesse that only Apple has possessed. Congratulations, Microsoft.

Editor’s note: As in all op-eds, this article expresses the author’s opinion.

If you have both a laptop and a desktop Mac, you probably know the pains of grabbing your laptop, heading to the local coffee house and searching for an app on your MacBook only to realize that it’s only installed on your desktop. This usually requires you to head home with your coffee and work from there, right? Wrong. If you’re router is properly configured, you can still grab anything you need from your home computer thanks to Virtual Network Computing, or VNC.

VNC allows users to remotely control their Mac or PC from another device. While all Macs have a built-in VNC host which can be activated under the Screen Sharing options in System Preferences, you’ll need to download your own VNC viewer, or client, to your laptop or other Mac that you would like to use to control your home computer. Luckily for you, the App Store is filled with different VNC viewers, each of which bring individual luxuries to the table. Below, we’ve compiled the best of the best in order to help you make the best decision when purchasing a VNC viewer.

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And one more from our editor…

Conclusion

So there you have it, the top eleven VNC viewers for Mac. When choosing the best VNC viewer for yourself, remember to make sure that the one you’re purchasing fulfills your specific needs. For instance, if you’re just helping your grandmother with her new MacBook, you probably won’t need Apple Remote Desktop; however, if you’re looking to start your own remote support side-business, you may want to look into a more premium option. If you have a favorite remote VNC viewer, tell us what it is in the comments!

Our sponsor this week is Jaksta for Mac, an app that lets you record streaming audio and video from thousands of sites. If you’ve been looking for a way to watch your favorite online media when you’re offline, Jaksta for Mac is the app you need to try out.

Whether you want to watch YouTube videos offline, or want to record streaming internet broadcasts, Jaksta can record them all to your Mac, and can even handle multiple captures at once. Just open Jaksta, start your media playing, and Jaksta will automatically record it and save it in the formats you want. It works with most standard streaming formats on tons of popular sites, and can even add the recorded media to your iTunes library so you can easily watch or listen to it later.

It’s your one-stop-shop for recording streaming media on your Mac.

Go Get It!

If you’ve been looking for a great way to record streaming media on your Mac, then you should definitely try out Jaksta for Mac. You can download a free trial, then we have two special offers for our AppStorm readers this week. First, you can purchase a copy for just $39.95 with the exclusive sponsorship coupon code OCTJAM-APPS.

Then, if you purchase a copy, you can get a copy of either Jaksta Video Converter or Jaksta Music Converter for free. After purchasing Jaksta for Mac, just send an email to [email protected] with the app you want and the name of an audio or video site other than YouTube that you enjoy, and you’ll get your free bonus app!

Sometimes an app comes along that just wows you with what it does. It makes something incredibly difficult seem effortlessly simple, and you wonder why nobody had done the same thing before — or if they had, why you didn’t already know about it. Sweetie is one of those apps. It’s more a toy than a full-fledged image processing app, but boy does it impress.

Sweetie turns your photos — and any other images you choose — into beautiful ASCII art. The results are spectacular, and I’ve never enjoyed testing an app for review as much as I did here. The interface has some serious issues, which will need to be rectified before Sweetie can really shine, but that shouldn’t stop you from picking it up.

ASCII Art at its Finest

ASCII art, for the uninitiated, is a graphic design technique whereby pictures are composed of letters, numbers, and symbols. It has roots in pre-Internet culture through bulletin board systems and (dating further back) typewriters. It can be incredibly versatile, especially when you allow coloration of characters and the background.

Sweetie takes out the hard work of illustrating with text characters, crunching the data for you and spitting out an ASCII-fied version of your source image. Note that not every image is suited to conversion to text-based visual art, and you’ll have to experiment early on to see what works.

Not all images adapt nicely to ASCII format, but many that do are stunning. This is Times Square in New York, from late September this year.

Your image appears in the main panel, with an Apple-style stitched-grey background. You can drag and drop or open images via the file menu. The magic happens over on the left. You have choices for font, color, background, character set, grid type, tile size, and padding between tiles. Click the Render button at the bottom to convert the image into ASCII art.

Lots of Options

Courier Bold is selected as the default font, but you can use anything on your computer—selectable via the standard OS X font swatch. Most of the images I used worked well with Verdana and Arial Black. Different fonts leave empty space in different places, and using non-fixed-width fonts can have unpredictable results. Color refers to the character color(s). The cell average option measures the average color at that point in the grid and uses that value. Stencil gives an effect of stencilling the image and using text characters to create the corresponding graininess. You can also choose a single color to use for all characters.

Here’s a photo put through the stencil filter, with cell average for the background color.

Background color options are transparent, solid (one color uniformly; user selectable), auto (the average color of the entire image), or cell average (average color at each grid point). Your selection here may only apply to the backdrop, but it can dramatically alter the feeling and mood of an image. Don’t neglect it.

This is the same photo as up top, put through different filters. Most notably, the transparent background offers a starkly different mood to the solid black of before.

Your character set (aka charset) options are ASCII, letters, symbols, all, or user-defined. You can add or remove characters from the text box. You’d be surprised how much of a difference this part can make. The alphabet often looks radically different to a series of dots and dashes, even with the same source image and filters set.

The grid can be either symmetric or asymmetric. This refers to the uniformity in size of tiles. Each tile holds one character. Symmetric grids have all tiles the same size, whereas asymmetric include a range between the user-defined minimum and maximum. Padding impacts on the space between tiles. Just changing this value turned a few of my images from ugly to magnificent. As with all art, everything comes down to personal taste — one person’s trash may be another’s treasure. My aesthetic preferences may differ from yours.

While symmetric seems to produce more reliably attractive results, asymmetric can be brilliant for some images. (Although this size just doesn’t do it justice.)

It’s easy to save and share the finished product — there’s a share button with Flickr and Facebook support, along with a save button, just below the image. Keep in mind that there’s no undo button, though, so if you don’t save something and want to go back to it later you’ll need to remember the settings that made it.

Interface Oddities

Sweetie is held back by poor usability. It looks simple to use — and indeed it should be — but the user interface has several frustrating quirks and issues. The worst crime is that changes in the text boxes don’t take effect — even after re-clicking the Render button — until you hit Tab or Return or click on another option. This leads to great confusion whenever a change you make doesn’t appear to have any effect. When you click Render, it should render the image with whatever settings are visible at the time. (To be clear, this does not happen.)

Changing font and user-defined colors comes with a similar quirk. If you leave the font swatch open, change some other settings, then go to switch to another font, nothing happens. You have to click on the Font option every time. It’s the same with colors — the color swatch has no effect on the selected color unless you make sure that it’s the active interface element. Sound confusing? It is; inconsistency in UI design is maddening, and it significantly hurts Sweetie’s usability.

It looks like I’m changing the font to Comic Sans Bold, but Sweetie doesn’t register this unless you click on the Font button and then click on Comic Sans again.

Other issues are more minor. Looking through the charset text box is difficult (due to a lack of scroll bars) when the characters don’t all fit in the viewable portion. There is a minimum and maximum tile size for every image — it varies depending on the image dimensions — but the app doesn’t tell you what these are. You’ll only find out that a value is “too large” or “too small” if it falls outside this unspecified. In my experience, padding must be between 0 and 3 (inclusive) for all images. Why does the app not tell me this? It’d save a lot of frustration, and also give users a better idea of their boundaries.

Here’s one more image, so you can see how it copes with a drawing. This is something I sketched on white paper and scanned in, then put through the stencil filter with a custom color for the background.

Conclusion

I thoroughly enjoyed my time with Sweetie. I think it’s fantastic. With just a few clicks of my mouse I can turn a fairly generic photo into a beautiful work of art. It’s the kind of app I look for — the kind that I’ll rave about because it’s just so cool. But in its current state I feel compelled to tell each person that the app is brilliant but the user interface is borked. I hope it gets redone, with better documentation, usability, and guidance for newcomers. Because right now that’s all that holds Sweetie back from being one of the coolest apps I’ve used this year.