Category: Mac

As always every Saturday, our roundup of the hottest application and Apple news! Enjoy!

(Oh, and if you’ve been living in a cave since Tuesday, make sure you check out our full roundup of Apple’s announcement here)

Pocket now comes to the Mac in its own native client

Pocket, the popular “read it later” service which has been available on mobile devices for some time now has now released a native Mac client, which can be downloaded for free from the Mac App Store. The company’s blog announced:

Today we’re thrilled to introduce a brand new app on our next supported platform: Pocket for Mac. […] We brought everything you love about our iOS and Android apps – offline access, distraction-free reading, streaming video, and more – into a beautiful app that is optimized for Mac.

The app is essentially a stripped down version of the popular Read Later client, which was developed by Michael Schneider and who joined the Pocket team to develop the application. Schneider also has no plans to bring further updates to his existing Read Later project however it will continue to work just fine.

If you want to find out a bit more about this client, then make sure you check our Connor’s comprehensive review (spoiler alert: it got our esteemed 10/10 rating!). Otherwise, go ahead and grab it from the Mac App Store.

Apple announces price hike for apps in its European App Stores

Apple has announced a price hike for apps that are sold in its European stores, with a new base price of €0.89, ten cents higher than the previous price. Currently, the change is being seen in the stores in Belgium, Italy, the Netherlands, Germany, Denmark, France and Slovenia, with other stores expected to follow suit shortly. Many customers have taken to Twitter to vent their anger and frustration at this new price rise.

However, the official explanation isn’t the fact that Apple is simply trying to up its revenue figures. In Europe, applications are subject to VAT (or Value Added Tax, which is legally required to be included in the sale price) and VAT rates differ across Europe – there is no standardisation. The iTunes arm of Apple is currently registered in Luxembourg as an S.à r.l. (or Société à responsabilité limitée – literally: company with limited liability) and the VAT rate that Apple has to pay (which in Luxembourg is currently 15%) is absorbed by lower commissions to developers. Whereas in the United States and elsewhere, developers receive the full 70% payment from Apple, in the EU it is closer to 60% due to the VAT cost. The state of the Euro is also a factor, which has been steadily decreasing over the past 12 months against the major world currencies (back at the end of October 2011), €1.00 was equal roughly to $1.40 – now €1.00 only gets you $1.30 in return).

It isn’t only Eurozone countries that have been affected, too. In the UK, the base price for apps has also been rising steadily – back in July 2011 the base price for an app rose from £0.59 to £0.69, and in a higher tier from £1.19 to £1.49. However, seeing as the UK is not (yet) part of the Eurozone, the price increases described above will not affect British consumers (or any other European countries that are not in the Euro either). The US App Stores also have not been affected at time of writing.

Parallels users shouldn’t upgrade to Windows 8, yet

Despite the fact the final version of Windows 8 was released back on Friday, Parallels have been warning their Mac users not to upgrade to the new version just yet until they finish their rigorous testing process of the new operating system in a virtual environment. The company posted a note, which stated (among other things):

If you are planning on upgrading from an existing Windows OS to Windows 8, we strongly suggest waiting until Parallels has finalized testing the upgrade process. Upgrading now may damage your virtual machine, causing you to lose all your data, files and Windows applications.

The company is working hard on bringing full support for Windows 8 to Mac users, and users should receive an in-app notification when the testing is complete. Until then, resist that upgrade! (as tempting as it might be – Windows 8 is actually pretty slick!)

Apple being sued over “Quick Look” feature

Apple is no stranger to big lawsuits, and this time it is being sued over a feature that was introduced back in 2007 with Leopard – Quick Look. A non-practicing entity (which, in harsher words, is a “patent troll”) WhitServe filed a claim in the United States District Court of Connecticut, accusing Apple that their Quick Look feature infringes their patent for a “system for sequentially opening and displaying files in a directory”, which was filed back in 2006 and subsequently granted in April of last year.

The company is seeking damages and court fees from Apple as well as a permanent injunction against any further use of Quick Look on OS X. We’ll keep you updated on this story should anything else happen.

Heard Anything Else?

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

Skitch received a major upgrade to version 2.0 last September, taking the Mac community by storm—in a bad way.

Personally, I’m pretty open-minded towards app upgrades. I almost always welcome changes made to an app’s design and functionality, giving it the benefit of testing out the changes first before making any judgments. So, you can imagine how curious I was when I saw how version 2.0 enraged so many of Skitch’s users just after it was released. Did Evernote really push out an update that broke Skitch, a fine application, and made it clunky and unusable?

The New Skitch

After buying out Skitch last year, Evernote pushed this major update to fully integrate Skitch with its service while giving it a fresh UI redesign to coincide with it with its iPhone and iPad counterparts. Considering that this is a major upgrade for a very successful app, you would have thought Evernote would have something juicy in store for its wide user base.

Instead, many thought it was the biggest mistake on the part of the company, as the new version removed several of Skitch’s key functionalities. Even big names like TechCrunch and TUAW felt that the app completely lost the unique touch that made it one of the most popular screen snapping and annotation tools for the Mac.

This review is of the latest version (2.0.2), so I’m testing out all of its features, including those recently added (or in this case, re-added) to the app. If you haven’t made the jump to version 2 yet, read on to see what the real deal is about Skitch’s problematic upgrade.

How It Works

So, before going into the comparison, let’s take a look at how Skitch 2 works as a standalone app.

No presumptions and expectations, just Skitch 2.0.2.

Upon launching the app, you’re greeted with a log in window where you can either register a new Evernote account or sign in with your existing one—the first tell-tale sign that complete integration with Evernote is in full swing.

The Welcome window then prompts users to first import existing Skitch 1.0 documents to your Evernote account. This means you’ll see all of your screenshots on both the web and Mac versions of the app. If you decide to skip this, click on the Later button.

By default, you’re taken to a dark gray dashboard where all Skitch notes synched to Evernote are displayed. To actually go to the canvas, click on the four-squared Evernote button at the top beside the sync icon.

Screen Snapping

At this point, there are two ways to take a screenshot: use the menu bar icon to take crosshair and fullscreen screenshots, or click on the Screensnap button at the top centre to open the drop down menu. You have several options, such as full screen, screen snap, camera, etc.

On the menu bar, you can click on Capture for more options, such as Menu Snapshot and Window Snapshot. Menu Snapshot snaps the active menu (excluding the background) after three seconds, while the Window Snapshot snaps, well, the active window. Both require you to click on the menu or window before snapping.

Skitch’s menu bar icon only allows Crosshair and Fullscreen. When taking a crosshair snapshot though, you’ll need set the final width and height of the screenshot before actually capturing it.

Annotation

After taking a screenshot, the next step would be to edit it.

The basic editing and annotation tools can be found on the left side of the window: Arrow, Text, Shape, Pen, Colors and Tool sizes, Pixelate, and Crop and resize. Clicking on Shape and Pen displays sub tools for more options, such as Highlight, Ellipse, Line, etc. You can also select these tools using keyboard shortcuts, which are listed in the Tools menu.

Once you’re done, you can rename the finished image by clicking on the timestamp found above the canvas. You will also find a Share button and a Trash icon at the far right if you’d like to share the image or delete it to start anew.

I do have a problem with the app having no pointer tool to just select and move annotations around the screenshot. You’d have to carefully click on the annotation, or you’ll end up creating another arrow, text box, or shape by accident. You also can’t change font styles other than size and colour, so you’re stuck with a single font outlined in white.

Saving Your Snaps

There are three ways to save a screenshot: Drag Me, Export, or Save to Evernote.

Drag Me, a popular Skitch feature, enables you to drag your screenshots to your desktop. Simply select the file format of your choice and drag.

You can also drag the finished image to file sharing services like CloudApp or Dropplr. It saves you the extra clicks to export a screenshot to a folder. I do advise resizing Skitch into a smaller window before doing so. Dragging while the app’s on full screen mode doesn’t seem to work.

Exporting an image simply allows you to choose where to save the image and in what file format. If you’d like more control over where and in what format to save your screenshots, choose this option.

Lastly, you can save by synching screenshots to your Evernote account. In Preferences, you can choose to save/sync to Evernote automatically, have Skitch ask first, or never ask to do so. If synched, your screenshots are available anywhere on any Evernote platform. The problem here is that you don’t have any other option to go for if you choose not to save to Evernote.

Sharing Your Snaps

Skitch’s sharing options include share via email, Messages, Twitter, Facebook, and setting the image as a desktop wallpaper.

Sharing via email doesn’t seem to work, though. The email contains only text and a link to Evernote.com—nothing more. Unless this is a bug of some sort, this makes the feature practically useless. Likewise, I don’t see how anyone would want to set annotated screenshots as their desktop wallpaper. To each his own, I guess. Sharing easily to social networks is a plus though as it saves users time from that extra step of saving to desktop and then uploading to Twitter or Facebook.

Below these options are the ability to share and copy the URL to a screenshot. The screenshot is essentially uploaded to Evernote’s service and made visible through the shared link. This enables public viewing of and access to your screenshots. If you prefer not to use Evernote to share your screenshots online, you can disable sharing anytime by clicking on Share » Stop Sharing.

The Big Changes

Putting it side-by-side with version 1.0.12, big changes have been made to Skitch.

Besides the universal design, Evernote introduced new features to the app:

• Uploading and synching Skitch notes or screenshots to Evernote, with available sync options.
• Being able to search through Skitch notes for text annotations, including handwriting.
• Importing previous screenshots from Skitch 1.x.
• Pixelate and Highlight tools
• Ability to modify the width and height of the screenshot before capture.
• Ability to easily click and resize shapes
• Ability to multi-select images for easier deletion.
• New keyboard shortcuts

Unfortunately, they weren’t satisfied with just adding new stuff. They removed and complicated many of Skitch’s core features as well:

• No more Snap from Link option.
• No more saving screenshots to (S)FTP and to other accounts besides Evernote.
• No more saving to other file formats (i.e. PDF) besides what is available (.png, .jpeg, .tiff, .bmp, and .gif). You can’t even control the quality of JPG files anymore.
• Speaking of which, no more compressed JPG files.
• No more resizing images by simply resizing the Skitch window.
• No more editing font styles other than colour and size.
• No more pointer tool.
• No more timed or countdown screenshots. They replaced it with Menu Capture.
• No more direct URLs to screenshots.
• No more image size presets and ability to insert a watermark into images.
• Very limited sharing options.
• An annoying dock icon that won’t go away.

Removing and complicating these tasks have crippled the app to the point that many find it unusable and alien to one’s workflow. For instance, many of Skitch’s users value the ability to upload content via FTP onto their own servers, as it allows sharing and previewing images privately, so to speak. In contrast, pushing all content to Evernote means publicly displaying these images using Evernote’s service.

Evernote’s intentions are clear: they want to push existing users and their content directly to their service. It’s a shame though that they chose to do this at the expense of ease of use and flexibility, leaving users with a completely different app with very little left to work with.

Fortunately, Evernote has listened to the outcries and made version 1.0.12 available for download from their website. You can also find a copy over at MacUpdate. If you upgraded your Mac App Store copy and would like to revert back to the older version, you can uninstall and download, or use Time Machine to grab the old version back.

The Verdict

Comparing it to version 1, is Skitch 2 a huge step backward in terms of design and usability?

In my opinion, absolutely.

First and foremost, I have no problem with Skitch’s new makeover. It’s clean and clutter-free. Since the goal was to also pattern it to the look and feel of Skitch for iOS, I think they did a good job at it. I even find a couple of Skitch’s newer features useful. Being able to modify the size of the screenshot before capture, cropping images, and sharing to social networks like Twitter and Facebook are just a few that I found useful to my own workflow.

The downfall is really in the lack of both usability and overall functionality— the key features that made Skitch the great screenshot tool that it was. Using version 2 for the first time, I actually had to relearn Skitch to be able to get the hang of it again. While it didn’t take long for me to do so, I find it ironic that this universal design, clean as it may be, sacrificed ease of use and familiarity. Long-time power users are obviously not pleased.

Moreover, I don’t understand the reasoning behind the decision to remove and/or complicate simple features, such as resizing, cropping, running silently on the menu bar, etc. Since these are some of Skitch’s successful features, it’s clear that Evernote didn’t test this version for initial user feedback before making it available to the public. If the premise is to make Skitch 2 work similarly to its iOS counterparts, it’s definitely not working for Mac users.

Conclusion

I’d like to be optimistic towards Skitch and Evernote though in that I’m keeping a close eye on the development, hoping that they will see the light and bring back some of Skitch’s best features back. While that’s in the works—and I sure hope it is—I’ll keep using version 1.0.12.

Are you still using Skitch despite the huge drawback? Do you plan on making the switch to a different screenshot tool?

I teach high-school students in a one-room schoolhouse in the state of Vermont. I am not an English teacher, science teacher, home-economics teacher, or history teacher; instead, I am a generalist. I teach my students a little bit of everything, and for the really hard stuff, the students work with outside mentors. But of all the things I don’t teach, the one subject I really don’t teach is math. When it comes to math, my skills and knowledge simply don’t add up.

That’s why I wanted to play a game called DragonBox+. Advertised as a “revolutionary math game” for learning basic algebra, DragonBox (I hoped) would help me brush up my skills while also giving me a tool to use with my students. Of course, with high-school students (especially most of my students), any hint of “math” turns them off. If DragonBox does what it says it can do, then maybe my students can get tricked into learning algebra. That’s something I had to try.

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Overview

Developed by WeWantToKnow, a French-Norwegian company focused on developing “a new generation of learning games,” DragonBox+ is a video game designed to teach kids the basic rules of algebra in under an hour. While it’s designed for children around the age of ten years old, I found that it worked well enough to remind this 35-year-old man how much he had forgotten from Mr. Divencenzo’s 8th-grade math class.

How it works

There’s nothing on the title screen that would tell you this is a math game. In fact, until you get a good portion of the way into the game, you’ll have no idea that you’re learning math.

The game board is divided into two sides. On one side, there’s a box and some cards with monster faces on them. On the other side, there are some more cards. To win the round, you have to isolate the box on one side. And that’s basically it.

Since this is a game, though, there are certain rules you have to follow. For example, each card has a “night” card, which looks just like it, except in darker colors. If you drag a night card onto a regular card (or vice versa), the monsters disappear and you’re left with a card that has something like a swirling black hole on it (as if the monsters had been sucked into a void or something). If you click on that swirling card, it disappears.

In other words (and remember, I’m not a math guy), there are negative cards and positive cards, and they can cancel each other out.

As the problems progress (there are 20 problems over 5 chapters), more rules are introduced, rules that are the DragonBox+ equivalent of multiplication and division. But because they’re introduced using monster faces and night cards, your children aren’t going to shirk from learning the rules. And when all is said and done, they’ll have mastered basic algebra.

Enter The Dragon

When WeWantToKnow sent me the reviewing code to download the app, they suggested I try to find a ten-year-old kid to play the game with me, since that’s the intended audience. Unfortunately, I don’t have easy access to any ten year olds. On the other hand, I’m a bit immature myself, so I think I can appreciate what they’d appreciate.

First, there’s the dragons. I mentioned that the game is broken into 5 chapters, with 20 problems each. When the chapter starts, you get a little picture of something at its beginning stages (an egg, a test tube, etc.). As you move through the problems, the egg or test tube starts to transform, growing bigger with each problem, until finally, after you solve the twentieth problem, you get to see the dragon in all its glory.

It may not sound like much to a sophisticated individual like yourself, but to a ten year old kid, watching that dragon become more powerful is probably about the coolest thing in the world. Wired reported that all the dragons in the game were drawn by a fourteen-year old girl, so not only are they intended for kids, but they were drawn by a kid too.

As you move through each of the problems, you get scored on three different dimensions. The first dimension is whether you isolated the box (i.e., solved for X); the second is whether you isolated the box using the right number of moves (i.e., not only did you solve for X, but you did it as efficiently as possible); and the third is whether had the right number of cards remaining (i.e., you found the simplest form of the equation). If you are successful on at least one of those dimensions, then you get to see the next stage of the dragon.

X = What Now?

While I thoroughly enjoyed playing this game and felt like I learned/re-learned the rules of basic algebra, I also felt a little annoyed because, as a teacher, I couldn’t put a name to things that I learned. I mean, yes, if you gave me a basic algebra problem right now, I could, thanks to DragonBox+, solve it or simplify it. But if you asked me if I knew how to perform an inverse operation, I’d look at you like you had two heads.

But, of course, in the real world, it doesn’t matter if you know the jargon or not. What matters is that you know how to use a night card to cancel out a day card (or vice versa) to isolate the box and see the next stage of the dragon. No, wait: it matters that you know how to do the math you need to get through life. And DragonBox can get you going in that direction pretty well.

It’s not all fun and games

I realize I’m making it sound like DragonBox+ only uses cards with monster faces on them, but that couldn’t be further from the truth. In fact, only the first groups of problems in each chapter use the monster faces. As the problems progress, the game introduces, first, cards that look like dice faces, then letter variables (i.e., “c” and “-c”), and then regular numerals, so that, by the time you read the 20th problem in each chapter, you’re solving/simplifying an equation that could be found in any traditional math textbook.

And once you finish the final chapter, you can go back through the entire game with 100 different equations, none of which use the monster faces. Of course, by that time, just playing the game (i.e., doing the math) is a lot of fun, so you don’t care about the monsters. Believe it or not, all you care about is solving for x.

Final Thoughts

DragonBox+, which is available not just for Mac, but for iOS, Android, and PCs, is a fun, addictive, and challenging way to master basic algebra. It’s relatively inexpensive, provides over an hour of entertainment, and actively makes you smarter.

How could I not recommend it?

ScreenFlow 4, the most recent version of the premier Mac screencasting application by Telestream, landed yesterday. We were given a look at it last week in advance of its official release and have the review for you hot off the press!

Read on to see how ScreenFlow 4‘s feature improvements, such as improved production features and Retina capabilities, stack up and whether it’s worth the hefty price tag.

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Why Screencasts?

Screencasts are an incredibly useful way to teach people how to use applications. A well-edited screencast can make using a new web app or understanding a computer-based task a breeze for anyone, regardless of their prior ability. A simple three-minute screencast can even take the pain out of a tech support call with your parents! They’re vastly superior to lengthy descriptions and screenshots.

Introducing ScreenFlow 4

ScreenFlow is arguably the best screencasting app available for the Mac, with Camtasia for Mac the closest competitor. It’s essentially a polished and purpose-built video editing app designed to make creating screencasts as painless as possible. Version 4 brings a host of new features that take its capabilities to a new level.

Design

As Steve Jobs said, “Design is not just what it looks like and feels like. Design is how it works.” ScreenFlow 4 neatly exemplifies this idea; it looks great but the true test of its design is in how well it works.

The interface design of the Edit window is clean and follows a similar design aesthetic to iMovie and several of Apple’s other apps, using many different shades of grey to create a professional interface that isn’t distracting or overbearing. While the layout is intuitive and easily understandable by anyone who has ever done audio or video editing, the use of clear recognisable icons is excellent and allows you to dive right in.

Recording

The design of the recording window is also superb — it pops up as soon as you start a new recording and allows you to quickly access every setting you need. Its default is to record the desktop from your screen but it has three other options that are worth mentioning.

• Record Video from: This option allows you to record video from your FaceTime camera or other connected device instead of recording your screen.
• Record Audio from: Allows you to select your audio source, either the Built-in Microphone or other connected device — it found my USB microphone immediately.
• Record Computer Audio: This is a simple check box that allows you to record the audio coming from your computer — you do have to install a small driver for this to work, but ScreenFlow walks you through it.

As you can see there is also a Record button and a simple help icon, as if it wasn’t clear enough.

The final button in the bottom right is a switcher that allows you to set a Timer, simply enter how long you want the recording to last and hit the Set Timer button.

You don’t need to define a capture area before recording, as ScreenFlow records your entire screen with an algorithm that gives you the highest quality recording, low file sizes, and the flexibility to record everything and decide later what to edit out.

It’s this powerful simplicity that makes ScreenFlow such as useful tool.

When you stop a recording, ScreenFlow immediately launches the editing window with all of your recorded sources placed in the timeline. It’s wise to set easy-to-remember keyboard shortcuts for starting a recording and for pausing it.

As Jeffery Way (the Nettuts+ Editor) will tell you, the best way to record a screencast is to speak clearly and take your time. Using pause gives you space to think about what you are going to say next and reduces the editing you’ll have to do later!

Editing

Once you’ve finished recording ScreenFlow takes you to the editing window, here’s where the fun begins.

The beauty of a professional app like ScreenFlow is that it allows you to keep things simple if you need, while also providing the tools to get creative should the project require it. I won’t go into the details of editing, suffice to say that it’s reasonably intuitive once you’ve grasped the idea of marking In and Out points and using Ripple Delete to keep editing time to a minimum.

What I will do is take a look at some of the features that make ScreenFlow 4 such a powerful tool for creating professional screencasts. ScreenFlow 4 introduces a few new features that help keep ScreenFlow ahead of the curve, these include:

• Nested Clips — which allow users to merge multiple elements into a single clip on the timeline, making it easier to access and edit content and apply filters and video actions.
• Chroma Key — which allows users to replace a green (or any color) background with a custom video or still image background, adding a professional look to video productions.
• Full-Screen Retina Recording — which allows you to create extremely high quality productions.
• Subtitles and Closed Captions — which allows users to create ADA approved subtitles and closed captions in multiple languages.
• Dynamic Update — a feature that offers the ability to automatically reload media that has been modified in another application, saving time and disk space.

These are all superb updates that can add polish and give your screencasts an edge, but some of the simpler features are just as important for creating a great production. Here are few of the best features of ScreenFlow 4:

• Live Scrubbing — great for easily finding the right spot for a marker.
• Easy Resizing and Scaling of the Video — remove your menu bar from screencasts, add reflection, focus on just one area of the screen, everything you could want is there.
• Powerful Audio Features — bring the level of your audio up to create a professional production, easily duck the audio under some important recorded computer sound, add effects and filters (careful with these…).
• Screen Recording Properties — increase the size of the mouse pointer, add a click, add a click effect (such as a radar lines whenever you click).
• Add Callouts — to improve your screencast ScreenFlow allows you to add callouts that highlight a certain area of the screen, or your mouse, by darkening or blurring the background. You can also zoom in to further highlight a particular action.

Conclusion

ScreenFlow 4 is a powerful screencasting application that is surprisingly easy to learn. It’s designed to make creating professional screencasts as quick and effortless as possible and succeeds with aplomb. It does, however, come with a reasonably hefty price tag of $99 for the full version ($29 as an upgrade). On first look this might seem steep, but it’s a fair price for such a professional screencasting application. If you have a need for an app like ScreenFlow, then chances are you need it to enhance your business or are making money directly from it — in which case it’ll pay for itself pretty quickly. You can always check out the free trial first to make sure it’s the app for you before shelling out for it.

ScreenFlow is a great example of what a well-designed app should be: the perfect tool for a particular task. It’s the powerful simplicity of ScreenFlow that makes it such an indispensable tool for screencast creation.

It’s easy to get lost among all the new content that we are around everyday. Throughout the day I usually find through many different ways (Twitter, RSS and what not) tons of articles and blog posts that I would like to read, but can’t do so right then and there. That’s why apps like Instapaper, Pocket and Readability exist, so that you can save articles for later without getting them lost in the sea of content out there.

But having an account with each of these services can get pretty confusing, and even if you only use one of them, using it in your browser is not always convenient. Today we’re reviewing Words, an app that can help you access and keep those articles that you bookmark, directly in your Mac. It’s especially interesting now, as it’s the only way to read Instapaper offline on your Mac now that the former Read Later app has been turned into the new Pocket for Mac. And, we’ve got 8 free copies for our readers to try it out, so keep reading!

How It Works

Words is $6 app on the App Store that downloads all of the articles that you’ve bookmarked on your favorite read later service. This way, you can easily access them with a clean, distraction-free interface right from the app, even if you’re offline.

Words arranges all the content that it pulls and it makes it easily searchable, by adding related keywords to certain articles so that you can always find a piece even if you don’t remember its complete name or source.

Compatibility

Words has the ability to simultaneously work with three popular bookmarking services, from which it will continuously synchronize and pull your new articles from. These are the three services it currently supports:

• Readability
• Instapaper (needs a premium account, which is $1 per month)
• Pocket (formerly known as Read It Later)

If you have more than one of these services active in Words, they will all get treated the same, and articles from them will be pulled into the same stream, arranged by bookmarking date, and without really any distinctions between them.

Indexing

What makes Words stand out is the fact that it doesn’t only pull content from your bookmarking accounts, but it also saves them so that they are always available in your computer, regardless of whether you are connected to the internet or not.

This plays as both an advantage and a disadvantage. Pulling content, especially the first time you sync the app, takes a lot of time and if you have a lot of pages bookmarked, perhaps also a lot of space. The advantage is quite obvious: if you spend a lot of time in places where you don’t always have internet (like airports), you can use that time to catch up on your reading.

The Bad

The app’s UI feels a bit clunky and unfinished. While it’s not ugly (quite the contrary, actually), there are a few details that make it feel weird, like for example: not being able to resize the window of the app (the original size is too small for my taste), and not being able to interact with articles in any way other than reading them and accessing their original URL. Click on an article to open it in a full window, and that’s all you can do.

Words also doesn’t have any way to keep track of what you’ve read and what content is new. In fact, other than pulling your content, saving it for online use, letting you read it with a clean interface and indexing it by keywords, there’s not much else you can do with the app. This release of Words feels a little bit too simplistic.

And then there’s a few bugs that I noticed with the app. While setting up Readability and Instapaper was easy and fast, I couldn’t get Pocket to work since the app would crash everytime I tried to setup my account. I’ve heard this is not the case with everyone, so it might have just been a problem with my computer.

Competition

At $6, Words was hard to justify against free similar alternatives like Read Later. Words has the more simplistic approach of the two, and the automatic tagging feature definitely ups the app’s usefulness massively in comparison to Read Later, as well as its compatibility with an additional service, Readability. But Read Later had a much nicer, 3 column customizable interface that let you tweak fonts and article rendering, use a variety of keyboard shortcuts and sharing services, and more. It would still be the winner of the read later wars.

Unfortunately, Read Later has now been removed from the App Store (and will be receiving no more support or updates) to make way for the official Pocket for Mac client. That makes Words a little more interesting, especially since now it is the only Instapaper client for the Mac.

Conclusion

Words‘ strength definitely comes from its ease of use and its compatibility. It may not have big features like sharing to social networks or tracking of what you’ve read, but these and more are said to be coming in a soon-to-be-released update that will bring a major overhaul to the UI and the inclusion of new features. The upcoming new UI previews look really nice, and we’ll be very excited to try it out as soon as its released.

At the moment, Words might be worth the early investment as an offline “library” for keeping everything that you bookmark readily available in your computer. It might not be cheap, but currently it’s pretty much the only app out there that can sync with all these services.

Get Words App for Free

If you’d love to try out Words App on your Mac, the developer has given us 8 licenses to giveaway to our readers. If you’d love to win a copy of Words App, just click the link below and send out the resulting tweet (or just copy and paste), then leave a comment below with a link to your tweet, and let us know what read it later services you’ll want to use in Words App.

 

We’ll close the giveaway on Wednesday, October 31, so hurry and get your entry in!

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

We’ve written before about the proliferation of apps that only do one thing, and do it very well. There’s something to be said for simplistic, minimalist tools that you bust out only when you need them, plow through the task, and close them again with blinding efficiency. One of the categories of apps that I find this to be the most true is graphics and design apps. Tools like Photoshop and Illustrator have ruled supreme as workhorse, Swiss Army Knife-style apps for some time, but innovative and well-designed apps are popping up all over that aim to replace single functions from these apps, and they often do it better than the larger programs.

Today we’re going to take a look at Spectrum, which is a beautifully designed app from developer Eigenlogik. Its designed to make it simple to create color palattes in a simple, beautiful interface. Put on your creative hat, and let’s dig in to find out more about how Spectrum works.

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Interface

First, take a second to notice the staggering level of visual polish that is exhibited in Spectrum. It’s beautiful enough to make you think color palattes are interesting even if you’ve never thought so before.

This is the main screen that you’ll see in Spectrum: your palette library. I’ll go more into the functionality in a bit, but notice a few of the gorgeous visual elements. The purple ribbon indicates the palette in which you are currently working. The beautiful wood texture makes your color palettes really pop off the screen. Finally, notice the iconographic nature of the controls in Spectrum. Rather than buttons with text, nearly every function is facilitated by simple icon-based controls.

Functionality

The library controls are fairly straight forward. You can add tags to your palettes, give them names, and then search through your library using the tags or titles. The three buttons on each palette will let you either duplicate, delete, or edit the palette. Let’s take a look at palette editing.

When you choose to edit a palette, you are show the color wheel by default. The swatches in your palette are displayed across the top, and the active color is indicated by the faint teal glow underneath it. Colors can be added or removed by using the + and – buttons on the top toolbar. There are a number of different settings you can use with the color wheel. Each color is indicated by a small node on the wheel, and the way these nodes move in relation to each other can be set by using the icons in the lower right corner of the window. You can manipulate the nodes individually in Freeform mode, or get precise color relations by using Monochromatic, Analogous, Complementary, Split Complementary, Equilangular, or Rotation Lock modes. The luminosity can be set using the vertical slider on the right, and as the screenshot above shows, there is an entirely different screen for selecting Shades and Tints.

For more granular control, and more precise, value-based settings that artists and designers are used to, there is a Color Inspector.

The Color Inspector can be opened by clicking the magnifying glass icon in the top-right corner of the window, and gives you access to the RGB and HSV values of your color. For those users who are proficient in coding, you can find the hex value for your color at the bottom of the Color Inspector, which brings me to the next section of our tour: real world application.

Real World Application

The way the app functions within itself really is nice and stylish, but where Spectrum really shines is in how it can be integrated into your workflow. First, the aforementioned hex code for a color can obviously be copied-and-pasted into HTML/CSS code, for example, or into your art app (Photoshop, perhaps) to use the colors in your designs. Additionally, you can simply click and drag a color from virtually anywhere within Spectrum into a code editor, and the hex key will automatically be inserted into your code.

You’ll also notice that there are a few icons in the Spectrum interface that I haven’t touched on yet. Let’s start with the Camera icon, located adjacent to the Color Inspector icon.

The Colors from an Image function lets you use an image from your computer to automatically generate a color palette. Here, I’ve chosen my favorite picture of Theodore Roosevelt fighting Sasquatch. The handles on the rectangle that surrounds the image in the screenshot above can be dragged, which lets you choose a specific portion of an image from which to generate a palette, and the slider along the bottom sets the number of colors in your palette. Once the settings are where you want them, simply click Done and your palette will be generated and added directly to your library.

The icon next to the Camera is the Screen Color Picker. This icon turns your cursor into a magnified color picker and will let you grab a color from anywhere on your computer screen, from an interface element, or even straight from a webpage in your browser.

Finally, the Eye icon next to the + and – buttons is your Preview Palette function. This is a particularly neat feature, as it will let you see how the colors you’re working with will interact together, in various shapes and on various backgrounds.

The Preview Palette function is a full screen mode that lets you use the left and right arrow keys on your keyboard to change the shape and layout of your colors (cycling through various arrangements of stripes, circles, flower-like shapes) and the up and down keys to cycle through white, black, light gray and dark gray background colors.

The Verdict

I’m not a world-renowned designer or artist, but the utility that Spectrum provides is clear, and in my opinion can’t be overstated. Its beautiful design makes it easy and enjoyable to use, and the real-world functionality is implemented brilliantly.

The app is a bit on the premium side, price-wise, at $19.99 on the Mac App Store. That said, I imagine that designers and developers who are accustomed to paying hundreds of dollars for powerhouse software like Photoshop might find the utility offered by Spectrum to be well worth the price. That said, we’d love to hear your thoughts in the comments. Is Spectrum’s beautiful design enough to make you tempted to buy it, or is it a bit too premium for a color palatte app for your taste?

This post is part of a series that revisits some of our readers’ favorite articles from the past that still contain awesome and relevant information that you might find useful. This post was originally published on July 20th, 2011.

Over at iPad.AppStorm, Joel Bankhead wrote a fantastic article about what makes a great iPad app icon. It caught my attention, and really got me thinking about the differences between iOS and OS X app icons – Are the principles the same, or very different?

In this article, I’ll be having a look at what you should and should not do in order to make a wonderful OS X icon.

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How Important Is a Good Icon?

It is hard to express just how essential a great icon is, especially with the Mac App Store in play. Many people will go through the App Store and only find out more about an app if their eye is drawn to the icon. Others would argue that this is a foolish thing to do, as the quality of an app could be great, even if their icon is not. This is, of course, true, but an icon is a great representative of the quality of your app. If you’re willing to invest time and money in creating an awesome icon, there’s a good chance that you will have spent the same amount of effort with your app. If you drew a few colourful shapes in MS Paint for your logo, your app’s quality is likely to reflect the same type of effort and investment.

So What Makes a Great Icon?

There are, of course, a huge number of factors which determine just how good your icon is – I’ll touch on those which I think are most important, and give a few examples along the way.

Size

One interesting difference between Mac and iOS icons is that iOS icons are all a fixed size – They fit into that nice box with rounded corners. You can’t really go wrong. With Mac, however, it’s quite the opposite. The default icon size for Mac is 512×512 pixels, but if your icon stretches to the borders of that, your icon won’t look right.

Let’s take, as our first example, some square icons. First up, we have Mixtab, an app which started off on iPad, and whose icon is the exact same as the iPad version. Secondly, we have the Adobe CS4 icons, which, despite being a simple square, were undoubtedly focus-grouped to death. Looking at them side-by-side, the Mixtab icon is much bigger, and doesn’t fit in with the standard icon size in your dock. Adobe, on the other hand, have added a little bit of padding around the square, making the icon fit into your dock much more easily.

Secondly, here’s a screenshot of a whole load of great circular icons – You’ll notice that they are all the same size – It’s this level of consistency which makes the standard of design on OS X so wonderful.

Perspective

If you look at any icon in your dock that represents a real object, you will find that they have a certain perspective, and if you go with a flat icon, or an icon with a very different perspective, your icon will, quite frankly, look ridiculous. One of the most well-known examples of this is the Twitter for Mac app. It’s a great app, but it’s default icon is at an angle which is completely off. Your icon doesn’t have to be perfect, but if it is too conspicuous in your dock, it won’t work.

Number of Elements

When creating an app, it’s important to keep the number of elements to a minimum – One or two should work fine. I don’t care if your app has a billion features, it doesn’t need to have an icon which represents every single feature. The challenge for a designer is to find something which represents the app as a whole.

Something that represents this wonderfully is the icon made by SoftFacade for Eloqua. SoftFacade are an absolutely incredible team, and have made beautiful icons for apps such as Radium, Notificant, and much more. This client, however, requested that they include all kinds of elements in the icon, and it ended up as something of a mess. The elements are drawn to perfection, the perspective is great, but the number of elements just ruins everything.

Realism

There’s a certain level of realism that comes with making an OS X icon – You don’t want a cartoon drawing, or anything too two-dimensional. Icon designers are expected to make 3D icons that look almost like the real thing. “Almost” is an important word there. Your icon should not just be a photo (thought Preview’s icon does contain a photo). It should be slightly unrealistic, to keep with the overall look of the operating system.

One icon which I feel goes too realistic is the Yojimbo icon – It’s a great app, but the icon looks a bit too like a photo. Maybe it’s the texture, or the lighting – I’m not sure. Either way, for me, it just doesn’t work.

Conclusion

I’d like to say that I’m not an app developer, nor am I an icon designer, I’m just an app consumer who knows what he likes and doesn’t like in an OS X app. There are also tons of other factors which I didn’t touch on, such as not using too much text in the icon, illustrating what the app does in the icon, and much more. The elements I focused on are, in my opinion, the most important, and often where many icon designers fail.

There are loads of amazing apps with stunning icons, but unfortunately, as the Mac App Store means anyone can be a developer, we are also seeing more and more unprofessional icons, which is never a good thing. Leave a comment below and let us know what your favorite and least favorite app icons are. What do you think makes a Mac app icon great?

Back in April of this year, the popular service Read It Later was revamped and completely renewed, completely with a brand new name, Pocket. Pocket continues to be one of the popular mobile apps that is always featured on roundups of must-have apps for your iPhone or Android device.

Today, the developers of the hit bookmarking service released Pocket for Mac, an official client for the service on OS X, to work alongside and in sync with other platforms. If you’ve been using Read Later on your Mac, the release of Pocket for Mac replaces that too with developer Michael Schneider having worked on the official client. Shall we take a look?

What is Pocket?

Pocket is a “read it later”-style service that allows users to bookmark parts of the webs to be read in the future. The basic premise is that you come across an article you like and then “pocket” it in a central location, one that can be accessed from a variety of platforms including your mobile and, from today, your Mac (at least, officially).

Pocket for Mac is a brand new app, but it’s been designed with Michael Schneider, developer of the aforementioned Read Later app. It borrows some of nuances from Read Later but combines it with the beautiful design of Pocket, as Schenider explains below.

We took everything you love about Read Later and made it better, incorporating Pocket’s beautiful design and functionality. I hope you like it.

The only bad thing is, the original Read Later app has been pulled from the App Store and won’t be supported going forward. If you were using it to read Instapaper articles on your Mac, you’ll have to look elsewhere, perhaps to the Words app. Still, for Pocket users, the new version is a big boon.

Getting Started

Once you’ve installed the app, you’ll get a short tutorial of sorts introducing you to the service. You should take the hint to get some extensions for your browsers setup — if you haven’t already used the service — allowing for fast bookmarking and storage of articles into Pocket. Likewise, it might be worth taking this opportunity to download the mobile apps to your devices too.

The design of Pocket is very familiar to other reading apps. By default, there’s two panes: one for a piece of selected content and the other for your list of saved items. As previously mentioned, you can use your browser to save items, but you can also save items from the mobile apps and even straight from your clipboard.

I didn’t actually have the Pocket extension installed in Safari, but in seconds I had it up and running. Then, when I started adding in articles, they instantly appeared in Pocket for Mac. The whole setup is fluid and seamless — it just works.

Editor’s Note: And if you’d prefer to use a bookmarklet, you can just drag it to your bookmarks bar. If you’re using Safari, seconds later you’ll see the bookmarklet synced via iCloud to your other Macs and iOS devices. That’s a rather handy way to get Pocket saving ready everywhere!

Reading Articles

When the times comes to read the articles you’ve saved, they’re presented, by default, in an optimised view that gets rid of the clutter from the original webpage. This is done much in the same way as features like Reader in Safari, which rids you of anything but the content you actually want. This isn’t for everyone, and fortunately there’s a simple switch at the top of the app that will launch you into an embedded browser showing the original source. Though, you should note that the optimized articles will be downloaded for offline reading, while you’ll have to be online to see the full, original articles.

As is expected with this kind of optimised view, you can manipulate the typography to better suit you by changing the size, presence of serifs in the typeface and switch between left and print-style justified alignments. We’d expect these features from any app that uses these kind of features, so it’s certainly welcome to have them in Pocket. One thing to note is that you can’t chose your own font, and rather can only choose from one serif and one sans-serif font.

Articles can also be starred to be organised by a filter later on, and also tagged to gain a similar way of organisation. You can also share articles right from within Pocket for Mac on a number of platforms, including Facebook and Twitter.

Design and Interface

Simply put, Pocket looks great. It’s fairly minimalist, allowing most of the app’s real estate to be dedicated to the content itself. Most of the actual functionality comes from the handful of buttons across the top so Pocket utilises the simplicity and intuitive nature of its iOS origins.

Pocket is one of the simplest app available for its purpose. It’s a tad too simple, though, if you’re used to the options in the original Read Later app, but then again, it’s got just what’s needed for simple offline reading on your Mac.

Final Thoughts

Pocket for Mac is sound in both function and design. If you’re looking for an app to fill this purpose, chances are that Pocket is the perfect one. It’s already established mobile apps and browser extensions make it super easy to get up and going not only on your Mac, but all your devices.

In testing, we didn’t notice any stability or performance issues with Pocket. It’s just an overall well-rounded app that would be most welcome sitting in your Mac’s dock.

Ever find yourself thinking of the games that you played years ago, perhaps on your first computer? They were simple by today’s standards, with low-res graphics and insanely low system requirements, but the captivated us and inspired many of us to learn to program. The GOG (Good Old Games) team has been working to bring back the magic of classic gaming to modern computers, rereleasing titles that were originally released 15 or more years ago.

After starting out supporting games on Windows, GOG just recently added Mac support to a number of their top games. Let’s take a look at how GOG games run on the Mac, and take one of my old favorites – SimCity 2000 – for a spin in Mountain Lion.

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The GOG Gaming Experience

Back in the early ’90′s, you would have bought your games on disks and floppies from local stores, or perhaps mail ordered them from a catalog (gasp). Today, we’re so used to installing games from the App Store or Steam that it seems second nature. You can still buy games on disks today, but it’s far more rare today to have to buy a disk to get the game you want.

If you wanted to start playing older games, you could try to find your old disks, or search eBay for original copies, then run them in an app like Boxer or perhaps a version of DOS running in VirtualBox or Parallels. Your odds of getting the game you want up and running that way aren’t great, though. That’s where GOG comes in. It’s built up a library of classic games, gotten quite a few of them ready to run on the Mac, and made it as simple to run a classic game as it is to install any OS X app.

To get started, you’ll need to create a GOG account, which will let you manage all of the games you purchase in your own online library. GOG is giving away 10 games for free with new accounts right now, 8 of which work on the Mac, including classics such Beneath a Steel Sky. That way, if you just want to see how it words, you can get some classic games on your Mac for free to try it out. Or, you can go ahead and purchase games and download them, if you want.

GOG lets you download games directly with their bonus material (manuals, wallpaper, soundtracks, and more, depending on the game). Alternately, you can use GOG’s own downloader, which is a small app that promises faster downloads, notifications when there’s updates for your games, and more. It’s nice, especially if you’ll be downloading a lot of GOG games, but not necessary if you just want to grab a quick game.

I’m always curious about how apps are put together, and was especially interested to see what GOG was using to make classic games run on the Mac. After downloading SimCity 2000 and starting it up, I noticed the anticipated DOS prompt, and dug into the app’s internal files to see what was powering it. After digging a bit, I found that it was based on Boxer, a suspicion that was quickly confirmed by checking Boxer’s blog. Boxer is a specialized port of DOSBox for OS X, and its developer worked with the GOG team to get a standalone version of Boxer that runs individual classic DOS games as their own Mac apps. You can’t jump back down to the DOS console, and will for the most part never have to think about your GOG games running inside DOS, since the final implementation just works.

Time to Play

Ready to play? You’ll be glad to hear that playing SimCity, at least, was virtually flawless for the most part, for me. The emulator runs like any modern Mac app, complete with native full-screen support. There’s one major thing to remember: GOG games are run in an emulator, so interacting with the game is much like, say, running a program in Windows in VMware Fusion. The mouse integration isn’t 100% smooth yet; you’ll have to click into the window for the game to “grab” your mouse, and then will have to CMD+click to get your mouse released. Alternately, you can just CMD+tab or open Mission Control to switch to another app. Almost all of your Mac keyboard shortcuts will work fine, and won’t be picked up by the game, but if something feels off, keep in mind that the game isn’t a real native Mac game and instead is running in an emulator.

Running in an emulator gives you a few interesting things with the games. First, you don’t actually have access to your Mac’s real file system, and saved game states and more are simply saved inside the game. You’ll find all of your GOG games’ saved states inside your ~/Library/Application Support/Boxer folder, and you can reset any game to its default settings from the emulator’s File menu. Along with that, you can choose from three different graphics rendering modes, control the game’s sound independent of your OS X sound, send special characters to the emulator from the menu, and speed up the emulator’s speed to make the game run faster through slow areas. There’s also a built-in screenshot option, but I found that using OS X native screenshots worked fine for the most part.

Once you’re ready to start playing, everything should work much as you’d remembered. You’ll smile to hear the old soundtracks, and perhaps be frustrated at how much you have to relearn to play the games successfully. The graphics looked better with the default mode, in my opinion, though if you’d like a less blocky look, you can try the included “Smooth” rendering mode. For the most part, though, there’s not much to mess with, settings-wise, and you’ll just get to sit back and play your game like it’s a standard App Store app. That’s sure a lot nicer than most emulated games, where you’ll need to tweak settings to get everything to work.

It might take a bit to get used to if you haven’t used DOS based games in a while. Scrollbars have to be dragged and the screen will delay a bit in refreshing. Menus also feel terribly broken at first, as you’ll have to click and hold to open the menu, then hover over the entry you want and release your mouse. Just like in the good old days. At least this time, if the game freezes, a quick CMD+Q will close the game and let you quickly start over. I was able to crash SimCity by trying to view the included “Will TV” videos, and also got the game nearly unresponsive by speeding up the time in-game and running multiple disasters at the same time. Remember: you’re in an emulation, which makes it much like running the game in an old computer, except this time, the old computer is running right inside your Mac.

And if you ever get stuck in the games, you’ll have the full original documentation at hand from GOG, ready for your reading pleasure. In many ways, the manuals are more fun to read than they were originally, since much of what they say feels so quaint for today. The SimCity 2000 guide, for example, helpfully lets you know that you need a mouse and that your city’s file name will be a shortened version of the name if your computer doesn’t support long file names. Since you’re running inside DOS, suddenly that ancient restriction applies to your Mac in 2012, too.

Conclusion

The GOG games are a fun way to go down gaming memory lane if you loved playing computer games back in the early ’90′s, and they’re equally great for going back and playing games you missed back then and have heard others praise ever since. The Boxer-based emulation brings a nearly perfect gaming experience. In fact, odds are you’ll have less trouble playing in the emulator than you did back on your computer when these games were first released.

For the next 9 hours or so, GOG has a launch promo running with 50% off a set of classic games, including SimCity, so you might want to hurry and grab it if you’re interested. Otherwise, most GOG games run between $3-$6, easily cheap enough to grab a few for some afternoons of retro gaming.

Album artwork is a big part of iTunes! For a lot of people, it helps make content easier to locate by adding an image to each artist and album. It’s also a half-developed feature, however. Apple could do a lot more with the album artwork from the iTunes Store. The developer of Bowtie had the same thoughts, so he introduced an app that put artwork on your desktop where you’ll see it often. Now you don’t have to open iTunes to see what’s playing; do a quick show-the-desktop gesture on your trackpad instead.

The Bowtie utility isn’t everything, though. Themes make it worth using: themes designed by individuals. There is a superfluity of different ways to view album artwork with Bowtie, from the pleasant default theme included with the app to minimal, yet interesting ones like Pixld. Since there are 15 pages in the app’s theme downloader and even more around the ‘net, it seemed like a good idea to gather up the most fetching for Mac.AppStorm readers. Keep reading for ten of the best Bowtie themes out there.

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Important Information

All themes are free so there will be no mention of price in any of the entries. Also, none of them are optimized for the MacBook Pro with Retina display, so don’t expect things to look perfect.

Lastly, use the latest version of Bowtie, 1.5, with these themes. All of them have been tested and function properly with this update.

TurnTable Bowtie

First off is a very fancy and elaborate theme from desktop modding specialist Murat Levent, aka neodesktop. Levent spent a fair amount of time designing and coding TurnTable Bowtie, one of the few themes that looks like a mini-app. It has a static turntable for a retro feel, a mute button, a playback time indicator, and controls. There’s also an option to show or hide the artwork.

TurnTable Bowtie is a 345 KB download.

Developer: Murat Levent

Lux

Australian designer Ryan Christensen brings a unique theme to the table. Instead of the usual album artwork display, Lux pulls the top five images from the artist’s Last.fm profile and shuffles them in a 400-pixel frame. (Album artwork is still displayed and you can click it to play or pause the current playing song.) This makes for a different look at what you’re listening to. If there’s a band, all the members will usually be in one picture together. For artists like Florence and the Machine, however, lead singers — in this case, Florence Welch — get the spotlight.

Lux is a 484 KB download.

Developer: Ryan Christensen

Embedded Bowtie

And now, a deeper look at things. Chinese designer known as RyanGe brings a new dimension to the table using an illusion. Many designers make good use of the drop shadow, a tool that makes the element selected appear as if it’s above something on the screen. Likewise, an inner shadow will give the appearance that something is embedded. These are the basics of such techniques and there is a lot more to making things appear realistic. Well, RyanGe had no problem here. Embedded Bowtie is a beautiful, simple illusion that samples your wallpaper so the theme comes across as being sunk into your desktop. It’s nifty.

Embedded Bowtie is a 254 KB download.

Developer: RyanGe

curLion

The concept of this theme was originally formulated by Austrian graphic designer Philipp Antoni. After his version, titled Curl, went out of date (he works for Microsoft’s Mac software division), a student who goes by the name of Sentry15 on deviantArt decided to modernize the idea for Lion. CurLion was his intent brought to life, and it works exceptionally well. It has continuous scrolling of the track name and artist, a play/pause button integrated into the artwork, and a very fancy visual effect for its main appearance.

CurLion is a 364 KB download.

Developer: Sentry15

Blood Diamond

This unique theme comes from deviantART member and artist CTF0. It’s not recommended to use it with a red background, but blue is perfect. The theme simply displays the song title, artist, and album artwork. There are no toggles or fancy features, just a diamond design that looks nice with a simple wallpaper. It does come in two variations, one of which is titled Blood Diamond Scroll, a special edition that scrolls the artist name and song title.

Blood Diamond is a 502 KB download.

Developer: CTF0

PaperRift

Only the anonymous Creeze could design such a theme as this. That’s not a joke, either, because nobody really knows what his name is — there’s no proper link between him and the only other search result on the Internet. So, for the sake of proper facts, I’ve left a URL off his name. The them, however, is fantastic. It’s skeumorphic and is supposed to look like crumpled paper. There’s a playback time indicator in the form of a yellow bar and the usual album artwork. The theme looks best when used with a minimal wallpaper.

PaperRift is a, well, unknown download size since there’s no deviantART page for it.

Developer: Creeze

Pixld

From student and designer Taylor Cohron comes a minimal view of what’s playing in your favorite music app. It’s a pixelated view of things, and while the text may be a bit hard to read for some, minimalism is always free of distractions and helpful to folk who don’t enjoy cluttering up their desktop.

Pixld is a 415 KB download and includes the PSDs if downloaded from the author’s deviantART page, just in case you felt like having fun tweaking Cohron’s work to your liking.

Developer: Taylor Cohron

Massive Vinyl

Welcome back designer Taylor Cohron, this time to a larger stage. His Massive Vinyl theme is worthy of much praise with its nice vintage retro appearance. To understand the origin of the inclusion of “massive”, one must look at Laurent Baumann’s third default theme for Bowtie: Vinyl Nano 2.0. It’s tiny and can often get misplaced, so why not make it bigger? That’s what Cohron thought, though his version might be controversial — it’s gigantic at 340 by 300 pixels. In any case, there are playback controls that pop up when the artwork is clicked and the theme does look quite nice.

Massive Vinyl is a 2.1 MB download and includes an Ecoute modification when downloaded from deviantART.

Developer: Taylor Cohron

Fair

Quite a few themes have miniature artwork, but Fair has the smallest of them all. Developed by one Countryvibe, this theme only offers album artwork, scrolling text, and white playback buttons. The funny thing is the buttons aren’t labeled. Instead, the designer thought it better for you to use logic in order to discover the functionality. Have fun.

Fair is a 309 KB download.

Developer: Countryvibe

BTState

Our final theme for this roundup is BTState by one Marique. It’s an extremely simple play-pause theme that uses the Walkway UltraCondensed font. This is probably the most complicated installation of them all since most people don’t have that custom font on their computers, but it’s worth it for the theme. BTState is limited to a play/pause button and song and album titles, so don’t expect an advanced theme.

BTState is a 243 KB download.

Developer: Marique

Your Favorites

Now that I’ve provided you with the ten best Bowtie themes I could find, you’re probably set. However, if you happen to stumble upon something else while browsing the app’s built-in themes section, let us know in the comments. We’d also love to know what you’re using in Bowtie right now and why you decided to choose it.

This morning, I woke up to a Reeder full of articles about Apple’s new announcements in yesterday’s keynote. Living in Asia makes it a bit tough to watch keynotes live, and Apple usually doesn’t even stream them live online. After reading through the articles and checking through Apple.com, I didn’t really feel the need to watch the full keynote. I enjoy watching Apple’s product launches, but this one felt like one I could skip. Incidentally, it turned into a very exciting keynote for Mac users, with new iMacs and Mac Minis, but still, I could find what I needed to know from Apple.com’s pages.

That said, I’ve watched tons of Apple keynotes over the years, especially while Jobs was still alive and doing his magic on stage. I’ve gone back and rewatched portions of old keynotes to see how Apple’s changed (ouch, the fonts in old keynotes hurts to look at), and listening to Jobs’ speeches from when he first came back to Apple gives a unique perspective on the company.

So how about you? Do you always watch Apple’s keynotes, or do you just pick choice ones to watch? Or have you never watched an keynote before (is that even possible)? We’d love to hear your thoughts below!

To say the universe is big would be a gross understatement, so the idea of creating an app that lets people explore outer space must be hugely intimidating. Solar System simulator Cosmographia tackles the subject on a limited scale, by focusing on just the stuff in our galaxy. It has 3D models and star maps, great visual effects, and everything is built from real scientific data.

Cosmographia is akin to a beginner’s guide to the Solar System, and insofar as that it’s an impressive app — well presented and pretty to look at, with no assumptions of prior knowledge. But it doesn’t go deep enough, and you’re likely to leave wanting more.

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Starry, Starry Night

The app presents you with an interactive model of our Solar System, complete with planets, moons, asteroids, the Sun, and a star map. Everything is based on real astronomical data, and presented in gorgeous 3D models. You get a sense for the majesty of the universe, especially with labels and other visual aides turned off in favor of only the bits that are actually out there.

You click and drag with the left mouse button to rotate, or with the right mouse button to pan across the field. Scrolling zooms in and out. Double click on a planet or moon to zoom directly to it. Right click on an object to bring up a contextual menu, with options to track, set it as center of the screen, show a description or basic properties, plot trajectory, and more.

Included with the descriptions are special views of the objects that highlight key features or simply showcase their beauty. This was the best part of the app for me — specially-tailored views of Io casting a shadow on Jupiter’s surface, a sunset over Tasmania, Saturn rising just over the horizon on Titan, Voyager 2 zooming over Neptune’s north pole, and many other similar scenes.

Moving around feels intuitive, and you can explore more systematically with the help of the Search function or the gallery-style view of the 40 main planets, moons, and asteroids. There are also keyboard shortcuts for just about everything, and a guide helps give direction to your explorations. You can also alter the date and time, pausing or accelerating it in either direction, and turn a number of visual features on or off.

Settings Galore

There are loads of visual tweaks. The Milky Way, clouds, atmospheres, shadows, reflection, sun glare, diffraction, brightness, anti-aliasing, anaglyph stereo, labels, constellations, star names, orbital paths, equatorial grids, and twelve special add-on effects can all be toyed with. It’s a good idea to play around with these settings to find the right balance between noise and information. The difference between everything turned on/up and everything turned off is like night and day.

Beauty Only Skin Deep

The 3D models of planets, their moons, and several other key objects look great from a distance, but often lack detail on closer inspection. Most jarring, though, is the way in which the detail gets shown — planets appear perfectly spherical, with textures mapped onto their surface, while asteroids and moons are only slightly more bumpy, some of them come without the benefit of textures. This hurts the experience because it gives no sense of the scale of these surfaces — especially when looking at impact craters and mountain ranges on the rocky planets — or it just plain looks out of place.

Having said that, some of the real-time effects are stunning. Watching shadows dance across Saturn’s surface on a greatly accelerated time-scale, with other planets and moons flying by in the background, is captivating. You can even set objects as a fixed center, and watch the universe seemingly rotate around them. It’s no wonder the pervading viewpoint was that Earth sits at the center of the universe until the Renaissance.

The caveat to my complaints, I should also add, is that astronomers don’t have accurate, complete maps of planetary surfaces and their topography. The developer elected to use only information they could source from current astronomical data and research. This strikes me as a fair compromise, though I maintain my reservations about the decisions made about how and what to model in this virtual Solar System.

Jupiter’s rings aren’t rendered, apparently “because of their extreme faintness.” Wherever Cosmographia could go into greater detail, it skirts around. I was disappointed at the terse descriptions available for each of the objects represented. Cosmographia captured my imagination, and I wanted to know more, but I had to look elsewhere to find it. Simplicity is great, but there comes a point where you want to go deeper. And the app doesn’t measure up to this desire.

A Decent Primer

Cosmographia is more the kind of app that you lose an evening to than one you use as a persistent reference tool. But if you have any interest in space, and don’t happen to be an expert on astronomy or the Solar System, it’s still a good pick. With a clean presentation and pretty graphics, it’s tailor-made for novices to dip their toes into the world of astronomy.

Just because Apple held an iOS-focused event yesterday — there was some Mac news, but most of the announcements were focused on a smaller Apple-branded tablet — doesn’t mean there are no Mac deals. In fact, there are quite a few this week, including Gemini, Trine and Trine 2, and BusyCal 2. Catch them all after the break.

Civilization V, Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic, and Other Aspyr Games

Aspyr Media is the publisher of some of the best games for Mac, from the Call of Duty franchise to Quake 4 to Star Wars: The Force Unleashed. This week, it has a large sale going on for three of its top games: Civilization V: Campaign Edition, Star Wars: Empire at War, and Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic. The titles are priced at $19.99, $9.99, and $9.99, respectively. All of them are well-developed — Civilization V even has Retina display support — and worth the price if you enjoy the types of games. The first is the latest iteration of a classic strategy game, the second an older strategy game, and the third a fun first-person action title. Go download them from the Mac App Store while the sale lasts.

The Mac.AppStorm Snapheal 2 Sponsorship Special

One of the best deals of the week comes straight from our own site, with our Snapheal 2 Sponsorship. Snapheal is already on sell for just $7.99 this week, 60% off of its normal price. Best of all, the MacPhun team is offering a free copy of FX Photo Studio Pro to each of our readers who purchases a copy of Snapheal this week. Check out the sponsorship post for all the details!

The MacHeist Bundle – 2 Days Left!

The MacHeist Bundle has been running for the past week, and now has juts 2 days left to go. It’s one of the cheapest Mac bundles this year at just $29, and includes a ton of awesome software for that price. You’ll get Scrivener, Artboard, Courier, Firetask, Printopia, 15 months of Evernote Pro, and more for that. Be sure to hurry and check out the bundle if you haven’t already!

Is That All?

There might just be more deals out there later this week. Some may even be somewhere other than the Mac App Store. If you happen to spot anything, let us know in the comments so we can add the deals to next week’s post, providing they’re still valid. Have a wonderful week!

It’s very frustrating to take what you think is a great photo only to find it’s blurry when viewed later. Blur can result from poor focus, focusing on an object other than the one intended, or motion. In poor light the camera shutter often must stay open longer to allow in more light and it’s easy to move your hand resulting in a blurred image. Normally after seeing a blurry photo you’d have no alternative but to trash the photo.

On TV shows, there always seems to be a magic “fix photo” button that is used whenever a character needs fix a blurry image that magically restore it to perfect clarity. In real life, there is no magic button. But, there are some programs that can restore some clarity to images, and Blurity is one of the best. It will take a blurry image and in a few clicks produce a photo with recovered detail and far less blur. Let’s see how well it works.

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Getting Blurity

Blurity has been available for Windows for a while, but was just recently released for the Mac. The program is regularly prices at $49, but currently is on sale for $39. There is a demo version available from the publisher’s web site at http://www.blurity.com/download. The demo is fully functional, but adds a watermark reading unregistered to each deblurred image. The demo lets you try the software on a photo you wish to rescue and pay only if the results are worth the cost. If you decide to buy, can be purchased by credit card or using Paypal.

Using Blurity

When you first run Blurity, you’ll be presented with a tutorial to introduce you to the program. This process begins by opening the original blurry image, selecting a sample area of the image that represents the blur in the image, and then clicking Process. Blurity will then attempt to fix the blur. That’s the exact process you’ll need to go through to take the blur away from your own images, so the trial will get your ready to get started.

You begin by loading the original blurred image. You set the sample area by clicking on the original photo placing a red box around a sample area. This area should enclose a portion of the image that clearly shows the blur. The size of this box can be adjusted depending on the size of the area you wish to select and the blurriness of the image. A good sample area will contain a simple shape that completely show the blur and is enclosed by the red box. Areas with no shape or that won’t show blur such as a solid colored floor or background will not work well. Photos with no clear shape also do not work well.

Once you are happy with your selected area, you process the image by clicking the Process button. Blurity will then process the image and attempt to remove the blur. If you’re not happy with the results you can move the adjustment point and try again until the blur is removed and you’re happy with the results. When you are happy with the deblurred image, you can save it to disk.

Results

The results can be impressive when Blurity works well. I tried on several blurry photos, all the result of either the camera or subject moving while taking the photo. For one photo of a squirrel on a log, the results were pretty impressive. For other photos the results were less impressive, but in almost every case the resulting photo looked sharper and clearer than the original image. Often I found it took a number of different source locations to find one that gave the best results. Some source points in fact led to results worse than the original image. Some experimenting will definitely pay off in a better final image.

In all cases the resulting image might be clearer, but also usually looked more noisy. That tradeoff is unavoidable in the algorithm that processes the image and removes the blur. The results are less noisy than any other similar tool I’ve tried, though. For many images, the results were clearly better as the focus improved greatly with only a small increase in noise in the photo. For other images the resulting noise overwhelmed the image. In most cases adjusting the source point could balance the reduction in blur and the additional noise and produce a usable image.

Conclusion

Overall, Blurity does work quite well. The ability to take a single blurry image and often produce something acceptable and occasionally very nice is impressive. The program consistently was able to take my test blurry photos and produce a better image. The resulting final images weren’t as sharp and clear as a well focused original would have been, but in almost all cases were an improvement on the original photo and usually good enough for family shots.

Sometimes it required tweaking and moving the source point for the photo to get the best result. This often felt like trial and error, but over time it became clear that selecting a clearly distinct object with a simple shape resulted in the best results. On my Mac the software runs quickly enough that trying a few different points to get different results didn’t take long.

Blurity is a very specialized app that only does one thing: removing blurs from pictures. It also will never produce a result as good as if the blur wasn’t present in the original photo. The cost is also a bit expensive for a single purpose app, since it’s closer to the cost of many mid-range image editors. But if you have a precious memory or important text trapped behind a blurry photo, Blurity might be able to salvage it for you, and that might easily make it worth it to you. With a fully functional demo, you can try it yourself and see if you find it worth the cost.

Apple has announced a whole host of new and upgraded products in their most anticipated announcement as of yet, which took place at the California Theatre in San Jose. The venue was a good choice for the announcement (especially given its ornate interior) and at 10 AM PST, Tim Cook took to the stage with all eyes on him.

Want to find out everything they announced? Read on for our full roundup.

NOTE: All images used in this post are reproduced with permission from Wired under the Creative Commons agreement.

Some starting figures…

It wouldn’t be an Apple announcement without the initial announcement of facts and figures, would it? These are, however, worth boasting about. The iPhone 5, which was released only last month in September, sold 5 million units over the first weekend. iOS 6, which was also released last month, achieved the fastest upgrade rate in history and now graces 200 million iOS devices worldwide. Since Documents in the Cloud was launched back with iOS 6 and OS X Mountain Lion, over 125 million documents have been uploaded onto the cloud servers.

There was also a push for the App Store and its new milestone too. 35 billion applications have now been downloaded from the iOS and Mac stores and this has exceeded Apple’s expectations. Not wanting to be outdone, Cook also admitted that over $6.5 billion has been paid out to developers, so it really pays for them to be in the business.

New version of iBooks with continuous scrolling

The first upgrade to be announced was a new version of iBooks. Since its release, there are over 1.5 million books available for purchase and these have been downloaded over 400 million times, which is still a handsome sum (but not when you compare it to the number of applications downloaded!). The new version of iBooks comes with continuous scrolling, iCloud support for purchased books and the ability to share your favourite quote via e-mail, Twitter or Facebook – just tap on it and share it.

The new version of iBooks also supports 40 different languages and Cook was eager to demonstrate some, including Chinese (with the vertical writing), Japanese and Korean. The update ships today and can be grabbed by heading over to your iPhone or iPad now. If you haven’t got iBooks yet, then now is a perfect time to grab it – just head over to the App Store.

A new MacBook Pro 13-inch with retina display

Cook then proceeded to talk about the Mac, which has been outgrowing the PC market for the past 6 years and consistently ranks in the top spot for customer satisfaction. So with that, Phil Schiller came up on stage to announce, you guessed it, the new 13-inch MacBook Pro with a retina display. It measures a mere 0.75 inches thick – 20% lighter than the previous model – and weights only 3.57 lb (1.6 kg), which is a full pound lighter than the previous generation model – it’s the lightest one ever. There’s also a MagSafe 2 port, a Thunderbolt port, an SD card slot, 2 USB 3 connectors and, just like the 15-inch model, HDMI support.

That retina display measures in at a mean 2,560 x 1,600 pixels (or 4.096 million pixels) resolution, making it the second highest resolution notebook display out there on the market (of course, the 15-inch MacBook Pro with Retina still rules the roost). The display has been enhanced with richer colour and a 75% reduction in glare, which certainly makes it attractive for designers and developers and comes with Intel’s new range of Ivy Bridge processors, making it all the more faster and more efficient.

The new model starts shipping today and the base model, which comes with a 2.5 GHz processor, 8 GB of RAM and 128 GB of flash is priced at $1,699, which is still an eye-watering amount but a full $500 cheaper than the 15-inch model.

An updated Mac Mini

The long-forgotten Mac Mini, Apple’s most affordable Mac ever which ships sans monitor and keyboard also got its update today with the new range of Ivy Bridge processors, HD graphics and 4, yep count them, USB 3.0 ports. There’s also a 1 TB hard drive or 256 GB of flash storage (SSD) and the base model, which comes with a 2.5 GHz processor, 4 GB of RAM and a 500 GB hard disk drive is priced at a mere $599. Bargain.

A new, thinner, stunning iMac

Probably the biggest redesign came to the iMac, and boy was it due. The iMacs last got their update back in May 2011 and it seems that today, that long wait definitely paid off. The new iMac measures an jaw dropping 5 mm, yes – you read that right – 5 mm thick, making it 80% thinner than the previous model thanks to a new technique called friction stir welding (don’t ask me what this is. Just realise that it makes a damn sexy computer!). The iMac still comes in the classic 21.5 inch and 27 inch models and the displays are still the same, 1,920 x 1,080 pixels for the 21.5 inch model and 2,560 x 1,400 for the 27-inch model (no, they’re not retina…yet).

The new iMac also comes with a FaceTime HD camera, dual microphones, up to 768 GB of flash storage and 3 TB of hard drive storage, up to 32 GB of RAM, 4 x USB 3.0 ports (just like on the Mac Mini) and 2 x Thunderbolt ports. Interestingly enough, there’s no optical drive at all (is Apple trying to kill it off, do we think?), but for those “still stuck in the past” you can get one for the iMac, at extra cost of course. There’s also a handy new tool called Fusion Drive, which combines both the flash and HDD storage onto one dynamic volume. So, 128 GB of flash storage and a 1-3 TB hard drive would, essentially, be treated as the same volume on the operating system. Mountain Lion, of course, stays on the flash bit so it can be accessed a bit quicker.

The new iMacs start shipping in November (for the 21.5-inch model) or December (for the 27-inch model) and are priced at $1,299 for the 21-inch starter model with a 2.7 GHz i5 processor, 8 GB of RAM and a 1 TB hard drive or $1,799 for the 27-inch starter model with a 2.9 GHz i5 processor and the same RAM and hard drive specifications.

An updated, 4th generation iPad and a new “Mini” baby brother

The perfect way to round up a pretty much perfect announcement would be some changes to the iPad, and there are plenty. In two and a half years, the iPad has shifted 100 million units and in Q2 2012, more iPads shipped than PC units. 91% of the total web traffic share from tablets is from the iPad – some pretty impressive figures. And with that, Cook announced the new version of iBooks Author, which is available for download now. Authors can now use their own fonts, embed multitouch widgets and complex mathematical equations straight into text books.

Afterwards, our friend Phil came back on stage and…there’s a 4th generation iPad (despite the fact the 3rd generation was released only back in March, something which annoyed your dear author terribly) with a new A6X chip promising faster performance and 2x graphics performance, 10 hours of battery life and a new FaceTime HD camera.

There’s also expanded LTE support for more countries (let’s hope Apple doesn’t make the same mistake twice!) and 2x faster WiFi (802.11 a/b/g/n with 2.4 GHz and 5 GHz support for the n band, just like on the iPhone 5). The 4th generation iPad has also been given the Lightning treatment, and sports one of their new connectors. Best of all, for people who are considering a change, the 4th generation is priced at the same price as the 3rd generation: $499 for the 16 GB Wi-Fi model and $629 for the cellular model.

And it didn’t stop there. The 4th generation iPad flipped around on the screen to reveal its baby brother – the iPad Mini, which had been rumoured for quite a long time. With the new version, the iPad can now be held in one hand and is as thin as a pencil and light as a pad of paper. It sports a 7.9 inch display (compared to the 9.7 inch one on the bigger iPad) and a 1,024 x 768 display, the same as the iPad 2. The Mini weighs a mere 0.68 lb and measures only 7.2 mm thick and, to the joy of developers, all previous iPad apps will work on the Mini, so there’s no altering applications either.

The iPad Mini features a dual-core A5 chip, a FaceTime HD camera, a 5 MP iSight camera, LTE wireless support (similar to the 4th generation iPad), expanded Wi-Fi and a Lightning connector, so the guts are basically an iPad 2 with a few added extras. This new version starts at a mere $329 (the iPad 2 starts at $399 and the normal iPad at $499) for 16 GB of memory and starts shipping on November 2nd for the Wi-Fi models and on November 16th for the cellular models.

Over To You!

As always with these big Apple announcements, we’d like to turn the floor over to you – our readers. We finally saw the new iMac we were all hankering after and a (slightly) cheaper MacBook Pro with retina display. So, were you impressed or disappointed with Apple’s offering today? Will you be pre-ordering anything that was announced? Were all the new products just like you expected, or did a certain feature surprise you?

Please share all your thoughts and opinions in the comments section below!