Category: Mac

Microsoft isn’t usually the first company on our radar as Mac users, but with their upcoming release of Windows 8, they seem to be actually thinking different, for once. Windows 8 is easily the most dramatic change Windows has ever seen, taking it quite far away from its original Macintosh-inspired design. At worst, it takes some inspiration from the iPad in being a touch-centric UI, but otherwise, everything new in Windows 8 is a Microsoft-based design.

New innovation is always cause for excitement, and even if we love Apple, we’re always excited to see other companies pushing the bounds and making great new products. Windows 8′s new square and typography centric design is at least an interesting step in a new direction. It might be one that leaves most PC users behind, but it’s also one that piques our interest, at least a bit.

Has Windows 8 caught your interest, and are you looking forward to trying it out? Do you think it could tempt you away from OS X and iOS? We’d love to hear your thoughts in the comments below!

Photography can often be a troubling trade when little things don’t go according to plan. After all, if you only have one chance to take a photo, you had better get a good one. Post processing has become a big part of modern photography, from amateur tools like Snapseed to more professional apps Photoshop, Aperture, or the increasingly popular Lightroom.

But simply owning Photoshop or Aperture isn’t enough. You must keep it up to date and use the best plugins for your trade. I’ve been doing a lot of concert photography lately, so I decided it was time I got a better way of reducing noise (a high ISO is required with my fairly slow lens). Imagenomic’s solution, Noiseware, seemed most appropriate, so I began with the 30-day trial. During that time, it was useful enough to sell me on getting a full license. Let’s take a closer look at what makes this plugin better than Photoshop’s built-in noise moderation.

Important: This plugin is compatible with Adobe Photoshop, Photoshop Elements, and Apple Aperture, and doesn’t run as a standalone app. We mistakenly originally mentioned that it works with Lightroom. While it’s not officially supported, there’s a droplet in Noisware’s forums that may get it working in Lightroom, however.

Installing

Click it and off you go.

Installation instructions for Noiseware can be found on Imagenomic’s Web site and will vary depending on what editor you’re using. It takes less than five minutes to install the plugin and there are hardly any complications — it’s just like any other OS X app that isn’t delivered with the Mac App Store. If you bought the software, you’ll have to input a license key unique to your email address and name. There is a 30-day trial, otherwise.

Detail

Notice the blurred details.

The biggest challenge with reducing noise is keeping the detail. To reduce noise in an image, the program glazes over the details to create a new, speckless image. It may look good when zoomed out, but sometimes the image needs more than that. Text can often become blurred, edges softened, and little details get lost. Noise isn’t always bad, and getting rid of it doesn’t always improve a photo, but with the right tool, an image with a lot of noise can definitely be improved.

You should always remember that all noise reduction dulls the image, so a layer of clarity is lost. This happens with every method.

Noiseware’s main adjustment tab is the Detail tab. It allows you to add luminance, color, sharpening, and contrast to an image. There’s also an Edge Smoothing drop-down that improves the detail of the edges buildings, people, or any figure. Tweaking these can improve the detail quality or destroy all detail. It’s important to leave sharpening at zero in most scenes because otherwise, all detail will be lost to an ugly blur.

Fine Tuning

This is the manual tuning tab.

Another extremely important tab is Frequency. All noise is not simply “noise”. It’s there for a reason, with certain characteristics assigned to it. You can fix some types of noise while leaving other areas of a photo intact — no detail lost. This is the most important function of Noiseware, and it’s the main weapon in the fight against Photoshop’s built-in plugin. Big chunks of noise are low-frequency, while small ones are high-frequency. Armed with that knowledge you can tweak certain areas of a photo without hurting the rest of it.

Previewing

Nobody wants to run a bunch of modifications on an image unless they’re absolutely sure it’s going to look nice. Noiseware renders a fast preview by default. It’s close to the final image, but you will notice a difference if you did something wrong. To get the image you’ll see when finished processing, click Accurate. This setting is set as default only because it saves time on a slower computer. How much time? Only a few milliseconds, on a 2012 MacBook Air, at least. It’s better to ensure the image looks good rather than swiftly process it.

Presets: Are They of Use?

A full list of Noiseware’s included presets.

Anybody who spends $79.95 on this software should know what they’re doing. Presets are usually something for amateurs: they’re fine for learning, but are not going to yield the best image. I had some fun messing with the presets, just to see if they were worth using. Since the concert photos I have were taken indoors, I selected the Night Scene preset first. It didn’t remove as much noise as the default setting. A higher ISO is always required at night, and it knew that, so it didn’t want to destroy the details.

In some areas, the Night Scene preset helped, but in others it went too far. The problem is it applies the same setting to the whole image, when it really needs different treatment in some areas. There’s actually an easy solution for this: select the portion of the image that needs noise removed and adjust the settings for it alone. Things might look uneven if done quickly, but quality will show if you pay attention to what you’re editing.

Save them for later.

But that’s not all you can do with presets, thankfully. If you have a few photos that include the same scene and colors, consider saving your adjustments for those. The Save button in the top left of Noiseware’s interface will let you put settings away for another time. You can load them by clicking the Presets button beside Save. It’s an easy way to keep processing fast, yet high quality.

How Much Noise is Removed?

Sometimes an image can end up looking like a painting.

Many photographers are looking for a way to make noise disappear without losing detail. If you’re one of those, go buy a new lens that’s f/1.8 or larger. Less noise means less ISO and if you don’t want to blur everything, consider investing in a faster lens. Any ISO above 800 will show noticeable noise. If that’s not an option, then Noiseware is your next best option. It does the job, and does it great if you’re up to doing some manual tweaking. Sure, you can have a two-click system that removes noise from a photograph. It’s not going to look as pretty, though, since that’d be using the default preset.

Noiseware is a great piece of software if you know how to use it. There are adjustments for each color, just like in the RAW editor — think of it as Camera Raw for noise. The many manual settings help it go well beyond Photoshop’s integrated noise reduction tool, which has four simple sliders and a more complicated color adjustment function. If you can afford it, Noiseware is the best noise reduction software available for Mac at this price.

It is hard to believe, but we are already in October. In the gaming industry, this time of the year is known as review season due to the many video game releases around this time. This year, for example, it all started with Borderlands 2, followed by Resident Evil 6, XCOM: Enemy Unknown, Dishonored, and more. Sadly, none of these games are for OS X.

Worry not though: there are many new games coming to the Mac App Store, so we will have your back when it comes to your gaming needs throughout the season. This time, however, we will be talking about one silly little game known as RC Mini Racers. It may not be the most immersive game you’ve ever seen, but it may help you kill sometime while you take a break from work, or wait for those “triple A” titles to launch.

Presentation

Main Screen isn’t life altering.

Let’s start by saying that this game isn’t going to blow your mind away. Rather, it will help you relax when you need to, and take a breather when you feel like you’re about to crash. Keep in mind also that this is a free game (at the time of publication), so don’t expect something like Forza. Then again, don’t expect it to blow your budget like a more immersive game.

With that said, this game goes straight to the point. The main menu is presented with a rather suitable tune and a very simple layout. It all lets you get started quickly. Once you are ready to race, pick a mode (usually the first one), and then choose a car. There won’t be many cars to pick from, though, so you should be on with your game quickly.

Start your engines.

When you are in the race, you’ll inevitably notice the Toy Story-like level design. If you remember some of those old Hot Wheels games, you will probably feel comfortable with this setting, and to be honest, this is a pretty sweet way to view the world — you know, all huge and stuff.

The only downside with this is that every circuit in the game is a small portion of the same street block. This would be fine if the street block had different looks to it, but sadly, it doesn’t. Once you play the first circuit (which actually feels bigger than the following ones) you will already know how the next circuit will look like. Some levels have extra jumps and more, but nothing to make them significantly different from one another. It just feels like you are racing in the same area over, and over, and over again.

Gameplay

Power-ups! Use them!

When the race starts, your obvious main objective is to beat all other racers. To do this, you will not only need to have a good handle on your car of choice, but also be careful of other racers’ power-ups. In the good fashion of many arcade racers, this game offers a few power-ups, too. Power-ups are probably the most satisfying aspect of the game, but they also feel a bit shallow.

Placing a mine in the right spot so someone behind you blows up into the air is great, and launching missiles to competitors in front of you is just as cool. However, other than mines, missiles, and boost, there are no other types of power-ups. Sure, they are fun, but with repeating tracks, repeating power-ups only adds to the game’s repetitiveness.

Car meets car.

Another big aspect to gameplay is the actual handling of your RC. This isn’t as extreme as something like Need for Speed or Forza, but it is solid enough to give you a fun experience. There is no drifting though, so someone with an N64 Mario Kart experience will probably feel out of place here. Mastering your car of choice comes down to how you use your break and how fast you go. It is easy to get stuck spoiler first into the wheel of a real car that happens to be parked on the street. Another determining aspect is how you land your car after a jump. If you are playing in some of the harder difficulties, landing the wrong way could cost you the race.

Verdict

Collisions are inevitable.

Triple A title or not, RC Mini Racers remains a very enjoyable game. There are in-app purchases that are only cosmetic, so there is no one making you buy anything in order for you to enjoy this game. Customizing cars with the coins you earn throughout your time playing will allow you to color your car the way you want. No matter how many other little features you have, it really comes down to the silly fun you’ll have with the gameplay.

Whether you are strategically placing mines throughout the track or firing missiles left and right, the gameplay is fun enough to give you a superb quick fix. This is definitely one of those games that you can pick up at anytime and play for a few minutes, thus making it a perfect break time distraction, for free.

As decent app news (apart from mundane updates) can sometimes be difficult to source some weeks, we’ve redesigned our weekly news roundup to give you both a flavour of app and Apple happenings throughout the week. We will try and keep all rumours to a minimal (unless they are highly relevant or pretty much confirmed), as there are plenty of other blogs out there on the Internet that cover Apple rumours in a bit more detail.

What we here at Mac AppStorm would like to focus on is high-quality, accurate and interesting news pieces from both the world of Mac apps and Apple as a company. So, without further ado, let’s see what’s been happening this week. Hope you enjoy it!

Tweetie for Mac has (finally) been killed off

Over the past couple of months we’ve seen a couple of clear signs that Twitter for Mac may be nearing the end of its life, especially given that the last update to the app was over a year ago (on 1 June 2011) and there has been no word on updates for either Mountain Lion or the new MacBook Pro retina display. This week, unfortunately, another favourite Mac Twitter client finally popped its clogs. Tweetie, which is actually the predecessor to Twitter for Mac, stopped working a couple of days ago due to the fact that Twitter had cut access to its API endpoint, effectively rendering it useless.

Tweetie for Mac was finally killed a couple of days ago, as Twitter cut access to its API endpoint, effectively rendering it useless.

Tweetie has been around since April 2009 and became a popular Mac Twitter client. It set many benchmark standards and its interface gave inspiration to many other Mac apps out there on the market (Sparrow is a good example of one of these). It was acquired by Twitter on 9 April 2010 and in January 2011, it rebranded itself as Twitter for Mac, sharing many of the same design features.

At time of writing, the developer’s site, Atebits, was down for comment or any further statements.

Apple reaches a license agreement over the Swiss railway clock design

Swiss Federal Railways, SBB (Schweizerische Bundesbahnen) have reached a deal with Apple regarding the supposedly unauthorised use of their clock design in the iOS 6 Clock app on iPad. The new Clock app on iPad featured a clock design which is almost identical to the iconic design which graces almost all railways in Switzerland, along with other merchandise (such as Mondaine watches).

Apple’s use of the iconic Swiss railway clock design (left: Apple’s clock in iOS 6, right: the official version on the SBB website) was unauthorised however both companies have since reached an official agreement.

SBB have announced publicly that they are “flattered” that their clock design has been featured by “a brand as important as Apple” however the use of the clock was unauthorised as there was no proper licensing agreement. The company has since met with Apple (back in September) and has reached a formal agreement.

iPad Mini expected to be announced on October 23rd, along with improvements to iBooks

We promised above that we wouldn’t report on rumours unless they have been pretty much confirmed, however multiple sources point to the unveiling of the long-anticipated iPad mini, which is scheduled to take place on October 23rd. The iPad mini (with a 7-8 inch screen) is likely to be a cheaper alternative to the standard iPad and is presumably designed to compete with lower priced tablets, such as the Kindle Fire HD and Nexus 7. It is also presumed that the event will focus on iBooks, given the rise in popularity of e-books over the past couple of years.

We’ll keep you posted on this story as it progresses!

TweetDeck bumped up to version 2.0, and it’s a big one

If you want further confirmation that Twitter for Mac has been killed, then just look at TweetDeck, which was acquired by Twitter back in May 2011. This week, the app received a massive update to version 2.0 which brought improved clarity of columns and tweets, the ability to change font sizes and redesigned profile panels with images (given the redesign on Twitter a couple of months back).

The new version 2 of TweetDeck, featuring a lighter and brighter interface along with plenty of improvements.

Users can now switch between two different themes, the classic dark one and a new light one (featured in the screenshot above) and you’ve also got the ability to reposition the default notification window and reduce the volume of the notification sound, so that it’s not as intrusive. The official blog post for the update can found here and if you want to grab this latest version of TweetDeck, then just head over to the App Store.

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!

Keeping on top of all the bills that come in can be difficult. Have you ever wished you had an app to help you stay on top of them without much trouble, that didn’t cost an arm-and-leg like most financial apps? If so, you’re in luck.

Bills to Pay is exactly what the title hints at: an application in which you note the bills you need to pay. A newcomer to the App Store, Bills To Pay is priced at $5 which is low enough for anyone’s budget. But is it worth the admission price? Let’s find out.

We’ll imagine a scenario: we need to pay three bills in the following three weeks:

• we paid a translator to translate a document for us, but he is UK based and charged us £10
• we have an electricity bill for 800HRK (I live in Croatia, bear with me – it’s around $150)
• we owe 6000HRK ($1000) for plane tickets to our cousin for last month’s trip to Canada

We know we’ve got some money coming in from our freelance design work, but it won’t all come at once and we need to pace out the payments. What we need is a finance app that can help us do that. Enter “Bills to Pay”.

After purchasing the app and installing it, it neatly embeds itself into our OSX menu bar. It sits there silently, until we click it when an empty screen greets us telling us to add a new bill by clicking the plus button at the bottom. Right off the bat we notice it recognised our local currency based on system settings, as the bottom of the window says HRK.

We proceed to add our bills onto the list. We know we’ll be getting the first influx of money in a couple of days, and we assume it should be enough to pay for the first bill, so, provided it’s October 9th, we decide we’ll pay that one on October 14th. The second bundle of money will be coming in around the 20th, at which point we figure we should be able to pay the electricity bill. Whatever we have left goes to the cousin – he can wait. Let’s add the bill.

Realising we can only define amounts in our local currency, we are disappointed but we adjust and enter the current local equivalent, 120HRK. We set the date and leave the frequency at “Once”, and save. This adds our bill to the list and colours it orange, since the deadline is only 5 days away. The colour in the menu bar is a bit distracting, however, especially if it has to sit there for 5 days.

Let’s add the electricity bill now. Since this bill arrives monthly, we might as well put the frequency at Monthly and change the next month’s amount when the bill arrives with “Edit”.

Finally, let’s add the debt to the cousin onto the list as well. We don’t know when we’ll be able to cover it, so we would prefer not to leave a date, but the application forces our hand and we pick October 31st.

It is now October 15th, and the money has yet to arrive. PayPal must be delaying it to get some more interest, so our BTP flag turns red – we are overdue. The notification popup lets us know this as well. Just as we close the notification we get an email from the bank that our payment went through. We pay the first bill and check it off the list by clicking “Paid”.

We are pleasantly surprised to see it ask us how much of the bill we want to mark as paid, but since we got enough to cover the whole amount, we just click ok and see it fade out before our eyes. Where did it go, though? Can we somehow find out which bills we’ve paid and how much total we’ve spent on a service of a given name/category? Sadly, no.

On October 18th we get a call from our cousin saying he urgently needs at least some money due to his own debts. The priority of our debt to him has escalated, and we would prefer to alter the order of the bills, or sort them by some kind of priority flag. Alas, this feature does not exist and the only thing we can do is move the date up. Without knowing when we’ll get the money, moving the date seems pointless, so we leave it as it is.

It is now the 20th, and we got 3000HRK for the logo we made last month. This means we can cover the electricity bill which, by now, has generated several warnings from the electricity company, so that’s what we do. Immediately, the bill disappears and another appears in its place with the date exactly one month in the future. Satisfied by BTP’s automation, we turn our focus to the debt to our cousin. We are left with 2200HRK, so we pay this partial amount and mark it as such. The amount decreases, and all we can do now is wait for our next bundle of cash.

Time to hit the specwork sites and look for more gigs.

Verdict

On one hand, the app is very light weight and integrates into the menu bar unintrusively. It’s very fast, and the interface is intuitive and very easy to learn.

However, the app does have its downsides. The inability to change currency is a critical flaw. Not all people operate in their local currency, and forcing them to use it renders the app more tedious to use than it should be what with the forced conversions. The ability to see paid bills and their total sum is another missing feature – sometimes I forget whether or not I’ve paid a given bill, or just want to know how much I spend on a given service every month. Prioritisation and email notifications would be great, too, but the app never advertised having those, so one can’t exactly call them “missing” features. Still, the app feels incomplete, and at $5, it just cannot rival the likes of free and near perfect applications like Todoist or Cashbase – both multi platform unlike this one, and both available on mobile devices as well.

Conclusion

Bills To Pay is exactly what it advertises it is. It’s an app focused on bills and on reminding you to pay them at a given date. While there is some limited customisation (you can change whether or not the app should notify you in the preferences, and how long before the deadline, you can also define the notification repeat rate, annoyance level, basic sorting and whether or not to open the app at system login), there are certain features that are definitive deal breakers due to which we cannot give this application more than 5 / 10. A valiant attempt, but definitely needs more work.

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 September 21st, 2011.

I used to absolutely love menu bar apps. Years ago, it was a fairly tiny niche of the Mac app market that contained only a few really solid gems. These utilities provided a quick and easy way to control iTunes, run a quick maintenance script and get back to what you were doing.

At heart, menu bar apps were essentially thought to be little things that perhaps didn’t quite merit a full on application but still merited a permanent, always-on spot on your Mac. Things have changed though and I find myself becoming annoyed when I download an app and find that it has no alternative to the menu bar mode.

Should developers move past the trend of offering menu-bar-only apps in favor of giving users the power to decide? Let’s discuss.

Pros and Cons

In recent years, the menu bar app market has exploded. What was once a handful of utilities is now an impressively large secondary app market. As a Mac user, I see both pros and cons to this rapid expansion. Let’s take a quick look at both sides.

Why Menu Bar Apps Rock

The positive side of having more menu bar apps available is simple: there’s more to choose from! If Apple’s App Store experiments have proven anything it’s that, in the minds of most users, more is better.

Whether you’re looking for a todo app, a fully featured email client, somewhere to store notes or quick access to a web service, there are likely a handful of menu bar apps to get you there. Here at AppStorm, we love them so much that we recently posted a roundup of 25 such utilities.

Interestingly enough, in my opinion, menu bar apps have almost entirely stolen the thunder from Dashboard widgets. If you think about it, conceptually the two types of apps are very similar and almost redundant. In the short term, Dashboard widgets came with a lot of hype and grabbed a lot of attention but with time we’ve come to see that they have a fatal flaw: out of sight, out of mind.

Menu bar apps are always visible, no matter where you are in OS X. This makes it very easy to remember to take advantage of them. Dashboard on the other hand is relegated to a side screen that we can easily go weeks or even months without seeing.

Further, it seems that developers jumped ship on Dashboard widgets initially in favor of the iPhone App Store and more recently in favor of the Mac App Store. The distinction here is important: Dashboard apps are traditionally distributed free and can’t currently be sold on the Mac App Store while menu bar apps can easily fetch a few bucks at the least and are quite popular on the Mac App Store.

From these arguments we can see that menu bar apps have a clear advantage over Dashboard widgets both in the eyes of users and developers.

Why Menu Bar Apps Suck

Now, for all their amazing benefits and convenience, it’s easy to see some downsides as well. The most obvious and frustrating of these comes from having too many menu bar apps and too little screen space.

Menu bar apps are cut off by menu options

The example above first shows all the various apps running in my menu bar if I’m looking at the Finder app. However, if I switch to Safari, some of these become inaccessible. This problem completely defeats the usefulness of menu bar apps. Rather than being handy utilities accessible from anywhere, they’re actually harder to get at than traditional apps because you can’t activate many of these either from the dock or application switcher. In this situation you have to bounce around until you find an app with few enough menu options that you can actually click on the menu bar app you’re hunting for.

Don’t Run So Many!

The solution here is quite simple right? Don’t run so many menu bar apps! It’s a valid argument, however, I think pointing the finger solely at users fails to look at the whole issue.

For starters, MacBooks are more popular than ever, meaning that a huge chunk of Mac users are using computers with screen sizes as small as eleven to thirteen inches, this doesn’t leave much room for menu bar apps.

To illustrate this fact, let’s take another look at my menu bar. Is it really that overrun with third party utilities? Have I gone menu bar crazy? To get some perspective, I highlighted the apps that aren’t built-in OS X features (there might be a little iStat voodoo happening with my time and date).

Third party tools are highlighted

Notice that, before adding a single third party app, MacBooks already have a lot going on in the menu bar. In my screenshot there’s Spotlight, the date and time section, battery level indicator, wifi status, sound, iChat bubble, Time Machine and Bluetooth menu. There are also plenty of other default options that I don’t have turned on such as the International menu.

With all the menu bar functionality OS X has to offer right out of the box, MacBook users are left with a large number of utilities to compete for a very small space.

How Can We Fix This Problem?

Users who don’t run a lot of apps will likely think that this is a non-issue: simply don’t run menu bar apps! Easy right? I can see you typing your comments already!

However, for me, this is simply not an option as many of these apps (like Dropbox) are invaluable to my workflow. I’ll wager that plenty of other users will respond similarly about their own apps. Further, if I ask these developers what the solution to this problem is, I doubt that they would say to run fewer menu bar apps since that would cut into their own user base.

Ultimately, I think “Don’t run so many” is a copout answer that sidesteps the problem by shaking a finger at users rather than truly attempting to find a useful solution. So what, if anything can be done?

The Real Issue

As the market for menu bar apps continues to expand, the real heart of this problem lies in the fact that menu bar apps are becoming too difficult to avoid.

The Mac AppStore is chock full of great tools that use this format and there’s no easy way to filter them out. Despite the fact that there are two fundamentally different types of applications in the MAS (dock apps and menu bar apps), Apple has lumped them together.

One reason for this is likely that, while the two categories can be mutually exclusive, the reality is that they often overlap, meaning a single app has both options. And herein lies the solution!

Dear Developers, Give Me Options

Almost by accident, we’ve stumbled onto the simple answer that makes all of this trouble go away. Perhaps menu bar apps that solely occupy a space in the menu bar shouldn’t exist. I know, that’s a radical statement and menu bar app fans will quickly take offense. However, I think the alternative is a better OS X experience that puts more power in the hands of the users.

So what am I suggesting? The perfect model for the ideal app behavior can be found in TextExpander. Open up the TextExpander preferences and this is what you see:

Choose between a menu bar app, a dock app or both!

It’s a beautiful thing is it not? TextExpander gives me complete freedom over how I want the app to work. I can make it a menu bar only app, a dock only app or choose to have both the menu bar and dock functionality.

To be fair, many apps have indeed adopted this functionality, not just TextExpander. That being said, it’s definitely not a standard behavior and the apps that aren’t playing along are those that eat up your menu bar unnecessarily. They’re awesome utilities that serve a very useful purpose, but they choose to tell users that certain functionality should only be found in the menu bar when ultimately, that’s a decision best left up to each individual.

Conclusion

If you’ve only skimmed up to this point you’re probably wondering what this article is all about. Am I calling for the death of menu bar apps? The answer to that question is simple: absolutely not. I love menu bar apps and find them to be an awesome part of the OS X experience.

However, with such a large portion of the Mac user base experiencing OS X on a small screen, I think it’s time for menu bar app developers to rethink their strategy and consider offering a non-menu bar mode for users who would prefer to have the app running in their dock. This isn’t a rule that Apple should impose on developers but simply something that developers should be courteous and thoughtful enough to offer of their own volition.

Apps like TextExpander set a clear precedence for a better system that allows each individual user to choose how the app will be accessed. It’s a superior, more versatile way to build apps and I think that developers should be eagerly hopping on board.

What do you think? Is this one long pointless rant or is there really a menu bar app problem for users with small screens? Do you agree with my suggestions or do you have a better solution? I want to hear it!

Have you ever searched the Mac App Store for task management apps? If not, go check real quick; we’ll wait. Surprising, isn’t it? There’s literally hundreds of results. Outside of the mainstays (Things, Omnifocus, and Wunderlist to name a few) there are some diamonds in the rough out there, great apps that might not be as polished but deserve more than simply being ignored in the App Store. Onlytasks may just be your diamond in the rough.

By implementing several unique features—such as Evernote sync and Calendar integration—Onlytask provides an appealing option in the task management category. Odds are, you’ve never tried it before, so let’s take a look.

Like the article? You should subscribe and follow us on twitter.

Setting Up Onlytasks

Onlytasks is developed by Juan Miguel Escribano who initially developed the app out of the desire to provide a task management solution that integrated with Evernote. (To check out some of Juan’s other projects visit his blog.) So if you need to sync your tasks across multiple Macs or with the iOS versions of Onlytasks, your first step is going to be syncing with Evernote.

The first time you sync Onlytasks you will be prompted to login to your Evernote account.

On first sync, login to an Evernote account is required. If you already have an Evernote account you will be able to choose which notebooks you want to sync. If you use Evernote separate from your GTD or task management system, chances are you will not sync all or even most of your notebooks. Note titles will become tasks and the body of the note will become a task note. In my testing initial sync took a couple of minutes, but sync was very fast afterwards. Initial sync will sync all of your tags in Evernote, but you can hide the tags you will not be using. After syncing for the first time all newly created notebooks and tags will sync with Evernote and Onlytasks.

If you don’t have an Evernote account, setup is quick and free. If you use Evernote and want to keep your GTD system and notes separate, creating a new Evernote account is also quick and free.

What Makes Onlytasks Unique?

With so many task management app options out there, it is worthwhile to point out where Onlytasks is unique. The first thing that stands out opening Onlytasks is the three-pane window.

Onltask’s three pane window is rare among task management apps for Mac.

After using Onlytasks for a few days, I noticed a couple of advantages of having a three-pane window. First of all, notes are visible without having to open the task. Second, adding the third pane means several customizable viewing options allowing users to customize the view to their heart’s content.

This is just one example of the many viewing options available in Onlytasks.

Another very valuable feature in Onlytasks is the integration with both the native Calendar app and the native Reminders app. When adding a new task, clicking the option at the bottom of the Add window allows you to send the task to a calendar or a Reminders list and set an alarm—without having to open either app. This is extremely flexible because you do not have to choose a predefined calendar or Reminder list to send tasks to.

Onlytasks makes it simple to integrate your task list with your calendar.

Powerful filtering is another feature that sets Onlytasks apart. Using the Command key, you can filter as many lists, notebooks, and tags as you want. This translates into the most powerful filtering tool I have seen in a task management app (and that is saying something because I have tried them all). What makes this filtering option even better is that when you filter tasks in a way you find useful, creating a saved search will remember the filters and they will be just one click away.

Other Nice Features

There several other features available in Onlytasks that are not necessarily unique, but for me—and many other task manager app users according to reviews and message boards I have read—are very useful. For example:

• Access to the app in the menubar. The menubar shows tasks due today and has a shortcut for adding new tasks.
• A universal shortcut for adding new tasks.
• Customization options for font styles, font sizes, icon sizes, etc.
• Plenty of options for sorting tasks within lists.
• An Instructive, built-in Help menu.

iOS Integration

In today’s busy world your tasks should go where you go. An app that does not sync across devices is a deal breaker for many. Thankfully, Onlytasks also sports a universal iOS version. Additionally, tasks are synced to Evernote for backup and editing. In my testing, sync between the Mac and iOS versions as well as Evernote was accurate and fast. I encountered no sync errors. That is not to say the integration is complete. The ability to send tasks to your calendar or create a reminder in the Reminders app is absent in the iOS version of Onlytasks. You can set reminders in the iOS version, but they do not communicate with the Mac app. The developer informed me in an email that integrating the notifications between iOS and OS x is on his list. The powerful filtering tool is also missing from the iOS version.

Onlytasks’ iOS companion is a universal app

A Couple of Setbacks

While I was impressed overall with Onlytask’s feature set, there are a couple of things missing. I have several tasks that need to be completed on a quarterly, monthly, biweekly, or weekly basis. Unfortunatley, Onlytasks is not helpful for this aspect of task management as it lacks the ability to set up repeating tasks.  Also, new tasks that require a due date cannot be added completely from the keyboard, which is a drawback for keyboard enthusiasts. Finally, the interface for Onlytasks is a bit unrefined and cluttered. The current version is a big improvement over previous versions, and hopefully this will continue to improve as the app matures.

Couple of months ago, a movie studio obtained a John Doe order and got a bunch of popular video sharing and torrent websites offline. I found this highly repulsive in two significant ways. First, they were retarded enough to leave YouTube from the list and got Vimeo banned instead. Raise your hands if you’ve ever watched a pirated video song or a movie on Vimeo.

And second, as a proud citizen of the largest democracy in the World, I found this a gross violation of my freedom and an extension of the Great Firewall of China. That’s not a proud title to wear around your neck. Such infringements occur time and again even in highly democratic countries.

Not knowing that there are so many ways to sidestep these stumbling blocks is a mistake from our end. One of the most efficient and trustworthy services I have discovered in the last year is TunnelBear. After the break, let us see how you can enter the open Internet by just flicking a switch!

Like the article? You should subscribe and follow us on twitter.

Bear Awesome!

I’m a paranoid porcupine and I’m always weary about using any VPN or proxy service that I stumble upon. TunnelBear was no exception. I still remember using a dedicated browser with cookies disabled while using the app and not entering any sensitive data when using the VPN session. Gradually, I discovered that the bear is harmless and is actually trusted by tens of hundreds of people.

Pricing

The app itself is free to download and comes bundled with some free bandwidth to test the waters. Nicknamed the Little TunnelBear, you get 500MB of free bandwidth each and every month. That’s not much, but if you are a heavy user, opt for the unlimited plan at $4.99 a month. In addition, if you are open to promote the app by tweeting about it, you’ll be rewarded with free 1GB of bandwidth.

Setting the Bear Up

A Gorgeous User Interface

You’ll need a TunnelBear account to login to the app. Once logged in, getting access to the free and open Internet is as simple as flicking a switch. When I mean flicking the switch, you actually have to flick the switch from the user interface that resembles a radio!

Once the service is on, you can connect to the Internet as a user from USA or UK. In my experience, I have found that with IP’s from either of these countries, you won’t have trouble accessing any website in this whole wide universe. By design, VPN services are a bit slow and TunnelBear is no exception.

But the good news is it’s hardly noticeable. I took the occasion as an excuse to stream and watch a full 20 minute video and found that there was no lag at all. I have used similar services in the past and they offer a number of servers for each geography. So, when one server gets blocked by the ISP, they can go on with their business without any hitch using another one from the list. While there are no such options available in the app, I guess the TunnelBear algorithm automatically routes you through the safest servers with lesser number of connections.

TunnelBear at Work!

All connections are encrypted end to end and depending on the plan you are subscribed to, the encryption only gets stronger. The bandwidth transfer rate and the amount of bandwidth left in your account can be monitored in real time as well.

Naturally, the argument against using a service like TunnelBear is access to unlicensed content. There is always that negligible number of people who find a shady use case for any great technology. To me, VPN services help securing your connection and to break away the clutches of anarchy. If you are someone whose purpose falls in either of this category, then TunnelBear is the obvious choice!

If you love apps, gadgets, and great deals on software as much as we do at AppStorm, and you haven’t had a chance to sign up for the AppFanatix newsletter yet, then you’re missing out! AppFanatix is a classy fortnightly email newsletter that distills the very best content from around the network and will regularly bring you:

• An exclusive discount or giveaway for a fantastic application.
• Some of the best content published on the AppStorm network.
• Stylish desktop wallpapers.
• And much more…

It’s been going strong for 32 issues now and we’d hate for you to miss out on everything we have in store. Subscribe now and make sure you’re on the list to receive the next awesome app discount!

Social networking isn’t a new thing of 2012, but it’s sure hit a mass saturation point. You can’t ride public transit or eat at a restaurant without seeing people checking Facebook and tweeting pictures. It seems you’re more likely to see a Facebook page mentioned on an ad than the company’s own website, reminiscent of companies advertising their Aol. keywords back in the late ’90s.

So, it’s not surprising at all that the latest OS X and iOS feature deep Facebook and Twitter integration. You can share most things you do on your Mac in a click, sync birthdays from Facebook with Calendar, get Facebook and Twitter avatars in Contacts, and push notifications when you get @replies. It’s great for those addicted to Facebook and Twitter, but not so much for those who avoid social networking or who’d rather use another network like App.net.

Have you started using the Twitter and Facebook integration in OS X Mountain Lion? Do you like it, or would you just as soon they’d left it out?

The Mac App Store is rife with price cuts this week, so come take your bounty from Mac.AppStorm’s deals.

Bundle Hunt “Mega Fall Bundle”

Last, but not least, is a grand bundle from Bundle Hunt. The autumn edition consists of Kinemac, Moneywell, Printopia, MailTags, PDFClerk Pro, GarageSale, Interarchy, a user interface pack from Impressionist, two e-books from SitePoint, four premium WordPress themes of choice from Tokokoo, and four responsive themes of choice from ThemeSpectrum. This isn’t just full of Mac apps, you see, for there are Web design tools and books too. The bundle costs $49.99 and the software is valued at $1,209, so it might be worth grabbing sometime in the next few days.

Did We Miss Anything?

Are there any other great deals out there this week? Let us know in the comments. We’ll see you next Wednesday!

Have you ever lost track of where you submitted a story or article? Or had to go searching through your email to remind yourself of the status of one of your submissions? Or are you simply unsatisfied with your current system for keeping track of your submissions?

If you find your self answering yes to any of these questions, then Story Tracker is likely the solution you are looking for. It’s an app for serious writers that submit articles, stories, and more to multiple publications, and want to keep track of them all. Let’s check it out.

Database or Spreadsheet?

For an app like Story Tracker to be “worth it”, it needs to bring additional functionality that a spreadsheet or project management app lacks. To be frank, Story Tracker is not for everyone. In my opinion, serious writers juggling upwards of ten submissions at a time will find Story Tracker useful.

Ask yourself if you need a database to keep track of your submissions, or if a simple spreadsheet will do. If you are thinking database, think Story Tracker. If you are using a spreadsheet now, you can import it into Story Tracker—no need to reenter all the data.

Basically, the utility of this app comes down to if you need a database rather than a spreadsheet to track your submissions. A database is usually preferred over a spreadsheet when you have a large amount of data and you are not looking to tabulate rows or columns. But another advantage of using a database packaged in an app like Story Tracker are the flexible options for viewing the data. Read on to see what I mean.

The UI

Storytracker allows users to view the data they have entered into the database using three views. Each view has two sortable columns—title and status. The status column is especially helpful because it shows when the next submission for a particular story or market is due. First, let’s look at the Story View. Here you get a list of all of the stories (or articles in my case) entered in your database.

The Story View lists all of the stories in your database along with the associated market (publisher) and submission status.

From this view you can add new stories, or double click a story to edit it or view the submission history.

Clicking the Submission History button brings up another window that lists every previous submission for that story.

If you ask me, the Market view is better thought of as the Publisher view because this is where the user keeps track of where they have submitted stories. There are several useful entry fields here including information about the editor and the pay rate of the publisher, which is then used to calculate earnings from submissions.

The Market view keeps track of the publishers you have sent submissions to.

Finally, the Submissions view lists all the submissions you have ever entered into the database. So if you have submitted a story several times, each submission will show up as an entry in this view. Similar to the other views, a new entry can be added or edited from this view.

The user interface is what makes this app great. The ability to view your data by story, market (publisher), or submission brings a level of flexibility and organization that you can’t get from a spreadsheet or task management app. Take this situation for example: you need to know how many submissions you have sent to a certain publisher. Double click on the publisher in Markets View click on Submission History and you have your answer.

Other Features and Weaknesses

Although you cannot tabulate your data like you can with a spreadsheet, Story Tracker does allow quick and easy access to statistics about your database.

A quick click or key combination (command-T) reveals some very useful statistics about your database.

Income is automatically calculated based on information provided in the database. Keeping track of how much you are bringing in off of your submissions couldn’t be easier!

Another great feature StoryTracker provides is the ability to create multiple databases. This could be useful if, for whatever reason, you needed to keep data completely separate.

iOS Integration

Story Tracker for Mac also includes an iOS companion app. While full cloud synchronization between the Mac and iOS versions is not available, it is very easy to get stories, markets, or databases from your iOS app to the Mac version or vice versa. All you need is a a wifi connection with the two devices connected to it.

Importing stories or markets is seamless.

Limitations

Up to this point, I have been lauding the flexibility of viewing your database using Story Tracker. Unfortunately, the app is not as flexible as it could be. Users are forced to use the predetermined fields for each story, market, or submission. The ability to create custom fields would be a much welcome addition to the app’s functionality. Also, I found myself wanting to rename the main data types almost immediately (story to article and market to publisher ). A few more options in this area could go a long way towards improving this app.

Conclusion

Story Tracker is for serious writers. While definitely more of a niche app, Story Tracker does what is says it does and does it well. I would recommend this app if:

• You are having a hard time juggling dozens of submissions.
• You need more flexibility for viewing data on your submission than a spreadsheet provides.
• You need a simple and effective way to keep track of income you make off of your stories or articles.

Our sponsor this week is Last5, an app that makes it incredibly easy to track the time you spend on work and more each day. It’s designed to be the “Minimum Effective Dose Of Time Tracking” you need, just enough to track your time without taking you away from the task at hand.

Last5 was designed by Jonathan Yankovich, a freelance web and user experience developer who found that the worst part of his job was accounting for how he spent his day. After working all day out of coworking spaces and other distraction-prone environments, he wanted a tool that would let him move fluidly between people, projects, and conversations without having to punch in or out.

With most time tracking apps, you either wait until the end of the day and try to reconstruct your day (or worse, week!) from memory, which is stressful and time-intensive, or you use timers which are prone to being forgotten. Last5 is designed to let you think as little as possible about tracking your time. You can setup your projects, then throughout the day, Last5 will ask you what you’re working on. Just hit the correct button, and go on with your work. That’s it!

You can then see a breakdown of how you’ve spent your time from the dashboard, and integrate it with Harvest for accounting if you want. Last5 is also planning to add Basecamp and Freshbooks integration in the future, and currently lets you export your data in Excel format from pro accounts. Best of all, you can use Last5 from your iPhone or Windows PC, in addition to your Mac, so it’ll work wherever you’re working.

Go Get It!

If you’ve been looking for a more efficient way to track your time, Last5 might be just what you’ve been needing. You can sign up for a free Last5 account to get started, and when you’re ready to get more serious with a project dashboard, and Excel export, you can go Pro for $8/month or $60/year.

Best of all, you can get 20% off a year membership if you sign up before the end of the year with the coupon code appstorm. What better way to finish out the year and start the next than with a discount on an app that can help you be more productive?

Games don’t often show players the future implications of their decisions or the systems behind their interactions, but for Eden Industries’ Waveform this is a core feature. It tasks you with guiding a wave of light safely through levels, layering ever greater complexity on a simple idea.

Colorful visuals, great music, and slick presentation combine to make Waveform a compelling, atmospheric experience well worth your attention, although the game falters and frustrates at times.

Wave-Time Manipulation

Waveform has just one control mechanism — move the mouse cursor up/down and left/right to adjust the amplitude and frequency of the on-screen sine waveform. By reshaping the wave on the fly, you guide your ball-shaped avatar clear of obstacles and into the path of light orbs. It’s a simple and intuitive concept to build a game around, and the developers managed to get a lot of mileage out of it.

You get points for collecting light orbs, travelling along colored waves, and grabbing score multipliers (along with a few other things introduced later on). Your movement speeds up when you do well, and it slows when you take damage. Your health is also tied in to orb collection, and your round ship grows or shrinks as it gets stronger and weaker.

Move the mouse to resize the wave, guiding it clear of obstacles and onto light orbs or colored waves.

I ran into frequent issues with performance and stability when first testing the app, but recent patches have mostly resolved this. Waveform does still crash occasionally without warning, however. Thankfully it saves automatically after each level.

Save the Universe

You start near Pluto, with hints about some sort of “singularity” affecting the stability of the universe. A nonsensical plot develops as you progress, but it’s nothing more than an excuse for the level designs. You’d be well advised to pay attention, though, because the loading screens and sparse story elements give hints and tips about mastering the gameplay.

Each world is a part of our solar system. There are 11 in total — one for each planet, plus Pluto, the Asteroid Belt, and the Sun. You can also buy DLC for a 12th world, Eris. Worlds are broken into levels, of which there are more than 100. You unlock levels by collecting stars, which you earn by collecting light orbs and maximizing your score. You get a rating out of 100 for each level, with stars awarded at multiples of ten.

Every world has a set path and at least one optional level, along with an Endless Mode that unlocks when you beat the boss.

You’re unlikely to have any issues with this for the first several worlds, even if you barely scrape through the majority of levels, then you may hit a roadblock. I reached a point close to the end where I had to re-play four or five levels — increasing my ranking to eek out a few extra stars — before I could unlock a new one, and then repeat the process over again. Waveform’s difficulty curve is not one for the feint of heart; casual players may never reach the end.

The final level of each world is a cute twist on the traditional boss fight. You don’t fight the boss — the mysterious entity referred to as the singularity, which functions rather like a black hole. You run from the boss. It’s heart-racing, head-pumping action, as you struggle to collect enough orbs and rockets and powerups to increase your speed, or to reach the portal that puts fresh ground space behind you — staying just ahead of your unstoppable foe.

Run for your life.

Frustratingly Brilliant or Brilliantly Frustrating?

At its best, Waveform is stunning. You get drawn into a world of music and color, lights and sound, where you become painter, conductor, and musician all at once. Your wave of colored light dips and arcs across the screen, gracefully reshaping itself to your mouse movements as you guide it into the path of oncoming orbs and prisms. You feel as though a part of this organism, which is beautifully abstracted from our own infinite universe.

When it works, Waveform is brilliant.

But Waveform is seldom at its best, or even near it. The game seems determined to show you how clever it is, luring you into nasty traps and breaking this immersive flow. Challenge is important in a game like this — without it we’d get bored and stop playing. But Waveform takes the challenge too far; it adds challenge at the expense of experience, and at its core Waveform is an experiential game.

Take the space squids, for example. I’m convinced that their only purpose in the game is to piss me off, such is the manner in which they’ve been distributed through the later levels. They stick to objects — and each other — and are attracted to your waveform. Avoiding them gets tricky, especially when there are asteroids and the like floating nearby. I’d come out of a tough spot, expecting a brief respite before the next challenging maneuver, only to find space squids waiting for me — watching me, with their glowing freakiness that manages to trip me up time and again.

Space squids are tricky to avoid, and they have a real knack of hitting me when I’ve got some sweet powerups.

Caught Between a Rock and a Hot Place

Waveform offers staggering depth; besides the sizeable campaign and DLC discussed above, there’s a New Game+ mode that remixes the levels for a second playthrough, loads of achievements, and a randomized survival-tinged Deep Space Mission on each world — which suffers in the absence of hand-crafted design but is otherwise great. It’s a beautiful game, too, considering the small team and low price.

But I can’t help feeling that the developers overextended themselves. Waveform would be stronger if it were shorter and more focused. Its concept reaches the stars, but the execution gets stuck in orbit.

The market for text editors is quite overwhelming, as there are tons of  apps out there with all sorts of features and a broad range of prices. There’s markdown apps for writers, code editors for developers, simple apps to just jot text down, and everything in between. For a newcomer app to break into this market successfully is perhaps harder than with any other app market, as it would need to be exceptionally good in order to really catch our attention.

We came across such an app last year, that despite being in an alpha stage, showed a lot of promise and even made it in our top apps to keep an eye on in 2012. It’s called Chocolat, and now that it has gotten an official stable release, we thought we’d check back on it and see what has changed since the last time we reviewed it.

Getting Started

Getting Started

Chocolat is a beautiful, simple, and yet very functional text editor. We did a review of it back when it was in alpha, and as such it was in early stages of development but still seemed like a very promising app. Chocolat recently saw a final stable release in which many things have been added and improved.

In our previous review we’ve already covered the major details of the app, so here we’re just going to give you a quick glance at them and focus on what’s new and what has changed with the app.

Chocolat

Chocolat

Chocolat has all the major features that you would expect from any text editor: syntax highlighting, multiple coding language support, customizable themes, split-screen editing, VIM mode, code folding, etc. While most of these features are pretty common and will hardly differentiate it from other popular text editors, the way in which they are implemented is what makes the app shine.

Take the themes, for example. Chocolat comes with a list of around twenty beautiful pre-defined themes, and you can even play around with them and set visual styles for very specific things, like whether comments should be underlined or if numbers should be displayed in a bold font.

Just as with the themes, every feature that you will find in Chocolat is well-thought, extremely customizable and very useful.

What’s New

So, what’s new with Chocolat? What has been redone and improved? Here’s a rundown of the new features you can find in the final release.

Auto-complete

Auto-complete

In our previous review of Chocolat we mentioned how auto-complete was not always quite functional. In the final release auto-complete now works well for the most part, especially if you’re coding in HTML or CSS. Other languages have the feature enabled, but it might not always work as you expect it to.

System Integration

System Integration

Chocolat feels most at home with Mac OS, as it is a native Cocoa application. Not only is its interface simplistic and beautiful, but it also supports full-screen mode, auto-saving, tabbed navigation and a useful navigation bar for exploring folders and jumping between documents, that make Chocolat feel like a true native app.

Live Errors

Live errors

Chocolat has the ability to check for errors in your code, but this feature only works when you are coding in Python, Ruby, PHP and JavaScript. If an error is found in a line of your code, the line will be marked and you’ll be able to see the details of it if you hover over the marker.

Multi-cursor Editing (Blockedit)

Blockedit

Blockedit lets you write code simultaneously in different lines of code. You can set multiple cursors by holding the Alt key and clicking over where you want each of them to be set. Everything you type while you have multiple cursors activated will be written everywhere you have selected simultaneously.

Documentation

Documentation

Online documentation for the active language is now easily available inside the app. You can bring it up by going to View->Documentation, or if you want to look up something specifically, you can select the text and hit CMD+Shift+J to automatically jump to it.

Templates and Snippets

A basic HTML5 Template

When you start a blank document, you will notice that a small button called “Template” becomes active on the top bar. This button can help you quickly get a basic template for starting your project, and it’s specific for each language. In Objective-C, for example, you can get a template for creating a class or a category, and in HTML you can get an HTML5 template that contains doctype, meta data, a CSS stylesheet link, and head and body declarations.

If you want to get a little more specific, there are also small default snippets of code for declaring certain things. Under the “Actions” menu, you can find these language-specific snippets for declaring all kinds of things, like basic cycle declarations or more complex stuff like conditional comments for specific browsers in HTML.

Build and Preview

Web Preview

Chocolat comes with a very useful Webkit-based live web preview for immediately checking out how your end result is looking if you are coding a webpage, and you can as well validate your code with the click of a button. With certain other languages, you can as well run your code in the Terminal right from the app.

Competition

It would be really hard to put Chocolat against all the options out there for text editing, just because there are so many of them and they all offer their own unique experience. Despite its impressive set of features, probably what will mark a difference for Chocolat is its price. Comparing to apps like Coda 2 ($99), Sublime Text ($59), TextMate ($52) and Espresso ($75), Chocolat’s price of $50 not only seems reasonable, but it might also be a decisive factor for anyone looking for a new text editor.

Chocolat is kind of right in the middle in terms of pricing between free alternatives like TextWrangler and paid ones like Sublime Text or Coda. Before using it, I worked with TextWrangler, because it’s a free alternative and it does pretty much just what I need even though it doesn’t feel glamorous or cool at all. Just with a few days that I’ve spent with Chocolat I’ve seen just how concentrating it is to have a clean, good-looking UI is and how useful having features like split-screen editing and live web previews is.

Conclusion

As one of our wise readers put it in a comment in the previous Chocolat review we did, “switching into a different text editor makes my head and wallet hurt”. If you are already set in your ways with a text editor, Chocolat is hardly going to convince you to switch to it. Although it has a strong set of features and its minimalistic UI certainly makes it stand out, there’s still not enough of an incentive to make you go migrating your whole workflow to a new text editor.

However, if you’re in the market for a new editor, Chocolat might just have enough to fill your necessities, and for a moderate price that’s hard to match in a market like that of text editors. For such a minimalistic-looking app, I ended up being more than impressed with everything it can do, and I intend to keep using it instead of my old text editor, which is about as good of a recommendation as I can make.

What about you?