Category: Mac

I think, if we were to do a random poll, we’d probably find that most of us hate keeping our computers running smoothly more than any other task. Looking for old files and keeping the trash cans empty are unenviable jobs, and as the owner of a small business, I’ve contemplated hiring an all-purpose secretary to handle email and computer maintenance — but that’s not really practical.

All joking aside, one of my favourite things about my Mac are the apps that are available that help make boring tasks like cleaning up my hard drive less dull. Oddly, one of my favourite apps of all time, DaisyDisk, made the task fun. Finding joy in mundane things like computer maintenance is one thing that only Macs can offer, and that’s why I was thrilled to give Disk Diag a shot. It’s a simple app on the Mac App Store meant to do one thing well: clean out your old files. Read on to compare it with some of the competition and see if it’s for you.

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Let’s Talk Design

I start most of my reviews for AppStorm with a little chat about the design principles of any given app, and I don’t think that’s entirely unwarranted. But in the case of an app like this, I think it matters even more than usual. If an app like this is ugly, I’m never going to bother using it.

That’s why I wanted to spend a few minutes talking about the charm of Disk Diag. Its most obvious visual comparison is a speedometer, which threw me off for a couple seconds. My main thought is that the app works really quickly, so I suppose a speedometer is a relevant metaphor. But it seems odd.

In fact, the app sort of looks odd in screenshots. To be completely frank, you have to try this app to understand its charms. The joy is in the animations. The Start button pulses on occasion, but never loses its friendly veneer.

Hitting Start brings up a quick list of different folders you could delete. Most of these are caches, the Trash can, or Mail downloads (the first time I deleted my Mail downloads, I had over a gigabyte sitting in there that I had simply never bothered to check out — and I’ve only been using this specific Mac for a year).

When you choose to wipe everything clean, a friendly dialogue bubble will let you know that you should back up your hard drive first (just in case). Deleting everything happens relatively quickly, and as it does, the speedometer dial acts as the visual completion reference. That’s when the metaphor becomes very cool.

And that’s it. This is a really basic app, but it gets the job done for a number of basic users. For people new to Mac, or people like my mother who would never download an app like DaisyDisk for fear of damaging something, it’s an easy recommendation.

But should you use it?

The Alternatives

There aren’t a ton of free alternatives. If you don’t mind paying for it, Clean My Mac 2 is a much more comprehensive solution. Again, DaisyDisk is an excellent piece of software. OmniDiskSweeper, available for free from the always-reputable OmniGroup, is available for free from their website. That being said, it’s not as dummy proof. Like the description says, “Delete away, but exercise caution.”

Of course, the other option is to delete everything yourself or use something like Hazel to automate when you delete things. If you take the time to set it up, Hazel can clear out caches or the trash can on a schedule (and it will boot when you log in). But Hazel is $28 USD — it’s a far cry from free, but for good reason. After all, it’s a comprehensive solution for Mac pros who need to enhance their workflows, not just empty their trashcans.

Theoretically speaking, you could also remove files or directories using Terminal (and if you’re interested, here’s some geekery about just that). But the problems with that are manyfold: most of us dn’t have time to punch in a bunch of code for each individual directory, and for anybody other than the most advanced of Mac users, the probability of making huge mistakes is going to be much higher. Even if you do know what you’re doing with Terminal, it’s time-consuming.

Final Thoughts: A Warning About Sandboxing

That being said, I’m also slightly curious about how effective Disk Diag is. I’m not an expert on the sandboxing that the Mac App Store has brought with it, so I’m relying on you folks to correct me if I’m wrong, but my understanding is that an app doesn’t have access to the whole hard drive. So while an app like Disk Diag is convenient for novices and power users alike, it’s not necessarily going to clean up everything hogging up your hard drive.

But I’m not sure what is. After doing some research and reading up on the options, the only thing I know is simply this: if you want to really clean up all the useless files on your Mac, you’re going to have to know OS X pretty well. And you’re probably going to have to repeat some of the process every time a new OS is released. It’s a giant pain. For me, Disk Diag makes it easy. I have my concerns about the simple deletion that a Mac App Store app could be doing, but at the same time, it makes it so simple that I find very little reason to complain. At a nonexistent price point, Disk Diag is practically a must-have for busy people.

Google Reader’s death has pushed us all to decide again what we want from RSS. But it’s easy to forget that Google Reader and online synced feeds weren’t the only option all along. The Mac used to include RSS sync in both Safari and Mail, and Firefox still has Live Bookmarks for a simple way to subscribe to sites. Neither option was as shiny as Reeder or as convenient as any online feed sync with companion mobile apps, but they just worked. You got the latest news on your Mac in a lightweight, native app, and got on with your life.

That’s exactly what the new Dayspring app offers. It’s a lightweight, Mac-only RSS reader that brings back the simplicity of checking your feeds in an app like Mail.

Just You and Your Feeds

Dayspring is just a feed reader — it syncs your feeds on your Mac, and that’s it. It looks practically just like a built-in app like Mail, with a standard toolbar and 3 column view that shows your feeds and folders on the left, feed entries in the middle, and the article you’re reading in the main column on the right. You can add your feeds individually, or import your OPML file from Google Reader or another feed app.

From there, it works just as you’d expect. It syncs your feeds (quite fast, too), then checks for new feeds every half hour or so, depending on your settings. There’s a star button in the top where you can favorite individual articles to make them easy to find again later, full-text search that does quite the great job finding text anywhere in any of your synced articles, and a button on the top right to open the current link in your default browser.

Then there’s one big extra feature that sets Dayspring apart: tabbed browsing. Just like in a browser, you can open links in new tabs in Dayspring, or press CMD+T to open a new tab and browse, say, different folders of your feeds at once. It’s an easy way to open everything you want to read in-depth in the app, and a nice extra for an app that’s just focused on reading RSS feeds natively on your Mac.

And that’s it. There’s literally nothing else in Dayspring, aside from options to set your reading fonts. There’s no sync, no read later or sharing service integration, and not Google Reader-style keyboard shortcuts. You can use your arrow keys and tab to move around your feeds and articles, and of course could set your own keyboard shortcuts from your OS X Keyboard Preferences, but that’s all that’s included in Dayspring. It’s literally just about your feeds on your Mac, and it does a great job at native syncing and feed reading — but that’s it.

Nice and Basic

If you’re looking for the slickest new RSS app that’s built around native RSS syncing, the new NetNewsWire 4 beta is likely a better shot for you. NewsBar and Leaf take the crown if you’re looking for an innovative, new UI for your native-synced RSS feeds, and ReadKit is easily the king if you want to sync feeds with the best online feed sync tools today.

But if you want traditional Mac-style RSS syncing with no frills, Dayspring’s actually the best app we’ve seen so far. It’s entirely predictable, feels like a native app — perhaps one from 2005 or so before Apple started focusing so much on mobile and sharing — and does a great job at just syncing feeds like it’s supposed to. If that’s what you’ve been looking for, it’s the app for you — one that’s hard to beat price-wise at just $2.99.

Out of all the major free blogging websites, Tumblr is possibly the nicest. Its social aspect is fun, and it’s really easy to use and post with. Unlike WordPress, it doesn’t require a manual to understand how to use it. Unlike Blogger, it’s actually useful (and its built-in social network seems more active than Google Plus). For these reasons, and many more, Tumblr is what I use for a music blog that I host.

Because I really like the web interface for Tumblr, I have to admit I was a little skeptical of Tublme, a native Mac app for Tumblr that replaces the need to open your browser. After all, Tumblr’s interface is easy to use and notoriously simple (to the chagrin of many WordPress web developers, I’m sure). But my curiosity was also piqued. Could Tublme make Tumblr more Mac-like and feature-filled without sacrificing any of its flexibility? Read on to find out.

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Native App Design

Tublme looks like a modern Mac app. It’s very dark, not unlike Pixelmator or Tweetbot, and fits in with the aesthetic that the most accomplished OS X developers seem to be going after. Thanks to that, Tublme is initially a little off-putting. Maybe I’m used to Tumblr’s brighter colours, but it took me some time to really appreciate what I was looking at here.

That design does influence the way I feel about the service in a magnitude of ways, though. The first is that Tublme makes Tumblr feel much more like a social service. I’ve already compared the aesthetic design to Tweetbot, an obvious influence (both even put many of their toolbars on the left side of the app). But this comparison is extremely relevant. Just like in Tweetbot, I was very interested in actually taking a look through some of my friends’ Tumblr posts to see what was new. I might be a rarity, but I rarely feel compelled to do that in Tumblr’s web app.

Sadly, the app doesn’t memorize your place in the timeline. Every time I opened it, I always saw the newest blog posts right away. This is exactly how Tumblr presents itself on the web as well, but it’s a shame that the developer isn’t making use of a small Cache on your Mac hard drive to remember your spot.

The Little Flourishes

Of course, because it’s a native app, the interface also has a little more flexibility. The app can allow for popup menus that a web interface simply can’t provide. If you want to see Notes on a post, you have to tap on a button that looks a little bit like a bookmark. This frees up a considerable amount of space in the interface for your posts, and puts a focus on reading what other people have to say.

That being said, I wish that level of minimalism reached through other areas of the app. It’s odd to me that Notes are only visible by clicking on a button, while Tags are always visible (especially since some people will be using Tumblr templates that make Tags invisible by default).

But every type of post looks beautiful. I was particularly impressed with photo slideshows, which I don’t think I’ve ever seen in Tumblr itself (or maybe I’m just not following the right Tumblr blogs). Regardless, the layout for the slideshows is gorgeous and had a friend nearby ooh-ing and ah-ing. Everything is responsive, and fast.

Finally, Tublme brings some things to the table that Tumblr’s native web interface simply doesn’t. You can add users to Lists (just like Twitter), if you’re the sort of person who needs to manage the dozens of blogs you follow. You can also navigate almost entirely with the keyboard, which should save you a ton of time if you prefer to avoid your mouse. (In fact, if you prefer to use keyboard shortcuts for navigation, I’d stop reading this review immediately and just go buy the app. It will be perfect for you.)

In other words, if Tumblr is your main source for social media, Tublme is going to be your best friend. It’s fast and consistently checks with Tumblr to see if new posts are available. It has a menu bar icon for notifications, which is handy, and can handle multiple account logins. Thanks to the ability to handle multiple account logins, some social media managers might find the app extremely useful. Of course, the app also allows you to post from multiple blogs with one account, which is the setup I use.

Writing a Post

This is the part of the interface where I usually end up spending most of my time, particularly in a native app that attempts to replace a web app for me. I occasionally write simple posts, but most of the time I’m writing longer and more complex pieces. I like to preview my work in a web browser as I go, which means that Tumblr’s ability to preview my work on my blog is important to me.

I also write in a combination of Markdown and HTML, usually compiling chunks of each of my posts for one of my blogs in particular in both. Thankfully, my first observation with Tublme was that it allowed me to write in either HTML or Markdown. Since I do most of my prep work in Byword, I chose to write in HTML. I can copy and paste the HTML directly from Byword, and Tublme will render it perfectly.

That being said, as nice as the interface is — and it’s lovely — it is lacking some functionality. As expected, Tublme allows me to post anything: text, images, quotes, links, chats, video, and audio posts are all supported. Sadly, though, I can’t find a way to mix them up. I frequently add photos to text posts, so this is a little sad. I tried dragging and dropping, which connected the URL path to the local file to the post, but it didn’t upload the image to Tumblr’s servers. (If there is a way to do this, then the developer needs to make it much clearer.)

The app also doesn’t allow you to preview anything before you push it live. In other words, if you want to see your post before everybody else does just to make sure it actually looks good, you’re not going to be able to preview it anywhere — not even in the web browser. It also loses the smart scheduler with natural language parsing, so instead of telling Tumblr to schedule a post tomorrow at 8, you’ll have to manually select tomorrow’s date and time. This doesn’t sound like a big deal, but it is — those few seconds will add up.

At the end of the day, some people will be able to get by just fine with Tublme. But my needs are a little more advanced when it comes to writing post, and Tumblr already has a difficult time catering to HTML-loving writers. For me, I still spend most of my time putting a post together in the Tumblr web app.

One appreciable difference between Tublme and Tumblr itself is offline saving of your post, so if you don’t have an Internet connection or lose it, you don’t lose all your work. That’s a huge perk, particularly if you want to make sure your post is perfectly prepared.

Final Thoughts

Tublme is a smartly-designed piece of software that improves on the social side of Tumblr in all the right ways. It makes browsing through posts a lot more fun, and even makes it a bit more social with features like Lists. I wish you could customize a bit of its visual experience, but it’s not like I was left wanting either: it’s a beautiful Mac app.

That being said, the writing experience can leave something to be desired. It doesn’t support all the flexibility that Tumblr’s website does, and despite the fact that it offers me the ability to save my work should I lose connection, I still found myself doing most of my post prep work in the browser. A Preview feature would be really nice, but it would be even nicer to add any kind of media to any kind of post. $10 is a lot of money to spend on a Tumblr app exclusively for an admittedly excellent social experience, and I’d love to see the developer refine Tublme’s posting experience to match.

Despite being the world’s largest software company, Microsoft has somewhat of a bad reputation when it comes to software for the Mac. Ask anyone who has ever to endure using Microsoft Entourage for any length of time and they’ll likely tell you its the only software package in existence that violates almost every human rights act there is.

Microsoft has had a remote connection app for Mac users to remotely access Windows workstations for some time, though it was so old and infrequently updated that system requirements even stated it was not for use with Mac OS X Lion or later.

Thankfully, Microsoft have been taking the Mac and iOS platforms a little more seriously and their latest remote access tool, Microsoft Remote Desktop, is not only a complete reworking of its ageing predecessor, it’s actually really good.

Out With The Old…

Rather than update their previous Remote Desktop tool, Microsoft has, instead, created a new one that is available through the Mac App Sore. This isn’t just the same old app with a new design (I’m looking at you, Outlook 2011), this is a whole new app designed to be as lean as possible.

Microsoft Remote Desktop isn’t so much a screen sharing app as it is a remote access tool. Screen sharing implies both you and the user currently logged in can access the PC. In fact, with Microsoft Remote Desktop, logging in with your username and password will log you out of the PC as Windows continues the user session remotely. This is something Windows has been able to do for some time and is used a lot by remote workers, though if you’re planning to provide any remote assistance then you might want to look elsewhere. This app is more for network administrators and remote users than casual screen sharing.

Managing Connections

The app itself launches to a small panel that stores any saved connections. Adding connections is as simple as selecting New or importing any existing RDP profiles you may already have available.

Adding new connections is straightforward, simply providing a name for the connection, IP address for the Windows PC and some login credentials. Some additional settings are options and can be customised, depending on your requirements.

Unlike Apple’s own Remote Desktop for Mac OS X computers, Microsoft Remote Desktop has no discovery feature and can’t scan your local network for machines available to connect to. Again, the purpose of this app is more for remote access than remote support, but a discovery feature would have been a nice addition nonetheless, especially for system administrators dealing with multiple computers and servers within their corporate network.

There’s a fair amount of control over each session as well as colour depth and resolution, with both app-wide settings as well as per-connection settings, perfect for dealing with a remote computer on a slow internet connection.

Full-screen support is, however, rather confusing. Setting the option to use full-screen within each remote profile does so in a rather proprietary way and doesn’t use Mac OS X’s native full-screen function. But if you leave the option unchecked, however, you can then use Mac OS X’s full-screen function as it will appear within the window.

Assuming Control

If there’s one thing Microsoft has always been great at, it’s speedy remote access, and Microsoft Remote Desktop is no exception. The app is blazingly fast, taking only a second or two from connecting to being logged in and interacting with your desktop. I tested the app with Windows 7 and Windows 8, using both a local network and connecting externally via 3G and the speed difference was negligible. Remote users who often find themselves at the mercy of hotel Wi-Fi will really appreciate this.

Rather frustratingly, Windows 8 requires a resolution of at least 768px in height or else most of the apps won’t even run. While this is fairly reasonable, there’s nothing to advise you of this within the settings.

Microsoft Remote Desktop does a good job of re-mapping keys so that the Apple key becomes the Windows key, allowing for all the Windows shortcuts you’re probably familiar with.

Remote users of Windows supporting RemoteFX (some flavours of Windows Server and Windows 8+) will be able to use multi-touch gestures using their Apple trackpad. Functions such as swipe and two-finger scroll all work surprisingly well and add an extra level of interaction.

File Sharing

Sharing files and documents via remote sessions is always a lesson in futility. Its always sporadically supported and, often, you end up relying upon services like Dropbox or SkyDrive to do the grunt work. This means waiting to upload the files and then having to download them remotely,

The Pièce de résistance of Microsoft Remote Desktop is its super-simple way of sharing files between your Mac and the remote Windows computer. The app has a rather understated feature called Redirection, allowing you to have continuous access to any folder on your Mac from the remote Windows computer. Simply add a folder to this list and it will appear as a mapped network drive within Windows as soon as you connect, allowing for two-way file transfer.

This is a great feature and it works brilliantly, providing a genuinely useful feature for file transfers, and it shows that Microsoft really understands the needs of remote users.

Conclusion

Microsoft Remote Desktop is a surprising app because, honestly, I wasn’t expecting such a well-thought out app that is brand new, not just a rehash or sloppy update to an existing one. While Microsoft is more than capable of making some stellar software, their Mac apps are often ridiculed as being bloated, buggy and decrepit.

This app is, thankfully, none of those and it does everything you’d expect from a remote access tool, and more. For any Mac users who have a PC or Parallels virtual machine just so they can work on a remote Windows computer. Microsoft Remote Desktop is, finally, a great way to do this on a Mac.

Two weeks ago at their special fall event, Apple released the much anticipated updates for its iWork suite. It’s been the biggest rework of the apps since the iWork suite was first launched. The apps bear a fresh, brand new UI but leave behind useful features, especially those that were most-loved by at power users. There’s been a lot of controversy about these apps over the past weeks, as is readily apparent from the comments on our Pages and Keynote reviews.

Numbers, Apple’s spreadsheet app that’s now in its 3rd version, is not an exception to the trend seen thus far in the new iWork apps. It’s simplified, looks much like the other new apps in the suite, and gets rid of some features that some of you might consider essential. Here’s my impressions on what I’ve always considered a powerful yet super easy to use combination of a free form spreadsheet processor and data visualizer.

A Completely Rethought User Interface

Much as with Pages and Keynote, the new Numbers features a radically redesigned interface — perhaps the most striking of all three apps.

The Format Panel

Like in the other apps of the suite, the floating Inspector palette has disappeared. Now, it has been replaced by a panel that is completely part of the window, sliding in and out from the right. This panel is not resizable, which is one of the little things I don’t like in Numbers 3. It can take up way too much space, especially on a tiny screen or if you’re not using the app fullscreen.

In fact, like I did in the Keynote review, I advise you to use this new version of Numbers in full screen whenever possible to get the best out of the canvas space. The only good thing is that icons and text in this panel are larger than in the previous Inspector, thus making things more readable. Some people are complaining about always having to go to the right to format things, though that itself doesn’t seem too frustrating to me.

If you don’t like going back and forth between the canvas and the format panel, remember you can always assign Keyboard shortcuts from the system-wide Keyboard preference pane of OS X for every single existing menu command in Numbers.

The great thing about the new Format panel is it’s context-aware: it automatically updates based on selection. Click on a table, you get table-related formatting options; click on a chart, you get chart-related settings. It isn’t completely seamless, though. For instance, when you select a table, the panel contains four tabs (Table, Cell, Text and Arrange) but it does not seem to recognize if you’ve selected a whole table, just a single cell, or even just text within a cell. Instead, it always selects the last tab you used. One could imagine that selecting a cell would lead you to the Cell tab, selecting some text to the Text tab, and so on, but unfortunately it’s not quite that smart.

Just One Toolbar, Lots of Popups, and Inconsistent Design Choices

There is now only one non-customizable toolbar sitting at the top of the window. Clicking on most of its buttons presents you with popover tabs. Just like with Keynote, some popups are slightly transparent, others look as if they are attached to their button, and still others give you drop-down lists. Even among these drop-down lists, no one is identical in design to the others.

I’m still wondering why it is such a mess. It’s as if different people designed each different popup and everything was put together in the same toolbar at the end of the day. A bit of consistency would have surely helped everyone use the new app easier — and helped users of the previous Numbers not feel so shocked at the changes — but alas, that was not to be.

Also, while the Format/Filter panel can’t be detached from the main window, some other UI elements are floating windows that can be toggled visible/hidden from the View menu:

• the Arrange Tools window,
• the Colors picker,
• and the Adjust Image window

Once you decide to show these windows, you get movable, persistent, floating palettes, much like the old Inspector was. I find it weird, both from a design and a usability point of view. First, these windows make the overall user interface a compromise between the old look and feel and the modern one. And then, while it might be handy to have a Colors palette always visible, I doubt the Adjust Image window is useful enough in a spreadsheet app to get its dedicated window.

But perhaps the most incredible thing is that the Arrange Tools window is an exact replicate of the Arrange tab available in the Format panel. Seriously? Why give the opportunity to detach (or, by replicating it, simulate the detachment of) only one UI element — that would, moreover, be really more useful in a page layout (Pages) or presentations (Keynote) app than in a spreadsheet app?

Finally, there is one more tiny element that — somewhat inexplicably, again — gets its dedicated floating window: the Find & Replace window that is curiously absent from the View menu but that you can show by clicking on the View button (i.e. the leftmost icon in the toolbar). But don’t get too excited about it because it’s really less powerful than its previous iteration in Numbers 2 (more on this later).

Sheets Are Treated Like Tabs in a Web Browser

Another big change is that sheets are not listed vertically in a sidebar on the left of the window, as it used to be. They are now located at the top of the window, just underneath the toolbar. This gives you more space on screen for the canvas. But, just as it’s difficult to reach a specific tab in your browser if you have too many tabs open, it can be tedious to reach a sheet if you’ve created too much of them. You can’t see more than six sheets at once, because each “tab” representing a sheet is of fixed size. Thus, you have to scroll right of left while hovering over the “sheets bar”, or use the small buttons at its right end to show more.

In Numbers 2, you had a tree view of all the sheets and their elements in a left sidebar, all at once. You now have to hover over the name of a sheet name to click on a drop-down button; there, the contents of this sheet is listed, and you need to repeat it individually for each sheet. Again, experienced users might be frustrated whereas newcomers will find the new look clean and uncluttered.

In some aspects, sheets are like tabs in Safari:

• When you need to add a new sheet, just click a + button, on the far left of the bar
• If you want to re-order sheets, simply click their “tab” and drag them left or right

However, what’s missing from a browser-like behavior is a little drop-down that would give you access to any sheet, without having to scroll all the way to reach it.

Clearly, Apple wants you to keep your documents simple: here, six sheets are enough. The trend is recurrent in any new updated iWork app: Apple decides for you that things should be kept simple, uncluttered, almost basic. Sometimes there are workarounds, sometimes you just have to accept it. Like it or not.

Tables Behave Differently, Too

There’s not only novelty in toolbars and buttons: tables also don’t behave like they used to. While in Numbers 2 you could move a table from any of its edges, without even having to select it, now you need to first select the table by clicking on it. This surfaces controls outside of the table, and then you can click on the new round handle in the top left corner to drag the table. Other handles, while getting new icons, give the same effect as before: the top right and bottom left handles let you add/remove column(s) and row(s) respectively, and with the bottom right one you can control both columns and rows at once.

The most striking change is the way autofill works, now, in the graphical user interface. Users of the previous Numbers, and even people coming from other spreadsheets software like Microsoft Excel or OpenOffice Calc, might be surprised:

• dragging a cell from its bottom right or top left corner just extend the selection; it does not autofill surrounding cells anymore
• to autofill, you need to drag the yellow dot that appears when you hover over the middle of any border (top, bottom, left or right)

Status Bar and The New Approach to Formulas

At the bottom of the window, there’s now a bar that appears only when you click on a cell in a table. This is sort of a status bar, in that it displays first the kind or state of data entered in the cell, and then the value of this data. It can read, for instance, Text then the text entered in the cell, Actual followed by a number if the cell contains a user-input number, and Formula followed by the formula itself when the cell, well, obviously contains a formula.

But the display is not static and, much as the Format bar, is context aware. For instance, Actual becomes Formatted while you’re typing something in a cell where a specific data format is applied, and Formula is changed to Formula Result when you’re creating/editing a formula. This helps you see what the cell will actually display once you’ve hit Enter before you hit it.

The biggest change since previous versions is that, while being automatically updated, you can’t edit the content of this status bar directly within it. You need to double-click the cell contents itself to edit it. In short, you now edit cell contents in place instead of in the status bar, including when you need to edit formulas. Indeed, double-clicking a cell with a formula shows up an editable iOS-style Formula bar.

Regarding formulas, there are several improvements that help you craft them step-by-step more easily:

• when creating/editing a formula, the Format panel (if already revealed) instantly updates to show you the Function Browser, where you can search for functions and get help about how to use them, with examples
• functions names can be autocompleted: just type the first letter(s) and press Enter if the first match is the good one, or tab through other choices then hit Enter; this is inspired by the iOS version of the app
• likewise, parentheses are replaced by “crescent moons” that include the function name and its argument(s); these visual cues are designed to reduce parenthesis mismatches, and should be familiar if you’ve ever used Numbers for iOS.

If you don’t like the crescent moons look, you can click on the name of a function in the edit bar and choose “Convert Function to Text” or “Convert Formula to Text”, which will revert the display back to a good old plain-text look, minus color-highlighted parenthesis like there were in Numbers 2.

A Better User Interface but You Need to Get Used to It

What I loved right from the start, the first time I created a new spreadsheet in the older Numbers 2, is the free-form canvas. Coming from Microsoft Excel, it was refreshing to feel free about the way you organize and display your data elements. No need to have an ugly, infinite, unique table on screen and superpose charts, drawing and text boxes over it. This approach is what makes Numbers so different and fortunately it’s been preserved.

But while the concept remains the same, the way it is applied through the graphical interface exerts a major rethink. New users, especially those coming from iOS, will be pleased by the clean, streamlined interface. On the contrary, experienced users that used to work with Numbers 2 will surely be confused at first. The good thing is you can show Coach Tips at anytime if you feel lost.

Admittedly, I was nitpicking on some points, but the interface gave me mixed feelings at first. Getting past Apple’s reality distortion field, I wouldn’t describe the UI as “stunning” like advertised, but just as a fresh, streamlined but inconsistent UI. After a week of use, though, I bet you’ll feel at home again and overall I think the benefit is greater than the little drawbacks I pointed out here and there.

What Remains from Previous Versions

In addition to the free-form canvas approach, the basic workflow remains the same, fortunately. There are some interesting and really well crafted Templates you can use when creating a new spreadsheet, if you don’t want to bother starting from scratch. These templates seem even better thought than their previous versions and look more modern, more elegant. There’s even a new Charting Basics template that teaches you how to choose and use the appropriate chart for your data, with use case examples.

When working on a spreadsheet, you can still easily add tables, charts, text boxes, shapes, media elements and comments from a broad set of predefined types and styles for these items. Editing and updating data and charts is also easy as ever. Formatting items is done at will in a snap; actually visual mini previews in the popups and the Format bar even help you get an idea more quickly, even before applying.

And of course, as with any good native Mac app, most of the things you want to accomplish can be done by dragging and dropping, which includes, for instance, adding some frequently used functions to your tables.

What Has Numbers 3 Gained…

There are a few additions as compared to the Numbers 2.

A New Format for Easier Interoperability and Sharing, No Seamless Collaboration Yet

iOS and OS X versions now share the same Numbers format. Spreadsheets are now fully compatible between mobile and the desktop and their contents will look exactly the same, on the web as well.

Beware: your documents created with previous versions of Numbers will be updated to the new format and there’s no way back.

You might lose some functionalities and formatting along the way. Make sure you keep a backup copy of your spreadsheets before opening them with Numbers 3.

Numbers now fully support iCloud and spreadsheets can also be edited via iWork for iCloud beta. However, just like with Pages and Keynotes, the feature set in the web app is very limited: for instance you can’t edit charts, and you won’t even leave a comment for your collaborators.

For now, the best way to collaborate on a document is by working on two different machines with their native app (on OS X or iOS). But this real-time collaboration is only available with iCloud sharing (via share sheets just like for other items in OS X), which requires you to move your spreadsheet to iCloud. If you’d rather keep the document on your machine, though, you can still send a copy, but will lose the benefit of collaboration. So, there is still room for improvement in this area.

Some Other Notable Features

• You can now insert Interactive Charts, with sliders that let you easily switch between different data sets to display on the same chart.

• There’s a new type of charts: Bubble Charts.

• You can now add comments to charts, shapes and text boxes, in addition to cells (previously available). These comments are like tooltips: they only appear on hover and are not resizable.

• You can now use 5-star rating as a data format in cells, in addition to other already existing special formats like checkboxes, sliders, steppers and pop-up menus.
• Talking about the pop-up menu data format, you now have the option to have them start with a blank entry.

…And What’s Been Lost

If you upgrade from Numbers 2, you’ll miss a plethora of features that gave the app a pro signature:

• No Applescript. It’s not just a reduced support: the dictionary has completely disappeared from Applescript Editor.
• Filtering data is less convenient because you can’t Categorize by column anymore, one the neat features that made Numbers unique. The multi-column Reorganize feature is also missing. There is now a new Filter panel: using it, you can display only rows that match user-defined criteria. Sadly, that’s definitely not the same approach.

• No more auto-completion for text previously typed in the same spreadsheet. If you start typing something and hit Alt-Esc, you get auto-complete from the whole OS X dictionary.
• Apparently, you can’t have more than six predefined table styles in a given template, and you can’t create custom ones — or I haven’t figured out how to do it yet. The workaround is to create a new document with another Numbers template, or format an existing table to your liking, then copy and paste the table into another document. But you’ll have to do this each time you want to re-use a table style not included by default.
• The Print preview is only for previewing. You can’t edit anymore in this mode, which implies a lot of back and forth between two different interfaces. Fortunately, you can still show horizontal and vertical rulers to see if your content will fit the page. Printing options are really basic: you can’t insert Page Headers or Footers and can’t define margins: you have to choose from different predefined paper formats and use the Content Scale.

• The Find and Research View is much less powerful: it’s gone from the full-fledged navigator in Numbers 2 to a basic toolbar that just highlights the results.

The lists above are not exhaustive. If you want an in-depth look, Apple users “SGIII”, “Yellowbox” and others, from the Apple Support Communities forum have build “The Great 2013 Numbers Migration Gained and Lost List”, which is comprehensive and very helpful.

Conclusion

I have mixed feelings about this new version of Numbers — I don’t want to use the word “upgrade”. While still using the Microsoft Office suite at work, I’ve always thought of Numbers, with its forward thinking, free canvas approach, as a combination between Excel and Powerpoint. It’s beautiful, usable, and innovative. It does not have the full power of concurrent apps, but fits the job elegantly for everyday tasks.

If you look at Numbers 3 from a newcomer point of view, like someone who has never used Numbers on OS X before, and/or uses its iOS version, and/or comes from more “traditional” softwares like Microsoft Excel or OpenOffice Calc, you should be happy with the release. The freeform canvas is a breeze of fresh air and an invitation to creativity. The UI is modern, uncluttered, fresh. You can get a working and professional looking document in minutes thanks to elegant and easy-to-use templates. Just focus on the data and Apple takes care of the rest.

But if you’re an experienced Numbers (power) user, you’ll be disappointed, for sure. Lots of functionalities have been removed, and it’s hard to swallow you have to rethink your workflow and maybe even rework your tables for just a fresh coat of paint and full compatibility with iCloud and the mobile version. Let’s hope this new Numbers is just a new start from a blank canvas, the foundation for great things to come that will bring back much more power and customization. Fortunately, iWork ’09 apps should still be available in a dedicated folder after the installation of the new versions, so you can get the best of both worlds.

Whatever your opinion is about Numbers, we’d love to hear what you think in the comments section below!

Have you ever wished that you could improve your reading speed so you could read everything you need each day faster while retaining the same reading comprehension? Then you need to try out 7 Speed Reading, the new speed reading app for the Mac.

Whether you’re a professional trying to speed up your workday or a student trying to cram in your extensive reading list ahead of finals, learning to speed read is one of the best ways to speed up what you need to get done. 7 Speed Reading promises to teach you to read 3 times faster than before, with full reading comprehension. It does that by helping you remove bad reading habits and improve your reading focus using the app’s adoptive UI. With detailed tutorials and personalized training exercise, you’ll find your reading speed improving in no time.

Then, you can improve your reading speed without spending any extra time learning, since you can import any Wikipedia article or your own text into the app for practice. That way, you’ll be reading the stuff you’d already need to read today while learning to read faster at the same time. Or, you can take advantage of 7 Speed Reading’s built-in library of eBooks to learn new stuff while improving your reading speed.

Best of all, 7 Speed Reading will help you keep track of how much your reading speed has improved over time, and includes tips on ergonomics to help you take care of your eyes and body while you’re working at your computer. It’s one app that’ll directly improve your life, and prove it.

Start Speeding up Your Reading Skills Today!

Ready to start speeding up your reading skills? Then get your own copy of 7 Speed Reading for Mac for $79.95. It comes with a special vocabulary training course for free to help you improve your vocabulary, and best of all includes a 1 year money-back guarantee if it doesn’t end up working out for you.

If you’ve been around the Apple scene for any period of time, you’ve probably learned about two of the best resources out there for finding out more about your Mac: Mactracker and the MacRumors Buyer’s Guide. Between those two places, you’ll learn what Macs you should buy and when, discover specifics about an older Mac and so much more. Heck, Mactracker helped me ID a Power Macintosh 9500 sitting around my friend’s office the other day.

Which is why, while watching the recent Apple Event, I started thinking about how long it’s been since the Mac mini has seen an update. And then when Phil Schiller said about hardware, specifically the Mac Pro. So what was this throw-away comment and what does it mean for the Mac mini? Let’s talk it out.

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The Quote

“Simply put, you cannot put a hard drive in anymore that is as fast as Flash.”

As far as I can tell, there are two currently shipping models of Macs that come with traditional spinning hard drives: the iMac and the Mac mini. The iMac is super thin on its edges, and bulges out towards the center to accommodate two things: the processor and the hard drive. Although engineers at Apple did take advantage of that space by making better speakers and the like, it seems to me that if hard drive thickness stopped being a limitation, the iMac could get to be laptop thin (making it bulkier on the edges than it is today, but still).

Now apply that quote to the Mac mini. This is not meant to be a powerhouse like the iMac. The mini is more of an introductory Mac — the easy entry-level Mac that people buy when they want to try out the platform and already have a keyboard and mouse. Expectations are low, and no one expects to buy it with a three terabytes worth of storage. Although they’re very capable machines, the point is that they could be more efficient. With Flash memory, that could radically change the game.

No bones about it, Apple wants to convert all of its computers to Flash, and why wouldn’t they? Not only can they then control their own supply (they purchased a company that builds Flash a few years ago), but it’s better for their customers. It’s already in all of their laptops, and even when they had a product that could (and arguably should) have traditional storage — the Mac Pro — they went with Flash. This transition is happening, it’s just a matter of when.

But Wait, There’s More

You can plunk an SSD into the Mac mini today with the help of a few aftermarket components. You can even double up on SSDs if you like, because there’s room for two drives in the current-gen mini. But neither of those options are Flash in the Apple sense of the word, which mean that there’s room for improvement.

Take away the extra space, throw the spinning platter hard drive in the recycle bin and you’ve got a ton more real estate to work with inside the Mac mini. Or keep the hard drive and go vertical with it like the current Time Capsule, and maybe use some of the technology found in the Mac pro to keep it cool. You have lots of options.

All this says to me — particularly when combined with Schiller’s quote about Flash — that the next mini is going to be a major upgrade in both speed and form factor. Maybe it goes as small as the current AppleTV, or turns into a smaller version of the new Mac pro. Further solidifying this theory, the current-gen mini is now over a year old. It’s been 377 days since the last model came out, and in Apple terms, that’s right in the wheelhouse for an upgrade (the iMac updates on average every 333 days, the Air at 340). Why a new one wasn’t announced a few weeks ago has yet to be explained, but I’d expect a mini any day now.

Does it Matter?

Look, there are absolutely no rumors around about the next Mac mini having Flash, and this is all speculation. But it makes sense. Although the Mac mini is a niche product, and although it’s used for servers, colocation and other very serious projects, it’s still Apple’s low-end Mac. It’s the gateway to OS X and a cheap way to discover the platform — and it’s also quite stale. Wouldn’t it be great if it was substantially faster and still affordable? It’s time to reset the platform with some new innovations.

We’re getting a new Mac mini sometime soon, you can be sure of that. And when it comes, my fingers are crossed that my theories come true.

There’s Mac app bundles going on all the time, but there’s seldom bundles this good. The brand-new Productive Macs bundle features an all-star set of apps, a set so good you’ll likely want to use every app in the bundle.

The bundle includes Keyboard Maestro, the keyboard shortcut app so versatile we used it in a recent tutorial to control the Mac from the iPad. It’s easily worth the cost of the bundle on its own, but there’s more. You’ll also get the time management tool Vitamin R, Numeric Notes for simple calculations, Trickster to help you take control of your file system, Default Folder X to make it simple to find the folders you need, the flexible notes app NoteBook, and FX Photo Studio Pro for simple yet powerful touchups to your pictures. All of that, for the low price of $29.99.

And, as you should have suspected from the title, we’ve got two copies of the bundle to giveaway! It’ll take a tad bit of extra work to get your entry in, though: you’ll need to share this post on your favorite social network, then leave a comment below with a link to your post and the name of the app you want most.

Hurry and get your entry in — our giveaway closes on Friday, November 8th!

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

Intelligent recognition software, whether it be voice- or picture-based, is continuing to improve. Google Googles is a great example of this. It recognizes patterns in an image and uses them to search for related data. You can use the service to translate a sign in a foreign country or help you distinguish a piece of art. Google is definitely on top of the image recognition software, but smaller competitors are beginning to develop their own versions of the software.

Picatext is a new Mac app that hopes to bring text recognition to the desktop. It supports over 40 languages, claiming that it can take text from an image and copy it to your clipboard in a matter of seconds. Let’s find out if it works.

It Works, But Only Just

I tested Picatext with several sample documents, some photos and others screenshots. All the photos were taken with my Moto X, which has fine clarity in decent light, and all the photos were taken indoors under a desk lamp. The first thing I noticed is that the app took a bit to process each image. From what I can tell, Picatext takes an image and uploads it to the developer’s servers. In this case, you should probably be cautious of using sensitive documents for privacy reasons.

Now, on to formatting. Picatext extracts what it perceives as text and puts together the closest match it can. The problem is, it has no support for any type of decoration. If you wanted to process an old document with bold, italic, or underlining, it just doesn’t work. On top of that, vertical and horizontal bars and other arrangement tools used in documents are not supported. This severely limits the types of documents you can use.

The first document I used was a special notice about a retirement fund from a job I had a few years back. It was organized in the usual legal manner, using bold-italic headers, underlined sections, and bullet points. Picatext interpreted some of the bullet points as periods, but most of them weren’t even recognized. The document as a whole looked fine at the beginning, but as I began to scroll through it got progressively worse.

Due to the lack of support for any type of styling, most of the underlined headers were read as gibberish, or horribly misspelled. There should be a spellcheck feature to avoid this, matching misspelled words to ones that are close. I’ll get to that in the next section, though.

Missing Essential Pieces

If you scan something and extract it’s text, you usually want to copy it to your clipboard. This app should have a setting that does this automatically when it’s done processing. Picatext has a lot of missing features similar to this one. The first one I noticed was drag and drop. Most menu bar apps support dragging and dropping of images onto their icons to make things easier. There’s no way to do that here. Rather, you must click the out of place orange upload button and navigate to your scan or photo in Finder.

Another thing you may want to do with your recently-imported text is save it as a text document. There’s no support for that either. In fact, there’s no way to save anything in this app. If it crashes, say goodbye to your text. If you don’t want to lose your precious document, it’s best to copy everything and paste it in a text editor right after the app is finished reading the text.

There should at least be an export option in Picatext — a way to save everything so you can open it later. It’d also be nice to have a history of your scans. In addition to having an export option, there should be a way to organize previous results and quickly copy them to the clipboard, like with Droplr or CloudApp. These are basic features that should be included with such an app, but they’re left out, making it quite subpar.

Bugs and Other Issues

Usually I don’t have to dedicate an entire section to an app’s problems. Picatext has quite a few, so I wanted to detail them.

• Using the app to take a screenshot and then pressing escape to cancel will crash the app.
• There are a lot of display issues within the app itself (note the chopped off “t” in its name).
• It’s not optimized for Retina displays and looks worse than most apps on one.

Lots of Room for Improvement

The developers call this app “An easy & nice to use OCR tool.” It’s easy to use, but the experience is far from “nice”. For one, a menu bar app that doesn’t support drag and drop is bizarre. It’s still usable, though, so we move on to the actual functionality. There I found simplicity in a detrimental form: most of the app is hampered by its lack of features. It does only what is asked of it and nothing more. I was hoping it would go beyond the call of duty, but the developer isn’t walking down that path at the moment. It’s very disappointing.

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

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

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

There have been a number of tools and services to help make web development more efficient over the years, with CSS extensions such as Compass, LESS and SASS, that turn stylesheets into faux-programming languages, complete with variables. In addition to that, mobile is now the most popular way of accessing the internet, so it’s crucial to make website code and scripts as compact and efficient as possible.

CodeKit, by Incident 57, describes itself as “steroids for web developers” and, after using it for some time, I wholeheartedly agree.

What CodeKit Is For

CodeKit isn’t your run-of-the-mill web development app. It isn’t a code or text editor, instead it’s a companion app that serves as a background tool for projects you’re working on. It monitors projects that you’re working on, constantly checking to see if any code needs to be compiled.

Tools such as CSS pre-compilers are becoming ever more popular, especially when wanting to design pixel-perfect websites. If you’re unfamiliar with what these are, effectively it introduces features such as variables into CSS, something that the language was never designed to do. With a CSS pre-compiler, you simply specify a variable and assign it a value, such as a colour, then use the variable wherever you would have used it. Now, you only need to change just one line of code for the entire site’s colour scheme to change.

But since CSS was never designed to do this in the first place, we have to rely upon a specific tool to monitor our stylesheets and convert them into a format that can be understood — they need to be compiled, and this is where CodeKit comes in.

Work Smart, Not Hard

The app features a dizzying array of different functions, so much so that almost any web developer would find it useful. Don’t be fooled into thinking that using this app will somehow make you a better coder, CodeKit expects you to have at least some working knowledge of how its supported languages work. Without this knowledge, CodeKit is not an app you can learn.

There’s Compass, SASS, LESS and CoffeeScript compilers, image compressor, Javascript minifiers and more. CodeKit supports a vast number of popular development languages when it comes to markup or styling. The app does all the compiling and processing itself, providing an all-in-one utility without having to keep Terminal windows open and commands running to watch folders for changes.

Certain frameworks and projects might need to use their own compilers and CodeKit allows for the use of alternative ones, rather than its own, right from the settings.

Projects

Adding projects is easy and you can choose between either a folder or framework, or a Compass project. CodeKit will automatically detect the required Compass settings if you’re adding an existing project so that your project continues as normal.

CodeKit understands that not all projects are alike and, while there are app-wide settings, each project can be individually controlled with custom settings. Speaking of settings, CodeKit includes a heck of a lot of configuration options and settings for you to specify for each language it supports, as well as general app settings.

Even for a Compass novice such as myself, creating new Compass projects was easy and even adding existing ones took no time at all. CodeKit will automatically recompile your project as soon as a change is detected, or at a regular interval, even providing a Growl notification as soon as it is complete — as well as logging any changes.

Compress and Minify

Even if you’re not taking advantage of any pre-compilers, CodeKit still offers a whole range of other tools. Javascript files can often be the largest files that a website serves, so CodeKit provides a number of ways to compress the files and reduce the file size as much as possible.

One of the best practices when it comes to web development is keeping the number of stylesheets and script files to as small a number as possible, though the downside of this is that you often find all of your code gets rather overwhelming. CodeKit lets you continue working with separate files but includes the option to import Javascript files into one another, providing an outputted file that becomes the sum of all the files you’ve chosen. From a development point of view, you can continue working with all of your various scripts that organised separately, but CodeKit will always output a unified, compressed Javascript file that your project can refer to.

It isn’t immediately obvious how to do this, however, as you need to select a Javascript file first and CodeKit will then display an option to import another file, which you then select and drag. While it isn’t totally unintuitive, it does take some getting used to since you can’t just drag files on top of each other.

On top of the compression features, CodeKit also offers full syntax checking for many languages to ensure the code you’re writing works right the way through development.

Image Compression

In keeping with the rest of the app, CodeKit includes a image compressor to reduce image size on images within your project. There aren’t any customisable settings for image compression like there is with apps such as ImageOptim, but you’ll find it more than adequate. As a staunch user of ImageOptim, I use it less and less for web development simply because I can just process the whole lot through CodeKit.

Wrapping Up

Since using CodeKit within my own web development workflow, it has become completely indispensable and is an app that I couldn’t do without. While some of its features are not as straightforward as I’d like, its support for a variety of different languages, ability to customise settings app-wide or project-specific, as well as various compression and syntax checking functions make it the ideal tool for any Mac web developer to own.

Quicksilver, one of the oldest “launchers” for Mac OS X, has reached one of its biggest milestones — the 1.0 release — a few months ago. We’ve already reviewed v1.1, and now we’re rolling out a series of how-to articles to get the most of this powerful app.

Quicksilver’s flexibility may be daughting at first. You’ve got to get your hands dirty to really see what it’s capable of. But fear not, we’ve got you covered! Last week we teached you some basic concepts. For a few weeks, we’ll have a weekly in-depth coverage of some of the most commonly-used plugins. Read on to get the most of managing your contacts and sending emails.

Installing Plugins

First things first, let’s see how to install a plugin.

When you launch Quicksilver for the very first time, the setup assistant invites you to add some recommended plugins. You can install as many plugins as you want. Just make sure that you at least check the Apple Mail and Contacts plugins so you can practice what’s described hereafter.

Later on, should you decide to add some more plugins, installing them is as easy as ticking a box in the Plugins tab of Quicksilver Preferences. Provided you included Internal Commands in Quicksilver Catalog, accessing this tab is done by issuing the Show Plugin Preferences > Run command. Else, you could access Preferences with Command-comma, just like with any native app on OS X. Before deciding to install a plugin or not, you can get more information about it by clicking the round i button at the bottom right of the window, which reveals the info drawer.

Contacts

Start by typing the name of a contact. The default action should be Show Contact, so when you hit Enter, it will show up in the OS X Contacts app. Remember, you can change the default action for a given category by dragging it to the top of the list in Preferences > Preferences > Actions. Access the Preferences with Command-comma, or the Quicksilver way: Show Preferences > Run.

There are 3 possible actions for a contact: in addition to Show Contact you can Edit Contact, which opens up the contact card ready to be edited, or Add Note…. With the latter action, a third, rightmost pane shows up and lets you type some text. Showing up this special kind of pane is called entering the Text Mode of Quicksilver. If you need to insert line breaks, press Control-Enter. Once you’ve hit Enter, your text will be added to the note field of the contact’s card.

Provided you’ve installed the FaceTime plugin, you can also FaceTime a contact.

OK, using Quicksilver to open up a contact with the OS X built-in Contacts app is fine. But what makes Quicksilver really interesting is that you can interact with this contact and its data without leaving Quicksilver. Type a contact’s name again and press Right arrow or / (or the space bar, if you’ve defined its behavior to Show Item’s Contents): there, all contact details are displayed line by line in the Results list (i.e the popup window showing up underneath the left pane).

Use the Up arrow and Down arrow keys to select one of the details. With some data selected, you can for instance run the following commands:

• Copy to Clipboard — pretty obvious
• Large Type will display the text on screen within a giant popup; useful when dialing phone numbers or writing a postal address on an enveloppe (hey, it still happens these days!)

Mail

Select the Mail app in the first pane of Quicksilver window. You can browse through its mailboxes (with Right arrow or whatever key you use to show item’s contents). You can also go deeper and show the contents of a mailbox to browse through all of its individual messages. If you select an individual message and hit Enter when the Open action is selected, this email opens up in a new Mail window. Unfortunately, Smart Mailboxes are not accessible from within Quicksilver, which makes the browsing feature not useful enough for me when you know what my workflow is.

Where Quicksilver excels is in the many ways you can send emails. Looking at the actions availables for Email Addresses, you’ll see four. Only E-mail item… (Compose) and Compose E-mail are enabled by default.

To compose an email to Michael, for instance, just search for Michael in the first pane then press Tab and select the Compose E-mail action before hitting Enter. If the recipient has several email addresses, the first one in the list (as seen on the related card in Contacts app) will be used. If you want to send it to another address, after selecting the contact, browse through her/his details to find the address you need before using the Compose E-mail action.

While you’re in the left pane, you could also enter Text Mode to type an email address yourself. Because I have a couple of TextExpander snippets for email addresses I frequently send messages to, this is the way I do it most of the time.

Sending attached files with Quicksilver is handy and fast. As I’ve explained in my review, you can do it however you like it:

• either first select the recipient, then E-mail Item… (Compose) and finally select the file,
• or the other way round, selecting first the file and last the recipient; the only minor difference lies in the name of the action that is E-mail To… (Compose) in this case (but since I use the emc abbreviation for both actions, I hardly notice it)

Customize how emails with attached files will look like by having a trip to Preferences > Preferences > E-mail Options. You can also choose your default From: address in here.

Remember two email-related actions are disabled by default? If you choose to enable them, you’ll get the opportunity to skip the compose window of Mail entirely:

• The E-mail Item… (Send) action (the one with the paperplane icon) launches Mail in the background and uses it to send your message,
• whereas the E-mail Item… (Send Directly) action (with its Quicksilver icon) completely bypasses Mail.

In either case, you should hear the well-known plane sound while the email is sent. With both of these actions, however, you lose a bit of flexibility as compared to the Compose actions: you have no other choice than selecting first the recipient and last the file.

Gmail

If you’d rather use the web interface of Gmail instead of the built-in Mail.app, you just need to install the Gmail plugin (that auto-installs the E-mail Support plugin along the way) and configure some little things.

First, go to Preferences > Preferences > Gmail and enter your credentials. If you use 2-step verification for your Google account (and you should) you’ll need to use an application specific password here.

Then, you need to specify which program Quicksilver must use for sending emails (Gmail or the built-in Mail). Go to Preferences > Preferences > Handlers and choose Gmail Plugin next to Email.

Once all of this is done, running one of the Compose command will directly open the New Message window of Gmail in a new tab of your default web browser.

Keep in mind you lose some integration benefits if you use Gmail instead of the built-in Mail. You won’t browse your Gmail inboxes directly through Quicksilver, and the E-mail Item… (Send) won’t bypass the compose window of Gmail.

Using Mail and Contacts Together

Let’s get back to our previous Copy to Clipboard action for a contact detail. Say a friend needs the phone number of another friend of yours, and wants you to send him by email. You could start writing an email, search for that phone number with Quicksilver and run the Copy to Clipboard command, then switch back to the email and paste the phone number with Command-V. That’s the least efficient way to do it, though! A slightly better way would be to write an email, search for the phone number in Quicksilver, and run the Paste command.

Fine, but here’s an ever better way to do this:

1. In the left pane, search for the phone number then press Tab.
2. In the middle pane, type the Email Item… (Compose) command and press Tab again.
3. Finally, in the right pane, search the contact you want to send this phone number to.

When you press Enter, a New Message window from Mail.app (or Gmail) will open up, with the recipient’s email and the subject line (containing the phone number) already filled up. The body of the email also shows this number but, since the text cursor is in the body field, just press Command-A to select all and type whatever you want instead.

Actually, the best and fastest way to compose an email message containing this required phone number is done with just one Quicksilver command. Here are the details:

1. In the left pane, search for the phone number but then, press the period key to enter Text Mode; the phone number is converted into text data that you can interact with.
2. Here, make sure you press any arrow key not to delete the phone number, as everything in the Text Mode is selected by default.
3. Compose an email directly in the left pane, by using the following convention: subject >> body (remember you can press Control-Enter to insert line breaks).
4. Press Tab to reach the middle pane, and proceed as described previously: select the E-mail To… (Compose) action then press Tab again and search the contact you want to send this email to, then hit Enter.
5. A New Message window opens up with everything already filled up, so you just have to hit Command-Shift-D (the default shortcut to send an email in Mail.app). Hear the plane sound? “Boom!”, as would have said Mr. Jobs, your email is sent.

What Next?

It takes a mouthful to describe all the ways Quicksilver can help you interact with your contacts. Just practice, though, and you’ll see the app is super easy to use and surprisingly adept.

Next week we’ll see how to control almost every aspect of iTunes with Quicksilver. In the meantime, feel free to give us some feedback, share your experience and ask any questions in the comments.

Despite the technological advances of fingerprint scanners and retina displays, iOS devices can still only print to a very limited number of printers that support AirPrint. While more and more printers are adding this feature (and some manufacturers, such as Canon, are even providing updates to certain models to add AirPrint functionality), buying a whole new printer for a feature you’ll likely not often use just cost effective.

Printopia is an app that’s best known for serving as a gateway between your iOS device and your printer, providing a way to print to any Mac-compatible printer directly from your iOS device, free from the restraints of AirPrint. While most may be content with only this functionality, Printopia offers so much more for both Mac and iOS devices alike, especially to those looking for a paperless workflow.

PC Load Letter

Printing, especially from an iOS device, is something we’re all doing less and less. Not only do you need to remortgage your home just to buy a set of colour cartridges but many of us now have a smartphone so that much of what we printed, from reservations to flight tickets, just doesn’t need to be put to paper. Despite this, there are some situations where a printed copy of a document is required.

Printopia exists as a preference pane, accessible from System Preferences. After installation, there is nothing else that needs to be done to start printing, as long as you had your printer set up within Mac OS X. Unless you regularly change printers then Printopia is truly an app you can set once and then forget about.

There are only a few options and settings that can be changed as the app manages everything else for you. Apart from enabling or disabling Printopia, you’re free to add and remove print destinations, though printers can only be disabled and cannot be removed.

Any existing printers that you have set up on your Mac will automatically be shared via Printopia across your network so, provided both Mac and iOS device are on the same network, your iOS device will instantly see an AirPrint-compatible printer as available. This lack of any configuration for both Mac and iOS device make Printopia a seriously simple app to get going.

Printing from an iOS device works no different than if you were to print to an AirPrint printer and Printopia even supports password protection, perfect for office environments where you might not want everyone to print to the expensive colour laser printer.

Go Paperless

Printopia’s name is somewhat misleading because some of its best features are when you’re wanting to avoid printing. I’m a huge advocate of paperless workflows, and nothing makes me scream internally quite like printing for the sake of printing. In addition to providing access to your printer, Printopia also lets you “print” from your iOS device directly to an app or folder on your Mac. As far as your iOS device is concerned, saving a document to Dropbox is just an AirPrint-enabled printer.

Printopia captures all printed documents it receives as PDF that can be automatically saved to any folder or sent to an app on your Mac, such as Dropbox or Evernote. Combine this saving feature with an app like Hazel and you’ve got yourself a great paperless workflow for your iPhone or iPad. There’s support for print actions too, just as if you were printing the document directly on your Mac.

Setting up these paperless workflows is a cinch as Printopia includes options to save to a folder, Dropbox or send to an app. Each one simply appears as an AirPrint printer for your iOS device to use.

Printopia does rely upon outside help for performing anything beyond saving to a folder or app, relying predominantly upon print actions that you can create through Automator. I’d like to see Printopia offer at least some sort of workflow creator or way to print a document after it has been sent to a folder. Granted, you can do this fairly easily within Automator, but offering it within Printopia would provide a whole new level of document archival. Even if you had to print a document, at least a copy could be saved at the same time rather than printing twice.

Mac to Mac

It isn’t just iOS devices that Printopia will work with, Mac OS X Lion and above support the use of AirPrint printers as well. While it may not be as useful to share printers that other Macs will likely already support, some of the paperless workflows might come in handy should you find yourself sharing a friend or relative’s Mac.

Wrapping Up

My only criticism of Printopia is its name and I suspect many people just aren’t aware that it offers so much more than simply being an easy way of printing from an iOS device. While that is certainly a great feature, Printopia’s crowning achievement is its folder workflows, providing a way to save printed documents directly to a folder or app of your choice.

Even if you have an AirPrint-enabled printer already, Printopia is exceptional if you’re wanting to do more than just put ink to paper. Since iOS offers no way of saving documents, messages or web pages that you might want to print to other apps consistently, Printopia not only offers a solution but it’s one that is supported in any app that can print.

It’s been just over a week since OS X Mavericks was released, and yet our analytics show that over 40% of you have already upgraded to Mavericks. That’s quite the quick switch, but then, Mavericks being free made it an easy jump. Plus, it looks and works practically the same as Lion and Mountain Lion, on the surface anyhow, so there’s not really anything new to learn.

But there is a lot of new stuff under the hood — and even closer to the surface if you look around. There’s the new tags and tabs in Finder, iBooks, Maps, and a new version of Calendar and Contacts without all the leather. Power users will love the new multiple display support, and developers have all kinds of new API goodies to play with. There’s even new fonts, and AppleScript support for Reminders of all things.

But sometimes, the things we thought were most exciting don’t end up being what we use the most. I was terribly excited over Finder Tabs, then ended up not using them nearly as much as I thought I would. iBooks, on the other hand, is my new go-to place for some inspiration and down-time distraction, and I’ve loved having it around as much as I thought I would. Apple even seems to think it’s a pretty big addition, and is featuring iBooks on the first screenshot in Mavericks’ App Store page.

So how about you? What’s your favorite feature in Mavericks after spending some time in it? We’d love to hear how you’re using the new Mavericks features in your work and play!

I always want to make working on my Mac easier, and I’m never disappointed when I find an application that does that. Fast Toggles isn’t itself really an application, though, but a collection of small applications that each performs one small function each. These are all things that are often used but can take some digging to reach. Fast Toggles puts them in one place and makes them a lot easier to get at. Is Fast Toggles that much faster, though, or just a waste of time?

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Just Toggle It

There are a couple of functions that I go for a lot and can already easily find in my menu bar, but frequent readers know that my menu bar can be a pretty crowded place. I like to hide a lot of stuff, and sometimes that comes at the expense of functionality. The Bluetooth and Wifi toggles in Fast Toggles keep me from looking to hidden menu bar icons or, worse yet, opening System Preferences to quickly turn those functions on and off.

Then there are the toggles that just make it easier to use my Mac. The Logout, Restart and Shutdown toggles are probably useful to someone, but I can just as easily click to my Apple icon. More practical are the Quit All Apps and Lock Screen toggles. Sometimes I’m just ready to get out, and I don’t want to go through and close and quit all of my apps manually, and Fast Toggles can handle that for me.

The Lock Screen toggle just makes good security sense when I’m working in a shared space, because I can hit that, and my screen locks up. No one can see what I was working on without my login name and password.

I keep my Downloads folder close at hand on my Dock, but that’s not everyone’s bag, and the Open Downloads Toggle gets me there just as quickly. There’s a toggle for opening the Dropbox and Home folders, too. No more burrowing required to get to these often accessed files. The only thing I’d ask for in addition to this is an Open Documents toggle, since I find myself there a lot, too.

The last of the toggles are a mix of useful one-off tasks. My favorite is the Desktop Icons toggle, because it hides the mess of my desktop, making all of the files and screenshots and everything I’ve collected invisible. I just click that toggle again, and it all comes back to the desktop. The Hidden Files toggle is a help, too, because though I rarely need to get at anything OS X doesn’t want me to see, when I do, it’s important, and I don’t want to be slowed down by a System Preferences maze.

Is It Just More Clutter?

Okay, so what are you supposed to do with your toggles? There are a bunch, and it just doesn’t make sense to slap them all on your Dock like I did in my screenshots. I’ll tell you that after the fact, I kept my favorite, Desktop Icons, in my Dock, because I use it all the time to clean things up before I take a screenshot.

Everything else is in the Fast Toggles folder next to my Trash. I can get to anything I need quickly, but it doesn’t have to takeover my whole display. If it’s nothing you go to often, Fast Toggles can live in your Applications where it will be accessible from Launchpad. The important thing is that it has to be easy to find, or it defeats the purpose.

Final Thoughts

There are certainly some useful toggles here, but there are a few I just don’t get. Why do I need a special mini-app to empty the Trash? It’s right there on the Dock and in the Finder’s menu bar. Failing that, there’s a keyboard shortcut that will take care of business just fine. If none of that works, I’m going to be looking at a third-party app to fix my issues or moving to Terminal to take care of the problem, not the Fast Toggles Trash script.

That’s the thing. These are essentially AppleScript applications in a really nice package. I’d bet you could make most of these on your own with a bit of knowledge. I’ll admit I haven’t attempted all of these, but I’d already tried my hand at creating a few similar applications in Automator in the past when I was just looking for an easy way to get things done on my Mac. If you know what you’re doing, where to look, or feel like learning a bit, it’s not that difficult.

So why would you pay for these when you could likely cobble them together on your own? A lot of people could make them work, but not everyone will, and Fast Toggles is for them. Also, there is some effort in creating them, and that’s already done for you here. Plus, they come with some attractive icons that all match, which is more than you’ll have if you make your own set from scratch.

That said, if you’re only interested in a couple of the toggles, you might be better off looking into creating your own. If all fifteen seem like the business to you, though, it’s probably worth it to fork over the ten bucks for a full set.