Category: Mac

I have a lot of music, as most of us do, and I need to keep my music organized. I download and import music from lots of different places, so my music files end up tagged with all sorts of different genres, artist and song titles are garbled, and they get all kinds of comments stuck on them. It can be a burden to clean all that up.

Yate, an audio file tagging app, can edit metadata and get all your music organized the way you want it. We’ll try editing a few files, see if Yate stands up, and find out whether it can really clean up the mess of your iTunes library.

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Tagging Music with Yate

Yate isn’t all that intuitive, and when I first launched the app, I wasn’t really sure where to start. It seems every time I open Yate, it prompts me to take a look at the help file, but even that didn’t really explain in a straightforward way how I should get going. It was really up to me to figure out my way around the application.

Yate’s main window; I’ve opened all of my music files and started editing one.

To start working with your music files, select Open from the File menu. If you’d like, you can adjust how you open your music files with File > Open Mode, for instance if you want to be sure files within subfolders are included. Be careful when you start opening a lot of files; I tried opening just about my entire music library, and Yate took what seemed like a year to process all of that.

After I started over with a single album, I saw that Yate had brought up pretty much the same info I’d find in the Get Info pane in iTunes. For the basic user, you can edit the title, artist, and genre, just like in iTunes. The Artwork Search button up top will help you replace missing album artwork, a lot handier than the complete lack of any similar feature in iTunes. There’s also a wizard that will import tagging info from MusicBrainz or Discogs, if you prefer to use those services.

I’m editing the information for an entire album.

If you want to edit more in depth information for your music, additional tabs not available in iTunes will let you do that. Add credits, such as lyricist or musicians, the music’s language and mood, copyright information and publisher, and associated URLs.

Yate gives you some additional tagging options.

Once you’ve made all of your edits, hit the Save button. Again, if you’ve added a lot of files to Yate, it’s going to take some time to get all of that processed. However, when I edited only a single album, my wait was much more reasonable.

Pros and Cons

All of what I needed or wanted to edit, I could have easily taken care of in iTunes. However, for power users who want to hang on to the copyright information or want to save the artist’s website in the song’s information, along with a whole string of other data, Yate will let them do that.

The beauty of Yate is that when linked to iTunes, it will automatically update your file’s metadata inside of iTunes for you. Unfortunately, I couldn’t get Yate to link to iTunes. Every time I tried, I got an AppleScript error. This is kind of a big problem.

The extensive Yate application preferences

When you change the information for a song in Yate but Yate isn’t linked to iTunes, you have to manually open each song in iTunes and sign off on the changes. So if you change the info for a few songs by different artists, you have to hunt down those individual songs, open up their info individually, and click OK. When I changed information about an entire album, I was able to open all of those songs at once and OK them in one swoop.

According to Yate’s help file, there should be a Refresh iTunes action that will take care of all of this for you, provided you can get iTunes linked to Yate, but I couldn’t find that action anywhere. iTunes will eventually figure out on its own that the files have been updated, even without the Yate refresh or your manual OK. But that’s not how the app is supposed to work.

Conclusion

If you just need to organize your music and get an out of control iTunes library cleaned up, Yate doesn’t give you any more tools than iTunes. Everything you need is available in the Get Info pane; add a little elbow grease, and you’ll have a music library anyone can be proud of.

However, if you need to keep track of lots of extra information, beyond what’s available in the Get Info fields, that’s where Yate’s going to do you a lot of good. Its tagging functionality goes far and away beyond what’s available in iTunes, and provides real value if you need to keep track of copyrights, publishers, and additional URLs.

I just really wish the app worked better. I had a tough time getting started, and despite Yate’s prompts to check out the help file, that wasn’t much good to me when I couldn’t figure out how to get my files into the application. Beyond usability, the link between iTunes and Yate was just broken, and no matter how many times I tried or how many ways I tried to link the two, it just didn’t work. The lack of linking really cut down on the functionality.

Yate is billed as being the right app for anyone serious about organizing and tagging their music. If iTunes isn’t giving you all the tags you require, Yate is definitely one to try, and even without the link, iTunes is smart enough to figure out the changes eventually. If you just need to organize your cluttered music library, though, you’ll probably want to look elsewhere.

Apple Stores have become all but ubiquitous in most major cities around the world. I live in Thailand, which doesn’t actually have its own Apple Stores, but their Apple Premium Resellers here, iBeat and iStudio, look quite the part of their Apple Store counterparts. And they’re everywhere, in all major malls and even small-town superstores.

Apple Stores are great places to try out the latest Macs and iOS devices, and make it rather easy to, say, buy anything from new power adapter for your MacBook or a new MacBook in just a few minutes. But if you’re not content with the default specs, you’ll want to head to Apple’s online store. There, you can trick out your Mac with all the ram and SSD space Apple offers.

Or perhaps you’re looking to save some money. In that case, you might be better heading to Amazon.com or a brick-and-mortar retailer. They don’t offer quite as fancy of a shopping experience, but they often are a bit cheaper at least.

That’s why we’re wondering: how do your buy your Macs and other Apple hardware? I personally have purchased all of my Macs from Apple’s online store, though I tend to pick up accessories as I need them at local Apple Premium Resellers. How about you?

Our sponsor this week is CourseNotes, a great app for taking notes for school on your Mac or iOS devices. It’s been recently redesigned and is on a 50% off sell right now, so if you’ve been looking for a great app to help you out with your classes this semester, it just might be what you’ve been looking for.

CourseNotes describes itself as a student’s class companion for Mac, iPad and iPhone. It helps you take notes during classes, and keeps them organized by subject and class meeting. You can then review notes later and search through multiple class meetings or notes all at once. Best of all, you can track assignments by due dates, so you’ll never miss that important deadline for your term paper.

Even if you don’t take your Mac into the classroom, CourseNotes can still help you out with its iOS versions that sync over the air with your Mac. That way, you could type up notes on your iPad, iPhone, or iPod Touch in class, then review your notes later in the dorm on your Mac. Then, if you’re trying to study as a team, you can share notes with your classmates over Bluetooth or through email, and can print notes via AirPrint or save them to Dropbox. That makes it quite the study aid for everyone!

Go Get It!

If you’d like to start keeping your classwork organized with CourseNotes, now’s the time to get it. It’s currently on a 50% off sale until October 14th, so you can get CourseNotes for your Mac for just $3.99. You can also grab a copy of the universal CourseNotes iOS app for the same price so you can keep up with your notes everywhere.

Today, we are excited to announce Building a Career Around Photoshop, a live online workshop that will help you take your Photoshop knowledge and skill to the next level.

Attendees can join in each week, download video recordings of each session, take part in homework exercises, and interact with other attendees, live and from the comfort of your own home. During these workshops we will be covering photo editing and retouching, graphic and web design, user interface design, digital art, and much more.

Each weekly session lasts two hours, giving you the chance to receive live training from one of our post popular and talented authors — Martin Perhiniak. It is an amazing investment in your future career, and we think you are going to love everything we have planned!

Visit the Tuts+ Live Workshop Page to Find Out More

There is no shortage of so-called ‘distraction free writing’ apps for our beloved Mac platform, a trend that started with the excellent WriteRoom from Jesse Grosjean’s Hog Bay Software in 2008. WriteRoom was the original full-screen minimalist text editor that inspired many similar writing apps that fill the App Store today. The company later followed up with a plain text to-do list app, TaskPaper, and also released QuickCursor, a simple app to edit text from any text field in your favorite text editor. Hog Bay Software not only made it nice to write plain text, but made it simple to do so whenever you want for whatever you want.

After creating the genre, the little company now re-invents it with FoldingText, an incredibly easy-to-use combination of plain text based tools. Geeks, nerds, writers, productivity gurus, rejoice: a new plain text productivity platform is born.

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Meet FoldingText

What strikes you when you first launch the app is its extreme minimalism. No toolbars, no buttons, just a clean, crisp, low-contrast window filled with dark grey text on a light grey background. It’s perhaps a bit too close to iA Writer or Byword’s design, though when you strip everything away, perhaps it’s hard to be more unique. Plus, seeing as it all started with WriteRoom, we’ll give FoldingText a bit of a break.

The minimalist yet classy main window should look familiar to iA Writer or Byword users.

Really more than just another minimalist writing app

Every new FoldingText window includes a few lines of instructions that are enough to get you started. But you will miss some unique, powerful yet easy-to-use features (called modes) if you don’t look at the detailed, yet only 3-page long, user guide. Indeed, FoldingText is not only a Markdown-based text editor but also:

• an outliner
• a to-do list app
• and, surprisingly, a timer!

What is extremely pleasant about all these features is that everything is just plain-text based, as the user guide nails it down:

Remember, it’s just text.

FoldingText does some cool things, but in the end you are just editing text. If you know how to type, you already know most of what you need to effectively use FoldingText.

The real beauty of the architecture of this software is that you could use any mode wherever you want within the same document, while never being lost or distracted thanks to powerful filtering possibilities.

Markdown elegance at its finest

By default, the app hides all the inline Markdown syntax in your document, only showing you the resulting, WYSIWYG format. Just place the cursor within the formatted words and the syntax shows up again.

The inline Markdown syntax is hidden when not in use, giving a neat, uncluttered look to your writings.

Because of that, editing text might slightly move around your words and sentences on the screen when the syntax is hidden or revealed. Not a big deal, but if you’d rather have the syntax permanently visible, there’s a menu command for that.

Headers, blockquotes and lists, however, are formatted but keep their identifying characters visible. Hiding all inline syntax while keeping the document structure easily identifiable is a really elegant compromise. After a few minutes of use, I even wondered why this has not yet been implemented in any other Markdown editor, at least as an option.

What I like, too, is that text selection is handled à la Byword. Starting from where your cursor is, by hitting Cmd-Alt-Up arrow several times, you can start a new selection and expand it to the current word, sentence, paragraph, section or whole document.

Precise and quick text selection can be performed using menu commands or keyboard shortcuts.

Where the ‘folding’ in FoldingText makes sense

One of the killer features of FoldingText is that you can fold/unfold blocks of text. You can do this with TextMate and BBEdit too, but I’ve never seen it in a ‘simple’ text editor yet.

Just click on the # of any header and the following section is hidden from view, only replaced by an ellipsis. Click again on the # (not on the ellipsis — this could be misleading the first times) and the section content is visible again.

You can hide as many sections as you want by folding them. A great way to work within long documents.

You can also use menu commands (View > Expand and View > Collapse) or their corresponding shortcuts (Cmd-Alt-Right arrow or Cmd-Alt-Left arrow, respectively).

You can collapse all lists, code blocks and blockquotes as well, down to having just a backbone of your document on screen.

By folding everything, you have a bird’s eye view (so-called outline) of your document.

This way, the app could easily be used as an outlining tool. Indent/unindent items and move items up and down using the Items menu commands or with shortcuts. You can also “Move left” and “Move right” items, though in my testing this seems to be exactly the same as indenting/unindenting and I still wonder why these are separate options.

Stay focused

In addition to being able to fold/unfold paragraphs on the fly, you can also focus on any particular section. This is accessible via the View > Focus In menu command or its keyboard shortcut Cmd-]. As a result, everything else disappear.

When in focus mode, a discrete black and white indicator is shown in the upper left corner of the window.

Navigating in a long document is easy. Hit Cmd-L and choose (with your mouse or keyboard) a section to focus on. Just hit Cmd-L twice and you see your whole document again.

Interactive todo lists made easy

Let’s say you want (some part of) your document to be a to-do list. You could do this as in any other text editor: just type “To do”, hit return, start each line with an hyphen, and voilà.

The interesting way to do this with FoldingText is to add “.todo” (without the quotes) at the end of the line of your list title. It will tell the app that what you’re typing from now on has to be automatically formatted like a nice to-do list. Hypens in front of each list item will be turned into clickable boxes. Just click on a box: the item is marked as done and the text formatted as strike-through.

The todo mode adds special markup to offer a clean, readable interface.

FoldingText started as a rewrite of the TaskPaper engine, a plain text-based todo list software from the same company. You clearly feel this heritage in the todo list mode:

• words preceded by @ symbol become tags
• completed items automatically get the @done tag
• you can assign value to tags between brackets: if your todo list is based on priorities, for instance, you could have @priority(1), @priority(2) and @priority(3) tags
• clicking on a tag filters the view, only showing tasks tagged with that given tag

Overall, this makes for an easy-to-use yet powerful todo list app.

A plain text-based timer

The timer mode is the most unexpected feature. Say you have some plan in mind for how to spend the next two hours and want to track it precisely. All you have to do is to type it in a natural language:

The timer mode is surprisingly easy to use due to the natural language parser.

Notice that, each time you hit Return, a timestamp is added to the left margin of the line.

Don’t forget to indent each line — except the title one — else the timer won’t work.

Just click on a timestamp and the timer starts. When the timer is running a new line is added under the title, reading: “Start:” followed by the exact date and time it started. The current step is highlighted and when it’s finished, you’ll hear a “ting”. Another distinct sound marks the end of the list.

You can easily see if and when the timer started and where you are in your list.

You can re-use timed lists any number of times. The timestamps are updated everytime. You’re totally free about the syntax when defining times: you can make grammar mistakes (e.g. forgetting the plural form), forget a space between the number and the unit, place the duration whenever you want on the line, and indifferently use plain words or abbreviations. This mode can be used for whatever you like, from a simple cooking recipe up a complete Pomodoro technique helper.

Sadly, there currently is no way to stop the timer once it has started. Also, if you run multiple timers at once, it might be hard to figure out what step the sound you’ve just heard was for.

What is still missing

• You can’t customize the interface: no font choice, no color choice, no zoom (but the font size is comfortable). However, you will eventually be able to create or download CSS-based themes.
• There is no character/word count. The lack of this basic feature might be a no-go for writers.

You can use the ‘Statistics’ feature included in the free OS X third-party service from DevonThink WordService as a workaround to this.

• There is no ‘replace all’ function. The rather basic implemented search functionality seems based on what you see in TextEdit, but curiously you have to replace occurrences one by one.

Is FoldingText worth it? Absolutely!

Following the same path as TaskPaper on which FoldingText is based, the app provides a blank canvas. You could use it just as a basic Markdown-based text editor. But if you take advantage of its unique features (section folding, focusing, and special modes like todo and timer) then you have in front of you one of the best all-in-one productivity tool you’ve ever used, while having next to nothing new to learn to use it efficiently: just type, it works.

FoldingText is still in its infancy (it has been submitted to the Mac App Store as a paid app but not approved yet) and might look unfinished in certain aspects, but the roadmap gives great hopes about what has to come. Users will sooner or later be able to extend the initial features by creating and distributing their own themes and modes, making me think FoldingText is not just a software but could become a plain text-based platform in the long-term. A platform as simple as TextEdit but as powerful as TextMate. That’s sure something we can get excited about!

We’d like to say a special Thank you! to our weekly sponsors from the past month, 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!

If your day looks anything like mine, you probably spend a fair amount of time requiring some sort of time-sensitive response. Perhaps you need a file for work, an rsvp for an invitation or any myriad of responses. The problem, of course, is that once you hit send it’s qutie easy to forget about the message. An app to track replies to the message, then, is a great idea – and that’s where RSVP comes in.

RSVP is a unique Mac app. It integrates with Apple’s mail app via a menu-bar application and allows you to set reminders. The reminders track any responses to an email within a given time-frame, and send you a reminder at the end of the time frame if no one has responded to the message. It’s a simple app, but quite an ingenious idea. Stick with me after the jump to learn more about how the app works and what I thought of it.

Your First Reminder

First things first, let’s get you set-up. It’s fairly straight forward – just download and install the app. Then open up Mail to give the app a whirl. Unfortunately, Apple’s Mail app is the only app which RSVP supports, but more on that later.

The menu bar app plus Mail open for use.

In order to set-up your first reminder, find the email that you want to track. Make sure you have the conversation selected in mail or it won’t work. To set-up the reminder, just select the option from the RSVP menu. I recommend just setting a simple reminder time for the first message you try – we’ll get into the customized rules a bit later in the review.

Adding a new reminder.

Once you’re all set up … just wait. RSVP can take it from here. If you don’t get a response to the message within the time frame you specified, RSVP sends you a simple pop-up reminder. The pop-up gives you a few options. You can choose to deactivate the reminder and send a follow-up email. You can also snooze the reminder, allowing it to pop-up after your snooze time, or you can simply reschedule the reminder to a new custom time period.

The pop-up reminder when I didn’t receive a response.

Managing Reminders

Setting up an initial reminder is really simple, and that’s most of what RSVP has to offer. There are, however, a few other features worth noting. First up is the manage reminders section. This is the area where you can easily edit and deactivate any reminders that you have set up. The manage section has a pane on the left with a list of all active reminders, along with the edit section to the right. From here you can change the times for the reminder, edit the rules and deactivate. Any deactivated reminders are sent to their own list, where you can permanently delete them if you so choose.

It’s easy to manage/edit reminders.

If you hover over the subject in the manage reminders window, RSVP turns it into a clickable link back to the original message you are tracking

Rules are another feature worth noting. A reminder, by default, tracks responses from anyone who replies. Often times, however, the only important response is one from a particular person on the list of email recipients. Luckily, you can add rules to the reminders which allow you to track responses only from certain email addresses. You can add, delete and edit rules from within the manage reminders window.

Adding rules – now the reminder only checks for responses from specific individuals.

Lastly, let’s pop over to the preferences panel, as RSVP has a few things to keep an eye on. From the preferences section you can choose whether the app opens at log-in, set the sound for pop-up reminders and choose how frequently RSVP checks for replies. By default, RSVP checks for replies every 15 seconds. You can change this to whatever best suits your needs.

Editing the preferences.

Worth it?

First things first – RSVP only costs two bucks. If it seems like something that might be helpful to you, it’s worth the download. RSVP does its job well. It sends consistent reminders, and brings about an email feature that I really wish was just included by default in gmail (and other email services, of course). The app is simple to use – there’s not a lot that you can do, so there’s not too much to get stuck on. The available features are well thought out, offer some limited customization and are easy to find and put to work.

I do, of course, have a few things that I’d like to see fixed/improved upon. First of all, it’s really frustrating that RSVP only works with Mail. If you already use Mail, then no sweat. I prefer Sparrow, however and it’s really a pain that RSVP can’t integrate. I hope to see more email clients supported down the line, if possible. The design also isn’t great. Don’t get me wrong it certainly gets the job done, but I’d like to see a little more spice in the design work/basic interface.

Some more options for rules would be helpful as well. It’s great that you can filter by recipient, but it would be great to add a few more requirements. One thing that might be really helpful is the ability to check to see if there is an attachment of any sort. Often I find that I’m waiting for someone to send me a specific file, typically via an email attachment. If rules could check for things like attachments, I think that would make RSVP an even stronger application.

Final Thoughts

I’m definitely pleased with the two bucks I dropped in order to pick up RSVP. Even though I’d like to see more features, and the lack of Sparrow integration is kind of upsetting, it’s a great tool. It’s helped me to become more prompt with re-requesting information when needed, ensuring that I stay up to date with work. RSVP is simple, user-friendly and fixes a need that should have been fixed by email providers a long time ago (in my opinion).

So are you going to try it out? Do you think it’s worth it? Does the lack of integration with other apps upset you? Share your thoughts in the comments below.

There’s no denying that Macs have been quite popular with students for years, and with good reason. Apple’s computers are ideal for an academic context (and, we’d argue, almost any context, but we might be biased), given their reliability and features that help its users to get stuff done. However, I’ve come to realize that students often use their Macs superficially. Most are not taking full advantage of everything OS X offers them, not to mention the myriad of incredible third-party apps.

I’ll attempt to capitalize on my 4-year experience with using Macs as a student. In all honesty, many of these tips can be applied to any situation, so long as it involves productivity in one way or another. Moreover, don’t expect these tips to be mindblowing; they’re aimed at new Mac users, but even old timers might find a new tip or three.

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Backup Your Mac!

Granted, this is no revelation. Nevertheless, this doesn’t take away from the importance of backups. I’m sure you’ve already heard plenty on why it is important to backup your data, so I’ll skip that part and jump right to the how.

Luckily, there’s a built-in tool in every Mac that enables easy backups: Time Machine. You’ll find it in two places: in your Applications folder, and in your System Preferences. The former is useful only when you already have a Time Machine backup and want to find a file in it. The latter is where the user sets up Time Machine, which is what we want. All you need to do is plug in an external hard drive (which is entirely worth the expense, seeing as it can potentially save you the massive headache of losing data) and you’ll be able to Select Backup Disk in the Time Machine preference pane. The rest is self-explanatory.

A little side-note: you should also consider online backups, for the simple reason that if a fire breaks out where you have both your computer and backup disk, your backup is gone right along with your Mac. Two well-known, affordable services are Backblaze and CrashPlan. You should check them out.

Dropbox Is a Student’s Best Friend

You’ve probably heard of Dropbox, but never gave it second thought. Well, let me tell you that it is the single, most useful web service out there, especially for students. I would recommend putting all of your classwork in your Dropbox folder. Here’s why.

Dropbox is useful for so many reasons. First of all, consider it an automatic basic online backup solution. Obviously, with your free 2-GB account, you can’t put much, but you should have enough storage for those crucial school files. If you do decide to get a pro account, it might be all the online backup you need. Second, all of your files become accessible virtually wherever you are. You can either access them via a Dropbox app (say, on your smartphone) or you can simply use the web application. No more “I forgot my homework at home”. Third, a lesser known Dropbox feature is version history. You can read about it here, but essentially, it grants you access to previous versions of a file (up to 30 days with a free account). For instance, if you save a file after deleting some text and undo isn’t working, you can access a previous version and copy the text from there. It’s a true lifesaver.

SelfControl

I just need to mention this gem. Basically, you add a list of websites to a blacklist (e.g., facebook.com, twitter.com, youtube.com) and then activate SelfControl for a given time (e.g., 4 hours). You will then lose access to those websites and there’s nothing you can do about it, not even brute-force tactics such as uninstalling the app and restarting the computer. As a social media addict, I recognize the need for having this app on every Mac I use.

SelfControl’s power lies in its simplicity: a blacklist and a timer. That’s all you need for artificial self-control.

Prepare Yourself Against Theft

Unfortunately, university campuses aren’t without crime. Theft, most notably of high tech items such as laptops, is still very common. So, why not put the odds in your favor?

There are a few solutions out there, of which I will discuss two: Find my Mac and the Prey Project. Within iCloud’s settings, there’s Find my Mac, which allows the user to locate the computer, send a message or sound, and remotely lock or wipe the machine. Granted, these provide means of protecting the user’s data, but not so much to recover the computer itself. This is where the Prey Project comes in. Their homepage does a good job at describing what it does. In short, it offers better ways of finding the culprit. All you need to do is create a free account and run the installer on your Mac. This way, you won’t have any regrets if something does happen.

Textbooks on Your Mac

I’ve stuck with paper versions of my textbooks, but ebooks textbooks are increasingly a great option for saving money and weight in your backpack. A bunch of companies have been promoting this new medium, namely Apple and Amazon, though oddly Apple hasn’t done much to promote ebooks on the Mac themselves. Something worth noting is that you can install Kindle for Mac and view your textbooks right there, on your computer. This accommodates those that don’t have a tablet computer. So, next time you shop for textbooks, check out if Amazon offers Kindle counterparts, saving you both money and effort.

Preview Doesn’t Just Preview

If there’s one app which is a clear underdog and rarely given the attention it deserves, it’s Preview.app. You probably use it all the time to simply view images and PDF documents. However, its functionality doesn’t end there. I’ve used it on the past to crop images, annotate both pictures and PDFs, combine documents, and more. As of Mountain Lion, the tools found in the Edit Toolbar are even more powerful, allowing image resizing, color adjustments and more. It’s one of the best preinstalled apps on your Mac.

The myriad of options offered in Preview.app is amazing. Just click on the Show Edit Toolbar button.

Consider AppleCare

I know what you’re probably all thinking: is this guy really trying to sell me an extended warranty over the Internet? Indeed, I am, but I don’t work on commission, so stick around for just a bit.

As a student, your Mac will most likely become your life, meaning that losing your Mac, or your access thereto, would prove to be catastrophic. Thankfully, Apple has a great customer care system in place, the Genius Bar, to ensure quick repairs. However, there’s no denying it: they can be quite expensive, depending on the part. On my 15” MacBook Pro, I had the screen and the logic board swapped. If it weren’t for AppleCare, I would have payed over $500 for each repair. That’s why I think that tripling your coverage to three years with AppleCare is completely worth it, especially when you can get it at a discounted price as a student.

Quick Tips

That’s all the major stuff, but there’s so much more that you can do with your Mac to make your school life easier. Here’s an enumeration of quick tips that I use almost daily.

Use Spotlight

Make sure you make use of Spotlight. It’s a multipurpose tool that comes with every Mac. Not only can you launch applications, but you can also perform quick calculations (e.g., type “(1100 + 200)*1.15”), search for word definitions, and more.

Spotlight is more than just a file searching tool. You can define words, make quick calculations and launch apps.

Speaking of Dictionary

One of my favorite gestures is the three-finger tap. In most applications, if you perform a three-finger tap while the cursor is hovering a word, a dictionary and thesaurus pop-up will appear. This makes learning new words on the fly easier than ever. Furthermore, you also have embedded Wikipedia articles within the popup, great for reading the first paragraph, which more often than not contains enough information. Click on either Dictionary, Thesaurus or Wikipedia to expand that section right in the popup.

Screenshots Made Easy

Remember the days when taking a screenshot on Windows required to perform a Print Screen, then pasting in something like Word or MS Paint? Thankfully, it’s a thing of the past with OS X. If you tap Cmd-Shift–4, your cursor will change into a crossfire and you will be able to select a region of the screen. The selected region will then be taken as a screenshot and the image file will be created on the Desktop. You no longer have an excuse for taking pictures of your screen. Bonus: if you want to take a screenshot of an entire window, after pressing Cmd-Shift–4, press the spacebar. Cool, huh?

Change Your Default Finder Location

When you open a new Finder window during the semester, shouldn’t it be your school folder? You can do exactly that by opening the Finder preferences and changing the “New Finder windows show” to your current semester’s folder. Small things adds up.

Hide, Not Minimize

Coming from a Windows environment, it’s tempting to minimize apps when we need to temporarily get rid of them. Well, there’s an alternative in OS X which I find works better, and it’s the Hide mechanism. Instead of minimizing apps, you can hide them by clicking Cmd-H, in which case they simply disappear until you open it again (e.g., by clicking its icon in the Dock). This eliminates the minimize animation, which is cool the first time, but annoying every other time.

Paste and Match Style

Another cool OS X feature is the Paste and Match Style. In most apps, under the Edit menu, you’ll find this option below the regular Paste item. Let me explain the difference. Have you ever copied text into Word from a website and realize that the text kept the style from the source, such as the typeface or font size? Well, Paste and Match Style solves this issue. As the name implies, it strips any style from whatever text is in the clipboard. This way, when you paste it, it matches the surrounding text.

Final Thoughts

Even to this day, I’m always learning new ways of optimizing my workflow. Hopefully, this article will help newcomers, especially students, adapt more easily to their new Apple computers. If you have any other obscure tips or tricks, share them in the comments.

For a lot of applications that save data, it’s difficult to accidentally quit; there’s going to be a prompt that stops us from making a huge mistake, but I’ve blown past that prompt to save when I was in a hurry more times that I’d like to remember. It’s possible to turn some of those prompts off, too, if you’ve gotten a bit cocky. You may be able to recover some of that, but it’s going to pull you out of whatever you were doing if you have to start even an internet browsing session over.

Helping prevent some of that accidental quitting is CommandQ. Never again will you attempt to select all (Command+A) and quit an important application with a rogue Command+Q keystroke. CommandQ makes it just a little more difficult to go for that shortcut, but does it really make a difference?

The mighty preferences menu

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I Can’t Quit You

Open up CommandQ and it starts working, simple as that. Whenever you press the Command+Q keyboard shortcut, whether accidentally or on purpose, you’ll have to hold it just a bit longer for anything to happen. CommandQ is ensuring there’s intent behind your keystroke and that it wasn’t an errant slip of Command+W or, heaven forfend, Command+S.

The point is that a momentary Command+Q won’t get the job done. Hold the shortcut long enough, and you’ll see a CommandQ progress bar, letting you know how much longer to keep those keys pressed. If you keep your fingers on the shortcut long enough, the application on top will quit, or at least try to, giving you a prompt to save you work.

Quick, make a decision!

There are a couple of ways to get CommandQ to keep you from accidentally closing your hundred browser tabs of research on the pygmy elephants of Java. The first and easiest is to allow CommandQ to keep taking control of the Command+Q shortcut. The default time interval might not be long enough for you, though. In that case, you’ll want to adjust it in the application settings from the menubar icon. You can swing the timer up or down, depending on how comfortable you feel.

There’s a second option to slow your roll when hastily quitting apps. CommandQ lets you set an alternate keyboard shortcut for the global “Quit” command. As always, you’ve got to make sure the new shortcut isn’t assigned to any other function, though. This option is pretty helpful if you find you need a failsafe and want to add a more complicated keystroke, such as Command+Option+Shift+Q. If you can get yourself into the habit of using that shortcut instead, it will take a lot more effort to accidentally close an app.

There’s no way you’ll accidentally type that

Pick and Choose

CommandQ lets you pick and choose which apps you want it to affect. This is especially useful since a lot of programs, such as Adobe Photoshop or Microsoft Word, already have a popup that asks you if you’d like to save your work. CommandQ isn’t going to be a lot of help there, so you could exclude those applications.

Decisions, decisions

On the other hand, if you find you’re often losing progress in a specific application, you can add it to the include list. I use a browser-based word processor, and I’ve accidentally quit between autosaves. By assigning my browser to the list of included apps in CommandQ, I can spare myself a lot of headaches by giving myself a moment to stop, think, and check if all of my work has been saved before I finally do quit.

Conclusion

CommandQ is an incredibly simple little app that can solve a lot of problems for anyone worried about losing data through accidental quitting. It does exactly what it says it’s supposed to, and I didn’t have any trouble setting it up. It’s really easy to use and intuitive, and I could tailor it to my needs, right down to creating a brand new keyboard shortcut for the Quit command.

However I’m not sure CommandQ is worth it. At $7.99, it’s quite an expensive menubar one-trick pony. Most of us have the problem of accidentally quitting and losing progress on a document or other work at some point or another, but it’s like not an eight buck problem for a lot of us. For those of you chronic Command+Q shortcut users who manage to repeatedly and frequently blow through the popup prompts to save our work, you’ve probably already got your own autosave failsafes in place.

The usefulness of CommandQ is situational, and at that price, it isn’t going to be for everybody. It is really only for the truly paranoid and for apps that lack any kind of safety net when it comes to saving your work. Still, be it a school paper or or a big work project, CommandQ gives you a bit more of a cushion in securing your recent work. If you need that cushion, CommandQ may be worth the price.

QR codes are kind of ubiquitous now, but they all sort of look the same. For the most part, you can expect a QR code to be black and squarish, boring and samey. If you want something that looks really special, you’re on your own.

Until now. iQR Codes helps you create interesting and attractive QR codes that you can stick just about anywhere. That’s not all, though; iQR Codes will help you make lots of different kinds of codes. From contact cards to URLs to maps and more, iQR Codes has you covered.

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The Limitless Possibilities of QR Codes

The app opens up to the business card type of QR card first. You can either create a meCard or a vCard, and it’s really up to you which you prefer. As you enter your information, you can see your QR code become more complex. It’s up to you how much information you enter, and nothing is really required.

Creating a contact card, you can include or exclude whatever info you choose.

If you don’t need to share all of you personal info, just a URL, you can create a QR code for a website in the WWW tab. Enter your URL in the field, and choose a shortening service, if you’d like. You can also batch process up to three URLs at a time at no additional cost. If you need to create more URL QR codes at once, you’ll have to unlock batch processing through an in-app purchase.

Batch processing allows you to create three URL QR codes at once.

You can share calendar events via QR codes, too. It’s easy enough to set the event name and date, and even to add some additional info. However, you have to set the start time using an analog clock. Which made no sense to me! I couldn’t get the minute hand to a solid hour at one point, and all of my events started at 5:59 or 6:01. Fortunately, it’s much easier to set an end time, and you can even specify a time zone.

iQR Codes has a mapping feature, integrated with Google. Search for your address in the Location tab or even just a town or city, and Google will retrieve the coordinates inside iQR Codes. When I scanned the resulting QR code with a my iPhone’s code reader, it brought up a map of the area.

Location QR codes are really easy to create, even with hearts.

There’s really a lot of different QR codes you can make. You can create a QR code to dial a phone number or send an SMS. You can share your private Wi-Fi network’s credentials with a QR code or just share a message in plain text.

Giving Your Codes Some Color

Once you’ve created your code, click on the Customize tab. You can adjust the code’s resolution and reliability level; the default is set pretty low, so you can bump that up as necessary. iQR Codes lets you adjust how square your corners are and choose from a few different pixel styles.

Customizing a very pink QR code using gradients.

The pixel and background colors are where iQR gets fun. You can pretty much choose whatever colors you’d like for either and create gradients for both. Just be sure the foreground and background have enough contrast that your QR code can be read. There are some shadow/glow options that can help to make your code stand out or make it more difficult to read, so use these with care.

iQR Codes even lets you stick a logo under your QR code. Again, you want to make sure it’s not something that’s going to prevent the code from being read properly, but this is pretty cool. I don’t have a logo per se, so I stuck my Twitter avatar underneath the QR code. That really didn’t look good at all, but I’m sure if I’d used an actual logo instead of a picture of me at a concert two years ago, it would have been great.

Using Your QR Code

You can save your QR code in several different formats, and even choose a transparent background in the Save window. You can also change the resolution and dpi at the last minute, too.

If you aren’t ready to save your code but want to get a good look at it, you can print it out directly from the app. It’s pretty basic stuff, not many options in the print dialog, but it’s nice to have the ability right there in the app.

It’s simple to create a URL QR code.

Useful and not entirely expected is the Copy functionality. Click the Copy button, and the current QR code will be copied to the clipboard. You can then paste it wherever you’d like, whether it’s in an email or an image editor.

Conclusion

To be honest, I’m generally not a huge fan of QR codes. I’m of the opinion that a lot of the time people are using them because of the novelty factor and not because they’re actually useful. However, when QR codes are useful, they don’t usually look very good. If you can get a QR code that looks good and serves a real purpose, though, then you’ve really got something.

iQR Codes has that first part covered. They’re helping you make really good looking QR codes. You’re really only limited by your own creativity, as the color combinations and pixel designs are endless. iQR codes has made it super easy to create well-designed codes. What you do with them is up to you.

Your iTunes library can turn into an unsightly mess far quicker than most of us would like to admit. By the time you’ve ripped CD collections, purchased albums, and dragged in the random online mp3 download, odds are you’ve got a lot of music with missing cover art, artist info, and more.

Tunes Cleaner aims to make sorting and tidying your iTunes library easy and painless, along with helping you reorganize and repair your music using its ‘powerful online database’. Is it what you’ve been needing to keep your iTunes library tidy? Let’s dive in and see.

Getting Started

When you first launch Tunes Cleaner, it automatically starts scanning your library for duplicates, missing album artwork, song, artist and album information and then if you have any of this information missing, it automatically takes the information from its online database and applies it to your music.

Tunes Cleaner

Going through your music can be tiresome, boring and a lengthy process and this is why Tunes Cleaner is so appealing to someone that has huge amounts of music that simply doesn’t want to have to go through it all in order to keep it accurate and find problems. This application gives your music a list score, this is a rating out of 100 and is a rating of the current state of your library, the closer to 100, the cleaner your library – the first time I scanned my library, I got a score of 100; mainly because I have an obsession with keeping it clean but upon scanning again, Tunes Cleaner found an album that didn’t have a name and attempted to match the artist and the song name to an album, this failed completely, aside from the last song.

Repairing your songs’ metadata

I then removed a well-known artist to see if there was still hope for Tunes Cleaner and it correctly changed 7 out of 10 songs, which is somewhat disappointing considering the album and artist are well-known.

Not quite perfect, though…

Interface

Tunes Cleaner’s interface seems to be adequate and nothing more. It doesn’t appear to be surprising or particularly well designed, of course the application is functional and does work for what it’s suppose to do but it would be nice to see a more refined and cleaned up interface. When Tunes Cleaner finds various songs that don’t seem right, you can either have Tunes Cleaner fix them up for you by checking some rather standard checkboxes so overall, the interface is nothing to scream about.

What’s more, the interface doesn’t seem to be that of OS X Lion quality. In fact, when first opening Tunes Cleaner, you’re prompted that you’re required to install X11 in order for the app to function. With a minimum requirement of Mac OS X 10.5, it’s easy to see that this application isn’t making use of the new technologies of OS X Lion and Mountain Lion. That said, however, the application doesn’t have any problems running or operating with OS X 10.8.2.

Problems

The most evident problem present within Tunes Cleaner is its ability to match song and artist names with an album name, after testing out various different artist names and trying to get Tunes Cleaner to find the album name, it didn’t do too well.

The problem here is not that it didn’t recognize the artist, the problem was that it didn’t seem to take into account that I was matching a whole album and not just a couple of songs so it seems strange that Tunes Cleaner would match EP and single titles to the songs. Tunes Cleaner is marketed as an intelligent assistant that will help you clean your library but the fact it’s unable to differentiate between an album, EP and a single does beg the question of whether or not it’s actually as intelligent as it’s said to be.

One way to overcome this problem is to manually enter the information yourself but then this diminishes the need for Tunes Cleaner in the first place, as you can easily add this information within iTunes.

Alternatives

Tunes Cleaner has some pretty hefty competing applications that fulfill the same task, one of which is Dupin. Dupin is able to find duplicated tracks, missing artwork and discrepancies with artist, album and song name and then attempts to amend it correctly, although I haven’t tried out Dupin yet, it does seem to be a contender and appears to put up a good fight with Tunes Cleaner and generally has positive reviews around the web.

Overall

With everything considered, it’s hard to ignore Tunes Cleaner’s lack of accuracy when locating and retrieving track information. If you’re willing to pay a price of $19.99 for a tool that simply locates tracks that it deems as problematic then Tunes Cleaner is something that should be considered but if you’re the person that wants something that will not only find discrepancies but also accurately fix them, maybe it’s time to wait for the next update.

The developers, Leawo Software Co., have announced that they have indeed submitted version 2 and that it should be available soon so it’s probably a good idea to hang on to your $19.99 until then.

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 9th, 2011

As you would expect from the editor of a Mac blog, I’m a complete app addict. I have random applications for everything from cataloguing recipes to counting characters in a TextEdit document. Some of these I use on a daily basis, but many of them admittedly sit and collect dust in my Applications folder.

This article is an attempt to narrow down my absolute bare essentials. What three things do I think are fundamentally lacking in OS X and would need to be installed on any machine that I use for more than a few hours, regardless of what I’m doing? Which apps genuinely save me a considerable amount of time in my daily routine? Let’s take a look!

Clipboard Managers

Clipboard managers are an absolutely vital tool to have if you spend a considerable amount of time at a computer. Let’s face it, your default OS X clipboard functionality is fairly limited: you copy something, you paste it, you copy something else, the first thing is gone. If you’re a real pro, you can access a secondary clipboard-like feature with Kill (Control-K) and Yank (Control Y), but no one really even knows that feature exists and fewer remember long enough to use it.

Copying and pasting is a pretty fundamental activity that nearly all computer users are familiar with and engage in regularly. It makes sense to beef up this functionality with a tool that provides a full clipboard history, which gives you access to multiple past clippings.

What I Use

There are quite a few really powerful clipboard managers on the market, but the one that seems to fit my workflow best is a completely free utility called ClipMenu.

ClipMenu

ClipMenu represents the best combination of simplicity and power that I’ve found in a clipboard manager. It has all the features I need: a completely customizable history, support for text and image clips and a keyboard activated pop up window. It even has some really powerful options that I now couldn’t live without such as a snippets manager and a robust actions system that allows you to manipulate strings of text (change the case, wrap with tags, etc.).

The thing that really makes me love ClipMenu is that it doesn’t even really feel like an app. Instead it feels like a natural extension of OS X. I’ve tried some really expensive and fancy options that I didn’t like half as much. If you’re in the market for a clipboard manager, start here.

Alternatives

ClipMenu is definitely not for everyone. If you try it and decide that you want something else, check out the options below.

• Stuf: $24.99
• iCopy: $0.99
• iClipboard: $29.99
• Jumpcut: Free
• Clips: $4.99
• Clipboard Evolved: $4.99
• Clyppan: $3.99

Launchers

I hesitated to include launchers in this article because the idea that they’re an essential add-on is arguable. For starters, Launchpad on Lion is a new and quick way to launch your apps. However, to me, Launchpad is really no better than hitting “??A” to bring up the applications folder. You still have to manually sort through all of your apps to find what you want, which is a real pain!

A more appropriate argument would be that Spotlight functions as a launcher: hit a keyboard shortcut, start typing and applications will appear at the top of the list of results. You can even perform some basic functions like simple math.

For whatever reason though, Spotlight still feels like a search tool that has some launcher functionality rather than a tool created for launching apps. For this reason, I definitely recommend that all OS X users check out third party application launchers. They can save you tons of time and tend to have some really advanced functionality.

What I Use

To be honest, I never thought I would give up Quicksilver. It was the first launcher that I ever used and still has more features, plugins and crazily random functionality than almost anything else you can find (mouse gestures, pie-shaped file menus, custom global triggers, Quicksilver has it all).

However, there’s something to be said for using software that is actively being developed and improved. I honestly can’t imagine why the developers lost interest in Quicksilver but it happened, and that left many of us looking around for alternatives. I tried to no avail to switch and always came back, that was until I tried Alfred.

Alfred

Alfred is a true gem of an app. The interface is simple and friendly but still quite attractive and the already impressive feature set is constantly growing by leaps and bounds. Much more than an app launcher, Alfred can perform complex math with parentheses (these confuse Spotlight), define words, search for files, act as a file browser, control iTunes, launch websites, search websites, access your clipboard history and a heck of a lot more. And these are just the built-in features, the new third party extension system is really starting to give Alfred the endless possibilities that I enjoyed in Quicksilver.

Alfred is a free utility but many of the advanced features require the £12 PowerPack. Alfred is so great that I tell every Mac user I know to download it right away. As far as I’m concerned, it should be the first thing you install on a new Mac!

Alternatives

Among the high-powered launcher contenders, the most popular competitor that can stand toe to toe with Quicksilver and Alfred is Launchbar, which has a similar goal of providing you with a single interface for performing a stunning number of different tasks. Check out Launchbar and other popular launchers below.

• Launchbar: $35
• Butler: $20
• Overflow: $14.99
• Sapiens: $4.99
• Launch It: $2.99
• Jumper: $0.99
• Launcher: Free
• Chuck: Free
• MoAppsLauncher: Free
• Google Quick Search Box: Free

Text Expanders

Because I’m a writer, the final category of apps that I couldn’t go without is text expansion utilities. You don’t need to write full time to appreciate these though, the concept is universal enough that almost every user can find a way to save time with a text expansion app.

If you’re not familiar with the concept, text expanders allow you to type shortcuts which then “expand” into larger snippets. For instance, if I type “email#” on my Mac, it automatically inserts my email address.

If you’re a developer, you can create abbreviations that expand into large snippets of code (perfect for those pesky CSS3 browser prefixes). If you write a lot of email, you can store standard responses that pop into place with only a few keystrokes. The possibilities go on and on: usernames, passwords, addresses, phone numbers, websites, words that you commonly misspell; anything you want! The bottom line is, what used to take 1-2 minutes to type or find elsewhere and copy over now takes two seconds to insert!

What I Use

TextExpander is probably the most popular text expansion solution currently available, and for good reason. It’s an extremely powerful and versatile tool that supports every app that I’ve ever tried to use it with. This app alone saves me hours and hours every single month. I know because it conveniently tracks this information!

TextExpander

TextExpander ($34.95) makes it easy to create different groups of custom snippets that can be expanded via a user-defined abbreviation. You can even insert smart snippets like today’s date, the contents of the clipboard or even another snippet!

There’s also an iOS app that can sync with the desktop version via Dropbox. This is great for working on my iPad, all the snippets that I’m used to using are right there and even work in several other third party apps.

Alternatives

Want to see a head-to-head comparison of popular text expansion utilities? We just happen to have one here. In the mean time, check out the options below.

• Typinator €19.99
• Presto: $0.99
• TypeIt4Me: $19.99
• yType: $14.99

Conclusion

I wear many hats as an OS X user: writer, editor, designer, photographer and musician. These three app categories serve as basic extensions of OS X that I personally would never like to be without, regardless of the task that I happen to be doing.

Leave a comment below and let us know what categories you find absolutely essential to your daily activities. Which apps save you the most time?

Platformers are ubiquitous among video games, and many new games of this genre riding on the coattails of the classic games of yesteryear. For a modern platformer to stand out, there has to be a new angle to hook players that are bored with an oversaturated market of generic Mario lookalikes.

Gunman Clive, an iOS game that has recently made the move to Mac, combines tight, challenging gameplay with gorgeous, stylish graphics, elevating it above copycat platformers. But are cool graphics and smooth moves enough to make a good game or is Gunman Clive just shooting his mouth off?

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An Old School Platformer

You start playing as Clive, a taciturn gunslinger who sets out to rescue the mayor’s daughter. She’s been captured by an army of bandits, and in a familiar save-the-princess storyline, it’s up to you to bring her to safety. Armed with only your six-shooter, you set off to rescue the damsel in distress.

Buzzsaws and Cowboys

The game begins in a desert town bristling with banditos, who lean out of windows and pop out of trapdoors. Their aim is to put Clive in an early grave. In a control scheme reminscent of such action-platformers such as Mega Man or Contra, Clive can jump, shoot, collect power-ups and shoot some more. The keyboard controls are not as tight as an actual controller, but the enemies move slowly and it’s certainly possible to avoid their volleys of bullets with a little finesse.

There are a variety of power-ups, including a Contra-style “spread gun” which shoots multiple rounds at once, and a homing bullet that seeks out hard to reach baddies. These items are scattered throughout the levels, usually as rewards for getting those hard to reach platforms or occasionally dropped by enemies.

Clive’s health meter is a red column on the left that decreases as our gunman gets repeatedly shot, stabbed, or blown up by a myriad hazards. He is revived by cake, which possesses mysterious cowboy-healing properties. There’s no game over, per se, so if Clive does meet his doom, he just returns to the beginning of the level.

Speaking of doom…

50 Shades of Brown

This first thing you notice about Gunman Clive is the detailed, sepia-toned artwork. The entire game looks like a sketch of the Wild West come to life. The animations are smooth, and the graphics haven’t suffered a bit in the transition from iOS to the Mac. Clive doesn’t just shoot, he fans his revolver as emptied shell casings fly through the air. Enemies fall over realistically into crumpled ragdolls when they die. Bombs dropped by evil pelicans blow up bridges in massive clouds of dust and smoke. Gunman Clive certainly has sense of style that is memorable and fresh, while still feeling nostalgic.

The environments are varied and the bosses are huge and menacing. Clive hoofs it through a whole range of Old West locales, including a steam train and a rickety minecart ride. The bosses, such as a hulking gang leader armed with a pompadour and a minigun, are well-designed and have a silly, absurd style that definitely keep the visuals interesting.

The bosses certainly aren’t unoriginal

True Grit

Gunman Clive’s difficulty ramps up significantly in later levels, as the game begins to throw in buzzsaws, dynamite, and tinier platforms to navigate. And while Clive is blessed with infinite lives, the checkpoints are a bit too few and far between. Maybe I’m a bit spoiled by the generous checkpoints in modern games, but dying repeatedly on the same hazard just to get to the next section and die again, having to repeat the whole sequence, can be frustrating and loses that “fun” factor quickly.

This could be bad

Games on mobile devices don’t necessarily have to have complicated stories or tell tales of great heroes; when played for a few minutes at a time, you’re looking for diversion, not depth. Gunman Clive is essentially an arcade platformer/shooter with not a whole lot of gameplay variety, which is fine in short bursts on your iPhone but not so great for an hour stretch on your Mac. It turns out desktop and console games, which are usually played at a longer stretch, can require a bit more characterization and plot to make the game fun to play.

You jump and shoot and occasionally climb a ladder or ride in a minecart. There are a few power-ups, but these really only augment further button mashing. While this is all well and good when I’m messing around on my iPhone, I can’t see myself booting up my Mac just to play this game. Beyond the flashy graphics, which are admittedly pretty fantastic, there really isn’t more to it than your standard platformer.

Conclusion

Gunman Clive flawlessly blends classic platforming with a fresh, interesting art direction; there’s nothing out there that looks quite like it. The beautiful visuals are varied and interesting throughout the game.

However, the difficulty combined with a lack of frequent checkpoints and the shallow gameplay all may turn off players, casual and hardcore alike. For fans of platformers, it’s worth trying, especially to get a look at the great visuals. If interest wanes quickly, though, graphics may not be enough to save it.

Last week, yet another Humble Bundle was launched, and the special is still running through this week. The Humble Bundle has become one of the best known software bundles ever, and the team behind it continues to surprise with consistently high-quality bundles.

The Humble Bundle is unique in the world of bundles for the way it does business. You can pay whatever you want for a bundle, legitimately getting a ton of games for perhaps mere cents. Now, though, it offers extra games for those who beat the average price paid for the bundle, which is a great incentive to pay more for the bundle. Even still, most of the time, you can get over a dozen games for less than $6, including their soundtracks, Steam licenses, and the option to play them on OS X, Windows, or Linux. Not bad at all.

That’s why we’re wondering: have you ever bought a Humble Bundle? Do you look forward to new ones coming out so you can get more games for your library? We’d love to hear your thoughts about the most popular bundle in the comments!

Students and professionals have a revolving door relationship with task and note taking applications. Very rarely is there one application that fits every need a user might have. SideNote was sent to us by developer Daniel Wee as a contender in this complex market. Contenders like Apple’s own Stickies – or powerhouse Evernote – make this a difficult space to succeed in.

Does SideNote have a place in today’s information collection station? Let’s take a look.

Introduction

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The developer of this application was kind enough to give us a free promo code, but I purchased this application for $0.99 during their back-to-school promotion. This application appears to be targeted towards the audience of people who want a more grown-up approach to the native Stickies application on your Mac. Unlike Evernote, it does not provide complex note organization or powerful editing capabilities.

If you are looking for a more complex note taking experience then this application is not for you. The idea behind SideNote is to create a simple interface for quickly capturing text. I used it as a visible clipboard for copy/pastes while editing articles and searching for available domain names. It is a lightweight application with a limited feature set that does exactly as the developer promises – simple note taking.

What It Does

When you launch the application, it immediately creates a little side tab that can be clicked to reveal the notetaking panel. Taking notes is an easy task utilizing several keyboard shortcuts or available buttons on the bottom SideNote panel. Each note is time stamped and is listed from top to bottom in the order the note was created. Making good use of keyboard shortcuts, most operations SideNote offers can be done quickly and efficiently.

SideNote Quick Launch Tab

SideNote also gives users an ability to anchor the notetaking panel to remain on top of all other open windows. This ability, along with the transparency settings, come in handy when referencing notes you may have collected in other applications. The note panel itself is resizable (to an extent), and you do have the option of placing the collapsable tab on either side of your desktop. Lastly, you can opt for a white or black theme while controlling font size, type, and window transparency. I did not have the opportunity to test the advertised iCloud support, but the developer did include it in the 1.1 release.

Adding a note is easy, and SideNote provides basic note editing functions like spell check.

Where It Falls Short

There are some notable things about side note that will remove it from contention for occupying serious note taking tool boxes. Although this application has iCloud support, there is no native IOS companion app to manage or take notes on the go. The developer doesn’t market this application as being an “all-platforms” tool, but it would open up a range of possibilities if this process was available. I also found that getting notes out of SideNote was not as easy as getting them in. For example, if I want to copy the contents of a note, I need to double-click the note and then select the portion I want to copy. I would like to see a dedicated button or keyboard shortcut that allows a user to quickly capture the entire note onto the clipboard.

A critically absent feature is the ability to search through your notes. I would imagine that if SideNote became littered with notes for particular project, it would be easy to get lost without some basic search options. Not to worry, however, as the developer has confirmed he is working on adding search in a later release. Lastly, and this is a personal nit pick, this application resides aimlessly in the menu bar. I love most menubar applications, but clicking on the icon only opens up the SideNote panel. At a minimum there should be an option to open up preferences or quit the application entirely. Multi-monitor support is lacking as I could not find a way to move the SideNote tab to another screen.

Conclusion

This is a decent application for basic note taking tasks. SideNote certainly has a lot of ways to grow, but I did find myself appreciating the simplicity of it for basic copy/paste tasks. The developer does a good job in keeping things simple, but I believe some additional work is needed to keep pace with the intuitive UI expectations that most Mac users have. Would I replace the Stickies application with SideNote? Absolutely.