Category: Mac

Photographers and digital artists alike always try to keep their images organized neatly. If you’re a designer, this is typically vital to doing your job as well. There are a bunch of different ways to organize these files on your Mac, from Adobe’s Bridge (included with Photoshop and other software) to iPhoto, Apple’s default solution for OS X. I’ve never been a keen user of either of these because the former is too complex in areas and the latter can often dawdle here and there.

To find an app that would suffice for my needs, I took to Google and have been looking around for a few months in vain. A few weeks back, however, a friend recommended Shiny Frog’s Pixa, a new beta app that’s in constant development. The promise is to help you organize images “the easy way”, but does Pixa live up to it? Let’s find out.

This is a beta and will have bugs; don’t condemn me if I point them out often. I’m using version 0.9.3.

Import Your Images

Pixa’s main library screen with only a few images in it.

Before you can organize things in Pixa, you’ll have to import the images you’d like to be in your library. The app will start up with a brief reminder about the changes in the current version and once you view them, you’ll be taken to the main screen. When there, you can import images by going to the File menu and then navigating to the Import menu within. You can choose to either import files (you can select multiple, but they must be in the same folder) or folders as projects. The latter will create a project in the sidebar using the folder name.

Alternatively, you can drag and drop any file or folder onto Pixa’s dock icon to import it.

I took issue with the import feature of Pixa because it doesn’t import folders without making them new projects. What if I wanted to reorganize everything in a different way than they were before? I’d have to do that manually after importing folders. This seems like a strange way to go about things if you’re going to be handling a lot of files and folders.

A project within a folder? Why?

Another weird thing that happens after importing a folder is that Pixa doesn’t really convert it to a project and instead makes it so the project is within a folder under the Projects section in the sidebar. That’s quite unproductive if you need to import folders from different directories because you’ll have to go back to reorganize them. I’d have hoped this app would make it easier to import files, of all things, but I’ve found that even Adobe Bridge and iPhoto are better.

Of all, the biggest letdown in Pixa’s file handling capability is its lack of support for RAW files (.CR2 for Canon cameras and such). For any photographer, especially myself since I shoot all photographs in RAW, that eliminates the reason to use this app for organization. Either it wasn’t mean for photographs or the developer has plans to introduce support sometime in the future. Until then, I really can’t see myself using this as a way to organize anything but wallpapers, app icons, and user interface elements.

Find Metadata, Exif, and More in the Information Panel

Metadata is displayed at the bottom of the window.

If you select an image and click the little “i” in the bottom left hand corner of Pixa’s main interface, you’ll be presented with the Information Panel. In there, you can add notes to to the file, tag it with things that you’ll remember for searching later on, and look at the file’s detailed information. I imported a some of my photographs and a few icons from ex-Apple designer Louie Mantia for my sample library, which gave me a diverse Information Panel on many items.

Adobe Bridge (left) is much more organized than Pixa (right). Note that you can scroll down in Pixa.

Photographs will include much more information than icons or any other type of image because they have Exif, ExifAux, TIFF, and IPTC data for things like ISO speed, aperture, the lens used, shutter speed, the orientation, and the camera the image was taken with. Pixa displays all of this, but not in such an organized fashion as Bridge. Adobe’s sidebar, for instance, is far easier to find things using. In Pixa, you can’t collapse any information categories so things are hard to find, especially since the list in photographs is so long.

Automatic Tagging

Tags are displayed on the bottom right.

Organizing is one thing; finding it is another. Pixa hopes to make things easier with its automated tagging system. When you import a picture, it will be scanned and automatically tagged based on its size and colors that make up the majority of the image. Automatic tags can be somewhere along the lines of “small”, “blue”, etc. You can actually change the characteristics of a small, medium, or large tag by going to the Tags pane of the Preferences menu and changing the pixel values in the appropriate boxes.

I didn’t think automated tagging was too bad, but it didn’t pull as many colors from some of my photos as it should have. “September Sunrise”, for instance, is a photograph containing yellows, blues, grays, greens, and beige, yet the app only tagged it with gray and blue, the latter of which isn’t as prominent as green. This will likely be improved in a later version, but right now it’s a bit useless and you’ll end up inputting the tags manually instead to ensure that they’re correct.

Oddly, Noise is Added to Pictures

What have you done to my picture?!

The lack of RAW file handling support is not at all as much of an atrocity as is the noise that Pixa adds to photographs. For some reason, all the images I added to the app had significant increases in noise when there was no trace of so much as a spec on them before. This even happened to app icons, though it’s a more noticeable on larger images. I don’t know what happened to the image on its way to my library, but I suspect there’s a bug in the file handling system.

Conclusion

Pixa isn’t a terrible app for image organization, but it seems to have only one use and that’s mainly for designers. I found it unfortunate that RAW is not supported and the app added a bunch of noise to my images, but I guess that’s just the way it goes in beta sometimes. This app wants to help designers organize things in their workflow a little better with projects and such, but right now it’s proving that there’s still a lot to be done in the app itself.

The sharing features in Pixa aren’t all that mentionable since they’re exactly the same as iPhoto’s with the addition of an “Add to iPhoto” option. On the app’s website, the developer says that “If you are a Dribbble fan please ask for uploading and searching API, [they’ll] be happy to integrate them in Pixa”. I’d like to see this in the app as well, along with support for more than mere JPGs and PNGs. Pixa has been, for myself at least, nothing at all special or unique.

You’ve probably gotten invited to more than your share of Facebook events, and if you’re like me, you tend to lose track of them fairly quickly. Either you RSVP that you can’t make it, and when you change your mind, you can’t find the event to save your life, or you did let the organizer know you’d be coming but promptly forgot until Facebook reminded you the day of the event.

With seemingly everyone using Facebook events to plan everything from baby showers to beauty pageants, I’ve thought there has to be a better way. So did the developers of Going, a menubar app that keeps track of all your Facebook events for you and even syncs up with Calendar. With the ability to RSVP, create events, and event post to Facebook, is there anything Going can’t do?

Go, Go, Going!

You’ll need to first sign in to Facebook via Going before you can get started. This is pretty obvious for a Facebook events manager, so get that out of the way. As soon as Going and Facebook are connected, all of your Facebook events will appear in the Going dropdown in the menubar.

There’s only basic information in the upcoming events list view. You’ll get the title of the event, along with the date, time, and location. You can also see your RSVP denoted as a check for going, a question mark for tentative, or an X if you don’t plan to attend. There won’t be a mark next to it at all if you haven’t responded yet. You won’t get any more information than that without digging further, but it’s a nice snapshot of what you’ve got coming up.

The events list in Going

To find out anything more about a particular event, click on it, and it will open up in the Going window. Same as on Facebook, you’ll see who the organizer is, who’s invited, and any information posted about the event. You can also RSVP in this view.

Clicking on anyone’s name will open their Facebook profile in your default browser, especially handy if you need to contact the organizers or any fellow attendees privately or just want to make friends before the big day. If you click on the location, a Google map will open in a new browser window, and if you click the date, Going lets you toggle whether the event syncs to Calendar.

Viewing an event in Going

Going also comes complete with all of the normal Facebook event accoutrements, such as the wall. This, the event info, and a list of attendees are all accessible from the left sidebar. Just click any of those links to bring up the view you want. Within the event in Going, you can not only comment and reply to others, but the application also provides the ubiquitous “like” button, maintaining the seamless Facebook experience.

If you want to see more about a past event, that’s easy enough in Going, too. Back in the upcoming events list view, click the left arrow at the top. That takes you to your previous events. It doesn’t go back in time indefinitely, and it only seemed to hang on to events I’d replied to. Still, it’s great to have those events so close at hand, whether you want to connect with someone you met or want to use a previous Facebook event as the foundation for your next.

Creating an Event

Beyond managing your events, you can also create new events in Going. To get started, just type the event title in the text field above your events. A new event window will open up, and you can start plugging in all of your information. Besides the date and location, you can also add a description for the event and even upload an event picture.

Creating a new event

Going also allows you to create your guest list right in the app. Just start typing your friends’ names, and Going will do the rest. You can also browse through your friends and check all the invitees off. Once you’ve got everyone invited and all the event info squared away, click the Create Event button. That makes your event real on Facebook and sends out your invitations.

Really Great Stuff

Not only are all the events you’ve already sent a confirmation to listed in the main Going view, but so are all the events you haven’t responded to yet, the events you said you might attend, and even the events you’ve declined. I was really pleased to see my declined events so easily accessible in Going, as they can be difficult to find on Facebook. If your situation changes and you want to attend an event after all, if can be hard to change that negative RSVP. Going makes it easy to see all of your events and update your RSVP if necessary.

The preferences allow you to sync with Calendar and more.

Going also makes it really straightforward to add events to Calendar. There are other ways to go about this, such as creating subscription calendars based on your Facebook events, but it’s not incredibly simple. Going’s application preferences allow you to automatically sync events to Calendar as you RSVP, and you can even choose the default calendar to use. If you don’t want events synced automatically, you can toggle whether they show up in Calendar inside each event.

Conclusion

I love the utility of Facebook events; it’s a quick way to connect a lot of people, great when you’re trying to organize an event, big or small. However, I’ve never found Facebook events very easy to manage or participate in without going out of my way to keep an eye on them. Going, however, collects all of my events into one place, so I don’t spend half an hour playing hide and seek on Facebook with my best friend’s crafting party or the neighborhood walkathon.

Going is easy to use and a lot better looking that Facebook. More than that, it’s uncluttered and simple. With Going I can keep track of all of my events in one place and easily sync them with Calendar. Going fills a hole I didn’t know was empty and does it so well, it’s hard to imagine what I did before.

Imagine being a kid in this generation. Some kids today are able to enjoy technology like we never had back when we were kids. From iPods and iPads, to iMacs, MacBooks, and gaming consoles, kids nowadays have so much technology around them that it is extremely hard to imagine how it would have been like for us.

The good thing is, electronics aren’t only for entertainment either, but they can be used as learning tools that develop your children’s motor skills, comprehension, creativeness, and so much more. With that in mind, we’ve gathered up some of the coolest children games in the Mac App Store. Some of them are just games, while others are meant to be learning games. So, quit Coda or iWork for a bit, and let your children enjoy some of these games.

Conclusion

Keep in mind that some of these games are educational and others aren’t; however, they are all for kids to enjoy in their free time. At the end of the day, if you were a kid again and you had a MacBook Pro in front of you, wouldn’t you want to mess with it, too? Of course you would! And hey, if you are caught playing of these games, we won’t tell on you.

If you want to store your notes in the cloud, but haven’t clicked with Simplenote and are looking for a better solution than a TextEdit file in your Dropbox folder, CloudJot may be the note syncing app you’ve been waiting for. It keeps your notes close at hand, both on your desktop and in your menubar, while always staying synced to Dropbox.

Is CloudJot as robust as the Simplenote apps we’ve reviewed? Or is it a gimmick playing to Dropbox’s popularity? We’ll see how well CloudJot shapes up as a quick note-taking app while testing it’s syncing chops.

Getting Started

When you open CloudJot for the first time, there’s no prompt to connect your Dropbox account or otherwise sign in, and I almost forgot to do this on my own. While you can certainly start typing up notes without linking to Dropbox, CloudJot isn’t really going to be very useful. Open the application preferences via the menubar icon or by clicking the gear in the upper right of the CloudJot window, then click the button to link your computer to Dropbox. Dropbox will open in your default browser, and you’ll need to confirm you want to allow CloudJot access.

Linking CloudJot to DropBox

Once you’re linked up, you can start writing your notes. Everything is saved as rich text or .rtf files, so you can change your fonts, colors, and text alignment easily. Unfortunately, the default font is a little too like Comic Sans for me, and while that can be easily changed inside the note, the title font can’t be edited.

To create a blank note with a default title, click the plus sign at the top of the window. Be aware that every time you create a new note in CloudJot, it also creates a new file in your Dropbox folder, so if you get a little punch happy clicking that plus sign, you could end up with more files in your Dropbox than you need.

A note with custom color and font

The Finer Points of CloudJot

To access or edit an older note, click the Notes button in the upper left. This will give you a dropdown of all of your notes; just select the one you want and CloudJot will display it in the main window. You can also move through your notes by using some handy keyboard shortcuts available in the gear dropdown menu.

Looking at all of my notes

Click the anchor in the bottom right to keep the CloudJot window open or closed. With the anchor highlighted, that window isn’t going anywhere and will sit on top of all your other windows. Deselect the anchor, and the window will slide closed when you mouse off of it.

To bring the window back, either select “Slide In” from the CloudJot menubar icon or hover your cursor at the edge of your screen. Option+Space will also pop it out, but you’ll want to make sure that shortcut’s not assigned to another application. The anchor seems to select itself, too, if you try to change the font for instance, so your notes may stay visible of their own accord.

How’s the Syncing?

I’ve tried out a couple of other apps that sync with Dropbox but they either didn’t give their files meaningful filenames, so I couldn’t find the file outside of the app, or they bury the files in subdirectories that don’t seem to correspond to anything. Using CloudJot for the first time, I was worried I would again clutter my Dropbox folder with useless directories or with files I wouldn’t recognize in a couple of days.

When I took a look on the Dropbox website and then checked out my local Dropbox folder, just to make sure everything was in fact syncing, I really couldn’t have been happier with what I found. Dropbox creates a folder for each of your connected applications, so all of my CloudJot files were easily located in /Dropbox/Apps/CloudJot/. As mentioned above, I also discovered they were saved as rich text files, not some random CloudJot file format, and could all be opened with a compatible text editor. Even better, they all had really obvious filenames that correlated to my note titles, like “Grocery List.rtf” or “Things to Do.rtf.”

What if I Don’t Want Rich Text?

Unfortunately, there’s no support for Markdown. I say that because Markdown isn’t going to render in a rich text document. However, there’s nothing stopping you from using CloudJot as a way to quickly type up something in Markdown, save it for later, and eventually copy it into an application that will more readily support Markdown.

This is the default font and color for your notes.

At that point, though, I feel like you’ve added so many steps to the process, you’re probably better off going with a Simplenote client that supports Markdown, even if you can’t sync to Dropbox. So if Markdown is important to you, CloudJot probably isn’t the way to go.

Conclusion

I’m really pleased with CloudJot. It doesn’t have Markdown, but I don’t think that’s necessarily a requirement for a good notes editor. It does have rich text formatting, and if you just want to take your notes beyond plain text, that’s really all you need. The Dropbox syncing was quick as a whip, and all of the CloudJot files were saved in such a way that I could easily find and open any note I wanted without the CloudJot app.

All of that’s already available with a TextEdit file saved in your Dropbox folder, though. What makes CloudJot really special is the ease of access to your notes. It pops up whenever you need it but hides when you don’t. You don’t have to worry about remembering to save your latest edits, because CloudJot autosaves all of that for you, and you can create new notes in a flash.

Choosing a notes editor really comes down to what you need it to do. If you’re looking for something that will easily and seamlessly sync with Dropbox, you like rich text editing, and you aren’t concerned with whether your notes editor supports Markdown, CloudJot is definitely one to try.

September 12th, 2012 was a day that had been anticipated by many for a long time. Ever since Apple released the invitations with the mysterious caption “It’s almost here”, along with a number 5 in the shadow, almost every tech blog has been speculating what will be announced. Maybe the long awaited iPhone 5? A refresh of the iMac line? A whiff of iTunes 11?

Today, those rumours have been debunked and at 10 AM local time, Tim Cook took to the stage of the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts in San Francisco. The world was watching and so were we. Here’s what Apple announced.

NOTE: All images in this article are used with permission from Wired and licensed under the Creative Commons agreement.

A brand new iPhone with a 4-inch, 16:9 ratio display, 4G/LTE support and new A6 processor

Apple has finally revealed the much anticipated iPhone 5 after months of speculation and rumours. The new version features a re-worked design that is completely manufactured out of glass and aluminium and it is the thinnest and lightest iPhone ever made, weighing in at a mere 112g and measuring 7.6mm thick. Form-wise, it retains the shape of the previous iPhone 4 and 4S but the big new draw to this model is the beefed-up display, which is now 4 inches wide and has a resolution of 1,136 x 640 pixels, or a 16:9 aspect ratio.

Just as the rumours had predicted, the new iPhone 5 comes with a taller 4 inch display.

The display is still retina with a resolution of 326 pixels per inch (just the same as on the iPhone 4 and 4S) however the one on the iPhone 5 boasts more clarity due to the thiner design of it, meaning that there is less “stuff” between you and the display. All of Apple’s stock apps have been updated to take advantage of the new, larger screen and older third-party apps will have black letter boxing on the top and bottom until they are optimised, however Apple state that this process is extremely easy. The homescreen in iOS now displays 5 rows of apps plus shortcuts instead of the standard 4.

Apple were keen to demonstrate what they referred to as near “console-quality gaming” with Real Racing 3.

The new iPhone also sports ultra-fast wireless technology with support for the latest HSPA+, DC-HSDPA and LTE (4G) support, allowing for theoretical download speeds of up to 100 Mbps on supported networks and there’s also support for the latest wireless internet standard 802.11 a/b/g/n. Apple have also upped the processor in this model to its new A6 model, which promises a CPU that’s twice as fast (so apps loads up quicker) and beefed-up graphics, which offer near console-quality gaming on a device that you can shove into your pocket.

The new A6 chip promises to deliver a 2x performance over its predecessor, the A5.

There’s also a better camera with improved image processing (thanks to that A6 chip) and a new Panorama mode which can take images up to 28 megapixels (despite the fact the camera still remains at 8 megapixels) and the battery life has also seen a boost as well. And finally, the iPhone 5 comes with a new 8-pin Lightning connector (Thunderbolt and Lightning anyone?) that is 80% smaller than the previous 30-pin Dock connector. Apple also sell an adapter (for $29) that allows you to connect up any older equipment.

The iPhone 5 prices are identical to those of the 4S at launch: the 16 GB model on a standard 2-year contract will set you back $199, with the 32 GB model coming in at $299 and 64 GB at $399. Not wanting to be outdone, the iPhone 4S has had its price slashed to $99 for a 16 GB model (again on a 2-year contract) and the iPhone 4 is now free. The 3GS has, unfortunately, died a timely and inevitable death.

Pre-orders for the new iPhone 5 start from this Friday via the Apple Store with shipping from September 21st.

iOS 6 will be available from September 19th

If you were expecting some last minutes features in iOS 6, then you may be extremely disappointed. Apple seemed keen on showcasing the features we have already seen back in June at their annual WWDC conference, such as a new Apple maps, turn-by-turn navigation, Facebook integration and a beefed-up Siri offering, whereby you can now tweet, update your status and launch apps from Siri, along with much more.

The new Apple-based maps in iOS 6 with a flyover over Big Ben in London. Very impressive, yes, but nothing we haven’t seen before.

iOS 6 will, however, be hitting our devices via the in-built Software Update on September 19th (and as far as we know, it’s free).

iTunes 11 announced with a redesigned interface, iCloud and Facebook integration and more

Cue Eddy Cue (sorry, bad joke…) up on stage now to talk about the music side of Apple – and by the looks of it they sure have been busy. The first item on the agenda was iTunes 11 which brought a simpler new interface on both Mac and Windows to Apple’s slightly tired default music player (in terms of looks, anyway). The new design is now edge to edge and focuses on cover art (so get tidying up your libraries!) in a new grid style. There’s also built-in iCloud, tying in with the deeper integration we saw in Mountain Lion and Facebook is now woven into iTunes, effectively killing Ping in the process, Apple’s failed attempt at social networking.

iTunes 11 with its new store interface. It’ll be available for Mac and Windows in “late October”.

The iTunes Store has also been redesigned on the Mac and Windows version (to tie in with the new design in iOS 6) making it a much easier experience to find what you’re looking for and the mini player has also received a revamp, with new roll-over controls, a search box and dynamic results. It’s not available yet though; according to Eddy, iTunes 11 will be released in “late October”.

New iPod Nano and iPod Touch announced, with new “Ear Pods” headphones to match

Apple certainly didn’t dedicate a whole “Music” section to their keynote just to talk about a new version of iTunes which could only mean one thing: new iPods! The iPod Nano has now reached its seventh generation and this version is a mere 5.4mm thick and 38% thinner than the previous model with that new Lightning connector seen on the iPhone 5, a bigger screen and improved controls.

The new lighter and thinner iPod Nano.

There’s also an FM tuner built-in with a groovy new live pause function and widescreen video is now supported for the first time on the iPod Nano. The seventh generation version also comes with Nike+ and a pedometer built-in and Bluetooth for wireless music streaming. And yet all this fancy stuff will only set you back $149 for the 16 GB model.

The trusty old iPod Touch, a device very dear to my heart, also received a nice refresh today and, surprise surprise, it looks like an iPhone 5, only thinner (6.1 mm) and lighter (88 grams). There’s a retina display and that new Lightning connector and the fifth generation iPod Touch also has an A5 chip, just like the 4S and new iPad which promises 7x faster graphics than previous models.

The new thinner, lighter and iPhone 5-like iPod Touch.

There’s also a beefed-up battery offering which now offers 40 hours of continuous music playback and 8 hours of video. You’ve also got a 5 megapixel iSight camera with autofocus and LED flash and yes, there’s that new Panorama feature as well. The new iPod Touch also comes with a “loop”, whereby you can attach a wrist strap or lanyard, presumably to stop you catapulting it into space if you’re at the gym or running along with it. Gone are also the boring old black and white colours: this model now comes in silver, blue, yellow and red (no white, oddly enough) and yes, you’ve also got a matching wrist strap.

The fifth generation iPod Touch ships with iOS 6 and Siri, so you can natter away to it until the cows come home and starts shipping in October (however pre-orders start from this Friday). Price-wise, you’re looking at $299 for the 32 GB model and $399 for the 64 GB model.

The final music-related product was a new set of Apple headphones that replaced those, let’s be frank here, crappy ones that you got burdened with previously. Apple call them Ear Pods (yes, I groaned too when I heard the name) and they’ve apparently been working away on them for three years. They are designed to inject your music right into your ear canals (meaning less leakage) and come with the fifth generation iPod Touch, seventh generation iPod Nano and iPhone 5 as default. Otherwise, they are available as a separate accessory and you can grab a pair straight away from the Apple Store for $29.

Over To You!

As always with these big Apple announcements, we’d like to turn the floor over to you – our readers. OK, so there wasn’t anything Mac-related (apart from iTunes 11) but it’s likely that we’ll see some brand shiny new Macs coming our way in October, along with a possible iPad Mini as well. Were you impressed or disappointed with Apple’s offering today? Will you be pre-ordering anything that was announced? Were all the new products just like you expected, or did a certain feature surprise you?

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

On a fine summer day this year, I stood in front of my MacBook Air — yes, sitting had become tiresome — thinking of a way to make my process of reviewing apps better. Sure, there are lots of ways my workflow could be improved, but I had one element in particular that kept me from being a pedant: the unobtainable icons for iOS apps. I could review whatever I wanted, but how was I to get a quality 200 x 200 pixel image? I thought about it a bit and to no avail, then pushed on to another task that needed attention.

A few weeks following the transpiration of said events, I happened upon Retina Mac Apps, my new favorite place to discover quality Mac apps. Among the collection of beautiful icons was Pragmatic Code’s Crunch, an app that stood out by having an icon closely resembling the well-known home button found on iOS devices. I wondered, why would a Mac app have such an icon? After a bit of reading, I realized that this was the very app I had been searching for weeks before. So I downloaded it and have been using it regularly. If the idea of this app sounds like something you see yourself using, keep reading for a assiduous appraisal of the app and its worth.

The Crowd Crunch is Intended For

I decided to maximize the size of things a bit, but don’t worry because Crunch is Retina-optimized.

If you made it this far then you likely have an interest in the core functionality of this app; alternatively, you’re wondering who such a utility is meant to serve. Whatever the case, Crunch does have a focus and it’s not only for developers or app reviewers. You see, unlike Mac apps, there’s no way to perform a “Show Package Contents” operation on Apple’s mobile format, .IPA files, without getting into developer territory. Even if you’re just looking to get the icon, the process is more complex than it should be.

The question is not actually who this app is for, but rather what you’re planning to use it for. Developers, designers, app reviewers, journalists, users who have a penchant for icons, and so on will find this app useful. Crunch gives you the ability to steal the source files of an app, which isn’t its intended purpose. In fact, the developer warns you not to do so and I advise against it. I’m surprised Apple doesn’t encrypt the app files so utilities like this can’t make their way into the covert depths of developers’ fancywork.

Extracting Icons

You can actually export icons and resources for more apps than one.

Crunch has the ability to extract all the files in an iOS app or just the icon. I don’t have any use for a full extraction, so I typically just use the app to extract the icon. (Don’t worry, I’ll discuss its other abilities as well — check below.) The operation is extremely straightforward: double-click the app you want to export, click the Icon tab, click Next, and conclude with finding a destination and clicking Save.

An alternate way to extracting icons and contents is to click the download icon in the bottom right corner and drag a .app or .ipa file to that screen.

If you’re in the mood to go big, you can actually select multiple apps using the Shift or Command key and then double-click one of them to export them all. From there, things are the same as before, but you can’t set different sizes for each icon, which can be unfortunate if you were planning an advanced batch operation.

There are a few options along the way to give the icon a better look than the default square box. A Decorated export will look just like the icon does on the device (it adds a slight shadow to all edges and an even heavier one if you check the corresponding box), while the Rounded option keeps things flat and simple on the edges. Lastly, there’s the bland, square-edged format (Original) that is pretty much the original icon before the original icon, just not a PSD. I use the Decorated option since I want the icon to look as good as possible.

I’m exporting an icon, but I raised the size above the source.

One thing that you should know before exporting an icon is that even though the maximum dimensions are 1024 x 1024, most apps, even Retina-optimized iPad ones, do not exceed 512 x 512 pixels. If you drag the size slider to anything beyond 512 x 512, the quality declines and things can get ugly. I don’t understand why the slider even goes farther than 512 x 512 since not one app I have is that large.

Extracting Resources

Looking for all the files? This is the right tab.

So long as you’re not plotting to go rogue and purloin the goods of designer and developer alike, Crunch can help you look into the very structure of your favorite iOS app. I think this kind of functionality is actually useful for people who want to know exactly what a user interface element looks like so they can be inspired by it — not that real designers actually do that.

To grab all the resources from an app, you’ll need to download Xcode: it includes PNG Crush, a tool that converts iOS PNG images to ones that are readable by OS X. And contrary to popular belief, Apple’s development software is free on the Mac App Store, but it is a hefty 1.46 GB download that takes up quite a bit of disk space once installed. If you don’t have it, you’ll not get all the images, just some of them. Got that all sorted out? Okay, let’s begin.

Get exactly what you want here.

Start by double-clicking an app and selecting the Resources tab. Now, if you want all the files from that app, make sure All is selected under the “Files” drop-down menu. Alternatively, you can export only the icons (not just one like the dedicated Icon function — all sizes the app has in its contents), images, or media files (sound effects, videos, etc.). A useful checkbox is “Only export the high definition” because it’ll make sure you don’t get tiny, fuzzy images on that Retina MacBook Pro of yours. The “Rounded corners” option will become available if you’re exporting only icons. Once you’re done customizing things, click Next and select a destination for the files to finish up.

Large apps (200 MB+) take a while to export, so go to Preferences and check the “Play: System Alert” button to give yourself a reminder.

You probably have Xcode if you’re a developer, but if not, I’d suggest getting it for this function.

In my experience, Crunch exported things in a fast manner, but I didn’t have the PNG Crush tool installed so it didn’t convert any of the images and they were left completely blank. It’s really too bad the only way to convert iOS PNG files is by downloading Xcode because if you own a MacBook Air like me, you’re sparing in using up that precious SSD space. I spoke with the developer of Crunch and he told me that this tool is the property of Apple, so he’s not authorized to distribute it with the app; if he were, things would surely be much simpler. Unfortunately, if you want to use Crunch to its full potential, this is the only way. Most developers have Apple’s software though, so it shouldn’t be too much of a problem for most users.

It’s Simple and Works Well

Scroll past the end of the app list to get an easter egg.

I can’t really look at everything Crunch has to offer, but I gave you a good description of every major feature with a few minute ones included. For the other stuff, I suggest you refer to the app’s Web site and read all the information the developer has to offer on there. I’ve found this app to be extremely useful for my job and I hope you find a great use for it. Pragmatic Code is charging $9, which may seem like a large fee, but there’s a 30-day trial and the app is worth the money if you are going to use it. One thing I’d love to see in this app is the ability to export icons of OS X apps, just for a quick way to do so without finding the .icns file. That’s it though — Crunch is perfect otherwise.

Whether you got your Mac from the Apple store, customised it online, or found it on the street, for the most part your Mac is the same as pretty much everyone else’s Mac – at least as far as the eye can tell. For some people, that’s okay. But others strive to make each machine their own, to show the world that they are different. You could do something simple like changing the wallpaper on your Mac, perhaps using one of the many wallpapers we’ve rounded up. Or, you could get several monitors to turn your Mac into the perfect workstation. Customizing your wallpaper then, though, can be a rather difficult task if you want a continuous picture across your screens that looks perfect.

This is where Multi Monitor Wallpaper comes into play. No longer are you forced to open photoshop and manually split the wallpaper into parts and attempt to align it perfectly for your display setup, only to find you misses it by a few pixels. With Multi Monitor Wallpaper, you can now get a wallpaper to span across your displays perfectly every time. Read on for our in-depth review of the app.

Getting Started

Your empty canvas

When you first start the app, you probably won’t be terribly impressed. Its user interface is on the plain side of basic – the only real merit being that’s its pretty straight forward what to do next. Picking the image is done either by browsing your Mac to find a photo or wallpaper that you already have, or by browsing Flickr. This sounds promising and to some extent is very useful. You can search through the public expanse of images or select from your own on the site.

However, there are some limitations with this feature that I’d like to see remedied. For example, you have to actually search through using a keyword. There’s no browsing through categories or popular feeds, and there’s no chance to preview the image in a bigger size before selecting it. None of these are deal-breaking problems, but small issues that would be nice to see fixed in future releases.

Finding photos on Flickr

The checkbox to hide images smaller than your monitors is handy, though. Depending on the size of your monitors you may have trouble here as this resolution can stretch into several thousand pixels, and not a huge amount of photos on Flickr are that wide – so you may have to settle with some slight resizing for an image to fit your screen, depending on how big your total workspace is.

Fitting your wallpaper

We’re half way there

Once you’ve made you selection, its time to make sure your image will display properly on your Mac. You are given a preview of what the image will look like, with the clearer part representing what part of the image will be displayed on your monitors, and the washed out section showing what will be cropped off the image. If you are happy with this, then you may simply go ahead and click Save and Apply and you’re done. If you are not completely happy then jump into Edit and you can fine-tune the wallpaper to get it perfect.

Now, you can make any changes necessary to your wallpaper to suit your needs. You get the same view of your screens and the cropped area, but here you can alter them. You can move either the image or the screens – at the time of writing, with the latest version 1.1, you are unable to zoom apart from arbitrarily squashing the image to fit entirely in your monitors. Once again the user interface is laking somewhat, but for the most part you can make the changes you desire.

Here’s the result of just a few minutes’s work

You can play with the wallpaper and make ‘gaps’ in the wallpaper to account for physical spaces in-between your monitors, and once you’re ready just click Done to go back to the previous screen awaiting your approval. Apply the changes, and you’ll have a nice multi-monitor wallpaper spanning across your displays. As you can see in the picture above, it actually does get quite nice results, and if you’re willing to deal with the basic interface, it’s a perfectly capable app for making great multi-monitor wallpapers that are perfect for your setup.

Conclusion

Multi Monitor Wallpaper is unlikely to be collecting any Apple Design Awards any time soon – the user interface is about as minimalistic as can be, and there are some user experience issues such as the lack of easy zooming or browsing Flickr. Nonetheless, it’s a simple app with a small price tag of $1.99 and it gets the job done very well. You’ll likely save a fair bit of time every time you want to change you’re wallpaper if you have a multiple monitor setup and for most people, time is money.

Over the past few weeks here at Mac.AppStorm, we’ve been taking a look at the state of gaming on Mac OS X, taking a look at and rounding up some of our favourite games on the platform. We’ve looked at the how the Resonance Cascade not only had drastic consequences for the Half-Life universe but revolutionised first-person shooters and some of the top games available to be downloaded right now on Steam and the Mac App Store.

It’s time to take a look back at the past month of gaming content in case you’ve missed any of our coverage!

Download vs Disk: Which Is Best?

We kicked off gaming month with our look at The State of OS X Gaming, investigating how gaming had changed on OS X over time, especially after the introduction of Steam and the Mac App Store. Shortly after, we took one of the main points of the article and expanded it in Download vs Disk: Which Is Best?

Steam’s introduction on the Mac in 2010 offered a significant platform for games to launch on OS X, some of which we took a brief look at in Must Have Games On Steam followed by Great Games on the Mac App Store.

Half-Life 2 is a timeless classic brought to the Mac!

With all these great games on the Mac, it might be time to upgrade your hardware! If you’re looking for a new Mac, we took a look at how you can be sure your new Mac will be able to handle the games you want to play in Buying a Mac for Gaming (and even How to Run a Minecraft Server on it too!). We also looked at Game Capture HD, a great tool if you want to record your epic gaming. Not every game might be available on OS X yet though, so we also ran you through the steps of How to Run Windows on You Mac with Boot Camp. And if you want to make games, we looked at Game Salad, an app that makes it easier than ever to design your own games, and also mentioned Envato’s new GameDevTuts+, our sister site that just launched to help you learn how to make games..

Then, of course, it’s time to take a look at the games. To kick off future gaming coverage here at Mac.AppStorm, we started with reviews of The Sims 3, Spore and Half-Life 2. Earlier in the month we also took a look at Minecraft’s latest update, version 1.3 too! We looked at some of the most intensive games on the Mac today, with a roundup of games not for the faint of heart, as well as an in-depth look at Lone Survivor and . Everyone’s not looking for complex games, though, so we also covered light games like The Last Rocket and Nova Golf.

Our whole team is looking forward to writing more gaming content going forward, so stay tuned for reviews of latest updates and new games for your Mac. If you’ve got any upcoming releases you’d like us to cover, be sure to leave a comment or email us!

Get it whilst it’s hot – Mac AppStorm’s weekly roundup of the best app deals out there.

Happy downloading!

Trine 2

Trine 2, from independent Finnish developers Frozenbyte is a great Mac game with action, puzzles and platforming where you play as one of the Three Heros who makes their way through dangers untold in a fantastical fairytale world. There are plenty of different styles puzzles and the gameplay is extremely varied with different game modes and worlds to explore. You’ll require a fairly modern Mac to run it properly and before you download it, check your graphics card is supported from the App Store description. The game is currently 75% off for a limited time only (it retails normally for $14.99).

Price: $14.99 – $3.99
Developer: Frozenbyte
App Store link: Trine 2

Weather HD

Weather HD will be well-known to anyone who uses an iPhone or iPad and now there is a Mac version which brings accurate seven-day forecasting for over 2 million locations all around the world, high-definition animations that reflect the current weather conditions and weather maps that show the current temperature, satellite, humidity and more across the globe. If you live in the United States, Canada or Australia then you can also choose an animated radar map and for the United States and Europe, the app can also push through any severe weather alerts. Weather HD is currently discounted, so if you want a fantastic weather app for your Mac, make sure you get it whilst it’s still this cheap!

Price: $3.99 – $0.99
Developer: vimov LLC
App Store link: Weather HD

Pinna

If the iTunes interface is too “busy” for you then Pinna might be the answer to your worries. It’s a music app for your Mac which is loosely based around that for the iPhone and makes it easy to navigate through your music and any playlists that you may have. The app syncs automatically with your iTunes library so you don’t have to bother going through and adding your collection again and there are also a couple of little hidden features, such as reverb, delay and pitch tools, automatic pausing when you unplug your headphones, a 10-band equaliser and keyboard shortcuts. The app is currently running a 50% off promotion however some Mountain Lion users have reported an issue with scrolling from within the app, which the developers are aware of and are working on a fix.

Price: $4.99 – $1.99
Developer: Roundabout LLC
Link: Pinna

And Yet It Moves

We’ve got another game for you this week with And Yet It Moves, which is currently having a 30% off summer sale. The game is physics-based and the aim is to rotate the game world to solve different puzzles. There are 17 levels set in three different environments and you can either race against the clock or against your friends. The app has scored a very handsome rating of 4.5 stars from 259 reviews so is most definitely worth a quick look!

Price: $9.99 – $6.99
Developer: Broken Rules
Link: And Yet It Moves

If you use your Mac for photos and videos then there’s a great app bundle up for grabs this week. Metakine has teamed up with MacUpdate to bring you their entire range of apps for a mere $39.99, a saving of 87% off the recommended full retail price. Not only have you got tools for DVD remastering and touching up any dodgy photos, but you’ve also got a couple of useful utilities in there as well (like Aurora, to automatically wake both you and your Mac and Processes, an advanced system monitor). You can grab the bundle here but be warned, it ends today!

Check Back Next Week!

Remember to check back next Tuesday (not Wednesday, now!) for some more hot (and free) app deals and if you can hardly wait until then, feel free to share your thoughts and comments on the apps featured above!

When Steve Jobs unveiled the original iPhone 5 years ago, many downplayed the device’s significance to the industry but still assumed it’d sell good thanks to Apple’s Mac fanbase. The iPhone quickly proved it could hold its own in the world, and thanks to the App Store and iCloud, you could easily use an iPhone today even if you didn’t own any other computer at all. Many iPhone users have never owned a Mac, and despite most Mac users love of all things Apple, there’s still many Mac users that have never owned an iPhone.

I’m one of those. I’ve owned an iPod Touch, and loved it, but continued using my old phone for voice calls and txts since iPhones are only sold unlocked in Thailand and cost more than an iPad upfront. Even with Apple’s upcoming launch of the next iPhone, I’ll be paying more attention to details about the next iPod Touch unless they seriously cut the unlocked iPhone’s price.

Whether for cost or just because you don’t use the phone that much, there’s still many of us who don’t have an iPhone. Are you in that number, or are you more devoted to your iPhone today than your Mac? We’d love to hear your thoughts in this week’s poll on the eve of Apple’s next major iPhone launch.

I tend to just take quick glances at my calendar, checking the dates of events coming up or looking to see if I can fit something new in. Sometimes it’s a huge pain to open the app on my phone or computer, so I end up guessing whether I have anything on a particular date — which is a recipe for disaster.

What I need, I realized a few weeks ago, is a good menubar calendar that I can call on at a moment’s notice with a simple click of the mouse or tap of the keyboard. Qbix’s Calendar Plus fits the bill, and to sweeten the deal it includes great customization options. Let’s check it out.

Easy Access

Calendar Plus lives permanently in your menubar, symbolized by a generic calendar icon with the numbered day of the month. Clicking on that reveals a drop-down menu with the month view. You can navigate through days and months, with event information shown to the left of the calendar. If there’s an event listed on a particular day, you’ll see a small colored circle — the specific color depends on the calendar the event was taken from.

The app sits in your menubar, where it can be quickly and easily accessed. Both events and the calendar get displayed when it’s activated.

Calendar Plus automatically imports your iCal calendars and syncs to iCloud. You can disable some or all of these in the settings, where you can also add Facebook and Google calendars. The app recognizes your color-codings in iCal, and duplicates them in its own calendar display. All calendars (that are turned on) get shown together in a unified view; there’s no separate viewing option.

Setting up accounts is easy. If you use iCal, they’re right there; Facebook and Google just need to be authorized.

Clicking (or possibly hovering, depending on your settings) on a day shows the events for that day and a set number of days into the future. I like to know what’s going on a week ahead of things in my calendar, so I set that to seven days. You can specify whether to display events on one line or two, with or without the end time. If you’re anything like me you make up the end times as often as not, so this is a welcome option to reduce unnecessary information.

Double clicking on an event opens it in iCal or BusyCal, where you can edit or check out more detailed information about it. The app doesn’t show the location field for events, which is anything from a minor to a major inconvenience — depending on your needs. Hopefully that’ll be added as an option in a future update.

It’s Getting Hot in Here

Putting weather forecasts in a menubar calendar app seems like a stroke of genius — I can check the weather right alongside my upcoming events, planning ahead or even considering whether we need to cancel due to adverse conditions. Calendar Plus can grab minimum/maximum temperatures, humidity, precipitation, and even sunset/sunrise information for you and pop it right in the events list as well as on the main calendar. Unfortunately, the service it uses to get weather information is consistently wrong for my area.

The weather forecasting would be extremely handy…if it were accurate. Hopefully it’s better in your area.

Your results may vary, and I suspect those of you in North America will have the best luck, but its track record in Melbourne (Australia) for the couple of weeks I’ve been using the app is terrible — temperatures several degrees off the reality (and our local bureau’s predictions), with conditions also wrong. For instance, I’m writing this on a lovely 24ºC day full of sunshine but marred by strong winds. The Calendar Plus weather widget says it’ll be partly cloudy with a max of 19ºC and mild winds.

Customize to Your Heart’s Content

Don’t like the default look of the app? No problem — you can change it. We’ve already covered some of the customization options, including the display of events and weather. There are also ten color schemes, your own choice of background, keyboard shortcuts, optional visual flair, and more.

Backgrounds can be set individually for each month or overall for all months. The app includes five, seasonally appropriate (for the northern hemisphere) images for each month. But you can search Flickr or choose from your hard drive if you want something else. Fans of skeuomorphism can add space (about 20 pixels) between the menubar and the calendar, with options of ropes, spring, wood, or glass. You can also resize the calendar by dragging from the bottom right corner, if it seems too big or small for your purposes.

You’d be surprised how many (free) artistic photos of a Macintosh Plus you can find on Flickr.

Calendar Plus is completely controllable via the keyboard. Press Command-Shift-K to open it, then use arrow keys, space bar, Return, and Escape to navigate around or close it. These work well — better than the mouse, sometimes — and will no doubt please people who like to keep both hands on the keys.

You can also specify which day weeks start on, what should be displayed when the calendar opens, whether or not to label events with the name of the account they come from, and whether the menubar icon should be colored or grey.

A plethora of options for the tweak-happy.

Potential Overkill

For power users and customization nuts, Calendar Plus has nearly everything. But what if you just want a basic drop-down calendar which tells you what days you have things on, perhaps with quick access to iCal? Qbix has you covered there, too, with the aptly-named Calendar, which is a popular free alternative. Other lightweight options include ACalendar, CrisCalen (which lives on the desktop), CalendarMenu, and QuickCal (which is more focused on events).

Qbix’s popular free alternative Calendar offers a streamlined, barely-customizable version of Calendar Plus.

At the other end of the spectrum, Fantastical offers a plethora of features with fewer appearance-tweaking options. It’s a great app, but comes with a big price tag. Blotter does the same, only from the desktop. If you have any other calendar assistants to recommend — either lightweight or more full-featured — let us know in the comments below.

A Fine Calendar Assistant

Calendar Plus fits a need — to quickly check your calendars and any upcoming events — and it does so with great panache. The many tweaks and customization options it offers hark back to the old days of third-party apps, where skins and user-defined behavior was placed above pure aesthetics (which is both a good and a bad thing, I should note — there’s something to be said for visual uniformity). And it integrates well into existing iCal, Google, and BusyCal workflows (and Facebook, too, if you use it that way).

The result is a handy tool that you can make your own, which may not fit with current trends of minimalism and skeuomorphism but puts a bit of you back into your menubar. It’s earned a permanent place in mine. It could do with a few more options regarding themes and events display, but it’s made a great debut.

Don’t forget to read our interview with the creators of Calendar Plus, Qbix, on their development and design philosophies and procedures.

We’ve collected the top four reviews, roundups and how-to articles from across the AppStorm network in February. Whether you’re interested in Mac, iPhone, Web, Android, Windows, or iPad apps, there’s bound to be something you didn’t spot over the course of the month. Now would be a good time to explore a part of the AppStorm Network you’ve never seen before!

Thanks for reading AppStorm, and I hope you enjoy looking over some of our favourite posts from last month!

Best of Android.AppStorm

Best of iPad.AppStorm

Best of Windows.AppStorm

Best of iPhone.AppStorm

Best of Web.AppStorm

Best of Mac.AppStorm

Share Your Ideas

Is there something in particular you’d like to see on the site next month? We’d absolutely love to hear your suggestions for articles, topics and giveaways. Just let us know in the comments. Thanks for reading AppStorm!

Our sponsor this week is Get Dealy’s Summer Bundle, one of the best deals on Mac apps you’ll find this summer. You’ll get $500 worth of great Mac apps for just $49, and can even get one app for free!

The Get Dealy Summer Bundle includes 10 apps, including award winning Mac and web apps that can help you be more productive and make it easier to work on your Mac. You’ll get Crossover XI to run Windows apps on your Mac, GaragePay to keep up with your PayPal payments easier, Snippets to help you quickly reuse code snippets, Espionage to encrypt folders and keep your data safe, Ronin to track time and make invoices, and more.

Best of all, the Get Dealy Summer Bundle is the exclusive way to preorder a license for Archy, the Mac app for getting the most out of Google Drive. We called it a Must-Have app in our recent review, and if you’re using Google Drive all the time, it’s sure to be a handy app to have around.

Then, if you’re ever looking for deals on software in the future, be sure to check Get Dealy, as they’re always running great discounts on apps you’ll love.

Go Get It!

If you’ve been looking for a great bundle of Mac apps this summer, your search is over. Head over to Get Dealy’s site to get your copy of the Summer Bundle before the deal’s over a week from today. Best of all, you can get a free copy of Speedy, an app to help you launch favorite apps, sites, and more quickly, just for entering your email. That’s a deal you really shouldn’t pass up!

This week has, again, been a fairly quiet one in terms of app news but I’m sure we’ll have plenty to report on come next Wednesday (we may even see some Mac-related gear being announced) after Apple’s announcement! We will of course bring you a full roundup of all the new products just after the announcement but in the meantime, feel free to sink your teeth into this week’s news findings.

Dragon Dictate 3 for Mac announced with improved accuracy and audio file transcription

Not wanting to be outdone by the built-in dictation feature in Mountain Lion, the developers of Dragon Dictate for Mac, Nuance have announced the third version of their popular dictation software, which is due to be released on September 19. Dictate 3 comes with improved accuracy and speed and allows users to dictate long passages of text without an internet connection and you can also transcribe audio files as well.

According to the developers, Dictate 3 “inherits the accuracy boost” as seen in Dictate 12 for Windows and Mac users can expect to see a 15% boost in accuracy over the previous version 2.5. The new version does come at a fair whack though: for new users, Dictate 3 can be pre-ordered from the company’s online store for $199.99 (either as a boxed shipment or electronic download). The digital download is available from September 13, whereas the physical product begins shipping on September 24.

RIP, Twitter for Mac

It seems like development on Twitter’s official Mac client has ground to an inevitable halt, according to a tweet by TechCrunch columnist MG Siegler. The application will not be killed off however development will be shelved inevitably (meaning no new features will be released for it), presumably whilst the company concentrates on further features for TweetDeck, which it bought out in May of last year.

Word is that Twitter made the call today: Twitter for Mac is done. They won’t kill it outright, but no further updates. Goodbye, old friend.

— MG Siegler (@parislemon) September 6, 2012

The announcement was inevitable, to say the least. Twitter for Mac received its last update in June of last year and has not been updated following the release of the retina MacBook Pro (according to one source, a retina version was developed then mothballed) or Mountain Lion (however standard Twitter notifications can still be had through the built-in Twitter support in Mountain Lion).

We have heard nothing official from Twitter regarding this, however it seems that with the lack of new features, this will drive many former Twitter for Mac users to other alternatives, such as TweetDeck and Tweetbot.

Apple working on a Pandora-like internet radio service

One of the hottest Apple rumours this week (which has been confirmed by many sources) is that Apple is working on a internet radio streaming service, much like Pandora in the United States or We7 in the United Kingdom, which will hopefully help take a mighty bite out of the on-demand music streaming market, which has grown big in the last few years. Although nothing official has been announced as of yet, Apple has reportedly favoured Pandora‘s radio option, whereby users are fed songs based on their own suggestions and interests, rather than Spotify‘s model of users selecting tracks based on their own searches.

According to the Wall Street Journal, Apple has been negotiating deals with major record labels in the United States however the launch could be months away (we may see an announcement about it on Wednesday). The company will also face hurdles if it wants to use the name “iRadio”, as this is already in use by several radio stations and an iPhone app.

Heard Anything Else?

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

MacTuts+ is the superb new site dedicated to teaching people how to use their Mac, and OS X, more effectively. We’ve got you covered for apps, but combine that with an in-depth knowledge of OS X and you’ll be unstoppable, limitless!

This is a quick roundup of the best tutorials from MacTuts+ in August, from mastering Mountain Lion to taking control of your Mac’s clipboard!

Best of Mactuts+