Category: Mac

There’s notebook apps to store all your text snippets, ideas, notes, outlines, and anything else you can think of. They’re designed to make it easy to save notes, and easy to search through and find the note you need later. There’s plain writing apps, that strip away all the distractions and help you focus on your writing. And then there’s the export tools page layout apps that help you publish your finished work.

And then, there’s the new Ulysses III 1.1. Ulysses III reinvented what it meant to be a plain-text writing app when it was released this spring, and the new v1.1 update adds advanced search and improves external file and export support enough that it’s a notebook, focused writing, and publishing app rolled into one. It’s the one app modern writers need.

Everything in One Place

Search has finally come to Ulysses III

As covered in my original review, Ulysses III is a reinvented Markdown writing app that lets you organize everything you write in an iCloud library and add Markdown formatting with simple word processor-style keyboard shortcuts and HUDs. You can bring in your own external folders of plain text or markdown files to edit alongside your Ulysses documents, and their changes are saved back to the original files. It’s every bit as nice of a writing environment as iA Writer or Byword, if not nicer, with the addition of document management.

And now, there’s a ton more. The document library was nice to have all along, but it wasn’t very useful without search. That’s all changed with v.1.1. There’s now sidebar search to search across the full contents of anything the folder you have open, as well as a new Alfred-like Open menu that lets you open any file in any folder — including external sources — in Ulysses via search. The latter is the best addition to the app yet, making it the perfect place for everything you need to write down, including short notes.

Sidebar search works much as you’d expect. It’s essentially a quick way to filter through the documents in your currently open folder. It’ll search across every piece of text in your documents, including links and footnotes, or you can filter to only search through, say, headings or any other part of the markdown documents you want. Best of all, you can select the specific search results from a document and jump directly to that part of the document.

The star of v1.1: the open pane

The Open pane, though, is my favorite. Tap CMD+O to search across everything in the library you currently are working in (say, iCloud or your External Sources), or — and this is the one you’ll want to use by default all the time, really — press CMD+Shift+O to search across everything you have in Ulysses, including all of your iCloud documents and external sources. It’ll show your most recently edited documents when you first see the open pane, so you could just tap your down arrow to the document you want and hit enter to open it or CMD+enter to reveal it in its folder in the sidebar. Alternately, start typing to find the document you want, then open it with a simple Enter. It’s like nvALT or Evernote, except in a full-featured Markdown writing app. If you’ve ever saved your nvALT notes as a folder of text notes in Dropbox, say, you can import them as an external source, then easily open and edit them in Ulysses III, and the changes will still be saved to Dropbox. It’s that simple.

From Start to Finish

It’s not Marked, but it’s close

It’s simple to write a document or note in Ulysses and quickly find it later, and the Glue Sheets option lets you pull several files together into one virtual document in one click. Now all you need to do is publish it. The new Ulysses has everything you need for that. There’s the same quick export options as before that let you select a snippet and press ALT+CMD+C to copy just the selected text as HTML, and the Quick Export HUD in the top right corner that lets you export your document in a variety of formats or open it directly in another app. But the latter has far more options than before.

You’ll first notice that ePub support is finally back (complete with an option to add a cover image), and the other export options have been moved around a bit. You’ll also likely notice a new preview option that’s also available by tapping CMD+Shift+P, one that will live-refresh the preview document as you’re writing, and where you can directly copy text or export using Ulysses III’s new styles.

All the export styles you want

Styles are the biggest change to publishing from Ulysses III, since they give you the option to export fully formatted PDF, ePub, RTF, or HTML documents right from the app using the styles you want. There’s a handful of nice styles built-in, or you can build your own styles using the apps CSS-like ULSS markup. It’d be simple to turn your blog’s theme into a style to preview articles before copying them as plain text, for example, or your could build your company’s letterhead template in a PDF style and use Ulysses as your one-stop publishing hub — one that already has everything you write in it.

The crazy thing is, that’s not all that’s new in v.1.1. You’ll also find a new Typewriter Scrolling option that highlights your current line of text and can set your editing view to the top, middle, or bottom of your document so you can write the way you want. There’s also new automatic list and tag completion, so writing an outline in Markdown isn’t so cumbersome. And of course, there’s still all the original goodness of Markdown XL writing (again, check our first review of Ulysses III for more info on that), customizable writing themes and fonts (including size, spacing, page width, and more), and quick Markdown reference in an option sidebar. Plus, you can minimize all the sidebars with a quick tap of CMD+3, so you’re left alone with you’re writing. It’s really great.

Conclusion

I try out so many plain-text writing apps, and yet nothing could win me away from the simplicity of iA Writer until I gave Ulysses III a serious try. Its beautifully advanced Markdown integration combined with document management and simple export won me over, and it’s where most of my writing in 2013 has taken place. And now, with the new quick search tool, it’s getting me back to writing notes in plain-text, Dropbox synced files like I used to with nvALT — only now, those notes are in the same place I keep my article drafts, as well as an archive of everything I’ve published. And somehow it still manages to give a focused, full-screen writing experience that’s as nice as the best other writing apps could offer.

Ulysses III is nothing short of brilliant. You’ve got to try it out if you haven’t already. There’s a free demo version on the Ulysses III website to see how it works before buying it, so there’s no reason not to try it out. Add some of your folders of plain-text files, write some new stuff, then try searching through everything. I think you’ll be blown away by how nicely it works.

My Mac is essentially always on, because I always have apps running and browser tabs open. If I shutdown my laptop, that means all of that gets closed, which I’m okay with. What I’m not okay with is having to open all of it back up again. It took me ages to find all of those panda cam video screenshots; am I just supposed to do all of that “research” again? No thanks!

What I need is an app that will save all of my open windows, tabs and applications and open them back up for me when I’m ready. Cupcloud says it can do just that, so I gave the beta a try. I’ll let you know how it goes and whether it’s worth a download.

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Pick Up Where You Left Off

Essentially, Cupcloud saves just where I am and what I’m doing on my Mac so I can pick back up in the same place at a later time. Hit Cup, and Cupcloud will remember what I’ve got going on, including what websites I have open and any files or folders I’m looking at. When I clicked Uncup, all of that opened back up, just where I had left off in the appropriate applications, which is the important part. I don’t want to just look at my Word documents in Finder, I want them to open up in Microsoft Word, and Cupcloud will make that happen.

Save your open windows and come back to them later.

I use my computer for work and everything personal, too, so I ended up with a lot of unrelated cups. Luckily, I could create a bunch of folders to organize all of that. I made some for work, sure, but I’m planning a huge holiday party, and that got its own folder, too. All of my cups were private by default, but I could share them, and all of those showed up in the Shared folder.

Let’s just be honest and admit we all get distracted and often find ourselves with extra open windows that don’t have anything to do with the task at hand. Yeah, Cupcloud saved everything I had open, including my thirteen Pinterest tabs and all of my searches for early Black Friday ads. It probably would have been in my best interest to clean some of that up before I cupped my session, but when I forgot, Cupcloud let me edit a cup. Everything in a cup is listed on the right, and I just deleted anything that wasn’t relevant.

Save as many cups as you need or want, with as many windows as you require.

Cupcloud is a pretty simple service, but it’s going to fill a pretty large gap for some people. It is certainly a service, though, and not just an app; I had to sign up before I could get going and then sign in again each time I used Cupcloud. There’s an automatic login, though, and Cupcloud remembered my password information for me.

App Compatibility

I certainly liked being able to save everything I was doing and come back to it later. There are already some pretty banging extensions that will do this in Chrome, my browser of choice. My favorite flavor saves sessions automatically, so I can usually go back and find anything really important, lost forever in the sands of time thought it may seem. While that’s pretty great, it only saves browser sessions and not everything I’m working on outside of Chrome. Though I’m pretty browser dependent, it’s great to have those Finder sessions saved, too.

With a premium account, you can share your cups.

Unfortunately, the list of compatible apps is pretty limited. Cupcloud seems to work with all of the major browsers, so if your favorite doesn’t have a nifty extension like mine to save your sessions, Cupcloud can handle that for you. The app is worth the download if only just for that, but there is more compatibility, don’t worry. Cupcloud also works with Microsoft Word, et. al., iWork, Acrobat, and Finder. That’s it for now, but the developer plans to add more apps to the list.

Final Thoughts

Still in beta, Cupcloud is a neat little app for sort of bookmarking where I am in a project and returning to the same spot, but I could always just pop all of my favorite apps on the Dock or set everything I need to open on login. Cupcloud certainly makes the process easier, but it’s not exactly revolutionary. The real value comes from sharing cups with coworkers or project collaborators. Shared cups makes it easy for fellows to hop in and out and pick up where I’ve left off.

There are a few options, but there’s not much customization to this beta.

Shared cups are part of the premium Cupcloud service, though, and are only available for an additional fee. The number of uncups is limited with the free app, too, so there’s more to the premium service than just sharing. The ingenuity of Cupcloud lies in sharing those cups, though, and the free version of Cupcloud, unfortunately, wasn’t a lot to write home about.

The Activity Monitor in OS X Mavericks has been nicely redesigned, but it’s still far from enough for anyone who wants to keep up with their Mac’s real-time stats. For a detailed overview of how your Mac is actually performing, you’ll ideally need the stats you want in your menubar or in a condensed window that shows just the stats you want to see together. That’s why you need Colossus, our sponsor this week.

Colossus is an advanced system monitor for your Mac that makes it simple to keep on top of the most important stats. For just $3.99, it lets you keep tabs on your Mac’s CPU activity, memory, download and upload speeds, battery, storage, and temperatures with an optional addon in your menubar, a floating window, or a customizable dock icon. You can keep track of as few or as many stats as you want, in the places you want.

No matter what stats you pick to be shown in the menubar and Colossus’ animated Dock icon, you can always jump into all of your Mac’s stats from the app’s full-featured floating window view that can optionally float over every other app on your desktop. There, you’ll find collapsing views that show your summary stats for every part of your Mac at a glance with more detailed info on click. Combine that with the customizable menubar and dock icon, and you’ve got the perfect monitoring app for your Mac.

Get a Copy of Colossus Today!

Colossus is a brilliant and simple way to keep up with your Mac’s stats, and it’s far cheaper than the competition while including the features and performance you need. Get your copy of Colossus from the Mac App Store for just $3.99, and start keeping up better with how your Mac and internet connection are performing.

Apple spoiled us all last week by releasing OS X Mavericks and the new iLife and iWork apps all for free. That should have freed up some of your pennies to get some great indie apps for your Mac — and we’ve got a great bundle to share where you can get a ton of apps for said pennies.

Paddle’s newest Pay What You Want bundle includes 16 apps that are ready for your Mac with OS X Mavericks, including the Bits diary app we’ve just reviewed and Shortcat, the awesome keyboard shortcut app that was developed by a former Envato team member. There’s more, too: MenuEverywhere to get your Mac menus right inside your apps, Focus to improve your photos, Code Collector Pro to backup your code snippets, Slink to securely connect to remote networks, and more. All that for the low price of whatever you’d like to pay.

Or, you could get it for free, since we have 5 of the bundles to giveaway. Just comment below and let us know what apps you’d like most in this bundle to enter — then share the giveaway on your favorite social networks and leave another comment with a link to your shared post for an extra entry.

Hurry and get your entry in — the giveaway closes on Friday, November 1st!

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

I take a lot of pictures — not just professionally, but also for fun. That being said, I don’t think there’s such a thing as a “perfect” image editor. I’ve tried everything over the years, some of which I’ve reviewed here on Mac.AppStorm, but I have yet to run into one tool that can singlehandedly replace all the others.

But when MacPhun, the folks behind Snapheal, reached out to me, I was intrigued. Their newest app, Intensify Pro, looked like it could be a real game-changer, and I was eager to put it through its paces. Read on to find out if Intensify really brings anything new to the table.

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What Intensify Is

Intensify is a powerful photo editor that’s aimed straight at professionals and serious hobbyists looking to get all the detail possible out of their photos. That’s a tricky proposition. After all, most apps that claim to do this merely make your photo noisier (unless it was taken under perfect light conditions with a $3,000 camera, which I doubt describes many of us). Needless to say, Intensify has its work cut out.

There’s a ton of stuff in the Presets pane alone.

It tries to do this by combining presets, which MacPhun says are created by professional photographers, and also allowing you to precisely control each element of the photo in a more fine-tuned Adjustments pane. I personally prefer the Adjustments pane, which I simply find easier to use (more on that later).

The Adjustments pane is where I prefer to spend most of my time.

The goal with Intensify, of course, is similar to other image editors. It wants to reveal details in darkness, bring barely-visible colours to light without sacrificing image integrity, and accentuate the details you haven’t seen before. Like any editor, you can push it too far with many of your photos. That said, Intensify is uniquely vivid with its colour and detail enhancements. Used tastefully, you can get some great results. Used carelessly, you’ll damage photos more than you’ll help them. Intensify allows you to make your photos look as vivid as the screen on a store’s floor model TV, which isn’t good. But used carefully, you can really bring some depth to photos that would otherwise lack it.

Editing With Intensify

Now that I’m done with a brief overview, I wanted to use some examples from a couple recent shoots that I did. Almost all of my work is done in Aperture before I go anywhere else. I organize with Aperture and I do some subtle colour tweaking with the app as well. I’ve also got some film filters I find myself using 99% of the time in Aperture. That being said, the workflow isn’t perfect and I find Aperture can only do so much well.

My original photo. It needs some work.

I thought I’d try bringing Intensify into that workflow. Intensify has the ability to open any RAW file, which is great because that’s what I use. (Fair warning: Intensify does not export RAW. But importing RAW allows you to use it as a non-destructive image editor.) If you buy Intensify from MacPhun’s website, you can use it as an external image editor in Aperture or your favourite Adobe app. If you buy it straight from the Mac App Store, you can only use it as a standalone app. (The Mac App Store version is also called Intensify, while the MacPhun version is called Intensify Pro.)

In reality, it doesn’t make much of a difference. The Open function in the standalone app lets you open any file on your Mac without a problem, while the ability to use it as an external editor simply means it’s easier to open Intensify from another app. Personally, I’d still prefer to buy it directly from MacPhun, but updates are easier with the Mac App Store so I’d take your pick.

Using the Adjustments pane exclusively, this was my before and after shot.

I had two recent photo shoots I wanted to try the app with. The first was a wedding I recently shot on a rainy and grey Saturday morning. The second was an outdoor photo shoot with a friend who was helping me test a new 50mm lens.

While testing out some wedding shots, I tried out using all the Presets, but I discovered very quickly that they didn’t offer me the flexibility I was looking for. After some experimentation, I stuck with the Adjustments pane, and in literally five minutes, I was getting some great results.

This was my original work with one shot.

What most impressed me was how easy it was to use these fine-tuned features. The controls are focussed enough that it feels like there’s a slider for almost every image adjustment in every tone. It’s incredibly granular, and goes well beyond simple things like contrast control.

This was the finished result. It’s not over saturated, but it’s a touch more vivid. It looks a hint more detailed. It’s just better.

The selling features of Intensify, when used appropriately, can make an image just a touch more vivid. I don’t mean “more saturated,” although that’s certainly a part of it. But I very much mean more vivid. Intensify’s nearly-magical power is that it can make an image appear more saturated without making it appear candy-like. That’s something I haven’t been able to replicate in any other app. It’s interesting, to me, that an app that at once allows you to destroy your images by over-editing can also produce what are undoubtedly very tasteful results.

The User Experience

I do have to devote some space to talking about the app’s user interface and design, though. Intensify has a high learning curve. Both myself and a photographer friend of mine have been testing it for over a week, and we both agree — you’ll need some serious time to learn how to use this thing. It took my friend about a day to figure everything out. I don’t mind admitting I’m still trying to understand Intensify’s nuances.

The problems, for me, all lie in the Presets pane. I can appreciate what Intensify is letting you work with here. In fact, there are some stupidly cool features. You can add effects as individual layers, and then change the opacity of any effect. It’s just like layering in Photoshop. Truthfully, it’s not a feature I use all the time, but that’s because I’m not used to it. I think it’s very handy.

The app’s also got some super-cool features, like a gradient to slowly ease into your layered fixes.

The problem is, though, that I can’t tell which Presets are applied. I can’t really tell what happens when I click on a preset. I can see the difference, but that’s not enough. I want to be able to see the controls for each preset and adjust the sliders on my own without having to click to gain access. Clicking on a preset sometimes turns it on, but clicking it again doesn’t turn them off. It’s very strange. If the Presets pane functioned more like the Adjustments pane, and Presets were stackable (I can’t tell if they are), this would be nearly perfect.

I want to mention a couple other things really quick. The first is that there are some great tutorials and manuals available for Intensify available online. I’d recommend watching them. The second is that the design is clearly modelled after some popular Adobe software in many respects. It seems a little more Mac-like to me and a little less cluttered, but it does look very heavy. I prefer Aperture’s interface, hands down. And finally, there’s no lens correction. I’m shaking my head at this. Every image editor should have built-in lens correction by now (yes, including Aperture, which is also a shame).

Final Thoughts

At the end of the day, I could probably spend another few thousand words writing about Intensify. That speaks volumes to its power and its usefulness. I will most certainly be keeping it on my Mac, and definitely be using it to touch up photos where just a little bit more of a human touch could make all the difference. I also love how it allows you to save your progress as you go. There’s a million little touches that make Intensify really great.

But I wish the app’s biggest selling feature — the Presets — were more fleshed-out. It’s hard to know which Preset is currently applied, or whether or not tapping on a Preset activates a preview or turns it on permanently. I wish that was made a little clearer without checking out instruction manuals. That doesn’t mean that Intensify isn’t worth getting, though — it just means there’s lots of room to grow. I look forward to seeing Intensify grow, and as it is, I can see it becoming an important arsenal in any photographer’s toolkit. I’m hard on it because I think it’s one of the best photo editing for professionals currently available, and I’d love to see it get even better.

It wasn’t so long ago that the majority of internet users would connect via dial-up modem. Back in those days, download managers were a necessity since there was nothing worse than spending days downloading a file, only for it to be interrupted because someone picked up the phone in another room. Nowadays, with widespread access to high-speed internet and the fact that browsers have become a lot smarter over the years in resuming unfinished downloads, download managers have all but faded into obscurity.

But the light hasn’t gone out completely for download managers and one such app, Folx, does more than simply download files. After spending a few days with it, I’ve found myself remembering why download managers were just so useful.

Your Personal Assistant for Downloads

Download managers were originally created to provide a better way of managing file downloads, since most downloads took hours rather than minutes. What’s more, due to the fickle nature of dial-up and the fact there were so many ways a connection could be unexpectedly terminated, having a central location to start and resume downloads was a huge deal.

Folx, by Eltima, brings that centralisation back in an app that does its best to manage, organise and control your downloads. Just keep adding downloads to the app and Folx will work its way through the list.

Folx isn’t the prettiest app but it is certainly not the ugliest.

The app has a simple interface that certainly stands out, with its darkened chrome, though I’m not particularly keen on the mustard-coloured background. Ignoring this, the app is well presented and easy to navigate. There’s a toggle for completed and in-progress downloads in the title bar and you can filter downloads according to status using the status bar below.

A useful function is a separate window for bandwidth activity that provides realtime usage of how much bandwidth downloads are using.

A bandwidth monitor provides a great visual indication of how your downloads are doing.

Browser Integration

Folx works by either pasting in a direct URL or, more conveniently, through the app’s ability to capture download links directly from any browser. Downloads are then redirected to Folx rather than using your browser, providing you with a number of options that you can change, such as adding tags and description or even scheduling when the download starts.

Downloads opened with Folx display a confirmation window, providing options for additional settings.

When using multiple browsers, it makes download management much easier as you don’t need to worry about which browser is downloading what. If I had a coin for every time I quit a browser because I thought I was finished with it, only to find it was performing a download, I’d be a very rich man.

Oddly, there are two separate and differing ways that adding downloads is accomplished. You can either enable the ability for Folx to continually watch for any downloads within your browser, or by installing a browser extension. With the option to have Folx watch for downloads enabled, the browser extensions seem to make little sense. The browser extension simply adds a contextual menu item to send links to Folx.

Folx’ monitoring is much more powerful and you can even specify exactly what files to monitor. If you’d prefer to download ZIP files within your browser, for whatever reason, you can simply tell Folx not to add downloads that contain ZIP files.

You can pick and choose which file types Folx will catch and which will be left to your browser to download.

Organisation

Folx’s download organisation revolves around tags, something that features prominently within the app and has an entire column dedicated to them. Tags can be set during the initial download process or automatically by a customisable set of rules, similar to Apple Mail’s rules.

Completed downloads are displayed in a separate view.

This organisation is present throughout the whole app and completed downloads are, too, organised by tags. Infrequent downloaders will probably skip tagging altogether and, thankfully, the tag sidebar can be hidden. For anyone frequently downloading large amounts of data, you’ll likely find this particularly useful.

Speed Limits & Scheduling

Unless you’re able to configure Quality of Service settings on your network router, running huge downloads can impact you or others from using the internet, especially if someone is trying to make a FaceTime call.

Folx includes a speed limit option that can be either manually or automatically enabled and disabled. Many alternative download apps, such as Transmission, has been offering this for downloading files using BitTorrent, so it’s good to see it in a traditional download manager.

You can specify a speed restriction on downloads either automatically, manually or when certain apps are in use.

Folx takes this one step further with a feature it calls Smart Speed Adjustment. By specifying certain apps, such as Safari, you can have Folx automatically lower the speed limit that downloads run at when those applications are active. Again, you could add FaceTime to the list of apps and as soon as you launch it, Folx will throttle your downloads.

Scheduling downloads will automatically start and stop them, but limited speeds are not able to be scheduled.

You can schedule downloads to start and stop at specific times so that you can take advantage of out-of-hours bandwidth. Unfortunately, you can only specify a schedule for when downloads start and stop, you can’t schedule download speed limits.

Multithreaded Downloads

Folx supports multithreading for downloads, meaning it will establish multiple connections for the same downloads. This means that you may find downloads occur much faster than they have been within a browser. Folx supports up to 10 threads with their Pro version.

Even testing the free version of Folx, I found downloads of Ubuntu consistently faster using the app than Safari 6, sometimes by almost 1MB/sec. While this is in no way perfectly scientific, with some of the difference likely attributed to other factors beyond the browser, it was enough that downloads consistently occurred faster within Folx.

Conclusion

The app is available in two flavours: a free version and a Pro upgrade. By going Pro, you unlock features such as smart speed limits, scheduling and the ability to use more than two threads.

Folx was a surprising app and, to be honest, I was not expecting this level of functionality and usefulness. For light users or anyone who doesn’t require automatic speed limits or scheduling, the free version of Folx would be more than enough.

At $19.95, it isn’t the cheapest download manager though it is one of the few that offers some functionality at no charge, and certainly one that I wholeheartedly recommend.

Did you, like me, rush out and update your Mac to run Mavericks? And did you just love the tabbed finder, added notifications and all of the other goodies? And did you then open Apple Mail, listen to the fan crank up to max and wonder why it showed 130% CPU usage in Activity Monitor?

Turns out that you’re not the only one. There’s been a shift in the way that Apple Mail handles Gmail accounts in Mavericks 10.9, and since tons of people use Gmail for their primary accounts, there’s a big problem on hand. TidBITS was the first to point it out (and that’s a great place to read the technical reasons why it’s broken), but today it’s a huge issue that needs to be fixed. Now.

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A Little Background

Let’s start out by stating the obvious: a lot of people use Gmail. It’s free, it’s easy to use and super awesome with spam management — why wouldn’t you use it? And even though now it costs a bit of money to use with Google Apps for Business (what you’d use if you setup your own domain name), it’s still worth it considering the benefits. At least it is for most people.

There is no one application (that I know of) that can handle my needs the way that Mail could.

I personally have 17 websites and 12 active email addresses (technically, I have at least two more emails, but I don’t use them at the moment). Now I may be in the minority here, but I’m sure most of you have at least two accounts: personal and work. In some cases, they could both be on Gmail, or they could have a combo of Gmail and Exchange. Either way, you’ve probably got two email accounts to manage, and accessing them on your iOS device or the web may not be ideal. That’s the case for my situation, unified inbox or not.

So if you want a desktop email client, you might turn to Apple Mail the way that I did. For years, that’s been a more than adequate solution, with lots of handy filters and tools that you can use to speed up your email processing. But now all that is gone, because Mail is broken badly. Unless Apple fixes it in an update, it’s not going to be a productive tool for anyone using Gmail. Which is to say, not a lot of people (unless they like duplicate emails, missing docs and weird folder movements, then sure).

Limited Alternatives

I obviously can’t go without email, so I started looking at alternatives, starting right here at Mac.AppStorm. After going through Matthew’s recent roundup, I tried Airmail and Postbox 3, as well as a few other options including Microsoft Outlook and Inky. The results? Not good.

There is no one application (that I know of) that can handle my needs the way that Mail could. Out of my 12 email accounts, one is IMAP (iCloud), 10 are Gmail and one is Exchange — Airmail and Inky don’t support Exchange, and Postbox 3 doesn’t support whatever flavor of Exchange that server is running (which I don’t know — long story). Outlook does support Exchange and does it quite nicely. But everything else? Holy cow is it a nightmare to setup, and even when I did get it working it felt like more of a hack. Besides, I really just don’t want to use Outlook, it’s so dang ugly. Plus, I’ve become a keyboard ninja with Mail, something I can’t do with any of those options.

I wanted to like Inky, but security concerns and workflow problems kept me out of it.

What I’m now doing is using two applications to manage my email. Outlook handles my Exchange and iCloud account, and Airmail covers the rest as well as iCloud. So why is iCloud on both?

When I first signed up for MobileMe (yup, I was that guy), I figured out that an excellent way to have all my email on hand was to dump it into iCloud. By storing my docs there, I could access any email account’s archives from just iCloud. It meant that if I had an iPhone.AppStorm email from 2012 that I needed to find, I’d just look in my iPhone.AppStorm folder on iCloud instead of going through the Gmail folders. Why the complication? Because not all of my emails for one account come to one account. I get emails about iPhone.AppStorm via personal accounts, as well as two other emails also related to our parent company, Envato. Which means that I’d have to go through at least three accounts to find one email. Doing it all through iCloud made a ton more sense.

To continue this process sans Mail, I have to keep iCloud running on both email apps. That way I can file my Exchange emails into iCloud as well as my Gmail accounts, and it’s all kept in harmony. That’s the plan, but we’ll see how that all works out.

Making The Best of It

This system is still new, but it’s just not ideal. As Matthew wrote:

Airmail’s combination of style and features would actually be nearly perfect if you’re willing to tweak things a bit and deal with a plethora of settings. The only problem is, everything doesn’t work quite right. Airmail works great when it works, but it failed far too often in our tests to make the cut.

And therein lies the problem. I really want to like Airmail because it’s just so pretty, but functionally, it’s not awesome. Postbox 3 feels like it should be my best alternative, but I hate looking at the thing and I can’t move my windows the way I prefer. And Outlook? Ugh. It makes me feel dirty just to open it up.

At the end of the day, Apple Mail may take a lot of flack, but it’s not a bad tool to use for email. And since it handled pretty much everything you threw at it, the thing worked well. But now? Not so much, and it means that I’ve got to run a virtual Rube Goldberg machine every time I get a new email. And that’s no fun at all.

Among photographic editing apps, Adobe’s Photoshop is not exactly strides ahead of the competition, particularly not in terms of the features required by the average user. Yet it holds the majority market share, mostly due to the Photoshop brand’s early establishment as the go-to image editor. Nowadays, it is a brand name we even use as a verb.

But the competition is catching up. OnOne is not as well known as Adobe, but it is a development company dedicated to photographic apps. Perfect Photo Suite 8 is the latest instalment of its flagship series, and it has just been unveiled in a pre-release beta. It is a package that is designed to work as a comprehensive standalone editor, but it is also happy to work alongside the likes of Photoshop, Lightroom and Aperture.

But can OnOne’s latest offering tempt long-time Adobe customers away from their beloved ‘shop?

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Environment

It would be very harsh to describe the interface of Perfect Photo Suite 8 (PPS8) as a clone of Lightroom, but it certainly looks very similar. The UI is entirely painted in that familiar dark grey. There is a left-hand sidebar which holds folders and metadata, and adjustments are made over on the right. Adobe fans will certainly feel at home.

PPS8′s interface isn’t particularly unique, but it gets the job done.

However, PPS8 takes an interesting approach to editing. Rather than simply throwing you in to the traditional all-in-one editing environment, PPS8 takes you on a step-by-step progression through file browsing, layers, enhancements and effects, before finally offering to output your end product. You can, of course, skip unnecessary steps, but for those who do choose to follow along, this is a system that puts the “flow” in “workflow”.

Editing

The file browser in PPS8 is smooth and fast to load. Selecting the right file is a task made easier by the quick-time retrieval and presentation of basic metadata in the sidebar. After choosing whether your upcoming edits should be applied to the original file, a copy, or just a layer, you’re ready to start editing, but it should also be noted that 16-bit colour depth and PSD file creation are both supported.

Layers

The Layers workspace is the entry point into PPS8 editing. A thin, vertical tool palette inhabits the left-hand side, and it includes all the basics. There are a couple of more unusual, nifty options, though. For example, the Trim tool crops only the currently selected layer, and the Masking Bug offers easy access to the creation of mask gradients, which camouflage the transition from one layer to another.

Blending modes are previewed in real-time.

Meanwhile, over on the right, below the Lightroom-style image Navigator/Loupe/Histogram window, is a run-of-the-mill layers palette. Due to the specific role of this editing area, the controls for managing each layer are quite large — a positive in terms of usability.

Enhancement

The Enhancement area of PPS8 is easy to operate, but it is somewhat understocked – and a touch disappointing as a result.

The Quick Fixes take precedence, and for edit-and-go expediency, they are fine. In terms of more detailed control, however, only basic stuff is on offer.

For the adjustment of tone, the choice is essentially restricted to Brightness, Contrast, Shadows and Highlights, while colour can only be adjusted in terms of Temperature, Tint (a.k.a. hue) and Vibrance (a.k.a. saturation). A basic vignetting menu is also provided, but the range of three different styles is, once again, hardly comprehensive.

Basic adjustments: yes. Anything greatly clever: no.

The bright spot here is the sharpening menu, which provides surprisingly good control over both what is being sharpened, and what sort of sharpening should be applied. Particularly helpful is PPS8′s presets library, which makes it easy to apply the correct type and amount of sharpening for your chosen output medium (print, screen, etc.).

Portraiture

Although solid in most departments, PPS8 does have a couple of areas of true excellence. The Portrait workspace is one of them.

Automatic face detection makes slider-based adjustment of portraits swift.

PPS8 automatically detects faces, and once the app has locked on, numerous sliders make the airbrushed look fairly easy to replicate. Skin tone can be adjusted, blemishes smoothed, and eyes and teeth can be lifted and made to sparkle. The results, I might add, are highly impressive.

Effects

The Effects compartment of PPS8 contains adjustable preset styles. However, unlike the menu of the same name in Elements, the choices here are focused on photography, rather than graphic design.

There’s a massive selection of effects on offer, and each can be modified.

The number of Blur types on offer is impressive, as is the quality and variety of the Texturizer‘s styles. Many realistic photo filter emulations are included, and a very, very long list of nice looking borders is also available.

B&W

Another outstanding area of PPS8 is the B&W area.

Monotone images can be fine-tuned.

Toning is the most notable strength here — individual colour sliders and a tone curve are both at your disposal — but glow and vignette can also be added and modified.

My personal favourite feature, however, is the option to add film grain. Imitations of Fuji, Illford and Kodak films are present, each offered at several different levels of ISO. Most importantly, they look great, although the apparent realism of these grains will be welcomed by traditionalists.

Mask

The importance of selective adjustments in modern image editing is made clear by the separate Mask workspace in PPS8.

A diverse tool palette awaits you here, providing pretty much every method of mask application and refinement under the sun. The option to use a mask for background removal is made easily accessible, and the colours marking what is masked, and what isn’t, can also be modified.

Output

The other section of PPS8 that really stands out is the Export workspace.

Resizing isn’t usually a particularly noteworthy feature. But OnOne owns Genuine Fractals, a technology which used to be sold as an industry-leading standalone resizing app. As a result, the quality of the upsizing on offer in PPS8 is superb.

The control over output is spectacular.

Equally, there are some extremely useful presets provided. These include the print media of all the big printer manufacturers, the screen sizes of iOS devices, and tricky stuff like gallery wraps.

Verdict

An app with the depth and quality of Perfect Photo Studio 8 is hard to mark down. It provides a wealth of editing options, it runs smoothly, and it is happy to play ball with software you might already have installed on your Mac. It is certainly a solid purchase, no matter what kind of photographer you are.

This is a $79.95 app (the standalone version, after the beta phase), though, so it must be judged against similarly priced competition. In this light, it starts to look a fraction weaker. For the application of hands-on manual edits, Photoshop Elements is clearly more proficient, and efficient. Equally, some users of Perfect Photo Studio 8 will find the segregation of editing workspaces to be a significant drain on productivity, due to the loading time that must be waited out as you move between them.

However, Perfect Photo Studio 8 does exceed the abilities of many similarly priced apps in certain categories, such as portraits, and black and white. Therefore, for photographers whose style regularly coincides with these specialities, I would quite seriously recommend Perfect Photo Studio 8 over and above Adobe’s offering, or indeed, anyone else’s.

It’s been a busy week for Apple fans. We knew Apple had a lot more to cover with this week’s announcement, and were rather certain that OS X Mavericks would be released sometime this week. There was the hint at WWDC of a new iWork and possibly iLife, but we wouldn’t have been way too surprised if the new versions hadn’t been announced. And yet they were, along with upgraded MacBook Pros — with the Mac Pro’s release date left as the final known Apple puzzle of the year.

Price was the theme this time, with Mavericks, iWork, and iLife all going free, the MacBook Pro and Retina Display MacBook Pro both had $200 shaved off their price, and the Mac Pro’s announced price of $2,999 is cheaper than you can build a similar PC right now. And yet, everyone’s not happy. OS X Mavericks is pretty great, but some of its includes apps such as iBooks weren’t quite as power user friendly as we would have hoped. That trend continued, with GarageBand X gaining nice new features but losing its pro tools, and Pages and Keynote looking sharper than before but losing AppleScript and most OpenType support, among other issues. The new Mac Pro would make anyone think Apple was more interested in pro users than ever, and yet their software choices make us question that pro users commitment.

All in all, I happen to like most of the new software, and am hopeful Apple will bring back some of the currently missing pro features. They’ve done that before with Final Cut Pro X, and they just might again. But what’s your thoughts on the new apps this week? Are you enjoying Mavericks and the new iWork, or sticking to your current apps for now? We’d love to hear your thoughts in the comments below.

Ever since Google bought out Sparrow, we’ve been hoping for a new best-in-class email app for the Mac. We listed the elusive .Mail as one of the main apps we hoped to see released in 2013, but alas, nothing has materialized to date.

That’s no reason for doom-and-gloom. Instead, there’s an updated Mail.app in OS X Mavericks, along with the just-released Unibox and Airmail 1.2. Plus, there’s a public beta of Mail Pilot for Mac coming soon. Here’s the latest email choices on the Mac, with enough options that almost everyone should find a mail app they like for now.

Mail.app

Our own Pierre Wizla showed us earlier this year how Mail.app can be the best mac email app, and that’s even more true than ever in OS X Mavericks. The latest version isn’t perfect — it has some issues with Gmail that may mean you’ll need to redownload every email from Google’s servers — but it’s faster and more stable than ever. It’ll check for emails automatically, which means they’ll come in at least nearly as fast as in Sparrow, and in my usage, syncing doesn’t seem to hang as often as it did in Mountain Lion. Plus, it takes advantage of Mavericks new notifications to let you reply to emails right from the notification without leaving your current app. Throw in new and improved smart mailboxes that let you limit searches to just one of your accounts more, and search that lets you look for specific types of attached files, and you’ve got a rather good email app included with your Mac for the low, low price of free — one that happens to even support Microsoft’s Exchange server.

Unibox

Most email apps are generally the same list of folders on the left, messages in the middle, and the conversations themselves on the right. Unibox turns that around, and makes your email about the people you talk to. Instead of focusing on Inbox Zero, it makes it easy to manage a full inbox — so much so, you might not want to archive emails anymore. You’ll instead be able to see every conversation in chronological order, with easy-to-identify avatars that make it easy to know who emailed. It’s got in-line quick reply just like Sparrow, and a clean interface that’s even simpler than Sparrows. And yet it makes sense.

We loved Unibox while it was in beta, and now that it’s just been released on the App Store for $9.99, it’s time for you to try it out. It’s easily the simplest and most unique email app on the Mac right now. For all the talk of replacing email, Unibox shows that the core email experience can be reinvented and made to feel much more like a modern chat app without ditching email itself.

Airmail 1.2

The first new Mac email app to make an appearance this year, Airmail’s beta was initially promising but then didn’t hold up as great in its first release. Don’t let that first impression stick with you, though — the Airmail team has kept at it and continued to hone Airmail into a great email app. Every complaint I had about the initial version is gone, and there’s more new features to boot. The latest version includes support for Mavericks’ interactive notifications, just like Mail.app, and also throws in full-app keyboard navigation and a ton of bug fixes. It really works great now, and is a refreshing new mail app that’s new yet still works the way you’d expect an email app to work.

If you want a simplified email experience that’s customizable to work and look just like you want, Airmail is a great option. The options can be a bit overwhelming, but with a tiny bit of effort you can make it more minimal than Sparrow or as full-featured and options-packed as you want. It’s just $1.99 on the App Store, so there’s really not to try it.

Coming Soon: Mail Pilot

If you’ve always thought of your email inbox as a todo list of messages to clear out and things to get done, and you happen to be a fan of minimalist interfaces, get ready to love Mail Pilot. It turns your email inbox into a real todo list of sorts, where you “complete” your emails, can set reminders for the emails you need to check on again at a certain time, and can organize messages in your inbox the way you want. Most interestingly, you can push an email from your Mac to your iPhone or vise versa to clean out your inbox and still have the info you need on the device you need it. It looks very, very cool.

With a promised public beta very soon, Mail Pilot is the app that’s tantalizing us this time. We may never see .Mail in action, but Mail Pilot is actually coming — and that’s exciting.

And more.

Email’s too big of a market to ignore — we all have to use it, after all, and Sparrow’s lack of continued updates has left a hole in the market. There’s still Microsoft’s Outlook for business types, and the Thunderbird spinoff Postbox, and with this roaster of brand-new email apps, there’s surely something for everyone.

Our own James Cull argued that the future of email might not look so different than it does today, but the little tweaks and changes to our workflows that each new app brings makes the age-old online communications tool a bit more palatable to keep using. And we’ll still hope against hope for something really different that changes the way we all think about email.

Then again, sometimes it’s the little things that really matter the most.

iWork is Apple’s answer to Microsoft Office, and its pro apps directly compete with Adobe’s Lightroom, Premiere Pro, and Audition. But when it comes to Photoshop, the alternate even Apple itself shows off these days is Pixelmator.

Just over 6 years after the first version of Pixelmator was released, the 3rd version of Pixelmator is here with a slightly new name: Pixelmator 3 FX. This new version brings the long-awaited layer styles along with new liquify effects and a brand new, faster-than-ever editing engine.

First up: the new non-destructive layer styles. The one feature I personally was missing the most from Pixelmator versus Photoshop, layer styles make it easy to add shadows, gradients, strokes, and more to your layers. It’s not something you’ll want to go overboard with, but it’s a great way to stylize text and more without having to do any tricky photoshopping techniques to get everything to look like you want. Combine that with Pixelmator’s great shape and text tools, and you’ve got a simple way to trick out any design.

Then, there’s the liquify tools, which make retouching pictures simpler than ever. You can use the bump tool to increase anything in size, or the pinch tool to shrink — tools you can put to use to make details pop, or to tweak photos to the way every they are on every magazine cover. The warp and twirl tools give you even more fun ways to experiment with your photos. Throw in the power Pixelmator already had, including a healing tool that can remove objects from photos automagically, and the clone stamp tool, and you’ve got all the photo touchup tools you could want.

One complaint against Pixelmator for quite some time was that it’d always save files in the Pixelmator format unless you went through its export options. That’s gone now, too, and you can select the format you want right from the save options, or tweak a .jpg picture and just hit CMD+S to save it back to is original format. It’s simple and easy.

Best of all, Pixelmator is faster than ever with a new image editing engine that’s powered by the best of OS X Mavericks. It’s up to twice as fast at most edits, and Apple even showcased it on the new Mac Pro Performance page instead of Photoshop, a first for the company. Pixelmator has always been one of the first apps to adopt new OS X features, and it’s a leading example of the power of the built-in image editing libraries and more in OS X.

For anyone trying to avoid Adobe apps, it’s easier than ever on the Mac. There’s alternates to everything in Creative Cloud on the Mac, and the alternate apps keep getting better. The Pixelmator team has done an incredibly impressive job of making a best-in-class image editing app for the Mac, one they keep making better with free updates. They’ve filled our main complaint in Pixelmator versus Acorn, its closest Mac competitor, so the fight’s closer than ever.

If you don’t have a copy yet, it’s time to download the trial and consider getting your own copy. It’s that good, and at $29.99 one-time compared to Photoshop’s $19.99 per month, it’s quite the steal.

For many, entry-level food service preparation is not a life-long dream. Yet those lusting after powering five-star, Michelin-grade dining experiences need to start from somewhere, even if that’s just a one-man operation making salads and corn dogs in the middle of a city.

Cook, Serve, Delicious! is a fun restaurant simulator that takes you through the process of running a small operating on a floor of an inner-city skyscraper and developing it into a full-on five-star experience. Through Steam, the game is available as a result of the community-based Greenlight program and today we’re going to check whether it’s worth your time.

Starting from Scratch

When you first begin a game of Cook, Serve, Delicious, you won’t have access to much. You begin with a measly budget of $7500 and must use this to put together your opening menu and buy any basic equipment. Not everything’s available to you — more complex and “speciality” products require a certain star level — which offers a welcome chance to set goals for yourself if you want to make that delectable one-star cafe that only serves only chicken and coffee later on.

Foods can be upgraded post-purchase, increasing the sale price and adding to the number of variants you can offer your customers. However, more choices means more complexity, resulting in a steady increase of challenge as the game progresses.

Every run of Cook, Serve, Delicious! starts off in a run-down greasy spoon.

When you’re running a restaurant by yourself, food isn’t the only concern. Throughout the day, a number of work tickets will appear requiring you to take time out to clean dishes, flush the toilet and perform other menial tasks. There’s eventually chances to augment the upkeep of your restaurant with equipment like dishwashers, but it’s important to dedicate the appropriate time to maintenance early on to avoid any negative repercussions.

A Kitchen Like No Other

When the day has started and your restaurant is open, customers will steadily flow in and order one of the items on your current menu. These orders can, and will, stack on the left of your screen and will slowly count down until the customer angrily leaves when they’re not attended to. It’s painful to watch an order of fries slowly fade away when you’re hectically trying to put together three of the most complex pizza orders you’ve ever received.

Actually preparing the food is the main mechanic of the game and it’s fun, frustrating and hectic all at once. Most menu items have a combination of some basic preparation stages — such as holding the fries in a fryer until they’re cooked, or releasing the cork on a bottle of wine — and a variety of optional ingredients — for example, the toppings on a pizza or contents of a soup — which each have a specific key binding. To perform a stage of preparation or add an ingredient to the mix, you simply need to press the relevant key. This controls system is the best for this type of game and, albeit after a steep learning curve, lets you efficiently process orders without much thought. You can also customise key bindings to your own preferences, which is a plus.

Food and drink are prepared with a set of options bound to keys, although clicking them is an alternative.

Once you’ve got the hang on which keys to hit, processing orders is a straightforward process and really rather fun. However, hit one wrong key and you’ve messed up the entire order, which is frustrating when you’re on a streak of perfect orders. An option to discard the food and start again would be welcome here, even if it was balanced by a financial hit for doing so.

Preparing food is the main attraction of the game, but it doesn’t feel like a grind in the way games like Papers, Please do. Every order is different, so the game doesn’t bore you with a streak of ten customers all ordering a certain style of pizza or a tankard of beer. Certain menus will also create negative buzz if they’re left on the menu for too long and the constant need to be swapping around the products you offer makes every couple of days different enough to not let gameplay get stale.

Sketchbook Cooking

Cook, Serve, Delicious! has a charming style that foregoes the pixel-themed or hyperrealistic aesthetics many similar games opt for. The game is really beautiful and the level of detail put into every aspect of the visual design is pleasing. While developers Vertigo Gaming could have still made a game with nothing more than text descriptions, hitting the B key and seeing your product made up with a layer of bacon creates a welcome degree of immersion.

Food preparation isn’t the only job. Work tickets appear throughout the day to ensure the upkeep of your restaurant.

Personally, Cook, Serve, Delicious! is one of those games I play while listening to music or watching a video since it’s far from dialogue-heavy. However, if you do opt to play with the sound on, Cook, Serve, Delicious has a fairly nice soundtrack, although the hours you put into the game when it becomes an addiction will probably lead to getting bored of it pretty quickly.

Final Thoughts

Cook, Serve, Delicious! is super fun, super addictive and super beautiful. It’s got a “one more day” addictiveness that’s difficult to pass up on and the randomness of orders ensures every day is different. There’s a few areas that I’d welcome improvement or development in but that doesn’t detract from the fact that Cook, Serve, Delicious! is a fantastic game and an absolute steal at $9.99.

The Realmac team's LittleSnapper was the Mac screenshot tool of choice for anyone who wanted to save more than just individual image images to Finder. LittleSnapper turned made it simple to keep a library of everything you've ever snapped, and then annotate and tweak the shots all from one app. And then they decided to start over and make a new app: Ember.

Ember was designed from the ground up to be the best way to organize all of your design inspirations — not just for geeks managing screenshots of apps, even though it's still awesome for that as well. Essentially, you throw all the pictures you want — screenshots, sure, but also photos of architecture or crafts or web design mockups — into your library to easily find them later. Throw in tags and descriptions, and you've got a whole new way to manage those images that otherwise would get lost in Finder.

And now, with the Mavericks-focused v1.2 upgrade, Ember is smart enough to help you find just what you want from your library, and keeps your image assets backed up in iCloud.

Your Mac Recognizes Colour

Most screenshot tools are simply designed to help you snap part of your screen, and perhaps add some annotations and tweaks before sharing it with the world. But a screenshot tool is decidedly geeky, and the Realmac team saw more potential for Ember than just that. So it made it into a library that’s perfect for organizing any images you want, be it vacation photos or food shots or design inspiration or screenshots. And now, with a Mavericks-only addition, Ember can recognize the main color in your images and help you search for shots by their color along with any other metadata you’ve added to the photos.

It’s insanely easy to use. Just install the update, then try searching through your library for a color (dark blue, say). Voila — you’ll see all the pictures in your library that are dominated by that color. It works really good by default, and you can tweak it to either search more narrowly or more broadly for color, depending on your tastes. Then, you can make new smart folders that’ll automatically show images with certain colors, giving you a great way to sort all the new white iOS 7 or old black iOS 6 app screenshots out of your library (among other uses).

Along with that, v.1.1 added a new Smart Drawing tool to Ember that makes it easy to markup your images. Draw a straight line, and it’ll turn into an arrow; draw a circle, and it’ll turn into a far more perfect circle than you could ever hope to freehand draw on a touchpad. It’s a great addition that makes it simple to annotate screenshots and more in Ember.

If you want to tweak your shots more, though, you can set your favorite image and code editor in Ember to one-click send anything in your library to your favorite editor for extra editing. Throw in the fact that it can capture full-length webpages with its built-in browser or the Ember browser shortcuts — including a screenshot and the actual source code of the site — and timed screenshots, and it’s one of the best screenshot tools for the Mac right now. It just needs a blur option to knock out sensitive data, and perhaps a resize option when exporting images, and it’d be perfect.

iCloud for Everyone

It might be surprising to know that Ember didn’t already support iCloud sync, since so many apps already support it we’ve come to expect it. That’s not a concern now, since Ember 1.2 lets you move your library to iCloud — or, you can keep it local on your Mac if you want, your choice. There’s also a brand-new iCloud based sharing option in Ember that lets you upload a shot to iCloud and share it from there for 2 weeks, no matter where your library is stored. It’s a great way to quickly share shots without having to rely on CloudApp or Droplr. The only problem with it is that your recipient will be greater by a happy iCloud shot and will have to wait to download your image to see it, instead of getting a quick preview of the shot online.

Conclusion

In our original review of Ember, writer Toby Seers concluded that Ember was a great image library and expected that the Realmac team would continue to make it even better. And that’s exactly what they’ve done. iCloud support is perhaps a foregone assumption these days, since so many apps support it. But, the new iCloud-powered sharing is very nice, and something that few other apps have right now (Napkin is the only other app I can think of right off with a similar option). The new color search and smart folders, though, are what really stands out, and together they help to make Ember the smartest screenshot and design inspiration tool.

If you only take screenshots every now and then, you’ll want to stick with the built-in screenshot options in OS X. And if you rarely save images of design inspiration and such, stick with Finder and iPhoto. But if you want a serious tool to help you get the most out of your design images and screenshots — and especially if you snap websites often — you should definitely give Ember a try. It’s the same price as Snagit, and yet is a brand new way of working with all types of graphical inspiration with so many ways to put it to use. It’s got a free 14 day trial, so you can see if it fits your needs before shelling out cash for it. I happen to bet you’ll get hooked.

Logic and MainStage just got sizable updates back in July, bringing them to version 10 and 3 respectively. Now it’s time for GarageBand, Apple’s free DAW (digital audio workstation), to get an overhaul. At the Apple event this month, the company gave its iLife suite a facelift, with the exception of iPhoto. iMovie and GarageBand now resemble their iOS counterparts, and GarageBand X (it’s version 10) has been modeled after Logic Pro X.

GarageBand X is sporting lots of new features, from Drummer to iCloud sync. We just hope it hasn’t lost anything special.

Design, Hailing from 2010

Hints of wood hardly give us confidence that the UI has changed.

Apple’s professional software is taking a new turn in design. First, Final Cut Pro X released with a much darker, more pretentious user interface. It was perfect for the $300 software. Then, a few months later, Logic Pro and MainStage also got the dark treatment, MainStage’s being slightly less drastic. Soon, Aperture and iPhoto will join the rest of Apple’s amateur and professional creative software. For now, though, GarageBand and iMovie are the latest ones to get a beautiful redesign.

Strangely, Apple is still using wood on the edges of GarageBand. This will probably be removed when OS XI releases with an iOS 7-esque slant, but things are staying with the physical resemblance for now. It looks nice, too. GarageBand’s user interface is better on the eyes than the previous version. The darkness makes for a more professional look than before, but the wood immediately implies that this software is actually much less valuable than Logic Pro. That’s probably why Apple left it in there.

It’s strange that it’s 2013 and we’re still seeing this much chrome (both literally and figuratively) in GarageBand. It definitely doesn’t flow with the rest of Mavericks, and that’s disappointing. To quickly move between Calendar or Contacts and this app is fine, provided you expect a more 3D appearance of half-polished wood and shiny knobs. Alas, this aesthetic is no longer in fashion. It’s time for Apple’s iLife designers to move on. There is no “best of both worlds” here.

The New Presets and Graphic EQ are Fantastic

You’ve probably grown tired of GarageBand’s default patch library. It’s understandable: they haven’t added to it in a few years. No longer must you pay for additional samples and loops (previously known as Jam Packs). All but additional Drummers are included for free. Even these cost a mere $4.99 as a one-time in-app purchase.

Finally, truly productive graphic EQ.

From synths to electric pianos to drum machines, nearly everything has been re-imagined. You can get creative and tweak things just as before, or you can use one of the many presets available. Graphic EQ is finally modeled after Logic’s, supporting multiple bands and width adjustment. The Analyzer shows you what the instrument or vocal is doing before you equalize it so you can tame hurtful notes.

Unfortunately, GarageBand X is missing some key features from the previous version. You can no longer add plugins to a track. Worse, custom Audio Units aren’t supported. These are definitely more professional features, but to completely remove them from the app is a bad move. A lot of people used plugins to modify the reverb on individual channels. Likewise, third-party AUs were used to create a custom experience within GarageBand. You could have powerful synths like Sylenth1 right in your free DAW. Those days or over.

Smart Controls make tweaking settings easier, but are very limited.

With the new Smart Controls panel, you can turn the reverb up and down, but not alter how it behaves. In the Effects pane, pianos only have a Delay, Ambiance, and Reverb knob. For new users, the Quick Help feature (the ? in the top left of the screen) doesn’t explain anything inside the Smart Controls panel.

Arpeggiator and Drummer

Finally, you don’t have to keep hitting one note manually and then quantize it later. Instead, use an arpeggiator to automate the process. Beware: adding and using an arpeggiator is not all that user-friendly. The function is hidden behind a small button on the top right corner of the Smart Controls screen. You’d expect it to have an icon not resembling MIDI notes, but for some reason Apple chose to make it confusing. Once you click the icon, a drop-down menu will appear. Using it you can adjust the note order, rate, octave range, and one of the preset patterns.

Hidden behind an unsuspecting icon is the new arpeggiator.

The arpeggiator as a whole is much less user-friendly than the MainStage or Logic Pro version. There’s no GUI, which is very surprising. You can’t see what a note is doing or switch on latching, nor can you make your own pattern. This is understandable, considering it is the free version of these professional tools, but it should be easier to start using. It almost seems as if Apple is trying to be mysterious, hiding the function behind a misleading icon and not even explaining what it is.

Quick Help assists you in identifying what this and that means, but it’s a shame Apple isn’t more straightforward about it. When you install GarageBand X, they give you a very brief tour of the new features, but they don’t show you how to use them. The help button does make things better, but mainly hides the underlying problem: this interface isn’t as user-friendly as it should be.

A generic sound for your tracks.

Moving on to Drummer, Apple’s headlining feature in this release. It’s designed to be a simple way of adding beats to your track. Rather than recording your own with a drum machine or prerecorded samples, Drummer adapts to your content. There are 15 drummers in GarageBand, and only one of them is free. The others must be acquired with the in-app purchase.

Overall, I found Drummer to work very well. It’s definitely nice to see a core feature of Logic Pro inside a free app. Having the ability to adjust the way your drummer plays — simple or complex, loud or soft — is the very essence of the feature. You can even adjust what percussion, cymbals, kick, and snare the drummer’s set has. You can switch them off too. All adjustments take place in realtime.

Each drummer has his own unique sound, but I didn’t find any of them nearly as talented as some amateurs I play with on the weekend. I didn’t expect them to be great, but they still left me disappointed. Drummer is a good step in the right direction, it’s just not there yet.

No Podcasts

One of the biggest complaints in App Store reviews is the lack of support for podcast creation. There is no longer a template for this type of project. Apple does offer Podcast Assistant, a separate tool for developing XML code for your podcast. That’s only part of the process, though, and GarageBand used to help you create a podcast. There will undoubtably be quite a few users who miss this feature. If you’re one of the, we suggest waiting until a third-party developer makes something even better.

No Longer Even Semi-Professional

It looks nice, but don’t let that fool you.

I started using GarageBand three years age before MainStage was separate from Logic Pro. It was my main DAW for playing live, and I made the most out of it. If I were to try doing that now, I’d immediately upgrade to Logic Pro. The lack of support for custom Audio Units and plugins is appalling. It makes the app unusable for anyone wanting to create unique music. Drummer only reaffirms this.

Seeing GarageBand become less of a DAW and more of a simple music creation tool is disheartening. It surely doesn’t promote indie artists and their unique voice. If you want to do anything truly creative (custom), it’s not possible with this new version of GarageBand. That’s the app’s purpose, so what’s left?

Among the many apps unveiled at Apple’s Fall special event were long-overdue new versions of the iWork apps for the Mac. We had to wait almost five years to see Keynote version bump from 5.0 (aka iWork ’09) to 6.0, which was almost as long as the wait between between 1.0 and 5.0. But it’s been worth the wait for the most part.

The brand new Keynote 6 brings a completely revamped UI and new features to Apple’s venerable presentation app. Let’s see how far Apple went in re-thinking the app that powers all of the company’s own presentations.

Streamlined, Mix and Match UI

Apple, with a touch of their famed reality distortion field, describes Keynote’s new user interface as “stunning”. I’d rather say its streamlined. What strikes you most in Keynote 6 is its extreme simplification. There’s no doubt that there were “a thousand no’s for every yes” when they re-thought the UI.

There is now a unique toolbar at the top of the window, one you cannot edit as you could the previous version’s toolbar. It only includes 14 buttons —  almost a third of what was in previous versions — without a single superfluous one.

The new UI in Keynote 6.0 is a lot less cluttered…

…than in the previous version (5.0 is shown here).

Gone is the Inspector palette. In its place, there’s a new right sidebar that appears when when you click one of the three right-most buttons in the top toolbar. The Format Panel, the default right sidebar you’ll be using most often is context-aware, which is awesome. Click on a Text Box and you get access to font sizes, styles, alignment and so on; click on an image and you can control borders, shadows, opacity and other image-related settings. It’s similar in a way to the Office ribbon, and yet smarter — plus, it fits a lot better on wide screens by pushing the tools from the toolbar to the sidebar.

The Format Panel on the right automatically updates based on selection, showing here text-related options…

… and here image-related options.

An example among the numerous popups featured in the new UI.

Another striking difference is that popups are now all over the place, from the toolbar buttons to the extra formatting options in the right sidebar. They’re the first obvious bit of iOS 7 style in OS X, and yet they look perfectly at home on the Mac today.

The UI also features some nice animations touches:

• Adding new slides make them literally jump out from the popup to the main window.
• The Format Panel slides (no pun intended) in and out, and the canvas automatically resizes to fill the remaining window space.

There’s been, and still is, a lot of speculation about what interfaces might look like in upcoming OS X versions in context with the all-flat, minimalistic iOS 7 design. The first touch of that is the new sidebars and popovers in the iWork apps, which in many ways seem to point to the future of Apple’s design. I wouldn’t say that the new iWork UI is flatter, per se, but it definitely is less cluttered, more concise, much akin to what you get with iTunes 11 and iBooks. I’d love this trend to extend to the OS X user interface in general.

A Share button (left) that will look familiar to any iOS 7 user.

That’s not to say there aren’t some inconsistent design choices. The UI still looks like it’s in a transitional state, where forward-thinking elements sit next to almost dated ones. The Share button, for instance, is largely inspired by the new up-arrow-coming-from-a-box button as seen everywhere in iOS 7.

Why transparent, Apple?

On the other hand, the View and Zoom buttons produces old-style dropdown lists that seem a bit dated and weird, especially because these are the only semi-transparent elements in the UI.

Also, there is a somewhat ugly glitch that appears on every “modern-style” popup attached to the top toolbar buttons: the left, triangular button that lets you browse through the contents of the popup appears as if it was permanently selected. This leaves a kind of a bitter, beta-feeling aftertaste. Hopefully this will be fixed in a forthcoming update.

Easier to Use, With Shiny New Features

The new Keynote comes with a brand new selection of themes. However, in lieu of the multiple slide sizes that were tailored to all screen resolutions, the interface is now simplified and you just choose between Standard or Wide versions. Here again, simplification is key.

The theme chooser features 30 gorgeous new and updated themes available in Standard (4:3) or Wide (16:9) formats.

Basically, creating and filling up slides remain the same: you get several templates with placeholders where you just need to click to type text and drag and drop images to replace the default ones.

Adding new slides is done with the only UI element that is located at the bottom of the window: the plus button on the far left. Clicking on the big + button reveals another popup with mini previews for each possible slide layout available, much like what you’d expect from previous versions of Keynote.

Getting an idea of the slide you’re going to add is easy with the new Add a Slide popup.

Inserting tables is easier than ever, thanks to a large choice of elegant style presets that match your theme perfectly. And yes, change your slide theme, and you’ll immediately find different tables styles. It’s a simplified way of making everything look great without you having to do the heavy lifting.

This bare bones table style is specific to this theme. Notice that other available choices (in the Format Panel on the right) have colors that perfectly match the current theme.

Modifying the table layout is also a vastly enhanced experience, as you don’t have to drill down into obscure panels to find buttons. Basic actions are done directly on the canvas, thanks to drop down lists and increment buttons that appear with just a click when hovering over table elements. It’s similar to the way tables work in the new Numbers, without the logic behind the cells.

Basic actions are done in a snap, with settings direcly accessible on the content.

Adding charts and editing their data is easy as always and the UI is, again, more elegant than with previous versions.

You can easily format charts and edit their data with elegant UI and well-thought elements.

A shiny new addition is the ability to insert interactive charts. These allow you to display different data sets — say, evolution over time — within the same chart. In creation mode, these interactive charts come up with a slider so you can choose how things will look like for each set of values. While presenting, they will simply be automatically showed one after another with a smooth animation in between.

An interactive chart in action. Move the slider at the bottom to jump to a different set of values.

You also get new and updated cinematic transitions, “Magic Moves” and animations, that I’ll let you discover by yourself. The best new animations let you individually animate elements on your slide when transitioning to a new slide, which works very nice if you use the same background throughout your presentations. What is really nice is that, instead of the tiny preview you got in Inspector with previous versions, you can now have a live on-canvas preview of effects before deciding to apply them, just like you had in Keynote for iPad.

You now get live previews of animation directly on the canvas. Here is the new Clothesline effect.

There’s more changes, too, in the tiny details in Keynote. Among other welcome additions, you’ll notice that text now automatically resizes (most notibly, the font size automatically decreases) to fit text boxes. Almost everything has been re-thought so that you just have to focus on your content and message and how to make it pop, and not on how to achieve all of this by trying to find items hidden in menus or toolbars. And if you’re still a bit lost, you can easily show “Coach tips” with a click of the yellow question mark button in the toolbar.

Collaboration Made Easy, but Flawed on the Web

You can add still comments on your slides. But instead of the Sticky Notes style of Keynote ’09, comments now look a bit like a mini version of what’s offered in the new Notes app UI of Mavericks.

The comments looks more modern now. But they can’t be seen in your web browser.

Accessing and sharing presentations has been made easy with iCloud integration. Unfortunately, iWork’s iCloud web apps are still in beta in your web browser and offer a limited feature set for now. For instance, editing charts and tables is currently impossible. Comments added on the Mac are not visible on the web, which is a major drawback for efficient collaboration. Also, while edits done on your Mac are almost instantly reflected on iCloud.com (the browser notifies you of some modifications and offers to reload the page to display them), it does not seem to work flawlessly the other way round. Instead, I had to close and re-open my presentation in Keynote on the Mac to see changes made on the web.

A Much Welcome Update

Waiting for new iWork versions has almost been as long as waiting for the winter to end in Westeros. But it’s been worth it, especially for Keynote. The new Keynote is easier on the eyes and easier to use — at least for beginners, as expert users might at first be a little surprised by the complete overhaul. The app features more than just a fresh coat of paint (not without glitches and inconsistency, though) and adds some nice, attractive new features. However, collaboration is flawless only if people you invited also use the OS X version, not the web app.

Let’s hope future updates to both the OS X and web apps will convert this great software into an almost perfect one. Anyway, since updating is now free (but requires you to run OS X Mavericks), you risk nothing making the jump, especially since the install won’t delete your old iWork ’09 folder. And, if you buy a new Mac, iWork comes free along with the long-included iLife apps.

Whether you love or hate the new Keynote, we’d love to hear your thoughts about the new app in the comments below.