Category: Mac

Many of us have dreams of visiting foreign places and speaking with those of other nationalities and languages. This is a far off goal for many people, especially those who do not have the funds to pay for college classes or time to spend abroad immersing themselves in the language and culture. As a result of these circumstances, many have resorted to computer programs to learn the language of their choosing. The problem is that many of these programs did not work on the Mac and if they did, they were poorly designed and were, quite frankly, an embarrassment. Fluenz saw this as a problem and created a program it hoped would solve it.

Fluenz Latin America Levels 1-5 is a revolutionary computer program that was expertly designed to work on our beloved Macs and also happens to teach Spanish as it is spoken throughout many Latin American countries. The Fluenz team decided to send me a review copy of its Latin America program for Mac for me to try. I have taken the last thirty days and used the program for this review. Lets get right to it and see what I thought!

Getting Started

Although this review is for the Latin American Spanish version, Fluenz comes in an array of different languages. You can demo the Fluenz program in your desired language on their website. Once you are ready to order, you can purchase Fluenz based on levels or level combinations. If you want all 5 levels, you can purchase it right now for $498 and it comes with a 100% money back guarantee. The price of Fluenz is comparable to other popular language learning programs.

After purchase, set up is easy! Just use the serial number provided to activate and install the program. The program is about 4gb a level and can either be run directly off the DVD or installed onto your Mac and run off your hard drive. For speed and efficiency, the preferred method would be to install Fluenz directly to your hard drive.

The Program

What separates Fluenz from its competitors is its method of teaching. Many programs use pictures and allow the users to click pictures with words in Spanish under them. The problem with this, of course, is the lack of explanation of the Spanish words. Fluenz strays away from that flawed concept. Fluenz Latin America uses a personal course guide, Sonia Gil, to explain the language and its quirks to you. Instead of clicking, you feel like your own private tutor is teaching you. Each lesson starts with a personalized introduction and ends with a summary of everything learned in the lesson including any tips and tricks mentioned in the episode. The approach Fluenz uses will lend itself more to those who would like a more personalized approach to learning a new language.

Sonia Gil – Fluenz Spanish Personal Guide

The exercises are the strength of Fluenz and are the bulk of the program; I even think they are exactly what make the program so successful. These excercises allows the user to work on their grammar, spelling, writing, and conversation skills. Some of my personal favorites are match the words, write the phrase you read, and basic conversation.

Write The Phrase

Basic Conversation

Match the Words

The exercises are mixed up and contain words from the current lesson along with previous lessons. Along with the introduction and ending videos, performing all of the exercises may take close to an hour. I found the excersises fun and addictive!

My Experience

I, like many, have wanted to learn another language. Spanish was my desired language and it was the language I chose to take on in High School. However, after high school, I found that I still could not speak Spanish. So I began to look for another way to learn Spanish. I tried books, tapes, government programs, and other computer programs and I had no luck. Worst of all, most of the available computer programs were Windows only and had no Mac alternatives. That is when I found Fluenz. Fluenz works natively on the Mac and was the answer to my search.

After working with many programs and other methods, I was very skeptical that Fluenz would work. So I took the last month and used the program every single day to see if it worked in such a small window of time. If it did, then I knew it would work over the long run. Thirty days is not a long enough time to learn a language; learning a language is a long-term commitment because there is always material to learn, it is never over! During my experience for this review, I found I did not even complete level 1, and there are 5!

One of the things I liked most during my experience was how each lesson was linked to the next. What you learned in one lesson was used as the basis for what you are learning in the next lesson. This repetition is what I found really helped drill Spanish into my head. Another big help were the exercises. The exercises coincide with the lessons and use a variety of techniques to increase active memory. It helped with writing, spelling, and listening. Many other programs I have tried only dealt with either writing or speaking only, this meant I needed multiple programs to meet the requirements of writing, speaking, and reading Spanish.

Fluenz Exercise

Fluenz has a unique way of teaching; the instructor, Sonia, is actually there on video. She explains the sentences word by word and her explanations, along with the exercises, really reinforces the material inside your head. The instructor also tells you similar words that you would use in English to express these words in Spanish and also tells you whether it’s is a female or male word, and that’s very helpful. Sonia, the instructor, will also give you helpful hints to help you remember the words in Spanish, such as if they are similarly spelled or pronounced, these tips really helped me commit more Spanish words to memory.

Sonia Gil Teaching

At the conclusion of this month long review of Fluenz, I really found all new respect for the program. It really goes to the foundation and explains the art of speaking Spanish and uses a very friendly instructor to give me helpful tips and tricks on learning the language. Fluenz also uses exercises that are repetitive, friendly, and fun to do. Fluenz also reinforces material in previous lessons in the next lesson so you start to build a very meaningful foundation for the language you are learning. Fluenz focuses on Spanish that you would actually use in conversation with Latin American Spanish speakers and does not focus on the words that you do not need. This is very helpful and I picked up a lot of new words in just one month of using the program. Fluenz is really a precious gem in the midst of a bunch of useless, worthless rocks of other programs that help you learn foreign languages on your computer. For us Mac users, it very importantly works on the Mac!

Conclusion

I enjoyed the time I spent using Fluenz Latin America. I love the teaching concept and the inviting guide, Sonia Gil. Fluenz has Mac support and is filled with exercises that work on your grammar, writing, and reading skills. The lessons are broken up into manageable sections and the lesson videos include useful tips and helpful pronunciation designed to help English speakers. I would like to have seen resolution controls built into the app. Fluenz shows up very small on some displays and does not match the native resolution of your monitor. For this reason I rate Fluenz Latin America a 9 out of 10. Fluenz comes in a bevy of different languages and also has an online demo available at the Fluenz website.

What language would you like to learn? Have you tried Fluenz? What are your favorite Mac language learning applications? Chime in and let your voice be heard in our comments below!

iOS started off as OS X’s younger sibling, but it’s grown to dominate the world of technology more than OS X in many ways. Most new hit apps come out on iOS first, it seems, especially if they’re social networking or entertainment apps. Then, though, we’re seeing a return to the Mac, with Apple putting more iOS apps and features in OS X, and more developers bringing their iOS games and apps to the Mac. Some of the best productivity apps, such as Apple’s iWork and iLife apps, and the Omnigroup’s apps like OmniFocus, started out on the Mac, and have since then been recreated for iOS.

iCloud makes it much nicer having the same apps on iOS and OS X. When you use apps like iA Writer, iWork apps, and more, you’ll see your documents seamlessly pushed between your Mac and iPad or iPhone without having to do anything extra to sync. For apps that don’t have iCloud integration, such as OmniFocus and Things, most with OS X and iOS versions have their own sync system to keep your data up-to-date everywhere. That makes it that much nicer to use the same apps on both platforms.

That’s why we’re wondering: do you use the same apps on iOS and OS X? Do you feel bad having to pay for both copies? What’s your favorite app that runs on both platforms? We’d love to hear your thoughts in the comments below!

Screencasts have become a prime factor when showcasing new applications, creating tutorials, recording gameplay, and so much more. And, as new hardware comes out, these screen recording apps need to stay on top of their game. That includes taking full advantage of Apple’s new Macbook Pro with Retina display.

While there are many screen recording apps to choose from (including QuickTime, which comes preinstalled on OS X), today we will cover Screenflick 2. Screenflick 2 has been updated with a number of new features including support for Retina displays. All these features plus Screenflick’s ease of use make it a sweet addition to anyones toolset.

The Recording

All hands on deck.

When it comes to screen recording, you can rest assured that you will have one of the best and easiest experiences with Screenflick. Screenflick is a slimmed-down, easy-to-use app that gets you recording within five seconds of launching it. When you’re ready to record, all you need to do is tweak some settings, and then hit record. A huge countdown will start and once the time is up, start making some magic happen.

Before hitting that record button, though, the settings that you can change allow you to pick the recording location, capture rate (up to 60 FPS, which is great for recording video game gameplay), scaling, and system or microphone audio. These options are extremely easy to understand, so even if you have limited knowledge, you can jump right in.

The New Features

Yup, Retina display ready.

The simplicity of Screenflick is perhaps its biggest asset, but don’t let that fool you. You see, Screenflick is powerful, very powerful. The features it had prior to the update were great, but now with the new features, you get even more bang for your buck — and that is a lot of bang for just 30 bucks. So, lets check out some of the new features.

Live Scaling – Say you want to record every inch of your screen, but you don’t want the video to be at that resolution, you can record in full screen and once you’re done just export it at a lower resolution. Good feature if you don’t want to lower your computer’s resolution before recording — saves space and time as well.

Time-Lapse Movies – Time-lapse is exquisite. If you are an artist, photoshop master, or an illustrator guru, you can showcase your many hours of work in just a few minutes. This can be extremely useful for artist who want to show off their skills, or use their time-lapsed videos on their portfolio.

Some of the cool version one features.

Recording Preview, Screen Camera Mode, Pause & Resume, and Export Presets – These are some of the features that while new, they don’t offer an “oh that’s cool” factor. Take Pause & Resume for example. This feature should be in every screen recording application. Why would anyone get excited about a feature an app should of had back in version one. Export Presets suffers from the same illness, and so does Screen Camera Modes. The one feature that seems out of place is Recording Preview. While, yes, it offers a preview of how your keyboard and mouse options will look like, it really just sits there teasing you about the fact that you can’t trim down the video or edit it in any way.

Mountain Lion and Retina Display Support – Perhaps one of the biggest features for this app going forward is the Retina display support. The app is also integrated with Notification Center, albeit not a very hot feature, but it is nice to see some support for Notification Center.

The Verdict

Click here to see gameplay in 720p.

Whether or not you get Screenflick 2 is gonna depend heavily on how you want your workflow to be. If you want a one-stop screen capture app with all the bells and whistles, this app is probably not for you since it lacks the ability to edit your videos (as well as a few other features). But, Screenflick 2 is a sublime experience that gives you a great end result. If you already have a tool to edit movies with (like, say, Quicktime…), you probably won’t mind the lack of an editor within Screenflick. It is a tough one no doubt, but as whole, Screenflick 2 does give you a bang for your buck.

As always, leave your comments below, and let us know what is your favorite screen capture application — perhaps it’s that one app you already have installed called Quicktime, or maybe it’s a free web app? Let us know and keep and eye out to see more apps getting updated with Retina display and Mountain Lion support.

Some say this day would never arrive, some even called it abandon-ware, but Things 2 is finally here. Cultured Code, the developers behind Things for Mac, iPhone and iPad released an updated version of their suite of productivity apps today. Also arriving with the set of updates is Things Cloud – Cultured Code’s sync service that keeps your copies of Things updated on all of your devices.

Let’s take a look at Things 2 for Mac as well as Things Cloud and explore what’s new since we first covered this task manager back in 2009 and what might tempt you to make the jump from another task manager.

First and Foremost, Things Cloud

This update has been nearly two years in the making and shows it with the level of polish and speed at which their new sync engine works. If you’ll remember, when Things launched on the iPhone and Mac you needed a Wifi network that supported Bonjour to sync. It was limited to local network syncing and required both apps to be open to initiate a sync. In late 2010, Cultured Code announced in a blog post that they were working on a new cloud based syncing solution. Unfortunately, it was a far way out. Cultured Code didn’t start open beta trials of its syncing solution until May of 2011. On top of the long wait, they announced that it would only be available for Mac-to-Mac syncing first.

The poster Cultured Code made when they announced their Over-The-Air syncing solution.

In August of 2011 Cultured Code announced the limited availability of cloud syncing with iOS devices. Through a hidden feature launched with a pervious version of Things, you were able to shake your phone on the settings screen to activate the beta features. In February of 2012 they announced the open public beta of their cloud syncing solution, meaning that anyone could try out the new Things Cloud service, even if they weren’t the first few to sign up for the beta when it was announced in May of the previous year.

I began testing the beta of Things Cloud back in early August 2011 on my iOS and Mac devices and found it to be incredibly stable and miraculously fast compared to other Over-The-Air syncing solutions out there.

The Things Cloud preference pane

Setting up Things Cloud can now be done from the preferences screen of any of their apps and requires just an email address and password. Things Cloud is a completely free service.  One of the best features of Things Cloud is how invisible it is: instead of having to press a sync button, Things will automatically sync every time you make a change to any to-do, create or edit a project, Area of Responsibility, or reorganize your tasks. The only way you’ll have any idea that Things Cloud is working is a small cloud icon that appears next to the Full Screen button in the title bar.

Once you have Things Cloud set up, you can just forget about it and know that your tasks are backed up and synchronized with every change.

Daily Review

In Things, you can easily organize what you need to get done by the end of the day in the Today list. Items used to get moved into Today automatically when they become due as well as well as when they are scheduled for today. In a slight departure, Things 2 separates these tasks, placing them into a “Daily Review” list. That way, you can easily mark the tasks that you actually need to to today and which you can delay until later.

The Things Daily Review card

I found the Daily Review list to be an integral part of using Things. Every morning all of the tasks that I have either postponed until today or are actually due today appear in the Daily Review. I can easily reschedule tasks that I don’t have time for as well as mark the important ones for completion today.

Reminders Integration

Adding tasks via Siri is one of the coolest features of Apple’s built-in Reminders app. Things 2 now has Reminders.app integration. In Things’s preferences, you can have the app monitor tasks that are on a specific list and load them into Things’s inbox. This way you can enter tasks via Siri and have them show up in your Things suite. You can also have Things export your Today list to another Reminders.app list if you so choose.

The Reminders.app sync panel in Things’s preferences.

Other New Features

There are a few other features that are important to note in this 2.0 release. Full screen mode is now enabled and the app is Retina-ready for those with the new MacBook Pro. Things is also now sold exclusively through the Mac App Store, with a trial still available via their website.

Things in fullscreen mode

Wrap Up

The app hasn’t changed a great deal, in terms of user interface design and I for one am really glad about that. The app remains one of the most beautiful ways to manage your tasks on your Mac, iPhone and iPad. Now powered with a brand new cloud backend, you’ll never be out of sync. Daily Review provides another great way to quickly power through your scheduled and due tasks and the Siri integration works quite well.

I would highly encourage you to check out Things for all of your devices. Let us know what you think in the comments!

This post is part of a series that revisits some of our readers’ favorite articles from the past that still contain awesome and relevant information that you might find useful. This post was originally published on April 20th, 2011.

Do note: this video screencast is only in Flash, so you won’t be able to view it on your iOS device. Sorry!

Bundled with every new Mac is the iLife suite of apps. iLife promises an exciting and fulfilling digital experience, one that integrates your Mac into your day-to-day life. But having the program is only half the battle – the hardest part is knowing how to use it!

Today’s screencast overview will walk you through using iMovie for the first time, how to create your first project, and how to import in your video. Let’s get started!

Watch the Screencast

While there’s no shortage of image editing applications for the Mac, it’s safe to say that Pixelmator is one of the top contenders when it comes to more ambitious tasks. It might be too much to say that Pixelmator is a full replacement for Photoshop, but it does offer a wide variety of features which will satisfy the needs of many.

Today, Pixelmator received an update, bumping it to version 2.1, codenamed Cherry. And if you haven’t picked up a copy yet, now’s a good time to try it out, as it’s on a summer sale for only $14.99. After the break, we’ll take a look at the changes and how they’ll affect your workflow.

Take a close look: Retina-Ready

For all those Retina MacBook users, it’s finally time to enjoy working with Pixelmator again. While complaints about apps not being ready and ugly to look at surfaced pretty much immediately after the rMBP was shipped, the team behind Pixelmator went to work and updated the entire user interface to meet the new demands.

All user interface elements have been upgraded for the Retina display – here’s a comparison of the normal sized icons and the Retina ready ones

As you can see, all buttons and interface elements have been upgraded; of course that in turn means that the size of the application has increased as well, but not significantly (from 59.1MB to 68.6MB). I’m not on a Retina Mac, so I couldn’t take full advantage of preview version I had for testing, but I think the differences in the icons as shown above clearly indicates that Retina users will have a lot more fun now.

Work everywhere: iCloud Support

If you work on different Macs, iCloud support will make your life a lot easier. Instead of having to remember to save your stuff to some accessible place – Dropbox, for example – Pixelmator will automatically offer you the option to save your work to iCloud.

Consider, though, that iCloud storage is not unlimited. Every user gets 5GB of storage for free, and previous MobileMe owners get 25GB, but those will be downgraded after one year to the standard 5GB. While it takes quite some documents to fill up this much space (your purchased music, TV shows, apps, books and photo stream images don’t count against free storage), edited images can grow large sursprisingly fast. And with all those other apps offering iCloud sync as well, you might want to keep an eye on what you store there. If money doesn’t matter, you can upgrade iCloud with additional storage with up to 50GB for $100/year.

So, iCloud’s support is nice, but it might not be the most important addition for most of us.

Effects Browser (Formerly: Filters)

While Pixelmator is a lot easier to use than Photoshop (and a lot cheaper, too), it still requires some getting used to. Especially novices to the entire image editing process will have difficulties finding their way.

To make it easier to touch up photos without having to know exactly what you’re doing – thereby aiming much more for the consumer segment – Pixelmator removed its Filter menu and instead implemented the Effects Browser.

Quickly apply effects by dragging them from the Effects Browser onto the image

So, instead of having to know (or guess) what Motion Blur, Linear Bump, Pointilize and all those other complicated words mean, now you can actually see the effect on a tiny thumbnail. Moving your cursor horizontally across a thumbnail will show you the progression of the effect’s strength.

In a way, its very convenient to have the Effects Browser, which can either show all effects at once or only certain categories, depending on your selection. Beginners especially will find this of great value – not having to blindly apply effects to simply find out what they do.

Oh, and you can add effects to a Favorites category. Often used effects will end up there anyway, but by right-clicking a thumbnail in the Effects Browser you can add anything there manually.

Vintage, Miniaturize, Black & White, Rain & Snow

Apart from bringing us the Effects Browser, Pixelmator also created five completely new effects for Cherry. As with all other effects, simply dragging an effect onto an image applies the changes. Before those are final, you can adjust the effect strength or dismiss it, if you don’t like it after all.

The new vintage effect offers many adjustments

Professionals rejoice: Alignment Guides

This new feature will be a benefit to all users, but especially to those with some advanced tasks ahead of them. If you use Adobe InDsign (well, Pages has it too), you will value the alignment guides, which will indicate the relative position of an object to another.

Alignment Guides take the guesswork out of positioning objects

That means, if you drag an object around, at some point these lines will appear if the dragged object lines up with the edges or center of the other object. While some might wonder what that is good for, designers will appreciate the help. Instead of having to manually set up guides to align objects, Pixelmator now helps on its own. Definitely one of the best features in this update.

Mountain Lion – Sharing and other goodies

While the update speaks of “enhancements to take advantage of the latest OS X Mountain Lion technologies”, it becomes most apparent with the new sharing features in Apple’s OS. Instead of having to save a file before you can share it, you can now send or share it within Pixelmator itself.

Thanks to Mountain Lion you can now share your work from right within Pixelmator

Verdict

The team behind Pixelmator did a really great job on this update – Retina users will rejoice about not having to stare at pixels anymore, beginners will finally understand filters and advanced users will see a significant speed increase in their workflow thanks to Aligment Guides.

I didn’t experience any issues with Pixelmator Cherry (mind you, I only got to test it for a few hours), but the update seems stable and considering all the new goodies, you should hit that Update button soon.

If you’re needing a way to edit and OCR PDFs, run Windows apps on your Mac, make invoices, create logos, design beautiful slideshows, and more, you’ll be excited to hear about today’s giveaway! No, we don’t have a new super-app we’re featuring. Instead, we’ve got 5 copies of the Macbundler bundle to giveaway!

The Macbundler bundle is one of the most exciting bundles we’ve seen in a while, with 8 apps for $39. It’s got several very nice apps, too, that you might have already had your eye on, including PDF Editor Pro, an app that normally costs $99 and lets you edit and OCR PDFs. It also includes CrossOver XI, a Wine-powered Windows emulator that lets you run many Windows app directly on your Mac, as well as Invoice 3, a nice invoicing app.

It’s a great deal, but best of all, 5 of our winners will get the entire bundle for free!

Quite a shelf of apps!

Tweet to Enter

If you’d love to win a free copy the Macbundler bundle, it’s easy to get your entry submitted. All you have to do is click the link below and send out the resulting tweet (or just copy and paste), then leave a comment below with a link to your tweet and the app you’re most excited about in the bundle. That’s it! We’ll then randomly pick 5 winners of the bundle when we close the contest.

We’ll announce the winners next week on August 15th, so hurry and get your entry in today! And if you want a chance to win an even bigger prize, head over to the Macbundler site, where they’re giving away 2 retina display MacBook Pros as well!

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

If you’ve used a Mac for any amount of time, you’ve surely heard of the Omni Group‘s popular Mac apps. OmniFocus, easily their most well known app, is the leading task management app for Mac users that want to keep up with everything about their tasks and get things done. Their other apps, including OmniOutliner for outlines, OmniPlan for project management, and OmniGraffle for creating drawings and diagrams, are all category-leading apps that have been popular for years.

The Omni Group got its start as a consulting company for NeXTSTEP, the predecessor to OSX by Steve Jobs’ second company, and later transitioned to making apps for OS X. Today, all of their major apps are on iOS as well, and are in many ways leading examples of the best iOS has to offer for productivity.

Back on the Mac, Omni’s apps are still popular, and continue to be some of the best ways to get things done, make outlines and diagrams, and more. They’re a big part of the Mac app scene, and a great example of the great software you can only get on a Mac.

That’s why we’re wondering: what Omni apps do you use? Do you rely on them every day? We’d love to hear your thoughts about the Omni apps in the comments below.

…goes to check off this task in OmniFocus as I hit publish

As always every Wednesday, here are our weekly picks of the best deals on the App Store for this week.

Happy downloading!

Check Back Next Week!

Remember to check back next Wednesday for some more hot (and free) App Store deals and if you can hardly wait until then, feel free to share your thoughts and comments on the apps featured above!

When it comes to sharing code snippets with others, there aren’t really many services that do it justice. Many lack syntax highlighting, and don’t even have desktop clients to make the experience of uploading a snippet pleasant. There’s plenty of ways to share code, but few that check all the boxes for a perfect Mac-to-web code snippet sharing experience.

SourceBox is an app that allows you to easily upload snippets of code and other text to PasteBin, as well as their own SourceDrop service and other popular sites for sharing code snippets online. If you find yourself often needing to share bits of code, this just might be the app you’ve been looking for.

PasteBin: The Web Service That Started it All

If you’ve never used it, PasteBin is an web app that allows developers to share their code snippets online with the world. PasteBin is especially useful if you’re looking for a solution to a problem you can’t seem to solve, or if you just want some inspiration by looking at other people’s code. PasteBin features various handy features such as the ability to set expiration dates, syntax highlighting and privacy settings.

PasteBin also has the bragging rights that it’s the number one paste tool since 2002, so it’d only be natural for them to develop and release a desktop client to make it even less painless to upload. Strangely, they don’t have a client they’ve developed themselves. That’s where SourceDrop comes in. It’s a simple native app for your Mac that makes sharing text and code on PasteBin, TinyPaste, and even Github Gist simple.

Interface

As with any app, the first impressions are given by the interface of the app. SourceDrop is a relatively simplistic app that just waits for action in your menu bar. It’s unobtrusive and although this is good, it’s easy to forget that you’ve got it installed. It’ll remind you of file-sharing apps like CloudApp and Droplr, with keyboard shortcuts to automatically upload your clipboard contents and links to your recent uploads and preferences in the menubar.

A simple menubar app that works as you’d expect

The preferences of SourceDrop are also rather simple, featuring the ability to create keyboard shortcuts, copy the link of a drop to the clipboard, play a sound when you upload something, using Growl notifications, and toggle whether you want the app to launch at login. Within the second tab, we have the ability to change the sharing service – we’ll come to that soon – as well as an option to use syntax highlighting and HTTPS on SourceDrop’s own sharing service.

Getting the code sharing service you want

Services

Another handy addition to SourceDrop is the ability that send highlighted text online when you’re working in your favorite application by simply right clicking, selecting Services and then Choose Share Selection. Once you’ve shared something, you’ll get a handy link from the menu bar item.

Share text and code straight from your Services menu

Once you’ve uploaded, whether from the keyboard shortcut, the menubar clipboard upload option, or the services link menu, you’ll see a small popup in your menubar with a link, styled much like Droplr’s popup when you upload a file. Assuming you’ve enabled it in the settings, your link will be copied to your clipboard immediately so you can quickly share it, or you can click the notification to open the code in your browser.

Your code in the cloud, with a not-so-short URL

Pro Features

Although SourceDrop is useful when you simply want upload some text online, I do find it rather misleading that SourceDrop is a PasteBin client, simply because without purchasing SourceDrop Pro, it is nothing more than a way to upload text to SourceDrop’s own system. That’s not bad in itself if you’re just looking for a way to upload text online and could use any service, but if you’re actually looking for a way to upload to PasteBin (or Github Gist and TinyPaste), you’ll need to purchase SourceDrop Pro with a $1.99 in-app purchase.

Sharing via SourceDrop

If you do not purchase SourceDrop Pro, you will have to use SourceDrop’s own sharing service. Here’s a preview if you’d like to check out what SourceDrop sharing looks like: https://www.sourcedrop.net/z51fb02cc7ea9.

It really doesn’t pack too much of a punch, with a nice enough interface marred by a large Adsense banner on the left. It is a decent service for sharing text and code, though, including syntax highlighting and an option to download the text or code in a file. One thing that I do think it’s lacking is an online account so that people can see the history of their text shares. As it works right now, once you’ve lost the think to your text, you have to go back to the app and see your recent shares. Additionally, there’s no apparent way to delete your shared text and code. So, it works, but it might not be the best way to share code online.

Conclusion

Unfortunately, I must say that I am somewhat disappointed with SourceDrop. It labels itself as a PasteBin client, but it is nothing more than a way to upload text to the internet with their own service without an in-app purchase. If you just want a way to share text and code online, you might already be using CloudApp or Droplr, and they can work fine for this.

On the other hand, SourceDrop is a small, minimal, unobtrusive application that can come in handy for those that want to be able to share text and code online. If a $2 purchase is worth it to you to share to PasteBin and Github Gist from your Mac with a simple keyboard shortcut, then this might be just what you’ve been looking for. It might not the most perfect way to share code, but it’s one of the few simple ways to share to PasteBin and Github Gist.

If you’ve ever been editing an image and found your eyedropper wandering outside the application window to all of the colors on your desktop and beyond, I can sympathize. You’re not the only one who’s wanted to extend the functionality of Photoshop’s color picker beyond the application and been frustrated when you just weren’t allowed to do that.

Well, be frustrated no more! Meet Frank DeLoupe, a menubar color picker that will work anywhere. Going by Frank for short, this app gives you Photoshop integration and the ability to copy a color’s code to your clipboard. With so much packed into such a tiny app, can Mr. DeLoupe really do it all, or will Frank fall on his face?

Picking Colors with Frank

Though you can certainly start using the Frank DeLoupe color picker right away, it’s a good idea to sync Frank with Photoshop. This will only work with CS5 or later, though. To get started, open Photoshop. In the Edit menu, select Remote Connections. Enter a password, and click Okay. In Frank’s application preferences, find the Remote tab and enter the same password you just created. If Photoshop is still open, the lights should switch to green, letting you know Frank and Photoshop are onboard.

Getting connected to Photoshop

The beauty of Frank DeLoupe is that it allows you to select any color you want anywhere on your desktop. To get started, make sure the icon, window, website, or whatever you want to use to capture your color is visible. Click the Frank eyedropper menubar icon and select Color Picker.

The pointer will transform into a large loupe, or magnifying lens. Hover the loupe over whatever color you want to grab. You’ll be able to see right down to the pixel, so you can be sure you’re clicking in the right spot. There’s also a bubble on the edge of the loupe that will display a larger swatch of the selected color, so you know what you’re getting before you click.

Using the Frank DeLoupe color picker

When you’re sure you’ve got the color you want, click on it. You’ll see your color is now filling the Frank eyedropper in the menubar. If you connected Frank and Photoshop, it’s also the foreground color swatch in Photoshop, like magic!

If you’d like to select a background color using Frank, it’s similar to selecting a background color in Photoshop. Click Color Picker in the menubar dropdown as before and find the color you want, but this time, hold down the Option key when you click on the color. As in Photoshop, Option+click will make the selected color the background color. However, this only works in Photoshop; there’s only room for one color in Frank’s menubar eyedropper. The most recent color you’ve selected, whether foreground or background, will fill in the eyedropper.

Deciding what color mode to use

You may not be using Photoshop or are choosing colors for another reason, and Frank DeLoupe still has you covered. Whenever you pick a new color, Frank automatically copies the color’s code to your clipboard. You can choose in the application preferences whether you want to use RGB, hexadecimal, or HSL. There’s a few varieties on each, but those are the big three. This is useful for coding CSS or if you just need to get the values to plug into another graphics application.

An Application Done Right

There are absolutely no cons to this application. Frank DeLoupe fills a big hole for designers and developers. There have been so many times I’ve tried to drag the Photoshop eyedropper out of the application and out onto the desktop, knowing it would only end in tears. Grabbing colors outside of Photoshop for use in the application is huge, but so is the ability to pick colors from anywhere for really any use, not just in Photoshop.

Frank is easy to setup, and while I imagined connecting to Photoshop would be a hassle, it really wasn’t. This is in large part thanks to Adobe’s Remote Connections, but the team that created Frank DeLoupe managed to put Remote Connections to such great use. The only thing to remember is that Photoshop must be open for Remote Connections to work, or all your color picking will be for naught.

Conclusion

If you do any design work at all, this app is a must have. After working with Frank DeLoupe for only a few days, I can’t imagine going back. It’s one of those applications that just works. It makes picking colors much easier and saves a lot of time. Whereas before I would constantly be opening multiple files to get at what I needed, now I just look to Frank.

I can’t recommend Frank DeLoupe highly enough, especially to the pros. I think they’ll immediately see the utility in an expanded color picker. However, there’s plenty here for amateur designers and developers, too. If you just really want to know what the background color is on that website or grab the color from a photograph on a blog, Frank’s there for you. Frank DeLoupe really does do it all.

In 2008, Apple kicked off the transition away from physical media. The lack of an optical drive in the MacBook Air eventually influenced the removal of it in the Mac Mini and, more recently, the next-generation MacBook Pro.

With all these Macs ditching their optical drive in order to achieve a thinner form factor, it’s time to take a look at which is better: disk or download?

Speed

There can be some pretty significant disparities between the time taken for software on a disk to get up and running on your Mac and the time taken for downloaded apps to install. For, say, an average productivity app, there isn’t really that big of a difference since even a mediocre internet connection can handle a download in a reasonable amount of time.

Where the differences become really evident are in games, where downloads are measured in the gigabytes and the strength of your internet connection is really important. There’s a good chance you’ve got a strong internet connection as the whole world moves towards universally better broadband – the UK government is promising a 2Mbits/sec minimum – but, even then, your package can come with limits. Here in the UK, you might still have to settle with a 10GB/month download limit or face throttling and/or additional costs. Therefore, not every internet connection is yet perfect for downloading games.

Though, of course, if you have to order the physical game online, you’ll have to wait even longer than that!

While continually improving, internet speeds still vary significantly.

Price

When you buy a physical copy of game, you’re probably doing it through a reseller like GAME or Gamestop (i.e. not direct from the publisher). This allows the reseller to choose their own price, put games on sale and continually update prices to compete with rival resellers. Just as a supermarket can set and adjust the price of a box of cereal, a game store can do what they want to push out stock.

On the other hand are digital distribution mediums. There is much fewer of these available and due to the lack of competition, and, in a lot of cases, proprietary nature, prices don’t really change because there’s not really much reason for them to do so. While a physical reseller will want to clear out their inventory and will adjust prices to match both supply and demand, there’s no physical product in digital distribution so there’s very little reason for developers to reduce prices there.

Steam’s various sales, such as the recent Summer Sale, are exceptions. In fact, you can get insanely cheap games during these times but they amount to only a few weeks in a 52-week. Spore, for example, has been available in stores local to me for under £10 for a good couple of years, it remains at £19.99 on Origin and £29.99 on Steam (note that neither of those services offer a Mac version, though).

Some games remain priced online at multiple times of the physical price.

Availability and Convenience

Digital distribution isn’t really looking that good, is it? Well, one aspect where it really does shine is in making sure games are available. Theoretically, games are infinitely available digitally while brick-and-motar retail stores will only have a limited stock. This is especially important for older games that don’t warrant shelf space in stores but that can easily be sold many times digitally. Conversely, however, not every Mac game is available for download even if they’re still available in stores (The Sims 3, for example, is only available for Mac through optical media).

Similarly, digital distribution offers the convenience of having access to games at any time, day or night, 365 days of the year. You also don’t have to head out to a store to buy either, you just have to click a button. As long as you have access to a strong internet connection, you have access to a massive catalogue of games.

Half-Life 2 for Mac isn’t available in any game stores near me (at least, on my last check), yet it can be downloaded at any time through Steam.

For all types of media, especially movies and TV shows, digital distribution means you never have to try and find disks in order to play a video or a game, it’s just a matter of looking it up in Steam or iTunes.

Available Anywhere

iTunes in the Cloud powers a fantastic advantage for digital downloads over physical media. Just by picking up my Apple TV and plugging it into any television in proximity to an internet connection and I can have access to all the TV shows and movies I’ve bought through iTunes. I don’t need to bring DVDs with me, nor ever be dissatisfied because I’ve forgotten one.

Conclusion

I’m a little apprehensive about declaring either of these mediums the superior. In a utopian world where we all had access to high-speed internet all of the time, digital distribution presents a perfect scenario with constant availability and convenience. However, it’s not yet time to completely dismiss optical media because not everyone’s setup meets the requirements to live a solely digital life.

Editor’s Note: While I’m not a gamer, I do use applications that can take quite some time to download, including Microsoft Office and Adobe Creative Suite 6, and yet I purchase everything as digital download. I haven’t use a disk to install programs in over a year. For me, the convenience of downloads outweigh the disadvantages of my sometimes-pokey internet connection.

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Go Get It!

If you’re ready to get started designing better UIs with interactivity, you should give ANTETYPE a try. You can try ANTETYPE free for 30 days, or buy it just now during the summer sale, where ANTETYPE is available for $99 until August 17, down from its regular price of $289. You can also get an educational licenses for just $19 if you’re an educator or student.

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!

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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!

Dropbox has been the go-to for cloud storage for many of us for many years now. Unfortunately, it’s not the easiest cloud sharing service there is, and for those of us who like to keep our files all together, that’s a problem. There are some pretty prominent services, perhaps most notably Cloud.app and Droplr, that allow easy drag-and-drop sharing from your desktop, but Dropbox hasn’t kept up.

Currently in free beta, Droplings is a new app that allows you to share in a similar way to the other cloud services, but from Dropbox. Droplings uploads files to your Dropbox Public folder and creates a download page for your file, just by dragging your files to your menubar. We’ll take a look, after the jump!

Using Dropbox with Droplings

Before you get started with Droplings, you’ll need your Dropbox ID. Droplings gives you some instructions for getting the ID in Finder, but the method they describe just wasn’t working for me. I got my Dropbox ID by going to my Public folder at the Dropbox website, right-clicking on any file, and copying the public link. In that URL was an 8-digit number, my Dropbox ID. I plugged that into Droplings and was ready to go.

Check in the the application preferences to make sure Droplings knows where your Dropbox folder is on your Mac. Apparently the default is the user directory, but I’d moved mine into Documents at some point, creating potential confusion for Droplings. Take a moment to find your Dropbox folder and make sure Droplings has the correct path before you get started.

To upload a file to Dropbox with Droplings, just drag it to the Droplings menubar icon, just as you would have with CloudApp or Droplr. When the upload is complete, the Droplings icon will turn blue, and the shortened URL for your file’s download page will be automatically copied to your clipboard. To view your file and its download page, just paste the URL into a browser.

A Droplings download page

You’ll see that your Dropbox file has its own webpage now, similar to a Droplr or Cloudapp upload. Usually, the public download links for Dropbox files are pretty sparse. If it’s an image, all you get is a direct link to the image; if it’s any other sort of file, it’s likely visiting the public Dropbox link will just start an automatic download. The Droplings uploader gives you a more attractive download page while keeping your files in Dropbox.

You can upload up to five files at once with no problems. However, only the most recent URL is copied to your clipboard. To get the other four URLs, click the Droplings icon in your menubar. You’ll see a list of your most recent uploads via Droplings. Just click the name of the file you want to share, and its URL will now be copied to your clipboard. You can repeat this for all files in the Droplings menubar dropdown.

The Droplings menubar dropdown

Things to Think About

Droplings only remembers the last five uploads, and without a login, there’s no way to get at those previous Droplings uploads. You do have two options, though. You can upload your files again, creating duplicates. This obviously isn’t ideal, and depending on file size, can eat up your storage fast. Your other option is to go into your Public folder and grab the public links manually. However, because Droplings is creating a folder for each file, this can get tedious if you’ve uploaded a bunch of files.

Each file uploaded gets its own folder and HTML file, all created within a “share” folder in your Dropbox Public folder. While it’s great to get all that separated out and frankly necessary to make the Droplings theme work, the folders aren’t named anything useful. If you want to get back into them to retrieve a file you’ve uploaded previously, you’ll find them organized by month uploaded, but that’s it. You just have to get to digging to really find anything.

Choosing a theme in Droplings

While Droplings advertises that it has custom themes, they really are custom in that you have to customize them yourself. There’s actually only one theme available and no others to choose from. If you want your file’s download page to look different from the default, you’re going to have to do that all yourself. There are some instructions on the Droplings website, though, to walk you through it. This is going to be crazy useful to designers and developers who want their shared files’ pages to fit their sites, but the default theme will probably be enough for the rest of us.

Conclusion

Droplings isn’t going to work for just any quick uploads you want to ever see again. If you just need to get something into Dropbox for your own use, it’s best to take the extra minute to move it into Finder’s Dropbox folder or upload it via the web interface, rather than let it get lost in Droplings maze of folders. Droplings isn’t going to be a replacement for the official Dropbox app or the web app.

However, if you want to share files in a professional way online, with a customized page for the file that looks as nice as CloudApp or Droplr, Droplings is the way to go. It gives you a great default download page, and with some work you can create personalized themes that match your own website or nameplate page. Plus, if you just want to use Dropbox to share one-off files like screenshots, this is likely the easiest way to do it, especially if you don’t really care to quickly share the same file again in the future. While not a substitute for how you’re already using Dropbox, Droplings is a great add-on to the service.