Category: Mac

Our weekly sponsor this week is Slidevana, the ultimate presentation toolkit. It helps you build better Keynote and PowerPoint presentations in less time than ever, giving you time to focus on what you’re presenting instead of how you’re presenting it.

How often have you worked for hours on a presentation, only to realize that you’ve spent most of your time pushing pixels in Keynote or PowerPoint rather than really honing your message? Slidevana is a unique presentation toolkit takes the tedium out of creating clear, elegant slides and enables you to focus on conveying your message.

Slidevana contains over 150 slide layouts including everything from basic layouts, such as lists, charts, and tables, to layouts that communicate complex business concepts such as timelines, architectures, sales funnels, and common frameworks. Slidevana’s vast array of layouts means that creating a presentation is as easy as copying the perfect slide and pasting the content that captures your message.

Slidevana features a clean, minimal design that looks professional and highlights your insights. It is available in two color schemes: Slidevana Dark is designed to deliver maximum visual impact for audiences of any size, and Slidevana Light is perfect for presentations that need to be both projected and printed.

Go Get It!

If you’re ready to get started spending less time on your presentations while making them more powerful than ever, you can get Slidevana for PowerPoint or Keynote for $79.00. Your purchase includes free, unlimited lifetime updates, and if you’re not satisfied for any reason, you can get a 100% refund just for asking.

Mountain Lion has been out just under a week, and millions of us are already running it on our Macs. Apple’s announced that they sold 3 million copies of Mountain Lion in 4 days. Despite some initial problems with the Up to Date program, and expected slowdowns for first-day downloads, Mountain Lion is running strong, and very few of us have encountered major problems with it.

That’s why we’re wondering if you’ve taken the plunge and upgraded already, or not. Did your upgrade go good, or are you having trouble taming Apple’s latest cat? Or are you waiting for updates and for time to try upgrading? We’d love to hear your thoughts in the comments.

And, if you haven’t checked it out yet, be sure to read our own Mountain Lion review for an overview of the new features, as well as our roundup of smaller changes throughout the OS, including new iCloud features.

Free-To-Play games have been part of gaming for a while, but they are often seen as low budget and graphically-ugly MMO games. After E3 closed its doors this past June, however, some of the most notable titles that emerged from the event were Free-To-Play. This has shaken up the industry a bit, and from it, we now have a future console in the works like the OUYA (which is aimed at supporting free-to-play games), new free-to-play games coming out left and right, and even some retail games embracing the free-to-play model.

Today, the free-to-play model is being adopted by more and more developers. These games are no longer ugly-looking creations that attract only a certain type of gamers, either. From MMOs to FPS games, there is a free-to-play game for everyone.

Now, most recent free-to-play games are not Mac bound (yet), but there are still plenty of titles to enjoy on your OS X machine. The following is a list of some of the greatest free-to-play games available for the Mac. Keep in mind that some of these games may be rough around the edges if you’re playing on Mountain Lion.

RC Mini Racers

Our first item is one of the coolest free-to-play racing games on the Mac App Store. RC Mini Racers is a racing game that has you control RC cars. I know what you are gonna say, though. The description says it is only free for a few days. True, but the game has been free-to-play since it arrived, and you should get it before it stops being free. (That may have changed depending on when this is published.)

Red Crucible 2

From the coolest racing game, we come to the coolest FPS game in the Mac App Store. Red Crucible 2 is a superb ‘modern combat’ game that puts you face-to-face against others online. You have a few classes to choose from, and sweet vehicles to man, so get out there, soldier!

UberStrike HD

UberStrike HD is a free-to-play game that uses the model a bit too harshly on players; however, the game doesn’t fall short from sweet. Crazy maps and crazy wars are all waiting for you for free. This also is one of the best looking free-to-play games in the Mac App Store. That ‘HD’ title isn’t there just for looks. Its only downfall is how the micro-transactions are handled.

Blood & Glory

Blood & Glory is probably not a game you want your children playing, but you on the other hand, you can enjoy all the goriness and the bloodshed for free. The game is said to have HD visuals, and some gesture control, so check it out. It is free after all.

Zen Pinball 2

Zen Pinball 2 is one of the coolest pinball games out there. With a high Metacritic score, you are sure to have some fun with it. Odd that a game of this genre is free-to-play, but if you want to add more to it, you can also get the Marvels’ The Avengers table for a small fee.

Radiant Defense

Radiant Defense is a tower defense game that takes place in a rather… vibrant universe. You will fight hordes of invading enemies, so be ready to defend yourself. We recently reviewed this game, so if you want to check that out before you go downloading anything, you can do that here. We enjoy helping you save money and hard drive space.

Shadow Era

Shadow Era, which was also reviewed here, is the trading card game for the Mac. While it may not be as robust as something like Magic: The Gathering, Shadow Era is a phenomenal game for those out there who love this genre. Extra cards can be obtained by playing through the single player, or bought from the store. Shadow Era has a big community behind it, and if you do join, you’ll be welcomed by many great individuals.

Robotek

Robotek is a cute yet fun time-passing indulgence that can help you kill some time. While it sounds like Robotech, Robotek isn’t about transforming mechs. This game is more of a mix RPG action and strategy game. Check it out, and let us know what you think!

Touch Grind

Ever played with those finger skateboards? Anyways, Touchgrind is an awesome game that basically brings finger boarding to your Mac. Be warned though, this game requires multi-touch technology, so that means that some MacBooks won’t be able to play this (unless you have an external peripheral).

World of Warcraft

World of Warcraft, the oldest of the bunch and yet the most well-known MMORPG, stands the test of time as millions of players keep coming for more. This MMO gives the player many, many hours of playtime.

City of Heroes

Ah yes, City of Heroes. This game is a hidden gem that you should download right after reading this roundup. City of Heroes is the first superhero MMO and it came to the Mac soon after. The game itself offers a deep level of customization for your character (which is perhaps the funnest part of it). Once that is taken care of, join the fight against, well, the bad or good guys. Note: City of Heroes is a bit buggy if you have updated to Mountain Lion, but hopefully they will fix this problem soon!

Quake Live

Quake has been in the consoles and PCs of many, and throughout its existence, it has been one fabulously fun game. So what is awesome about this? Quake Live lets you relive those amazing Quake moments. The best part is that this Quake experience is free.

Second Life

Remember that horrible movie Gamer? Yeah, me either, but Second Life is a huge MMO that lets you have a second life. It basically looks exactly like that scene from that movie you can’t remember. If you love social gaming, this is probably your best bet. Give it a try.

Team Fortress 2

Give me some Steam, you say. Okay, well, here is one of Steam’s biggest free-to-play offerings. You may know this game already, but in case you didn’t know it was free-to-play, now you do! If you commit to it, you will have lots of fun playing Team Fortress 2. Just don’t go camping while you’re cloaked. No one likes that!

Spiral Knights

Do you like old-school Zelda games? Okay, now add multiplayer to it, and you will get Spiral Knights. So think of it as a Zelda clone that is and MMO. If you like these type of games, you shouldn’t pass this one up.

Marathon Trilogy

Perhaps MMOs aren’t your thing. What about another super old-school FPS? Marathon Trilogy is a classic series that arrived to the iPad for free, but has been available for the Mac for many years. It recently went 100% free, but it is still a good choice if you like retro gaming.

Realm of the Mad God

Okay, perhaps you don’t like Team Fortress. Maybe you will like the following free-to-play Steam games. First up we have Realm of the Mad God. This game is an MMO game that is as retro as it gets. Featuring a cool 8-bit era feel to it, it is the first ever cooperative MMO bullet shooter. You can fight monsters with up to 85 players. Yeah, 85!

Iron Grip: Marauders

Iron Grip is an indie MMO game that offers sweet tactical combat features. With PvP battles, cool visuals, awesome quests, and ongoing game development, you have a long, long time to enjoy this game.

Pirates of the Caribbean Online

Do you like pirates? Do you like Pirates of the Caribbean? No? Neither do I; however, for those out there who do, check out Pirates of the Caribbean Online. This game is an interesting MMO spin-off of the movie, so if you really, really liked those movies, treat yourself to this game.

BattleStar Galactica Online

Want to fill that Battlestar Galactica void? Get it, void? Anyways, if you like the series, check out this game! Many people complain about the controls, but if you are able to endure them, then by all means check it out.

StarCraft II

Well, if I didn’t include this game in this list, the comments would have exploded with outrage. So, due to that fact, here it is: StarCraft II. Much like WoW, StarCraft really needs no introduction. If you like this genre, you’ll most likely love StarCraft II.

Command & Conquer Tiberium Alliances

C&C is a popular RTS franchise that has seen many variations of the title. If you like RTS games, you should absolutely check out C&C. EA has proudly made this one a free-to-play title that you can enjoy over your browser. Try this one out as well.

Wolfenstein: Enemy Territory

Wolfenstein: Enemy Territory is a free-to-play multiplayer combat game where players pick a faction and battle it out. This is a game you’ll enjoy if you like war games. Again, remember not to camp.

AssaultCube

Back in the day, Counter Strike was an awesome game the everyone played, and many still do. If you want a similar experience on the Mac, have a look at AssaultCube. This game isn’t only free-to-play, but it is also open source, and a very lightweight size weighing in at 40MB. With 26 different maps and fast gameplay, you’ll be hooked!

RuneScape

This game had to be included as it is one of the oldest free-to-play games out there. This fantasy MMORPG has been running for many years and it holds the Guinness World Record as the world’s most popular MMORPG. From casual to hardcore gamers, anyone can get into RuneScape.

Savage 2

Savage 2 is a RTS game that doesn’t only tie you into a top down view. You can actually join the fight in third person, or first person view. This game is a fantasy team-oriented game, so grab a friend, and play this game together. You might just find it to be a great addition to your library.

Regnum Online

Regnum Online is another F2P MMORPG that offers a vast land to explore as you undertake many quests. There are nine fully customizable characters to choose from, and 3 realms that you can visit. Also, the game has some good graphics, so you should enjoy your time with it as you walk along the different realms available.

Dofus

Dofus is a cute little MMORPG that has many comical adventures waiting for you. Dofus visuals look great with their colorful textures and Bastion-like graphics. Give it a try. If the “enchanting” universe doesn’t do it for you, the millions of players in the world may enrich your experience.

Drakensang

Amazon recently rolled out Game Connect. Game Connect allows you to easily download content you buy for free-to-play games all with your Amazon account. This is one of the few titles compatible with Mac (mainly because it is browser based), but expect many more free-to-play games to come soon (both downloadable and browser based). Drakensang is a MMORPG with a big world and an epic story. It offers PvE missions as well as PvP arenas.

Puzzle Pirates

So, we’ve already covered the fact that I don’t care about Pirates, but for those out there who like pirates and puzzle games, you should check this game. Puzzle Pirates is a mix of the MMO genre with the Puzzle genre. The game itself can get quite deep, so for those out there who like economy, puzzles, and lots of booty, try this one out!

Fallen Earth

Fallen Earth is a science fiction MMORPG set in a 3D post-apocalyptic environment. The game can be played as either a first person shooter or a third person shooter. The devastated land is immense, so you will have a vast land to explore. This game seems to have some issues, and it has never been tested in Mountain Lion, so watch out.

Heroes of Newerth

Heroes of Newerth is an action RPG similar to DotA (Defense of the Ancients – a Warcraft 3 Mod). According to the description: “two teams of up to five players each take on the role of special Hero units. With the assistance of AI-controlled armies, each team sets out with the sole objective of destroying the other team’s base”, which is pretty similar to DotA indeed.

Conquer Online

Okay, so we had a lot of MMO games here, but this one is about Kungfu! It also has some magic, but this artsy medieval game brings you plenty of fun moments. There are many PvP options available as well as simple or complex gameplay. Give it a try. Warning though, you might actually want to buy some things for this game if you get hooked!

Conclusion

These are just a handful of free-to-play games that are scattered throughout the internet, but there are a few more that you can find in order to suit your gaming preferences. If you find a game that you desperately want that isn’t available for OS X, you might want to check if you can install it with WineBottler; albeit, not as good as running it normally, but it should help out a bit.

As always, leave your comments below. Let us know what free-to-play games you are into, what usernames you have on your different games, and what game is missing from our list!

Also, feel free to to join our Steam Group in order to play with or against Mac.AppStorm readers and writers.

Mountain Lion has brought its share of changes OS X, changes that bring many iOS features to the desktop. From the new Notes and Reminders apps to Notifications Center and Messages, it seems that the Mac looks more like a mobile device every day.

That’s not to say OS X isn’t a great desktop OS. Mountain Lion brings many small features that make your daily workflow nicer, as well as a number of little changes that might make you scratch your head. After nearly a week with Mountain Lion, here’s some of the biggest changes we’ve noticed throughout the OS.

iCloud is Everywhere

iCloud isn’t a brand new OS X feature, as it was already included in Lion and put to great use by a number of apps, especially writing apps like iA Writer and Byword. While iWork for iOS has had iCloud support for nearly a year, it was difficult to impossible to use iCloud synced iWork documents on the Mac.

That’s all changed in Mountain Lion. Now, iCloud files are the first thing you’ll see when you open iWork, or even standard bundled apps like TextEdit and Preview. Apple’s idea is for you to store all of your documents in iCloud, so they’ll seamlessly sync between your Macs and iOS devices. It really does work great, though for those of us used to apps opening with blank documents by default, the new iCloud file picker is quite frustrating to have to deal with. Still, since you can drag files into folders, and view them in a list, it’s not a half-bad way to keep files for an app together.

iCloud is omnipresent throughout Mountain Lion

Another potential problem with iCloud is that you only get 5Gb of storage for free. That’s not such a problem for syncing just your iPhone, but if you’re storing all new documents from your Mac in iCloud, odds are you’ll fill it up fast. If you know what’s going on, that’s not such a big deal, but for normal customers that might have chosen a MacBook with more storage so they could store more files without understanding the difference between their local storage and iCloud, they’ll likely feel cheated when they’re asked to pay for more iCloud storage.

That said, iCloud still feels somewhat magical. When setting up my new MacBook Air with a clean install of Mountain Lion, the setup asked me to enter my Apple ID and activate iCloud. By the time I’d logged in, Safari already had my bookmarks, Notes and Reminders already had my iOS notes and todos, and the All my Files view in Finder was already showing my iOS iWork documents. That’s a little glimpse of the future, where we’ll likely be able to sign into any computer and automatically have our whole workflow ready to use in seconds. It sure makes setting up a new computer easier, and that’s obviously one of the things Apple’s aiming for here.

iWork ’09 in 2012

As already mentioned, iWork has already been updated with iCloud support, and it works great. But there’s still a few oddities in iWork apps that show its age. First, with a clean install of iWork apps, you’ll still see the old Share button that lets you share files to iWork.com beta, which Apple recently discontinued. That shows one small problem with iCloud: there’s no way to access or share your documents online. It’d sure be nice to have an online dashboard for all your iCloud files, so you can access them from any computer or share them, but there’s simply no option for that now.

Then, another dated feature left over in iWork is iWeb sharing. Now, users with an older boxed copy of iWork might still have iWeb sitting on their Macs, but since its not currently supported and doesn’t come on new Macs, it seems very odd that Apple’s kept iWeb sharing in iWork.

iWork.com beta, a dead service still in iWork

That said, iWork apps are still great, and there’s no reason not to use them. It just seems odd that Apple hasn’t made a full new version, choosing instead to add new features and not cleanup old leftover stuff. Then, of course, we’re overdue for a new version of iLife, too…

Lauchpad Greatly Improved

If you’ve found Launchpad frustrating in Lion, you should definitely give it another try in Mountain Lion. It now has a built-in search box that you can start typing in as soon as you open it (which means F4, type app name, then enter to launch). It also adds new app icons on the first space along with Apple’s preinstalled apps, where Lion automatically put new apps on the 2nd page. Finally, it only shows actual applications, so installing Creative Suite won’t leave you with a dozen extra icons you’ve got to hide in a folder.

And so much more…

Then, there’s a lot of little extras our team has noticed as we’ve been using Mountain Lion, some good, some bad. Here’s the things that have stood out to us:

– Notification Centre is quite nice, but not perfect. It opens Twitter notifications online, instead of in the Twitter app, and doesn’t clear notifications unless you click them directly.
– Opening Notification Centre from the trackpad works best if you swipe from the outside of your trackpad into the right side. Takes a bit of practice to get right.
– The Share button is a nice addition, but we really wish 3rd party apps could add themselves to it. Seriously, CloudApp integration would be killer. Also, if you’re looking for the bookmark button in Safari, it’s now in the Share menu. Seems like this should really be called the Send menu, since you’re sending the data you’re viewing somewhere else: to bookmarks for storage, to an online service, or (in iOS) to another app.

The Bookmark option, hiding in plain sight.

– Preview has always been great for adding some small edits to PDFs, but it’s improved in Mountain Lion. There’s a quick highlight button always visible, and new markup features including better form support. Plus, password-protected PDFs now show their password screen in grey, instead of the eye-searing red used before. And if you’ve never tried signing a PDF using iSight in Preview, you should give it a try: it’s awesome.

– Dictation works great in Mountain Lion, and its smart enough to cut your fans and pause iTunes while you’re dictating text. Interesting, you can dictate during a Skype conversation, a somewhat awkward way to record some of what you say. Do note: you’ll need to be online for Dictation to work, as it uses Apple’s servers to translate your speech into text.

– There’s a ton of new photo screensavers in Mountain Lion, with great photos from National Geographic. If you browse to /System/Library/Frameworks/Screensaver.framework/Versions/A/Resources/Default Collections, you can even copy the pictures and use them as desktop backgrounds if you’d like.

Screensavers are suddenly cool again …maybe

– Save As returns in Mountain Lion, as well as an option to rename files in apps while you’re editing them. Check out this tutorial if you’d like to get the old Save As keyboard shortcut back, too.

– Mountain Lion has many little iOS style touches, like new popover selection panes. Unfortunately, sometimes they’re less functional than their older OS X counterparts. In the User Account settings, for example, there’s no obvious way to select a picture of your own. You can still drag-and-drop in any picture, so you’re not totally out of luck.

Wait: you took away my options!

– iCal and Address Book have been renamed Calendar and Contacts, respectively, apparently to match their iOS counterparts. One nice thing is that Spotlight search still shows the correct app if you type the older name. Launchpad search, however, doesn’t.

iCal still lives (at least in Spotlight…)

– To find a word definition, just 3-finger tap once over a word. In Lion, this require a 3-finger double-tap, which was somewhat awkward.

– 2-finger swipes to go back and forward now work in Dictionary, iTunes, and App Store, making going back and forth consistent in almost every app.

Anything Else?

That’s all the major things we’ve noticed so far that haven’t been as widely talked about, but we’d love to hear any new Mountain Lion features or changes you’ve noticed. Are there any changes you’re loving, or things you wish they’d left alone? We’d love to hear your thoughts in the comments below.

There are so many different ways to keep notes on the Mac, but even with the advent of Notes on iOS and now OS X, Simplenote has remained one of the most popular apps for taking notes. Simplenote on its own is a convenient way to access text notes via your web browser from just about anywhere. Matched up with the literally dozens of apps for Mac, PC, and mobile, you can have complete control over your notes wherever you go.

We’re going to look at five of the Mac apps for Simplenote and see where they succeed and where they fail. Whether you’re a Simplenote veteran looking to try something new, or you’ve never even thought of using an app to manage your notes, we’ll take a closer look at what makes a good notes app. While there’s still more Simplenote apps to be had out there, hopefully this list will help you break free of pen and paper.

Justnotes

Justnotes, a recent addition to the offering of Simplenote apps, has a pretty simple interface, but it gets you to what you want fast. There are two ways to edit notes: in the main window or in a separate note-only window. You can also open a note in fullscreen creating a distraction-free way to edit your text. The interface is very similar to the Simplenote webapp, so if you’ve been using that exclusively, you won’t experience a huge culture shock with the move to Justnotes.

Unfortunately, there’s no Markdown support. You can of course still write your notes in Markdown, but you won’t be able to preview them that way. If you want to copy the styled text, you’ll first have to login to the Simplenote webapp or move the note into a Markdown editor. While this isn’t a dealbreaker and certainly won’t affect anyone not interested in using Markdown, it’s still a bummer.

Justnotes has a similar interface to Simplenote.

There are some great shortcuts for working with your notes in Justnotes that aren’t in the Simplenote webapp, and that adds some functionality you can only get from the Mac app. I’m always a big fan of keyboard shortcuts for speeding up how I work, and this is a favorite for me. I’m not sure that makes up for the lack of support for Markdown though, and if you give Justnotes a try, you’ll have to see for yourself, but the similarity in design and ease of moving from Simplenote to Justnotes is a nice bonus.

Price: $9.99

Metanota

Metanota has a very similar interface to Evernote, though it’s incredibly trimmed down. If you like Evernote but only really need to sync text, Metanota may be the right choice for you. The far left pane houses your folders, which are really just labels in Simplenote. Each tag is given a color when it’s created, and you don’t get a choice as far as I can tell. Beneath all this is where Metanota serves its ads in the free version.

The center pane lists all the notes with a particular tag and the date each was created. You can sort by title or creation date, but that’s about it. You can’t sort by the date the note was last accessed or updated, unfortunately. Clicking the magnifying glass in this pane will bring up the search field, allowing you to search all of the notes in that folder for whatever text you want.

Metanota’s triple pane interface

The third pane, all the way to the right, is where Metanota displays your notes. You can create new notes or delete them, or even share them via email in this third pane. Clicking the plus sign allows you to add the note to a new or existing folder/tag. You can also add the note to your favorites by clicking the star at the bottom of the window. Metanota is pretty barebones as far as what’s on offer, but the interface is intuitive, and it really gives you all you actually need, if not all you may want.

Price: $9.99

Nottingham

From the view menu in Nottingham, you can sort your notes alphabetically, by date created, or by the ever handy date modified. Whenever I tried to sort by the label, though, and get all of my similarly tagged notes together, nothing ever happened.

In the righthand pane is your note, and it just looks like some text until you open a Web Preview window, either in the Window menu or via the ??P keyboard shortcut. Nottingham lets you format all of your notes in Markdown and then preview them to make sure you got everything right. Which is nice for folks like me who aren’t too familiar with Markdown and want to style our notes a bit but want to make sure we aren’t creating ginormous goofs along the way, either.

Nottingham’s sort and Markdown preview features are standouts.

It’s easy to organize your notes by color in the Edit menu, but I wish I could choose a single color for all note with a specific label. If I want all of my grocery lists to be green (and let me tell you, I do!) I would have to select each note individually and change its color one at a time. These colors won’t get synced to Simplenote, but it’s nice to have them here in Nottingham.

Price: $9.99

Notational Velocity

The interface in Notational Velocity is incredibly clean, but it’s not the most intuitive. Once you’ve got the hang of it, though, it’s a knockout. Notes can be sorted by title, tags, and date modified. The sort feature is something I come back to again and again in these Simplenote apps, but it’s because I’m always curious to see what they feel is important (or isn’t).

Notational Velocity’s fat-free UI.

Despite being provided with a short tutorial note, I was flummoxed when it came time to create a new note. It didn’t seem to make sense to just start typing in what looked to be a search field at the top of the application window. Where would the actual note go? But indeed, that’s exactly what I needed to do; hitting Return after creating a title gave me my new note, and I could edit it in the field below, giving Notational Velocity a slimmed down interface with absolutely no fat to trim. Again, you can create your notes in Markdown if you know what you’re doing, and you can even use some text styling and hyperlinking between notes.

One drawback that was pretty major from where I was sitting was the lack of tags. I could tag all my notes in Notational Velocity easily enough, but none of my labels from Simplenote synced as Notational Velocity tags, and I never saw any of my local tags sync to Simplenote, either.

Price: Free

nvALT

A fork of Notational Velocity, nvALT is incredibly similar to its sibling app. The interface is just about identical and has that same uncluttered, almost too bare bones look. But the features on the inside are what really set it apart.

I keep tools like Simplenote open all the time, so they’re there when I need them, but I don’t necessarily want a mile long dock to match all of my open applications. To put it simply, I’m a menubar enthusiast, and nvALT caters to me, allowing me to toss out the Dock icon and manage the app entirely from the menubar.

nvALT is like Notational Velocity, with a menubar icon and improved tag syncing.

Aside from my own selfish menubar fixation, nvALT has improved tag syncing over that of Notational Velocity. Which is to say that it has tag syncing at all. By default, there’s no tag column in the application window, though, but it’s easy enough to turn that on in the View menu. Once that’s settled, you’ll see all of your Simplenote labels attached to your notes, as they should be.

Besides these features, nvALT also has improved Markdown support and makes it easier to get to the HTML source code if you need to copy your note to a blog or webpage.

Price: Free

Click.to

Click.to is absolutely not for managing your notes via Simplenote. You can’t edit notes or organize them, and there’s certainly no support for Markdown. What Click.to does let you do, though, is make a quick note out of just about any text faster than you can say “really really fast.”

When you open Click.to for the first time, you choose which services will be in the satellite, a sort of pop-up menu, and which will be in the satellite’s submenu. Beyond just Simplenote, you can have Facebook, Twitter, Evernote, a bunch of apps, and a whole lot of stuff I’ve never heard of.

Click.to let’s you create notes from the clipboard or by typing out new text.

Select text pretty much anywhere, whether in a document or in a browser. (Click.to works with images and folders, too, but that kind of thing isn’t compatible with Simplenote.) Copy it to the clipboard, and your satellite menu will pop out. Choose the service you want to use, in this case Simplenote, and a new note will be created for you from your clipboard contents. The new note will open in your default browser, just so Click.to can prove how clever it is.

You can also create a note by hovering over the satellite menu until it appears and clicking the Simplenote icon. You’ll get a gray text box into which you can enter pretty much anything. If you want to get down with Markdown here, you certainly can, but you won’t see the results until you login to the Simplenote webapp.

The downside is that if you want to edit, tag, or in anyway work with the notes you’ve created with Click.to, you’ll have to either use the webapp or a second app for your Mac, like one of the apps mentioned above. While Click.to is a brillaint tool for taking quick notes but otherwise staying out of your way, it goes best with a Simplenote app friend.

Price: Free

Verdict

There were never going to be any winners or losers in this race. If you’re looking for a new app for managing your notes on your Mac, you first have to figure out what’s most important to you.

Do you want something you can update and sync quickly or something with lots of bells and whistles. Is organization important, a sleek interface, or ease of use? Hopefully I’ve at least helped you narrow down your list and given you a good place to make your start.

This week has been an extremely busy one in terms of the going-ons in the Mac app newssphere (and I think we all know why…!) so without further ado, let’s get cracking.

Happy reading!

Mountain Lion released to the general public, Lion is sadly no more

On Wednesday the eighth reincarnation of Apple’s OS X operating system was released to the general public via the App Store at the general price of $19.99. Mountain Lion features tighter iCloud integration, built-in apps such as Notes and Reminders that were previously only seen on the iOS platform and a deeper level of security with the new Gatekeeper function.

Mountain Lion was released to the public on Wednesday this week after being announced by Apple back in February.

The release of Mountain Lion prompted a surge on Apple’s servers, which struggled to keep up with the ever-growing demand (some users were unable to download the operating system until a few hours after its release) and one network reported an increase of 5 to 6 times the normal network traffic.

The spike experienced in one network’s traffic after the release of Mountain Lion.

Apple also quietly pulled OS X 10.7 Lion from the Mac App Store (including from users’ Purchases lists). Any users running Snow Leopard can upgrade directly to Mountain Lion, as long as their system requirements are sufficient.

If you haven’t already upgraded, make sure you check out Alex’s extensive review of the new operating system and all its new features before heading over to the App Store to grab yourself a copy of it! And remember: our sister site MacTuts+ has plenty of tutorials available to help you get to grips with Mountain Lion.

iWork office suite updated for iCloud and retina-display support

The iWork suite got a big update as well on Wednesday to version 9.2, which brought along iCloud synchronisation for all your Pages, Keynote and Numbers documents across all your iCloud-enabled devices, including iWork on iOS.

iWork 9.2 brought much needed iCloud document synchronisation to complement the tighter integration in Mountain Lion, along with retina support for the new MacBook Pro.

Now, documents created in the iWork suite can be saved to iCloud with a couple of clicks and any changes will automatically be pushed to all your devices, so if you edit a document on your iPad on the way home from work, the changes will be ready and waiting for you when you open it up on your Mac. The change is a welcome one, especially seeing as iCloud support has been built into the iOS version of iWork for some time, and will surely make everyone’s life a lot easier.

The 9.2 update also brought a few other features, including most notably retina-display support for the new MacBook Pro, so your documents will now look even crisper and sharper.

The update is free for all existing users and can be grabbed from Software Update.

Safari 6 released with new unified address-search bar

Another exciting update back on Wednesday was Safari 6 and the good news for those who haven’t yet upgraded to Mountain Lion (or aren’t planning to) is that it’s an update for Lion users as well. One of the most noticeable features of the new version is the unified search bar (similar to Google Chrome), whereby you can type in either a search term or a URL. Safari will then try to match it up either based on your bookmarks or search history, as well as pulling up common search queries from your selected search engine.

The new unified search bar in Safari 6.

Other features for all users include offline reading lists and an improvement to the browsers Nitro JavaScript engine, which increases the loading speed of a website, along with tweaks to CSS rendering and hardware acceleration to make websites seem smoother to browse through. Mountain Lion users get iCloud tab sync (but only across Macs until iOS 6 is released), support for website notifications and built in sharing features into web pages (such as Add to Reading List, E-mail this Page, Message and Send to Twitter).

The update also saw Apple drop the development of Safari for Windows (which cannot be downloaded from their website). though Webkit nighly builds (the engine that Safari is based on) are still available to download from their website.

The update is available by heading over to Software Update on your Mac. For those of you who have upgraded to Mountain Lion, Safari 6 comes pre-installed.

Carbon Copy Cloner no longer free; now costs $30

Carbon Copy Cloner, a popular solution for Mac users to create a complete backup of their starter disk, has now turned into commercial software from donation ware software, with new users to the software being given a 30-day trial to test its features before being expected to cough up $30 for the full version of the program.

Carbon Copy Cloner, once a donationware app with adverts, has now become a commercial product.

The move was to made in order to “grow our support and development team” and promises the user more frequent updates with the move to commercial. The donationware version can still be used for an unlimited amount of time (though it’s not compatible with Mountain Lion – you’ll have to get the paid version!) and anyone who has made a verifiable donation to Carbon Copy Cloner before July 24, 2012 will be rewarded with a free licence, a nice little touch in my opinion.

If you haven’t already got a licence, then you can go ahead and grab one from their store. To celebrate the launch of Mountain Lion, the app developers are offering a 25% discount on new licences up till August 12.

Heard Anything Else?

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

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

This is a quick roundup of the best tutorials from MacTuts+ in July, from how to create a foolproof backup system for your Mac, to getting to know Safari 6 — dive in and become a pro!

Best of Mactuts+

Last Thursday was a sad day for Sparrow users ’round the world. The company announced, in quite a surprise turn, that it had been acquired by Google and that any new features for their Mac and iOS apps will no longer be developed – presumably because the team are now busy overhauling the default Gmail client with some of Sparrow’s fancy features.

Sparrow was one of the leading examples of the innovative apps on the App Store that helps make OS X a better platform for everyone. Plus, it was one of the few email apps that actually worked better than the alternatives. So what does all this mean for the future of email on OS X?

When a Sparrow Falls

Sparrow was acquired by Google last week for an undisclosed sum and no future features for Sparrow’s Mac and iOS apps will be developed.

When the news of Sparrow’s acquisition first broke, I, for one, was a little angry at the change (expressing my true anger would make this article definitely NSFW), and it seems that I was not alone in my thoughts. There are plenty of other commentators around the ‘net who have expressed their anger at this change, presumably because the developers at Sparrow are now dedicating all their resources towards Google, not their own projects. As I had shelled out around $13 of my hard-earned cash to Sparrow for the privelege of owing their programs on my Mac and iPhone, the move made me, at least, feel a little betrayed – especially seeing as I will see no new features in future releases, just the standard bug fixes.

Other Email Apps Aren’t Dead, but They Feel Ancient

So, what does this mean for the future of e-mail on OS X? Well thankfully, there are at least a couple of lights at the end of the tunnel. Of course, you can always stick to the default option of Mail.app on OS X or go for one of the many alternatives (Postbox, for example), but the problem with these is they don’t really do anything completely differently. I don’t really like the default e-mail app in OS X, and because I use an Exchange-based email system, my only real option is Microsoft Outlook, which I grabbed along with Office 2011 for Mac at a discounted student price. Mail.app never worked perfectly with the Exchange based email system, even marking read emails as unread, forcing me to stick with Microsoft’s email app that’s more aimed at the enterprise than individual users.

As someone who uses an Exchange-based mail system, Outlook is often my only other alternative to Mail.app for full support.

But at the end of the day, most of the email clients available for Mac nowadays are all largely the same old approach to email we’ve always seen. Apple’s own Mail.app has had a few new features added to it over the past two versions of OS X, but that was just to make it look like the iPad client (which I also don’t like – I’m a tough guy to please, by the way). It’s still basically the same email we’ve always known, without any major innovation. And, after all, we are Mac users so we want something new and innovative – if we didn’t then we wouldn’t have bought a Mac. That’s why Mac users took to Sparrow so quickly: it really was innovative, bringing the best of Gmail together with the best of native OS X apps, which made quite the killer combo.

So it begs the question: what’s in store for email on OS X?

.Mail – The Next Sparrow?

The first alternative is dotmailapp (or .Mail) which promises to reinvent mail as we know it. According to the .Mail team, email hasn’t changed much since the 1970s, when the first email was sent, which is of course debatable, but it’s sure hopeful when an email app team recognizes the need for change. Apart from its gorgeous interface and website (which brings tears of joy to your eyes if you’re hoping for a better-than-Sparrow email app), it promises Actionsteps, which are designed to help you prioritise your email a lot easier through simple clicks and differently shaded squares, a dark red one for important and a light red one for those not so important.

Actionsteps in dotmailapp is an approach to e-mail never really seen before.

What’s more, it’s being designed by Tobias van Schneider, a German art director and user interface designer, and it started out as a design concept that was then anounced to the world as an upcoming real email app. As such, .Mail has really got a touch of class and style in there, unlike other email clients which tend to prioritise functionality over aesthetics. These both are things I feel should really, at least on the Mac platform, go hand in hand with each other. Many clients seem to sacrifice one for the other and the results can sometimes be undesirable – you’ve either got a really stylish e-mail client that doesn’t really do anything or a really powerful one with tonnes of great features that looks like the back end of a bus.

It remains to be seen how much real innovation they can bring to email, but the concepts look very promising already, especially for those of us that are tired of looking at slight iterations of the same old email UI.

The interface in the upcoming dotmailapp is drop dead gorgeous – clean, simplistic and easy to use.

Or Maybe You Want a Pilot for Your Email

Another email app in the works is Mail Pilot, an app that also looks very promising for a new take on email. It is currently backed by over 1,600 people on the funding platform Kickstarter and has received around $54,000 worth of pledges (much more than the planned $35,000). This project, however, is a lot bolder approach to redesigning email than .Mail. Instead of reading e-mails one by one, Mail Pilot acts ore like a task manager, marking new messages as uncompleted tasks. You then read through that e-mail and mark it off as complete once you’ve finished with it.

Mail Pilot processes your e-mail like a task manager, with incoming e-mails being marked as “to review”.

Any messages that are marked off as complete are then archived automatically to try to avoid any inbox clutter. If an e-mail arrives and you don’t have time for it at that particular moment, you can mark it down for review and Mail Pilot will automatically remind you in a period of time (which is set by you) to look at it again. Thsi should help ensure that none of your emails are ever forgotten before you’ve taken action on them! The other great feature about Mail Pilot is that is works with virtually every single mail account, so you aren’t tied down to any particular platform. Oddly, though, it looks like Mail Pilot will be a subscription based web app with native apps for OS X among other platforms, so it’s hard to say how well it will really feel on the Mac.

Good Things Come to Those Who Wait … We Hope

Unfortunately for us consumers, there’s no public betas for both of the clients I’ve looked at today, but I’m told that they will be arriving sometime “this summer”. Hopefully that means that, come the end of August we’ll be able to test them both out. However, given the exciting new features and intuitive workflow pattern demonstrated in the applications featured above, it can definitely be said that the future of e-mail really is on OS X. We really do need a different way of dealing with our e-mails – I dread it when I’m hovering over the Lotus Notes icon on my desktop on Monday morning at work and it often takes me a good hour to work through my backlog.

I’d certainly be looking for a new way of sorting through my e-mails and I’m sure I’m not alone on this front. How often do we spend at home, work or in our spare time just looking through and trying to deal with all those little unread items in our inbox? With these two fantastic projects currently in progress, the future is looking bright. And I’m sure it’ll be a relief to almost everyone to see that innovation on OS X from indie dev teams is far from dead!

Oh, and if anyone from Google’s reading this, please don’t buy out either of these projects unless you really plan to ship their Mac apps. And we still wouldn’t mind if you kept developing Sparrow!

The official Google Drive Mac app made a somewhat underwhelming debut. While it features full Finder integration and syncing options that matched those of the Mac Dropbox client, it fails to leverage the power of Google Drive on the web — which includes a full office suite and a plethora of sharing and file management options. And neither the Mac app nor web app are particularly user-friendly.

I’ve wondered why it has to be so hard. Apparently the developers of Archy felt the same way, so they created an app to make Google Drive and Docs easy. The app’s still in beta, but I can already say confidently that they succeeded.

Familiar Design

The resemblance to Twitter for Mac is uncanny.

Archy is a brand-new app designed to make Google Drive work great with your Mac, even better than it does with Google’s own tools. It still in beta, but already stands out for its great features and interface. The layout will be instantly familiar to users of Twitter for Mac or Sparrow. You have a dark grey sidebar on the left with a profile picture and five icons, and items on the right separated by thin horizontal lines. The sidebar icons, from top to bottom, represent Files, Favorites, Contacts, Collections, and Trash.

Each item has a star and a lock to the left of its icon — click on the star to favorite/unfavorite, or on the lock to change visibility. Double click anywhere within the item box to open it in the default app. The date of last modification, the name of the last editor, and the collection it’s from are shown below the filename. To the right, there’s a share button (indicated by a cut-out person with a plus sign next to their head). You decide whether to let them view or edit the document, and enter the email addresses of your intended recipients.

Great news for mouse haters: Archy can be used entirely from the keyboard. The arrow keys navigate through lists. Hold Command and press a numbered key from 1-5 to switch between the main sections. Command-6, Command-7, and Command-8 offer preview, sharing, and organization options for the selected file or folder, respectively. Command-0 shows your profile. There are also keyboard shortcuts for opening, sharing, and deleting files, and the Space bar toggles OS X’s Quick Look view.

Swipe up/pull down (depending on your scrolling settings) from the top of the list to refresh, just like with Twitter for Mac. If there’s a general, non-Twitter-specific function that you use on Twitter for Mac, it’s almost certainly replicated here. Archy appears to be completely modelled upon the design of the official Twitter app. And why not? It works, looks good, and it’s familiar.

Clever Sync

You can drag-and-drop both to and from Archy to copy files between your Mac and Google Drive or to share them with others. If you open a file via Archy, then subsequently modify it, the updated version gets automatically uploaded to Google Drive. All your Drive files are saved to your computer for offline use; you can keep working on them anytime and they’ll be automatically synchronized when you go back online. You also get notified if new documents have been shared with you, or if changes have been made to existing docs. It all feels rather magical.

Drag and drop files to the Archy window to upload them to Google Drive. It works in reverse, too.

But there’s a darker side to this. Archy does not keep an easily accessible folder on your computer, à la Dropbox — or the official Google Drive app, for that matter. It hides them in your Application Support folder, which is invisible to most users. If you’re using the Google Drive app to sync, take note that you could have a bit of data redundancy once Archy comes into the fold. That said, it’s not that much different from the way iCloud sync hides the real files and only shows them in apps.

I love that Archy includes offline support, and I love that it automatically uploads new revisions to Google Drive. I’m concerned, however, that it isn’t more transparent about where and how it stores files for offline use. I wish I could tell it to use a folder of my choosing; I wish it would play nice with my existing Google Drive desktop sync setup. But it doesn’t. Archy doesn’t even warn you about downloading and caching documents for offline use. Not an issue for most, but definitely concerning for those with limited hard-drive space or small bandwidth caps on Internet usage.

Integration

I’ve already mentioned many of the ways in which Archy integrates flawlessly with both OS X and Google Drive. Technically minded readers will be happy to know that the app leverages a number of OS X Lion and Mountain Lion’s core technologies, including Grand Central Dispatch for optimizing multi-core performance and Core Data for syncing. It shows in the performance – Archy is fast, responsive, and lightweight, even though it’s still in beta.

Beyond keyboard shortcuts, Quick Look, drag-and-drop, and automatic uploads, the app offers real-time notifications with Growl or Mountain Lion’s Notification Center, it lives in your dock or menubar (or both), and you can set any app as the default for opening each of the Google filetypes (Documents, Presentations, Spreadsheets, Forms, Drawings).

Even if you tell Archy to open files in a non-Google app, it will automatically upload your revisions to Google Drive.

Everything that you can do within the Google Drive web app (except for editing files, which is elegantly handed off to external apps) can be done within Archy — including organizing files into collections, restoring deleted files, and clearing out the trash. They’ve got all the bases covered…almost.

No Multiple Accounts

I expect that I’m the exception to the rule here, but I found the biggest missing feature to be support for multiple accounts. I have three Google Drive accounts in regular use (one personal, two for work), and it’s a huge pain to sign out of one then sign-in to another. The web app is inconvenient and oftentimes unwieldy, but at least it allows me to access files from all three accounts simultaneously.

With an increasing number of companies adopting Google Apps for business, this could go from a handy bonus for power users to an essential feature in no time at all. I hope we’ll see multiple sign-in support added soon, but I fear it may not hit until version 2.0 or later.

A Great Start

As I’ve stated a few times above, Archy’s still in beta. It has a few outstanding bugs, and is prone to partial-breaking occasionally — I had a few instances where the open and preview functionality stopped working until I rebooted the computer, and sync failed a few times. My profile picture never once loaded, either. For the most part, however, it’s very much stable and usable as it is.

The Archy team’s done a great job laying the foundations for what may be the definitive Google Drive app on Mac OS X. For all its raw power and functionality, Google Drive is an unwieldy beast. Archy tames it, adding a layer of usability and design to harness all of its flexibility. If this is how it works in beta, I can’t wait to try the full release.

Macs aren’t known for being easily customizable, but if you put a little work into it and have the right tools, you can make some great changes to really make you Mac your own. This is especially true with your application icons. With the exception of your wallpaper, switching out the icons that represent each of your applications is perhaps the easiest change you can make to your interface. Sometimes, though, the image or icon you want to use isn’t in a format that’s going to work as a Mac application icon.

iConvert Icons wants to fix all that. I’ve been using their webapp for years to convert images and Windows icons to something I could use in OS X, and I’ve never found a Mac app I’ve liked near as much. They’ve finally released an app that can live on my Mac, though, and save me the trip online every time I need a change of scenery in OS X. But will the new Mac app be as good as (or perhaps even better than) their webapp?

Converting Icons to .ICNS

Let’s say you found an awesome icon of a flying bison from a pretty popular cartoon show, and you want to start using this cool icon for maybe all of your apps, or at least the ones you like the most, differentiation be damned. Unfortunately, the icon is in .ico format, which would be great if you had a PC, but it’s not going to work on your Mac.

Converting a flying bison icon by dragging it into the app

That’s where iConvert Icons comes in. When the app opens, there’s really only one thing to do: drag an icon into the window and wait for it to convert. But there’s more to it, and this little tool packs a big icon punch.

If you have an image that’s anything but a Mac .icns format, iConvert Icons will handle it for you. The checkboxes on the right let you choose whether you want a Mac icon, a Windows icon, a .png for use on Linux or the web, or if you want to create a favicon for use as a URL or website icon. Select a single format or multiple formats and drag your image to the left window.

That starts the conversion process. The only thing you’ll have to do is choose a destination folder. iConvert Icons won’t navigate to your new icons, though, so choose your folder wisely or you’ll have to hunt your icons down. Batch conversion, impossible on the webapp, is also super simple here. Select the images or icons you want to convert and drag them to the conversion window. The output process is the same as with a single conversion. It’s good to note that if there’s already a file in the destination folder with the same name as one of your new files, iConvert Icons will ask before overwriting anything.

Creating Images You Can Actually Edit

Because I do tend to customize all of my icons and try to get a really specific look on my Mac, I like to be able to edit my icons before implementation. Unfortunately, neither .icns nor .ico files are compatible with applications like Photoshop. This is where iConvert Icons can make itself useful again. Even if the icon or entire set you’ve downloaded is already in a Mac compatible format, you can convert all of them into files you can edit.

Choose .png from the checkboxes to the right to get a Photoshop compatible file

Just select the .png checkbox in iConvert Icons and drag everything to the conversion pane. Once complete, open the new files in your image editor of choice. Once you’ve gotten everything how you like it, save the edited files and convert them back to Mac .icns icons. (Remember to save them with different filenames, though, or you’ll be overwriting the originals!)

Quick Tip: This can also be handy if you need to use an icon from an app, say, in an article, and you want it in an image format.

Digging into the Preferences

There are some really useful preferences, especially if you’re going to be converting a lot of icons at once. You can tell iConvert Icons how to figure out the icon source, or you can just leave the app to auto-detect the source by default. iConvert Icons will also export icons of different types into separate folders, handy if you’re creating Mac and Windows icons at the same time.

The application preferences let you make some important choices.

The export format checkboxes are repeated in the application preferences without any additional utility. However, this is where you also can find the advanced size selection preferences. Depending on the output format and the OS you’re optimizing for, you can adjust the size and color depth of the finished icons.

Another Quick Tip: Once you have the icons you want, you could use iCondubber to tweak your Mac with them for free.

Conclusion

Any concerns I had that iConvert Icons would lose functionality with the move to the Mac were misplaced. All of the great features have been preserved with the addition of batch conversion and increased control over the output format. Whereas before you could only ever get one icon at a time and just took the sizes the webapp gave you, the Mac app will handle as many images as you throw at it and lets you take the wheel when deciding how your icons turn out.

The biggest drawback of the webapp was that it was, in fact, a webapp. I had to stop what I was doing and upload my icons one at a time. Now with iConvert Icons right on my desktop, icon conversion is seamless and no longer removes me from my editing or customization workflow. I really couldn’t be happier with the move of iConvert Icons to the Mac and would recommend it to anyone needing to customize icons for any OS.

I love arcade-style games. They offer such simple pleasure, with quick thrills, a mantra of easy to learn but hard to master, and you can drop in and out of them at any time. The Mac has seen its share of great arcade space shooters over the years, thanks to shareware classics from the likes of Ambrosia Software (Maelstrom, SketchFighter, Mars Rising) and Pangea Software (Pangea Arcade), among others.

While Sad Cat Software’s Violet Storm is a decent and mostly-fun game, it doesn’t hold a candle to these or other popular recent games owing to the legacy of 1979 arcade hit Asteroids (such as Geometry Wars, to which Violet Storm is highly indebted). But at $1.99, it might just be worth a look anyway. Allow me to explain why.

Destroy Everything

You can’t get a much simpler premise than that found in Violet Storm. The instructions sum it up well, “Destroy everything that moves and [everything] that doesn’t.” Try to do it quickly, too, because waves are timed and you get more points for destroying more enemies.

Destroy everything. And try not to get hit.

You can use either the arrow keys or the traditional WASD combo to move your ship. Click and hold the left mouse button to shoot; bullets fire out in the direction of the mouse pointer relative to your ship, which stays centred on the screen as you move about. It’s not a good game for trackpads, so use an external mouse if you have one. I couldn’t get any gamepads to work.

You’ll also pick up gravity bombs and “destructive multi-laser blasts.” Press the 1 or 2 keys, or click their icons on the screen, to use them. They prove invaluable for clearing out the screen when it all gets to be too much. Sometimes you’ll get a brief reprieve from the intense action with a few seconds of invulnerability or quad damage. Run out of life and it’s game over.

There are three game modes: Campaign, Speed Havoc, and Sniper Mode. Campaign is an odd name to give something that never ends, but it’s the one to pick if you just want to see how long you can last — it’s the traditional arcade mode, with continuous waves of enemies. Some enemies can shoot, but most just try to collide with you. Waves are timed to 1:32 each, with a congratulatory pop-up at the end. You get lots of extra points that can be collected during the 15-second cool-down period between waves.

The mode select screen. Click the bottom left area to change difficulty.

Speed Havoc asks you to destroy 650 enemies as quickly as possible, with a maximum time of six minutes and 12 seconds. Sniper mode gives you a stronger weapon and a 1:32 time limit, and scores you based on your accuracy. Each can be played on easy, medium, or hard difficulty. Your health is shown by a white bar beneath the score. Scores are automatically uploaded to the online leaderboards.

Interface Issues

Violet Storm was on iOS first, and it shows. The controls actually work pretty well — certainly better than I expected — but the game still has some interface issues. To pause the action, you must click on the Menu button in the top right of screen. Controls cannot be mapped to alternative keys. The space key fires, but you can’t direct shots if you use it. And leaderboards can only be navigated by clicking and dragging on the scoreboard area — the mouse wheel doesn’t work, nor do arrow keys, and there’s no scrollbar. There’s also no back button.

That’s me in 388th place. Scrolling this far down the list was almost as hard as getting that score.

Slick Visuals

Violet Storm’s neon-futuristic vector graphics are a joy to behold, with your Mac’s display filled glowing enemies, bullets, and lasers of all the fluorescent colors that you can imagine. This is most notable at higher levels, when it can be hard to see more than a few millimeters of background space. The background itself is a generic shot of space tinted purple, blue, green, and red by gases refracting light. This background image is overlaid with a grid, presumably to help you gauge distance — although in reality it adds nothing of use.

Capturing a screenshot on a screen full of enemies proved harder than I could handle. Believe me when I say it gets way crazier than this.

Press Command-F to switch to full-screen, for a much better experience.

The game rewards you for doing well with ever more stunning visual feasts and a stronger main weapon. What starts as a continuous stream of single bullets eventually becomes a searing bolt of electricity pouring out in all directions. It’s immensely satisfying, but once you get the basics down the first few waves drag on and feel boring. Upping the difficulty to hard alleviates this problem, but only for a while.

Repetitive

This is where Violet Storm suffers most; it’s really repetitive. The Campaign mode gets your adrenaline pumping after half a dozen or more waves, but you’ll feel less inclined to push through to that point each time you play. There simply isn’t enough variety to keep players coming back. Speed Havoc and Sniper Mode are effectively token offerings — with no additional levels, they last only as long as the novelty factor (which wore off after two goes on each of them for me).

Sniper Mode shows your accuracy in lieu of a score.

The main music track is more than two minutes long, but you wouldn’t know it from playing the game. It loops slight variations in its heavy electronic beats every seven seconds. Sound effects are believable enough, but they can get grating over time. Turn both sound and music down or off completely if you have a headache.

Consider Your Options

It doesn’t help that I’ve seen this all before, only better. Violet Storm, the gamers among you may recognize, is like a poor man’s Geometry Wars. Or maybe that should be a Mac user’s Geometry Wars, since the downloadable Xbox 360 hit series never made it over. If you’ve got an older version of OS X installed, the PowerPC build of freeware clone Grid Wars 2 is still floating around online (despite being officially pulled from circulation). Or you could grab a copy of MAME and the original arcade version of Robotron 2084 to go back to the core inspiration. These would all be better options.

If you’re stuck, though, and keen for some dual-stick shooter action, Violet Storm is a decent choice. It takes a bit long to build up difficulty, and suffers from a distinct lack of variety and depth, but it’s adrenaline-pumping fun nonetheless. For less than the price of a cup of coffee in most cities, it’ll give arcade fans at least a couple hours of entertainment.

Whenever Apple releases a new version of OS X, the blogosphere goes wild, typing tens of thousands of words about the latest features and changes in the operating system we all love. There’s always new core features that are hidden to most of our eyes, as well as the more subtile changes you might not notice in the UI without a reviewer pointing them out.

It’s only been one short year since Lion was released, but even with the quick release window for Mountain Lion, reviewers still went through the OS and found plenty to write about. Our own Alex Arena wrote a thorough overview of the new features and apps you’ll use most in his Mountain Lion Review. In our opinion, it’s a great place to find out what to expect from Mountain Lion if you don’t want to spend too much time reading about the deepest changes in the OS. We even included a giveaway of 3 copies of Mountain Lion, so be sure to check it out and enter in our drawing if you haven’t upgraded already!

But, if you’re looking for more detailed info about Mountain Lion, here’s some of the best Mountain Lion coverage from around the ‘net, as well as some extra Mountain Lion info you should keep in mind.

Don’t worry: This Mountain Lion doesn’t bite.

Digging Deeper Into Mountain Lion

• John Siracusa always writes the most comprehensive reviews of OS X at Ars Technica, and his Mountain Lion Review is no exception. It’s over 26,000 words long, broken into 24 pages in your browser, and covers everything from UI changes to the deeper changes Apple made in the internals of OS X.
  • Marco Arment of Instapaper fame even wrote a review of John Siracusa’s review, comparing it to previous reviews he’d written and rating it on features. It’s a fun read if only for the laughs.
• John Gruber is easily the top Apple blogger, and his Mountain Lion review puts this release in the perspective of Apple’s overall goals for OS X and iOS.
• Federico Viticci at MacStories wrote another lengthy review of Mountain Lion, covering in detail the changes, small and large, that you’ll notice in Mountain Lion.
• TidBITS is one of the oldest sites covering Mac news, and they wrote a nice feature article about little details you might not have otherwise noticed in Mountain Lion.
• Shawn Blanc wrote about more little features in Mountain Lion, and also wrote a concise review about the Simplification of OS X.
• Wayne Dixon digs into the new features and changes in Mountain Lion Server.

Extra Stuff to Keep in Mind

Now that you’ve got your Instapaper queue filled for a while, you might want to turn your attention to getting your Mac upgraded to Mountain Lion if you haven’t already. From an informal poll of our readers on Twitter today, and from looking at comments on the Mac App Store, it looks like upgrading directly from the App Store is working fine for most users. If you’d like to do a clean install of Mountain Lion, though, you can use our guide for making a Lion Boot Disk (we’d recommend using a USB flash drive), as it works the exact same in Mountain Lion.

Another thing to remember is that you can install OS X Mountain Lion on all of your Macs (assuming you have 5 or less) with the same App Store purchase. If you want to save the time and internet bandwidth of redownloading it on each Mac, you can copy the installer from your Applications directory before installing it on your Mac, then copy and run it on your other Macs. It might be a good idea to keep a copy on your external hard drive just in case you ever need it.

If you bought a Mac this past month, or buy a new one running Lion, you can get Mountain Lion for free. But you might have to wait…

Then, if you recently purchased a new Mac, you can get a free code to download Mountain Lion from the App Store from Apple’s Up-to-Date program. Unfortunately, there have been a few glitches, with some users not receiving their codes yet. Others, like myself, quickly received the code, only to have the App Store reject it saying the code had already been used. Apple Care says this is a known issue, and they’ll have new codes sent out within 72 hours. We’re still waiting…

Once you have upgraded (or clean installed), be sure to check the App Store for the latest versions of your apps. Many apps, including Apple’s own iWork apps and my favorite writing app, iA Writer, have been recently updated with support for the latest iCloud features. Also, if you have a new Retina Display MacBook Pro, you’ll find that many app updates include support for the Retina Display graphics.

Happy Upgrade Week!

We’d love to hear how the transition to Mountain Lion has gone for you, so if you’ve upgraded, let us know your experience in the comments below. Or, if you’ve found great Mountain Lion features you’d like to share, or are holding out on upgrading for some reason, we’d like to hear about that too.

Now let me go check my inbox again to see if Apple’s emailed me my Up-to-Date code for Mountain Lion…

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 July 27th, 2011.

Editor’s Note: Mission Control in Mountain Lion is almost the exact same as it is in Lion, so everything here still applies even if you’ve just upgraded to Apple’s latest and greatest OS. The only real change is that there’s an option to not group windows by their application, to make it easier to see more at once.

For years Apple has been tweaking and rethinking the way we interact with open windows and applications inside of OS X. Exposé came along and allowed us to quickly view all open windows or even hide them completely. Then Spaces entered the scene and allowed us to create a number of unique workspaces or desktops, each containing its own applications and windows.

Mission Control is the evolution of this process. It represents a new and very powerful way to manage your multitasking mess inside of of OS X. Some find the new system intuitive, but many others find it completely intimidating. Today we’re going to show you how to master Mission Control so your Mac can become a beacon of productivity.

Launching Mission Control

There are a number of ways to launch Mission Control, how you do it will depend both on your personal preference and specific hardware setup.

For instance, for those using a multi-touch trackpad (older trackpads won’t work), a three-finger swipe up will launch Mission Control. However, this gesture doesn’t do anything on the Magic Mouse. Instead, the default action to Launch Mission Control from the Magic Mouse is a double-tap with two fingers.

You can also launch Mission Control directly from the keyboard via the function keys. As with trackpads, older models will differ from newer models here as Apple has changed around the default functionality in recent years. The best way to find out and customize your setup is to go to Mission Control in System Preferences. Here you can set your keys for launching Mission Control and performing some of the old Exposé commands.

Mission Control Keyboard Shortcuts

Also shown in the image above is the option to set up Hot Corners. These allow you to launch Mission Control when your mouse resides in a specific corner of your screen. For instance, I have Mission Control set to the bottom left corner because it keeps accidental activation at a minimum.

The Anatomy of Mission Control

When you launch Mission Control, your desktop image will zoom out and your open windows will be displayed in groups according to their respective applications. Simply click on a window to exit Mission Control with that item in view.

Mission Control

Already we can see some huge benefits. In one slick view, we can easily navigate between not only our various open applications, but also the open windows within each app. This was possible before Mission Control, but the visual grouping is much nicer here.

Thumbnail Strip

In addition to the primary area of Mission Control where your windows are displayed, there is also a strip of thumbnails along the top of the screen. By default, these are organized by order of last use but this can be changed in System Preferences (I prefer the standard, static order).

Dashboard, Desktops and Full Screen Apps

This area is reserved for three distinct items: Dashboard, Desktops and Full-Screen apps. You already know all about Dashboard so I won’t waste any time explaining it.

You likely already know about full-screen apps as well. This is a new feature in Lion that is currently only supported by a few apps such as Mail and Safari. When an app is in full-screen mode, it is removed from the desktop that it resided in, placed into its own area and shown here.

Desktops are the most complicated item that you’ll see here. Mastering these is the key to really understanding Mission Control so we’ll discuss them in-depth in the next section.

Desktops

Many fans of Spaces become immediately upset when they update to Lion and see that the feature is now gone, replaced by Mission Control. It may not be immediately evident, but Desktops actually give you nearly all the benefits of Spaces and more.

As with Spaces, Desktops represent individual workspaces, each with their own assigned apps and windows. To place an app on a Desktop, launch Mission Control and drag it to that Desktop.

Each Desktop can have its own wallpaper! Just switch to a Desktop and go to System Preferences to set the wallpaper for that screen.

To create a new empty Desktop, click the icon in the upper right (shown below). To create a new Desktop with an application in it, drag the desired application to the same icon.

Creating a new Desktop

A little “x” will appear over the new Desktop on hover, allowing you to delete it. You can quickly switch Desktops with a swipe gesture (two fingers on the Magic Mouse, three on a trackpad) or by hitting Control plus the number of the Desktop that you want to switch to.

So we see that, where Spaces forced us to make a solid decision on our number of spaces, Mission Control allows this to be a much more fluid process that can be decided and changed at will as your setup changes throughout the day.

Assigning an App to a Desktop

One of the things that I struggled with initially is how some apps automatically appear on every Desktop. To change this behavior, right-click on the app icon in the dock and go to Options.

Assigning an App to a Desktop

As you can see, you can assign an app to no Desktops, all Desktops or the currently active Desktop.

Exposé

Just as we saw that the Spaces functionality has been rethought and placed into Mission Control, Exposé functionality is also still present and even improved.

For instance, if you have a number of TextEdit files open, hitting your “All Windows” shortcut will not only show you a spread out view of all of the open TextEdit windows, you’ll also see a strip of recently open files along the bottom of the screen.

Recent files are displayed on window Exposé

If you have lots of recent files, you can use the arrow keys to navigate the thumbnail strip.

Conclusion

Though many new Lion (…and Mountain Lion) users are initially shocked to find that Spaces and Exposé have been wrapped into a new unified system, the news is actually great for all users because most of the functionality that you loved from Snow Leopard is still here, albeit in an improved form.

In place of Spaces, we have Desktops, which function very similarly and even allow you to assign different wallpaper images to each, keeping them visually distinct. All of your favorite Exposé commands still work, and some are even better than before.

Mission Control also gives us a completely new way to view our various open windows and applications. This new, zoomed-out view of our workspace is immensely helpful for quickly sorting through the clutter and can be instantly activated via mouse, trackpad or keyboard.

No matter how you prefer to navigate your windows, you’ll likely benefit immensely from making a serious attempt to incorporate Mission Control into your workflow. Leave a comment below and let us know what you think of Mission Control and how it has improved or worsened your Lion experience.

Note: Wallpaper images by Fifty Foot Shadows.