Category: Mac

Space… the final frontier. A frontier not often explored by video games — not in a spaceship anyway. While there’s a sea of racing games, first person shooters, and other genres that have way too many clones, space flight simulators that let you explore the vast galaxy while admiring it’s magnificent beauty are very scarce.

This once popular type of game is considered by most to be a “dead” genre, and this is sad because there are many people who love space, spaceships, and space battles. Some have EVE to rely on, but not everyone can afford the monthly price or the hours needed to invest in such deep game.

This is where Galaxy on Fire 2 Full HD comes into play. While these are not the voyages of the starship Enterprise, this title will take you were no one has gone before — and it’ll do so with finesse.

Presentation

In the grand scheme of things, Galaxy on Fire 2 Full HD is a complete overhaul from its predecessor. The look and feel of many parts of the game have been revamped to create a great sci-fi experience that immerses you into the game. The galaxy map, for instance, has received and amazing lift-up. Not only does it work much better than in the previous game, but it looks gorgeous as well. Jumping from one solar system to the other with the jumpgate is a joy to look at.

Freelance missions are back as well, and they too have a visual touch-up. They are no longer just plain menu items you can choose from. All of these changes make GoF2 a more visually immersive game. Rather than having a bunch of menu items like in the first game, this iteration pulls you closer into the experience.

Immersive menus are not the only new additions to this game. Another great addition is mini games, like mining, that can be found throughout your gameplay experience. This enhances the emphasis different jobs have on your ranks. Since you can always deviate from the main story missions like in the previous installment, there are always plenty of side missions to tackle here as well. Items at the shop cost much more than they did on the previous game, so you will want to embark on different missions quite a bit.

When it comes to the story, GoF2 follows the adventures of former Wing Commander of the Terran Space Fleet, Keith T. Maxwell. And much like in the previous game, he is a complete pro at taking down the bad guys.

Right from the start, the story will take a surprising turn, allowing you to explore a wider scope of the galaxy. Without spoiling anything, it is safe to say that while the story isn’t going to have the lasting appeal of a certain space third-person shooter, the story does manage to keep you interested.

The only downside with the overall plot lays completely in the voice acting and the lack of connection with the characters. The characters are forgettable, and although at times the voice acting is somewhat polished, as a whole it does little to improve the story.

Graphics

The guys over at FishLabs were not kidding when they decided to add “full HD” to the name of the Mac version. GoF2FHD looks phenomenal. It is perhaps the prettiest looking space ever seen from games in its price range. Passing beside meteors and through space dust is something to behold. The graphics alone are reason enough to play this visually-striking game.

It doesn’t stop there, however. Menus, sun glare, lasers, ships, and space stations, all look extremely good. And considering that we were running our review copy on a fairly old 2007 Macbook Pro, the game runs amazingly well and looks even better than we could have expected.

Gameplay

At its very core, GoF2 is a space trading and combat simulation video game with an open world environment. Because of this, you are able to do a broad range of jobs throughout the galaxy. This allows you to gain credits, credits of which you can spend on new ships, weapons, equipment, and random items that you can sell for more money in other systems. This makes the game addicting. It makes you want to work hard to get the best craft and the best weapons available. The only downfall to this is that trekking from system to system is a bit slow. Other than that hassle, the game takes a hold of you and makes you play it by enticing you with plenty of goodies.

Gameplay in this game varies depending on whatever you’re currently doing. If you’re mining you’ll probably hate it until you get a better mining tool. If you’re fighting pirates, you’ll probably find it daunting until you get a better weapon. From the handling of your ship to the power of your weapons, the gameplay gets better and better each time you upgrade.

The only letdowns this game has are few. The ships aiming for example; when you aim, the curser moves but the ship follows it slowly. In other games, when you pull up by dragging the cursor down, most crafts would follow the curser instead of lagging behind it. It’s a bit hard to get use to coming from other flight games. Also, the lack of a cockpit view is rather depressing. From cars to mechs, cockpit view is amazing and it should have been implemented.

Final Thoughts

Galaxy on Fire 2 Full HD is a grand triumph for those out there who still enjoy a space fligh simulator. With superb graphics and a killer gameplay experience, this game is a must have for those who enjoy this genre and those who wish to venture out into space.

As always, don’t forget to leave us your thoughts on the game below, and feel free to join our Steam Group in order to play with or against Mac.AppStorm writers and readers.

It’s been a pretty quiet one this week for news but we’ve still managed to find a couple of pieces to keep you ticking over until next week.

Happy reading!

VLC 2.0.2 released with retina-display support and more

The popular open-source media player VLC has received an boost up to version 2.0.2 today with a load of new features, especially for what seems like just a minor update. Apart from retina display support for the new MacBook Pro, VLC 2.0.2 fixes bugs from previous versions and adds further refinements to the Mac interface, including enhanced crop features and the restoration of the popular “go automatically to full screen” feature.

You can also drag and drop directly between the playlist, services and media library and Growl 1.3 is supported as well (although there’s currently no talk about support for Notification Center in Mountain Lion). One of my favourite new features is the removal of that “building font cache”, which used to crop up every so often and made it impossible to watch a video without having to wait 5 minutes for VLC to find all your fonts.

The new version can be grabbed either directly from their website or via an automatic update from within VLC.

Mountain Lion to offer automatic security updates

On Monday it was revealed that the new upcoming version of OS X will feature automatic security updates that will check whether Mac users are running the latest and up-to-date software, ensuring complete protection from Internet threats.

The move came after an increase in the amount of Mac malware, including the Flashback trojan, discovered back in April and which affected around 600,000 users worldwide. The update, known as “OS X Security Update Test 1.0″, performs a daily check with Apple’s servers to make sure that Mountain Lion is completely up-to-date, or when the user’s Mac is restarted and also has the ability to download and install updates discreetly in the background.

Apple has also toned down the language on its corporate website following the Flashback trojan. The section on Mac security stated before that Macs “don’t get PC viruses” and that you can “safeguard your data – by doing nothing”. Now, the section reads that OS X is “built to be safe” and that safety is “built right in”.

The new feature is available in the new Developer Preview 4 and will feature in the retail version of Mountain Lion, expected to be released later this month via the Mac App Store.

And finally…

RIP, MobileMe

Today didn’t just mark the start of a new month but also the death of MobileMe, Apple’s cloud-based Internet storage which has been around (in one form or another) since 2000 and has been ditched in favour of iCloud. Visitors to the service are greeted with a simple “Closed” sign and a link to how to move your files across to iCloud and download any existing files from your Gallery.

MobileMe was born on January 5, 2000 as iTools before being renamed to .Mac in July 2002 and MobileMe in July 2008. It was criticised mostly because of its high price tag – a yearly subscription clocked in at $99, and teething problems experienced at its launch, including unstability and synchronisation problems.

Heard Anything Else?

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

I have almost completely given up on organizing the files and folders on my hard drive. There are just so many files that accumulate before I have a chance to clean up and organize them. Certain folders, like my Desktop and Downloads folders, are always filled up with stuff that I don’t even remember putting there.

That’s where Folder Tidy comes in handy. As you can probably guess by its name, it is an app that can help you organize your existing files neatly into folders. How does it do it? Let’s take a look!

Getting Started

Folder Tidy isn’t a very complex app, but what it does is truly genius. Basically, you just point it to a disorganized folder, then point it to a new folder where you want to store your organized files. It´ll then take over and will do all the cleaning work for you. It will arrange the existing files into corresponding new folders by file type, saving you all that time that you would have spent separating each file from the rest.

It can even get much more specific, if you want it to. That’s what’s great about it: it is ready to clean up anything the first time you launch it, but it is also very customizable and can become a powerful tool without getting too complicated.

The Process

Folder Tidy’s cleanup process is quite simple. As soon as you open it, the app will guide you through a couple steps to get you started cleaning. The first one is pointing the app to the messy folder that you’d like to organize. The default ones are the desktop and the downloads folder, but you can point the app to any folder in your disk.

The second step is choosing the target folder, where the organized files will be sent to. Inside that folder, all your files will be organized into subfolders, organized and named by file type. But we’ll get to how the rules for organizing work next.

Organization

Although Folder Tidy might look a tad too simple at first sight, under the Preferences for the app you can find a few options that can help you tweak the app so that the organization works however you want it to.

Rules

The most important part for customizing how the app works are the Rules. These define where the files end up after the cleanup. By default, the app comes with a set of basic pre-existing rules, which cover pretty much any common file types and extensions. The default ones include Apps, Music, Pictures, Videos, and about a dozen more common preset file types.

You can activate and deactivate any set of rules for each cleanup that you do, and you can also make up your own rules. These basically work through a bunch of logic statements, where you can specify any set of conditions under one single rule. The conditions you can use include kind of file, last opened and modified date, date of creation, name, and file size.

Given the level of customization that the app provides, you can get quite creative with it and use it for doing certain organization tasks that would otherwise waste a lot of your time if done manually.

Ignore

If there are any elements within the folder that you’re getting cleaned up that you’d like to keep intact, you can point the app to it through the Ignore preference. This feature works with both files and folders, and you can add as many of them as you’d like. Once the cleanup process starts, the files that you’ve specified here will not be organized, and instead will be, as the feature puts it, ignored.

Reversing

Once the cleanup process ends, you’ll be shown a window with a few options and a notification that the process was successful. Here you can go to the new organized folder, quit the app, or undo the whole process, returning all the files to the old folder as if nothing had happened. This can be very useful if you setup your rules wrong, selected the wrong folder, or just wanted to try it out and see how it’d work.

Conclusion

Folder Tidy is definitely not the only option around for cleaning up and organizing your desktop or any specific folder. However, it might very well be the most convenient, fast, and easily accessible app for what it does. If you are willing to drop the five bucks for it, I’m certain Folder Tidy will prove quite useful for you, especially if you are an advanced user that would like to get very specific sorting from the app.

Let’s face it, even the most organized of us need a little help from time to time. Even if Folder Tidy’s price seems a bit too high for you, the amount of time that it will save you by sorting your messy folders will more than make up for it.

For what seems to be ages now, browser plug-ins and extensions have been improving the way we use browsers, and some go as far as to determine which browser we end up using as a default. These extensions not only improve the browser experience, but they also provide a way to interact with many other programs outside of your browser, rendering some applications less important.

Based on that fact, we have put together a great list of Safari Extensions that’ll make your web browsing experience more powerful, immersive, and incredibly social. Now, be aware that jamming too many plug-ins into your browser may make it run slower, or take more time to start up, so make sure to only install the ones you really want. With that said, have a look at some of the most useful Safari Extensions below.

Social

Browser Enhancing

Support

Development

Entertainment

Conclusion

So there you have it, some of the most handy extensions for Safari out there all in one list. There’s many more awesome extensions out there, so if you have some favorite ones you always install, we’d love to hear about them in the comments below!

Some days, it seems to me that we’re in a technological era that demonstrates simultaneous trends of increased utility and decreased complexity. The strive for simplicity is apparent in Mac software, and the effects are often increased productivity and clarity. The best example of this that I can come up with is a growing number of Mac apps that set out to do one thing really well, rather than the swiss-army-knife applications of the past (not that there isn’t still a time and place for those).

Today, I’m going to take a look at one such application called SnipEdges. Developed by Houdah Software, SnipEdges is a new kind of global snippet manager. It uses the confinement of your screen as its management method, rather than a hierarchical window, and it does so to great effect. Let’s dig in, shall we?

Saving And Using Snippets

There will always be a special place in my heart for menubar apps, and SnipEdges is a particularly elegant one. When you launch, the menubar icon will pop out a helpful introduction video to help you find your bearings. To get started, simply highlight some text you might need later, and drag it to the edge of your screen.

As you near the edge of the screen, a green tab will appear. You can fine-tune the location of the tab, and once you release the mouse button, your snippet will be created. The tabs are beautifully equipped with a slide-out mouseover animation, which is handy for seeing which snippets are which when you’ve built up a large number of them along the edge of the screen.

By default, the name assigned to the snippet will be the first line of text within it, but simple clicking on a snippet that is moused-over will give you the option to rename (or remove) it.

Finally, SnipEdges is built on a drag-and-drop system. So to use a snippet, simply drag it from the edge of your screen to your desired location. The text will be inserted, and the snippet will remain on the edge of your screen for later use.

Not only can SnipEdges handle text, though. You can drag files, folders, and multiple media formats to your screens edges as well, which can likewise be drag-and-dropped into various applications. Text snippets will always have a green color, while any other type of file will be stashed on a blue tab.

A bit of a technical warning: snippets created for files or folders are only references that duplicate the original when dropped. Moving the original file will break the snippet.

In addition to the color coding, SnipEdges provides you with a few customization options. By default, both the left and right edges of the screen are fair game for tab-stashing. However, this can changed to just one or the other, which can come in handy if you’re working in an application with a side-dock or palette window, for example.

From the same Preferences menu (attractively displayed as a pop-down from the menubar icon), you can change the behavior of the tabs themselves. You can disable the mouse-over animation, in the event that you’re confident enough in your ability to remember which snippets are which. You can also turn off the tabs all together, which will keep the out of sight until you actually mouse-over the edge of the screen, which I found helpful for a distraction-free workspace.

SnipEdges certainly isn’t the first piece of software to try and accomplish functionality like this. But it is definitely one of the most graceful. And developing for modern machines poses it’s own challenges in how the software will deal with certain things, such as multi-monitor setups, or the virtual desktops and fullscreen apps found in OS X Lion. And while while Houdah’s website says it will only work on the main monitor (I only use a single monitor), I am quite pleased to report that your snippets will follow you to all of your other Spaces and full screen applications. This makes dragging and dropping between assorted writing applications, coding applications, or browsers an absolute breeze.

Creative Uses

One of my favorite things about these lightweight apps that do a single thing really well is that the ways in which you can use them often vary dramatically from user to user. I’ve come up with a few various ways I think SnipEdges could be used, but I’d love to hear how others are using it as well.

If you find yourself creating several files or folders at a time, SnipEdges can be an efficient way to spawn empty folders or blank documents. Similarly, you can stash templates for later use (think pre-built spreadsheets, or blank invoices).

I haven’t mentioned it much so far, but in my experience, the word “snippet” is most often used in reference to pieces of code, and I haven’t overlooked the benefit of using SnipEdges in such an environment. In addition to the tabs themselves following you to your full-screen IDE, there’s something to be said for not having to use a snippet manager in a separate window.

Final Thoughts

SnipEdges is a creative solution to problem that is probably so commonly-occurring that most people forget that it could be streamlined. Managing text and images between applications and projects has come a long way in the past few years, but that doesn’t mean that it couldn’t be simplified even further. Because let’s face it: the less time you have to spend tinkering with your tools, the more time you can spend focusing on the content behind them.

SnipEdges is only a 1.0 release at the moment. With that in mind, I will confidently say that it has definitely improved my workflow since I began using it only a few days ago. That being said however, it is easy to see how it could fall short on a longer scale. For example, your screen edges only have so much space, so all of your context-specific snippets could get quite unruly after a while. I would like to see some sort of solution for this, such as a profile manager that would only give you access to the snippets you need (text snippets for writing, code snippets for programming, etc.).

Criticisms and feature requests aside, for the low price tag of $2.99, SnipEdges is exactly the kind of lightweight utility I love to fall in love with. I look forward to seeing what kind of improvements Houdah can make, and what other creative ways it’s users find to implement it.

Music is a great thing. It speaks to the soul and talks about the many troubles and triumphs of daily life. Isn’t it nice having all those websites like lyrics.com to find out what the words to your favorite song are? I’ve always use web-based services like that myself, but apps are giving us some new choices and Strophes is one of the latest you may have heard of.

Developed by Alfredo Devvi Bovi, the app aims to be your new solution for instantly finding lyrics to any song you’re listening to, whether it be in Spotify, Rdio, Radium, or iTunes. You can even search for songs that you don’t have in your library or are listening to in your browser. Let’s see if this is the end-all solution for song lyrics, or if you should keep searching for a better solution.

Finding and Reading Lyrics

Getting started with Strophes is very easy. All you have to do is open the app, click a source, and start playing any song you want to listen to. If the lyrics are available on the app’s source website – which happens to be the horribly designed mp3lyrics.com (it actually redirects to .org for some reason) – then it will show them automatically. (Obviously, you must be using one of the aforementioned apps to play your media. If you’re not then you can always use the “Search” function located in the top right corner of the app.)

If the lyrics are in the wrong language, then you can click “L” button to translate them to your native tongue, which can be changed in the Preferences menu.

I can’t really say anything good about the source that Strophes uses for lyrics, unfortunately, because there’s a lot of incorrect capitalization and bad spelling in many of them. In addition, the album artwork is not available most of the time, which defeats the purpose of having it in the lyrics screen. The same goes for the artist’s picture in the “Artist” tab.

You can easily share lyrics to Facebook or Twitter using the traditional share button that you’re used to seeing in iOS and Mountain Lion, but I wouldn’t recommend it because, like I said before, the source is pretty bad. Another fun little feature is the ability to control the music source using Strophes. You play, pause, and skip to the next or previous song using them. This probably isn’t needed though since all Macs have dedicated buttons for such a function.

User Interface

The designers spent some time polishing up Strophes quite a bit, but not enough. While it is beautiful in most areas, the icon not only misses the mark but also looks completely different from the app. It really doesn’t fit such an otherwise well-designed lyrics app with its purple eighth note as a layer on top of the little binder-style notepad. The notepad looks decent by itself, but the music note just kills things.

Other than the repulsive icon, Strophes looks pretty nice. It’s a bit retro in areas with some overly-fancy cursive – in my opinion – in the top bar. It kind of looks as if it’s trying to have a more classic leather-bound feel to it with the torn paper at the top. The skeumorphism actually looks quite nice on the eyes, but the app’s included variant themes – “Golden Twine”, “Cafe Royal”, and “Charcoal” – are far from appealing.

The darker theme, “Charcoal”, is way too dark for the already dark font and secondary color that’s being used. There’s very little contrast and it’s actually kind of hard to read/see the content that resides on the top bar. Another area that needs higher contrast is the “Artist” tab’s links. They’re using a light blue color for the font (#A0BAED to be exactly) and it has almost no contrast with the off-white background texture. An example of this is available here.

On top of that, the “themes” only change the top bar’s appearance and nothing else. It’d be nice to have a night mode or something else for the text below. I honestly don’t see the point of having any customization at all since most of that available to the user isn’t very nice.

There are only three fonts available in Strophes and one of them, Bradley Hand ITC TT, isn’t available at all. You can click it in the preferences menu and the it will become selected, but whatever font you were using before also stays selected and you can’t actually use the Bradley Hand font.

It’s Buggy

The core functionality of Strophes, finding lyrics for the song you’re listening to, works well, but there are some issues throughout the app. Here’s a list of them for you to skim over before taking this app into your consideration:

• Shortcut for preferences doesn’t work: You can’t press the CMD + , keys to bring up the preferences screen.
• Preferences and about won’t open: I tried to bring up the app’s preferences screen for a second time in one instance and it won’t even open. The same goes for the about screen. The only way to get it to open again is to uninstall and reinstall the app, which is ridiculous. It renders the customization of the app unusable and I had to reinstall it four times while testing it for this review.
• Bradley Hand ITC TT font doesn’t work: As I explained in the user interface section, the third font available in Strophes doesn’t work at all. I’ve found no way of enabling it in the current version of the app – it always leaves one of the other fonts checked as seen here.
• Lots of random crashes: Simple thins like opening some lyrics will sometimes crash the app.
• Switching to different tabs using the “Window” menu breaks buttons: If you use the “Window” menu to change tabs from the lyrics to search or artist, the little menu that resides in the top right corner of the app will completely disappear. In addition, you get something like this when reentering the app. As you can see, the shadow is messed up.
• Quitting the source leaves lyrics up: I’m not sure if this is a feature or bug, but when you quit the source app that the music is coming from, the lyrics stay up in Strophes. It should just close the lyrics and bring back up the start screen that has a list of sources.
• Longer titles don’t show correctly: If you have a track, artist, or album that’s too long to fit in Strophes’ field for them, then whatever doesn’t fit won’t show at all. You can see an example of what I’m talking about in this screenshot.

Hopefully the developer will fix these issues soon because they are hindering a lot of the usability.

Conclusion

Lyrics are nice to have, but Strophes is far from the best way of delivering them to you. I’d only recommend this if the developer fixes the many bugs I’ve managed to discover. Otherwise, $4.99 is way overpriced for an app comprised of such limited functionality and over-abundant bugs. For that price, you could get something like musiXmatch, which is much less buggy and even saves the lyrics to the metadata inside the song you’re listening to in iTunes so you can read them on your iPhone. If you do feel brave, then go ahead and check out Strophes in the Mac App Store.

With the introduction of OS X Lion, Dashboard widgets seem to be on their way out of the OS for good. While many of us still use them everyday, lots OS X users rarely do — some of them don’t even know about Dashboard widgets. That is quite a shame, though. Dashboard widgets can be very helpful when you don’t want to fire-up a bigger app just to get one single and simple task done.

For those who still use widgets as well as those who don’t, we have a sweet list of formidable widgets you can download today. They are small, useful, and some even look really, really good. Give them a chance if you don’t already have them installed.

Reference

Email & Messaging

Calculations

Developer

Others

And that’s all for now

There they are, a bunch of useful and powerful Dashboard widgets for you to download and install at will. If you have some widgets you’d like to share with us, feel free to comment bellow and leave us your must-have widgets. Also, let us know what you think may happen to widgets in future iterations of the OS.

To complement Google’s annual developers conference, I/O 2012, which took place on Monday of this week and saw a few new products, including Android 4.1 Jelly Bean, a new Nexus 7 tablet and that famous Google Project Glass head-mounted computer, BlueStacks has released an alpha version of its Android emulation program for Macs, allowing you to run a number of Android apps directly on your Mac.

The release follows BlueStacks for Windows, which was released back in March this year and amounted an amazing 1 million downloads in just 9 days within launch. The app runs Android apps in their own virtualisation environment whilst still maintaining their original functionality.

The app, which is available as an alpha download from their website, is currently in Alpha status (so there will probably be some bugs and issues that need fixing) and runs as a Stack next to your Trash on your Dock. BlueStacks have signed up with several developers and there are 17 apps available, including Facebook, Pulse, Seesmic, Twitter for Android and WhatsApp (which also works despite being a app completely for mobile phones), with more to follow. There is also talk about optimising the apps for high-resolution retina graphics on the new MacBook Pro and the company is also positioning the App Player as a way of “breaking open the Apple ecosystem”.

BlueStacks may also make it possible for Mac users to download and experience free Android apps, instead of purchasing them off the App Store. Angry Birds, for instance (sorry to use a clichéd example!), is free on the Android platform (ad-supported, of course) but £0.69 (for me anyway) from the App Store. If more developers sign up to BlueStacks, then there may be more free apps available for Mac, though at some limitations (the emulation can be a bit jerky sometimes).

BlueStacks for Mac is available for immediate download (installation around 850 MB) from their website. Be warned, though, that this release is an alpha version so there will almost certainly be some bugs and limitations at the moment. And although the project is currently in its infancy, we are pretty certain that more developers will sign up soon, giving you a far greater choice of apps.

We’re big fans of apps which reside in the Menu Bar here at Mac.AppStorm. Personally, at least two of my most essential Mac apps live up there in the top right hand corner of the screen. However, with the proliferation of useful, lightweight Menu Bar apps, things can begin to get a little crowded in no time at all.

Well, for this admittedly niche problem, there’s an elegant solution in the form of Surtees Studios’ Bartender. Its a utility which promises to give users about as much control over the Menu Bar as one could reasonably hope to have.

Installing Bartender

Bartender is currently in Beta, so you can download a free copy for trial purposes from the developer’s website. Of course, that also means it probably should not be considered completely stable, or perhaps even suitable for use by less technically savvy Mac users. However, in testing I found Bartender to be remarkably bug free and more than able to function as a usable app – though as always, proceed at your own risk!

After the non-App Store process of download, unzip and drag-to-install has been completed, Bartender pops up with the above prompt which bids users no allow the app permission to install ‘a file’ – this slightly vague request seemed odd, though you can get more detailed info by clicking the question mark. Basically, an app like this has to integrated deeper into your Mac than standard apps, and it’ll need to add a system file to do that.

Getting started

The Mac I’m making use of in order to review Bartender is only a couple of days ol,d so there’s not too many apps shoehorned into the Menu Bar just yet. Despite this, I’ve already ran into a familiar annoyance: Two of my most important Menu Bar apps, iTeleport Connect and Little Snapper, have icons which look rather similar, ensuring that while I’m tapping away furiously trying to make a deadline and reach up with the mouse pointer to click and make a screenshot, I invariably click the wrong icon.

It’s a miniscule issue, to be sure, and one which only shaves off seconds of productivity from my day, but it’s irritating enough that I felt compelled to see if it was possible to remedy my issue with Bartender. So, clicking on the Bartender Menu Bar icon brings up the above menu options and from there, we can choose to enter the app’s preferences.

Once within Bartender’s preferences box, we can configure several options, such as whether to hide the default system Menu Bar icons like Airport’s WiFi status, the battery icon, etc – or these can be placed within Bartender’s own bar. Once the relevant decisions have been made, Bartender can be made to perform the desired action by selecting the “Control Menu Bar Items”.

The same choices can also be made for active Menu Bar apps, finally allowing me to tuck away that pesky iTeleport Connect icon and save those precious seconds, as shown in the following screenshot:

When wishing to access the hidden Menu Bar items, a click on the Bartender icon will make Bartender’s Bar visible, which you can then move around the screen if desired. Bartender’s Bar is visible below:

Beyond the basics

What sets Bartender aside from the majority of similar apps designed for managing the Menu Bar are the little touches which Surtee Studios have made. For example, the entire point of Bartender would be somewhat undermined if one doesn’t like the little icon of a man in bow-tie, but the developers helpfully included the option of selecting from several different icons and even let you add a custom icon if you’d like.

Another great option is that Bartender can also be assigned a hotkey, which seems like an excellent addition for productivity geeks. Perhaps the ability to navigate Bartender’s menu with just the keyboard would also be a welcome feature in the future.

Conclusion

So, is Bartender an app which everyone reading Mac.AppStorm should rush out and download then buy? Absolutely not. Frankly, Bartender will probably only appeal to a relatively small percentage of Mac users, those who like to keep everything just so and ensure that their folders are all correctly organized and named – that is, people just like myself.

With Bartender, Surtees Studios have managed that rare feat of doing one thing and doing it very well indeed. Bartender won’t set the world on fire, but it’s useful, well made, and does what it says perfectly. Bartender is free to try while in beta, or if you’d like to purchase a license you can do so now for a reduced price of $7.50 – this will reportedly double on the app’s release.

The Mac App Store has some nice free apps available this week and I’ve rounded them all up into one quick read. There aren’t as many apps that were actually discounted this week, but I’ve added some great ones that are regularly free to make it worth your while.

Have you been staring at the same dull wallpaper for weeks? Do you need something to spruce up your computer in time for summer? Then look no further as we present 100 of our favorite wallpapers for your Mac. From beautiful photography to simple, clean designs, there will be something for everybody in this collection.

If you would like to skip directly to a certain style of wallpaper, just select one of the categories below:

• Landscapes
• Lifestyle
• Abstract
• Black & White
• Space

Otherwise, just dig in and scroll though them all until you find something that strikes your fancy!

Landscapes

Lifestyle

Abstract

Black & White

Space

100 Gorgeous Wallpapers

There you have it folks, 100 cool wallpapers to help spruce up your desktop. If you have any of your own wallpapers that you’d like to share, please do so in the comments section below. Or, if you switched to one of these wallpapers, we’d love to hear which one you chose!

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 June 28th, 2011.

The Super Nintendo Entertainment System was a phenomenally fun console that successfully ate up a large portion of my childhood. There are so many classic games from this era that have long been forgotten. If only there were a way to download and play those 16-bit masterpieces on your Mac. Oh wait, there is.

Today we’ll flood your memory with enough digital nostalgia to make you teary eyed by showing you where you can grab these games and play them today. Be sure to read the fine print though as emulating old Nintendo games on your Mac is risky business!

Is This Legal!?

In our article Attack of the Mac Emulators: Retro Games on OS X, we outlined a hot debate on the legality of emulators. There are three sides to the debate, each fiercely held by many individuals and each with valid points.

The argument that partially condones the practice says that if you actually own the original version of the game, there’s no harm in downloading a ROM. You did in fact legally purchase the game so who cares if you want to play it on your Mac instead of the dusty SNES your wife makes you keep in the attic?

The argument you won’t like comes directly from Nintendo. According to them, it’s illegal to download and play these ROMs regardless of any other circumstances. No two ways about it, having this software on your Mac is a prosecutable violation of copyright laws. People downloading Nintendo ROMs are no better than music and software pirates (in all honesty, Nintendo is probably spot on here).

The third argument comes from a number of commenters on the article mentioned above. These intrepid souls pretty much say that Nintendo has long forsaken some of these titles and won’t be making money on them any time soon, so there’s absolutely no reason we shouldn’t breathe some life into their legacy. Surely it can only be good for Nintendo for us to remember how much we love their games right?

Download at Your Own Risk

Today I’m avoiding the debate and simply pointing out that, legal or not, these games are in fact out there and easy enough for anyone to get their hands on. I will assure you one thing: Nintendo has better lawyers than you. Regardless of which opinion you subscribe to, if Nintendo says this is an illegal practice, and you for some reason get caught, you’re likely screwed.

If you want to be safe, read the following as a list of links to avoid. If you do decide to proceed, you can’t say that you have not been warned! Also, be sure to check out Emulator Zone for a collection of supposedly legal ROMs that are less likely to make the FBI knock on your door.

Snes9x

While we’re discussing things that you shouldn’t download, make sure you don’t grab Snes9X, which is what people use to play these games on their Macs.

The Games

Once again, it’s probably best if you just avoid this whole ROM business altogether. And to help you with that, here’s a convenient list of games that you definitely shouldn’t download.

What Are Your Favorites?

To sum up, Mac SNES ROMs are a moral gray area of the Mac gaming world and shouldn’t be downloaded without some serious thought towards what the potential consequences. However, for now, you can in fact find them all over the web and today’s article merely seeks to point this out.

Leave a comment below and tell us about your top three favorite SNES games. Are you a Mario geek, a Samus Aran fan or a Final Fantasy addict?

We all love getting something great for free! However, hunting down the good free apps from the terrible ones in the jungle out there can be a difficult job.

Fortunately for you, AppStorm is here to help. We’ve collected together some awesome roundups of fantastic free apps for every device you own – all while trying to keep a mix of old classics and new favourites, hit the links below and immerse yourself!

• 50+ Free Mac Apps for 2012
• 50 Fantastic Free Web Apps
• 50 Free iPhone Apps to Get You Started
• 50 Fantastic Free iPad Apps
• 50 Spectacular Free Apps for Windows
• 50 More Gorgeous Android Apps (these ones aren’t free, but they’re gorgeous!)

It’s always exciting to find a new app that perfectly fits your needs. Some programs are great, and you’ll use them every day, but then sometimes you need this one little utility to make a part of your life easier. Even if you only use it a few times it feels amazing that there was an app that did just what you needed.

App Stores are great for discovering apps like this. I once needed to quickly crop and rotate a set of images on my iPad. Without knowing any apps that could do that, I searched the App Store and quickly found OneEdit, which did exactly what I needed.

On my Mac, I’ve recently started using QuickCursor and Sublime Text 2, both apps that I thought I didn’t need but now would hate to live without. It made me wonder how many apps our reader have recently discovered that really helped them.

So, what’s the greatest new app you’ve started using on your Mac? We’d love to hear your thoughts in the comments below, and maybe we’ll discover a few apps we didn’t know of before, too!

I know: it can’t be a poll without a poll, but hey, you have to change things around sometimes, right?

Medical school students have it tough – lots to study for, tons of rote memorization, and hundreds upon hundreds of pages to read every single week. Luckily, developers have noticed this problem, and there are plenty of apps out there to help make the average medical student’s life easier. These applications range from detailed, intriguing reference applications to applications that help ease the pain of all the studying require to succeed in medical school.

This roundup contains first and foremost a section dedicated to some of the best reference applications available for students of medicine. Applications range from a medical dictionary to ways to study up on muscles, drugs, and much more. I’ve also included some study and organization tools in the roundup. Knowing how expensive medical school, textbooks and even some of the applications are, I’ve tried to include free alternatives whenever possible. Read on to learn about some of the best applications for medical students on the Mac.

Reference Applications

Study and Productivity Applications

Conclusion

Medical students definitely have it tough – long, sleepless nights full of books and studying. Hopefully, these applications can help to ease the stress of medical school. Whether you need an app to learn the muscles and bones of the body, a way to research medications and terminology, a study application, or just a way to read your professor’s notes, there are many different applications to try out. And these are just apps to help in school – once you get into the hospital itself, there are infinitely more applications.

I’m curious, as always, to hear from you. Do you know of an app that every good medical student should have? Let’s hear from the students themselves! What are your favorite applications to use during your time in medical school?