Category: Mac

Due to its cross-compatibility and wide range of uses, the PDF has been a wildly popular document type for years. Despite the ubiquity of the PDF, there has been relatively little innovation in way we view and interact with these documents. Most PDF viewers simply show you the file with no bells or whistles.

HyperPDF from NeoMobili aims to break the boring mold of PDF viewers by introducing some new ways to read, markup, edit, and share your documents. Are the features worth an upgrade from your current PDF client?

Getting Started

Out of the box, your Mac has the Preview app take care of any PDFs that you want to open. HyperPDF is designed to do everything that Preview can do, only better.

Like Preview, you don’t get a welcome screen when you first open HyperPDF. If you want HyperPDF to be your default PDF reader, you’ll need to find a PDF file somewhere on your computer, right click, select Get Info, change the “open with” field to HyperPDF, and click the “change all” button. Sadly, HyperPDF doesn’t let you make it the default reader anywhere in the preferences. I would have liked to see that be an option when you first open it.

Viewing Formats

Preview lets you view documents in four different layouts. Content view (which simply displays the page without any sidebar information), thumbnails (which adds a small preview of each page in the sidebar), table of contents, and contact sheet (which is only thumbnails).

HyperPDF has these viewing formats as well, but they are divided up slightly differently. When you open a document, you’ll find yourself in “Edition” mode. This is the basic, Preview-ish format. The main window of Edition uses two panes like Preview, but also has a narrow third pane all the way to the left, like we’ve started to see with apps like Sparrow and Twitter’s Mac client. This makes the top bar slightly less bulky, which I certainly wouldn’t complain about. PDF readers should help you see as much of the document as possible, and a slimmer top bar helps that. The search box is moved to the sidebar as well.

HyperPDF makes more efficient use of your screen space.

Your options on the far left include thumbnails, table of contents, notes, and snapshots. You can make annotations in Preview, but I like the way HyperPDF implements notes more. Making notes on the document is a cleaner, more organized process than with Preview. Keeping a listing of all your notes in that sidebar makes them easier to find, as well.

Adding notes to your documents is a very streamlined process.

The final tab in Edition mode is snapshots. The snapshot feature lets you manually select an area of your document to save. While this can be very useful, the process for saving these snapshots is somewhat inefficient. You click and drag to create a box which grays out the surrounding area to help you focus on what you’re selecting.

What would have been nice is to see a small box popup after making the selection, but you have to right click and find “take snapshot.” From there, a new window pops up with your selection. Again, no button to save the snapshot is anywhere to be found. Clicking on the red window button (which has the familiar “not saved” dot in it) closes the window without even prompting you to save it. You have to go up to the File menu and manually select “Save.” This is a great feature conceptually, but there are a couple of extra steps that make it unappealing to actually use.

Making snapshots in HyperPDF is a great idea, but not implemented particularly well.

After Edition, the second viewing mode is Presentation. At first glance, Presentation may appear to just be fullscreen mode, (which HyperPDF also supports). Presentation puts your document into fullscreen, but gives you some options that might be appealing if you were using the app as a way to display the document for an audience via a projector. I am generally not a fan of Powerpoint, so I often put presentations together in PDF form. HyperPDF adds a few features that people like myself may miss about Powerpoint, such as transitions, (of which there are many styles).

HyperPDF has a ton of transition styles.

The last mode is perhaps the most interesting, and what HyperPDF markets itself on: Reading mode. HyperPDF says it lets you read your PDFs like a book. The document you have open displays with two pages visible at a time, side to side. Using your multitouch trackpad, you can swipe through documents with page-turn animations.

I had mixed feelings about this mode. On the one hand, page-flipping animations have become trendy with tablets, and multitouch trackpads make the transition to the Mac seem like a natural next step. However, there was one problem that I ran into that made this mode impossible for me to use: Screen space. I own a 15″ MBP, and even in fullscreen mode, everything had to get shrunk down so that two full pages could fit side by side.

Reading mode is a great idea, unless you have a laptop.

The text was way too small for me to be able to read anything comfortably. Of course, a 15″ screen isn’t ideal for this mode, but if you had, say, a 27″ iMac, I’m sure that this Reading mode would be much more feasible. I was also using HyperPDF to read a document that was heavy on text. If you were looking at Powerpoint slides with big bullet points or anything that had larger text, Reading mode would be usable on smaller machines.

Additional Features

HyperPDF offers a great level of customization. The preferences pane is packed with options, but my favorite is the ability to choose at what size a document opens. I export huge images from Photoshop that when I open with Preview, automatically get shrunk down to a size that will fit everything into a small window. Hitting the shortcut to view the image at actual size is minor inconvenience, but when you have to do it every time you open something it can become a real frustration. HyperPDF gives you the power to open at full size, which is something I can’t believe Apple doesn’t let you do.

The preferences pane is packed with options.

HyperPDF offers PDF-TeX support as well, with presets for a ton of popular Mac word processors, such as TextMate, BBEdit, and TextWrangler. Honestly, I’ve had very little need for PDF-TeX, but power users will welcome this feature.

HyperPDF has PDF-TeX support with presets for many word processors.

With the release of Lion, Apple introduced a new system for automatically saving your files. While many welcomed this as a wonderful evolution for the OS, I always missed the ability to “Save As.” Fortunately for people like me, some apps still have that feature, and HyperPDF is one of them.

When you choose to export a file in Preview, you get the option to run a filter, (black and white, sepia, etc.). HyperPDF doesn’t let you do that, but it does have a few more options for file formats to export to. Preview exports to different image types, such as JPEG or TIFF, but HyperPDF gives you control over, for example, whether you want to include the notes you made.

HyperPDF gives you many options when you choose to export a document.

There are lots of other features that I haven’t mentioned, but that’s because if Preview can do it, so can HyperPDF. You can of course rotate PDFs, create bookmarks, and much more.

Conclusion

It’s not often that we see the words “innovative” and “PDF” in the same sentence, but I think that the developers of HyperPDF have really done a great job of thinking about PDF viewers in a new way. The Reading mode, which lets you swipe through pages like a book, doesn’t work well on small screens, but the animations are smooth and undoubtedly looks great on much larger screens. The note taking functions work much better than with Preview. Most appealing to me were all the options in the preference pane that I’ve been wishing Preview had for years.

All in all, this is a worthy upgrade from the Mac’s Preview app, and I’ve already made it my default reader. However, it is not perfect. At $10, it is tough to overlook certain problems, such as the snapshot saving process that I mentioned. For me, the good far outweighs the bad, and even though I won’t be using the Reading mode, I will be using this to open my PDFs for the foreseeable future.

Our featured sponsor this week is USBMate, an awesome app that optimizes your external drives.

Your external drives can easily become cluttered with temporary files or perhaps even infested with malware. All of this can be avoided with a quick trip to USBMate right before you eject your drives.

Every time USBMate is run, it will clean and optimize your connected external disks and USB flash drives, purging them of all the temporary files that your system throws on there. It will also automatically check your drive for any AutoRun viruses and take the appropriate actions to get the drive back in perfect shape.

USBMate is a menu bar app so it sits quietly out of the way until you’re ready to eject a drive, then you’re only a click away from maximizing your drive’s performance.

Go Get It!

USBMate is currently available on the Mac App Store, so be sure to stop by and download your copy. Your USB drives drives will thank you!

I’ve always been a big fan of tower defense games. However, until pretty recently I had stuck to the web or my iOS devices to play these types of games. I recently began the search for some different tower defense-type games for the Mac and found a pretty decent variety.

This round-up features eight of the tower defense games that I enjoy. Some are traditional land-based games, others are more futuristic and some are a simpler and more accessible type of game. Read on to learn more and see which is right for you.

Traditional Land-Based

Space-Based and Futuristic

Casual Tower Defense Games

Conclusion

Tower defense games are a popular way to while away a few minutes (or a few hours). While many of the existing tower defense games are made for the web or for mobile devices, there are definitely some gems out there for Macs.

These are just a few games I found that I thought were worth mentioning. There are many more out there, so please share your favorites in the comments below.

Our featured sponsor this week is USBMate, an awesome app that optimizes your external drives.

Your external drives can easily become cluttered with temporary files or perhaps even infested with malware. All of this can be avoided with a quick trip to USBMate right before you eject your drives.

Every time USBMate is run, it will clean and optimize your connected external disks and USB flash drives, purging them of all the temporary files that your system throws on there. It will also automatically check your drive for any AutoRun viruses and take the appropriate actions to get the drive back in perfect shape.

USBMate is a menu bar app so it sits quietly out of the way until you’re ready to eject a drive, then you’re only a click away from maximizing your drive’s performance.

Go Get It!

USBMate is currently available on the Mac App Store, so be sure to stop by and download your copy. Your USB drives drives will thank you!

Throughout the day we’re all bombarded by tons of information and things that want to call for our attention. Some you might not care much about, but there’s also those few things you run into that you might want to remember to look up later. That’s why note-taking apps (like Evernote) and to-do apps (like Wunderlist) work, because they let you quickly write down everything you’re thinking about without interrupting what you’re doing.

However, it’s hard to keep up with those reminders and notes after you’ve taken them, and few apps can help you do anything other than store them. But what if we told you about an app that does all the research for you from all those notes you gather through the day? Sounds interesting, right? That’s what Dunno claims to do.

The Concept

Brain Slap!

Dunno can be thought of as a productivity experiment. Apps that can help you take notes and make to-dos or reminders for later have flooded the market already, but Dunno came from the idea that none of these apps help you really “achieve” anything unless you’re on top of everything, which let’s face it, you’re not.

To put it in a daily setting, the Dunno devs have come up with the concept of a “brain slap”, which is basically anytime that you stumble upon anything that you don’t know a lot about and would like to remember to look up later. Dunno is supposed to help with those “brain slap” moments, by providing you with a very quick way of jotting down whatever you’re thinking about and doing the research on the subject.

It sounds like a wonderful concept, doesn’t it? But does it actually work?

How Dunno Works

Dunno

Dunno works as a sort of informal note-taking or to-do app, in which you can save quick short reminders with things you’d like to remember for later. What makes the app interesting is the simplicity with which it allows you to input information, which is pretty hassle-free considering that its interface is very simple to understand and work with.

The app has its own window for viewing old reminders and jotting down new ones, but it is also complemented by a menu-bar component, always present and running, that can give you quick access to basically the same set of features except reviewing what the app has found on each subject that you’ve told it to research.

The Research

Research

Perhaps the most important part of the app is how smart it is at recognizing exactly what to look for and where to look for it. Well, it’s not exactly a Siri (you can’t exactly ask it anything and expect a concise answer back, instead you’ll get a few links where the answer may be found), but it does a good job at saving you time by making you skip the “Googling” process.

Once you’ve created some notes of things you’d like to know more about, they’ll be researched and available for you to read after a few seconds. Depending on what your note is, you might be shown the same results that you would get from a search engine, including the usual Wikipedia entries, a few images, and other relevant links for the subject like Amazon links, YouTube clips, etc. These will be shown in a list organized by type with the most relevant result on top.

I’ve tried looking up songs, websites, artists, books, definitions and related things and they always seem to turn out more or less the same results that Google would. However, when you get a little more specific and start adding questions or specific tasks is when the app really shines, as it actually turns out more specific results related to what you are looking for.

Using the Information

Dunno for iPhone

Dunno for Mac has its own browsing feature where you can get to read all about the research that the app has done for you. If you click any of the links that the app has brought up, the sidebar of the app will collapse making space just for a list with the subject’s links and the browser window where the content will be displayed.

The app gets really flexible when it comes to how you’d like to use it. Dunno is available for the iPad and iPhone, and with your account all of your notes will get synchronized to all of your devices. This way, you can create notes on the go while you’re going through your day, and get to read more about them when you’re at home at your computer.

Conclusion

Depending on how you use Dunno, you could say that you’d get the same results by simply Googling the term, but what makes the app so special is that it provides you with a clean environment for saving those things that you’d like to research, so that they won’t end up lost in your note taking or to-do apps. The strong part of this app is not exactly the algorithm for showing you relevant results, but the commodity and the convenience of having a simple place to put those little pieces of information that you stumble upon throughout the day.

The idea, although simple, is quite great and I’d never seen it applied as it is to any Mac apps. However, as the developer puts it, the app is in continous development and is very much a work in progress. By the time this review is released it might even have a different algorithm for deciding on what results are relevant enough, or perhaps a couple minor bug fixes. Dunno has a lot of potential at becoming something great, it just needs to grow more. What do you think?

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

Happy downloading!

Check Back Next Week!

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

As we sit on the precipice of another generation of new Macs, I thought it would be fun to take a look back. It’s time to throw open the closets, dig through the garage and climb up into the old dusty attic. We want to know the age of the oldest Mac that you still have in your possession.

Are you a new Mac user who doesn’t even remember the days of the sunflower iMac or are you an old school user who remembers what Macs were like back when Jobs was a long-haired hippie? Perhaps you even owned an Apple computer before the days of the Mac!

Cast your vote in the poll and then leave a comment with the dirt. Which Apple computer is it? When did you purchase it? What are the technical specs? We want to know! Also, if you happen to have a picture, we’d love to see it.

An introduction to Instagram might be more than unnecessary, but for the few lost ones that have never heard of the service, Instagram is a mobile service that allows you to upload and share pictures right from your phone, with its characteristic vintage filters that make even the dullest photo look interesting.

However, Instagram has yet to come up with its own web service to view pictures from your computer, and right now the only way to browse through your Instagram feed (as well as upload pictures) is through your iOS or Android devices. That’s why today we’re going to bring you 5 third-party Mac apps that allow you to browse and interact with your Instagram feed right from your desktop.

Instadesk

Instadesk is perhaps the most “average” Instagram Mac client, but that doesn’t mean that it’s any less useful than the competition. In fact, it might be the most complete of them. Its interface resembles that of any usual Mac app, with its sidebar that works as the navigation menu, and its corresponding toolbars for interacting with the photos. Your feed is shown in the main frame with adjustable views, you can have it be seen as a “timeline” list view, or as medium or small grids.

While it might not be the prettier or most intuitive alternative of them all, Instadesk has it all in terms of features. Commenting, loving, notifications, tags, searching for users, sharing and even a custom feature for creating “albums”, makes this app worth the five bucks.
Price: $4.99
Requires: Mac OS X 10.6 or later
Developer: Benedikt Terhechte

Carousel

I’m not gonna lie, Carousel is my default Instagram Mac client. It just goes very well with Instagram’s vintage feel, and its interface can’t be topped. It only features a list-like view of your feed, but everything inside the app is very well done and intuitive.

Despite its simplicity, Carousel does not leave behind any of the basic features for you to interact with your feed. You can easily comment and love pictures right from the app, as well as view the popular pictures on the service and search for tags or users. Oh, and it’s also one of the cheaper alternatives out there.
Price: $1.99
Requires: Mac OS X 10.6 or later
Developer: Mobelux

Instaview

Instaview steps away from the usual viewing styles of most Instagram clients, by making you browse through your feed with only one frame. It has a pretty well implemented slideshow view, but you can also manually browse through pictures with a couple forward/back buttons. What’s interesting about it is that you can also have different windows setup, so that you can get creative with how you use it.

Getting used to using Instaview might be a little bit awkward at first, but to its credit, the app tries to be quite original in a market where originality isn’t so easy to come by. Instaview, just like most of the competition, supports features like commenting, viewing users and loving pictures, but not much else can be done with it.
Price: $4.99
Requires: Mac OS X 10.6 or later
Developer: Rogue Sheep

Visual Grub

Visual Grub is the cheapest of the apps that we’ll be showing you today, but that doesn’t mean that it’s any worse than the competition. In fact, for the most part it looks quite good. It’s very simple and it kind of reminds me of a Twitter app with its navigation sidebar and its list-like view of your feed. At certain parts, it looks a little rough around the edges, but the simplicity that the app tries to achieve is much appreciated.

At the time of this review, Visual Grub has some major bugs around the edges, especially at the time of trying to love or comment a photo; but if you’re only going to be browsing through your feed without interacting much, it gets the job done. Hey, it’s free.
Price: Free
Requires: Mac OS X 10.6 or later
Developer: Swell Lines

Ratatam

Ratatam is one of the newest additions to the Instagram Mac clients, and it looks quite promising so far. Its interface resembles Carousel, in that it looks simple enough, but yet is very pleasant to look at and navigate through.

Ratatam supports all the usual basic features like commenting, notifications and loving, but the one where it differentiates itself from the competition is with its ability to backup all of your photos. Ratatam might not look like much right now, but it’s still a young app and more is said to be coming in further updates.
Price: $0.99
Requires: Mac OS X 10.7 or later
Developer: Christophe Harmeling

Conclusion

With Instagram hitting massive popularity and notoriety recently, making headlines like Facebook’s expensive purchase of the app, and its very well received Android launch; we’re sure we’re bound to see much more support for Instagram in many more platforms, both from third-party devs and from the Instagram team.

In the meantime, we hope that the variety of Instagram Mac clients that we have shown you today will suit your needs, whatever they may be. If you’re looking for a cheap client and are not too serious about it, affordable apps like Visual Grub might be enough for you. However, if you’re looking for a much more complete app that can even help you organize the photos that you come across, then spending the $5 bucks for Instadesk might sound just about right.

Personally, I think you can’t go wrong with Carousel, in both features and price. But what do you think? Do you use any of these apps and which one? Would you rather just keep Instagram to your phone? Let us know in the comments!

I’ve recently started toying with the idea of upgrading my MacBook Pro’s stock 500 GB hard drive with a new SSD. The cost of an SSD that comes anywhere close to 500 gigs is terrifying, so I’ve been shopping around for a drive that has less than half of that capacity. In order to determine if I could survive with a comparatively diminutive drive, I’ve begun some serious spring cleaning.

There are a ton of great apps out there for keeping your Mac’s hard drive clean. FIPLAB joins this crowded market with a very simple utility called Disk Doctor. I’ve employed it in my quest to squeeze my disk usage down to SSD capacity. Read on to find out how it fared in my tests.

The Basics

I suppose the name of the app is a tad misleading here. You might expect an app that has “disk” and “doctor” in the same name to be capable of some actions similar to your Mac’s built-in Disk Utility. Disk Doctor doesn’t actually diagnose or “fix” anything; it just cleans your drive in much the same way as many competing apps.

Disk Doctor quickly finds your hard drive and prompts you to begin the scan.

After launching the app, it’ll scan your drive. You’ll see a gauge which shows your drive’s capacity, how much is being used, and how much space Disk Doctor can give you.

What Disk Doctor Finds

Beneath the gauge are six checkboxes: Caches, Logs, Languages, Trash Can, Downloads, and Mail Downloads. The developers do a nice job of giving casual users an idea of what each of these categories is with a quick explanation beneath each label. Under languages, you can select which ones to delete.

The scanning process is quick. It took less than a minute to find about 3 GB of junk.

For comparison’s sake, I let Disk Doctor perform its first scan but did not let it clean up anything. I then launched CleanMyMac, (a long-time favorite of mine for keeping my disk lean), and let it perform a scan as well. Disk Doctor found 3.1 GB to clean. CleanMyMac found the exact same number, though it carried it out to one more decimal (3.16).

Performance

Regarding these two scans using Disk Doctor and CleanMyMac, there was a significant difference in speed. CleanMyMac took about 80 seconds to complete the scan while Disk Doctor was done in about 25. The reason for this is the scope of the search: I ran CleanMyMac in “authorized” mode, which requires that you enter your user password in order to grant the app access to more files on your drive. CleanMyMac had to search more of the drive, but still found the same amount of junk to delete. I’m sure that wouldn’t always be the case though.

Once it's done, Disk Doctor will tell you how much space it saved.

Once I was ready to delete what Disk Doctor had found, I hit the “Clean” button. The app gives you a little warning to remind you that it isn’t compressing anything – its deleting.

I couldn’t compare the speeds of Disk Doctor and CleanMyMac when it came to actually deleting files, because after I ran Disk Doctor’s cleaning function CleanMyMac would have nothing to do. However, the 3 GB were dealt with in about 45 seconds, which certainly felt like a reasonable amount of time. After Disk Doctor is done, you get a somewhat unimpressive window with a summary of how much space you’ve saved.

Criticisms

The first thing I found disappointing about Disk Doctor was the sixth area for the scanning process: Mail downloads. I, like many Mac users, have not opened Mail for years. I have used Sparrow since it was released, and before that I used Outlook for Mac. Consequently, not being able to scan any other mail clients means that Disk Doctor is ignoring a potentially huge area for cleaning. That said, CleanMyMac didn’t search for big attachments in Sparrow either.

While part of this app’s appeal is its simplicity, there are some trade-offs there. There is no preference pane for Disk Doctor, which means everything that I’ve covered here is the extent of its functionality. Open the preferences for CleanMyMac and you’ll see a ton of options, including some important ones like the ability use “secure” erase mode, (which Disk Doctor does not offer).

I use a couple of 2 GB external drives to store movies and music. I’ve let those become a disorganized mess of random files and junk that I would love to be able to clean up with a program like Disk Doctor. However, it automatically chooses your main drive for scanning with no option to scan others. Again, CleanMyMac doesn’t actually score any better, as it too ignores external drives. So far, the only app I’ve tried that does clean external drives as well is DriveSlim.

The last critique is a very minor one. During the cleaning process, a progress bar appears. However, it doesn’t show you how far along it is, let alone what step it’s on.

Conclusion

There are loads of these sorts of drive cleaning utilities, and I’ve tried plenty of them. Personally, I’ve always been perfectly happy with CleanMyMac. Disk Doctor was able to perform many of the same functions as CleanMyMac, and did so slightly more quickly. However, CleanMyMac has a few important features that still make it my favorite among these sorts of utilities, (such as automatic application uninstalling). Still, Disk Doctor performs its more limited duties very well.

At just two bucks, you’re getting a very capable utility for a great price. CleanMyMac goes for $30 for a lifetime license, which makes the price tag for Disk Doctor even more appealing. If you are simply looking to free up some space on your drive, I have no qualms about you buying Disk Doctor. If you are looking for a more robust cleaning solution, you may want to consider a more fully-featured app.

For those who haven’t heard of Two Dollar Tuesday – you are seriously missing out. It is an initiative started up to help smaller and independent Mac developers to gain more revenue and sales by cutting the price of the app to a mere $2. Last week, Dropzone reached the number 2 spot on the Top Productivity Apps and saw a massive 6,700 sales in one day.

Remember these deals are only valid on Tuesday so try to grab them whilst they’re still hot! For more information about the Two Dollar Tuesday initiative, head over to their website.

So, without further ado, here are this week’s $2 app deals.

WriteRoom

Forget the clutter of Microsoft Word and Pages. WriteRoom allows you to simply write in a completely distraction-free full-screen environment, allowing you to focus on the writing in hand and not get disturbed by text formatting and font size. Although it is a very basic word-processing program (you can’t insert pictures, graphs, tables or anything similar), if you want to do some quiet writing, WriteRoom is your best option. The app syncs with Dropbox and is available for the iPhone / iPod touch as well, ensuring everything is in constant sync.

Price: $9.99 – $2.00
App Store Link: WriteRoom
Developer: Hog Bay Software

Chronicle

Chronicle is a great little app to help you manage your finances. It includes a reminder to tell you when bills are due, a tool to manage your debt and repayments and a monthly spending chart. The app integrates well with iCal and comes with a free companion app, Chronicle Mini, meaning you can view which bills are due directly from the menu bar.

Price: $14.99 – $2.00
App Store Link: Chronicle
Developer: LittleFin LLC

CodeBox

If you’re a web or app developer, then CodeBox is the tool for you. It allows you to manage your “snippets” (or little pieces of code) easily and effectively. Think of it as an advanced code clipboard. The app sorts out each snippet into a relevant code library (which is especially useful if you are programming in several languages) and you can access your snippet library easily from the menu bar.

Price: $11.99 – $2.00
App Store Link: CodeBox
Developer: Vadim Shpakovski

Before consoles existed and became the most popular form of indoors interactive entertainment, board and trading card games were all the craze. Today, the trading card game community is still strong and new players come to the fold everyday. Trading card games (TCG) or collective card games (CCG) never age because of their deepness and their outstanding replay value. Like RPG games, most TCGs let you buff yourself or your character, summon various allies and creatures, cast any number of spells, and defeat your enemies with cunning strategy; this gives you, the player, ultimate control over your play-through experience.

Shadow Era doesn’t do anything new with the formula and it has a number of downsides, but it gracefully delivers everything a compelling TCG has to offer. From single player, to multiplayer, Shadow Era gives you an easy-to-get-into experience, a great amount of replay value, and a lot of flexibility to tailor your own game experience.

Presentation

Because Shadow Era doesn’t mess around with the TCG formula, the game is presented with a simple structure. Once you are pass the subscription/login screen, the game introduces you to the map; the map is the single player part of the game where you will duel a number of enemies in order to win gold and Shadow Crystals (both of which are the currency of the game).

The enemies you encounter have a small back story explaining why you need to defeat them. This gives you a good enough reason to confront them, but overall, the game lacks a real story. Although a story isn’t necessary in these type of games, the single player would be more appealing with a small story.

The Map

As you progress through the map, you will gain levels and gold. Each time you level-up, you will receive 25 Shadow Crystals. Once you accumulate 100 Shadow Crystals, you will be able to purchase a booster pack or a deck from the Merchant.

This is where the game’s flexibility and customization come into play. Once you get new cards (separately with gold or from booster packs and decks with Shadow Crystals), you will be able to go to the deck section and customize your own deck. Building your own deck will allow you to pick better cards, which ultimately means better spells, better allies, and so on. Deck building is a key factor of TCGs and Shadow Era delivers with authority.

Deck Customization

Unfortunately, getting 100 Shadow Crystals takes a few play-throughs, especially if you are new to TCGs. If you wish to avoid all of that, you will have to purchase the booster packs and decks with real money. Sure, you get around 20 gold coins for each match you win, but separate cards cost 200 to 450 gold coins depending on rarity.

For all your efforts, there is very little reward. This is also very upsetting when you move to the multiplayer section of the game. You start out with 31 cards in your deck, but in order to play online, your deck must contain 40 cards. If you do the math, you’ll need quite a bit of gold.

Standar Deck – 100 Shadow Crystals

Graphics

Card Art

Aside from these few nuisances, Shadow Era carries a good graphical experience. The most important part of the game are the cards, which are beautifully designed. The art in them is top-notch — they are so good, you could confuse them with the competition’s cards. This alone would make any avid TCG player appreciate Shadow Era’s potential.

When it comes to the actual game’s graphics however, it sadly doesn’t do the game nor the cards justice. Because this game is not specifically made for the Mac, this is not necessarily a big issue, but it would have been nice to have better graphics that take advantage of the Mac’s power. The upside is that the leading competitor doesn’t have a Mac version to begin with, so Shadow Era, good graphics or not, is still a great game.

Gameplay

The Battlefield

Ultimately, that is what everything is all about: the game. The most important part of a TCG is the gameplay. From the way it handles to how fun the game is, Shadow Era is an outstanding TCG experience. When you play your first duel, the game does an amazing job at teaching you exactly what to do. Within the first play-through, you will become very familiar with how the game works.

After that, the game highlights the cards you are able to interact with, which will help if you ever forget the rules. The card’s descriptions are simple and to-the-point, and they don’t contain a lot of keywords you may not be familiar with, thus letting you know exactly what your next move will be.

Defeating a Hero

Shadow Era is fun, period. If you are a TCG enthusiast or a new comer, you will have a fun time collecting gold, Shadow Crystals, customizing your deck, and bringing all of that back to the battlefield. The game can be tough with you at times, but with persistence and strategy, you can tackle all your enemies.

Thankfully, beating more difficult rivals does make up for the lack of reward. Another interesting bit to take into consideration is the way you summon any type of card. In other TCGs you would count on Mana to use as a resource, but in Shadow Era, you must sacrifice any card currently in your hand. Those sacrificed cards will then become the way you are able to summon other cards. This gives the game a very on-edge sense of strategy. The rush you get while choosing which precious card to get rid of is like no other.

Conclusion

All in all, Shadow Era is fun, addicting, and has tremendous replay value. The craving you get for new cards keeps you coming back for more, and the cross-platform multiplayer adds even more entertainment to the game’s fun factor. Let’s not forget that the multiplayer allows you to chat with your enemy as you play. This is great because the Shadow Era community is solid, and you will undoubtably make friends as you play through the multiplayer. If you can get pass the graphics, and the high cost of new cards (which you should), Shadow Era is a must have for both TCG lovers and new comers alike.

Don’t forget to leave us your thoughts on the game below, and share your user names so we can all go head-to-head. Also, feel free to join our brand new Steam Group in order to play with or against Mac.AppStorm writers.

This week has been quite a busy one for app news so without further ado, here’s our roundup of the latest going-ons in the Mac software world.

More hints of upcoming features in latest Mountain Lion Developer Preview

The latest Developer Preview of Mountain Lion, which was released last Wednesday to registered Apple developers, is giving us all subtle hints at what we can expect come the official launch, which is expected to take place at the upcoming WWDC conference in a couple of weeks time. Although still a bit temperamental, this update enabled automatic app downloads (similar to iOS), whereby purchased items from the store are automatically downloaded on all your devices.

The new iOS-style automatic downloads feature in the latest Developer Preview of Mountain Lion

There was also a subtle hint towards possible voice dictation, similar to that on the iPhone and new iPad. Developers that tore apart the Safari resources file in the latest build found a keyboard shortcut to “Start Dictation”, which is enabled by pressing both Command keys simultaneously.

9to5Mac found possible evidence of an upcoming dictation feature in Mountain Lion, as shown in the Safari resources file

Although the feature is not enabled in the current Developer Preview (and no other evidence has been found supporting this claim), it is an unconfirmed rumour however Apple is always known for its surprises, so this may well be a new and upcoming feature for Mountain Lion.

Cobook released on the App Store

On Thursday, Cobook, a little free application that aims to improve contact management on your Mac, came out of beta status and hit the App Store. The app syncs with your existing Mac address book and sits in the menu bar for quick and easy access.

Cobook came out of beta and into the Mac App Store on Thursday, where it instantly became the first ever 'Editors Choice' app

Cobook automatically updates your contacts from Twitter and Facebook and you can set tags, making it easier to manage your contacts. The app is free and available for immediate download from the App Store.

Dropzone sells 6,700 copies as part of “Two Dollar Tuesday”

As part of a new initiative entitled “Two Dollar Tuesday”, Dropzone dropped its retail price from $14 to a mere $2 and consequently shifted an incredible 6,700 downloads in one day, netting around $8,000 for its developers. The app, which is a simple and quick way of sharing and moving documents on your Mac and supports a wide range of third-party providers, such as TwitPic, ImageShack and Amazon S3, has attracted praise from a wide range of sources and currently holds a 4.5 star rating on the App Store.

The new Two Dollar Tuesday initiative, which was started up by Mike Dattalo, helps to propel less well-known Mac applications into the esteemed top 100 list. Before the sale, Dropzone wasn’t even in the top 100 productivity hours but within hours of the price drop, it had rocketed up to third position. Dattalo notes:

Customers prefer to purchase apps in the Mac App Store, because they can easily reinstall them if they switch computers, and they never have to worry about losing a license…the hardest problem independent developers have to tackle is obscurity – finding a way to get their apps noticed.

To find out more about the Two Dollar Tuesday project, as well as see which Mac apps are currently on offer, head over to their website.

“Editors Choice” and “App of the Week” appear in App Store

Apple have tweaked the App Store layout to now feature an “Editors Choice” and “App of the Week”, which aim to help Mac users discover new and previously unknown apps as well as net themselves a good bargain.

The new Editors Choice feature in the Mac App Store

The change has been implemented across all of the App Store, including the one on iPhone and iPad and the first app graced with the title of “Editors Choice” on the Mac App Store was Cobook, which we looked at above. Apple will be refreshing the apps weekly so remember to check back often for some new material!

CleanMyDrive hits the Mac App Store

MacPaw, the developers of the popular utility CleanMyMac, which scans your Mac for any system junk and helps free up precious hard drive space, has released its little brother, CleanMyDrive. Although not as feature rich as its older sibling, this free utility sits in your menu bar and constantly monitors your disk space and how much storage junk files are taking up.

CleanMyDrive scans any external drives connected to your Mac for junk files, helping you free up disk space

The app performs automated cleanups of any ‘junk’ files on any external drive connected to your Mac (for example, Thumbs.db, .DS_Store and so on) and also allows you to eject all your connected drives at once, instead of having to drag each one individually to the Trash. Contrary to its name, however, it won’t clean your entire drive – you’ll have to get CleanMyMac for that.

CleanMyDrive is available in the App Store and is currently free (limited time offer).

Developers vent their frustrating at sandboxing guidelines

A mere couple of days after we wrote about the upcoming sandboxing guidelines for apps submitted to the App Store, developers are already feeling the pinch of the strict rules imposed by Apple. Some are not clear about what the guidelines are, despite the fact new entitlements for sandboxing were built into OS X 10.7.3 and new APIs in Xcode 4.3, and many are unhappy with the changes.

The British magazine Macworld UK interviewed some developers (many of whom wished to remain anonymous) with their thoughts on the new guidelines and the general consensus of their comments ranging from reluctancy to sheer loathing. According to one developer, they (the developers) are, “all going into this blind” and that pre-sandboxing screening of new app submissions that conform to the guidelines has been “shockingly arbitrary”.

Probably one of the most shocking comments comes from a developer who states that Apple is resort to “cheats” that third-party developers “would never get away with”, especially seeing as most of its own applications are not sandboxed but will still be available via the App Store.

LEAP Motion allows you to control your Mac…’Minority Report’ style

Kinect: eat your heart out and move over. A new company called Leap Motion is planning on releasing a small USB peripheral for both Mac and Windows which will allow you to control your computer via hand and finger movements.

The new Leap device, which goes on sale in January of next year for the tiny price of $69

The new device, which isn’t expected to go on sale until January 2013, is priced at a mere $69 and boasts an accuracy 200 times more than any other device on the market, being able to detect your finger movements down to 1/100th of a millimetre. Users will also be able to create custom movements for their computer and the company is planning on releasing an SDK for developers, meaning that they can integrate the Leap into their own programs.

Leap Motion is taking pre-orders for the device and you can find out more about it (along with a pretty smart demonstration video) by visiting their website.

With the recent announcement of OS X Mountain Lion, Apple decided to bring AirPlay Mirroring functionality to the Mac. While that’s exciting to look forward to down the road, an alternative app, AirParrot, has come out of the woodwork promising to be even better than Apple’s own solution.

Does AirParrot stand a chance against Mountain Lion or should you just wait until that latter’s summer release? Read on!

Overview

You can customize many of the features within AirParrot

The promise of AirParrot is very simple – as the developer puts it, “your Mac’s screen, on your AppleTV”. To accomplish that goal, AirParrot uses some AirPlay hackery, which generally works pretty well.

Since AirPlay works over wifi, a strong, preferably 802.11 N connection is a prerequisite. Within the settings of that app you’ll find some reasonably robust controls, including options to control underscan, video quality, frame rate, and resolution. In addition, AirParrot gives you three ways to output content to your AppleTV, which really make it stand out from the crowd. Here’s a quick overview of each:

1. Mirroring – this is your standard fare, and comparable to what Apple is releasing with Mountain Lion. It displays whatever is on your Mac’s screen in an exact copy (hence, mirroring). Unless your Mac’s screen is running at 720p or 1080p, the image won’t fill the full screen. This is a good choice for giving presentations or demos where you need to broadcast your screen.
2. Extended Desktop – this basically turns your AppleTV into a second monitor for your Mac. Your AppleTV will even show up as a second display in System Preferences allowing you to adjust position, resolution, etc. Moreover, if you set the resolution correctly, the image will fill the entire screen. This is a great solution if you want to do work on your Mac and watch a video on your TV.
3. Specific App – this is a bit of a beta-esque feature. It allows you to send an individual app to your AppleTV in fullscreen. You can’t minimize the app of your choice, and while it will still work if you pull the focus away from the app, your mouse will still be overlaid on the screen, so you should remember to disable the mouse cursor in AirParrot’s settings. This also works well for watching video or just putting an auxiliary app on the big screen.

You also have the ability to stream audio to your AppleTV, which is a nice value-add for anyone with a good home theater setup, although there’s no audio only option, which would be nice. All things considered, AirParrot is pretty well feature-packed for only $10.

Limitations and Performance

AirParrot works in the Menu Bar

Despite it’s lengthy feature-set, AirParrot is still limited in a few areas. First of all, performance leaves something to be desired. My Core i5 Macbook Pro with an SSD and 8GB of RAM even had trouble powering AirParrot alongside basic apps like a web browser or video player.

While running AirParrot, my system became laggy with tasks as simple as text entry. Unfortunately, using AirParrot to watch a Hulu video on my AppleTV while browsing the web on my Macbook only was an acceptable experience at medium-to-low performance settings. Luckily, audio was pretty well in sync throughout the video.

In short – if don’t mind just hard-wiring your Mac to the TV, you’ll get a far better experience. That being said, if you value the cordless experience as I do, you should be ready and willing to overlook the decreased performance and video quality. As I mentioned before, there’s no way to stream audio only, which would have made the app pretty killer.

AirParrot is also a bit quirky, in my time with the app I was consistently annoyed by the fact that you can’t connect-on-startup, meaning that you’ll have to do some configuration, however minimal, before you’ve got video on your AppleTV. All-in-all, though AirParrot’s features outweigh it’s limitations.

Comparison to Mountain Lion

Whenever an operating system update comes along, a developer’s worst fear is that the functionality of their app will become integrated into the system. Unfortunately for the developers of AirParrot, it would seem that Apple has done just that with their announcement of AirPlay mirroring in OS X Mountain Lion.

In my time with Mountain Lion I found that Apple’s own AirPlay Mirroring functionality surpassed that of AirParrot in both quality and performance. Moreover, setup is drastically more user friendly in comparison to AirParrot.

Nonetheless, you shouldn’t be prepared to relegate AirParrot to the garbage-bin. In the short term, AirParrot is available right now versus a summer release of OS X Mountain Lion. In addition, at only $10 it’s still cheaper and easier than performing an OS upgrade. Looking forward, though, there’s still a place for AirParrot in the market. Since the app offers the ability to extend your display as well as mirror a specific app, many people will still find it infinitely more useful than Apple’s own solution. So while many people won’t need the extended functionality of AirParrot, there’s no reason to believe that it’ll be going away any time soon.

Wrap-Up

When I bought my AppleTV a few months ago, AirParrot was the app I was most looking forward to using. The dream of watching Hulu on the big screen so seamlessly seemed almost to good to be true, and while AirParrot’s performance does leave something to be desired, I’m still largely in love with the app.

Of course, if you don’t mind only being able to mirror your display, waiting for Mountain Lion isn’t a bad idea, but for those of us who want to take full advantage of the awesome trio that is Mac OS X, AirPlay, and the AppleTV – AirParrot is well worth the nominal $10 price of admission.

Of late, the tech world has been abuzz with alarming news of Mac malware threats, the reports given weight by the emergence of a newer and more sophisticated version of that annoying thorn in Apple’s side, Flashback. Known as Flashback.K, the latest iteration of the trojan horse which has been grabbing headlines since mid-2011 makes use of a known Java security vulnerability to launch malicious code and potentially record users personal data.

As OS X market share continues to rise, security is becoming an area of concern for more users and there’s a perception building that Macs have lost their previous status as secure computers, with some analysts even going so far as to say that we’re about to enter an era of cat-and-mouse games between Apple and malware makers. So, is the sky falling or is this all a lot of hot air?

Caught napping

Apple's lag between Java updates facilitated the Flashback.K malware issue

The Java security hole which gave rise to Flashback.K also posed a security risk for other operating systems which use the cross-platform programming language, but as Linux and Microsoft Windows users receive their versions of Java direct from Java’s developers Oracle, the hole was discovered and quickly plugged.

However, because Apple deign to produce and release their own version of the largely open source Java, OS X users are at the mercy of Apple’s update process which in this case lagged over two months behind Oracle and gave malicious hackers the opportunity to infect over 600,000 Mac users before Apple stepped in with a Software Update fix which both plugs the hole and removes any existing Flashback.K infection.

Frankly, the entire Flashback.K episode is not evidence of an inherent security flaw within OS X itself, but was rather facilitated by Apple’s failure to keep on top of security threats and patch known holes, a mistake the company are certain to wish to avoid in the future – indeed, as Ars Technica recently reported, Oracle will soon take over the supply of Java security fixes for Macs, thus firmly consigning such lags to the past.

What’s In a Name?

At first glance it may seem pedantic but referring to malware by its proper name is useful

It may be useful to remember that while talk of Mac ‘viruses’ is common as of late, there is currently not one single credible virus on OS X. To be sure, there exists Mac security threats, but understanding the differences between non-existent viruses and the real threat posed by trojans (both of which fall under the umbrella term ‘malware’) will go some way to offering a tangible defence against their ill effects.

A virus is a piece of software which can replicate itself and spread from one computer to another. Often making use of a local network, the Internet or removable media like USB sticks, a virus can remain undetected for years and show no outward signs of malicious intent. Indeed, some viruses don’t seem to do much else than replicating at length on the target computer and slowly using up increasing resources.

There are currently no known viruses for any recent version of Mac OS X.

A Trojan Horse on the other hand is an altogether different piece of malware. Taking its name from the mythical Trojan War in which Greek soldiers were said to have been smuggled into an enemy city hidden within a large (and seemingly harmless) wooden horse, the modern trojan horse acts in much the same way.

Often masquerading as a desirable application, a well made trojan horse will fool the user into installing it and may even perform the expected function (a popular choice is screensaver), in addition to also performing other less desirable tasks, such as logging each password entered into the computer.

By nature of its focus on exploiting user error, trojans doubtless offer by far the most signifiant malware threat to Mac OS X and for this reason they are the worthy focus of Mac security professionals. There have been several successful Mac trojans, Flashback.K being the most infamous, though the rate of infection is still remarkably small compared to some other platforms.

Lightweight Alternatives to Anti-virus Software

An updated Mac is a Mac which is safe from Flashback.K

Let’s take a look at some non-invasive and lightweight alternatives to anti-virus software which can help us stay a step ahead of the malware makers:

Use OpenDNS

As highlighted in a company blog post, OpenDNS prevents the Flashback.K malware from installing on Macs and the popular ad-supported (or ad-free at a premium) service will even prevent an already infected Mac from being exploited by Flashback.K (and many other forms of malware) effectively cancelling out attempts of the trojan to ‘call home‘ with its data.

Some further information on OpenDNS can be found here on our sister site, Web.AppStorm.

Use Noscript or disable Javascript and Flash
The Firefox-only extension Noscript will block Flash and Javascript (in addition to other plugins) from running unless a website is designated as ‘safe’ by the user and thus kept on a ‘whitelist’. Though compiling such whitelists can take some initial time to set up, once in place it is an effective method of ensuring you surf the web safely. There are similar plugins for Google Chrome named NotScript and ScriptNo, but Safari users are limited to Click-to-Flash and manually disabling Java within Safari’s preferences.

Surf Safely
The single most effective way of preventing infection is also the most eye-rollingly obvious and I’ll risk possible derision by discussing it anyway. Ensuring that you visit only trusted websites and download applications from reputable sources will go a long way toward preventing infection. When connecting to a website in which one enters secure details, such as an online bank account, ensure that https:// is present in the URL Bar, as the all important s denotes a secure connection.

In addition, deselecting the option within Safari’s preferences to open safe files after downloading is not selected is a prudent measure, as is using only trusted and secure wireless connections.

Stay Updated
Though the usefulness of Software Updates is reliant on Apple offering timely fixes, it is essential to maintain a fully updated Mac system – remember that a fully updated Mac running any version of OS X from Leopard upwards is totally protected from Flashback.K and its known variants.

Conclusion

When discussing Mac security, it’s all too easy to fall into the familiar trap of taking up a position on one extreme of the spectrum – the argument usually goes that either Macs are completely immune to all malware, or Macs are a wide open security threat waiting to be hit by a deluge of viruses ‘any day now’. Of course, neither position is correct and understanding that there is a middle ground will help ensure that your Mac does not become infected with malware.

The choice as to what steps a user takes in order to safeguard against malware infection will be a personal one and it would be foolish to state that Mac users will never need anti-virus software, but I will stick my neck out and state firmly that the tipping point is yet to be reached.

Really, at this point in time the cure is probably worse than the disease and running potentially resource-hogging anti-virus software is overkill for something which is unlikely to happen if one follows some basic good practices.

If I had a nickel for every window management app I’ve used on the Mac, I’d be a rich man. With that in mind, it’s no surprise that a small and relatively unknown app named Spectacle faces an uphill battle in the fight for their share of the window management market.

Will its simple interface, rich functionality, and open source code be enough to give Spectacle a place in this already crowded market? We’ll go in-depth after the break.

Overview

Viewing documents side-by-side with the help of Spectacle.

In the window management app world there are two distinct camps – those who use a keyboard and those who use a mouse. Spectacle falls into the former with their byline in the App Store reading “Spectacle is a simple utility that allows you to easily organize your windows without using a mouse”, and that just about sums up the functionality of the app itself. The interface is extremely basic, but usable and allows you to set shortcuts for different functions as well as choose how you’d like the app to run. You’ll be given the choice between running the app as a background application or in the status menu.

Whichever way you choose doesn’t really matter, although I chose to have Spectacle run in the background to save room in my ever-crowded status menu. In addition the app also has a checkbox to run on startup – I’d do this, otherwise you’ll have to open the app manually, which defeats much of the purpose of an app designed to make you more productive.

On that note, there’s no real reason not to keep Spectacle open all the time, as a free and open source app, you’ll never see any pop-ups or annoying up-sells, and it usually only takes up around 18-19mb of memory. In other words, for anyone with a computer that was made in the last 10 years, its memory usage is negligible at best.

Functionality and Presets

The Spectacle preferences window.

So what does that 18-19mb of memory give you in functionality? Quite a bit. Spectacle has 16 built in presets that allow you to snap your windows into a variety of positions. Below is a quick list of some of the more important presets and a quick review of their functions.

1. Center – this puts any app smack in the center of your screen, it doesn’t do much for functionality, but I find it tidies things up nicely.
2. Fullscreen – this basically acts like the “maximize” button in Windows, causing an app to fill the whole screen. I always hear complaints about the omission of this feature from Mac OS X, so it’s a welcome addition to Spectacle.
3. Left Half – this makes your application window fill the left half of the screen, similar to the snap feature in Windows 7.
4. Right Half – this makes you application window fill the right half of the screen, also similar to the snap feature in Windows 7.
5. Top Half – this allows applications to fill the top half of your screen.
6. Bottom – this allows applications to fill the bottom half of your screen.

As mentioned before, aside from the above presets, Spectacle includes 10 others which control everything from the basics to controlling window positions on an external monitor.

Shortcomings

While all the above presets are useful, they’re not very customizable. Although you can change their keyboard shortcuts, adding new functions is currently not supported. So what does that mean for you? If you’d like to do something with Spectacle and it’s not listed in the 16 presets, you’re out of luck.

All things considered though, the presets included in Spectacle are pretty comprehensive, so I can’t imagine many people would be left wanting for more. Aside from the lack of customizability, I can’t really knock Spectacle for much more, as it’s functionally almost perfect. I haven’t experienced a single crash, bug, or error message since I began using the app around two months ago.

That being said, these days, many window management programs also double as app launchers or are just a bit more all-around feature rich. On its current path as a open source project, I can’t really see too many new features coming to Spectacle any time soon, but who’s to say someone won’t fork it and turn it into something even more powerful?

Finally, since Spectacle is open source, there’s no support outside of Github, and no warranty or other-such guarantee. You’re basically on your own. Then again, Spectacle is only a small utility so there’s not much that could go wrong to begin with. Either way, if you’re wary of open source apps, you might want to look elsewhere.

Conclusion

Spectacle is awesome. Since I began using it around two months ago, I’ve been consistently delighted by the simple productivity increases it affords me on a daily basis. Even as someone who is admittedly not fond of keyboard shortcuts, I really can’t find much to complain about with Spectacle.

If you’re even so much as on the fence about switching up your window management regiment, you should download Spectacle and try it out for a bit before you spend a single penny. In the crowded world of window managers – Spectacle can hold it’s own.

If you’ve tried out Spectacle and you enjoyed using it, don’t hesitate to send the developer a small tip. It’s a nice gesture and helps ensure future development of the app.