Category: Mac

AirPlay is built into iOS and OS X these days, making it simple to mirror anything on any of your devices to your Apple TV. Oddly, though, there’s no built-in way to steam your iOS screen to a Mac using AirPlay, even though the 27” iMac might as well be a TV at that size.

As is so often the case, there’s an app for that. There’s AirServer, the tool that, once installed, lives in your Mac’s Preferences and makes it easy to stream from iOS to your Mac, and Reflector, which makes it look like you’ve actually got an iOS device on your Mac screen. Then, there’s the brand-new X-Mirage that aims to be the best tool both for AirPlay streaming and one-touch recording of anything on your iOS device screen.

Keep reading to see how it stacks up to the competition, and to get a chance to win one of 5 copies of X-Mirage.

Bridging Apple’s Own Tech

X-Mirage gives you an easy way to mirror your iOS devices to your Mac. Just start the app (you may need to right-click on the app and select open the first time, since the app is, oddly enough, not signed), and allow it to accept incoming network connections, then choose the resolution you’d like and set a name for your Mac if you don’t want to stick with the default. Then, just jump over to your iOS device and enable AirPlay mirroring or stream media over AirPlay, and it’ll automatically open in a clean window on your Mac.

That’s when you’ll see X-Mirage’s signature one-click recording option that’ll appear when the AirPlay mirroring window first opens. You’ll also see play/pause buttons to control media if you’re streaming music or videos from your iOS device to your Mac instead of just mirroring your whole screen. It’s great for mirroring, and works just as you’d expect, with minor lagging if your Wifi connection isn’t strong but otherwise solid performance.

Recording is similarly simple. Just tap the record button, then use your iOS device as normal, and tap the record button again in X-Mirage when you’re finished to stop recording. Then, you’ll be prompted to choose your video format and quality, and will be able to save it to your Mac or upload it directly from QuickTime. It’s simple, and works great.

X-Mirage Versus the Competition

If you just want to mirror your iOS device to your Mac, X-Mirage, AirServer, and Reflector are all great apps. At $16, $15, and $13, respectively, they’re all similarly priced. They all three get very similar performance with AirPlay streaming, but in testing I’d say that Reflector seemed to fare the worst while AirServer and X-Mirage gave almost the same quality.

With recording, X-Mirage makes it the simplest with a one-click option to record, while maintaining the nice play/pause buttons that AirServer also includes that makes it nice for use as just an AirPlay server without the recording features. That makes it the nicest of the 3 if you want it for AirPlay streaming and iOS device recording. There’s only two things it needs: its UI could use a bit of Reflector’s class, and it needs to be signed so it’ll run by default in OS X.

Win a Copy of X-Mirage!

Whether you just want a way to play iOS games on the big screen — where your iMac, and not the TV, is the big screen — or want to record app tutorials and more, X-Mirage is a great way to do it. And you just might be able to get it 100% for free, since we’ve got 5 copies to giveaway. Just leave a comment below and let us know what you think looks nicest about X-Mirage to enter the giveaway. Then, share the post on your social networks and leave another comment below with a link to your post for an extra entry.

Hurry and get your entry in — we’re closing the giveaway on Tuesday, October 22nd.

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

Not every device prefers to use M4A as its main audio format. Some situations call for an MP3 file, and sometimes even something outlandish like OGG. The App Store is full of “free” music converters that either don’t work or have an abundance of ads. After researching things a bit, I discovered a quality alternative to anything available in the App Store. It’s MediaHuman’s Audio Converter, one of the few freeware apps with an appealing user interface. The question is, does it perform as well as the paid apps? Let’s find out.

It’s Speedy, in Small Jobs

I didn’t expect my MacBook Air to have enough power for such rapid batch conversion. MediaHuman’s app restored my faith in this machine’s abilities. Songs of average length (4–5 minutes) converted in a mere 7 seconds, albums taking slightly over a minute each. I didn’t especially enjoy watching the app do its work as most of the interface is a bit bland, but appearance isn’t common for tools of its nature.

Adding more than 40 songs at once freezes the app for a few seconds while it loads them all into the RAM. I tried converting 228 files at once for a stress test and once the conversion started, things slowed down significantly. Scrolling through the app was jittery and I was barely able to use it. I checked Activity Monitor to see what it was actually doing and discovered that the app was using over 400 MB of my memory to temporarily store the files while it pulled and pushed them from and to to the disk. FFmpeg, an open source tool for audio conversion, was using as much of the CPU as it could, which is why the files convert so fast.

Unfortunately, the app quit after only 100 files, verifying my fears about intense batch conversion. Every other test I ran worked fine, but I completely lost confidence in the app’s powerhouse ability. I tried again to no avail. The key may be to have nothing open while converting. That’s not very productive, so I didn’t try it. Overall, the batch conversion issue is a shame, really.

Actually adding the files to the conversion queue was as easy as a drag and drop. Folders, too, can be dropped onto the app icon to make converting albums effortless. Overall, the performance was most speedy — surprisingly so, especially compared to the competition.

Shining In Comparison

OS X has a built-in audio conversion tool in the secondary-click menu. If you go to the Services section, you’ll see an Encode Selected Audio Files option. Clicking this will bring up a small window with conversion options. While this is a free way of converting audio for your Apple devices, it does not take into account MP3, FLAC, or really any type of format other than Apple’s. There are four options: High-Quality, iTunes Plus (128 kbps), Apple Lossless, and Spoken Podcast. However, there’s a major downside to Apple’s tool: it can’t convert anything besides AIFF, AIFC, Sd2f, CAFF, or WAVE, which are not common formats.

iTunes also has its own encoder, which can be configured in the Import Settings of the app’s General tab in Preferences. This can convert nearly anything (FLAC is an exception) to any format. I’ve found it to be significantly slower than MediaHuman’s app, though, and would not recommend it for batch conversion. On a quad-core i7 machine I own, it took over six hours to convert approximately 1900 songs. Calculating MediaHuman’s average conversion time, it would take just over half that. Well, that’s considering it doesn’t crash 1/19th of the way through as it did when I tested it.

That leaves the free and paid tools in the Mac App Store. Systemic’s Music Converter is one of the most popular apps. The free version is ad-supported, doesn’t have any options, and is very slow, but the “Pro” version, which costs $9.99, isn’t half bad. Many of the other options in the Mac App Store either only work with MP3s or have such a high price that justifying a purchase is impossible.

Top-Notch Freeware

There are a plethora of free tools available for the Mac. Quality ones, on the other hand, are very hard to find. You can’t expect the average Google search to yield something as well-built as MediaHuman’s Audio Converter. One major issue is that it can’t batch process anything over 50 files confidently.

If you need transfer a bunch of files to a smartphone that only plays MP3s or you want to convert all your files to a single format, consider using iTunes’ integrated encoder. Otherwise, when compared to the competition, it easily comes out on top with a simple interface and lots of options. The developers also update it monthly, and hopefully they will fix that multiple file issue soon.

It was a tuesday, and since I got home from the office early that day, I decided to pop into my son’s daycare to take him home. As I open the door, I see him (wearing a fireman’s hat) with two other boys, all crowded around a PC screen. They keep touching the CRT and my son says, “It’s broken.”

The touchscreen — and more specifically, the popularity of the iPhone and iPad — have changed the way we interact with technology. A few years ago, Steve Jobs was insistent that touchscreen computers just weren’t going to take off. But my three-year-old boy says different. And I think he might be right.

Read the rest of the post at iPad.AppStorm.net. 

There are billions and billions of emails sent every single day and, while most of them are nothing more than lousy attempts at attempting to get access to our banking information, it’s still the most popular form of communication used today. If you’ve recently received an order confirmation from an online retailer or a weekly newsletter from your favourite coffee shop, it’s likely to have been very well designed and, in some cases, easy to read on a mobile device.

With Mail Designer Pro, it’s now possible to design great-looking email templates on your Mac that actually look really good and will work across many devices. While a little costly, the benefits and savings it provides make this an attractive alternative to dedicated design studios when it comes to jazzing up your email newsletters.

One Size Doesn’t Fit All

Email is still the biggest weapon in your marketing arsenal when running an online business so it’s important to make sure that your emails to customers not only look good, but work across many devices. Otherwise, no-one is going to be able, or bother, to read them. Up to now, designing a great email was hard work and usually done at a great expense by web designers, or at least it used to be.

Unfortunately, email newsletters are incredibly difficult to design. While they work the same as a web page, email apps do not, with many (such as Microsoft Outlook) lacking support for even the most basic of HTML tags and features.

iWork for Mail

Mail Designer Pro has been developed to bring an almost iWork-like function to designing an email template. There’s no code to look at, no designers to involve, it’s just Pages for email templates.

This really shows when you launch the app and you’re presented with templates that you can base your design from. Many of these templates actually look great, so you’d be forgiven for simply using these without changing a thing. That’s great, though the app offers some incredible functionality to really make these your own.

Layout Tools

For seasoned desktop publishers, the app will feel right at home with many options for altering the layout of any items or elements within the template. My only criticism of the app’s interface is that there isn’t enough to distinguish between whether a toolbar icon is disabled or not, something that isn’t helped by the darker background.

The default view is also icons only, with no real explanation of what some of the functions do. For anyone coming to Mail Designer Pro for the first time, I’d suggest changing the toolbar to display both icon and text to avoid confusion and I hope it’s something that could be changed in the future.

Everything is very much drag-and-drop, with options to add images, shapes and texts. You’re a little more restricted than with Pages as the app conforms to a specific set of rules to ensure that your email will look the same on any device it is viewed on. This may seem like quite a restriction but, because of the disparity between email clients, it’s one limitation that serves a very good purpose.

It can be a little difficult to figure out how how to hide elements at first and you’ll find yourself referring to the manual quite often to begin with, though while some of the features may not be immediately apparent, they’re soon quickly remembered.

Mobile First

With more people using mobile devices, such as smartphones, than any other computing device, Mail Designer Pro includes a dedicated mobile device preview that can be toggled between any number of devices to provide a live preview. For those wanting to see how it would look on an iPhone and Android device, multiple mobile preview windows can be displayed.

You can toggle between the desktop and mobile layout when it comes to customising and even specify elements that will only display on certain devices, such as hiding any sections that may not look great on a mobile device or that have no relevance.

Focused Features

As I mentioned before, Mail Designer Pro doesn’t give you much leeway regarding the width of the template in order to ensure maximum compatibility. The same goes for fonts, as it’s not immediately apparent you can select any font you wish. While it could be seen as a limitation of the app, it certainly isn’t the case. Mail Designer Pro limits the fonts to, again, ensure maximum compatibility and the fonts listed will be accessible on all devices, with some font sets being able to gracefully fall back to more common fonts if the specialised ones aren’t available.

Integration

While Mail Designer Pro will let you customise a template for you to then use in mail sent from your Mac, it also integrates very well with more popular online newsletter services such as MailChimp or Campaign Monitor. If you’ve ever tried to use either of these services to design a template, it can be very hard work. Being able to create a powerful and great-looking template from the comfort of your own Mac and then simply upload the results is a huge benefit.

Mail Designer Pro features full support for templates on either of the above services with the ability to insert the required placeholder code directly within the app, no fiddling about afterwards. As someone who uses MailChimp regularly, this is a great feature and one that works brilliantly.

You can also output HTML directly, allowing for use with other services, bespoke systems or simply hosting a web-accessible version.

Conclusion

Mail Designer Pro is a complete email template creator that is unsurpassed by anything else on offer currently. Its advanced features and relative ease of use make it a great app for anyone involved with newsletter campaigns on a regular basis. Even more experienced web designers will find Mail Designer Pro useful, being able to take care of almost all the hassle when it comes to ensuring a newsletter not only looks good but works well.

But at $99.99 Mail Designer Pro isn’t cheap, especially when you realise that there is a cheaper version, Mail Designer, available at just $33.99. The difference in price dictates wether you’re newsletters will be responsive and easily read on mobile devices. This can be rather bitter pill to swallow for the sake of responsive design, though when you consider that more people check email on their phone than their computer, that additional cost seems a little easier to digest.

All in all, it simply comes down to how integral emails are to your business or website, but I’d recommend Mail Designer Pro over the lesser Mail Designer in most cases simply because the extra cost would be worth it in the long run. After all, given the choice between receiving a newsletter that was mobile-ready or one which isn’t that requires a lot of pinch and zoom, I know which one I’d throw to the trash and which I might read.

Tired of having your RSS feeds, longform articles, and bookmarks spread across different apps and services? ReadKit is the reading app you need. It’s the app to keep all of your reading in one place.

ReadKit is the perfect post-Google Reader RSS reader for the Mac, with built-in native RSS sync and full-featured support for all of the best new RSS reader services, including Feedly, Fever, NewsBlur, Feed Wrangler, and Feedbin. You can then add your reading later services — including Instapaper, Pocket, and Readability — and bookmarks from Pinboard and Delicious, and keep everything together in one app. It’s easy to find everything you want to read, with Smart Folders and search, and simple to make your reading experience just the way you want with 4 beautiful themes and the reading font and size of your choice.

Want more than just reading? ReadKit’s got you covered, with rich integration with all of your favorite sharing and bookmarking services. It’s even got one-click Evernote saving, so you can build an archive of your favorite articles to easily find them later.

ReadKit is our AppStorm RSS and reading app of choice, one we gave a 10/10 rating in our most recent review. We’re pretty sure you’ll love it.

Get a Copy of ReadKit Today!

ReadKit is the RSS and reading later app you need. It’s just $6.99 on the Mac App Store, a steal for everything it offers. Go get your copy today, and start enjoying the best reading experience the Mac has to offer!

Last week, we reviewed a serious alternative to launchers like Alfred and LaunchBar: Quicksilver – a program that finally came out of its 10-year long beta period a few months ago.

This software is really powerful and is relatively easy to use, yet you might miss its full potential if you don’t spend enough time with it. Let me make a few things easier for you and guide you through the steps from a complete beginner to becoming a Quicksilver master in just a few articles. This week, we’ll cover the basics that help you understand of the app works and how you can perform basic tasks on files and folders.

Understanding the Catalog

There are two ways of finding things with Quicksilver:

• by searching, i.e typing letters to match the name of an item
• or by browsing, which is done by pressing Right arrow when an item is selected

If you don’t like having to press the Right arrow key, you can use the space bar instead. First, though, you’ll need to assign this behavior to the space bar by changing the default setting from Normal to Show Item’s Contents in Quicksilver’s Preferences, under Preferences > Command > Search > Spacebar behavior (yes, there are Preferences in the Preferences).

By the way, unless specified, always use lower case when typing in Quicksilver. While in most cases, using capitalized keys won’t do anything particular, you can assign a special behavior to capitalization. I’ll cover this in a forthcoming article. For now, you don’t want to mess things up, so don’t capitalize words (and it’s easier to type, after all!).

Quicksilver does not use Spotlight indexing. Instead, it has its own index: the Catalog. Items have to be registered in the Catalog first before they can found by searching. Thankfully, though, the Catalog already includes some of the most used items by default:

• your Home, Downloads and Documents folder,
• your Desktop,
• the Trash,
• items in the Dock,
• OS X Recent Items,
• all Disks (both internal and external, including those accessible over the local network),
• Preference Panes,
• Printers,
• …and some extra items.

You might be surprised that I mentioned your Home folder and your Downloads, Documents and Desktop folders. The latter are subfolders of your Home folder, after all. You will understand later on why this has its importance.

Scanning and Subfolder Depth

If you take a deeper look into Quicksilver Catalog presets for some folders, you’ll understand a bit more why you can have access to some items and not to others. Let’s have a look at it now.

First, open up the Catalog. You can do this by “invoking” Quicksilver then pressing Command + comma, just like you would with any native Mac app. Remember that invoking Quicksilver is pressing the keyboard shortcut you defined to show the Quicksilver window (it’s Command + Space for me; this can be configured in Quicksilver’s Preferences > Preferences > Command > Activation > HotKey).

In the window that’s opened now, click on the Catalog icon on the right of the top row. In the list on the left, choose User, then select Home in the Sources list on the right. Finally, click on the little i button in the bottom right of the window. This will open up the info drawer.

In the drawer, you can see that “Include Contents” is set to Folder Contents and that the Depth is set to 1. It means that when scanning your Home folder, Quicksilver also scans items contained in this folder and adds them to its Catalog — but only for first level items. Therefore you will find subfolders of your Home folder (Documents, Images, Movies, and so on) but not subfolders within these subfolders. You can check this by switching from “Source Options” to Contents at the bottom of this drawer.

Notice that everything is grayed out in this drawer: this is because the Home entry is a preset of Quicksilver, and presets can’t be modified.

If you want to modify a preset, you should first create a copy of it. To do this, click Attributes in the bottom of the drawer, then on the Create Copy button. This will then add a copy of this Catalog entry to the Custom list (which is accessible from the list on the left, just under User). This copy is editable, so you can now specify the Depth for your Home folder.

While it’s technically possible to specify the level of depth to be scanned for, I encourage you to think twice about it: don’t go too deep into sub-folders so as to keep things snappy (but it’s largely dependent on the power of your machine). You can always access any item by browsing and adding specific, deep-buried folders later as needed.

Now let’s look at your Downloads folder. Keeping the drawer opened, choose Downloads in the Sources list, just underneath your Home folder. You can see that Depth is set to 2. This way, the Catalog includes your Downloads folder, its subfolders, and items contained in these subfolders, but nothing deeper in the filesystem hierarchy.

Adding Files and Folders to the Catalog

If you need to add a folder to the Catalog, click on the + button at the bottom of the window and choose File & Folder Scanner.

This folder will show up in the Custom list. Remember you can specify the depth of scanning with the info drawer. You can also limit items to be included using the Types: and Exclude types: lists.

If you use Dropbox, you might want to add your Dropbox folder as I did. I’ve set Include Contents: to Folder Contents as well as chosen a Depth of 1. This way, first-level sub-folders of my Dropbox folder are accessible by searching. However, the content of these sub-folders is accessed by browsing, so as not to overload the Catalog.

Adding Some Special Items to the Catalog

To take full advantage of Quicksilver, I suggest you include a couple more things in the Catalog. Inside the “Quicksilver” list, make sure you check all Sources lists, especially Proxy Objects. You’ll see in a short while how this can be useful. By including Internal Commands, you can also get access to Quicksilver Preferences and other useful tools from the Quicksilver interface itself.

Here are the things you can now do:

• Access any Preferences by running the Show [panel] Preferences > Run command, where [panel] can be Triggers, Catalog, Plugins, or just nothing (thus just typing Show Preferences) to open the related tab.
• Rescan the Catalog if you can’t find something you’ve just added, by issuing the Catalog Rescan > Run command.
• Check for Quicksilver Update > Run – this is pretty obvious.
• Show Guide to access Quicksilver documentation.
• Access, with Proxy Objects, the current application, the current window, the current web page in your browser, the last commands you typed, and so on.

Actions

Now that you know how to include items in the Catalog, it’s time to do things with them, with Quicksilver “Actions”. There are at least 50+ built-in actions and even a whole lot more when you install plugins and other applications Quicksilver can interact with.

You can enable/disable actions by visiting the Preferences. You can also re-order them in order to modify their “Rank”. This Rank reflects the order in which actions appear: those ranked 1 in each category appear as default ones in the second pane of the main interface of Quicksilver, while others actions can be browsed, searched and filtered out within the Results list (i.e the dropdown list showing up when you press the right-hand arrow).

It’s worth noting that some actions have Alternate Actions. An alternate action is accessible when you press Command whilst you’re in the second pane. Try searching for something, and when the Open action shows up, press and hold Command to change it to Reveal. Pressing Enter while holding down Command executes the Reveal action, which opens a new Finder window with the item selected. Unfortunately, to my knowledge, you can’t modify an alternate action or assign your own (but now that Quicksilver is in super active development again, maybe you could ask the developers for it!).

Working with Files and Folders

One of the things you’ll probably most use Quicksilver for is replacing the Finder. Let’s see how you can accomplish that.

Searching and Browsing

As you now know, you can find everything that’s in the Catalog, either by searching for it directly (typing its name or an abbreviation) or by browsing through the filesystem, with any imaginable combination of searching/browsing in between. If the content of a folder is not directly searchable, you can still:

• search for the folder by typing its name or any abbreviation matching it…
• …and then browse its content with Right arrow.

When browsing, the content can be filtered out by searching again. Just make sure that the Search Mode of Quicksilver is set to “Filter Results”. To access this setting, you must have a Results list displayed on screen: just type any letter and wait a few seconds for this dropdown list to appear. Then click the little icon in the upper right of the Results list window, or simply press Command + Left Arrow or Command + Right Arrow several times to cycle through the three available modes. Since the release of Quicksilver 1.1, “Filter Results” should be the default search mode, but it’s worth knowing how to change it, just in case.

For instance, finding a file named “Invoice September 2013” sitting in your Downloads folder is as easy as typing “down”, pressing the Right arrow, then typing “inv”. If you access this file super frequently, then typing d, Right arrow, I should be enough, because Quicksilver learns from your habits and means you have to type less and less over time.

Assigning Abbreviations and Synonyms

By default, Quicksilver ranks your search results by score. It means that the more frequently you access something, the higher it will be in the list of results, and the less letters you have to type to select it. For instance, if you use the “down” abbreviation to access your Downloads folder, there’s a great chance that, the third or fourth time you start typing “do”, the Downloads folder is already selected. In short, Quicksilver auto-assigns abbreviations based on your typing habits. If this is not fast enough for you, or for any other reason, you can manually assign abbreviations.

For instance, I’ve assigned the “D” abbreviation to my Downloads folder in just one command:

1. Select your Downloads folder in the first pane,
2. Press Tab to access the second pane, and start typing Assign Abbrievation…, then press Tab again to go into the third pane
3. Here, in the text box, type the abbreviation you want to associate your Downloads folder with, like “D” for example, then press Enter. This closes the Quicksilver window and your new abbreviation is now registered.

Keep in mind that the letters you use as an abbreviation should be included in the full name. If not, you should use what Quicksilver calls a Synonym, instead. For instance, if you’ve used OS X for years, the name iCal might hard-wired into your brain. But you also know that the iCal name has been changed for “Calendar” since Lion. Therefore, if you’re like me, you might want to type iCal to reach the Calendar. Quicksilver won’t find iCal because the letter “i” is not in the word “Calendar”. This is where Synonyms are useful.

To add a synonym, go to the Catalog Preferences, click on the Plus button at the bottom of the window, and choose Synonym from the list — the drawer opens up. In the “Synonym” text field, type the Synonym you want to use, here I’m using iCal, then click on the big exclamation point that reads Target name, Click to Change. Then select (by typing) the item you want this synonym to be associated with, here Calendar. Finally, hit Enter. You should see a new line in the Sources list that reads “iCal ? Calendar”.

The Comma Trick and other useful tips

• Use the Comma trick to select multiple files and folders: Select an item first either by searching or browsing, press Comma, select another item, etc. You can select as many files and folders as you wish.

• Grab the item currently selected in any Finder window, including the Desktop, by pressing Cmd-Esc (you don’t even have to invoke Quicksilver first). This is a preset HotKey Trigger (more on HotKey Triggers in a forthcoming article).
• Press ~ to access your Home folder
• When browsing a folder, press Alt-Right arrow to reveal hidden files (so, for instance, the sequence “~”, Alt-Arrow, “L” should help you find your Library)
• Press Cmd-Y to Quicklook what’s selected (you can assign Quicklook to the Space bar, if you prefer, in Preferences > Preferences > Search > Spacebar behavior)

Finally, I suggest you go to Preferences > Preferences > Actions, and in the “All Actions” list, search for “Add to Catalog” and check its box. Now, if you can’t find a file or folder by searching, just access it by browsing first, then use the Add to Catalog action to, well, add it to the Catalog without having to dig into the Catalog preferences. Neat, isn’t it?

Perform Finder Actions

Here are the actions you’d usually do with the Finder, that you can access directly within Quicksilver. To use each of them, first select a file/folder in the first pane, press Tab and then type (you don’t need to use upper case):

• “Move to…”
• “Copy to…”
• “New Folder”
• “Rename”
• “Move to Trash”
• “Set Label”
• “Get Info”
• “Make Alias”, etc.

You can also empty the Trash with the Empty Trash > Open command. There’s no need to type Open, because it already is the default action for emptying the Trash. In fact, typing emp then hitting Enter should be enough. For those who are curious, it reads Open because it in fact opens (runs) a script named “Empty Trash”, located in the Script folder of Quicksilver’s Library > Application Support folder.

What’s Next?

By now, you should know how to find files, folders and applications easily, with just a few keystrokes. You also know how to perform usual Finder tasks without the Finder.

Next week, we’ll dig into some of the things you can do with Plugins, such as emailing files, searching over the web, navigating your browser history, controlling iTunes, tweeting, scaling images, etc. In the meantime, have fun playing with Quicksilver! And feel free to ask anything in the comments below.

This probably isn’t the first mention of Capo 3 you’ve seen. It’s probably not the first review you’ve seen. But this might be the first review you’ve seen from a guitarist with over a decade of experience with the instrument. I wanted to take my time to make sure that Capo 3 was adequately tested and given a legitimate and fair review from a gigging musician.

Capo has been around for a couple years now, and it’s a well-known and critically-acclaimed tool for learning music. Capo 3 comes with some new features, including automatic beat and chord detection — huge promises that should make guitarists both excited and wary. After all, most of us will know that the promise of an app that can essentially tab a song for us is an intoxicating, and maybe impossible, dream. Read on to find out whether or not Capo 3 does what it claims.

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Picky Design

Capo has always been a good-looking and easy-to-use Mac app. With Capo 3, some minor adjustments to an already-strong foundation make it even better. The app fits in really well the rest of OS X, and it hasn’t adopted anything foolish — there’s no linen or ugly faux textures.

The app looks professional, like the workhorse it is, but also playful. It’s one of those apps that’s just a joy to tinker with. The animations are precise, but fun, and messing with songs is great. (Adding a song is easy — either open it from the file menu or just click and drag from the finder.) A friend of mine was over, and she doesn’t play guitar, but she was keenly interested in the app after she realized it could change the pitch. (She wanted to hear Justin Timberlake’s voice an octave lower. That was interesting.)

Overall though, what makes the app work is that it doesn’t take long to learn how to use it. It’s simple and intuitive despite its power. Most apps meant for musicians are frankly pretty hideous, so I don’t think I could give it a finer compliment.

Mapping a Song

Let’s spend some time talking about what actually matters — whether or not Cpao 3 accomplishes what it sets out to do. Capo’s goal, when all is said and done, isn’t to automatically reveal the chords of any and every song to you. But it does want to make it easier to hear and learn the music. It wants to help you learn. I’ve used a lot of music apps that say they do this, and rarely are they being honest. Capo’s a bit of a different story.

First, let’s talk a little bit about chord detection. This is a new feature to Capo 3, and one that seems a little too good to be true. It sort of is, in some ways. Most songs are never as simple as “just” a few guitar chords, and since the app doesn’t analyze arpeggios and build chords based on root notes, sometimes you’ll feel robbed. For example, I imported Black Rebel Motorcycle Club’s “Shuffle Your Feet”. The app didn’t reveal many chords, but when I slowed it down, I realized that the guitar parts are actually picked throughout. There isn’t a single chord in the song, but the thick production is deceiving.

Some tracks fared better, but songs usually aren’t simple. That’s why the app’s other features are so important to note. The spectogram, as it’s called, is seriously cool. You can see notes and solos in it, but if you click and drag over them with your mouse, you’ll reveal the tab. After demoing a few tracks, I don’t want to say it’s always accurate. And neither does SuperMegaUltraGroovy, the developer. In fact, they warn you that distorted notes — particularly common in rock solos, of course — could make it more difficult for the app to accurately “read” notes.

In my professional studio experience, there’s no real way to counteract any of these problems. Distortion is very problematic for any technology. When one of my bands, a hard rock group, was recording in a professional studio, we had some difficulty with my vocals. Given the genre, I barked a lot of the lyrics and really didn’t sing much — think James Hetfield without the whiskey drawl. All musicians use autocorrect, even if it’s just to make sure layered vocal tracks all sound alike, but the autocorrect couldn’t detect the pitch of my voice because of distortion. This was about four years ago — a lifetime in technology — but I haven’t heard anything from any friends to suggest that this problem has been solved. With that in mind, I’m pretty impressed with Capo 3’s solo transcription. Often, it only has to be transposed about an octave — which is very easy to do in-app. So Capo is detecting the proper note, but displaying it an octave too low or high — still very impressive.

What’s really impressive to me, though, is the way that the app handles pitch and speed. You can raise or lower the pitch, or speed up or slow down a song. When you slow down a song, the pitch is unaffected. That’s really incredible. Traditionally speaking, slowing down a song also lowers its pitch. Speeding it up raises the pitch. With Capo, this doesn’t happen.

Adjusting pitch doesn’t affect the speed of the song either. So if a song is tuned a half-step lower than standard and you don’t want to adjust your guitar, it’s not hard to quickly fix that in the app without affecting the rest of the song. It’s jaw-dropping, and single-handedly worth the price of entry.

The app also detects a ton of other things — tempo, time signature, etc. You can change everything, and that’s part of the fun of the app. It doesn’t take long to make adjustments, and that’s when you start to learn. When you slow down the song and make change chords and fix up a tab, the app becomes really useful. This is an app for self-taught people. They’ll learn from it.

When you’re done mapping out a song, you can save your transcription and always keep it on hand. You can share it via Airdrop or email, or whatever’s easiest for you really. And yes, that means it’s easy to collaborate with other people who have Capo 3 and really get into a track. It’s fantastic.

Music to My Ears

An app like this is never going to be perfect. I don’t think any machine can ever be as finely tuned as the human ear. We can hear the smallest imperfections. Expecting an app like Capo 3 to perfectly transcribe a song is a mistake — but what it does do is pretty incredible. The way it teaches music is important. I don’t think musicians learn from anything other than playing music and really learning how to listen to it properly, and Capo allows them to do that at their own pace.

When I was younger and taking guitar lessons, I used to bring my favourite CDs in from my collection and ask my guitar teacher to help me figure it out. He liked doing that because he couldn’t teach me theory; I understood it before the lesson was over and then he felt like he was wasting my money. But teaching me to analyze and really learn music by studying my favourite musicians was something I used to pay a lot of money for on a weekly basis. Capo 3 does it for me, and it’s only $30. If you’re a guitarist, I can’t think of money better spent.

The App Store made buying software something normal people do again — but almost as quickly, it’s seemingly turned into a marketplace of free apps paid for by in-app purchases. Marco Arment of Instapaper fame has argued that “Paid-up-front iOS apps had a great run, but it’s over”, while Joe Cieplinski, the developer behind Teleprompt+, argues that “there is a whole world of untapped potential on the App Store for developers who can solve real problems for people who are happy to pay.” I’ve always sided with the latter argument that paid apps will never die, but it only takes a few minutes of browsing the App Store to see that freemium apps have seriously encroached on the domains previously held by paid apps.

Are paid apps dead, or not — and is this just about iOS, or is it the same on the Mac? To answer that, we’ve talked with Nik Fletcher, product manager at Realmac Software, about their team’s experiences with app pricing and sales on both the iOS and Mac App Store. Realmac has recently faced backlash on the iOS App Store over Clear+’s pricing, but at the same time decided not to run discounts on their pro Mac apps, so they have a unique perspective on both markets.

To them, there’s a bright future for carefully considered in-app purchases and paid pro software. Here’s the interview:

Are paid app sales declining over time?

There’s a definite feeling that paid app sales on iOS are declining. I suspect that it’s being felt particularly strongly in the very lowest price tiers (99¢ – $4.99). Higher-priced apps are less likely to be affected, but they’re a different market.

Is that the same for brand new apps?

Unlike even a year ago, a huge jump up the Paid app charts no longer generates the level of revenue you’d traditionally associate with the App Store. A look through the Top Grossing charts shows where all the revenue is being made — free apps using In-App Purchase — and that’s a notable change.

Is this true for iOS and OS X, or are the two platforms substantially different for app sales?

A quick look at the Mac App Store in the UK shows that there’s just half a dozen free apps using In-App Purchase in the 100 Top Grossing apps. It’s clearly still a very different market.

I think at this point, whilst the Mac App Store is a great buying experience, we’re certainly finding that offering an app directly — as well as from the App Store — isn’t cannibalizing Mac App Store sales. If anything, for certain products, direct sales are consistently stronger. That may be down to pricing expectations (RapidWeaver, at $79.99, is a pricey product for the Mac App Store), but the Mac App Store hasn’t destroyed the market for direct sales.

Is the App Store + your own store driving more or less sales to your apps than it was a year or two ago?

The revenue we’re seeing is consistent for where we are in the update cycle for our products; however, the iOS paid market for low-cost is certainly changing.

If you could change one thing about the App Store today, what would you add: free trials, paid upgrades, something else?

All the gripes about the App Store — free trials and paid upgrades — are effectively being replaced with IAP. I honestly don’t think that these gripes would make developers more money — the place at which low-cost apps prove value has changed, and we have to respond to that. The indie community can wish that it hadn’t changed, or we can embrace the change and stop treating IAP as taboo. If you’re building a paid app, you should probably reconsider your pricing plans.

Your team has stayed away from in-app purchases, and also recently said you won’t run discounts on your Mac apps. Could you explain your reasons for sticking with the traditional, relatively high upfront app price model?

We’ve stuck by our pricing for our Mac apps, as they’re far more involved, with a much bigger team to support. We’ve been working on Ember, as an example, for over a year — with a team of two developers. We’ve got a lot more planned for the app in coming updates, so we’ve priced it at a level that is sustainable for the team, and at a price that professionals can justify. Quite simply, we think the app saves you more than $50 worth of time.

Of course, iOS is a different. IAP is something we’re going to be carefully considering in the coming months. Whilst we work incredibly hard to balance the needs of the business with our desire to give customers all the free updates we can, ultimately we want to ensure that our products are sustainable — and IAP is very clearly the route that (when carefully considered) looks to be providing that in the longer term.

Knowing what you know today, is the world a better place with the App Store?

Absolutely. The way in which apps and iOS devices enable people to do more is incredible. This, combined with the trust and distribution of the Apple brand, has made software far more approachable and consumer friendly. It’s forced the software industry to raise the bar for design, interaction and careful consideration of the user. We’re far less tolerant of poorly designed apps than we were.

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In Conclusion — AppStorm’s Thoughts on App Pricing

It’d seem to me that, if anything, the days of $0.99 paid apps on the App Store were the anomaly, but their death and switch to freemium models does not by any means mean that the days of professional paid apps are over. The Realmac team’s perspective from both the iOS and Mac sides is fascinating, and it’ll be interesting to watch going forward to see what they do with both their lower priced iOS apps and their professional Mac apps that are priced accordingly.

And carefully considered IAPs? We’d love to see what innovative developers can do, building on the example of the likes of Paper and others. It’s an exciting time for apps — and absolutely not a time of doom.

Bundles started out as a great way to get a ton of apps for a cheap price. Then, thanks to the Humble Bundles, paying what you want for a bundle got popular. Now, this week’s bundle from StackSocial lets you get a huge bundle of apps, design resources, and subscriptions for a cheaper price if you buy it early during the bundle promotion.

For $35 today — but $50 if you wait until the last day of the bundle — you can get a copy of xScope, Corel Painter Lite, CSS Hat, Pixa, skEdit, and more in the SuperStacked Mac Bundle. You’ll also get a set of Photoshop and iOS app design templates, two beautiful sets of thin vector icons great for modern designs, and the entire Growth Hacker Bundle with subscriptions to web apps like MOZ, Stride, HitTail, and more. That’s a lot of stuff to get for that price, especially if you’re planning on launching a new side-business where the design tools and web apps would come in handy.

And, best of all, we’ve got two copies of the SuperStacked Mac bundle to giveaway to our readers. Just leave a comment below and let us know what you want most from this bundle to enter — and then share the post on your social networks and leave a new comment with a link to your social post for an extra entry in the giveaway. Best of all, if you really want the bundle, go ahead and buy it now — and if you win, you’ll get reimbursed in full for the bundle!

Hurry and get your entry in — we’re closing our giveaway on Friday, October 18th!

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

Flat design is all the rage these days, but back in 1984, flat was all there was. And back then, the Mac shipped with an acclaimed paint application: MacPaint. The legendary app showed the world that computers could, indeed, be the bicycle for the mind that Steve Jobs wanted so desperately.

Today’s TextEdit was the successor to Mac OS Classic’s SimpleEdit, but MacPaint never got a 21st century upgrade. That is, until now. Cloudpaint is a new web app that nearly perfectly replicates MacPaint in any modern browser — and it’s a ton of fun to play with.

Built by developer Martin Braun a year ago, Cloudpaint just recently was added to the Chrome Experiments site, and apparently got picked up across the internet from there, making the rounds on Boing Boing and Daring Fireball this week.  It’s just surprising it hadn’t been “discovered” sooner — it’s a nearly perfect clone of MacPaint running in Mac OS Classic, and is incredibly fun to try out.

You’ll find all the original MacPaint features in the app, from round rectangles to FatBits for fake zoom and all the original pixelated fonts. Then, in a hint of the present, there’s Facebook-based accounts for saving images and a 1x button to zoom the app much like an iPhone app on an iPad.

For some more MacPaint history, check out The Vintage Mac Museum‘s gallery of MacPaint screenshots and more, Folklore.org‘s fascinating history of MacPaint’s development, and The Computer History Museum‘s archive of MacPaint’s source code.

You know, it’s really surprising Apple hasn’t ever included a MacPaint-style app in OS X. I think they’d make quite a few Mac geeks happy with a complete, original copy — perhaps with iCloud integration just for laughs.

Task and project management apps such as OmniFocus and Things aren’t just popular, they’re a necessity for anyone wanting to keep track of tasks and projects all the way from start to finish. While I probably spend more time trying out new GTD apps than actually getting anything done, I’d be completely lost without any sort of task management app that lets me track individual tasks and projects.

My latest GTD distraction is Firetask, a project-orientated task management app that promises complete and simple control of your tasks so you can spend less time procrastinating and more time, well, getting things done.

Project Management

Apps such as Clear, Remember the Milk or Reminders are great task management apps but they serve a more linear purpose of simply building a list of tasks and checking them off as and when completed. Project-based task management apps provide much more organisational control and for multiple projects in multiple areas of responsibility.

Firetask describes itself as a project-orientated GTD app, allowing for some serious organisational options. Rather than dealing with simply a number of different task lists, Firetask provides full project and category management.

The developers of Firetask have taken David Allen’s Getting Things Done book of task management, the author who coined the very phrase, to heart and have designed the app to be as efficient as possible. Readers of the book will likely feel right at home while many of the features will still be familiar for anyone switching from another method of managing tasks.

Projects let you separate tasks for different objectives while categories can separate tasks into different types, such as meetings, phone calls or errands. This allows for you to not only view what’s coming up next in a project but also meetings you may be attending across all of your active projects.

The App

The app is rather contrasting in terms of its appearance as its toolbar and sidebar looks pretty dated dated and out of place in Mountain Lion yet its main interface has a very iOS 7-like look and feel.

Everything is laid out clearly and easily though similar to the toolbar, some of the icons (especially Today) look somewhat dated and don’t fit in with the flatter design choices in the rest of the app.

There are some UI quirks, however, such as having to find the sweet spot to double-click to enter or amend a task as the app seems to quite picky about where you click to edit a task. There are also some hidden fields with no labels, so double-clicking certain parts of the tasks would bring up the due-date calendar. For these types of fields, a heading would really be beneficial as it can be quite unintuitive to attempt to add or edit these fields.

You have to be lightning quick when changing a task’s status if you’re clicking on its status box, if it is set to completed for more than a second then it disappears from your list. It can be frustrating if you’re wanting to change it’s status and needed to cycle through to the beginning and you’ll end up just using the task detail window.

Projects and Categories

Tasks can be assigned to both projects and categories either independently or simultaneously. How you use either of these functions is up to you, though they’re all completely customisable so you can truly make the app your own and change it to work for you, not the other way around.

Quick Entry

Adding tasks is as simple as double-clicking within an existing task list or using the Quick-Entry option. Using either of these options allow for an easy way of entering tasks though the Quick Entry box provides more information.

Firetask for Mac includes some powerful features for keyboard junkies that let you assign tasks to projects and categories using #hashtags and @assign keywords. Instead of entering a task name and then using the mouse to change the assigned project or category or editing the task later, which can be time consuming if you have a lot to choose from, you can simply use keywords to assign a task to a project and category with no extra effort. I could easily create the task “Configure new web server #myproject @development which will place the task within the project My Project and assign it the category Development. This is a killer feature for organising tasks is made much, much simpler.

Task Status

Like many other project management apps, there’s an In-Tray for you to dump tasks into so you can organise them later. I often have bursts of ideas, especially for a new project, which means I’m usually entering task after task after task. An In-Tray lets you get the tasks written down first before spending time organising them.

Each task features a status, going way beyond many other task management apps and provides a way of tracking the progress of a task. Within most other apps, tasks are simply waiting to be done or done, you check the box when finished. With Firetask, you can not only mark a task as done but also whether it’s in progress, cancelled, actionable or even put it off completely. The developers really seem to understand that tasks aren’t simply a boolean value — they can have different stages of completion.

Strangely, the In-Tray and Scratchboard are actually classed as a task statuses, which can be a little confusing if you’re moving from a more traditional task management app. Within Firetask, the In-Tray is technically a status as it’s a task that has yet to be assigned, started or dealt with.

Throwaway Tasks

I like to keep my work-related tasks and projects separate from personal ones, since most of them just tend to be reminders to buy groceries or take something to the post office. For these temporary tasks, Firetask has a scratchpad where you can simply add one-off tasks that, while you still need to get done, don’t require organising. It makes the perfect personal to-do app as each item within the Scratchboard can still be assigned a project or category if needed.

Similar to the In-Tray, the Scratchboard is classed as a task status so it can prove a little confusing to begin with, until you realise that you can easily convert it to a proper task within a project if the need arises. As someone who often uses tasks as a way of jotting down a potential project idea, Firetask includes a smart option of converting a task into its own project.

Collaboration and Syncing

Firetask is very much an app you can use either individually or within a workgroup. Although there’s no syncing between users, Firetask does offer its own syncing platform which provides full task and project synchronisation to Mac and iOS devices running the app. Use this on your own or, provided your team all want to share the same information, have everyone use the same account.

Firetask includes a comprehensive URL scheme which comes in handy when emailing tasks as it includes a complete URL that other users can click on to automatically import the task into their own app. This URL scheme works across the Mac and iOS apps so it doesn’t matter what device you open the task in, it will create it regardless.

On the topic of collaboration, should you assign a colleague a task or project to complete, Firetask includes a Waiting For category specifically for tasks that have been assigned to other users. Again, while there is no interaction between other users’ Firetask apps, the app does include Assignee information that works similar to project, letting you assign the name of a colleague to keep track of who is doing what. Project managers will certainly find this useful when delegating tasks to team members and provides a way to keep track of how each of them are doing with their assign tasks.

Tasks Overview

Keeping track of when tasks are due or seeing a daily rundown of all current tasks that require completion can be done by the functional Calendar and the accompanying Organise section. Tasks can still be edited within these views so you could keep the calendar open and easily change a task’s status. It’s a feature that is exclusive to the Mac version of Firetask and which isn’t available within the iOS apps.

Conclusion

As GTD apps go, Firetask is one of the most comprehensive I’ve ever used and, in some ways, is what I’d describe as OmniFocus for the rest of us. For anyone looking for something that provides more control over tasks and projects than Things but doesn’t want the learning curve, or cost, of OmniFocus, Firetask is a perfect middle ground.

Some things will take some getting used to, task statuses especially but this is certainly one of the best intermediate GTD apps I’ve used. It’s advanced feature set and ease of use, as well as great iOS companion apps, has me seriously considering ending my long standing relationship with Things.

In-App Purchases have earned quite the bad reputation since they were first introduced to the App Store with iOS 3 in 2009. Their addition to the Mac App Store was met with dread and foreboding that it’d spell the end of quality paid apps in the wake of freemium apps filled with ridiculous in-app purchases. That hasn’t happened on the Mac yet, but on iOS, it seems like the traditional paid market is eroded more and more every day by free apps with in-app purchases.

The bad reputation is undeserved, though. I’m as critical of apps with in-app purchases as anyone could be — their very presence on free apps makes me skip the app by default unless it looks very impressive otherwise. But they don’t have to be bad.

Right now, the Mac App Store has escaped the worst of the race to the bottom in app pricing, in large part thanks to the fact that Mac developers can still distribute free trials to their apps on their own sites. It’s on the iPhone and iPad that in-app purchases have taken over, with a vengeance. Smartphone apps, perhaps, aren’t the best thing to compare to Mac apps, but iPad apps surely are fairly easily to compare, since many people today use iPads as laptop replacements. If in-app purchases are to be the future of app sales — especially on the Mac — they’d better be done right, and the best iPad apps with in-app purchases today are the best examples of how in-app purchases can be done well.

Paid apps aren’t dead, but in-app purchases are still going to be a big part of the app discussion going forward. Here’s what they need to make them work in a way that’s equal to or better than the traditional paid app market.

Exhibit 1: Paper

Pay for Tools

Paper has, hands-down, the most interesting in-app purchase model yet. The app is free with the initial pen and basic color palate, and then charges for each extra tool you want — or lets you buy them all as one set. You can try out the extra tools from the purchase page to decide if you want them first, and buy them anytime. Casual users will likely love the app for free, or perhaps want to at least buy the color mixer and one extra tool, while pro users will want the whole set. Either way, everyone gets a great app and the Paper team has a way to make more revenue going forward — add more tools that we’ll all want to buy.

Take one second to peak at Apple’s developer page about in-app purchases. Notice which app’s featured with a screenshot? Yup: Paper. Something tells me that Apple would love it if more apps found ingenious ways to use in-app purchases like Paper. I for one would love to see more apps with that — maybe it’d be silly to pay for each feature in Photoshop, but it’d sure be awesome to get the dozen features you need without having to pay for the whole shebang unless you want to. Byword 2 already added something similar on the Mac with an in-app purchase to let you publish articles from the app, and it’ll be very interesting to see more apps experiment with this model going forward.

Exhibit 2: MoneyWell for iPad

Pay for the Full App

When Marco Arment wrote that paid apps are dead, Kevin Hoctor countered with a post about his team’s strategy for MoneyWell for iOS’ pricing. Essentially, the app is free and lets you use all of its features to manage one account, and then you’ll have to pay to unlock the full app to add unlimited accounts. It’s almost like the old free 2 week trials, except this time, it gives a full, functional app to people who have the most basic needs, and also lets anyone else try that simpler version out for free before shelling out for the full version.

For every app that can’t find a way to sell directly upfront like apps traditionally have or charge per feature like Paper, this is the business model I happen to hope they adopt. It’s straightforward, obvious, and won’t make anyone feel like they were ripped off by in-app purchases. Plus, I think it could scale for apps that otherwise might not make enough money — think what Sparrow could have done if they charged per account, or how Tweetbot could, perhaps, be cheaper up front if it charged per account you added. That model could really be interesting, by letting those who use the app the most pay the most — something that definitely makes sense.

Exhibit 3: Evernote, Droplr, CloudApp, Dropbox, and Practically Everything with In-App Purchases on the Mac

Pay for Services

Did I say in-app purchases haven’t gotten a foothold in OS X yet? My bad. Actually, there’re already a part of many apps we love on the Mac, even if they’re not always done directly through the App Store. And odds are, you’re already paying for at least one each month.

The subscription model has taken the world of pro software by storm this year, with both Adobe and Microsoft switching to subscriptions for their app suites. That’s surprised and even angered many. But we’re already used to paying for extra storage space in online storage apps like Dropbox, Droplr, and even Apple’s iCloud. Evernote’s paid subscription brings some extra features, but the main reason you’d upgrade is if you really want to upload more data each month.

99.9% of web apps offer basic features for free, with a subscription for the pro version. It’s worth it if the app’s valuable to you, especially for business use, as I’ve found with Buffer. Expect more apps — especially productivity and professional apps — to experiment with this business model, as Billings Pro already has this year.

It works. I’ll admit that much. It’s the model enterprise software has used for quite some time. But I happen to hope — seriously — that most apps don’t take this route. There’s only so many subscriptions our budgets can take each month, and I still vastly prefer the in-app purchases models that closer resemble traditional app licensing. Subscriptions at least aren’t as sneaky as the evil game in-app purchases, but they’re still easy for consumers to forget about — something that we’re all going to have to be a lot more careful about.

The not-so-good: EA

Pay for upgrades

EA’s won the ire of gamers the world over, by switching most of its games to the freemium, in-app purchase model and entirely breaking some of their biggest releases of late (hello, SimCity). That ire’s entirely deserved for the most part.

But there’s one thing that EA’s managed to do better than many others: they’ve made in-app purchases that aren’t nearly as scummy as most freemium games these days. Really. You can very easily play, say, Real Racing or the new Plants vs. Zombies 2 without spending a dime on in-app purchases. Most of their in-app purchases do one of two things: speed up the game or let you purchase things (say, new cars that last forever in the game) that you could otherwise purchase with coins you win in the game. The first purchase option is decidedly on the evil side, in my book, but the latter is a perfectly legitimate way to upsell the game, especially a free game.

An early iPhone game from Iconfactory, Astronut, used in-app purchases to unlock levels in the otherwise free game, which essentially just made the game a free trial with a way to unlock the full game. That’s not bad at all. EA’s not done that good with their in-app purchases, but they’re decidedly not as bad as in many games — and hey, selling extra levels or cars in a free game sure isn’t as frustrating as their games that sell stuff in a paid game.

The Evil™: Most Top-of-Charts Free Games

Pay for every. single. thing. And then pay for them again. And again.

Here’s where evil itself dwells in the App Store: the free-but-top-grossing charts. Everything there’s not evil, granted. But Candy Crush? You have to pay to play once your time runs out, pay to get power ups, and that’ll only get your through the level you’re stuck at. Next time you’re stuck — or just play for a longish session — it’s another $1.99 or two.

You’re not paying for features, you’re paying to simply use the app — every single time you use the app, if you’re not playing frugally. You could argue it’s no more evil than paying a quarter to play a video game machine a decade or two ago, but you only have to Google stories of parents trying to get out from under multi-hundred-dollar charges their kids racked up on similar games to figure out that they’re preying on the least of these. That’s evil, in my book.

There’s a very fine line between games that fall in the previous category or this one — they’re both what has given in-app purchases a bad name. I hate to see both of them making their way to the Mac App Store, but they have already in a handful of top-grossing games.

Charge a subscription for your game like WoW, if you want. Charge per level, perhaps, or charge to unlock features for the entirety of the game. But the timers you have to pay to turn off each time, and the coins you’ll use up as quick as you hit Buy? No. There’s no way that’s how software should work. It’s gambling without any reward other than dopamine and a pretty on-screen animation at best, and outright deception and robbery at worst.

Replenishable in-app purchases — things you can use up in-app — are the worst type of in-app purchases, and are absolutely the reason they’ve gotten such a bad name. If there’s one thing I’d love to ask Apple to do, it’d be to remove replenishable in-app purchases — yes, the very type featured on this article’s icon. That’d get rid of the vast majority of these scummy practices.

The Passive: Ads

Paying with your time

It’s not in-app purchases, but it’s the only other business model beside the old, traditional pay-upfront model, and its one that’s already used in Apple’s own iTunes Radio and in most free web apps. In web apps (and sites like, cough, AppStorm) or a very few Mac apps, you’ll find ads in the lower corner or sidebars of the app. Or, as is more common in media apps like iTunes Radio or, say, Hulu, you’ll have a full commercial that forces you to watch through it before you’ll get to your content. It pays the bills, keeps stuff free, and doesn’t take anything out of your wallet.

And that’s fine. But — especially in apps where the ad takes over the entire interface — I think there should always be an option to pay — one time or a subscription — for an ad-free interface. Imagine if Photoshop was free but with a 30-second commercial spot ever 15 minutes or so. Hobbyists would likely continue using the ad-sponsored free version, but design pros would be glad to pay to get the ads away. An iTunes Match subscription takes the ads away from iTunes Radio, and Hulu loses most of its ads with Hulu Plus. Same goes for most web apps — and if any Mac apps switch to an ad model, they’d better do the same if they want to not hit my evil list.

The Future

Software costs money to make. Great software costs a ton of money to make. And we love great software, enough that most of us on the AppStorm team spend quite a lot out of pocket on apps we use in our daily work and play.

But most people don’t want to pay for software, and to have a hit app, you need to get most people using it. Plus, even those of us who love software are cheap to our own degrees, and no one can afford everything. So we’ve got to hit a middle ground. In-app purchases can provide that middle ground in a way that makes software more accessible for everyone, but they can also make the world of apps feel like a flea market run by con artists. That’s definitely not the future of tech we all want.

So here’s our plea to app developers the world over: please pick the best ways to do in-app purchases if you must do them. Charge us subscriptions, even, over the nickel-and-diming of most freemium games these days. And if you can at all, find business models that are the closes to the traditional paid app models, perhaps using the idea of paying per account if needs be. And most of all, make great apps. There’s still plenty of us that’ll buy them.

Trey Ratcliff is one of the most respected people in professional photography today. He pioneered the use of HDR (high dynamic range) to capture scenes in a lifelike way; he also writes one of the most detailed and well-composed tutorials for HDR on the Internet. Ratcliff is also known for some other side projects, like Stuck On Earth, a previously iPad-only app for exploring the world through photographs.

Ratcliff’s handy tool is now available on the Mac, and I’m going to take a look at how it fares in comparison to the iPad app.

Quick Setup with Voice Guidance

Photographer and voiceover specialist Karen Hutton welcomes you to Stuck On Earth with a pleasant voice, asking your name followed by some other details. The app asks whether you’re a daydreamer, explorer, photographer, or all three, and then brings you to the main map. Hutton’s voice accompanies many of the basic actions the first time around, which I found to be very helpful for getting used to the app. It’s much better than a step-by-step tutorial within the app and certainly not as bad as no tutorial at all.

Explore the Globe and Plan Trips

Stuck On Earth’s main purpose is to help you plan a trip, whether it be locally or abroad. Trey Ratcliff developed the app for himself as a way of planning where he’d visit when traveling to destinations abroad. “There is a big problem that this app solves for me, personally,” says Ratcliff. “I have limited time, and I want the best information about where to visit and what I will see, generally, when I get there.” Stuck On Earth is indeed the ideal solution.

This app uses Flickr to power its photo database. You can submit your own in the app by clicking Submit in the bottom right corner.

Upon download, the app is preloaded with featured lists and Ratcliff’s “Adventure In France” as one of two sample trips. The second included trip is named “Someday…” and is perfect for the daydreamer who knows that one day, he too will join the rest of the world in visiting Paris, Hawaii, and other exotic locations.

Adding pictures to trips can be a bit confusing at first. You can either put them in an existing trip or create a new one. When a photo is selected, it can be added to a trip with the click of a button, which is nice. There’s no keyboard shortcut, though, and at first it’s hard to tell whether or not an item has been added to a trip. A plane icon is displayed beside a trip when a photo is in it. The problem with this is it’s not necessarily noticeable to a first-time user and takes a bit if getting used to.

I found searching to be quick, but lacking a primary feature: suggestions. When typing in Cambridge, for example, the first result was from the city in Massachusetts, United States. I was actually looking for the city in Cambridgeshire, UK. The app didn’t ask me which city I meant to search for, nor did it display additional options when I typed in word in the text field (a feature I expect in search functions).

Weird Fullscreen Mode and Jittery Zoom

This app is compatible with OS X’s native fullscreen mode (10.7+), but not fully-so. Since the windowed mode doesn’t feel natural with an app that was originally built on a tablet, I used fullscreen to get some cleaner screenshots and a more distraction-free experience. The problem is, Stuck On Earth isn’t optimized for taking advantage of a Mac’s entire display. It has a different aspect ratio than most displays and looks like a widescreen video on my MacBook Air. The linen above and below the interface looks out of place and deducts from the overall experience.

Zooming is also a point of interest in the field of problems. Rather than using the smooth zooming effects that Google Maps has in the browser, Stuck On Earth’s animations are very rough around the edges. The map disappears when zooming and slowly pieces itself back together like a puzzle when you’re finished navigating. Definitely not the experience I was hoping for.

The fullscreen mode and unpolished zoom are minor issues when compared to the constant crashing. Whenever I left a photo open for more than 20 seconds, the app crashed. The only way to stop this from happening is not to leave any photos open. But then, still, the app often crashes from being open too long, as if something times out. This is an unacceptable problem and makes everyday use downright annoying.

Great Idea with Crippling Bugs

Stuck On Earth has an average beginning on the Mac. Sporting the same feature set and user interface as the iPad app, it offers a perfect way to update your trips from your Mac, or even use the device as your primary travel companion if you don’t own a tablet. Unfortunately, its ambitious efforts are short-lived. The developers need to work out lots of bugs and make sure things are significantly more polished in the future. Right now, Stuck On Earth is a great idea with inconsistent implementation. It cannot keep my attention for more than five minutes because it crashes so often.

There are a lot of people out there who aren’t exactly satisfied by iTunes 11, the release that overhauled Apple’s flagship jukebox last year and was built on with this year’s iTunes Radio release. For a lot of people — myself included, occasionally — the app is overly complicated and doesn’t easily do what it needs to: Let me play my music.

With that in mind, Vox aims to create a simpler interface that’ makes navigating and playing your music easier. It’s a free app, but is it worth making it a real personal part of your life? Let’s take a look.

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Detailed Design

Vox’s design is minimal and easy to use — exactly how it’s sold. Unlike iTunes, the app is very dark striking. It reminds me of some of my other favourite Mac apps, which go against the operating system’s bright colour stream, but end up becoming very striking.

As music plays, the scrub bar indicating how much time in the track has elapsed changes colour gradient. It’s actually pretty cool. A tab on the left side of the app, beneath the album artwork (which will expand if you click on it), reveals the tray of songs and albums in your library. I actually wish the tab wasn’t an option; I’d rather click the track title to bring up the playlist tray. I understand visual cues are nice, but in an app striving for minimalism, its dependence on buttons seems contrarian.

Moving your mouse over the song artist reveals the album title information as well. There’s no resizing the window — this is a little similar to a darker version of iTunes’s Mini Player.

While your playing track is highlighted in a dark yellow, the Repeat and Shuffle buttons don’t get the same treatment. It’s a little problematic, simply because it’s hard to tell whether or not your playlist or song is going to repeat or shuffle. The colour is either a very dark grey, if unselected, or a bright grey if Repeat or Shuffle is selected. The colours don’t stand out, and it’s confusing.

While, the controls are available in the Menu Bar at all time, what I dislike is that there’s no way to use the standard audio controls on the Mac keyboard to play your music. The play/pause button and skip buttons on the keyboard don’t do anything. If you want any keyboard functionality, you can set up keys yourself, but I find this counterintuitive. The fact that other apps, like Rdio, allow you to use the audio controls on the keyboard makes me feel like this should certainly be supported.

The app is nice to look at, but the little details that are off — like the colours — are odd. Hopefully this is fixed in a future update.

Vox as an Independent Music Player

Let’s first say that Vox integrates with everything you’d expect iTunes to. I’ve got a pair of Audioengine A2 speakers (once recommended on The Wirecutter if you happen to be in the market for speakers) connected to an Airport Express for Airplay. Vox supports that without a problem. In fact, Vox is particularly robust: It can play music to Airplay speakers even if the system is still using internal speakers. The best part is how clear and easy it is to set up.

As a music player, Vox is capable of reading just about every format imaginable (with the exception of DRM-loaded iTunes formats from an older era). This includes FLAC and WAV. If you want, you can set it as the default player for all non-iTunes files and let iTunes handle the rest. You can click and drag any file into the player, and easily create your own playlists and save them anywhere on the system.

For an in-app purchase of $2.99, you can also unlock the radio. Vox describes it as $3 for “thousands of high-quality online radio channels,” and while I don’t doubt that, I don’t listen to the radio much and didn’t try it. It does strike me as odd that they’re charging for the radio, of all things. It might have been more worthwhile to charge for the app’s Last.fm integration, which allows you to “scrobble” tracks instantly. In fact, I’d go so far as to say that Vox might be the best Last.fm client available for the Mac.

Vox for iTunes: The Integration Problem

Of course, the app also integrates with iTunes. This doesn’t require any setup, and is as easy as selecting iTunes as if it were a playlist. From there, the app is easiest to use with the search function. Just tap Command + F and instantly get to the search bar, and searching will bring up just about any result you’re looking for.

The problem with this set up is simple: Why bother? I’ve compared the iTunes Mini Player and Vox pretty extensively. The iTunes Mini Player is everything most people will want if they need a minimalistic jukebox. The controls fade away when you’re not hovering over the album art with your mouse, leaving the album art as the only indication that you’re listening to anything at all. And the Mini Player can be resized so that it can become even smaller than Vox, making the difference in screen space a moot point (and perhaps even a point for the iTunes side).

Finally, using Vox as your iTunes jukebox means you aren’t able to edit any of your iTunes playlists (although you can play them from the app). For iTunes diehards, Vox just doesn’t make an acceptable second skin. Not surprisingly, I can’t access the radio stations in iTunes on Vox. I’m presuming that, when iTunes Radio does roll out to Canada, I won’t be able to access it in Vox either.

Who Is Vox For?

Well, let’s get this out of the way: Vox is not for fans of iTunes. It can’t be used as an appropriate second skin. For people that like the layers of organization behind iTunes, there’s nothing here that will take them away.

That being said, Vox’s market is more niche, but more important. The jukebox player is mostly well-designed (although I do think that there’s room for improvement), and I think it offers a great way for audio aficionados to listen to high-resolution music files like FLAC, while iTunes simply can’t. Particularly useful is a badge in the display revealing every audio file’s actual bit rate. For those people, Vox is going to be attractive enough to make it worth getting — especially at such a low (read: non-existent) price point. Although it’s not becoming my default for all files, it’s becoming my default for high-quality files. Vox is recommended.

You’ve got Pocket and Instapaper if you want to save articles to read offline, but what if you want to save videos to watch offline? After all, watching the YouTube and Vimeo videos you’ve planned to watch later is impossible when you’re offline, and terribly annoying if your internet connection is slow. That’s why you need a copy of VideoGet for Mac.

VideoGet for Mac lets you download videos from YouTube, Vimeo, and hundreds of other sites without any more effort than saving an article to your reading later service. Just copy the link to your video, add it to VideoGet, and select what format you want to save your video in. You’ll find detailed settings for your saved video format, resolution, and quality so you can save space on your Mac or watch videos on any device you want.

VideoGet’s a simple tool that makes it easy to watch your favorite online videos anytime, even if your internet connection is down. It’s built by the same team as Mac Product Key Finder, and is just as simple to use.

Give VideoGet for Mac a Try This Week!

Got some YouTube videos you want to watch offline on your Mac? Go download a free trial of VideoGet for Mac and see how easy it can be to save them to watch later. You can download 20 full videos for free with the trial version, then get your own copy for $24.95 to save as many videos as you want for offline viewing.