Category: Mac

I’m a big fan of menu bar apps, if you’ve read a few of my articles you probably have noticed how much I’m used to having easy access to certain features directly though the menu bar, without having to quit what I’m doing.

Being a fan of these types of apps, I have also come to collect a ton of them that take up a lot of space and end up getting in the way of my workflow; they aren’t always in the same place and they always get moved around randomly when I boot up my computer.

That’s where today’s app comes in. It’s an app that gives you the ability to organize the items in your menu bar. It’s called MenuBar ReArranger, want to take a look?

The Problem

If you use more than a couple of menu bar apps (other than the default options such as the clock, battery indicator, wi-fi and Bluetooth icons, etc.), then you have probably noticed how every time that you load up the operating system, the order of the icons from your third-party applications gets switched up.

Now, if you only work with a few of these, this might not be a problem and you probably haven’t even noticed this behavior. But if you are like me and you have many of these menubar apps incorporated to your workflow, then you might think that this is a bit annoying as you can’t really depend on any of these apps ever being where you expect them to. That’s where MenuBar ReArranger comes in.

MenuBar ReArranger

MenuBar ReArranger is visible as a tiny separator between your third-party menubar apps, and the default ones. If you click on this separator you can gain access to the settings and the actual rearranger. The rearranger is basically just a window with a couple lists, one with all of your apps and another with the apps that are in your menu bar.

In the menubar list, you can rearrange it so that the items that you want at the far right are on top, and the ones on the left are on the bottom. It isn’t a very intuitive interface, but it’s also not too bad at getting the job done. You also have to be careful not to add apps that don’t run through the menubar to your list, as they will just open like they usually do once the “rearranging” process begins.

How It Works

The reason your third-party menubar apps always get randomized in their order is because Mac OS selects the order they will appear in by the speed with which they load. So, basically, the first app’s icons to load up will be the ones who will appear on your menu bar first.

MenuBar ReArranger isn’t a real solution to this problem, as it doesn’t actually just switch up the places of the apps like you tell it to; in order for it to work it needs to close all of your menubar apps and reload each of them in the order that you specified, basically by giving them loading turns and therefore guaranteeing that they’ll end up where you want them to.

Setbacks

This solution has some setbacks though, as it is basically forcing behavior on the OS by tricking it. The most obvious one is that for it to work you need it to close and reopen each app, which can be problematic if you are already working with any of your menubar apps.

The second one is that it isn’t a flawless process. If for any reason, one of the apps takes too much to load while the apps are being rearranged, then it will skip that app and let the next one start loading, but its order in the list might no longer be preserved if the next item loads first. The default time that it gives to each app to load is 20 seconds, but you can change this in the settings.

Worth It?

MenuBar ReArranger is quite a unique app, I had never seen anything similar to it before. However, at $4.99, you might want to consider how much use you’ll actually get out of it and if it really is that pivotal piece that your workflow needed. After using it for a few days, I can say that I’ve found it quite useful as I don’t really need to go looking for the slot where each app is when I want to use it, instead I already know where to look when I’m searching for specific things.

This might not be a big deal to some of you, but I’m sure there are a few people who will find it useful just like I did, especially the ones who have tons of open menubar apps at all times and often use most of them. Mac OS has its own way of rearranging the default menubar icons (that’s by holding Command while you drag them), so if you were looking for something to take care of those few items, you might already be set.

What do you think, do you regularly use menubar apps? Would you pay for an app like this?

An open source application is a piece of software for which the source code is available and in the public domain. Developers are able to download the code and modify, contribute and change it to suit their needs. This means businesses can ‘tweak’ software according to their needs and individuals can play around with code, add new features and explore how software works. Open source software is also the foundation to many of today’s largest, most renowned software packages – without open source software we might not have the amazing, mind-blowing applications and software packages we use everyday.

In light of this, I have compiled a list of 30 of the best open source applications for Mac. I encourage you to download and have a play with each and, where possible, replace over-priced commercial software.

Conclusion

That concludes a round-up of 30 open source applications. I recommend that before you fork out for some shiny, over-priced, commercial software you think about exploring the world of open source applications because you never know, there might be a perfectly credible alternative that’s free and is constantly being updated.

Leave a comment below and tell us about your favorite open source apps. Have you tried any of those listed above? What did we miss?

It is rare to find a note taking tool that incorporates task management. That’s why proNotes first caught my attention a few years ago, but then development seemed to wane and I lost track of the application. That is until a few months ago, when I stumbled upon the proNotes website and found that version 2.0 was in development.

I’ve been testing the new version, which is now available to the public. Let’s take a look at the new proNotes 2.0 and see if my early intrigue was warranted.

The Basics

The developer, SoftRaph, intends to make proNotes 2.0 available through the Mac App Store, but as of this writing it must be purchased through the web site for $39.95.

If you want to give proNotes a try, you can download a trial version which is fully functional, but limited to just 10 notes. While that is enough to try out all the features, it feels a bit skimpy to me, as I want to know how an application will function when I have a lot of data in it. Does it feel overwhelming, or is it still easy to navigate to the note I need at any particular time?

The first versions of proNotes were written in REALBasic, in part to allow the developer to compile applications for OSX, Windows and Linux. Version 2.0 has has been rewritten from the ground up to be a 100% Mac Cocoa application, which means there will likely be a few growing pains as small kinks are being worked out, something I experienced during my testing.

Unique Interface

At first glance, proNotes can appear somewhat lightweight. But that is deceptive, as there is a lot more power here than meets the eye. It begins with the unique interface, different from most note management applications, which tend to have one, two or three panes. proNotes has four:

1. The preview pane section resides on the right side of the screen by default, but can be moved to the left side.
2. The categories pane, where you select which categories of notes to view.
3. The titles pane, where you can narrow down your selection. More on titles below.
4. The details pane, which displays details of the selected notes.

This may put some users off, but we’ll see how it all works together. Before that, however, let’s look a little more closely at what makes up a proNotes note.

Anatomy of the proNotes Note

A proNotes note is composed of several parts:

1. The note’s text (i.e. the “note”).
2. Category
3. Title
4. Status
5. Creation date

In addition, you can add attachments and a list of to-dos, which I’ll be exploring in more depth below.

The note editor is pretty standard, with the exception that you can’t yet create a table, though you can copy a table from a word processing document into a proNotes note.

A row of buttons along the bottom edge of the preview pane allows you to switch your view from the text of the note, to the list view or the attachments view.

You can also open a note in its own window (see the screen shot below for an example).

To-dos Associated with Notes

One of the features that makes proNotes interesting to review is its ability to associate to-do items with specific notes. Each to-do has a due date, priority and a status check box.

The to-do lists in proNotes will not make anyone forget a robust task manager like Things or OmniFocus, but it is a handy feature especially for people who find those more sophisticated programs get in the way of planning, rather than facilitating it.

How might you put this feature to use? Imagine a note that contains the minutes from a meeting. You can then use the to-dos to create a list of action items resulting from the meeting.

When in to-do view, you have the option of sorting your tasks by priority or due date. You can also choose to only show open (incomplete) items. And as we’ll see, you can also get various overviews of all your to-dos.

ProNotes has a unique approach to changing the priority or status of a to-do item, by dragging it onto one of the three drop bars at the top of the list. This is a reasonable approach for changing the due date, but since you can change the priority by simply clicking on the required value (indicated by one, two or three stars) in the item itself, there seems no good reason to take up space with the drop bar for priority.

Adding Attachments

Switching to attachments view makes it easy to add all types of files to any single note. You can even create nested folders for organizing those attachments. When you create folders and add attachments, you are adding folders and attachments to the proNotes document bundle.

An option accessible through the context menu allows you view an attachment or folder in the Finder, which may or may note be useful, but at least it is reassuring to quickly see where your attached files are stored.

If you change the file or folder name in the Finder, you will need to run an attachment view refresh, the command for which is found under the proNotes View menu.

Getting Data In and Out

ProNotes features a simple, but handy ability to create a new note from clipped text via the Dock Icon. You can also drag and drop text from any application into an existing note. It does not take advantage of services, nor can you print a PDF directly to proNotes as you can with many other information managers.

You can import RTF files into proNotes. This feature works well. I was able to quickly import a dozen documents. However, it would be nice if you could set the category and title for imported notes as they come in, rather than have to do it manually for all your new imports.

The ProNotes printing operation is sensitive to which part of your note currently has focus. If you’ve got a to-do item selected, it will print the to-do list. If the note itself is selected (or its details selected in the detail pane), proNotes will print the note and all its meta-data.

You can also share your notes via e-mail, with options to send note contents as a PDF attachment, or as text in the body of the message.

One of proNotes biggest deficiencies is its lack of export of any kind (though, of course, you can copy text from a note and paste it into any editor). I’d like to see, at the very minimum, an RTF export. A mass export of a selection of notes would also be nice. Being able to somehow import a list as to-dos for any given note would be helpful, as well.

A Title By Any Other Name

We’ve looked at the kind of information you can store in proNotes. Let’s now look at how proNotes helps you manage your information.

As I stated above, the main screen consists of four panes. In the Category pane, you can select which categories of notes to view. In the Titles pane, you can narrow your note selection further. One of the concepts about proNotes that took me a little while to get used to is how titles are to be used. I am used to thinking of note titles as unique, but in proNotes you may end up with many notes with exactly the same title.

While there is no reason you can’t give each note a unique title, the intent of the developer is that titles actually function as sub-categories. If you think of them that way, you’ll make better use of the interface.

For example, say you’re working with a client called Acme. You might give each related note the title of “Acme” and a category of “Client.”

In the screen shot above I’ve narrowed the selection to the category “Clients” with the title “Acme,” of which there are three notes.

The detail pane displays the first line of the note, so it will be helpful to use that top line to put a description of the note’s content.

Strong Search and Filtering

Maybe proNotes biggest strength is the ability it gives you to zero in on the information you need. First of all, you can restrict the view based on status of OPEN, CLOSED or OTHER using the buttons along the tool bar.

Type a word into the search box and proNotes incrementally displays matching results as you type. In the screen shot below, I searched on the word “meeting” and got hits on three notes.

But if I want to restrict the search to just to do items, I select the appropriate filter button just below the tool bar, as in the screen shot below.

If you find yourself continually performing the same search with the same set of filters, you can save this as a “snapshot,” which creates a button in the snapshot bar, so that you can quickly re-navigate to this selection of notes.

Another nice feature is that you can toggle the details pane to show all the to-do items from all your notes, so you can get an overview of all your tasks.

Security

If you want to keep sensitive information in proNotes, you’ll find the EES-256 bit encryption welcome. You can also encrypt attachments, independently of whether or not the note itself is encrypted.

A Few Bumps in the Road

I encountered several small issues as I was putting it through its paces. But the developer is very responsive, correcting those issues quickly. He also added text highlighting in the release following my suggestion. So I expect that the rough spots will be worked out and that the application will continue to improve with user feedback.

Conclusion

It is difficult to rate a product like proNotes. It still needs some work, though I found it very stable. And its unique approach to note-taking and task management won’t appeal to everyone. Yet I appreciate that proNotes has been developed with a specific vision. I tend to like developers who think outside the box. Most task managers allow you to associate a note (or notes) with a task. But proNotes reverses this paradigm, making to-dos part of the meta-data for a note. Yet it also allows you to get an overview of all your to-dos from all your notes (or filtered subsets). This feels more natural to me.

proNotes will not replace a full-featured information manager the likes of DevonThink for serious researchers. And its task management isn’t likely to make an adherent of David Allen’s GTD approach switch apps. But anyone looking for a software that combines reasonable power for both managing notes and to-dos would do well to give proNotes a try. On this basis I give proNotes a reserved 8 out of 10, with the caveat that it is still a work in progress.

This week we dove deep into the Photoshop CS6 Beta preview and told you all about the great new features and changes (see that article here). This is one of the most dramatic updates Photoshop has seen in years. It sports a completely overhauled interface, lots of functionality improvements such as layer searching and group effects, and some awesome brand new features like Iris Blur.

Needless to say, there are a lot of great things to say about this new version, but oddly enough one topic that’s getting a ton of discussion around the web has nothing to do with any of these new features: the icon. Adobe has been giving us slight variations on the table of elements style icon theme for years and it appears that this time around they’re adding a thick border around the edge, a choice which has sent more than a few users hunting for good replacement options.

Today we want to know what you think of the new icon. Is it a decent evolution of what we’ve seen for the past few years or a hideous beast that you would never consider allowing to reside in your dock? Vote in the poll and then leave a comment below with your thoughts.

Our featured sponsor this week is Radium, the amazing menu bar Internet radio player.

We’ve been huge fans of Radium for years now. It’s the fastest, simplest way to access Internet radio from all over the world (50 countries and 100 languages!). The workflow is effortless: just type in a station name, genre or city and you’ll instantly get a list of results to choose from and can begin streaming immediately.

There are plenty of great features for power users as well, including AirPlay, social sharing, a comprehensive song history, customizable keyboard shortcuts and an impressive equalizer. Radium strikes that perfect balance between being powerful and so easy to use that anyone could pick it up immediately. We know you’re going to love it.

Try It Free Today!

If you’re ready to give Radium a test drive, head over to the CatPig Studios site and grab your free thirty day trial. Once you’re convinced that you need to own Radium, and you will be, check it out on the Mac App Store.

Since Adobe announced the beta for Photoshop CS6 a little over a week ago, it has been downloaded more than half a million times. Even if you’ve managed to miss the onslaught of tweets and reviews, the magnitude of eager testers should indicate how anxious photographers and designers were for an update to their beloved software.

A number of articles have been written that overview the new features and changes to CS6. After working with the beta every day for over a week, I will instead try to give my impressions on what features I find most useful and am actually incorporating into my workflow already. Read on to see what features have stood out to me.

A New Interface

The most notable change to the interface is the new default dark theme. While this dark interface is attractive, I find that the icons and text on the dark grey can feel sort of low-contrast.

After working in the app for a prolonged period of time, I feel adjusted to this dark world, and it makes for a more shocking transition when I switch to other apps. For this reason, I decided to switch the interface to the next-brightest option, which captures the native look of OS X best. This theme is slightly darker than CS5, and with the revamped tool icons that Adobe has created, I find the new interface to be an improvement.

Another interface change I really like is the thinner title bar of the app. Adobe has removed the buttons that felt a bit unnecessary at the top of CS5, and given the app a standard OS X title bar.

Improved Vector Handling

The improvements Adobe has made in the vector department are probably my favorite changes in CS6. If you are unfamiliar with vectors, these are the fundamental way that people draw shapes and curved lines, by essentially placing dots (anchor points) and a path that connects the dots.

Vectors are essential to designers, who need to create objects with simple shapes such as buttons, toolbars, and text fields. Thanks to all the love that vectors have received in CS6, working with them in Photoshop is now much less of a hassle.

Strokes

The first sign that Photoshop is becoming a more powerful vector editor is that you can now give vector shapes a stroke, just as you have always been able to do in Adobe’s flagship vector app, Illustrator. The stroke can be set right from the Tool Options bar, and is separate from any stroke you add to the object as a layer style. This means you can easily add two different colored strokes to a shape by combining the vector stroke and layer style stroke.

Conveniently, Adobe also provided a way to create a dashed stroke around a shape, which was nowhere near as easy to pull off in CS5.

If you want take the same fill or stroke properties that you have set on one shape and apply them to others, you can simply right click the layer, select “Copy Shape Attributes,” and paste these attributes to other shape layers.

Vector Pixel Snapping

If you work with vectors in Photoshop often, you know that they often suffer from fuzzy edges if the vector’s path is not perfectly snapped to the pixel grid.

The reason vectors would get off the pixel grid in the first place is largely because of how CS5 behaved when zoomed in. If you tried to draw or move a vector when zoomed in, Photoshop would move the object by just a fraction of a pixel, misaligning it on the pixel grid. When your object’s edges are sitting in between pixel lines in the grid, they end up slightly blurry, which leaves your design with a subtle grossness.

In CS6, you no longer have to worry about this odd behavior because of a feature in the General Preferences, checked by default, called “Snap Vector Tools and Transforms to Pixel Grid”. Now, even when you are zoomed in, moved and resized objects are snapped to the pixel grid. If you still find yourself with blurred edges on a vector, you can automagically get crisp edges by selecting the vector and clicking the new Align Edges option in the Tool Options bar. This will instantly snap misaligned edges of vector objects to the grid.

Merging

Occasionally, you might find the need to combine multiple vector shapes into a single shape that you can apply a style to. In CS6, you can simply select both shape layers, right-click, and choose Merge Shapes. This will create a single layer that contains both shapes, yet allows you still to edit both shapes individually in the canvas. If you combined them as a Smart Object, as you had to in CS5, it would be harder to edit the individual shapes again.

Little Things

There are also a few smaller changes that make vector editing a breeze in CS6. For example, the direct select tool has more wiggle room when it comes to selecting very small vector objects. I often create single-pixel lines when designing websites and interfaces, and before, it was essentially impossible to select something that small with the Direct Select tool. Now, anytime you click in the vicinity a small object, Photoshop will give some leeway and select it for you.

Another pleasant little addition I’ve found is that after you’ve adjusted or selected the anchor points on a vector object, they will remain selected whenever you return to that object.

Layer Management

Layer Filtering

Sometimes, after working in a document for a long time, you end up with what Fantastic Mr. Fox might call a “clustercuss” of layers. Being unable to find the layer you need amongst a sea of layers is not fun and can be a waste of time. Thankfully, CS6 now provides a thin strip of powerful tools to narrow down and find the layer you might be looking for.

Most of the time, I am still using the methods I have previously used to find layers, and generally prefer them. To find vector objects, I like using the Path or Direct Select tools to click the object directly in the canvas, which that will jump you to its respective layer. For non-vector layers, I usually right-click on the object in the canvas; Photoshop will then show you a list of all of the layers under the cursor’s current position and allow you to select the one you’re looking for.

Sometimes, however, I do find it useful to narrow down my layer list to a certain type of layer, such as text, so that I can easily change all of their fonts or sizes in one swoop.

Layer Styles on Groups

One of my favorite new layer features is the ability to apply layer styles to an entire group. How often do you have a bunch of layers that all need the same styling? Before you would have to change the layer style on one, copy it, and paste it to all the others. Rather than performing this tedious action over and over again, I can now just put all of these layers into a group, and edit the entire group’s layer style. This allows me to easily see the effect applied on all of the layers at once.

Clipping Layers on Groups

You can now also clip a layer over an entire group. Clipping, if you weren’t sure, is when one layer intersects another layer (or now, a group), and only the parts of the layer that intersect the other layer/group are shown; the parts of the layer that do not intersect are invisible.

Little Things

There are a number of ways CS6 allows you to perform actions on multiple layers at once. This bulk modifying has saved me time in a number of instances already. For example, you can select multiple vector shapes and alter their fill and stroke colors all together. You can now also select multiple layers and lock or unlock them all, or change the blending mode on all layers at once.

One last nifty bulk-modifying action you can perform is closing or opening all layer styles in your document with a single click. If you hold the option key while clicking the button that closes one layer’s styles, this will close every other layer’s styles, instantly making your layer list tidier and easier to navigate.

General Additions and Improvements

Auto Recovery

While some people complain about Photoshop crashing often, I work with relatively large documents (around 100MB), and rarely experience crashes (it does slow down to a crawl sometimes). That being said, it just takes one crash to occur at an inopportune time to really ruin your day. Knowing that unsaved progress will be recoverable after a crash gives me peace of mind those times when I briefly see the spinning beachball of death appear and I can’t remember when I last saved my progress.

Background Saving

When saving a large document in previous versions of Photoshop, an invasive progress bar would pop up over your work, prohibiting you from doing anything as it saved. Now, Photoshop will unobtrusively save your work as you go.

New Crop Tool

Using the new crop tool is a bit tricky at first, like using inverted scrolling in Lion for the first time. Rather than moving and rotating a crop selection around your canvas, you are really moving and rotating the canvas itself around behind the selection. The result of this is that you now always see your cropped selection centered and level on the screen, and I find, you get a better overall feel for how your crop is going to look.

On-Canvas Dimensions

This is a nifty little feature that I find myself using often. Any time you select, move, or transform an object, a small overlay will follow your cursor around telling you the dimensions of the object in pixels, or the number of pixels you have moved the object. I use it all the time as a makeshift ruler, making a selection around an object or space that I want to measure.

Create Shapes By Dialog

This is a feature from Illustrator that I have long wanted in Photoshop. If you know the exact dimensions, corner radius, etc. of a shape that you want to create, you can simply select a shape tool, click the canvas, and a dialog will appear that lets you input the info.

Dithered Gradients In Layer Styles

When you create a gradient from one color to another, there are many minutely different shades of color that must be displayed in between. Often times, the color mode that you are using does not support all of these slight variants of color, and you experience something known as banding. Banding is when there are noticeable, solid bands of color in your gradient.

To fix banding, you can do something known as dithering the gradient, which creates the illusion of a smooth gradient by mixing pixels of different colors together. Unfortunately, dithering had never been an option when creating gradients in the layer styles screen. In CS6 you can simply check off “Dither” in the Gradient Overlay screen to keep all of your gradients banding-free.

Features I Haven’t Really Been Using

I know that there are many people out there who do more in Photoshop than design, and who might appreciate a few features that haven’t played a role in my daily workflow.

Video Editing

Something that I was unaware of until researching for this article was that the premium version of CS5 actually had some modest video editing features available. With CS6 however, video editing has gotten a complete overhaul, and will now be available in the non-extended version of Photoshop as well. Using the new timeline feature, you can employ all of the Photoshop tools you are familiar with to adjust colors, use layer styles, and add things like filters and text.

3D

With the improved 3D editing capabilities, working with 3D renders is much more accessible and simple for all users. Once you make a text layer and choose “New 3D Extrusion From Selected Layer” in the 3D menu, you can actually change the text, which is great since previously you had to start from scratch if you wanted something different.

There are also nifty handles for adjusting the depth of the text on the page and the angle of the light, amongst other improvements in the 3D options and general interaction with the program while creating renders. If you want to see a great tutorial for this feature, check out this video.

New Blur Tools

Photographers are probably going to love these. I recently reviewed a simple Mac app called Focus that attempts to recreate the blur effects made by changing the focus of a camera lens. You can now easily create these blur effects in Photoshop as well using the new Iris, Field, and Tilt-Shift blurs.

With the Field blur, you place pins onto the canvas and adjust how much the area around them is blurred. It takes a little while to get the hang of it, but basically you end up placing pins all around an object to blur the background/foreground, and then you place pins on the object in focus with a blur of 0 px to keep it from getting blurred. After dropping a number of properly placed pins, you can create an authentic lens blur effect on a photo even when the object in focus is oddly shaped.

The Iris blur seems to work similarly, allowing you to place blur pins on the canvas, except the blur emanates from the pins in ovals, and you can carefully fine tune how each of the blurs is feathered. Finally, the Tilt-Shift blur allows you to create extreme perspective blurs around objects in the photo, which is often used to give photos the novelty miniature effect.

Criticism

While CS6 has introduced many features and small improvements that I have always wanted, there remain some long-sought features that I am a bit disappointed we still aren’t seeing yet. These are some things I hope that Adobe gets around to in a future upgrade.

More Native

Granted, the interface looks a lot better in Photoshop this time around, but Adobe failed to add the little touches that would make the app feel more native on OS X. While Photoshop has a fullscreen mode, it does not offer the native fullscreen mode in Lion. This would allow you to keep Photoshop in a separate space and switch between it and the desktop using the three finger gesture.

Photoshop still shows permanent scrollbars and tracks, rather than using Lion’s clean scrollbars that only appear while scrolling, and there is no bounce scroll at the ends of the lists. Apple makes it easy for apps in Mountain Lion to add the Share Sheets button that lets you easily share content from the app. Would it be too much to ask for Adobe to add a Share Sheets button that would let me easily email, chat, or upload and provide a link to a PNG of what I’m currently working on? Yeah, that would probably be too much.

Layer Style Stacking and Rearranging

There are times when using a layer style once on a layer just doesn’t cut it. For example, I often have to apply a drop shadow to a layer in more than one direction. Currently, you have to use workarounds that involve duplicating the layer and applying a style to that. It would be nice if you could stack a style to apply it more than once, and rearrange styles, so that you could decide which ones appear on top of or below others.

Changing Corner Radius of Existing Rounded Rectangles

Rounded rectangles are one of the most common shapes in interface and web design. It can be tough though to get the corner radius, or the extent to which the corners of the rectangle are rounded off, just right. Testing different corner radii involves constantly deleting and creating new rectangles, so it would be appreciated if Photoshop just let you adjust the corner radius of a rectangle even after it has been drawn.

A Unified Deselect Shortcut

When I first started using Photoshop, I remember it took me quite a while to figure out that text has to be deselected with cmd+enter, and vectors with enter. Cmd+d deselects selected pixels in the canvas; why not make cmd+d deselect any selected object in the canvas, so I don’t always have to assess my situation and find the proper shortcut to use? It would also be nice if the shortcut were consistent with Illustrator, which currently does its own thing in terms of shortcuts.

Select Anchor Points From Multiple Vectors At Once

Sometimes you have several vector shapes in the canvas that you want to modify in some way. In Illustrator, it is possible to select anchor points on different vector shapes at once and adjust them simultaneously. In Photoshop, I am often forced to select each vector shape one at a time and make my changes. Since vector support drastically improved overall in CS6, I am hoping we will see Photoshop adopt more of Illustrator’s vector skills in future versions.

Conclusion

Overall, I find this version of Photoshop to be a wonderful update. The whole experience feels more solid, thanks to features like the revamped interface and background saving. I am wasting less time wrestling with vectors because of the improved handling features, and I am finding ways to incorporate all of the new layer filtering and editing features into my workflow.

At around $200, or whatever the final upgrade from previous versions of Photoshop ends up costing, is it worth it? It is hard to assess the value of a purchase this big when people often nitpick over whether a $10 app should really be $5.

As the esteemed Pixelmator continues to progress as a photo-editing app at a modest price of $30, I wonder if we will ever see future versions of Photoshop that are more affordable, or sold through the Mac App Store for that matter. For the time being, I at least recommend that you download the free beta in order to see how much you will benefit from it. I have found it sturdy and reliable enough to use full time.

Apple has pushed two critical security updates to Java for Mac OS X this week in order to patch up some critical security loopholes found in the previous release of Java, version 1.6.0_29. The updates, which were released on Tuesday and Thursday of this week, are available via Software Update for Snow Leopard users running OS X 10.6.8 and Lion users running OS 10.7.3.

The updates were released after a Russian antivirus company, Doctor Web, discovered that Macs were vulnerable to the BackDoor.Flashback trojan, which saves an executable file on your Mac’s hard drive then downloads malicious code from a remote server.

The trojan has affected an estimated 600,000 Macs worldwide, with the majority located in the United States (around 55%), Canada (around 20%) and the UK (around 13%). An analyst at Doctor Web also reported that 274 of these infected computers were based in Cupertino, California – the same city as Apple’s headquarters meaning that some of Apple’s own computers may have been affected.

The trojan can only be downloaded through compromised websites which are mostly (dodgy-looking) online video sites ending in the domain name .rr.nu however according to Google search results at the end of March, some 4 million websites may be affected by the trojan, with some users reporting popular sites such as D-link may have also been compromised.

What is FlashBack?

BackDoor.FlashBack.39 is a trojan horse designed to exploit vulnerabilities designed to exploit a security loophole in Java on OS X. It has been around since September of last year and Oracle, the owners and developers of Java, patched up the issue back in February. Apple has only reacted to the issue after the vulnerabilities were exploited, and subsequently released two security patches this week. The company does not comment or disclose any security issues until a full investigation has been carried out in order to protect their customers, which may explain the gap between the issue being discovered and Apple’s reaction.

After you visit a compromised website, FlashBack installs and runs a small executable on your Mac, which subsequently scans for software (most of which would otherwise detect and remove the threat) in the following locations on your Mac’s hard drive:

• /Library/Little Snitch
• /Developer/Applications/Xcode.app/Contents/MacOS/Xcode
• /Applications/VirusBarrier X6.app
• /Applications/iAntiVirus/iAntiVirus.app
• /Applications/avast!.app
• /Applications/ClamXav.app
• /Applications/HTTPScoop.app
• /Applications/Packet Peeper.app

If these files aren’t found, then the trojan uses a special routine which generates a list of control servers and installs the malicious code onto the user’s Mac, compromising overall system security.

How do I find out if I’m affected?

If you haven’t already done so, head over to Software Update and install the relevant security updates. However, this simply patches up the issue, and does not tell you whether or not your Mac is affected or not. The FlashBack trojan only affects Macs with Java installed. If you haven’t got Java installed on your machine, then you don’t need to worry.

If you’re running a commercial anti-virus software on your Mac such as VirusBarrier X6 or ClamXAV, then chances are the system would have detected and removed the threat. If not (or you just want to be sure), then F-Secure has provided a step-by-step guide on how to remove it manually – head over to their website for the detailed steps.

What Next?

The FlashBack trojan infection has really highlighted vulnerabilities in OS X and Java, and begs the question as to whether Mac users are 100% totally protected from viruses. Although Apple has since responded to the threat, its response came two months after Oracle itself had detected and fixed the threat, giving the trojan plenty of time to spread and infect. The best possible advice really is to run a decent virus scanner on your Mac (there are excellent free ones, such as ClamXav) and regularly scan your computer for threats so they can be detected at the earliest possible stage.

As always, we’d love to hear your thoughts and comments on this issue. Are Macs now becoming more vulnerable? Was Apple’s reaction too late? Were you affected by the FlashBack trojan? Share your experiences in the comments section below.

At AppStorm we love helping you get the most out of your devices, mostly by giving you the low-down on the latest and greatest apps! Occasionally, however, it’s good to highlight the very best apps available; whether they be old classics, or new gems.

Recently each site has published a massive, and eminently thoughtful, roundup of the very best apps available, and I’ve collected them all together! Our editors and teams went to herculean lengths to ensure that these roundups would be more than worth your time, so without further ado…

• 100 Mac Apps To Rule Them All
• 111 Web Apps to Rule Them All
• The Top 100 iPhone Apps
• The Top 100 iPad Apps
• Our Top 100 Android Apps
• 100+ Absolutely Essential Windows Apps

Enjoy!

Once a small classifieds list for the San Francisco Bay area, Craigslist has evolved into a global marketplace and one of the Internet’s most visited sites. Craigslist has gained a loyal following thanks to the broad range of uses, from buying and selling goods and services, to finding a casual romantic partner who shares your unusual interests.

Unfortunately, as the site has grown and become available in thousands of new cities, the bare-bones layout has remained stuck in the 90′s. The simple format of plain text and links makes load times quick and navigation a bit less cumbersome than eBay, but you can’t help wishing there was a bit more functionality in the site. CraigShopper steps in to help those of us who want a few extra features to tweak the browsing process.

The Basics

CraigShopper is a Mac application that connects to Craigslist, aiming to help you navigate the site better. The focus of its design is in making the browsing process more organized. Your actual interaction with content on the site will remain unchanged, as you simply view it in a built-in browser. It is the column on the left makes CraigShopper something special.

Better Searches

The last few weeks, I’ve been looking for a nice used bike for light commuting, and most of my search has been focused on Craigslist. However, one of the biggest complaints I have with using it is making my way through the sheer volume of postings.

There is a decent system in place for “flagging” inappropriate posts, but that only helps maintain the clutter to a certain point. When I’m shopping for something in particular, I usually run a search, and then just scroll through the pages with my command key pressed, clicking links to open in new tabs. Then I scroll through the tabs to filter out what I clearly am not interested in. This lets me keep my search results window intact, but makes the whole process clunky.

CraigShopper fixes this problem by allowing you to see the search results on the left column while viewing content in the main window. Now you can click on each link without having to worry about opening up a huge number of tabs. You can change the viewing format of the search results as well.

One thing that eBay has going for it is the ability to view thumbnails right in the search results, but the Craigslist’s site has stuck to its plain-links layout. CraigShopper gives you the choice of viewing image thumbnails in the search results, (as well as giving you some flexibility over the size of the thumbnail).

You can also modify your searches if you want to change some of the parameters. For instance, if I want to expand the price range of the bike search, I can duplicate it so that I don’t have to re-enter location information, and then just increase the upper and lower bounds. Now I can compare the two searches. CraigShopper lets you rename and save searches for quick reference.

What I love about this duplicate search function is how you can compare new results. My original search was for Specialized bikes from 400 – 1000 bucks. When I duplicated the search, expanding the price range to 200 – 1200, CraigShopper marks new results that showed up in the new range (200 – 400 and 1000 – 1200). It’s a great feature that makes recognizing how your new search changed really easy.

In my search for a bike, I have filled up a folder in Chrome with dozens of prospects. Rather than create more clutter in your browser’s bookmarks, CraigShopper lets you mark what you like within a saved search, so that you can go back once you’re ready to narrow down your choices.

Cons

As I mentioned, I always hated having to click through pages of results, opening new tabs. However, there was one big upside to that: purple links. My browser kept track of what I had already looked at, and CraigShopper oddly overlooks that. Sure, you can mark what you like, but I also want to be able to do that for bikes I’ve seen and can eliminate from my search. Some sort of “hide” button would be a big plus.

The preference settings on CraigShopper are surprisingly barren. While the search window is great for viewing hierarchies of categories, locations, etc., there is no way to set a default location. Most people will always use this app to search specifically within their city, and being unable to save that means you have to start at the top of the list every time, (and by “at the top,” I mean starting at the continent you live on).

While I liked the simple layout, some of the design choices made the app feel sort of cheap. The landing page for the main window is ugly, and would be nicer to see the actual Craigslist landing page there instead.

Bugs, Bugs, Bugs

My complaints above are minor in comparison to some of the bugs I’ve experienced. They range from minor inconveniences to total crashes. This is version 2.0 that I reviewed, so I assumed that most of the bugs would have been ironed out.

The most prevalent problem was having the search bar clear out. The search was saved, so all I had to do was click on it again, but its frequency was annoying. I’ve used the app for a couple days, and it has completely crashed more than a handful of times.

Conclusion

If you are someone who looks around on Craigslist for the personal ads, I would say using your browser is probably fine. CraigShopper is designed for users who find themselves scouring the site for something in particular rather than just browsing. However, searches for jobs, apartments, goods, etc. all benefit from the advanced search features.

The problems that this app has don’t appear to be so severe that they couldn’t be addressed in a single update. If it gets a bit more stable, and the appearance gets tweaked just a bit, I would have no problem making this my go to app for browsing Craigslist. At $2.99, I don’t have any qualms about recommending it, but only for the most hardcore Craigslist users. Until it gets cleaned up a bit, I would recommend casual users stick to their browser, and check back in a while to see if the bugs get fixed.

So you’re quickly browsing through your Facebook or Twitter feed, taking a short break from work, when you find an interesting article or video that you know is bound to be a huge time-suck. You don’t really want to look it up later when you aren’t busy because you know you’ll forget to do it. You also don’t want to read it or see it right there because you don’t want to get too distracted or you’re not in the right situation for it.

If you’re anything like me, you’ll save it for later by bookmarking it; be it marking it as a favorite on Twitter, sending it to Instapaper, starring it on Google Reader, or any of the equivalents in any social network. But then you’ll likely never come back to it because you’ll forget exactly where you saved it (and the tons of other content that you also bookmarked on other networks for later). That’s where Favs comes in.

Getting Started

Favs is a Mac app that integrates all of your “bookmarks” or “favorites” from an impressive list of social networks and services, so that you don’t have to go haunting for them in each social network later. Favs has support for around 20 services, here are some of the most relevant ones:

• Twitter
• Facebook
• Instapaper (needs premium account)
• Google Reader
• YouTube
• Flickr
• Vimeo
• Many more…

Favs goes for $4.99 and is currently featured on the Mac App Store.

Sources

In order for Favs to work, you first need to set up your favorite networks or supported services by going to the left corner on the bottom of the app’s window, then selecting the desired service and filling your credentials to log in.

The way that these sources work with Favs depends on the service. For example, with most services your “bookmarked” or “favorited” content will be what you’ll be shown, but in a few others it works different, like with Github you’ll be shown your favorite repositories and with Facebook your liked pages.

Interface

Favs looks very, very good. Its interface is simple enough, yet it looks and feels great. You have two sidebars and then the main area. The smaller sidebar on the left is where you can find icons of all the services you have setup, clicking them will show you your feeds for the corresponding service; and if you click on the “Favs” icon that is on top of all the services you can see your overall feed which includes content from all of your active services.

The bigger sidebar to the right of the services one is where you can select the content that you would like to display on the main area. Each piece of content will be shown with a small picture, a preview, title and time it was favorited or created, as well as a small icon that indicates the service where the content came from.

Content

The content from each service is displayed differently in the main area, depending on the type. For example, Facebook’s posts have their own custom way of getting displayed, with a stripped-down version of the post on top and the actual Facebook page where it’s located below. Most times it will not load the actual page, but just display the relevant parts of it, much like an RSS reader would with its content.

Double clicking the piece will actually bring you in your browser to the page where it is located. You can also do a few other things with your feed, like email links, mark them as read/unread, and copy items or links. In the search bar on top of the content sidebar you can look up keywords in your feed or filter the content by showing only unread stuff.

The way the “unread” feature works is a bit confusing, as it doesn’t always work with all services, the idea behind it is that it works as a way for you to know which content is new, but it doesn’t affect the actual bookmarked state of the content in the service (in fact, there is no way to un-bookmark items inside the app, which sucks).

There are also some extra cool ways of browsing through your feeds. Favs has support for tags with certain services, and they are integrated quite well with the app. With Google Reader, Instagram, Twitter, YouTube, and any other service that uses tags or hashtags for organizing content, you can click on each tag and an automatic search will come up inside your Favs with the tag that you selected. You can also manually look up these tags by adding a hashtag before your search.

Worth It?

Getting into the app and seeing the reviews, I was a bit worried that Favs had way too many services to actually work well with each one of them. I tried out almost all of the available services and I was surprised to find out that most of them work like exactly they are supposed to. I sometimes had some problems with the content being displayed on Facebook, but for the most part Favs did a great job at handling all of the services with which it was linked.

Personally, I think Favs is totally worth the five bucks, especially if you find yourself identifying with the situation I laid out in the introduction. I would definitely appreciate support for a few more services, like Last.fm’s “loved” tracks, but overall this app is stellar, and if you are anything like me, you’ll find the concept fascinating and you might even wonder how somebody hadn’t thought of an app like this before.

What do you think? Would you pay for an app like this? Let us know in the comments!

When OS X Lion was released last year, Apple put a lot of emphasis on how speedy it was on their MacBook Air line of ultra-thin notebooks – or “ultrabooks”, if you will. An example of this can be seen all over the operating system’s main webpage as Apple seems to be giving attention to mainly the MacBook Air in their slideshow of the key features included with OS X Lion. It’s quite apparent that Apple is trying to say something with all of this, but what exactly is that message?

I believe the corporation is hoping to move towards the MacBook Air and oust the Pro from the picture almost entirely. It was obvious that they were going to do this when they discontinued the original MacBook last year; this in turn made the Air their entry-level notebook, which is what they wanted since it sported an SSD that was ten times faster than the white MacBook – regardless of the task. But what is their master plan for all of this? Let’s explore some potential scenarios.

The Possibilities

Now that I’ve given you a brief idea of what I’m going to talk about in this article, let’s get to the fun stuff. First, I’m going to talk about the possibilities and what Apple could do with their current MacBook Air line. I’ll do this in list format with summaries of each idea and possible scenario to make reading a bit faster. Some of these may not be all that realistic, but there’s always a chance of something beyond what you’d expect. Let’s take a look.

Good Stuff

In this section you will find some of the good possibilities of a Pro to Air merge.

• It’s compact and light: Wouldn’t it be nice to have a 15-inch notebook that isn’t thick or heavy? It’s incredible how tiny a MacBook Air is, actually. When you first try it out, you’ll probably be scared that you’re going to snap it, but it’s actually very well-crafted.
• The SSD is default: You won’t have to pay extra for a solid state drive in this notebook, though you will if you need some extra storage — and when it comes to SSDs, the price goes up really fast. Hopefully Apple will reduce the prices a bit when they merge these two notebooks because I’m sure many music lovers and users of space-taking software will be rather upset.
• Speed: With an SSD on board by default, this new notebook will be extremely fast and will likely start up in about ten seconds, waking from sleep instantaneously. If you’ve ever used the iPad, then you know exactly what I’m talking about. You open it and it’s on — perfect.
• No moving parts: I see this as a great benefit to any users who travel often, even if it’s to and from the office, since many standard notebooks in this day and age have a spinning hard disk that just asks to be scratched when carried somewhere.
• Better for the budget: First, let it go on record that I’m not trying to say Apple products are cheap, just that the Air is currently their cheapest notebook. So, if you are looking for something comparable to the retired white MacBook, then this may be it.
• Unified name: I’m not sure if this will actually happen, but there is the remote possibility, so I’m going to mention it anyway. I think that Apple might eventually unify the naming of their MacBooks to simply “MacBook” instead of the “Pro” and “Air” titles. They won’t be eliminating the Pro entirely though. Instead, I think they’ll keep the 17-inch model for users who need a powerhouse and transition the 13-inch and 15-inch models to the “MacBook” name in the form of what we currently call an “Air”.
• Retina display? This is highly unlikely, but I’m sure it’s in the plans. Apple’s MacBooks will one day be sporting a beautiful Retina display. This means that whenever you’re done with your iPad or iPhone, you won’t have to come back to your desktop, and see all those unsightly pixels. I’m sure this is a ways off, but there’s no harm in mentioning it as there’s always a possibility it will happen sooner than we expect.

Bad Stuff

Here you will find some of the downsides of having a much more compact notebook.

• No optical drive: This is one of the obvious moves that has been expected for some time now. It seems that Apple isn’t ever going to hop on the Blu-Ray train that Sony started back in 2006. Instead, they are one step ahead of the current market and into the cloud. This got even more realistic when they announced 1080p iTunes video content back in March of this year. Sadly, one major downside of not having an optical drive is that there is no way to import a CD or play a DVD. For audiophiles, this is appalling and may seem completely undesirable; the same goes for lovers of the traditional film on a disk, but there’s actually a simple solution to the problem. All you have to do is purchase an external disk drive, which I actually just did to rip Blu-Rays with. It was only $60 and can play Blu-Ray disks, so I don’t see this as a bad thing at all. In the end, it all comes down to the choice between functionality and portability (back in the day, everyone thought Apple was nuts for abandoning built-in floppy disk drives).
• You may need an external hard drive: If you have a lot of data on your current MacBook Pro, then the transition to an Air could be a bit bumpy for you since its storage is anything but large. I’m not saying you won’t have any space at all, but you’re definitely going to need an external hard drive if you have a lot of music or use spacey software like Logic Pro because the current default SSD size is 64 GB and prices rise fast as I’ve said before. One nice thing about the new MacBooks is that they have Thunderbolt, which means you can read from an external drive much faster than before. In other words, you can purchase an extra SSD just to put data on, though it may be expensive.
• Little upgradability: Even though the Air is a beautiful machine, there’s literally no room for expanding its capabilities. For instance, the max RAM available is 4 GB and you have to add it on Apple’s website during your purchase since it’s soldered to the motherboard. In addition to that, there’s no way to upgrade the SSD manually, meaning that you had better find the right size when you purchase this computer or you’re going to be shopping for external storage.
• Limited performance: SSDs are great, but they only boost the performance so much. There are a lot of heavy applications that depend on the CPU and RAM and right now neither of these is very powerful. I’m sure Apple will make some tweaks in the future, but the MacBook Air is completely unappealing to any power user at the moment.

The Rumors

Keep in mind when reading these that there’s a good chance they may never come true.

If you’ve been keeping up with the Apple rumor mill, then you probably know that there has been word about a 15-inch MacBook Air for quite some time now. First there was a report from DigiTimes — please note that they are a highly unreliable source, but nearly all rumor sources are — back in February that claimed Apple would be releasing a new revision of their MacBook Pro this month. The report further claims that Apple will be completely redesigning their MacBook Pro line, which hints that they may keep the name and just give it a fresh look instead of combining it with the Air, but please remember that this is just a rumor.

Fast-forward to March 14th, an accessory vendor told Electricpig that a 15-inch edition of Apple’s MacBook Air would be arriving in April. Well, it is April right now, so maybe we should be expecting something. It’s not usual for Apple to announce these sort of things in an event, but rather to just take down the pages on their website for maintenance and then publish some new product information.

Combining It All

As you can see, there’s quite plenty of reasons to think that Apple may soon be combining the Pro with the Air, possibly even resulting in a single unified “MacBook” line. Now that I’ve ranted about what I think, it’s your turn to tell us your thoughts on what Apple might have in store for this year’s MacBook revision(s). Give us some feedback in the comments below; I hope you enjoyed this post!

MacBook Air icon via IconsPedia

Owning Snapheal, is like owning a magic wand that you can wave over your photos to make objects disappear. Photoshop costs a fortune and can take years to master, but you can learn how to use Snapheal in a few minutes and get results that will blow you away.

We’re happy to announce that we’ve been able to snag five copies of Snapheal to give away to our faithful fans. Read on to see how you can enter!

Tweet to Enter

Entering is simple, all you have to do is click the link below and send out the resulting tweet (or just copy and paste), then leave a comment below with a link to your tweet. That’s it!

We’ll announce the winners on Wednesday, April 11th. Good luck to everyone who enters and thanks for reading Mac.AppStorm!

We’ve collected the top four reviews, roundups and how-to articles from across the AppStorm network in February. Whether you’re interested in Mac, iPhone, Web, Android, Windows, or iPad apps, there’s bound to be something you didn’t spot over the course of the month. Now would be a good time to explore a part of the AppStorm Network you’ve never seen before!

Thanks for reading AppStorm, and I hope you enjoy looking over some of our favourite posts from last month!

Best of Android.AppStorm

Best of iPad.AppStorm

Best of Windows.AppStorm

Best of iPhone.AppStorm

Best of Web.AppStorm

Best of Mac.AppStorm

Share Your Ideas

Is there something in particular you’d like to see on the site next month? We’d absolutely love to hear your suggestions for articles, topics and giveaways. Just let us know in the comments. Thanks for reading AppStorm!

In today’s great world of digital photo retouching, it’s rare to see a published photograph that hasn’t been retouched in some way, often drastically so. This retouching process has also begun to permeate our world of social media, with photos becoming more and more obviously retouched or edited in some way. Many traditional photo-editing tools, such as Photoshop, are not exactly easy to pick up for your basic computer owner. Simple apps like Perfect365 have come along to help basic computer users retouch photos for common, everyday usage.

Perfect365 is an application that allows users to input key points and do basic portrait editing. Perfect365 offers a very simple user experience, with default views focusing on presets rather than manual editing options. Installed presets include basic structural touch-ups and a variety of makeup styles. However, users can browse online for further styles and inspiration or even create their own in manual mode. Read on to learn more about how the app works, what it’s good for (and not so good for) and my overall thoughts.

The Basic Functions

The first step in touching up any photograph is to import the photo and adjust the key points. Perfect365 does a pretty good job of getting the key points set up accurately, but some points definitely need adjustments. There is a guide to make sure that you know where the key point should be placed, so it’s a very simple process.

Once the key points are set up, you can check out any of the presets to try out different structural corrections and makeup styles. The majority of the presets are different types of makeup as this is definitely the predominant focus of the application.

For the most user-friendly experience, you will definitely want to stick with the presets. These tend to do the least amount of structural damage while definitely improving the look and adding some fun makeup. If you are tired of the presets or can’t find the right look but don’t know where to start, check out the online gallery for more inspiration and an added variety of looks. Registered users can download additional presets at this time.

Advanced Uses

For advanced users, the first step is to check out the manual mode, which greatly expands the possibilities. There you can change just about every option you can think of, from the basics like blush and lip color to advanced settings like colored contacts and eyelash length.

The basic settings definitely work the best, as many of the “advanced” settings have little to no obvious impact on the photo at hand. To check the original in comparison with the edited photo, there is a before and after button which allows you to change from the original image to the edited by simply hovering.

I do wish there was a way to have the original and edited images side by side as it’s hard to get a good idea of what works and doesn’t without that layout.

Within the manual settings you can also play around with some edits to the facial structure, including cheek lifts, nose enhancement and facial slimming. This is definitely the weakest part of the program. Sometimes these edits work, but more often than not they do random things to your face, from adding unnecessary shadows to exaggerated slimming.

The settings don’t seem to take into account the light present in the picture, so while it works ok for shots that are straight on, it’s not good for images tilted to either side or at strange angles. On a side note, manual mode is also where I discovered that the makeup side of the program doesn’t work well with glasses, so remove those before taking a picture.

Once you have a photo that you like it’s easy to save and share. You can add all of your favorites to a collection in the program by simply clicking “I like it” at the top. If you wish to share your picture, it’s easy to export to Flickr, Facebook and Twitter. If you own the full version of the program you can print and save at any resolution up to the original resolution, although free users are limited to a resolution of 600×600 pixels.

Finally, it is also worth mentioning that the application offers the ability to detect multiple faces in one image. In fact, the app can detect up to 21 faces even if some are tilted, twisted or otherwise obscured.

My Thoughts

When I first started playing with the software, I was quite impressed and continue to be impressed with the app’s abilities to soften skin and add dramatic makeup. The application definitely seems to be geared towards women interested in experimenting with different looks and it certainly does a great job of that. There aren’t really any features geared towards men, so while you can do some basic blemish removal, there isn’t much more you can do, particularly with the not so great facial structure tools.

The tools present in this application make it easy to use, whether you are a computer expert or a novice user. Just about anyone can pick up this program and try out a few different looks.

It’s definitely best used for simple edits and experimenting with makeup, and not so great for editing male photos or facial structures in general. It’s also great for pranks, as it’s easy to add super dramatic makeup to any image. All in all, it offers a free version that’s pretty fun to play around with and definitely gave me a few laughs (in a good way). What are your thoughts? Would you consider using the program? Share below!

This post is part of a series that revisits some of our readers’ favorite articles from the past that still contain awesome and relevant information that you might find useful. This post was originally published on April 14th, 2011.

Mac OS X has a very high standard of interface design, more so than most other operating systems. This is thanks to designers to work extremely hard to make your software work the way you want it to. They may spend hours perfecting a single icon that you will use once and ignore – but it’s worth it.

Dmitry Novikov is a Russian designer who works for MacPaw, the software company that has brought you beautiful apps such as MacHider, Ensoul, and a personal favourite of mine that I couldn’t live without, CleanMyMac. Today, we’ll be talking to him about his processes, design decisions, and much more.

Tell us a little bit about the MacPaw team – where are you based, how many of you are there, and what motivates you as a company?

MacPaw is a small independent company. We passionately develop software primarily for Mac OS. There are 17 people in our team, responsible for different spheres of development and promotion of the products. Developers, designers, marketing, web-development, support, each of us is an irreplaceable part of the team.

Our company is based in Kiev, the capital of Ukraine and I’ve moved here just a month ago from Russia, because I worked remotely from there. We also have a lot of partners around the world.

How did you get into design, and, in specific, UI design?

Since my childhood, I always liked cartoons based on computer graphics and Hollywood movies with lots of CGI in them. Being a quite curious kid, it was extremely tempting for me to know how all those things are done and would it be possible to create something like that myself.

We did not have Internet access in our tiny suburban town at that time. Once I saw a poster at school saying that they were gathering a group for computer graphics training. I visited those sessions until I went to my institute. Later I was freelancing, creating sites and logos. Apart from that I enjoyed creating and optimizing software interfaces for Gnome (Linux) and this work with open source software brought a lot of experience.

One fine day, I met MacPaw CEO Oleksandr Kosovan at a freelance exchange, he ordered an icon for CleanMyMac and a company site. Oleksandr enjoyed the result a lot and I enjoyed drawing for MacPaw so we decided to work on a permanent basis.

What app interfaces are you particularly inspired by?

I thoroughly examine all interfaces, not only software. Objects from real life, whether it is a mailbox, a button panel in an elevator or a tap in a bathroom, those are all interfaces.

I like the concept of transferring real-life interfaces into virtual analogs of them. For example, the Notepad and the Books apps for iPad look like they are real and this makes the use of them really easy for an ordinary user. We tried to apply this concept in our Ensoul application

How do you approach a new project?

Here is the classic scheme that we use to create something new:

• Choose a really nice idea
• Set goals and tasks for the future project
• Discuss the functionality of the product in question, decide who will find it useful
• Create a scheme of the application, an algorithm of its usage cycle
• Create multiple interface sketches and select the most usable prototype
• Improve the selected prototype and create a design draft
• Provide the design for development to add graphics
• Test the application thoroughly
• Create final design for a release candidate
• And then we constantly receive feedback from our customers and polish polish polish, until we get a perfect application.

You add lots of fun, “eye candy” elements to your designs. Do you think that this helps the user engage in the app?

Life itself – as well as your work – must bring joy. Drawing buttons, checkboxes, progress bars and other interface elements is a real pleasure for me. And putting yourself in a role of a user, trying to see an interface with a fresh eye is always interesting.

As a rule, users are ordinary people and they love beautiful and high-quality things: leather car interiors, pleasant to the touch natural fabrics, harmonic colors. Applications are the same things, but virtual. Working with an application should bring pleasure exactly like driving a really nice car.

Your interfaces have quite a distinctive style. Was this a conscious decision to differentiate your apps from others?

There’s a lot of competition on software market and it is vital to stand out not only in advertising campaigns, but in products themselves. Our apps not only look different, they work differently as well. We and our users like this approach.

Why do you think that the Mac has such a wonderful standard of UI design compared to other platforms such as Windows and Linux?

I like all the platforms to be honest, as each of them has its advantages and disadvantages. However, Mac is more intuitive for users and it does not require a lot of time to learn the computer before you actually start using it fully.

Apple provides very usable instruments for developers and great documentation. I like that Apple treats developers like ordinary people and designers have rather good guidelines, written in a very simple language. Creating apps for Mac is very interesting and sometimes quite hilarious!

What’s your set-up like? Do you try to keep your hardware up-to-date?

Currently I work on a top-end iMac 27″. Basically it is even a little excessive in terms of hardware resources. I have a MacBook Pro 13″ at home.

The good thing is that graphic software doesn’t often raise system requirements and I work with current hardware until it starts to lag, which happens rarely. It is easier to change your Mac in the Apple world then try to upgrade internal hardware, and I recommend changing your computer every 3-4 years.

What apps do you use for interface design work, and what is your general workflow when crafting a new interface element?

Mostly I use Adobe Illustrator CS5. I think it is an ideal instrument for icons and interfaces. Besides, vector graphics provides certain advantages in terms of creation speed and flexibility of the ready components. Sometimes I also use Pixelmator and Icon Composer.

For someone interested in interface design, where would you suggest they start?

The main goal for an interface designer is to create usable things and then make these things look good. You can practice on real-life objects. Ask yourself what brings you any inconvenience or discomfort and try to improve this object or action.

Find a really unusable application and remake it on paper or in a graphic editor so that it suits your needs. Don’t be afraid to approach companies and offer to improve or remake their products.

Take older applications and redraw their interface elements, ask people if they like your result. Think of interface flexibility when you create an application, because developers would probably want to add or remove some functionality in the future.

Can you reveal anything about future MacPaw products in the pipeline?

The Mac App Store and Mac OS X Lion delayed some of our projects rather seriously. We had to introduce a lot of changes to fit new standards and requirements and basically re-build the apps almost on the very finishing steps of development.

Currently we are actively working on Ensoul and CleanMyMac 2, which will have very interesting capabilities and its interface and behavior should surprise and amuse our users.

In the near future we will also update our current CleanMyMac version and add some of CleanMyMac 2 features there. It will now have iPhoto image duplication search and some other very useful features. Also we are working on a very interesting project called DevMate. But I can’t tell you anything about it just yet!

Thanks, Dmitry!

Many thanks to Dmitry for talking to Mac.AppStorm and sharing his tips, insights and knowledge. We love meeting and learning about members of the Mac community, and Dmitry is no exception. We really appreciate his contribution, and wish him all the best with MacPaw and future software.

So, next time you use an application, have a look at its interface. That didn’t happen by accident – it was carefully planned out by skilled designers like Dmitry. Interface designers truly are the unsung heroes of Mac OS X!