Category: Mac

Last Thursday, Apple caught us all a bit off guard with the announcement of OS X Mountain Lion, the next major version of OS X. Now that I’ve had a few days to sit down and take a look at it, I can confidently say that this is no small upgrade. Mountain Lion is a huge leap forward in the unification of iOS and OS X (Apple has officially dropped “Mac” from the name), bringing over many much-loved features including iMessages, Notification Center, AirPlay Mirror, and a whole host of new applications.

Follow along as we dive in and take a look at all of the great new features, updates and tweaks of your next operating system.

Mountain Lion is a huge leap forward for OS X

Notification Center

Notification Center is one of the biggest improvements in Mountain Lion

One of the most important new features in OS X Mountain Lion is Notification Center, which unifies notifications throughout the entire OS. If you’ve ever used an iOS 5 device, you should feel right at home using Notification Center. Right now only a few Apple created apps support the notifications, but from what I’ve seen, it does everything you’d expect.

Perhaps the most outstanding feature of Notification Center is the ability to have notifications pushed to you even when apps are not running. Make no mistake: this is a killer feature. Usually I have Twitter, Mail, and a Facebook Notifications app running at all times, but with Mountain Lion those can all be replaced by push notifications.

If you’d still like to use Growl notifications in Mountain Lion, check out Hiss, it integrates the user experience of Notification Center with the ubiquity of Growl Notifications.

Not only is this a huge benefit to your system’s performance, but it also goes a long way towards simplifying your OS X experience. Clicking the “dart” icon in the righthand corner of the menubar launches you into the Notification Center, which shares more than a passing resemblance to it’s iOS brethren, but Apple also went one step further by introducing a new finger gesture, a two finger swipe from the right of the touchpad.

This is the first OS X gesture to take advantage of where your fingers are on the touchpad, and it’s pretty intuitive. All things considered, Notification Center should make the switch to Mountain Lion worthwhile for almost any user, from beginners to professionals.

Notes

Notes is just about what you'd expect from an app called "Notes"

Notes has been a familiar face in the Apple world since the original iPhone, but for whatever reason Mountain Lion is the first time its been included on the Mac. Notes is essentially identical to what you’re used to on an iPhone or iPad, it has the same aesthetic, and the same basic feature-set.

In my opinion, this is a really nice stealth addition to OS X, it syncs seamlessly with all your other iCloud devices and I actually wrote a good part of this article within the app. Notes is also really lightweight, as a dedicated user of WunderKit (which takes almost 15 seconds to load), it’s nice to have an app just open an up in a split-second and get your thoughts written-out. It doesn’t do much, but thanks to the iCloud integration, I can see Notes becoming an integral part of my daily workflow.

Messages

Messages is really just a new skin on top of iChat with a little iMessage mixed in.

Messages is the most obvious addition to OS X Mountain Lion, finally allowing you to send and receive iMessages from your Mac. Sadly, right now it’s a just mess of good ideas that are poorly executed.

First off, Messages is really just a new skin on top of iChat, with some iMessage goodness mixed in. Right now, that’s not quite a winning combination. iMessages often failed to reach both my Mac and/or iOS Device, and when they did get delivered, the experience was too buggy to be useful.

In addition, FaceTime is still a separate app, which can be activated from within Messages. This really makes no sense, but that seems to be a reoccurring theme in this particular app. Messages is not doomed to fail, in fact, it has the potential to be an essential part of OS X, but in order for this to happen, Apple needs to clean up the interface and focus more on utility instead of aesthetics.

Game Center

Game Center's interface is highly stylized, much like the iOS version of the service.

Apple is really pushing their online gaming platform, Game Center, and there seems to be no exception in Mountain Lion. Once again, if you are familiar with the iOS version of the service, the OS X version shouldn’t be too surprising.

Since Game Center is only currently available among developers, I couldn’t really try it out, but if it works as advertised you’ll be able to play against friends and strangers in a platform-agnostic experience.

In plain english; if you have a game on your Mac and your friend has it on iOS, you’ll be able to compete head-to-head. This might present some gameplay issues, but thats really up to developers to fix. It’s nice that Apple has included the ability to use Game Center, and it’s certainly a good sign for the future of gaming on OS X.

Twitter and Share Sheets

In OS X Mountain Lion, Apple has included their version of OS-wide sharing, aptly named “Share Sheets”. It works nearly anywhere with Twitter and Messages, and for photos and videos it supports Flickr and Vimeo, respectively.

You’ll probably notice that Facebook and Youtube are missing, among others. Apple is very picky about what services they’ll allow on their platform so I wouldn’t be surprised if this is intentional, but hopefully it’s just an oversight that will be eliminated when the OS is released.

While certainly not groundbreaking, Share Sheets should be a pleasant addition to your OS X experience, despite the fact that Apple seems to have been rather picky about which services to allow.

Airplay Mirroring

If you’ve ever used a PC with Intel’s Wireless Display technology, you probably understand how much Mac users are missing out on. Luckily, Apple’s own variation on the same idea of wirelessly extending your computer’s display onto your TV works just as well, if not better.

You’ll need an Apple TV to use AirPlay Mirroring, but at only $99 it’s not a hard purchase to justify. The ability to beam your music and video content to the TV wirelessly is just another amazing addition to Mountain Lion. Of course, since I was using a developer preview, the connection dropped occasionally, but Apple usually has these minor kinks worked out before the OS hits market, so I’m not worried. So if you’ve been holding out on an Apple TV, OS X Mountain Lion might just be enough reason to take the plunge.

Reminders

Reminders looks alot like its iOS counterpart.

Reminders is another app taken almost verbatim from iOS, and for most people, that’s a good thing. Functionally, it’s almost the same as the iOS app, allowing you to set reminders for yourself -and that’s it. You’ll lose the geo-fencing capability, but that’s probably just because your Mac doesn’t have GPS anyway, so we won’t shed to many tears over that lost feature.

In addition, you can export your reminders as Calendar events, which should be nice if you plan to take your task management full circle. Unfortunately, since Reminders is directly taken from iOS, it also includes a less-than-stellar interface which, in my opinion, looks a little childish. While some people may like it, i wish Apple would stick with classic UI elements instead of attempting to clone the physical world.

Security Settings (Gatekeeper)

Gatekeeper is perhaps the most controversial addition to OS X, as it locks down your Mac from potential security threats by preventing non-Apple approved apps from being installed. While this setting can be changed in System Preferences, it is symbolic of the shift towards an App-Store-centric universe.

If are a developer looking to make sure your app isn’t rejected by Gatekeeper, you’ll have to get a security certificate as part of the Mac Developer Program.

If you’re reading this article, you probably know a little about Macs, so Gatekeeper is probably more of an inconvenience than a feature, but from grandma’s point-of-view, it’s a lifesaver. Honestly, it’s not unrealistic to imagine that OS X 10.9 will do away with non-Apple approved apps altogether, but until that day comes, Gatekeeper is just one more setting for the true Mac geek to change when they set up their computers.

iCloud

If there is one thing I can say definitively about Apple’s strategy for the coming years, it’s that iCloud is really important. It’s everywhere now and Mountain Lion really pushes that concept.

For the first time, iCloud is beginning to dig deep into system level operations and that’s led to a far more robust user experience. When you first install the OS you are asked to set up iCloud and from that point on it is integrated into nearly every possible part of the experience; from syncing your notes to playing your music.

Although I found it to be considerably more useful than iCloud in Lion, there are still some glaring omissions. For example, “Documents in the Cloud,” isn’t really much better than it was in Lion. One notable addition is the ability to save files to iCloud directly from the “Save” dialog in some apps, but oddly enough though there’s no way browse those files you’ve uploaded. This particular feature might just need to be updated from within iWork, but I hope Apple addresses it before the OS is released; documents could use a little TLC. Otherwise iCloud in Mountain Lion is just plain useful; it works almost without fail in the background, and most users won’t even know it’s there.

Everything Else

Apple has integrated system updates with app updates through the App Store

Mountain Lion is really a huge update to OS X, and there are dozens of little tweaks you’ll likely notice. Below are the ones that stood out the most.

• Safari – The URL bar and search bar have been combined, Chrome style.
• Dashboard – For whatever reason, Apple hasn’t integrate the Dashboard into Notification Center, but they still seem interested in updating it. In Mountain Lion the interface to add and manage widgets is now similar to that of Launchpad, and the remove widgets feature has been updated for the 21st century. It looks like Apple still has a place in its heart for good ol’ Dashboard.
• Launchpad – You can now search in Launchpad. Why you’d want to do this instead of using Spotlight is really beyond me, but it’s there if you want it.
• Chinese Services – Since China is Apple’s fastest growing market, it makes sense that in OS X Mountain Lion they are integrating some popular Chinese services. Baidu now works in Safari and services like 126 and 163 are also included. I obviously didn’t test any of these, but they seem to really be Chinese extensions of Share Sheets.
• Software Update – Software Update is dead. In its place, Apple is managing system updates through the App Store. This is a pretty common sense move, and it works pretty well. It’s also a little zippier than what you’d expect from the old dedicated update app, so I’d imagine it will be a welcome change for most users.
• Mission Control – Hovering over fullscreen apps or spaces now shows you a zoom effect similar to the one in the dock. It’s not much, but at least it looks pretty.

Final Thoughts

Mountain Lion is a really impressive update to OS X. The sheer number of new apps and features is almost unbelievable for what Apple considers an incremental update. I’m excited, but I’m also more than a bit worried. Is this the end of OS X as we know it?

While I love many of the new features, the similarities to iOS are pretty outstanding. So one has to wonder, is Apple determined to unify their operating systems, at the expense of their power users? Sadly, that seems to be the way things are headed. Hopefully, though, that’s in a distant future; for now we can enjoy the massive improvements Mountain Lion brings to the operating system formally known as “Mac” OS X. Come this summer, Mountain Lion will be a must have update.

With OS X Mountain Lion, there’s a new sheriff in town: Gatekeeper. This utility gives you the power to decide which apps are acceptable to install on your system and which should be blocked due to being from a questionable source.

Does the arrival of Gatekeeper mean that Apple is inching closer towards full control over your apps? Or will this utility actually give you more control in the long run? Read on to find out.

Trouble Ahead?

When Apple announced the Mac App Store, many felt that they were pushing OS X toward a model similar to the iOS ecosystem, in other words, that Mac applications would someday be restricted only to the Mac App Store. One could certainly make the argument that this would be better in many ways for end users. For instance, if applications only came from the Mac App Store, and had to pass through the scrutiny of the app reviewers, then the end user could be assured a high degree of probability that the downloaded application is not malware.

But this model would also not be without problems. We are used to installing any third party application we please. Many called foul on the Mac App Store and warned to stay away from it. Well, at least with Mountain Lion, Apple has not taken that route. But Apple also did not sit still on this issue.

Gatekeeper: What It Is Not

• Gatekeeper is not a way to restrict third party applications on the Macintosh.
• Gatekeeper is not some heavy handed and draconian system for making unreasonable demands on developers.
• Gatekeeper does not (by default) restrict the user from downloading and installing applications from sources other than the Mac App Store.
• Gatekeeper does not mean the end of the third party eco system as we know it

A Logical Step

The Macintosh community enjoys a fairly risk-free experience. The reason for this, I think, is twofold.

1. OS X is a very robust and secure Operation System. To do any real damage, an application must ask for admin access.
2. OS X toils in relative obscurity by comparison to it’s largest, malware infested competitor (don’t flame me, I’m just stating fact. I don’t buy into the security via obscurity myth, but I do think OS X is less of a target than Windows).

However, this is not to say OS X is immune. While there are no known viruses in the wild for OS X, there are a few trojans. Some time back, Apple implemented a blacklisting system in OS X to warn users if they try to execute known malware. The list is updated remotely as these sorts of things come up. But it’s far from robust. Gatekeeper is just another stone in the security foundation, and another step toward robustness.

As I move forward, understand that I am not a developer and do not have access to the Mountain Lion Developer Preview. If I did, I wouldn’t be able to talk about it because I would be under NDA. So this information all comes from Apple’s website, or from other sources around the internet. But I think it’s important to spell all this out.

Default Settings

Gatekeeper, by default will allow two types of applications. Those that come from the Mac App Store (obviously), and those from identified developers.

So what is this identified developer stuff? The short of it is this: a developer signs up for the Developer ID program and Apple gives them a unique ID to sign their apps with. This digital signature serves a couple of purposes. First of all, it assures that the application has not been tampered with since the original developer compiled it. If it has been tampered with, the signature won’t match and OS X will tell you the app has not been signed by a registered developer. And secondly, someone making malware or trojans for OS X is not going to rush out and get one of these developer IDs.

One assumes also that, much like the safe downloads list, Apple has a way of letting OS X know if a registered developer did decide to go rogue and start distributing malware and thus revoke the signature.

Even in this default setting, Apple has stated on Mountain Lion’s security page that you can control click on an application to access controls for over-riding Gatekeeper’s settings.

Other Settings

Image From Apple.com

If you are feeling overzealous about the security of OS X, you can change Gatekeeper’s preferences to allow only apps from the Mac App Store. And yes, I think the presence alone of this settings is an indication that Apple has not entirely ruled out moving in that direction at some point in the future.

It gives me a little bit of pause. On the other hand, it’s not unreasonable to include this as a preference. I’m not sure who would use it, but it makes sense for the radio button to be there.

And of course, the third setting allows you to make OS X behave in the manner it always has — allow all applications regardless of source.

Developers

As I said, I am not a developer. However, I think that this is mostly a good thing for good developers. Developers who are doing good work, who are trusted and make great applications should get good standing and recognition in the OS.

By Apple giving devs a certificate they are essentially saying to the user, “We trust this developer, this is our stamp of approval.” Good developers should appreciate this. It protects the user, recognizes good developers, and doesn’t force anyone to compromise. And I would think that everyone is happy, developers certainly, that Apple has not moved to an App Store only model. There are quite a few great apps out there that Apple simply won’t allow in the Mac App Store.

Dissent

Even Gatekeeper’s gentle approach will not be without it’s detractors. I am only going to link to one example here.

Dustin Curtis, user interface designer, thinks Apple may be a bit draconian here. He does not like the dialog that comes up when you try to run an unsigned app (of which, right now, there are plenty of course). In the instance of trying to run Adium the dialog says:

“Adium” has not been signed by a recognized distributor and may damage your computer. You should move it to the Trash.

“Adium” is on the disk image “Adium_1.4.4.dmg”. Safari downloaded this disk image today at 11:06 AM from adium.im.”

Dustin says of this:

This is a fearmongering dialog. The vast majority of apps people download will not damage their computer, and mere mortals have no idea what “signed by a recognized distributor” means. The word “signed” in relation to security certificates is a very technical term and no one ever calls developers “distributors.” Also, saying “You should move it to the Trash” is weirdly strong wording.

Yes, perhaps it is. On the other hand, if it’s not worded strongly enough, users may not pay that much attention to the warning, and this defeats the purpose of Gatekeeper.

An Additional Resource

I just finished listening to episode 55 of John Siracusa’s excellent podcast Hypercritical. There is lots of talk about Mountain Lion in general, and John does discuss Gatekeeper. If you are interested in Gatekeeper (and Mountain Lion for that matter), then I highly recommend this episode: Hypercritical #55: Region of Pain

What Do You Think of Gatekeeper?

Personally, I think Gatekeeper is absolutely a good thing. It has not taken anything away from us and it will help to bolster security of OS X. And for those of us who know what we are doing and know our way around OS X, we can still certainly install any application we would like to. I don’t see any downsides at all, and plenty of upsides.

What do you think? We’d love to hear your thoughts on Gatekeeper, whether you’re a user or developer. Do you think it’s ultimately a good thing or is this a bad direction for OS X?

Just yesterday, the immensely popular iOS physics and puzzle game “Cut the Rope” arrived on Mac App Store. ZeptoLab, the developer of the game, hopes to attract many avid Mac and iOS gamers alike to this platform with the support of up to a 2560 x 1440 resolution, meaning that it will look great even on your largest display — that is, providing that you do not have an older Mac with a very outdated graphics card.

Now, you’re probably wondering how on earth you can control the game since Macs don’t really have a touchscreen like iOS devices do. Well, it’s actually quite simple really: you use a trackpad. This may sound scary if you own an iMac with a Magic Mouse, and it is, because the game wasn’t really designed to be played with a regular mouse. Read on for more details on this release and our first impressions.

First Impressions

The first level of Cut the Rope

The game is pretty good so far and the graphics look great, though they can be rough in some areas. As for the gameplay, the developers have made it even easier if you have a trackpad. All you have to do is put two fingers on it as if you were to scroll around like you do everywhere else in the OS and it will automatically enable the cutting tool. You can also click the “Options” button on the main menu and then change the way the cutting tool works to either “Click to cut” or “Drag to cut”. Other than that, the levels are self-explanitory and look beautiful.

By default, Cut the Rope for Mac does not display in fullscreen mode, which can be a bit of an annoyance for some. I’ve found it nice to have the game in a window so that I can switch from it to another app if I wish to. However, if you do not prefer windowed mode, then you can you can enable fullscreen simply by pressing CMD + F. It’d be nice if there were a way to enable this in settings so that you don’t have to manually switch to it after starting the game. In addition, there’s no fullscreen button like many other Mac apps have, which is strange since this would be a very easy way to switch the game to fullscreen and also keeps apps in it every time you start them. This will probably be added in a future update.

I think Cut the Rope for Mac does well in the graphics area, but it’s a bit jagged in areas, as I said before. I’m sure the developers will polish things up eventually. As for performance, it runs very well on my 13-inch MacBook Pro from last year — the latest model. I’ve tried running four tabs in Safari, the Mac App Store, and playing Cut the Rope all at once and performance is perfectly fine — I can’t even hear the fan spinning, yet.

Other Information

The second level of Cut the Rope with a highlighted rope; if I were to click it, it would be cut

There’s not much else in this iteration of Cut the Rope. It includes all the basic features and levels that the iOS version does. Here’s a small rundown of what’s in the game:

• 250 levels, 10 level boxes
• Innovative gameplay mechanics
• Realistic physics
• Cute character
• Outstanding graphics
• Achievements and leaderboards
• Constant free updates with new levels

I’m sure all of us deal with a fair share of documents. In the past couple of years, a lot of innovation has helped us move our document creation, storage, backup and sharing to the cloud. And in particular, there has never been a better time to collaborate extensively on a document with your peers. That’s all fine and dandy. But what about the documents we have on our hard disks?

Rummaging through folders in Finder and searching for them using Spotlight are by far the best options in front of us. I found Dossier when searching for a better way to organize all my documents. This wonderful app helps you organize all the information as you would like and easily share with others. Come, let us take it for a spin.

Getting Started

Welcome To Dossier

Dossier lets you intelligently organize information based on rules that you define – track recent changes, specific keywords in your text, and more. Post installation, you can either add your existing documents to Dossier or create a new document from the app itself. I was a bit curious with the option to create a document with Dossier and decided to proceed with that option.

User Interface

Creating a Dossier Document

Actually, it is a root folder that is created in the app, when you go with the document creation option. The user interface isn’t mind blowing, but even at first glance, the app looks intuitive and simple to use.

Major organizational parts of the interface are flexible and Dossier allows you to view your information however you’d like – choose between vertical or horizontal panes, independently hide or show parts of the interface, or use the simplified editor window to focus on editing.

Multiple Dossier Windows

You can have multiple windows of the app running at the same time by clicking on Add a new viewer window. Not many apps come with this awesome feature, but it might be very helpful if you are trying to stay on top of multiple documents or folders at the same time.

Creating and Managing Documents

Creating a Real Document

Dossier comes with a notepad editor. It’s a WYSIWYG editor and comes with the oft used features like text alignment, lists, bullets, formatting options and the like. It should be more than enough to whip up a quick document on the go without having to install or open a separate document editor.

Using the WYSIWYG Editor

What good is a document organizer if it doesn’t support folders? With Dossier you can create as many folders as you want to cut the clutter. The app supports nested folders as well. Meaning, you can create subfolders within a parent folder and there is no limit to that as well.

The explorer pane to the left does a very good job keeping the folder structure intact. However, if you are using a MacBook and the trackpad, you might want to deselect the current folder choice to create new parent folders. Else, you might end up creating a bunch of sub folders.

Folder Structure

For those having a bunch of folders and don’t have the time to find a document by clicking on each and every folder, the Unified Entries option will be of immense help. When you click on Unified Entries, the app will list all the documents stored, irrespective of the folder structure.

Importing Documents

I tried importing a bunch of document formats – doc, rtf, txt etc. and Dossier added them to the respective folders in a few seconds. Once imported, you can move the documents around by dragging and dropping them into folders of your choice.

Unfortunately, the app didn’t understand the document properties well. All imported documents showed that they were created today (but they weren’t). This is a big deal because, you won’t be able to use the calendar feature to the max. Ideally, each document should carry the date of creation and you should be able to access them by choosing a date in the calendar. But, when you create documents from within the app, this feature works perfectly fine.

Dossier is excels at search too. Documents are auto suggested as you start typing in the search box and I found the search results to be very accurate. On a similar note, documents created and stored inside Dossier are accessible to search from Spotlight too.

Final Thoughts

Overall, Dossier does an impressive job organizing data. Did I mention that Dossier come with a solid encryption system? So, you can lock away your data with a flexible encryption system that allows you to encrypt individual entries or folders. Now you can rest easy when carrying important personal or business documents on your MacBook.

At $24.99, Dossier isn’t exactly very cheap and the user interface isn’t very attractive. That being said, if you are someone who handles a large volume of documents, definitely go for Dossier as it will do most of the heavy lifting for you.

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 February 28th, 2011.

Many people would agree that iTunes is fast becoming (or has already become) bloatware. It has a ridiculous number of features and uses, but not always what we’d consider to be the right ones. You can find out what songs Bruno Mars is particularly enjoying at this time, and yet can’t search YouTube for music videos.

Luckily, everybody’s in the same boat, and people have been working tirelessly to create ways for you to make your iTunes work the way you want it to. Today, we’ll be focusing on DougScripts, a site started by Doug Adams a little over 10 years ago in February 2001, which is home to around 500 AppleScript files.

These scripts are free to download and easy to install. In this article, we’ll be showing you how to do just that, and showcasing some of Doug’s best work over the past 10 years.

Installing a Script

Installing an AppleScript script is just about as easy as you can get. If you want to follow along with this short tutorial, we’ll be working with Just Play This One, a script which plays a selected song in iTunes, instead of the whole album or playlist.

1. Download the script, and uncompress the ZIP file.
2. Open up the DMG. In this case, you will have all of the instructions laid out for you already, but if you download scripts from other sites, you are not always so lucky.


Installing the Script

3. Open up a second Finder window, and navigate to (your username)/Library/iTunes/Scripts. If you haven’t got a “Scripts” folder, which is likely, if you’ve never installed a script before, simply make one.
4. Drag Just Play This One.scptd into your Scripts folder. You can put the instruction file in too, but it’s not necessary for the script to work.

Running a Script

1. Bring up iTunes. There is no need to quit and reopen iTunes, the script will be loaded automatically.
2. In the case of the “Just Play This One” script, select a song from an album or playlist, go into the AppleScript menu (A scroll icon in the menu bar), and click “Just Play This One”. iTunes will play the selected song and stop.


Running a Script

Every script is different, so you will use them differently. Check the instructions that come with the script on how to use the individual script. One thing which stays the same is that you run the script from the AppleScript menu.

Assigning a Keyboard Shortcut

Having to go through the menu bar every time you want to activate one of these scripts is time-consuming. Wouldn’t it much easier to use a keyboard shortcut? Here’s how:

1. Take note of the exact wording of the command in the menu bar you want to add a shortcut to. All punctuation, capitals, etc. are essential for it to work.
2. Close iTunes.
3. Open System Preferences, and navigate to the Keyboard panel. Then, go to the Keyboard Shortcuts tab.
4. Click on the “+” button and a panel will pop up.
   

   Setting a Keyboard Shortcut

5. Select iTunes as the application.
6. Type the exact command into the “Menu Title” field. In this example “Just Play This One”.
7. Choose your keyboard shortcut. Try not to make it anything that will conflict with other shortcuts.
8. Open iTunes again and use your shortcut at will.

20+ Great Scripts to Improve iTunes

Now that you know how to install and use scripts, it’s time to start building your script library. Here are over 20 of the most useful scripts from Doug Adams.

Super Remove Dead Tracks
“Dead tracks” are those in which the file is no longer locatable, and can be identified in iTunes by a “!” next to their name. This scripts gets rid of them from your library in one fell swoop.

Delete Tracks Never Played
Everybody has a number of songs with a play count of 0 which they have never listened to. Maybe, eventually, you’ll conclude that if you haven’t listened to it yet, you probably never will, and want to delete them. This script does it easily.

Import iPod Audio Files
If you somehow lose some songs from iTunes, but have them on your iPod, you can use this script to recover them. This won’t work for your entire library, but it should be able to handle an album or two.

Update Expired Podcasts
If you haven’t listened to a podcast for a certain length of time, iTunes will stop downloading updates. Use this script to update them again.

Change iTunes Hidden Preferences
There are a number of iTunes preferences which Apple have decided to hide, but you can access them with this script. You’ll be able to hide the Ping buttons, use half stars for ratings, and several more.

Change iTunes Hidden Preferences

Gather Up the One-Hits
This script creates a playlist of the artists of which you only have one song by. Often, these  songs are crackers, so this is a very useful script.

Needle Drop
This can be used to play a certain length of every song before skipping to the next. If you have a low attention span, this could be for you.

Block Party
This app creates playlist of random songs, but in blocks of 2 or 3 songs by each artist. So you’ll get 2 songs by The Beatles, then 2 by Queen, 2 by Bowie, and so on.

Block Party

Just Play This One
This is the script from our tutorial. As previously explained, it plays a single song and then stops, instead of a whole album or playlist.

Play Selected Track Next
This is a nice way to queue up a track. Simply select it while another track is playing, and run the script. The selected track will play after the current song has ended.

Now Where Was I?
This script remembers the song you played when you quit iTunes, and starts playing it again when you open iTunes again. It requires a little more work to get its full function, but it’s very useful if you put in the little bit of extra time.

Tracks Without Artwork to Playlist
This does exactly what it says on the tin – Places all tracks without any artwork into a playlist so you can work through them in your own time.

Remove n Characters from Front or Back
Sometimes, all tracks in an album will be named something along the lines of “07 – The Beatles – A Hard Day’s Night”. With this script, you can remove a certain number of characters from the front or back of a track name, in order to clean it up.

New Play Count
I like my play count to be an accurate representation of my favourite songs (it rarely is), and this script can assign new play counts to songs, if you had to re-import a song, or if you just wanted to hide how many times you’ve listened to that Hannah Montana soundtrack.

New Play Count

Rate Me! Rate Me!
This script reminds you to rate a song, whenever an unrated song is played. If you’re not in the habit of rating songs, this is a great way to start.

Sundry Info to Comments
What do you put in the Comments field in iTunes? If you’re like me, you won’t have much to put in there. This script allows you to put the file name, file path, sound volume, file creation date or a number of other details in the comments field.

Album to Album Artist
In most cases, except compilation albums, the artist field will read the same as the album artist field. With the script, you can quickly synchronise the two fields.

Proper English Title Capitalisation
If you’re anything like me, you want every little meta tag to be perfect, and poorly capitalised song titles will drive you to despair. This script will save you from a lifetime of frustration.

Search Wikipedia
No prizes for guessing what this does – It searches Wikipedia for the song, album, artist or composer of a selected song. Great for getting data for meta tags quickly.

Search Wikipedia

Search YouTube
This too is pretty self-explanatory – It searches YouTube for the selected song. If you love music videos, this will be an essential download.

Guitar Tab Search
Can you guess what this script does? Yup, it finds guitar tabs on Ultimate Guitar for a selected song. How did you guess?

Music Trivia
This is less useful, more fun. It plays a snippet of a song, and you must guess the song.

Conclusion

As you can see, there are plenty of excellent scripts available, and that’s just on one website. Start exploring more websites and you’ll never need to manually edit a thing on iTunes ever again.

Considering how easy it is to install these scripts, and how much time they save, there’s no reason why you shouldn’t get started straight away!

Edovia, the developer of popular Mac VNC client Screens, has updated their app to version 2.0. This major release adds many new features, refreshes the user interface, fixes a lot of bugs, improves the overall performance of the app, improves the security, improves the documentation, and more. Read on for more information on this release.

New Features

The first major feature addition is iCloud integration. Since it released back in October of 2011, many developers have made good use of Apple’s new cloud storage system to synchronize elements within between iOS and Mac devices. Edovia has brought this great feature to Screens for syncing all your stored screens between your iOS and Mac devices. It’ll prove to be extremely useful if you have an iPad and iPhone or MacBook at home and iMac at the office.

Next up we have auto-resume. This is sort of like Lion’s Resume feature in that it automatically reopens the connections that you had open in your previous session. Auto-resume will be helpful if you need to restart your computer really quick and wish to start using Screens where you left off last time. It’d be really great if they added iCloud sync to this feature because then you could resume right where you left off on any device, not just the one you were on before.

Lastly, this update adds support for SSH Keys and SSH Tunneling, which are useful for advanced users.

Improvements

Screens 2.0 has improved many of its previous features, ranging from performance improvements and bug fixes to enhanced security and wake-on-lan abilities. In addition, the new user interface is much cleaner and completely removes the wooden texture that was in the previous version. It’s much more subtle and looks better with your screens.

Please beware that you must be running OS X 10.7 Lion or later to use Screens 2.0.

So, that’s what’s new in Edovia’s second major version of their beautiful VNC app. What feature are you most excited about? If you’ve already used this new version, then how is it faring thus far? Any bugs? Let us know in the comments below!

Earlier this week we reviewed Photosweeper, an excellent tool for sorting and cleaning photo collections resulting in more useable disk space.

Whether you’re a professional photographer, hobbyist, or just someone in need of more hard disk space, Photosweeper packs a powerful punch in de-cluttering any size collection.

We’re proud to announce that we have 50 promo codes available for readers keen to clear out their photo collections!

How to Enter

Entering the competition is really easy, but we’re putting a little twist on it! All you need to do is:

1. Post a link to this competition on Twitter, mentioning @macappstorm and the number of gigabytes of storage your photo collection consumes!
2. Leave a comment below with your username.

Best of luck, and I’ll be picking the winners in just over a week.

There are a huge number of ways to learn languages out there, from $500 software to classes to free translators. You can find software for any language you want, from Spanish to Urdu. It’s really a matter of personal preference how you choose to learn, but chances are that no matter what your learning style is, there’s something out there for you.

Today we’ve got a roundup of a variety of apps (from $5 – $500) as well as some utilities and little tips and tricks. I’ve tried to include software that is available in a variety of languages, so be sure to investigate further if a particular app seems like a good fit.

Rosetta Stone

Rosetta Stone

We’ll start right off with a heavy hitter. Rosetta Stone is one of the best known apps in the language learning business. It’s also one of the most expensive. They offer a huge number of languages, although not complete software for all languages. Rosetta Stone warrants a huge range of reviews. The software teaches you vocabulary in a way that is very similar to the way that a child learns a language. You are presented with images, and learn to associate the vocabulary word with the appropriate picture.

Some folks swear by Rosetta Stone, but I am not a huge fan of it, personally. I think it’s a lovely way to learn some vocabulary, but it’s not great for much else. You dedicate all of the time spent with the app to learning vocabulary. You learn complete sentences, but rather than understanding grammatically how the sentence works, you only learn the exact translation. For example, you might learn to say “The boy is on the airplane.” Rather than explaining the grammar behind the sentence, the app focuses only on the vocab. I personally prefer software with more of a focus on how a conversation works.

Price: Varies – $499 for all 5 levels, $179 per individual level purchased
Requires: Mac OS X 10.4.11 or higher
Developer: Rosetta Stone, Ltd.

Fluenz

Fluenz

Fluenz is another heavy-hitter, although much newer to the world of language learning than Rosetta Stone is. They offer several different major languages, although not nearly as many as Rosetta Stone. This software teaches in a much different way than Rosetta Stone. They offer a polished interface complete with video tutors and teachers. Rather than focusing solely on vocabulary, the app explains why things work the way they do. They incorporate cultural and grammatical lessons into the vocabulary. The software focuses on the ability to build your own sentences and conversations, rather than routine memorization of the presented words/sentences.

The software is just about as pricey as Rosetta Stone, but the biggest complaints for this software are just that it doesn’t have the greatest voice recognition software. In the grand scheme of things, this software is extremely popular and well-liked. If you have the money, I’d recommend this software.

Price: $498 for 5 levels, $187 per individual level
Requires: Mac OS X 10.4 or higher
Developer: Fluenz

Rocket Languages

Rocket Language

If you’re a fan of audio or story based language learning, Rocket Language is for you! If you’re not into listening, just move on. However, this audio based software is much more affordable and if it’s your style it has a pretty good success rate. You can order the CD-Roms directly from the website in order to have off-line access to the audio/transcripts/exercises. Unfortunately, all interactive content is solely online so if that’s what you’re looking for you won’t get an offline experience.

The software can be very engaging. They do a better job than most of sprinkling in cultural know-how from the very beginning. Beware, however, the website where you can purchase access to the software. Unfortunately, while their software is well-designed and extremely usable, the website is heinous. It’s nearly impossible to check-out, but if you persevere you can try a free 6-day trial and then purchase the software from there.

Price: $99.95 for online access, $299 for cd-roms
Requires: Mac OS X 10.4 or later
Developer: Libros Media Ltd

Jetset Spanish

Jetset Spanish

Jetset Spanish is software that’s created by the same company that brought us Rocket Languages. The difference, however, is that Jetset Spanish is primarily video based. The software includes 14 units that take you into different situations – e.g. “Getting into Town” or “Meeting the Family.” The software promises to be engaging and interactive, and it does seem to be.

One of the really nice parts of the software is that you are introduced to a few consistent “characters” during the lessons. You get to interact with the characters through video, quizzes and even mock conversations. While it’s not as great as having a real life conversation, it’s a step in the right direction. The software is a bit pricey considering the contents, in my opinion.

There are free/very cheap web based programs available (such as the BBC language programs). However, if you’re looking for something a bit more immersive or completely online the software does a great job of interactive, video-based learning.

Price: $147
Requires: Mac OS X 10.3 or later
Developer: Libros Media Ltd.

Mango Passport

Mango Passport

If you’re travelling to another country soon and want to be able to get around, Mango Passport has some modestly priced software with a modest amount of features. Rather than being full immersion and aiming to provide a base to eventually become fluent in the language, Mango Passport caters to those who want to get around a country without constantly holding a phrase book.

The software offers a simple interactive course along with supplemental vocab, phrase books and a few other features. It does what it aims to do quite well. It’s got a great interface and is fairly engaging. It’s lacking in games, most interactive content and voice recognition, however that’s not necessary for this app and what it does. If you’re a traveller, check it out but don’t expect all the content of other big name software!

Price: $79
Requires: Mac OS X 10.4.11 or higher
Developer: Mango Languages

Instant Immersion

Instant Immersion Software

If you’re looking for Rosetta Stone style learning but for a much cheaper price, this software just might be for you. It’s another piece of software that focuses on learning vocabulary without truly understanding why the language works the way it does.

The software is a bundled package that provides many different types of vocabulary learning, from image association to games. It has the potential to be an outstanding vocabulary supplement to a conversational/grammar based software. I particularly enjoy the games, as learning vocabulary can get quite dull very quickly.

Price: $49.95 for complete set
Requires: Mac OS X 10.4.11 or later
Developer: Topics Entertainment

Linguata

Linguata

Linguata is a software that focuses a good amount of time on vocabulary and phrases, but also dedicates some time to grammar, word order and sentence structure. You can test yourself on and practice comprehension, reading, writing, word and sentence order. The tests and games are simple, varied and effective with each designed to test one or more aspects of language learning. The software is quite fairly priced, fairly well designed and generally quite useful. As with most of these apps, it won’t provide a complete language learning system, but it will get you started and act as a good supplement.

Price: $29.99
Requires: Mac OS X 10.3 or later
Developer: Veneficium Ltd

Ciao Italian

Ciao Italian

This software offers some interactivity to learn vocabulary, basic pronunciation and some grammar. It is also available in Spanish, with very similar characteristics. The app offers 5 basic lessons, with a fun animated character. You pick up vocabulary that’s useful for travelling and getting around, with lessons like “At the Cafe” and “Checking into a Hotel.”

The software is fun and easy to use, with a good variety of lesson types. The big downfall is that it’s generally not worth the cost. The developer is adding 5 additional lessons at some point in the future, but at this point you’re able to move through the lessons much too quickly to warrant a $10 price tag.

Price: $9.99
Requires: Mac OS X 10.6 or later
Developer: Avataris Media

Noun Star

NounStar

This software is essentially a smaller, less featured version of Rosetta Stone. You are learning primarily through image association, rather than learning grammar and why the language works. Again, this is a potentially good app to use at the same time as something that teaches grammar. It is a nicely designed app and quite simple to use. It tracks your progress, which is a nice feature that not all programs offer.

Price: Varies – $2.99 – $4.99 depending on language
Requires: Mac OS X 10.6 or later
Developer: James Goruk

It helps to change the languages on everything you use daily to whatever your target language is. This includes your computer, mobile device and internet browser. It’s not a huge change, but it definitely helps make a difference!

Language Tutor

Language Tutor

More Vocabulary offers a way to learn approximately 10,000 words in a dual-language database system. You can learn English, Spanish or French with their system. They offer lesson based categorical learning, as well as a repetition based system to truly master that rote vocabulary. It’s another app that does vocabulary well and can be a great supplement to other apps out there. The interface is simple and efficient, offering 2 levels of learning and the option to track the progress of up to 3 different users. It’s simple, but more than sufficient.

Price: $9.99
Requires: Mac OS X 10.4
Developer: More Vocabulary

Innovative Language Learning – Basic

Innovative Language Learning – Basic Software

Innovative Language Learning specializes in Mac apps at a variety of levels and with many different learning styles. They offer several beginner/absolute beginner programs for many different languages. These $10 apps offer 25 lessons with 2 teachers, 25 interactive story-based lessons and vocab/sentence lists with translation.

If you’re looking for a good base in a language to be able to get around in another country, this app does a pretty good job. The user interface is simple and nice to look at and use. It’s not the most interactive software out there, based more upon reading/listening than interacting. However, it offers a culture section for every single lesson which is great for those using this software, since chances are good you’ll be in that country soon actually using the language.

Price: $9.99 for basic/beginner programs
Requires: Mac OS X 10.6 or later
Developer: Innovative Language Learning

Interactive Language Learning – Complete

Interactive Language Learning – Complete Set

Innovative Language Learning also has a “complete” set available for purchase. This app offers 198 lessons for the languages available, of which there are several. It functions in the same way as the basic software, with primarily the same features and learning styles present. One addition is a reference section which is great for grammar brush-ups and such. If you’re looking for a cheaper software that teaches both vocabulary and grammar in one, this software does just that.

Price: $49.99
Requires: Mac OS X 10.6 or later
Developer: Innovative Language Learning

Quickstart ASL

Quickstart ASL

Quickstart American Sign Language offers an app to learn a language we often forget about in our pursuit of foreign languages. ASL apps are far fewer than traditional “language learning apps” but there are definitely some out there. Quickstart ASL has 9 languages covering a variety of categories.

In each lesson you watch a video that teaches the signs while reading along with the given text. At the end of each lesson you can practice your new vocabulary and then take a quiz. It’s not the most in-depth app out there, but in a world with very few ASL apps, this one is worth checking out.

Price: $6.99
Requires: Mac OS X 10.4 or later
Developer: MPS Multimedia, Inc.

BSL Step 1

BSL Step 1

If you’d rather learn British Sign Language than American Sign Language, this app is offered as step 1 in a series of 3 apps designed to teach you BSL. The app offers video to learn the vocabulary. Once the vocabulary has been mastered, you are able to take a quiz in order to check what you learned that lesson. They offer a good amount of vocabulary in different categories for each app.

Steps 1, 2 and 3 do have to be purchased individually, but that can actually be quite nice in case you decide you don’t like it after the first app is through. I wish they offered a full set, just to have all of the lessons in one place, but it’s not a big deal. It’s easy to use software that allows you to learn a new language that doesn’t have many apps out there.

Price: $2.99 per step
Requires: Mac OS X 10.6 or later
Developer: Mandy Brennan

ASL Alphabet Game

ASL Alphabet Game

This app does one thing well, and that is to help you to master finger spelling in ASL as quickly as possible. If you’ve ever tried to follow the finger-spelling of a native or experienced signer, you know exactly how quickly they can finger spell. It can be hard to even try to follow at all. This app is a game to help you master finger-spelling so that you can do it yourself and hope to have a chance at interpreting what someone else is finger spelling. This game is a matching game with 10 levels that work to get you faster and more knowledgable about finger spelling as you progress. That’s all the app does, but it’s a handy little tool to have.

Price: $1.99
Requires: Mac OS X 10.6.6 or later
Developer: Fundi 3D

Jumpstart

Jumpstart

Kids should learn languages too, so I’m including a few language learning apps for the younger folks (elementary school ages). Jumpstart Language software offers fun ways for young kids to learn languages. The software is picture based, so reading isn’t necessary. It includes lots of fun games, puppet shows, videos and more.

If you want your child to learn some vocab in French, English, Spanish or Japanese, this software is worth investigating further. It has fairly mixed reviews, some kids love it, some adults think it’s much too hard to use/understand. I think it’s easy enough to understand, but it might be worth looking for a free demo before buying to make sure it’s right for you and your child.

Price: $12.99
Requires: Mac OS X 10.4 or later
Developer: Knowledge Adventures, Inc.

World Speak

World Speak

This is another language app that is made for children. This app is designed specifically for those aged 1-5. The app teaches vocabulary through interacting with pictures in a cute and fun application. It doesn’t offer the games and videos that Jump Start does, but there are more languages offered with the ability to master just as much vocabulary. The price is also significantly lower, at $2 per app rather than $13 for the software. If you would like to try something out, just to see if your child is into the idea of learning new languages, this app is reasonably priced and easy to use.

Price: $1.99
Requires: Mac OS X 10.6.6 or later
Developer: World Speak

No matter what you do, don’t forget to just have a conversation in your target language! Speaking conversationally is the best way to really pick up a language.

BYKI Software

BYKI Software

BYKI, or “Before You Know It” software offers many different languages to learn. 74, as a matter of fact! You can start out with BYKI “express” which is a limited use software that offers about 10 different vocabulary lists. This software is flashcard based and offers a great way to supplement another language software with additional vocabulary.

If you find that this software works for you, then upgrade to the deluxe version. With deluxe you can create/modify lists, choose from 100′s more lists or interact with the online community to chat and obtain user created lists. You’re certainly not going to completely master a language from this software (it’s only vocabulary) but it’s easy to use, and works really well for picking up additional words.

Price: Free express version, $69.95 for deluxe
Requires:
Developer: Transparent Language

Innovative Language Learning – Vocab

Innovative Language Learning Vocab

Innovative Language Learning offers a number of apps dedicated specifically to learning vocabulary. I think the fact that they set out to create an app just for learning vocabulary really allowed them to put together a solid app with a great feature set. You start in the app by listening to and pronouncing the word over and over. Words are chose from different category lists, so you can learn about whatever area you’re in the mood for or need to learn.

Once you’ve mastered the word, it goes onto the learned list. Once you’ve learned several words you are able to go in and use flash cards to make sure that you’ve mastered the vocabulary. You can also record your voice to match it to the voice speaking the word you’re learning to check on your pronunciation, and you can create custom word banks to study. All in all, it’s a well-designed feature heavy vocab app that I would choose above most other vocabulary apps.

Price: $9.99
Requires: Mac OS X 10.6 or later
Developer: Innovative Language Learning

Flashcards

Flashcards

Declan Software offers a large variety of languages that you can learn using their flashcard apps. The way the app works is that there are around 2,400 words/phrases to be learned. The words are divided up categorically into word bases. You select a word base to study, and go through completing spelling, listening, meaning and word exercises for all of the words.

You learn in sets of 10, allowing you to master words in small amounts, building up to a bigger set of words. Once you’ve completed the exercises, you go on to the flashcard section where their “smart-learning” software replaces words as you master them, allowing you to slowly but steadily tackle the entire set. They offer free “basic” versions as well as full paid versions for each language. It’s a fantastic flashcard based vocab app with a great learning system in place.

Price: Basic version is free, $14.99 for full app
Requires: 10.6.6
Developer: Declan Software

ProVoc

ProVoc

ProVoc is a free vocabulary learning system. This software has the typical features – flashcards, audio incorporation, downloadable and customizable lists, etc. It also offers several different learning methods – multiple choice, variable difficulty and more. It allows you to create your own flashcards, or download one of hundreds of user submitted vocabulary lists. If you’re looking for software that comes pre-loaded with tons of vocab, this isn’t for you. However, if you’re a student in a language class or just ok with making do with the user submitted lists, this is a great freeware option.

Price: Free
Requires: Mac OS X 10.4 or later
Developer: Arizona Software

Driller Vocab

Driller Vocab

If you’re a busy person (as I’m guessing most of us are), then you might want to check out Driller Vocab. This is your typical flashcard type app, that runs on Adobe Air. However, rather than sitting and learning many words at once, this app pops up at user-determined intervals. You just take a 30 second break from whatever you’re working on the acknowledge the presented word and take the time to memorize it.

If you’ve got some extra time and are feeling so inclined, you can use the “next now” button to learn another word at that time. This app is simple and to the point. It’s great for work-a-holics, or procrastinators. You get a little bit at a time over time, so it helps tackle any feeling of being overwhelmed by vocabulary.

Price: $7.99
Requires: Mac OS X 10.4.9 or later
Developer: Driller Vocabulary

iSpeak Translator

iSpeak Translator

As you’re learning vocabulary and grammar, it’s nice to try some reading comprehension. If you come across a word you haven’t learned yet, it’s extremely helpful to have a good translator and/or dictionary around. iSpeak Translator is a great app to have around. It currently only offers support for English, French, Spanish, German and Italian, but it’s a great app nonetheless.

You simply type in the word you want to translate, (or copy/paste or drag and drop from another document) and it will translate the word/phrase/paragraph both in writing and by speaking in a wonderful and very clear voice. It’s great to not only learn the definition of a word, but to also learn exactly what the word means. It might be a bit pricey for a translator app, but unlike most translator apps that “speak” the translation, it actually sounds natural which I find to be very important.

Price: $4.99
Requires: Mac OS X 10.6.6 or later
Developer: Future Apps

iTranslate Words

iTranslate Words

iTranslate Words does exactly what the name says .. it translates words. It doesn’t do anything spectacular or flashy. You just type in a word/phrase, choose from over 50 languages and it translates it for you. It doesn’t speak or anything like that. It’s a cheap, simple translation app that doesn’t need the internet to function which can be very beneficial, especially when travelling. It’s a great deal and functions exactly like it’s meant to.

Price: $1.99
Requires: Mac OS X 10.5 or later
Developer: VML Web

Red Leaf Dictionaries

Red Leaf Dictionaries

If you want a simple dictionary that functions back and forth from your target language to English, you should check out Red Leaf Dictionaries. They only have 3 apps available at this time (Spanish, French and Korean) but what they do have is fantastic. It’s simple and cheap, has a huge collection of words and functions great as a basic digital dictionary. Often these dictionaries offer tons of features and cost a lot (we’ll take a look at a few of those next) but if all you need is a basic dictionary this company makes great ones. They don’t crash and are simple to understand, exactly what an app like this needs.

Price: $1.99
Requires: Mac OS X 10.7 or later
Developer: Hong Diep Nguyen

iDictionary

iDictionary

iDictionary is kind of like the next level up in the world of digital foreign language dictionaries. It offers the same, basic functionality as the language specific Red Leaf Dictionaries. It has simple back and forth look-up and translations with a nice and simple user interface. This app, however, offers several languages in one dictionary. This app offers English, French, German, Spanish and Russian languages. If you’re travelling around Europe, this dictionary might be a good investment, as chances are good that someone will speak at least one of these major European languages present in the app.

Price: $8.99
Requires: Mac OS X 10.6.6 or later
Developer: Microton S.R.O.

Find something you enjoy to help with learning a new language – it might be foreign language music, television or just a simple podcast. Whatever it is, use it to immerse yourself in the language!

Ultra Lingua French Dictionary

Ultra Lingua French Dictionary

Ultra Lingua produces a sort of “premium” language dictionary/translator. Rather than just offering typical word look-up, this dictionary has a multitude of other features. The major features included are a special verb section, flashcard mode and usage/examples. The verb section allows you to conjugate any verb in your target language. This is a GREAT feature to have, and something some apps are created specifically to do. You can create flashcards of any word in the dictionary in flashcard mode, and then study at different levels/speeds. Lastly, a major feature is the usage/examples that are included with many of the definitions and translated words.

This is great because you’re able to see another way to use the new word in a sentence rather than just whatever the context of the word was that prompted you to look it up. You can definitely find several different apps to duplicate the features of this app, possibly for significantly cheaper. However, for the serious language student this completely offline resource will most likely prove a very worthy investment. Note that you’ll find many different “premium” dictionaries available in the app store and elsewhere for your purchase in a number of different languages.

Price: $34.99
Requires: Mac OS X 10.7 or later
Developer: Ultra Lingua, Inc.

One World Dictionary

One World Dictionary

If you’d like to try out a “premium” dictionary but aren’t sure about making the investment, One World Dictionary offers some advanced features and is a great example of freemium software. The free download includes 100,000 words in several different languages. Full dictionaries are available to purchase in-app for $9.99 per language.

The app offers some advanced features such as verb conjugation, probably the most useful advanced dictionary feature. Lion users can download free text-to speech add-ons for French, Italian and Spanish. This is a pretty decent dictionary that definitely serves as a great way to test out the advanced features to see if you need them before making any hefty purchases.

Price: Free for basic version, $9.99 per language add-on
Requires: Mac OS X 10.7 or later
Developer: Ascendo, Inc.

German Grammar

German Grammar

Reference tools like this German Grammar app are hard to find but great to have around. Unfortunately, most of this knowledge is only online or in books, not in app form. I was able to find a very nice German Grammar app. This app provides all of the information that you would find in the back of a language textbook – noun information, conjugation, regular/irregular verbs, pronunciation guides and so on.

The app has a pretty hefty price tag for not being interactive, but again it’s more of a convenience thing. It’s great to have all of this information neatly compiled offline for you usage. If you’re a student who already has a textbook with this type of information it’s not at all worth-while, but if you’re self-teaching a language it could be a really great app to have around.

Price: $18.99
Requires: Mac OS X 10.6.6 or later
Developer: MacMedia, Inc.

Skype

Skype

We all know what Skype is, I’m guessing. I chose to include the app because I believe (and most experts agree) that the best way to learn a language is simply to speak it. You can find plenty of communities and opportunities out there that allow you to find a conversation partner. Often, you can find a native speaker of your target language who wants to learn your native language. Skype is a great way to talk and learn and immerse with a native speaker.

Price: Free
Requires: Mac OS X v10.5.8
Developer: Skype

Which App Is Your Favorite?

So there you have it, 33 apps, utilities and tips for learning a new language on a Mac. I’m curious to hear about what you think of this software, and if you have a great app to share I’d love that even more!

We all want to get the very best out of our devices! Who doesn’t love finding out a new trick or shortcut?

Over the last month every AppStorm site has published an extensive roundup of features and shortcuts aimed at helping you get the most out of your devices! Each post comprises more than 40 entries, I’m pretty confident you’ll find something you didn’t already know about…

What are you waiting for?

• Mac.AppStorm: 40+ Super Secret OS X Lion Features and Shortcuts
• Web.AppStorm: 40+ Tips to Get the Most Out of Web Apps
• iPhone.AppStorm: 40 Secret iPhone Features and Shortcuts
• iPad.AppStorm: 40+ Super Secret iPad Features and Shortcuts
• Android.AppStorm: 40+ Tips and Tricks to Get the Most Out of Android
• Windows.AppStorm: 40+ Tips and Tricks to Get the Most Out of Windows

In the past two years, we’ve seen a lot of specialized photo manipulation apps enter the scene. Apps like Analog, Flare, and Instagram allow people to apply filters that recolor or add texture to photos. Focus is a photo manipulation app as well, but its specialty lies in creating unique blur effects in photos.

Cameras that have an adjustable lens allow you to change the focus of a photo, blurring objects at different distances. However, if your digital camera doesn’t have the ability to change the lens focus, or if you just took a photo without focusing it well, you might feel the need to give photos that effect manually. Read on to see what Focus has to offer.

How Camera Focusing Works

When you are taking a photograph, light from objects at different distances will hit your camera’s lens at different angles. A camera lens can only align perfectly to one of these light angles at a time, which means that only one distance can be in focus at a time. Whatever distance the lens is focusing on will appear crisp and clear, while the further you move from this focused area, the blurrier the photo gets.

Objects at the distance that the camera lens is focused on look very sharp, while objects at other distances appear blurred.

With a nice camera, when you turn the lens by hand to change the focus, you can see some objects at one distance become clear, while objects at other distances begin to blur. Focus can’t perfectly replicate the kind of focus you would get from a camera, but it can do a pretty convincing job of adding this effect to photos.

Getting Started

The design of Focus immediately makes a great impression. Its interface is simple and dark, with clear directions, a textured background, and well-crafted icons. Just drop a photo in to get started.

The start screen of Focus.

For my first test photo, I found a nice one of Carl Sagan in the lab. Once you’ve dragged in your image, simply select what type of blur you would like to use from the bottom toolbar.

Carl Sagan awaiting the blurring process.

From there, Focus will let you adjust the angle, size, and intensity of your effects via the right sidebar.

Blurring Tools

There are five blurring options available in Focus, each one suited for different types of photos.

The blurring options.

Portrait

The Portrait tool has a radial (circular) blur, and is optimal to use on a person. To adjust the size of the radial blur, click and resize the guidelines that show up when you hover over the photo, or use the two-finger pinch/expand gesture. The guidelines will automatically focus on a face using facial recognition, but you can drag them around easily if you want to manually set the focal point.

One nice thing about Focus is that the blur effects update live as you move them around or adjust them, making it easy to find the perfect blur settings.

Portrait blur makes our favorite astronomer really stand out.

If you want to adjust the spacing between the guidelines—in order to make the blur fade out more or less gradually—hold the option key while resizing them.

Nature

The Nature tool uses a straight, or linear, method of blurring. Its alignment is horizontal by default, but you can rotate it by grabbing the handles that appear on hover, or using the rotate gesture on your trackpad.

Nature blur lets you focus on a linear section of your photo.

Architecture

The Architecture tool provides a linear blur just like the Nature tool, except it starts off in the vertical orientation rather than horizontal. You could basically create the same effect with Nature by rotating it 90 degrees.

A towering Tokyo building works nicely with the Architecture tool.

Macro

“Macro” refers to macrophotography—close-up photos of very small subjects. The Macro tool in Focus gives you a radial blur similar to the Portrait tool, but it transitions to the blur much more abruptly. This tool is great for enhancing macro photos.

The Macro tool is perfect for small subjects like this fly.

Tilt & Shift

In photography, tilt-shift is a cool effect that makes a real life scene look miniature. It works by creating a drastic blur in the foreground and background of an image, essentially fooling your brain into thinking that the object in focus is actually quite small and close to you. The Tilt & Shift tool is an easy way to recreate this effect in your regular photos.

That's a real boat in Venice, but Tilt & Shift makes it look like it could fit in your bathtub.

Additional Features

Cropping and Straightening

Focus conveniently offers some general photo editing features common to apps like iPhoto and Picasa. If you click the Place button in the toolbar, you will be able to crop or adjust the ratio of your image. You can also adjust the horizon of your image, which is great if the camera was not level when the picture was taken.

The Leaning Tower, straightened out by adjusting the horizon.

Vividness

Focus’s vividness adjustment is another basic feature that you can find in Picasa and iPhoto, but it is nice to make all of these enhancements in one app. Turning up the vividness adds a little extra color and brightness to your photos. You can alternatively press the Enhance checkbox and Focus will try to automatically correct these qualities.

On the left is the original image. On the right is the image with the vividness turned up.

Cons

The main downside of Focus is that it cannot genuinely recreate the focus effect that adjusting a camera lens would. The reason for this is a technological limitation; digital photos do not currently store the information of the entire light field coming at the camera lens in different directions, which would be necessary to refocus objects at different distances. This means that you might have trouble giving certain photos an authentic blur look.

Take as an example the following image. Neil deGrasse Tyson and Pluto are at roughly the same distance from the lens, and should therefore both be in focus. However, The Portrait tool really only lets you focus on one person at a time, so most of Pluto is unfortunately getting blurred.

This image demonstrates how Focus cannot replicate a genuine blur on certain photos.

Another issue I experienced with Focus was occasional sluggishness. Sometimes the app would freeze up, especially when I had multiple photos open at once. I eventually brought the app to its knees when I tried to open a 4 megabyte photo.

Focus also lacks bulk support. There is currently no way to store and cycle through a folder of photos to liven them up. This single-photo approach is the trend among smaller photo editing apps, and suggests that Focus is really intended to be used on the occasional photo, not an entire album.

Alternatives

While writing this review, I discovered an app that similarly allows you to add blur effects to photos, called Big Aperture. The app is usually $10 (it appears to be on sale at the time of this article for $0.99).

After a quick test of the trial version of Big Aperture, I noticed that the app feels a lot less native and refined than Focus. However, the app does tout one impressive feature: it lets you select specific objects in a photo to apply the focus effect to. With Big Aperture, you can use a brush tool to manually pick out all of the items in a photo that you want to bring into focus. This functionality could solve the problem I experienced with photos containing multiple objects that should be brought into focus. It would be great if Focus added this kind of functionality in the future.

In Big Aperture you can select objects that you want to bring into focus.

On a related note, a company called Lytro has been in the news lately for creating digital camera technology that can save the entire light field to photos that you take, allowing you to accurately change the focus of the image after it has been taken. It is pretty amazing to witness. You can test it out by clicking on different objects in the images here.

There have been rumors that Steve Jobs was in contact with the Lytro founder before his death, possibly to get the technology integrated with devices such as the iPhone. So maybe one day, we will be able to perfectly alter the focus on a photo after it’s been snapped.

Conclusion

Focus does what it sets out to do well. The sleek interface and (mostly) smooth user experience make this app enjoyable to use. Personally, I don’t know if I would use it often enough to justify the $15 price tag. It was originally released at $5, then went up to $10, and is now at $15.

I think Focus fits better in the $5-10 price range like Analog and Flare, apps that all let you add simple effects to photos. You can look into Big Aperture as well if you are interested in a cheaper offering. Still, if you want a good blurring or tilt shift effect on your photos, Focus is a great app for the job.

If your job requires you to take a lot of screenshots or screencasts of what you’re working on (for example, if you write for Mac.Appstorm), you might soon find that the built-in apps that your computer came with to do the task, are sometimes not powerful enough.

Today we’re here to present you the most relevant and current apps for any task that might involve taking pictures or video of your screen. We’ve got everything from built-in apps, to the most expensive and complex screencasting apps, and everything in between. Come take a look!

Screenshot Apps:

Screencast Apps:

A little bit of both:

Conclusion

As you might have noticed, the price range of these type of apps is all over the place. That’s because there really is something for everyone, and that’s what we’ve tried to showed you in this roundup. If you don’t take many screenshots or screencasts, then the functionality of the built-in Quicktime and Grab apps might do fine for you. But if you find yourself in need of something more, then it won’t really hurt to spend the cash for a paid alternative, or even trying out one of the free ones.

What do you think? Which one of these apps do you use or have used? Which one is your favorite? Did we miss any? Share your thoughts in the comments!

Forged in the wake of Mozilla’s decision to drop support for the entire Mac PowerPC platform, TenFourFox is a web browser which brings the Firefox experience to PowerPC Mac users, whether one is running a G3, G4 or G5 PPC. While there have been several attempts at furnishing PowerPC users with a compelling web browser, TenFourFox is perhaps the first to provide a Firefox build which is tuned so well to cater to the PPC platform, that it can offer remarkable JavaScript performance, offering a reported twofold benefit over Firefox 3.6 and surpassing even Safari 5 (which is only available for Leopard users) in some respects.

Clearly, the TenFourFox team are to be lauded for their efforts, but can they really deliver a modern, stable and secure browser to the aging PowerPC? Let’s take a look.

The Backstory

Before Apple made the radical decision to transition their entire computer line to Intel CPUs, PowerPC (or PPC) was the engine that drove the Mac computing experience. Never shy to move forward in technology, Apple discontinued the PPC Mac in 2006 and so, while still perfectly capable machines, non-Intel Macs are now considered obsolete by Infinite Loop and all but ignored.

Unfortunately, but perhaps inevitably given Apple’s own stance, PPC Mac owners have been left in the cold by many software development companies and as a result miss out on a lot of the latest applications. Indeed, probably the other best web browsing option for newer and more powerful PPC Mac users is Safari 5.1 but there are rumours that Apple will not be further updating the browser and only Leopard users can run Safari 5.1 anyway – those running OS X Tiger are confined to Safari 4. TenFourFox brings users running OS X Tiger or Leopard a fork of Firefox which is optimized for PPC and offers massively increased performance as a result.

TenFourFox is made by the same team that’s behind the excellent OS 9 browser Classilla

Getting Started

Just enter "machine" into Terminal to work out which TenFourFox is right for you

Heading over to the TenFourFox website, one cannot help but feel impressed by the clear and concise manner in which the Floodgap team explain the need for TenFourFox and the strides which they have made thus far (as well as poking some good natured geeky fun at Intel-Mac users).

As is explained more fully on the website, since TenFourFox is so highly optimized for each operating system and processor type, there are three separate versions of TenFourFox and in order to begin using the software, one must first ascertain which such version one needs for their Mac. This is established by firing up Terminal and entering:

machine

The data that Terminal spits back out will point toward the version of TenFourFox needed, as shown in the screenshot above. Though this method feels slightly hacky and perhaps even intimidating for some users who are wary of anything command-line based, in practice its very simple indeed.

Using TenFourFox

Websites load quickly and correctly with TenFourFox

When putting TenFourFox to the test as my main web-browser, I mostly used a late-model 15″ PowerBook which has been upgraded and maxed out with RAM but in order to give a more rounded impression, I did also try the browser on a bog-standard white USB iBook and I found that the TenFourFox experience was largely comparable on each machine. While the best browsing speeds were naturally found on my more beefy PowerBook, the iBook was certainly no hardship to use either.

In real world use the browser felt far more snappy than Safari or the other browsers which PowerPC users often turn to, such as Opera, Camino, Firefox 3.6 and even the dreaded Internet Explorer – though I should note I haven’t yet tried the also very highly regarded iCab for comparison.

Visually, TenFourFox seemed identical to its more mainstream Intel-Mac Firefox counterpart and I was pleased to note that the few add-ons I use (including the ubiquitous Adblock Plus) worked correctly, as is apparently the case with the majority of add-ons. The browser handled multiple tabs with ease and there were no crashes nor beach-balling on my faster PPC Macs.

The Catch

While Plugins are disabled on TenFourFox, Add-ons are on hand to take up the slack somewhat

As previously mentioned, the TenFourFox team recently dropped support for Flash and other plugins such as Quicktime and PDF in favour of offering a more stable and secure browser (the full reasoning for this decision is offered here) and instead supporting add-ons, which are far easier to maintain. For some this may be a deal-breaker, but with much of the web now transitioning to tablet-friendly alternatives like HTML5, one can usually find a workaround for mainstream websites such as YouTube or Soundcloud with a poke around the website’s settings. With HTML5 browsing support enabled, YouTube videos reasonably well on my PowerBook but the older PPC Macs struggled somewhat.

TenFourFox’s developers point toward the free application MacTubes to browse YouTube videos and in brief testing I found it to work very well, proving a definite alternative to Flash or HTML5.

If you really want to, Flash can be added via these instructions written by Simon Royal for LowEndMac, but doing so is not recommended by the TenFourFox team.

Conclusion

On testing TenFourFox, I’ve come to really appreciate the hard work put into such a project and I can’t praise the developers enough for their efforts. TenFourFox definitely does give users a compelling reason to keep hold of that PPC Mac for the meantime and if the technology industry at large continues to head toward lower-power devices and lightweight Flash alternatives, one can imagine the venerable PPC Mac continuing to be of use for some time yet.

About the only negative point one could reasonably throw at TenFourFox is its lack of Flash support, but this is more due to the decision of Adobe to stop supporting the PPC platform rather than any fault of the developers themselves and for this reason I feel that it cannot really be taken into account as a criticism against the application.

As you’ve no doubt heard by now, the wizards at Infinite Loop are pushing out a major OS X update later this year: Mountain Lion.

If you’re like me, you’re nerdy enough that you simply can’t wait to get your hands any new version of OS X. Apple has such a tight hold on me that I have to keep up to date with every little software update they push out.

Unfortunately, since hardware tends to be a great deal more expensive than software, many of us quickly fall behind in this category. Consequently, I was dismayed to read TUAW’s recent article outlining the minimum hardware requirements, which revealed that my beloved 2007 MacBook would no longer be supported.

Here’s the list of all the supported hardware that we’re currently aware of, meaning if your Mac is older than the models listed below, you’re out of luck.

• iMac (mid 2007 or later)
• MacBook (13-inch Aluminum, 2008), (13-inch, Early 2009 or later)
• MacBook Pro (13-inch, Mid-2009 or later), (15-inch, 2.4/2.2 GHz), (17-inch, Late 2007 or later)
• MacBook Air (Late 2008 or later)
• Mac Mini (Early 2009 or later)
• Mac Pro (Early 2008 or later)
• Xserve (Early 2009)

With this list in mind, we’re wondering how many of our readers won’t make the cutoff. Do you use an older Mac? If so, will you be able to run Mountain Lion? After you vote in the poll, leave a comment below and let us know what you think about this. Are you bummed that your Mac won’t take the update or are you apathetic?

For many of us, our computer’s hard drive has become a vast repository of digital images. Everyday, we snap photos with our smartphones and digital cameras which are then deposited into countless folders. But let’s face it, when our hard drives start to get full, who enjoys the tedious process of navigating these folders searching for duplicates files and miscued shots? How often do we pause and ask ourselves, “Do I really need all 12 shots of that coffee table?”

Organizing and tidying up our photo libraries can be a time consuming project, one that some of us may never embark upon. Fortunately, getting a handle on this task has been made significantly easier. Enter Photosweeper, a robust photo organizing application that will assist in cleaning up and putting in order any photo collection. Whether it’s a hundred megabytes or dozens of gigabytes, Photosweeper will quickly and effectively sort images and help reduce the size of your collection, resulting in more usable disk space.

Interface

Photosweeper employs a single screen interface that is both visually appealing and extremely functional. All of the application’s tools and features can be accessed from this one place. There is no hopping back and forth between screens.

Photosweeper's Single Screen Interface

Selecting Your Photos:

After firing up Photosweeper, the first order of business is to add a photo collection in need of some housekeeping. Photos can be added in a couple of ways: clicking the “Add Photo” icon from the toolbar, or dragging and dropping photos directly from the Finder. Photosweeper also supports adding photos directly from iPhoto and Aperture, which is a huge plus for those using either of these two applications. Photos added from iPhoto and Aperture are tagged with a small green ribbon, a nice touch in helping to identify the source of these images. The developers at Overmacs state that Adobe Photoshop Lightroom support will be included in a future update.

Import photos from the Finder, iPhoto or Aperture

Setting the Filters:

So you’ve added some images to Photosweeper, now what? It’s time to define and fine-tune some of Photosweeper’s initial settings used in the filtering and sorting process. The next step here is to set the parameters for the file format and image size to be included in the comparison process. This is accomplished in the “File Settings” area of the application. By default, Photosweeper will include all supported file formats of any size when filtering images. Of course, these settings can be redefined to suit one’s needs. By the way, Photosweeper supports an impressive 42 file formats.

Configuring Photosweeper's File Settings

The Compare Settings:

Toggling over to the application’s “Compare Settings” area brings up the next group of settings to be defined in the filtering process. Photosweeper utilizes six methods for comparing photos, each method with its own set of filters. Because Photosweeper creates a bitmap of each photo during the comparison process, it’s OK to jump back and forth between comparison methods to see which method yields the best results for you. Your comparison results will not be lost.

The developers of the app suggest the “Duplicates Only” method as good starting place when cleaning up a photo collection. When this method is used, Photosweeper will compare only photos with identical content regardless of the file name or other meta data. When selecting the “Time + Bitmap” method, Photosweeper will make comparisons based on two criteria: the time interval between shots in a sequence and pixel similarities of the bitmap image.

The other comparison methods are:

• Bitmap – a direct pixel comparison between bitmaps
• Histogram – using histogram information from bitmaps
• Time Interval – comparing only time intervals between shots, regardless of other data
• Time + Histogram – combines both methods, Time Interval and Histogram

With all six of Photosweeper’s comparison tools, selecting and fine-tuning the details of the filtering process is a simple and straightforward process.

Configuring Photosweeper's Compare Settings

Putting Photosweeper to Work:

As we have now defined what we want Photosweeper to look for and how we want it to make comparisons, let’s put Photosweeper to work. Clicking the “Compare” button will start the comparison process based on the selected filtering methods. Photosweeper’s code was written to take full advantage of multicore processing and the application is indeed fast.

However, keep in mind the comparison process can take several seconds to several minutes depending on the size of the photo collection and chosen comparison method. The good news is that after Photosweeper finishes the comparison process, it caches the results, which are then saved as bitmaps (as mentioned) – a handy feature should you decide to change the filtering method for another round of comparisons, or close down the application and continue working later.

Photosweeper's Fast Comparison Process

Reviewing the Results

Once Photosweeper has finished comparing images, it’s time to toggle into the Results view and get busy with cleaning. Within the Results view, images can be displayed as sequences in group view or side-by-side in pairs view. Toggling from group view to pairs allows for greater image detail to be displayed, which helps in deciding which photos are headed for Photosweeper’s “box”.

The Results

The Box:

From the comparison results, one or multiple images can be selected at a time and placed in the box, which is essentially a virtual holding pen where photos are grouped until you decide what next to do with them. Once images have landed in the box, the final step in the cleaning process is to move the photos into the trash. You may also choose to move & rename them, or copy & rename them. At any point should you change your mind, with a click of button photos can be taken out of the box.

Photosweeper provides a drag and drop method for getting images into the box as well as a toolbar button. Standard keyboard commands work for selecting multiple images. I found the drag and drop method a little clunky and would like to see a checkbox, or some type of “move to box” button on each image. However, this was only a minor inconvenience.

Photosweeper's box holds your photos until you decide what to do with them.

Another nifty feature of Photosweeper is the ability to “auto put” photos into the box with a single click. This toolbar button will allow you to define a set of rules for moving entire sequences of photos into the box, keeping just the one you want.

Photosweeper's "Auto-Put" Feature

Conclusion

Whether you’re a professional photographer, hobbyist, or just someone in need of more hard disk space, Photosweeper packs a powerful punch in de-cluttering any size collection. As an application that may see infrequent use, some might balk at the cost. But if you consider the many hours of work saved by using Photosweeper, the price becomes very affordable. Currently you can grab a copy for half-price at the Mac App Store.

Well, as you probably might have guessed, the news this week has been dominated by Apple’s surprise announcement of Mountain Lion, the next reincarnation of their OS X operating system and if you’re lucky enough to be registered as a developer with Apple, you can already try out the beta by downloading it from their website.

Mountain Lion is looking to bring more features inspired by iOS into OS X, yet still keeping them two very distinct and separate operating systems. New features include Messages, a brand new Notification Centre and full Twitter integration. Feel free to join in our “debate” on whether Apple has made the right move here in the comments section of the original post and be sure to read Joel Bankhead’s comments on it over at What’s Hot: Big Cats.

In other news this week…

Messages Beta is released to all

One of the new features of Mountain Lion that was released straight away to the public was Messages for Mac, which allows you to keep in touch with all your friends using iMessage, Apple’s own instant messaging service.

Messages Beta on OS X (image courtesy of Scott Danielson)

Messages syncs across all your enabled devices, so you can leave a conversation on your Mac and pick it up easily on your iPhone and vice-versa. It will, however, replace iChat on your MacBook (seems like Apple is finally killing it off!) however don’t fear, you can still keep all of your existing accounts if you choose to migrate.

Scott Danielson took a fantastic, in-depth look at Messages a couple of days ago so to find out more, head over to his review.

Link: Messages Beta on Apple’s website

VLC updated to version 2.0, bringing an all-new interface and more

VLC, the media player which seems to be able to play almost any file format you throw at it, quietly received a major update this week which brought along an overhauled interface (which is unique to the Mac version!), full-screen support for Lion and experimental Blu-Ray support for Mac.

The new, improved interface on VLC 2.0

Although VLC has been a long favourite with most Mac users, given its support for a wide range of video and audio files, the interface has never been orientated towards the end-user, up till now. The new version also includes several bug fixes and improvements over previous versions and offers support for a wider range of formats and faster decoding times.

Link: VLC 2.0 download (OS X 10.6 and above)

Apple giving away $10,000 iTunes Gift Card

The App Store is ever nearing that magical figure of 25 BILLION app downloads since it started and Apple are celebrating this with a $10,000 iTunes gift card for the lucky person who manages to download the 25 billionth app.

The countdown to the 25 billionth app on Apple's website

The number is simply staggering when you think it (that’s more than 3 apps downloaded on average by every person on the planet, considering a world population of 7 billion) and the counter on Apple’s website is going up by about 1,000 apps a second. You don’t have to fill out any forms to enter, just download your apps as normal from the App Store (whether for the Mac or your iOS devices) and keep your fingers crossed!

Link: iTunes – 25 Billion App Countdown