Blancer.com Tutorials and projects

Remember how useful those kitchen timers where, the ones that you had to spin around to get them counting? They could be used for a lot of things outside the kitchen, and they were very fast and easy to setup. It seems like we haven’t been able to get the same thing working for a computer app, where you can just quickly set an alarm in a few seconds without a million options or setup steps to get in the way.

Today we’re reviewing an app that wants to your go to fast timer and alarm app. It’s called ChronoSlider. Does it deliver?

The Beginning

This is probably the easiest app that you could pick up, you surely will only need to spend 3 seconds to figure it out. The first time that you run it, your whole screen will be sent to the background and a semi-transparent screen with a notable timer in the center will appear with a few instructions on the sides. The instructions will be arranged into short sentences located in specific parts of the screen (the top, bottom, center, left and right sides).

The instruction in the top will say “click in this area if you want to set an alarm for up to 120 seconds”. The other ones will be the same thing but broken into ranges of 1 hour, 12 hours, “daytime” and cancel. We’ll get to these next.

The Alarms

So let’s say you are cooking something and you need to be reminded of when to turn the heat off. You can set ChronoSlider on by using the customizable shortcut, or by going into the menu bar icon of the app and clicking on the “Add Alarm” button.

The screen that we mentioned before will come up with the instructions (the instructions will go away after a few times that you access the alarm-setting thing, though). As you hover or slide your cursor over the different sectors of the screen, the timer in the center will change. So let’s say, if you are in the “0-1 hour” sector, as you hover over the area the timer will be changing in between minutes, starting at 1 and ending at 60. It’s not the most precise way of choosing a time, but it’s fast and it saves a lot of time.

The sector of the 120 seconds range will switch between seconds; the 0-1 hour range will switch between minutes and the 12 hour range will switch between hours. The “daytime alarm” area is the most interesting one, because it lets you set an alarm for any minute within the next 24 hours. This is the one you would use if you wanted to set an alarm that wakes you up in the morning or reminds you of an appointment you have the next day. There’s also a “cancel” section in the top, in case you don’t really want to set an alarm or timer.

Messages, Chronoslings and More

After you choose the time of your alarm or timer, the timer in the center will switch to a message saying “Slide!”. If you slide, a few messages will appear, such as “Feed the cat!”, “Go get the bus”, “Play iTunes” or just a plain boring “Alarm”. These are the messages that will appear on your screen once the alarm sets off, and you can only choose one per alarm. There are some default messages that come with the app, like the ones I mentioned, but if you go into the settings you can make your own and delete the factory ones.

There are also “Chronoslings”, which are basically Applescripts that you can set to certain alarms. There are already some of them built in to some factory alarms, like “Sleep” and “Pause/Play iTunes”. You can make pretty much anything you want with these, but you need to have some knowledge as to how to use them properly (the app won’t tell you how, but this article can).

There are also some useful hidden things like the ability to play sounds, dimming the screen once you set off the app, and setting a global keyboard shortcut to set off the app. By going into the menu bar icon, you can access the settings, view your current alarms and refresh or cancel them.

The Bad

Surprisingly, there really isn’t much to complain about in this app. When I first heard about it, I thought it would be too basic and that it would sacrifice a few features in order to make the app simpler and faster, but that really isn’t the case. However, sometimes it feels like you need to work your way around (perhaps) complex AppleScripts to get at what you want it to perform, like maybe play a song from your library, but the functionality is there.

The End

We’ve had roundups of alarm apps before, and they usually break down into two categories: the ones that are meant to work on a short range of time, like something that you need to be quickly reminded of within an hour or so; and the more complete and complex ones that are meant to be used within a larger range of time and do more complex stuff like wake you up using your iTunes library or play slideshows.

I think this app does a good job at balancing both of those. It’s simple enough that you can set a new alarm in just a few seconds, but also useful enough that if you want it to perform something complicated, you can most likely do it through the AppleScripts. All the features that you could want are there, they’re just not as “out” there as they are in other apps. I think for the price, you couldn’t really get something as useful and simple as this app, especially when the competition is really overpriced. I know I’ll be using it instead of my “Minutes” widget from now on.

Remember how useful those kitchen timers where, the ones that you had to spin around to get them counting? They could be used for a lot of things outside the kitchen, and they were very fast and easy to setup. It seems like we haven’t been able to get the same thing working for a computer app, where you can just quickly set an alarm in a few seconds without a million options or setup steps to get in the way.

Today we’re reviewing an app that wants to your go to fast timer and alarm app. It’s called ChronoSlider. Does it deliver?

The Beginning

This is probably the easiest app that you could pick up, you surely will only need to spend 3 seconds to figure it out. The first time that you run it, your whole screen will be sent to the background and a semi-transparent screen with a notable timer in the center will appear with a few instructions on the sides. The instructions will be arranged into short sentences located in specific parts of the screen (the top, bottom, center, left and right sides).

The instruction in the top will say “click in this area if you want to set an alarm for up to 120 seconds”. The other ones will be the same thing but broken into ranges of 1 hour, 12 hours, “daytime” and cancel. We’ll get to these next.

The Alarms

So let’s say you are cooking something and you need to be reminded of when to turn the heat off. You can set ChronoSlider on by using the customizable shortcut, or by going into the menu bar icon of the app and clicking on the “Add Alarm” button.

The screen that we mentioned before will come up with the instructions (the instructions will go away after a few times that you access the alarm-setting thing, though). As you hover or slide your cursor over the different sectors of the screen, the timer in the center will change. So let’s say, if you are in the “0-1 hour” sector, as you hover over the area the timer will be changing in between minutes, starting at 1 and ending at 60. It’s not the most precise way of choosing a time, but it’s fast and it saves a lot of time.

The sector of the 120 seconds range will switch between seconds; the 0-1 hour range will switch between minutes and the 12 hour range will switch between hours. The “daytime alarm” area is the most interesting one, because it lets you set an alarm for any minute within the next 24 hours. This is the one you would use if you wanted to set an alarm that wakes you up in the morning or reminds you of an appointment you have the next day. There’s also a “cancel” section in the top, in case you don’t really want to set an alarm or timer.

Messages, Chronoslings and More

After you choose the time of your alarm or timer, the timer in the center will switch to a message saying “Slide!”. If you slide, a few messages will appear, such as “Feed the cat!”, “Go get the bus”, “Play iTunes” or just a plain boring “Alarm”. These are the messages that will appear on your screen once the alarm sets off, and you can only choose one per alarm. There are some default messages that come with the app, like the ones I mentioned, but if you go into the settings you can make your own and delete the factory ones.

There are also “Chronoslings”, which are basically Applescripts that you can set to certain alarms. There are already some of them built in to some factory alarms, like “Sleep” and “Pause/Play iTunes”. You can make pretty much anything you want with these, but you need to have some knowledge as to how to use them properly (the app won’t tell you how, but this article can).

There are also some useful hidden things like the ability to play sounds, dimming the screen once you set off the app, and setting a global keyboard shortcut to set off the app. By going into the menu bar icon, you can access the settings, view your current alarms and refresh or cancel them.

The Bad

Surprisingly, there really isn’t much to complain about in this app. When I first heard about it, I thought it would be too basic and that it would sacrifice a few features in order to make the app simpler and faster, but that really isn’t the case. However, sometimes it feels like you need to work your way around (perhaps) complex AppleScripts to get at what you want it to perform, like maybe play a song from your library, but the functionality is there.

The End

We’ve had roundups of alarm apps before, and they usually break down into two categories: the ones that are meant to work on a short range of time, like something that you need to be quickly reminded of within an hour or so; and the more complete and complex ones that are meant to be used within a larger range of time and do more complex stuff like wake you up using your iTunes library or play slideshows.

I think this app does a good job at balancing both of those. It’s simple enough that you can set a new alarm in just a few seconds, but also useful enough that if you want it to perform something complicated, you can most likely do it through the AppleScripts. All the features that you could want are there, they’re just not as “out” there as they are in other apps. I think for the price, you couldn’t really get something as useful and simple as this app, especially when the competition is really overpriced. I know I’ll be using it instead of my “Minutes” widget from now on.

Remember how useful those kitchen timers where, the ones that you had to spin around to get them counting? They could be used for a lot of things outside the kitchen, and they were very fast and easy to setup. It seems like we haven’t been able to get the same thing working for a computer app, where you can just quickly set an alarm in a few seconds without a million options or setup steps to get in the way.

Today we’re reviewing an app that wants to your go to fast timer and alarm app. It’s called ChronoSlider. Does it deliver?

The Beginning

This is probably the easiest app that you could pick up, you surely will only need to spend 3 seconds to figure it out. The first time that you run it, your whole screen will be sent to the background and a semi-transparent screen with a notable timer in the center will appear with a few instructions on the sides. The instructions will be arranged into short sentences located in specific parts of the screen (the top, bottom, center, left and right sides).

The instruction in the top will say “click in this area if you want to set an alarm for up to 120 seconds”. The other ones will be the same thing but broken into ranges of 1 hour, 12 hours, “daytime” and cancel. We’ll get to these next.

The Alarms

So let’s say you are cooking something and you need to be reminded of when to turn the heat off. You can set ChronoSlider on by using the customizable shortcut, or by going into the menu bar icon of the app and clicking on the “Add Alarm” button.

The screen that we mentioned before will come up with the instructions (the instructions will go away after a few times that you access the alarm-setting thing, though). As you hover or slide your cursor over the different sectors of the screen, the timer in the center will change. So let’s say, if you are in the “0-1 hour” sector, as you hover over the area the timer will be changing in between minutes, starting at 1 and ending at 60. It’s not the most precise way of choosing a time, but it’s fast and it saves a lot of time.

The sector of the 120 seconds range will switch between seconds; the 0-1 hour range will switch between minutes and the 12 hour range will switch between hours. The “daytime alarm” area is the most interesting one, because it lets you set an alarm for any minute within the next 24 hours. This is the one you would use if you wanted to set an alarm that wakes you up in the morning or reminds you of an appointment you have the next day. There’s also a “cancel” section in the top, in case you don’t really want to set an alarm or timer.

Messages, Chronoslings and More

After you choose the time of your alarm or timer, the timer in the center will switch to a message saying “Slide!”. If you slide, a few messages will appear, such as “Feed the cat!”, “Go get the bus”, “Play iTunes” or just a plain boring “Alarm”. These are the messages that will appear on your screen once the alarm sets off, and you can only choose one per alarm. There are some default messages that come with the app, like the ones I mentioned, but if you go into the settings you can make your own and delete the factory ones.

There are also “Chronoslings”, which are basically Applescripts that you can set to certain alarms. There are already some of them built in to some factory alarms, like “Sleep” and “Pause/Play iTunes”. You can make pretty much anything you want with these, but you need to have some knowledge as to how to use them properly (the app won’t tell you how, but this article can).

There are also some useful hidden things like the ability to play sounds, dimming the screen once you set off the app, and setting a global keyboard shortcut to set off the app. By going into the menu bar icon, you can access the settings, view your current alarms and refresh or cancel them.

The Bad

Surprisingly, there really isn’t much to complain about in this app. When I first heard about it, I thought it would be too basic and that it would sacrifice a few features in order to make the app simpler and faster, but that really isn’t the case. However, sometimes it feels like you need to work your way around (perhaps) complex AppleScripts to get at what you want it to perform, like maybe play a song from your library, but the functionality is there.

The End

We’ve had roundups of alarm apps before, and they usually break down into two categories: the ones that are meant to work on a short range of time, like something that you need to be quickly reminded of within an hour or so; and the more complete and complex ones that are meant to be used within a larger range of time and do more complex stuff like wake you up using your iTunes library or play slideshows.

I think this app does a good job at balancing both of those. It’s simple enough that you can set a new alarm in just a few seconds, but also useful enough that if you want it to perform something complicated, you can most likely do it through the AppleScripts. All the features that you could want are there, they’re just not as “out” there as they are in other apps. I think for the price, you couldn’t really get something as useful and simple as this app, especially when the competition is really overpriced. I know I’ll be using it instead of my “Minutes” widget from now on.

It’s hard to believe that we’re coming up on a year since the Mac App Store was first announced. It seems like only yesterday we were itching to get our hands on a marketplace full of great utilities, games and other goodies all custom tailored to the Mac platform.

While categories like Games took off dramatically right from the start, the offerings for designers and developers got off to a much slower start and are just now starting to really take off. Below is a collection of over thirty useful Mac App Store apps for designers. I’ve intentionally left out obvious favorites like Pixelmator and tried to keep the list more towards hidden gems that you may not have tried yet. Take a look!

Measuring

Sizewise

Sizewise helps you quickly test your designs on a number of resolutions. You can enter in your own size or use one of the built-in presets. Sizewise can simulate a menubar, Dock, and desktop to provide a realistic replica of what users will see.

Price: $4.99

xScope

There are lots of tools that allow you to measure things on your screen but xScope easily stands out as one of the best. The on screen rulers can measure items, grab the distance between two items, span multiple monitors and even measure rotation. It’s a little pricey but justifiably so as it provides a lot more functionality than many of its competitors.

Price: $29.99

Guideliner

In addition to measuring objects on the screen, this app allows you to drag guides out over any content similar to how you would in Photoshop. There are some nice customization features as well.

Price: $19.99

Pixelstick

Pixelstick is much cheaper than the two previous options and has a pretty unique interface that helps you quickly grab distances and angles or copy colors to your clipboard.

Price: $6.99

Art Director’s Toolkit

Art Director’s Toolkit took the idea of a standard screen ruler and expanded it with a number of other utilities such as character palettes, fractions/decimal converters, color tools, and scaling calculators. Art Director’s Toolkit has been around for a number of years and is definitely a top-notch tool for designers of all kinds.

Price: $19.99

Design

Aurora 3D Maker

If you’re not into 3D modeling, it can be difficult to successfully generate accurate three dimensional graphics. Anyone can use Aurora 3D Maker to easily create extruded text, logos and more, rotate them in 3D space and apply different colors, textures and lighting setups.

Price: $29.99

ExportTools Professional

ExportTools Professional is a super powerful exporting tool for InDesign and QuarkXPress that allows you to quickly transform multiple documents into multi-page PDFs. You can also have Exportools Professional periodically scan a watched folder where you move or copy files. Every time a scan is performed, new files will be automatically added to the queue ready for processing.

Price: $99.99

Templates for Pages

This isn’t so much an app as it is a collection of 250 extra templates for Pages. If you’re not quite at the level of designing from scratch in Photoshop, Illustrator or InDesign, Pages provides a great entry-level alternative. This set of templates will expand your options and provide great starting points for posters, brochures and more.

Price: $16.99

Scopeworks

This one is a silly and fun utility for generating kaleidoscope images and animations. However, the results are often fairly interesting patterns that any designer could definitely find some legitimate uses for!

Price: $7.99

Icon Slate

Creating icon files can be a pain, this tool lets you easily compose, import or export icons in many formats : Apple icns, Microsoft ico, CandyBar iContainer, image (png or tiff). You can drag in multiple images, customize your background color, even view a quick preview in the dock!

Price: $4.99

Branch Designer

Every designer loves some good organic graphics, but they can be a little tricky and time consuming to pull off, especially if you’re a beginner. Branch Designer gives you the tools you need to generate custom branch graphics. The user defines the main trunk using a vector path, the offshoots and the leaves are then generated according to a set of parameters, that can easily be changed.

Price: $19.99

Prototypes

This is a really great little tool for anyone designing for iOS. You can turn your still mockup images from Photoshop, Illustrator or Fireworks into a tappable prototype that runs on iPhone or iPod Touch. There’s no coding required, just drag and drop to build your test app workflows.

Price: $39.99

Page Layers

This is a fantastic little tool that allows you to enter a URL, the contents of which will then be converted to a full-layered Photoshop file. Page Layers renders every element on the whole page to a separate, transparent layer. It’s sort of like a PSD to HTML tool in reverse!

Price: $11.99

VectorPro Color

VectorPro Color is an affordable autotracing tool that transforms bitmap images into high quality, scaleable vector files. This version allows you to trace black and white, grayscale and even color images, adjusting the number of colors used along the way.

Price: $19.99

PSD Localizer

If you’ve ever worked with designers from other countries then you know that localizing a Photoshop file can be quite the process. This app claims to automatically convert the file so that any text automatically appears in the language indicated.

Price: $4.99

Patterno

Patterno helps you create attractive patterns that tile seamlessly and therefore make perfect backgrounds for websites and other projects. The simple but effective toolset makes it easy for anyone to create tiling backgrounds by compiling multiple graphics files. Just choose your resources, adjust the parameters and you’re ready to go.

Price: $19.99

iArt Pro

iArt Pro is a sharp looking, super simple graphics editor for Mac. It’s a good starter app for anyone looking to do extremely basic photo editing, drawing or painting. The toolset is pretty standard and will provide a decent stepping stone to work your way up to something much larger like Photoshop.

Price: $7.99

Griddle

Griddle is a custom grid generator that can be used for all types of design work. You can adjust all kinds of settings including the size, origin, number of lines, line color and more. The resulting file has a transparent background so you can easily toss it on top of whatever you’re working on.

Price: $1.99

Artboard

Artboard is an impressive vector editing application with all kinds of powerful features: layers, built-in styles and clipart, bezier drawing and editing, pen tablet support, text to outlines conversion, masking and a lot more.

Price: $25.99

Layers

This app is just like Page Layers above but instead of capturing the items from a web page, it captures every item on your screen and outputs a layered PSD. This is extremely useful for designing custom screen mockups.

Price: $24.99

Developer

Sprite Monkey

When creating a web design, many designers and developers prefer to combine multiple images into a single document, which can then be essentially cropped via CSS to be placed as all the various individual images. This little tool will help you quickly compile your images into a single sprite sheet. Just select a folder of png images and then select what you want to save it as.

Price: $2.99

Hype

With the recent popularity of CSS3 and HTML5, web animation has reached an entirely new era. With Hype you can create complex, beautiful HTML5 animations in a user friendly WYSIWYG environment that saves you hours of coding time and frustration.

Price: $29.99

Fonts & Typography

Fontographer

Fontographer is a serious professional application for font designers. With it you’ll have access to a full suite of tools that will help you create new fonts from scratch, customize and add to existing fonts or even fix issues with poorly constructed fonts. If you’re looking to get into custom typeface design, this is an awesome place to start.

Price: $399.99

Fontcase

In the world of font managers, OS X’s built-in Font Book utility ranks pretty low and leaves many professional designers feeling less than impressed. Fontcase is one attractive and functional alternative that has become quite popular in recent years. The strength here is in the interface, which provides beautiful font previews and even tagging so you can quickly and easily find the font you want and move on. I’ve heard that some Lion users are experiencing some issues, but I’m sure the developers will have it patched up in no time.

Price: $29.99

Glyphs

Glyphs is a slightly more affordable alternative to Fontagrapher above. It has many of the same features, including the ability to create custom fonts or edit existing fonts. The interface looks pretty slick and definitely packs a major punch of functionality.

Price: $299.99

Font Catalog Creator

If you’ve got a million different fonts, and every designer does, it can be difficult to sort through them, keep them organized, or offer your clients a few choice selections. With this handy utility you can create awesome printable catalogs of your entire font library. You’ll love the ability to physically browse through your fonts and see them in a new light.

Price: $19.99

Art Text 2

Art Text 2 is a tool that helps you convert plain boring text into impressive logos, banners and the like. The interface is based on preset styles and shapes so you’ll be creating awesome pieces of art in only a few clicks. The results vary from super cheesy to fairly stunning, it’s all in who is using it!

Price: $19.99

Color

Colors

A simple but effective little color loupe that helps you capture any color on your screen and copy it to your clipboard.

Price: $2.99

ColorChooser

ColorChooser is a menu bar utility that helps you create and grab colors. You can select colors using the standard built-in Mac OS X color pickers, or use the magnifying glass tool to pick up a color from your screen. You can then copy and paste the color using a number of different supported formats.

Price: $3.99

ColorPalette

Rather than grabbing individual colors from your screen, ColorPalette helps you build attractive color schemes by using a popular designer’s trick that involves sampling colors from a photograph (which tend to have very nature palettes). Simply drop in a photo, tweak the settings and it will be reduced to a basic grid of colors.

Price: $1.99

ColorSnapper

ColorSnapper is another menu bar color grabber app, this time with a few cool tricks like a global keyboard shortcut and the ability to see recently grabbed colors.

Price: $4.99

Pochade

One last menu bar color utility, this one with a unique UI and some powerful features like building custom collections of colors for quick access. If you’re a serious color fan, this may be your best bet.

Price: $9.99

Image Compression/Conversion

JPEG4Web

Need to optimize a big batch of JPGs for web use? JPEG4Web has you covered. It allows you to compress, resize, crop and add watermarks to your images. It also includes live preview and final file size information.

Price: $9.99

ConvertIt

This little utility makes for lightning fast conversion of images into one of eight formats: PNG, JPEG, TIFF, PDF, GIF, ICNS, BMP, ICO. Just drag a group of images to the ConvertIt icon, choose the file type and you’re done.

Price: $0.99

Imagexy Batch Photo Resizer

Imagexy Batch Photo Resizer handles really large image sizing batches with ease. Throw thousands of images at it and just watch it work. You can even resize psd’s in addition to the typical jpg, gif, png and pdf.

Price: $9.99

Snap Converter

A super simple drag and drop file converter. Convert bitmap graphics, Mac and Windows icons, Camera RAW images, Photoshop documents, and many other formats. You can even create multi-image Mac icon files from a single image.

Price: $4.99

PNGPress

To be honest, I don’t usually give much thought to my file size for web projects if I’m using JPGs, but as soon as I start bringing PNGs into the picture then I definitely seek to keep things as small as possible. This app will help you make your PNGs as tiny as possible for web use.

Price: $0.99

RightClickImages

This one is a unique spin on image conversion. You simply right click on an image or folder of images and choose between the popular format choices, the app then jumps into action and performs its task. Quick, easy and intuitive!

Price: $4.99

Tell Us Your Favorites!

Now that you’ve seen our list of awesomely useful Mac apps for designers, leave a comment below and tell us about your favorites that aren’t listed. Are there any apps that you’re surprised haven’t made it to the Mac App Store yet?

While you’re at it, let us know which of the apps above you’ve tried and what you thought of them. I’d love to hear about your experiences with each.

It’s hard to believe that we’re coming up on a year since the Mac App Store was first announced. It seems like only yesterday we were itching to get our hands on a marketplace full of great utilities, games and other goodies all custom tailored to the Mac platform.

While categories like Games took off dramatically right from the start, the offerings for designers and developers got off to a much slower start and are just now starting to really take off. Below is a collection of over thirty useful Mac App Store apps for designers. I’ve intentionally left out obvious favorites like Pixelmator and tried to keep the list more towards hidden gems that you may not have tried yet. Take a look!

Measuring

Sizewise

Sizewise helps you quickly test your designs on a number of resolutions. You can enter in your own size or use one of the built-in presets. Sizewise can simulate a menubar, Dock, and desktop to provide a realistic replica of what users will see.

Price: $4.99

xScope

There are lots of tools that allow you to measure things on your screen but xScope easily stands out as one of the best. The on screen rulers can measure items, grab the distance between two items, span multiple monitors and even measure rotation. It’s a little pricey but justifiably so as it provides a lot more functionality than many of its competitors.

Price: $29.99

Guideliner

In addition to measuring objects on the screen, this app allows you to drag guides out over any content similar to how you would in Photoshop. There are some nice customization features as well.

Price: $19.99

Pixelstick

Pixelstick is much cheaper than the two previous options and has a pretty unique interface that helps you quickly grab distances and angles or copy colors to your clipboard.

Price: $6.99

Art Director’s Toolkit

Art Director’s Toolkit took the idea of a standard screen ruler and expanded it with a number of other utilities such as character palettes, fractions/decimal converters, color tools, and scaling calculators. Art Director’s Toolkit has been around for a number of years and is definitely a top-notch tool for designers of all kinds.

Price: $19.99

Design

Aurora 3D Maker

If you’re not into 3D modeling, it can be difficult to successfully generate accurate three dimensional graphics. Anyone can use Aurora 3D Maker to easily create extruded text, logos and more, rotate them in 3D space and apply different colors, textures and lighting setups.

Price: $29.99

ExportTools Professional

ExportTools Professional is a super powerful exporting tool for InDesign and QuarkXPress that allows you to quickly transform multiple documents into multi-page PDFs. You can also have Exportools Professional periodically scan a watched folder where you move or copy files. Every time a scan is performed, new files will be automatically added to the queue ready for processing.

Price: $99.99

Templates for Pages

This isn’t so much an app as it is a collection of 250 extra templates for Pages. If you’re not quite at the level of designing from scratch in Photoshop, Illustrator or InDesign, Pages provides a great entry-level alternative. This set of templates will expand your options and provide great starting points for posters, brochures and more.

Price: $16.99

Scopeworks

This one is a silly and fun utility for generating kaleidoscope images and animations. However, the results are often fairly interesting patterns that any designer could definitely find some legitimate uses for!

Price: $7.99

Icon Slate

Creating icon files can be a pain, this tool lets you easily compose, import or export icons in many formats : Apple icns, Microsoft ico, CandyBar iContainer, image (png or tiff). You can drag in multiple images, customize your background color, even view a quick preview in the dock!

Price: $4.99

Branch Designer

Every designer loves some good organic graphics, but they can be a little tricky and time consuming to pull off, especially if you’re a beginner. Branch Designer gives you the tools you need to generate custom branch graphics. The user defines the main trunk using a vector path, the offshoots and the leaves are then generated according to a set of parameters, that can easily be changed.

Price: $19.99

Prototypes

This is a really great little tool for anyone designing for iOS. You can turn your still mockup images from Photoshop, Illustrator or Fireworks into a tappable prototype that runs on iPhone or iPod Touch. There’s no coding required, just drag and drop to build your test app workflows.

Price: $39.99

Page Layers

This is a fantastic little tool that allows you to enter a URL, the contents of which will then be converted to a full-layered Photoshop file. Page Layers renders every element on the whole page to a separate, transparent layer. It’s sort of like a PSD to HTML tool in reverse!

Price: $11.99

VectorPro Color

VectorPro Color is an affordable autotracing tool that transforms bitmap images into high quality, scaleable vector files. This version allows you to trace black and white, grayscale and even color images, adjusting the number of colors used along the way.

Price: $19.99

PSD Localizer

If you’ve ever worked with designers from other countries then you know that localizing a Photoshop file can be quite the process. This app claims to automatically convert the file so that any text automatically appears in the language indicated.

Price: $4.99

Patterno

Patterno helps you create attractive patterns that tile seamlessly and therefore make perfect backgrounds for websites and other projects. The simple but effective toolset makes it easy for anyone to create tiling backgrounds by compiling multiple graphics files. Just choose your resources, adjust the parameters and you’re ready to go.

Price: $19.99

iArt Pro

iArt Pro is a sharp looking, super simple graphics editor for Mac. It’s a good starter app for anyone looking to do extremely basic photo editing, drawing or painting. The toolset is pretty standard and will provide a decent stepping stone to work your way up to something much larger like Photoshop.

Price: $7.99

Griddle

Griddle is a custom grid generator that can be used for all types of design work. You can adjust all kinds of settings including the size, origin, number of lines, line color and more. The resulting file has a transparent background so you can easily toss it on top of whatever you’re working on.

Price: $1.99

Artboard

Artboard is an impressive vector editing application with all kinds of powerful features: layers, built-in styles and clipart, bezier drawing and editing, pen tablet support, text to outlines conversion, masking and a lot more.

Price: $25.99

Layers

This app is just like Page Layers above but instead of capturing the items from a web page, it captures every item on your screen and outputs a layered PSD. This is extremely useful for designing custom screen mockups.

Price: $24.99

Developer

Sprite Monkey

When creating a web design, many designers and developers prefer to combine multiple images into a single document, which can then be essentially cropped via CSS to be placed as all the various individual images. This little tool will help you quickly compile your images into a single sprite sheet. Just select a folder of png images and then select what you want to save it as.

Price: $2.99

Hype

With the recent popularity of CSS3 and HTML5, web animation has reached an entirely new era. With Hype you can create complex, beautiful HTML5 animations in a user friendly WYSIWYG environment that saves you hours of coding time and frustration.

Price: $29.99

Fonts & Typography

Fontographer

Fontographer is a serious professional application for font designers. With it you’ll have access to a full suite of tools that will help you create new fonts from scratch, customize and add to existing fonts or even fix issues with poorly constructed fonts. If you’re looking to get into custom typeface design, this is an awesome place to start.

Price: $399.99

Fontcase

In the world of font managers, OS X’s built-in Font Book utility ranks pretty low and leaves many professional designers feeling less than impressed. Fontcase is one attractive and functional alternative that has become quite popular in recent years. The strength here is in the interface, which provides beautiful font previews and even tagging so you can quickly and easily find the font you want and move on. I’ve heard that some Lion users are experiencing some issues, but I’m sure the developers will have it patched up in no time.

Price: $29.99

Glyphs

Glyphs is a slightly more affordable alternative to Fontagrapher above. It has many of the same features, including the ability to create custom fonts or edit existing fonts. The interface looks pretty slick and definitely packs a major punch of functionality.

Price: $299.99

Font Catalog Creator

If you’ve got a million different fonts, and every designer does, it can be difficult to sort through them, keep them organized, or offer your clients a few choice selections. With this handy utility you can create awesome printable catalogs of your entire font library. You’ll love the ability to physically browse through your fonts and see them in a new light.

Price: $19.99

Art Text 2

Art Text 2 is a tool that helps you convert plain boring text into impressive logos, banners and the like. The interface is based on preset styles and shapes so you’ll be creating awesome pieces of art in only a few clicks. The results vary from super cheesy to fairly stunning, it’s all in who is using it!

Price: $19.99

Color

Colors

A simple but effective little color loupe that helps you capture any color on your screen and copy it to your clipboard.

Price: $2.99

ColorChooser

ColorChooser is a menu bar utility that helps you create and grab colors. You can select colors using the standard built-in Mac OS X color pickers, or use the magnifying glass tool to pick up a color from your screen. You can then copy and paste the color using a number of different supported formats.

Price: $3.99

ColorPalette

Rather than grabbing individual colors from your screen, ColorPalette helps you build attractive color schemes by using a popular designer’s trick that involves sampling colors from a photograph (which tend to have very nature palettes). Simply drop in a photo, tweak the settings and it will be reduced to a basic grid of colors.

Price: $1.99

ColorSnapper

ColorSnapper is another menu bar color grabber app, this time with a few cool tricks like a global keyboard shortcut and the ability to see recently grabbed colors.

Price: $4.99

Pochade

One last menu bar color utility, this one with a unique UI and some powerful features like building custom collections of colors for quick access. If you’re a serious color fan, this may be your best bet.

Price: $9.99

Image Compression/Conversion

JPEG4Web

Need to optimize a big batch of JPGs for web use? JPEG4Web has you covered. It allows you to compress, resize, crop and add watermarks to your images. It also includes live preview and final file size information.

Price: $9.99

ConvertIt

This little utility makes for lightning fast conversion of images into one of eight formats: PNG, JPEG, TIFF, PDF, GIF, ICNS, BMP, ICO. Just drag a group of images to the ConvertIt icon, choose the file type and you’re done.

Price: $0.99

Imagexy Batch Photo Resizer

Imagexy Batch Photo Resizer handles really large image sizing batches with ease. Throw thousands of images at it and just watch it work. You can even resize psd’s in addition to the typical jpg, gif, png and pdf.

Price: $9.99

Snap Converter

A super simple drag and drop file converter. Convert bitmap graphics, Mac and Windows icons, Camera RAW images, Photoshop documents, and many other formats. You can even create multi-image Mac icon files from a single image.

Price: $4.99

PNGPress

To be honest, I don’t usually give much thought to my file size for web projects if I’m using JPGs, but as soon as I start bringing PNGs into the picture then I definitely seek to keep things as small as possible. This app will help you make your PNGs as tiny as possible for web use.

Price: $0.99

RightClickImages

This one is a unique spin on image conversion. You simply right click on an image or folder of images and choose between the popular format choices, the app then jumps into action and performs its task. Quick, easy and intuitive!

Price: $4.99

Tell Us Your Favorites!

Now that you’ve seen our list of awesomely useful Mac apps for designers, leave a comment below and tell us about your favorites that aren’t listed. Are there any apps that you’re surprised haven’t made it to the Mac App Store yet?

While you’re at it, let us know which of the apps above you’ve tried and what you thought of them. I’d love to hear about your experiences with each.

It’s hard to believe that we’re coming up on a year since the Mac App Store was first announced. It seems like only yesterday we were itching to get our hands on a marketplace full of great utilities, games and other goodies all custom tailored to the Mac platform.

While categories like Games took off dramatically right from the start, the offerings for designers and developers got off to a much slower start and are just now starting to really take off. Below is a collection of over thirty useful Mac App Store apps for designers. I’ve intentionally left out obvious favorites like Pixelmator and tried to keep the list more towards hidden gems that you may not have tried yet. Take a look!

Measuring

Sizewise

Sizewise helps you quickly test your designs on a number of resolutions. You can enter in your own size or use one of the built-in presets. Sizewise can simulate a menubar, Dock, and desktop to provide a realistic replica of what users will see.

Price: $4.99

xScope

There are lots of tools that allow you to measure things on your screen but xScope easily stands out as one of the best. The on screen rulers can measure items, grab the distance between two items, span multiple monitors and even measure rotation. It’s a little pricey but justifiably so as it provides a lot more functionality than many of its competitors.

Price: $29.99

Guideliner

In addition to measuring objects on the screen, this app allows you to drag guides out over any content similar to how you would in Photoshop. There are some nice customization features as well.

Price: $19.99

Pixelstick

Pixelstick is much cheaper than the two previous options and has a pretty unique interface that helps you quickly grab distances and angles or copy colors to your clipboard.

Price: $6.99

Art Director’s Toolkit

Art Director’s Toolkit took the idea of a standard screen ruler and expanded it with a number of other utilities such as character palettes, fractions/decimal converters, color tools, and scaling calculators. Art Director’s Toolkit has been around for a number of years and is definitely a top-notch tool for designers of all kinds.

Price: $19.99

Design

Aurora 3D Maker

If you’re not into 3D modeling, it can be difficult to successfully generate accurate three dimensional graphics. Anyone can use Aurora 3D Maker to easily create extruded text, logos and more, rotate them in 3D space and apply different colors, textures and lighting setups.

Price: $29.99

ExportTools Professional

ExportTools Professional is a super powerful exporting tool for InDesign and QuarkXPress that allows you to quickly transform multiple documents into multi-page PDFs. You can also have Exportools Professional periodically scan a watched folder where you move or copy files. Every time a scan is performed, new files will be automatically added to the queue ready for processing.

Price: $99.99

Templates for Pages

This isn’t so much an app as it is a collection of 250 extra templates for Pages. If you’re not quite at the level of designing from scratch in Photoshop, Illustrator or InDesign, Pages provides a great entry-level alternative. This set of templates will expand your options and provide great starting points for posters, brochures and more.

Price: $16.99

Scopeworks

This one is a silly and fun utility for generating kaleidoscope images and animations. However, the results are often fairly interesting patterns that any designer could definitely find some legitimate uses for!

Price: $7.99

Icon Slate

Creating icon files can be a pain, this tool lets you easily compose, import or export icons in many formats : Apple icns, Microsoft ico, CandyBar iContainer, image (png or tiff). You can drag in multiple images, customize your background color, even view a quick preview in the dock!

Price: $4.99

Branch Designer

Every designer loves some good organic graphics, but they can be a little tricky and time consuming to pull off, especially if you’re a beginner. Branch Designer gives you the tools you need to generate custom branch graphics. The user defines the main trunk using a vector path, the offshoots and the leaves are then generated according to a set of parameters, that can easily be changed.

Price: $19.99

Prototypes

This is a really great little tool for anyone designing for iOS. You can turn your still mockup images from Photoshop, Illustrator or Fireworks into a tappable prototype that runs on iPhone or iPod Touch. There’s no coding required, just drag and drop to build your test app workflows.

Price: $39.99

Page Layers

This is a fantastic little tool that allows you to enter a URL, the contents of which will then be converted to a full-layered Photoshop file. Page Layers renders every element on the whole page to a separate, transparent layer. It’s sort of like a PSD to HTML tool in reverse!

Price: $11.99

VectorPro Color

VectorPro Color is an affordable autotracing tool that transforms bitmap images into high quality, scaleable vector files. This version allows you to trace black and white, grayscale and even color images, adjusting the number of colors used along the way.

Price: $19.99

PSD Localizer

If you’ve ever worked with designers from other countries then you know that localizing a Photoshop file can be quite the process. This app claims to automatically convert the file so that any text automatically appears in the language indicated.

Price: $4.99

Patterno

Patterno helps you create attractive patterns that tile seamlessly and therefore make perfect backgrounds for websites and other projects. The simple but effective toolset makes it easy for anyone to create tiling backgrounds by compiling multiple graphics files. Just choose your resources, adjust the parameters and you’re ready to go.

Price: $19.99

iArt Pro

iArt Pro is a sharp looking, super simple graphics editor for Mac. It’s a good starter app for anyone looking to do extremely basic photo editing, drawing or painting. The toolset is pretty standard and will provide a decent stepping stone to work your way up to something much larger like Photoshop.

Price: $7.99

Griddle

Griddle is a custom grid generator that can be used for all types of design work. You can adjust all kinds of settings including the size, origin, number of lines, line color and more. The resulting file has a transparent background so you can easily toss it on top of whatever you’re working on.

Price: $1.99

Artboard

Artboard is an impressive vector editing application with all kinds of powerful features: layers, built-in styles and clipart, bezier drawing and editing, pen tablet support, text to outlines conversion, masking and a lot more.

Price: $25.99

Layers

This app is just like Page Layers above but instead of capturing the items from a web page, it captures every item on your screen and outputs a layered PSD. This is extremely useful for designing custom screen mockups.

Price: $24.99

Developer

Sprite Monkey

When creating a web design, many designers and developers prefer to combine multiple images into a single document, which can then be essentially cropped via CSS to be placed as all the various individual images. This little tool will help you quickly compile your images into a single sprite sheet. Just select a folder of png images and then select what you want to save it as.

Price: $2.99

Hype

With the recent popularity of CSS3 and HTML5, web animation has reached an entirely new era. With Hype you can create complex, beautiful HTML5 animations in a user friendly WYSIWYG environment that saves you hours of coding time and frustration.

Price: $29.99

Fonts & Typography

Fontographer

Fontographer is a serious professional application for font designers. With it you’ll have access to a full suite of tools that will help you create new fonts from scratch, customize and add to existing fonts or even fix issues with poorly constructed fonts. If you’re looking to get into custom typeface design, this is an awesome place to start.

Price: $399.99

Fontcase

In the world of font managers, OS X’s built-in Font Book utility ranks pretty low and leaves many professional designers feeling less than impressed. Fontcase is one attractive and functional alternative that has become quite popular in recent years. The strength here is in the interface, which provides beautiful font previews and even tagging so you can quickly and easily find the font you want and move on. I’ve heard that some Lion users are experiencing some issues, but I’m sure the developers will have it patched up in no time.

Price: $29.99

Glyphs

Glyphs is a slightly more affordable alternative to Fontagrapher above. It has many of the same features, including the ability to create custom fonts or edit existing fonts. The interface looks pretty slick and definitely packs a major punch of functionality.

Price: $299.99

Font Catalog Creator

If you’ve got a million different fonts, and every designer does, it can be difficult to sort through them, keep them organized, or offer your clients a few choice selections. With this handy utility you can create awesome printable catalogs of your entire font library. You’ll love the ability to physically browse through your fonts and see them in a new light.

Price: $19.99

Art Text 2

Art Text 2 is a tool that helps you convert plain boring text into impressive logos, banners and the like. The interface is based on preset styles and shapes so you’ll be creating awesome pieces of art in only a few clicks. The results vary from super cheesy to fairly stunning, it’s all in who is using it!

Price: $19.99

Color

Colors

A simple but effective little color loupe that helps you capture any color on your screen and copy it to your clipboard.

Price: $2.99

ColorChooser

ColorChooser is a menu bar utility that helps you create and grab colors. You can select colors using the standard built-in Mac OS X color pickers, or use the magnifying glass tool to pick up a color from your screen. You can then copy and paste the color using a number of different supported formats.

Price: $3.99

ColorPalette

Rather than grabbing individual colors from your screen, ColorPalette helps you build attractive color schemes by using a popular designer’s trick that involves sampling colors from a photograph (which tend to have very nature palettes). Simply drop in a photo, tweak the settings and it will be reduced to a basic grid of colors.

Price: $1.99

ColorSnapper

ColorSnapper is another menu bar color grabber app, this time with a few cool tricks like a global keyboard shortcut and the ability to see recently grabbed colors.

Price: $4.99

Pochade

One last menu bar color utility, this one with a unique UI and some powerful features like building custom collections of colors for quick access. If you’re a serious color fan, this may be your best bet.

Price: $9.99

Image Compression/Conversion

JPEG4Web

Need to optimize a big batch of JPGs for web use? JPEG4Web has you covered. It allows you to compress, resize, crop and add watermarks to your images. It also includes live preview and final file size information.

Price: $9.99

ConvertIt

This little utility makes for lightning fast conversion of images into one of eight formats: PNG, JPEG, TIFF, PDF, GIF, ICNS, BMP, ICO. Just drag a group of images to the ConvertIt icon, choose the file type and you’re done.

Price: $0.99

Imagexy Batch Photo Resizer

Imagexy Batch Photo Resizer handles really large image sizing batches with ease. Throw thousands of images at it and just watch it work. You can even resize psd’s in addition to the typical jpg, gif, png and pdf.

Price: $9.99

Snap Converter

A super simple drag and drop file converter. Convert bitmap graphics, Mac and Windows icons, Camera RAW images, Photoshop documents, and many other formats. You can even create multi-image Mac icon files from a single image.

Price: $4.99

PNGPress

To be honest, I don’t usually give much thought to my file size for web projects if I’m using JPGs, but as soon as I start bringing PNGs into the picture then I definitely seek to keep things as small as possible. This app will help you make your PNGs as tiny as possible for web use.

Price: $0.99

RightClickImages

This one is a unique spin on image conversion. You simply right click on an image or folder of images and choose between the popular format choices, the app then jumps into action and performs its task. Quick, easy and intuitive!

Price: $4.99

Tell Us Your Favorites!

Now that you’ve seen our list of awesomely useful Mac apps for designers, leave a comment below and tell us about your favorites that aren’t listed. Are there any apps that you’re surprised haven’t made it to the Mac App Store yet?

While you’re at it, let us know which of the apps above you’ve tried and what you thought of them. I’d love to hear about your experiences with each.

Last week we published an article that got a lot of meaningful discussion going about menu bar apps. In it we outlined the all too common problem of the overflowing menu bar for MacBook users and discussed whether or not the best solution to the problem was to tell users that they are being overzealous or present developers with the request to give us more control over whether a given app appears in the menu or dock.

Today we’re following that up with a poll that simply asks how many third party menu bar apps you typically run at any given time. Are you picky about what earns a spot in your menu bar or are you a menu bar app addict who simply can’t get enough? We want to know!

After you vote, leave a comment below and let us know which menu bar apps you currently have open. Don’t cheat and take the time to open or close any, just take a gander at the top of your screen and give an honest account of what’s currently up there. Which are your favorites? Which do you think you could live without?

Last week we published an article that got a lot of meaningful discussion going about menu bar apps. In it we outlined the all too common problem of the overflowing menu bar for MacBook users and discussed whether or not the best solution to the problem was to tell users that they are being overzealous or present developers with the request to give us more control over whether a given app appears in the menu or dock.

Today we’re following that up with a poll that simply asks how many third party menu bar apps you typically run at any given time. Are you picky about what earns a spot in your menu bar or are you a menu bar app addict who simply can’t get enough? We want to know!

After you vote, leave a comment below and let us know which menu bar apps you currently have open. Don’t cheat and take the time to open or close any, just take a gander at the top of your screen and give an honest account of what’s currently up there. Which are your favorites? Which do you think you could live without?

Last week we published an article that got a lot of meaningful discussion going about menu bar apps. In it we outlined the all too common problem of the overflowing menu bar for MacBook users and discussed whether or not the best solution to the problem was to tell users that they are being overzealous or present developers with the request to give us more control over whether a given app appears in the menu or dock.

Today we’re following that up with a poll that simply asks how many third party menu bar apps you typically run at any given time. Are you picky about what earns a spot in your menu bar or are you a menu bar app addict who simply can’t get enough? We want to know!

After you vote, leave a comment below and let us know which menu bar apps you currently have open. Don’t cheat and take the time to open or close any, just take a gander at the top of your screen and give an honest account of what’s currently up there. Which are your favorites? Which do you think you could live without?