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Daily Mac App: Seasonality Core 2.0
Seasonality Core 2.0 is a Mac app any weather aficionado should have. That's because it's probably the most complete and detailed weather software I've ever seen on the Mac. The interface is simple enough. A list on the left allows you to enter any number of cities around the world you want to track. It's got 34,000 built-in cities in more than 200 countries. Additionally it allows you to add custom locations using ICAO stations, latitude and longitude and more. A selected city's forecast is displayed at the top of the app along with its current temperature, wind speed, cloud cover, dewpoint and more. To the left of the forecast you'll also see information about the length of daylight, sunrise and sunset times and the local time. But those metrics are something you can find in most weather apps. What sets Seasonality Core apart from the rest are its interactive graphs and amazingly detailed maps. The graphs, which chart a location's temperature, wind speed, wind direction, cylindrical wind direction, pressure, participation, snowfall, cloud cover, humidity, and wave height, not only show you the next seven days for all those metrics, it allows you to see a history of those metrics going back day, weeks, month, or even years. But my favorite part of Seasonality Core are the maps. They're beautiful. The terrain maps aren't actually Google Maps (for once). And they're available in over 2 gigapixels of resolution. More so, they're dynamic, meaning the terrain images change every month so you can see the turning colors of the leaves or the snow line move across the earth. Like any good Mac app, Seasonality Core has been designed for optimized OS X Lion use. The app offers fullscreen view and also multitouch gesture support for the graphs and radar/satellite imagery. With all the data sets and features Seasonality Core offers, it probably not even appropriate to just call it an "app." It's like having a full weather center built into your Mac. Seasonality Core 2.0 is available in the Mac App Store for US$24.99.
Daily Mac App: Easy Timeline
BeeDoc's Easy Timeline is an app that any reader who enjoy tracking events might find interesting. The app allows you to easily create interactive timelines to chart any number of things. After launching the app, select a look for your timeline from built-in themes, then the type. You can choose between three different types of timelines: Date & Times lets you create historical timelines based on dates, such as March 5, 1789; Geological Scale lets you create timelines which track events that span thousands or millions of years; and Quantities lets you create a timeline that tracks anything that can be numbered, such as "Week 34." After choosing the settings, you can enter events onto it. For each event, you can choose a start and/or end date, a custom name, notes, photos, videos, or audio, web links and tags. After you've created data points for your timeline you can continue to format it by choosing font and text sizes, background images, dateline options and more. But what's really cool about Easy Timeline is how you can view your creation. You can print it or email it to friends, but the killer interactive feature is a 3D-view of the timeline that lets you advance through an event at a time. When I showed Easy Timeline to my brother, a elementary school teacher, he immediately saw the educational benefit and said it would be useful to create historical timelines of subjects he was teaching, such as the American Revolution. I have used the software to create two timelines for a novel, one which tracks events as they happen in the book and one which tracks the book's events in chronological order. A councilor friend of mine said she could see a great benefit of the app in tracking the events of a patient's life. Easy Timeline is $19.99 in the Mac App Store. BeeDoc's also offers a professional version of the software, Timeline 3D, which has more advanced options, such as automatic data imports (from iCal, Aperture, Basecamp, etc), cinematic timelines, and advanced publishing options. Timeline 3D, which unfortunately isn't on the Mac App Store, can be bought from BeeDoc's site for $69.99. You can check out the differences between the two Timeline apps here.
Daily Mac App: BatterySqueezer
Modern Macs have pretty good battery life, but there are times when you can't get enough juice to keep working without a power adapter. BatterySqueezer promises to help you extend your battery by throttling process that are running in the background. The idea is that by reducing the amount of processing power demanded by applications that are not actively being used, it reduces overall CPU load. Reduced CPU load results in lower power usage, which in theory, should extend your battery life. BatterySqueezer sits in the background ready to throttle programs when they're not being used. Currently it supports four browsers, Firefox, Chrome, Opera and Safari, as well as Reeder, Microsoft Office and iWork. The throttled apps aren't killed off entirely, but plugins such as Flash, animated adverts and any processes that are demanding are reduced to practically no load. This has another benefit other than extended battery life and that's more free resources, which can be particularly useful on a low-powered Mac. In anecdotal testing BatterySqueezer throttled Flash from some 30% of CPU load to about 3% with Chrome backgrounded. The result was very jerky Flash animations, but who cares when its in the background. As soon as Chrome was brought to the foreground, it was unthrottled and everything was normal. It also had the benefit of keeping my hot-running Mac cooler with noticeably reduced fan speed when multi-tasking. BatterySqueezer is one of those apps that will have different mileage for different people and setups. If you're trying to eek out as much out of your battery life as possible or trying to stretch out the resources of a low-power Mac, BatterySqueezer might just be the ticket and is available for US$3.99 from the Mac App Store.
Daily Mac App: Social Weather
The weather might not be your first priority of the day, but if you ever get caught out of the house in the pouring rain, a good forecast could have helped. Social Weather is great free weather app that gives you detailed up-to-the-minute forecasts with hour-by-hour weather for most major cities around the world. Social Weather allows you to save your favorite locations and flick between forecasts. It offers both at-a-glance weather information including the temperature, wind speed and direction, and the humidity. Selecting a city gives you a 10-day forecast with icons displaying the weather type. The background also changes to reflect the current conditions, so if it's sunny you'll get a glorious blue background with the sun shining. If it's cloudy and raining, the background changes to grey with clouds moving across the sky. It's well done, not too distracting and gets the information across quickly while still looking pretty. Social Weather has optional Facebook integration, which allows you to see what the weather is like for your friends around the world. It's a nice feature that lets you gloat about the good weather you're having while your friends are sitting in the rain, and you can post directly to your friends' walls from the app. Social Weather is free from the Mac App Store.
Daily Mac App: Clarify
We're unabashed fans of the folks at Blue Mango Learning Systems; in fact, we did a video introduction to their flagship product, ScreenSteps, after we met with them at Macworld Expo 2008. ScreenSteps has saved countless hours of effort in quickly developing software documentation, but the Blue Mango team realized that it may be overkill for streamlined communications aimed at reducing the frequency of roundtrip email exchanges. That's the origin story of the new Clarify, a simplified take on screenshot-driven document creation that's meant to help everyone deliver clear and easy-to-understand instructions with a minimum of effort. The app is about as simple as can be: take a screenshot or series of screenshots as you walk through your process, then document them with as little or as much detail as you need. You can export to PDF with a single click, save your instructions to Dropbox for third-party review, or upload to the free Clarify-It web service. If you're already a ScreenSteps user, you'll be pretty comfortable with Clarify. It adds a few niceties (a menu-bar screenshot tool, highlight and border controls) while dispensing with the document library and workgroup editing features. It also drops the automatic capture of clipboard screenshots, which I regret; that's one of my favorite ScreenSteps tricks. Still, the Clarify UI is nice and clean, and it's easy to create solid documents in very short order. You can copy and paste your instructions as RTF for use with Word, Evernote or other destinations. If you need to include real-world images (versus screenshots) in your instructions -- say, to help rental tenants find climate controls or light switches in an apartment -- drag the pictures from the Finder, iPhoto or Aperture right into your Clarify document. Clarify is available as a 14-day trial and can be purchased direct or via the Mac App Store. Normal pricing is $29.99 for a single-platform license (Mac or PC), $39.99 for both platforms; however, through October 19 there's a $10 discount offer available. It's true, you could certainly make similar screenshot-driven instructions with Word or Pages, but if you spend any substantial fraction of your time describing tasks step-by-step you can save yourself aggravation and effort by giving Clarify a shot. If you think you need the power of ScreenSteps instead, the base license is $39.95.
Daily Mac App: Preflight
Sometimes super simple tasks work best when performed using super simple applications. List making might be one of them. Preflight is a free list-making app that's about as simple as they come. Type your list item in the "new item" box and hit return. Job done. If you want to delete an item from your list, select it and hit backspace. You can rearrange your list through drag-and-drop. The beauty of Preflight is that it's quick to load, create a list and does what it needs to do. However, if you need a bit more complexity, check out one of the myriad of to-do list apps that we've covered on the Daily Mac App including Wunderlist, Producteev and iProcrastinate.
Daily Mac App: Analog (Updated)
It's funny. As the cameras in our iPhones get more spectacular capabilities, more apps are appearing every day to give those beautiful high-resolution photos scratches, tints, and frames that make them look ... well, not so nice. Analog (Realmac Software, US$7.99 introductory price) is another Mac app that lets you change the look of your photos with an assortment of filters and borders. Others that you might want to check out before you make your choice are Flare ($9.99 through the Mac App Store right now or $19.95 on the Iconfactory website) and FX Photo Studio ($9.99). All of these apps pretty much do the same thing. You open a photo file or drop it onto the app, and you're presented with a number of preset filters that change texture, blur, saturation, brightness, contrast and tint. There are probably more settings, but I'm just picking a few. Why would you want to do this to a nice, clear digital photo? A lot of photos look good, but seem to lack emotional impact. Adding an effect to a photo often brings back that impact, by reminding people of photos from the past or by adding dramatic coloration. %Gallery-136059% Of the apps I've listed here, Analog is by far the easiest to use. You just drag a photo to the app, drop it on the blank area of the Analog user interface, and then click on a filter or border. A small pop-up shows four icons, which are used to toggle between your original photo and the processed image, crop the image, rotate the image, or share. Sharing can be done a number of ways -- saving it to your disk, sending it via email, or saving to CloudApp, Facebook, Flickr, or Picasa. I ran into an interesting and very repeatable error when dragging photos from iPhoto version 9.1.5 (615) to Analog. Each time I did this, the image ended up with a black square in the middle of it. Once this bug started, any photo coming from either the Finder or iPhoto ended up with a black square in it. Analog comes with 19 filters (plus "normal"), some of which are quite nice. However, the app lacks the fine control that is included with Flare, where you can actually adjust each filter and setting. Flare even lets you save and share your self-designed filters, and there's actually a preset library where you can download new presets for free. That means that Flare not only has 31 filters -- 11 more than Analog -- but you can download well over 50 other effect presets to add to the capabilities of the app. There are also 13 frames that come with Analog. That's a bit of a bonus, since Flare doesn't come with many effects that add a border -- although you can add them through the preset editing function. Realmac needs to add to the number of filters in Analog as soon as possible, and should also consider adding the capability of tweaking the effects so users can create their own. All in all, Analog is an easy-to-use app, but either needs a price cut or more capabilities to compete against some of the existing photo effects apps. Update: Realmac Software spokesman Nik Fletcher noted that they're aware of the "black box" bug and are working on a fix. In addition, Realmac is working on adding more filters and upload destinations, and also adding the capability to adjust effects in the future.
Daily Mac App: Final Draft
Final Draft 8, the industry-standard scriptwriting software, has finally come to the Mac App Store. Even for those of you who have never written a movie script, you've seen the fruits of labor of the app used by those writers. Before Christian Bale utters a menacing threat to a criminal in a Batman movie or Ashton Kutcher cracks a joke on Two and a Half Men, their words were written on Final Draft. AMong its features, Final Draft 8 includes Scene View, which allows writers to drag and drop scenes in the order they want them to appear in the script, split-screen writing so you can be at two places in your script at once and Format Assistant, which checks to make sure your layout and more applies to industry-standard rules. Now while I love Final Draft, it's important to note that the version released on the Mac App Store is the same one that's been available for a while now. There are no big new features that should warrant owners of the current version to switch. However, if you are thinking of buying Final Draft 8, do it through the Mac App Store and not through the website. Until Final Draft 8 became available on the Mac App Store, the software had one of the most burdensome registration processes ever. Instead of relying on a serial number for registration, users had to enter challenge and authorization codes online or over the phone, and if you lost one of those codes (as I have in the past) it was easier to buy a new copy of the software than trying to get the people at Final Draft to reactivate your copy. Users who buy Final Draft through the Mac App Store never have to worry about this again. While I do recommend that anyone who writes scripts for a living use Final Draft, that's not to say the software is without its drawbacks. First off, the UI is beginning to show its age. Also, there is cheaper software, such as Scrivener, that gives Final Draft a serious run for its money. But the main problem I have with Final Draft is they are usually slow to adopt new technology. This is no more apparent than using the software in OS X 10.7 Lion. As it stands now, Final Draft doesn't take advantage of Lion's new features such as Versions, iCloud document syncing, full-screen support and Auto Save. It also doesn't take advantage of Lion's Dictionary panel or scroll bars. The people at Final Draft told me that full-screen support and Auto Save are coming in a future version of the software, but Versions and iCloud document syncing will not be. The reason for this is that Final Draft is developing their own proprietary solution called Final Draft Connect, which will act as an online project-management solution. This makes sense because Final Draft isn't just a Mac app. Its got a massive Windows userbase as well. However, it would be nice if Final Draft would also implement Versions and iCloud document syncing in addition to its proprietary solution. Final Draft 8 is available on the Mac App Store for US$199.99. That's 20% off its normal $249.99 price. The sale runs until the end of October. %Gallery-135614%
Daily Mac App: Clean
Let's face it, cleaning your desktop can be a right chore. Clean makes it easy by automating the process for those who simply can't face it. Some of us are more prone to desktop clutter than others. I have seen some horrors in my time, desktops were you simply can't see the wallpaper for the side-to-side mess of icons. How does anyone find anything in that mess? Like other cleaning tasks, sometimes you simply can't face weeding through all the files, separating important from rubbish and that's where Clean comes in. It's a tiny app that you can either set up to clear out your desktop on a daily, weekly or monthly rotation, or fire it up manually when it all gets too much. Clean will move all the files on your desktop to a user-specified folder and will organize them by day or month. You can tell it to ignore files with labels, which means you can keep files on your desktop that you really want to stay by just applying a label to them in Finder. By moving, not trashing your files, Clean gives you the opportunity to evaluate whether you really need those files. If you haven't accessed them for a couple of months for instance, perhaps it's time to trash them and reclaim some hard disk space. Yes you can do all this manually, and no Clean doesn't do anything revolutionary, but it's a free app that gets the job done for those that have a mess of files on their desktop and can't face sorting them manually.
Daily Mac App: DropCopy
Mac OS X Lion introduced AirDrop, which offers zero-configuration, Wi-Fi file sharing between Lion users. DropCopy offered a similar service when we wrote about it in 2007. Today, DropCopy still deserves a place on your Mac, as it does a few things that AirDrop doesn't. For one, DropCopy can auto-accept file transfers. Meaning, your recipient needn't be in front of his/her machine to initiate or accept a transfer. That's handy if you want some files to be waiting at a remote work station upon your arrival. DropCopy also passes the contents of one machine's Clipboard to another, creating a handy -- albeit makeshift -- inter-machine link. The way it works is similar to AirDrop. Just drag-and-drop your file onto the Dropzone and it'll show all the possible destinations. Participating machines must be running DropCopy on the same network. Simple. If AirDrop just doesn't cut it for you because you're on a non-Lion Mac, you must send files to a non-Lion Mac, or you need to send files across a wired network, DropCopy is the answer. It's available in a free 3-machine limited version or a Pro version for US$4.99 from the Mac App Store.
Daily Mac App: Soulver
Soulver, which has billed itself in the past as a "plain English" calculator, has been around for the past few years as a complex calculator with a simple interface. To use Soulver, type in a math question as you would write it out on paper. Soulver provides the answer as you're typing, ranging from simple math and currency conversions to complex problems. The awesome thing about Soulver is that you also can type in words and Soulver knows what you're talking about. What to know how many miles are in 100 meters? Type "100 meters in miles" and you'll find it's roughly .06 of a mile. Soulver can keep track of stocks as well, but you have to program the app first. Once your preferences are set, tell Soulver the stock symbol and it spits out the current stock price. Or, if you want to purchase ten shares of Apple stocks and you're in the UK, type in 10 AAPL in Pounds and it tells you that it's currently £2,539.02. It's not a sophisticated scientific calculator, but can do basic algebraic equations, functions and other bases. Soulver is $24.95 and is available via the Acqualia site or through the Mac App Store. iPad and iPhone versions of Soulver also are available.
Daily Mac App: Shakespeare in Bits (updated)
While William Shakespeare's works are revered and deserve the praise, it's hard to grasp what's going on in his plays at times, especially if you're just starting your studies. While the language is still English, at times it is as foriegn to us as the words "iPhone," "iPad," "tweet" or "LOL" would be to the Bard. Mindconnex Learning Limited is helping to bridge the cultural gap through its series of desktop, iPhone and iPad software, Shakespeare in Bits. Shakespeare's plays are broken down into short bites. When a play is loaded, you can see a list of characters and detailed plot analysis exploring themes, imagery, language and more. The plays themselves are broken down by act, then by scene, then into smaller chunks of text. Animation is on one side while a menu on the right lets a user toggle between the play text, notes and a synopsis. In text mode, symbols beside the lines give more insight into the context and clicking highlighted words reveals the modern equivalent. I checked out a trial version of "A Midsummer Night's Dream," ironically the first Shakespeare play I ever read as a child, and immensely enjoyed it. The animation is simple, but does a good job at conveying the action. The voice acting is extremely well-done. As the animated scenes run, the play text highlights the person speaking at that time. Subtitles can be shown, and the play can either auto-advance or stop after each bit is played. The version of Shakespeare in Bits directly from its website, available as a trial, runs on Adobe Air. The Mac App Store versions are native Cocoa apps and has a slightly different multiwindow interface. Retail price is $19.99 per play with "Romeo and Juliet" and "Macbeth" currently available in addition to "A Midsummer Night's Dream." While this might seem steep, these are a good investment as plays such as "Romeo and Juliet" tend to come up repeatedly in high school and college, and this is an excellent learning tool. Updated: Clarified the differences between the Mac App Store and website builds of the Shakespeare in Bits programs.
Daily Mac App: CPU LED
Recently I've become a bit obsessed with CPU usage. Not because my 2011 MacBook Pro is underpowered -- far from it with its Quad-core Core i7. My concern is that the CPU generates an absolute bucket load of heat. CPU LED is a fantastic little menu bar tool for keeping an eye on your CPU load. It sits there with a small, customisable graphic that updates dynamically to display CPU load at a glance. It'll display each core or virtualised core separately or create an average for the whole CPU, depending on your preferences. There are loads of indicators to choose from, including Apple symbols, smilies, bars, colored circles and 3D chips. If you can't find something to your taste you can easily load your own icons. While CPU LED is a free download from the Mac App Store, there are two add-ons available as in-app purchases. The first is a Memory LED, which is available for US$0.99 and does what CPU LED does but for RAM, so you can keep an eye on your RAM usage and see when your system is paging to and from your disk. The second is Disk LED, which will set you back $1.99 (also available as a separate purchase). Disk LED monitors your disk activity and allows you to check their health status on-the-fly. While programs like iStat Menus are more configurable and comprehensive, CPU LED gives you at-a-glance information on your CPU at all times, is lightweight and most importantly, it's free. So if you're at all concerned about your CPU load and you've got space to spare in your menu bar, give CPU LED a whirl. You might like it.
Daily Mac App: MetaX
While getting ready for my husband's move to the US from the UK, we've both been digitizing our DVD collections so it's less for him to haul, and I gain extra room for what he does bring. What I'm using to tag the files for easy browsing in iTunes and on the Apple TV is MetaX. We wrote a tutorial on using the meta-tagging program in 2009, and it pretty much holds true still in Lion. Drag a video file into the program and you can search for associated tags through tagChimp and Amazon, or write your own. If the file isn't in iTunes, it'll copy or add it to your library based on your settings. To edit an existing file in iTunes, right-click the file, select "Reveal in Finder," and drag the file to MetaX. It'll replace the one in iTunes. If you're using Handbrake, you can set the preferences in Handbrake to send a file straight to MetaX once it's done ripping or converting it. There's a robust feature set in MetaX, including various browsers to aid your search for tags and cover art, a frame grabber if you'd rather use a still from your video file and a barcode scanner for using the DVD packaging to search for tags. There are a few glitches. Sometimes, the file will have two entries in the iTunes library. Delete the duplicate entry, but do not delete the file. I learned this one the hard way when I accidentally deleted the iTunes copy and had to rerip part of a DVD. The tag search also tends to stop after a period of time, but relaunching MetaX will take care of that. MetaX is a free download, and it's worth checking out if you're considering digitizing the DVDs you already own.
Daily Mac App: Color Splash Studio
It's been interesting to see how many new non-Photoshop image applications have been coming out for the Mac. While Photoshop can apply just about any effect to an image, I'm seeing an increasing number of specialized, low cost apps that do one or two things exceedingly well and don't require a mega-investment in Photoshop. A case in point is Color Splash Studio. The app allows you to take a color image, turn it to grayscale, and then brush selected color back in. This isn't an effect you would use on every image, but it has its place and can look pretty amazing if the subject matter supports it. Color Splash Studio is easy to use. You start by importing any image, including camera raw photos, and the app displays a grayscale image on your screen. With a brush, you basically paint the color back in, perhaps highlighting a flower or a sunset. If you make a mistake, there is an undo command, or you can brush the grayscale back onto the image if you get a bit sloppy defining an edge. The app provides zoom to help in maintaining edge accuracy, as well as an inverse mode so you can make an object grayscale while everything else is in vivid color. You can set the opacity and size of the brush in addition to its softness. In the hybrid picture that results, you can adjust the grayscale or color parameters separately including exposure, blur, contrast and hue (if you are working with color). I've enclosed a couple of sample screens in the gallery. Color Splash Pro is normally US $4.99, but is being introduced at $1.99 in the Mac app store. If you have a need for this effect and don't have a high-end image editor, it's a very worthwhile purchase. %Gallery-134672%
Daily Mac App: Pandoras Box
I enjoy integrating Pandora into my music rotation along with my iTunes library and Spotify, but doing so on the desktop either means keeping another web browser window up or downloading Pandora's desktop client for OS X. Pandoras Box does a good job in condensing the service down to a menu bar app, but there are a few caveats. Pandoras Box is a recent arrival to the Mac App Store, but the first version turned away many potential users by requiring both a paid account for Pandora and downloading the desktop client. However, a recent update eliminates both those requirements, turning it into a more useful utility for casual and power Pandora users. It's easy to give a thumbs up/thumbs down rating from the app, or undo it, and toggle among your pre-established stations. However, creating a new station involves using an existing official Pandora client or the website. You can tweet what you're listening to in Twitter and links are provided to iTunes and Amazon for purchases. There is the option to match songs with those in iTunes to increase play count there. Other options include integration with Last.fm, using keyboard media keys, enabling Growl notifications and launching at login. US$4.99 might be a little high for Pandoras Box. Similar apps run around $2.99, and I think that's a fair amount to charge for features that it has.
Daily Mac App: iProcrastinate
Most of us have a love-hate affair with task management apps. We hate the fact that we have to use them, but love the fact that some of them really help us get stuff done. iProcrastinate, a free task manager for the Mac aims to fall into the love category. iProcrastinate helps you avoid its namesake by making creating and completing tasks super simple. You've got your standard to do-style tasks with colorful check boxes and stars for more important tasks. There's a rating system for how urgent a particular task is, but there's also the ability to mark a task as in progress, which a lot of simpler task managers don't provide. Each task can be sorted into "Subjects" that act as collections, so you can categorise your tasks. The tasks themselves can be divided into steps, which allows you to create an overall task and still detail what needs to be done and check it off as you go -- something really useful for packing a suitcase for instance. Repeating tasks are available if there's a certain job that needs doing once a week, month or year and you want it pop-up automatically. You can also set dates for your tasks, so if you know you have to do a certain task next Monday, you can go ahead and program it in before you forget. iProcrastinate also allows you to sync your tasks via Dropbox or via Bonjour over a local network, while there's a US$0.99 iProcrastinate iPhone app that lets you take your task management on the road. iProcrastinate for the Mac is a nice, simple and easy to use task manager that's got some nice features to boot. If you haven't already got your heart set on something like Producteev or Wunderlist, then give it a try for free -- you might just like it.
Daily Mac App: Gratuitous Space Battles
Do you like space battles? Do you like explosions? Do you like strategy games? Gratuitous Space Battles is worth a look, then. While it isn't perfect, I've spent hours playing this game because it is so much fun to zoom in to a battle and see tiny fighter ships flying around gigantic space cruisers. But first let me describe how Gratuitous Space Battles works. You play the role of a fleet commander, and must create a fleet from somewhat limited resources. In fact, you actually "build" your ships based on a set of weapons and subsystems, and you place theses on a variety of ship chassis that range from tiny fighters to huge cruisers. You position your fleet, give a few orders (generally non-specific orders but you can set parameters to tweak the automatons piloting your ships) and set the battle in motion. During battle, which can be sped up or paused, you are a passive observer -- but that's the point. The idea is that you'll watch your wind-up toys duke it out and scoot around the screen, as you zoom and pan to watch the mayhem. As you win battles you're allowed to "buy" more powerful or efficient systems for your ships, and even unlock other races, which provide a variety of ship configurations to build upon. Gratuitous Space Battles is an interesting mix of strategy and resource management. As you move around and zoom in/out you're treated to some great visuals and sounds. For example, zooming in you'll see each fighter (tiny compared to cruisers) flying around, shooting and you'll hear the sounds of each weapon and explosions aplenty. It's great fun to watch this unfold. Still, your fleet is on autopilot. You cannot change orders during battle. This is an unfortunate flaw, but it forces you to think more carefully about the orders you give before battle. I'd like to see a more thorough set of orders as well, however, as you cannot target specific enemy ships, as a strike team would do. In fact, early on you may become frustrated as your ships do some dumb things. But I found that if you experiment with the orders and create teams within your fleet, you stand a much better chance of simulating an AI. If you stick to merely placing your ships with default commands you will not be pleased with your dimwitted captains fleeing battle once their damage gets too low! Despite these shortcomings Gratuitous Space Battles is fun, and even more fun to watch. I recommend pausing before jumping from fleet placement to battle, as that's when the app tends to crash. But once you see what's going on during battle you'll see why this game is processor intensive. Each weapon has a damage counter, each ship has a plan, and all of these details can be seen when you zoom in. Or zoom way out to see the bigger picture. You cannot zoom out to see the entire battle at once, however. Gratuitous Space Battles is $16.99, but there's a free version as well. I recommend you check it out and see if you like the game play, but give the learning curve a chance. I play the game on a big HDTV and it's glorious.
Daily Mac App: GeekTool
GeekTool was released as a free download on the Mac App Store a few weeks ago, and it's remained at the top of the download chart since. It's been around for years, and we've featured it a couple of times on TUAW, but the MAS release allows it to reach a new audience. Unlike the GeekTool of yore, the MAS version is not a preference pane, but a separate app. It allows users to display various information on their desktops via three plug-ins: file, shell and image. These are referred to as geeklets and can be used as follows: File: It displays live content from any file. It's mostly used to monitor system or application activity. Shell: This displays the output of any Unix shell command and is the root of a lot of the customizations in the program. Image: Originally developed to display monitoring graphs, it's also used for image customization. As the product description warns, this isn't for general Mac users, but those who are comfortable with Unix and shell commands. Drag one of the plug-ins to the desktop, then customize it for your personal use. There's a lot of scripts to choose from out there. This piece from Lifehacker will help get you started and Mac OS X Tips has a comprehensive list of geeklets. You can use GeekTool to monitor everything from time and date wherever you want to pulling your RSS feed and displaying the album cover of your current iTunes track. While it's not for the brand-new Mac user, or for the faint of heart, GeekTool is good to see if you're interested in learning more about the underpinnings of your Mac.
Daily Mac App: Go2Shell
Here on the Daily Mac App we love apps that do one thing really well. Today's app is no exception. Go2Shell is a tiny little 0.3MB app available for free from the Mac App Store that has the potential to speed up your work-flow if it involves Terminal. Go2Shell simply launches a Terminal session with the current folder you're navigating in Finder, or the folder that Go2Shell is located in, open for work. It even supports iTerm, iTerm 2 and xterm if you're not a fan of Apple's own-brand Terminal. It's so simple, it's almost beautiful and if you happen to have to modify files in Terminal, or any other similar task, Go2Shell could be just ticket to save you time. The best way to use Go2Shell is to drag it onto your Finder toolbar and from there launch it whenever you're in the desired directory. If you need something a little more advanced you should check out one of our previous Daily Mac Apps, DTerm, which gives you hotkey access, and a floating entry form into the Terminal session. Go2Shell is a great free download from the Mac App Store that does one thing and one thing well. So if you're a Terminal guru (even the app's preferences are accessed through the command line) then give Go2Shell a whirl. You might like it.
