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Daily Mac App: Quick Note
Lots of people still use notepads to jot down quick reminders, even when they're in front of their Macs. Quick Note is a note taking utility that gives you the simple, quick writing experience of a pad of paper on your desk, but on your Mac. Simplicity and speed are key in this kind of app and thankfully Quick Note delivers. It's super simple. Click the "+" for a new note and type away. It gives you a pleasing yellow lined paper-style note pad, complete with a black leather textured top, that reminds me of some of the A4 "refill" pads I chewed through when I was a kid revising for exams. Type your note and it's saved in the pop-out drawer to the side complete with a search tool for easy access. Simple and efficient. If you want your notes synced to different Macs, currently Quick Note has support for cloud syncing via Diigo.com, but support for Google Docs, Dropbox and some other cloud services are "coming soon" according to the developer. Quick Note is a simple, straightforward note taking utility that can replace that paper pad you still keep next to your Mac for scribbling down notes. If you're not after the complexity of something like Evernote, and alternatives like QuickNotes or OS X's own Stickies are too simple for you, then Quick Note could be the app for you. It's free, but ad-supported -- thankfully you can quickly close the advert so it's not intrusive in its current implementation. Checking it out if you're still looking for that perfect note taking app for your Mac.
Daily Mac App: Snap App
Taking screenshots on Mac OS is easy thanks to its decent built-in capture utilities, but taking nice ones is not as simple as you might think. App Snap is a developer-orientated screenshot utility that makes taking screenshots for app display a bit easier to manage. It's not just handy for developers, the utility is great for anyone who regularly takes screen captures of application windows, whether it's in an iOS or Android simulator or just regular desktop Mac apps. App Snap does what most other capture utilities will do, takes an image of the window of the app in question. Where it really shines is in the ability to quickly create aesthetically pleasing captures without having to mess around clearing your desktop and worrying about image sizes or aspect ratios. Once you've captured your window, App Snap will place the capture on an App Store orientated background, in this case the default desktop wallpaper at the right size and ratio for submission to Apple. It automatically obscures finder and anything else you might have on your desktop and gives you a nice clean App Store-ready capture in one click. In writing up these Daily Mac Apps, I often fight with screen capture tools with a combination of OS X's built-in tools, SnagIt and Skitch, aided by BackDrop to obscure the rubbish I have littering my desktop. App Snap has replaced all those apps with one click for US$0.99 If you're an developer for the Mac or iOS app stores, or even the Android Market, then App Snap could be a great addition to your workflow that takes the hassle out of screen captures.
Growl developers describe the app's major changes
Growl, the notification system for Mac OS X, was recently updated to version 1.3. While "dot updates" to apps usually don't signal a major change, that's not the case with the latest version of Growl. In a post on the Growl blog, the team described the major changes that have taken place: Growl is no longer free. The app has a full-time development team, and all of the money made from the sale of the app on the Mac App Store goes toward supporting the continuing development. Growl is available for US$1.99, and the team reported that without moving to a paid app model, development would have ceased. It's still, however, an open source project. Growl doesn't have to be installed for you to get notifications. When developers update their apps to take advantage of Growl 1.3, Growl no longer has to be installed for users to get notifications. As the team puts it, "Think of these updated applications as Growl, and the Growl application as Growl Pro. The Growl 1.3 SDK includes a framework which can display a notification, even if Growl is not available." Growl 1.3 supports sandboxed applications. Sandboxing is becoming a requirement for any application on the Mac App Store, and would have broken Growl had the team not made changes. The team says that Growl 1.2 and earlier will no longer work with sandboxed apps. Out-of-date apps don't work with Growl 1.3. Some apps will need to be updated in order to work with the new version. Developers can contact the Growl team for assistance, and users can download Growl Version Detective to determine if an app works properly with Growl. It's still Open Source. The team says that Growl "will remain Open Source for as long as people want to be able to modify the code." The source code is available at their Google Code Hosting project under the BSD license.
Daily Mac App: Gelatin
Some tasks need a really simple, straightforward, no-nonsense app to get the job done. Combining PDF files is one of those tasks, and Gelatin is the app to do it. Preview can do a similar thing, but it's certainly not as straightforward as Gelatin. The app offers a window to drag-and-drop the files you want combined together onto. Select them in finder in the order you want them melded and drop them onto Gelatin. The app will take care of the rest spitting out a PDF with all the files you've dropped onto it joined end-to-end. You can take the file and edit it up with Preview, email it off or save it. Gelatin is free for a limited time and is worth a download for the shear ease of use. If you ever need to combine PDF files, making Gelatin part of your workflow could save you time and effort.
Daily Mac App: Discovr Music
Music discovery has become harder and harder, especially if you, like me, don't listen to the radio. There are quite a few radio-type music discovery services, things like Last.fm and even Spotify will do it. But what about when you simply want to search, listen to snippets and explore artists that might tickle your fancy based on your favorite bands? Discovr Music does just that. It allows you to explore a plethora of artists, all linked in a mind-map style interface. Start by searching for your artist of choice. From there you can listen to song clips, read their biographies, get links out to their music videos on you tube, as well as links to Last.fm, iTunes, Amazon, MySpace, Spotify, Rdio, Mog and even Rhapsody. Bouncing back to the map you can visually explore similar artists, and a simple double click takes you into their info page, to preview songs and see whether you like them. It's a really engaging and slick experience. It's certainly a lot faster and more effective for finding new artists you might like than relying on the radio-style suggestions of Last.fm and their ilk. The problem I have with Discovr Music, and something that comes from the modern expectation that, rightly or wrongly, everything should be free -- it's US$4.99. Although the music search is good, the clips of songs are just that, clips. I can appreciate that a developer needs to make money, but $5 just seems a bit steep to me -- it is purely a music discovery app, not something to replace the likes of Spotify. Having said that, the app works well, is a great alternative to the likes of Last.fm for music discovery, and if you're into music and finding new artists, then you'll probably find it's $5 well spent.
Photoshop Elements 10, Premiere Elements 10 now in the Mac App Store
Announced by Adobe back in September, Photoshop Elements 10 and Premiere Elements 10 are now available in the Mac App Store. Photoshop Elements made its official Mac App Store debut with version 9 earlier this year, but this is the first time Premiere Elements has appeared in Apple's OS X storefront. Photoshop Elements 10 has the same underlying app engine as its bigger brother Photoshop, but is released with a smaller set of tools and features designed for the consumer. The biggest improvement in the latest version of Photoshop Elements is the addition of content-aware tools that let you easily replace a portion of your image by selecting it or brushing over it with a Smart Brush. Similar to Photoshop Elements, Premiere Elements is a scaled-down version of Adobe's professional video editor Premiere. Premiere Elements is designed to be a video editor for consumers who want to create home videos quickly and easily. It includes several one-click tools to correct flaws in a video, an InstantMovie builder and export support for Facebook and YouTube. Both Premiere Elements and Photoshop Elements can be purchased for US$80 each from the Mac App Store. [Via The Loop]
Apple now requiring Mac App Store applications to be sandboxed by March 2012
Apple's already made OS X more like iOS in more ways than one, and it looks like it will soon be taking another step in that direction. As of March 1st, 2012, Apple will require all apps available in the Mac App Store to be "sandboxed," which Apple says is "a great way to protect systems and users by limiting the resources apps can access and making it more difficult for malicious software to compromise users' systems." The other side of that coin is that by limiting access to said system resources, applications are also more limited in what they can do, which has left some developers facing a tough decision: either comply and get in the App Store, or go it alone. They will be able to request access to some resources, but they'll have to provide a justification for it to Apple as part of the submission process. As TUAW notes, however, this isn't a completely new development -- Apple had actually intended to implement the requirement this month, but it's apparently decided to give devs a bit more time to get used to it.
Apple to require sandboxing in Mac App Store apps as of March 2012
Apple sent an email to registered developers today that's bound to ruffle some feathers -- again. As of March 2012, Apple will require all apps submitted to the Mac App Store to implement sandboxing. This isn't a new development, as Apple was initially going to require sandboxing starting in November of this year. Apple has apparently delayed implementing the rule for another few months, but the requirement itself may cause challenges for some Mac developers. Apple's motivation behind requiring sandboxing is all about security: "Sandboxing your app is a great way to protect systems and users by limiting the resources apps can access and making it more difficult for malicious software to compromise users' systems." But the company's all-or-nothing approach is potentially problematic; "As of March 1, 2012 all apps submitted to the Mac App Store must implement sandboxing," Apple says. Over the past few months, developers ranging from Daniel Jalkut to Dr. Drang to Real Studio to Peter Sichel have pointed to flaws and shortcomings in the sandboxing approach, including a buggy Carbon implementation and questionable support for most AppleScript-centric automation tools. Jason Snell and Andy Ihnatko have weighed in as well, concerned that sandboxing may lead to a dumbing down of Mac App Store options or the death of AppleScript itself. (Not all developers are upset, to be sure.) The sort-of good news is Apple does allow for some exceptions to its pending sandboxing policy. "If your app requires access to sandboxed system resources you will need to include justification for using those entitlements as part of the submission to the Mac App Store," Apple says. But then there's the bad news: "Apps that are being re-engineered to be sandbox compatible may request additional temporary entitlements. These entitlements are granted on a short-term basis and will be phased out over time." Before the inevitable complaints about this policy kick in, it's worth taking a step back and remembering that unlike the iOS platform, the Mac App Store isn't the only legitimate way to get apps onto a Mac. That's probably cold comfort to developers who have found the Mac App Store an easier and more lucrative channel for app distribution than the traditional methods. There's also the fact that any discussion that begins with "The Mac App Store isn't the only way to get apps on a Mac" inevitably ends with the ominous pronouncement "yet." That said, just like some iOS App Store restrictions, this new policy seems a bit on the extreme side. Just like the "no third-party IDEs" rule for the iOS platform last year, it also seems like a policy born in committee that may have sounded like a good idea to Apple at the time but is eventually destined to be modified or deprecated once its real-world implications for the Mac platform become clear. The fact that Apple has already delayed implementing the sandbox requirement by five months could mean further reprieves or workarounds for developers with affected products.
Daily Mac App: Tunesque
Apple's app and media world is pretty extensive -- music, videos, books, apps and games. Tunesque makes searching both the iTunes Store and the Mac App Store a breeze, right from your menu bar. It has to be said that searching for things within either the Mac App Store or iTunes isn't the easiest of operations. For starters you actually have to fire up one of two apps, and let's be honest here -- iTunes isn't the fastest program around. You can't search both stores at the same time either, so it's a double job if you're looking for something like Evernote for both the Mac and the iPhone. The tiny little app sits in your menu bar waiting for a search command. Simply click the button and start typing, just like you would with Spotlight. By default Tunesque will display everything -- music, movies, TV shows, artists, Mac apps, iOS apps, eBooks, audiobooks, podcasts and even iTunes U; but you can refine your search areas if you're never going to want to pull up things from iTunes U, for instance. You can also choose which country store to search too, meaning that by default you can search another country's store or of course your local one. Tunesque will search as you type in you keywords and give you all the possible results in a drop-down menu. You can then navigate the list with the arrow keys, or a mouse hover, with a nice little pop-up summary of the highlighted search result displayed to the side, just like Spotlight does in Lion. Once you've found what you're looking for it's just a case of hitting enter, or clicking on the correct entry, to be taken to the appropriate store. It's a great aggregator that makes searching the Apple media and app stores an absolute breeze. It's one of those apps that makes you question why Apple didn't build that kind of functionality straight into Spotlight, and it has changed the way I search iTunes and the App Stores. Tunesque is a great little app, and best of all it's available for free from the Mac App Store, so give it a whirl and let us know what you think.
Daily Mac App: QREncoder
QR codes are a great way of instantly sharing information with a quick camera snap? QREncoder is app for your Mac that'll let you quickly and easily generate them for printing, uploading and sharing. You can encode almost any sort of text into a QR code: a URL, phone number, text message, email address, twitter handle -- maybe even a haiku. QREncoder makes creating codes easy. Fire up the app, select the type of code you want, and bung your text in the box. You've got a choice of size for your QR code, 5, 6, 9 and 12px and you can save it as a PNG for later use. QREncoder is quick, easy to use and free from the Mac App Store, so is well worth checking out if you want to create quick response codes.
Daily Mac App: Disk Speed Test
You've got a shiny new SSD-equipped machine, but you're wondering just how fast that SSD really is. Disk Speed Test from Blackmagic will give you a quick, straightforward answer. It's incredibly easy to use. Disk Speed Test writes large chunks of data to your chosen disk and then reads that data, giving you a real-world read/write speed in MB/s. The program then tells you what kind of uncompressed video that drive will be able to handle and allows you to save the results as a screenshot. As you can see from the image above, my magnetic hard drive-equipped MacBook Pro isn't going to win any speed awards. It also couldn't handle anything above uncompressed SD video according to the app -- but then again that's not the sort of thing I would even dream of trying. If you're looking to capture uncompressed video direct to a disk, Disk Speed Test will give you an indication of whether it's going to be up to the job. So, if you're curious about your hard disk speed, regardless of whether it's just a simple magnetic hard drive, an internal SSD, a network mounted disk array, or even a beast of a Thunderbolt SSD drive -- Disk Speed Test will quickly and easily answer that for you with just one click. Blackmagic's Disk Speed Test is available for free from the Mac App Store.
Daily Mac App: Sound Cloud
You're a SoundCloud user. You love playing tracks on your Mac and love the idea of SoundCloud, but hate the fact that your poor old Mac sounds like a jet engine whenever you play a track thanks to Flash. SoundCloud app to the rescue. The official SoundCloud app brings "the full SoundCloud web experience to your Mac" allowing you to play tracks directly from your SoundCloud account, search, favorite and create playlists all using a native app. The sounds stream pretty instantly, while tag search is also supported so you can go exploring either through keyword search, through users or tags and save the good stuff for later. You can even drag-and-drop SoundCloud URLs onto the SoundCloud dock icon to create playlists. The SoundCloud app also supports the built-in Mac media keys, so you can pause and skip tracks like you would with iTunes. Growl support is bundled too, so if you've got Growl installed it'll notify you of track changes. The only disadvantage of using the desktop app over the in-browser SoundCloud site is that only tracks which have been made available for 3rd party applications within SoundCloud will appear in the app. For the rest you'll have to resort to the website. For me that didn't make much difference as my favorite stuff was all present in the app without issue. Recording your own stuff is a doddle with the desktop app thanks to the nice big "Share Your Sound" tab in the top left that reveals a massive "Rec" button that you simply hit to record from your Mac. If you're into SoundCloud, but hate that you have to use Flash, then check out the SoundCloud desktop app -- it's free and works pretty well.
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.
10.7.2 update adds some Lion interface tweaks
Amid the flurry of software updates Apple released yesterday was OS X Lion 10.7.2. The big feature of the latest delta release of Lion was, of course, iCloud. But the 10.7.2 update also brought other features, such as a speedier Safari web browser and stability improvements. However, there are also some small, very welcome, interface changes I've been noticing as I've been using 10.7.2 over the last 24 hours: Launchpad icons got bigger. The most noticeable UI change is that the size of the icons in Launchpad got much larger. About 60% larger actually. This is a very welcome improvement for those with less than perfect eyesight. It makes finding and launching an app in Launchpad that much easier and faster. Desktop preferences got iPhoto Places country flags. Another small, but useful, tweak is in the Desktop & Screen Saver System Preferences pane. Since OS X 10.6, you have been able to navigate your iPhoto photos by Places in the Desktop pane, but now under 10.7.2 Apple has added country flags that sort where you photos were taken. You can then navigate down through the hierarchy by State/territory (highway sign icon), city (building icon), and location of interest (globe icon). Before 10.7.2 you had the navigation hierarchy, but it was much harder to distinguish between countries because of the lack of flags. Remove apps from purchase history in the Mac App Store. A final tweak I've noticed is that now you can remove purchases from your Purchased history in the Mac App Store. Click the Purchased button at the top of the store then move your cursor over an app from your purchase list. You'll see a small X appear at the far right. Click it to delete the app from your purchase history. Deleting a currently-installed app from your purchase history won't delete it from your computer. If you've found any other unadvertised interface tweaks in 10.7.2 let us know in the comments!
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: 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%
Growl 1.3 now available on the Mac App Store
Growl, perhaps the most well-known and popular notification system for OS X, has just released version 1.3 as a Mac App Store exclusive. The previously free notification system has become a paid app with Growl 1.3. As Macstories points out, the reason the Growl team decided to make what was previously a free System Preferences pane into a US$1.99 app was so users would be provided with an up-to-date app utilizing the latest Apple technologies. So what's new with Growl 1.3? Almost everything. Growl has been rewritten from the ground up using a new architecture, sporting a new UI, and adding lots of features previous iterations of Growl never had. But not to worry, Growl 1.3 still retains everything you loved about Growl 1.2, they've just added a lot of cool new features to it. Among the coolest new features is a Notification Center-like Rollup window. The window, which is accessed from the Finder's menu bar (where you find Growl now), keeps a history of all your notifications that you've received from various apps that use Growl. This is especially handy when you're away from your computer and want to see what notifications you missed. Growl 1.3 is $1.99 in the Mac App Store. Users also can still download the free System Preference pane version 1.2.2 here.
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.
