Controlling music on an iPod has always been easy. The buttons are right there — there’s nothing more to it than that. When you look at most computers these days, that’s not the case. Some have media control buttons, some prefer to go with a special extra row of touch buttons, and others just don’t implement the idea into the keyboard well. Apple did it right with volume, play, pause, and skip buttons on the function row of its keyboards. The thing is, you can’t use those for, say, Pandora radio or YouTube because they’re in the browser.
Or can you? Tube Controller gives you full media key support for Google’s video website. Now let’s see how well that works compared to clicking and dragging. (more…)
I wasn’t one of those people who hated iTunes 11 right off the line, and was even fairly generous to it in my review. After a while, I just got used to the idea of a new — and improved, from Apple’s perspective — iTunes. All seemed well, until I started paying attention.
A few days ago I downloaded a new album from the iTunes Store on my iPhone: Daniel Bashta’s “The Invisible”. Since he’s one of my favorite artists, I purchased the album on the release date while on lunch break and listened to half of it. When I got home that night, I went to my Mac to transfer the music purchase so all my devices would be in sync. Of course, when I opened iTunes it wanted to download the LP and the entire album, but I paused it to shorten the process. To my surprise, the album did not transfer. My iPhone synced “successfully” and the album didn’t appear in my library. I then headed to the artist on my iPhone to find out what happened. The whole new album thing was gone.
But that was just the beginning. (more…)
Microblogging has become very popular thanks to Tumblr. The social network/microblogging service was founded in early 2007 by David Karp, accompanied by Marco Arment of Instapaper as the company’s lead developer. Since its launch, more than 86.8 million blogs have been created on Tumblr (as of late December 2012). It’s been going strong, and many people are happy with the service, but there’s always been one thing missing for some Mac users: a native app.
Now that’s no longer a problem, thanks to Yunseok Kim’s TumbleKit. (more…)
Macworld has always been a great place to network with your favorite app developers. There were even times when apple attended the conference and announced its own products. Now that those days have come and gone, it’s important to focus on the smaller companies, like Smile Software.
While at Macworld 2013, I spoke with Greg Scown and Jean MacDonald about the company’s history and latest developments. It’s the perfect follow-up to our previous interview with the company.
Pictures capture moments, videos capture time. The former is valuable, yes, but the latter is its parent. Sadly, it’s not realistic for the average person to capture a beautiful sunrise in video that’s as high resolution as a photograph. That’s because not everyone has a Red camera. (For good reason: they’re priced in the tens of thousands, far out of the price range of the average consumer.) However, you can always make a time-lapse: a series of images taken seconds (2–30) apart and then merged to form a beautiful moving picture.
Time-lapses are a fascinating concept, and also one of the best ways to show someone what a scene looks like because you can get a larger aperture and use fancy 10mm lenses. Since it’s captured differently than a video — there are less frames per second — you are able to get a much higher resolution, so you can edit and crop things to your liking. Time-lapses are perfect for constellation movements and you’ve probably seen a lot of them around Vimeo. If you’ve ever wanted to make your own, Sequence may just be the best app for that. (more…)
The holidays have come and passed and here we are again with those trusty deals for the week. You would think that cheap prices didn’t live through the end of the winter holidays, but they have. We’ve got some utilities, text editors, and music players waiting for you after the break. (more…)
It was a premature spring day in March of 2011 that users began downloading Bloom Built’s Day One en masse from the Mac App Store. People initially reacted by asking for more features and bug fixes, as the comments in our review later in the month of March show. It’s not that they didn’t like the app at all, but rather that it was incomplete for what it was meant to be. The majority asked for something that was not being delivered — something that arrived a month later: search.
Now, 20 months after the release of version 1.0 on the Mac App Store, I’d like to take another in-depth look at the features Day One has adopted since we last told you about it.
There are a lot of ways to manage how you interact with coworkers and people who are helping you with a project. Before the days of computers, you had to fax them a daily plan, call them up and discuss things, or even mail them a letter containing details. And if they lived next door, you could always walk over there. Now, however, things have been modernized and we have wonderful tools like Basecamp at our disposal. It was one of the best, until Kickoff 2.0 went into public beta.
Released in the first half of the month, the app is a completely revamped version of its collaboration predecessor. From the design to the features and way you do things, the app has been changed. We reviewed the original one back in 2011, but now design has become more important and developers are distinguishing their user interfaces from what Apple sets as a standard. The question you probably have is, what’s so different about this app that makes it worth upgrading?
Photographers and designers merely create. It’s up to the consumer to enjoy what these creators have prepared for them. Now, there comes a time when people would rather steal images than purchase them rightly. There’s also the moment the creator realizes he’d much rather have his name on what he’s made so that the world knows. This is why artists sign their work and photographers and designers add copyrights and watermarks to things. Doing so in iPhoto isn’t possible (though you could download Picasa for free). What you really need, though, is a dedicated app.
Watermarker, developed by Reactiv Code, is a nice-looking solution. It’s simple, has all the features you need, and doesn’t cost nearly as much as Digimarc. Sounds promising, right? Let’s find out if it really is that good.
With Christmas just next week, developers are starting to decrease the prices on their creations. From Boom to N.O.V.A. 2 to Sketch to Dropzone, the prices continue to drop across the board. There will be a special edition of the weekly deals with all the great apps you need for your new Macs next week, but for now let’s check out what’s on sale at the moment.
