As more of our lives moves onto the internet every day, the importance of protecting our sensitive data grows. While many of us are happy to share vacation photos and blog posts with the world at large, some information will always need to be protected yet easily accessible when we need it.
mSecure from mSeven Software is one of the many apps designed to keep your passwords and more safe from prying eyes, one with a far cheaper price than most. The app stores everything from credit card information and web passwords to Social Security numbers and bank account numbers. In a field of increasingly-cramped competition, can mSecure offer new features and better performance to help it stand out?
Sometimes it feels like a day doesn’t go by without the release of another app in the over-saturated to-do list category. I’ve used Things to organize my life since it was first introduced, and I’ve stuck with it through the years, even despite the developers’ embarrassingly long delay for proper cloud syncing. My loyalty to Things has always been shaky, which has kept me experimenting with it’s many competitors.
I recently tried out Cheddar to see if it could replace Things as my go-to organization tool on my Mac. Here’s how that worked out.
Recently, I’ve found myself buying less music than at any other point in my life. The rise of “all you can eat” monthly subscriptions to services like Spotify and Rdio have sapped my desire to pay for an album when I can just stream it. When I want a more passive music-listening experience, I opt to have services like Pandora make my listening choices for me. I’ve recently fallen back in love with the seemingly marginalized medium of radio due to the passive listening experience and the skillful curation of knowledgeable DJs who can find great new music for me.
Radium has long been a popular app for listening to internet radio. I’ve been using the private beta of Radium 3 for the past week to listen to the radio on my Mac. How does it stack up to its predecessor and the competition?
For people like me that hate paperwork, tax season can be a terrifying time of year. The tediousness of entering a slew of financial information and the fear of a potential audit makes the whole process one that I dread. For the past few years, I’ve been content to just dedicate a weekend to organizing my information and doing it all myself via the TurboTax website. When I saw that TurboTax offered a desktop version of their service via the Mac App Store, I decided to use it this year instead of the web app.
How does the app stack up against its own web-version and the competition?
When you spend most of your work day in front of a Mac’s screen, you develop a system for being productive. Fortunately, there is an abundance of apps available for OS X that fill very specific needs and help keep you and your computer running efficiently. Some of the utilities that I use on a daily basis are rather expensive, such as 1Password.
However, I use dozens of utilities as part of my workflow that cost five bucks or less. Here are some of my favorites.
These days, it seems like people want to share just about every little detail of their life with others online. In a world where few brunches go un-instagramed and few complaints about the DMV go un-tweeted, its nice to see personal journaling experiencing something of a resurgence.
I’ve kept a paper journal for about ten years, and while it will always store entries about the more important events of my life, I recently started keeping a daily digital journal for recording the less momentous ones. I’ve spent a few days playing around with Memories from Juicy Cocktail. Can it handle my digital journalling needs?
Back when I first made the switch to a Mac, part of the appeal of both the OS and the hardware was the minimalist approach that Apple takes. I always hated having to delete the trial software that Microsoft lets other companies dump into their systems. Apple lets you start with a clean slate and enjoy your new machine from the second you turn it on. Unfortunately, though, Macs are just as prone to getting cluttered as anything else over time.
Even if you aren’t a digital neat-freak like me, chances are the available space on your drive shrinks a little bit more every day. If you aren’t proactive, you’re going to run out of space. If you’ve gotten a newer Mac with an SSD or replaced your Mac’s hard drive with an SSD, chances are you’re dealing with less storage on your Mac than you would have expected in the past. While SSD prices are falling, the price-to-capacity ratio still means that space is at a premium, and you’ll need to start keeping better tabs on what is eating up space. Luckily, there are a number of options for cleaning up the clutter, and we are going to take a look at a few that I’ve used in my battle to keep my laptop lean.
When the Mac App Store opened on Snow Leopard, the very first thing I downloaded was Angry Birds. I didn’t own an iPhone, but I heard about the game all the time and was excited to see what all the fuss was about. Since then, my life has been filled up with a few more iDevices, and I own Angry Birds on all of them.
When I heard that a new Star Wars themed Angry Birds was being developed, I was prepared to throw some more cash at Rovio. How did the latest release turn out?
Panoramic photography has become wildly popular in recent years, due in no small part to the smartphone market getting flooded with devices that have the functionality built right in. These sorts of shots have never been a staple of professional or amateur photography, but they can help give a broad perspective on interesting scenes.
Stitcha, by Florian Denis, gives you the ability to merge several different photographs or video clips into a single wide-angle shot. This simple app aims to keep the process as straightforward as dragging and dropping.
As social networks continue to grow, users share more and more of their lives online. Services like Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and LinkedIn are taking over as the primary places we spend our time online. Consequently, these networks are filled with years of our status updates, vacation photos, resumés, and more.
But what would happen if Instagram accidentally deleted years-worth of those 1970′s-style filtered photos of your brunches at the French restaurant down the street from your apartment? What if you lost access to your Facebook account and now would be unable to post a half-hearted happy birthday message to that guy who you vaguely remember from 7th grade P.E.? Fortunately, a service called SocialSafe has your social media life covered.
