Our sponsor this week is Yate, the Mac audio tagging app for serious taggers. If you want an easy way to add more info to your music files than you can in iTunes, it’s an app you should be sure to check out.
Organizing and tagging your audio files can be very tedious and time consuming. Yate aims to make it much easier. It lets you import audio tagging info from MusicBrainz or Discogs, and can help you quickly add missing album art info. It lets you add more metadata to your songs than you ever could with iTunes or OS X’s File Info. Then, you can add these changes to all of your songs at once with Actions, saving you the time of manually updating each song in an album.
Best of all, Yate integrates with iTunes, and was recently updated to work with the latest iTunes updates, so it can automatically sync your song tags with your iTunes library. You can use it to tag all of your mp3, m4a, and FLAC files, and keep your library up to date at the same time. If you ever need to change or revert tags you’ve added, Yate can take care of that, too!
Go Get It!
If you’re ready to start getting serious about tagging your music files, be sure to download Yate and try it out. You can test it for free for 14 days, then purchase a license for $30 to keep using all of its features. And if you have any trouble getting it going, be sure to get in touch with the Yate team; they’re great at making sure their customers can get the most out of their app, as we found while writing our review.
Microsoft isn’t usually the first company on our radar as Mac users, but with their upcoming release of Windows 8, they seem to be actually thinking different, for once. Windows 8 is easily the most dramatic change Windows has ever seen, taking it quite far away from its original Macintosh-inspired design. At worst, it takes some inspiration from the iPad in being a touch-centric UI, but otherwise, everything new in Windows 8 is a Microsoft-based design.
New innovation is always cause for excitement, and even if we love Apple, we’re always excited to see other companies pushing the bounds and making great new products. Windows 8′s new square and typography centric design is at least an interesting step in a new direction. It might be one that leaves most PC users behind, but it’s also one that piques our interest, at least a bit.
Has Windows 8 caught your interest, and are you looking forward to trying it out? Do you think it could tempt you away from OS X and iOS? We’d love to hear your thoughts in the comments below!
Social networking isn’t a new thing of 2012, but it’s sure hit a mass saturation point. You can’t ride public transit or eat at a restaurant without seeing people checking Facebook and tweeting pictures. It seems you’re more likely to see a Facebook page mentioned on an ad than the company’s own website, reminiscent of companies advertising their Aol. keywords back in the late ’90s.
So, it’s not surprising at all that the latest OS X and iOS feature deep Facebook and Twitter integration. You can share most things you do on your Mac in a click, sync birthdays from Facebook with Calendar, get Facebook and Twitter avatars in Contacts, and push notifications when you get @replies. It’s great for those addicted to Facebook and Twitter, but not so much for those who avoid social networking or who’d rather use another network like App.net.
Have you started using the Twitter and Facebook integration in OS X Mountain Lion? Do you like it, or would you just as soon they’d left it out?
Our sponsor this week is Last5, an app that makes it incredibly easy to track the time you spend on work and more each day. It’s designed to be the “Minimum Effective Dose Of Time Tracking” you need, just enough to track your time without taking you away from the task at hand.
Last5 was designed by Jonathan Yankovich, a freelance web and user experience developer who found that the worst part of his job was accounting for how he spent his day. After working all day out of coworking spaces and other distraction-prone environments, he wanted a tool that would let him move fluidly between people, projects, and conversations without having to punch in or out.
With most time tracking apps, you either wait until the end of the day and try to reconstruct your day (or worse, week!) from memory, which is stressful and time-intensive, or you use timers which are prone to being forgotten. Last5 is designed to let you think as little as possible about tracking your time. You can setup your projects, then throughout the day, Last5 will ask you what you’re working on. Just hit the correct button, and go on with your work. That’s it!
You can then see a breakdown of how you’ve spent your time from the dashboard, and integrate it with Harvest for accounting if you want. Last5 is also planning to add Basecamp and Freshbooks integration in the future, and currently lets you export your data in Excel format from pro accounts. Best of all, you can use Last5 from your iPhone or Windows PC, in addition to your Mac, so it’ll work wherever you’re working.
Go Get It!
If you’ve been looking for a more efficient way to track your time, Last5 might be just what you’ve been needing. You can sign up for a free Last5 account to get started, and when you’re ready to get more serious with a project dashboard, and Excel export, you can go Pro for $8/month or $60/year.
Best of all, you can get 20% off a year membership if you sign up before the end of the year with the coupon code appstorm. What better way to finish out the year and start the next than with a discount on an app that can help you be more productive?
Apple Stores have become all but ubiquitous in most major cities around the world. I live in Thailand, which doesn’t actually have its own Apple Stores, but their Apple Premium Resellers here, iBeat and iStudio, look quite the part of their Apple Store counterparts. And they’re everywhere, in all major malls and even small-town superstores.
Apple Stores are great places to try out the latest Macs and iOS devices, and make it rather easy to, say, buy anything from new power adapter for your MacBook or a new MacBook in just a few minutes. But if you’re not content with the default specs, you’ll want to head to Apple’s online store. There, you can trick out your Mac with all the ram and SSD space Apple offers.
Or perhaps you’re looking to save some money. In that case, you might be better heading to Amazon.com or a brick-and-mortar retailer. They don’t offer quite as fancy of a shopping experience, but they often are a bit cheaper at least.
That’s why we’re wondering: how do your buy your Macs and other Apple hardware? I personally have purchased all of my Macs from Apple’s online store, though I tend to pick up accessories as I need them at local Apple Premium Resellers. How about you?
