I work from home on my own computer, so of course I have a bunch of apps to get me through the day. You know, I listen to music, send and respond to email, and am constantly using one browser or another. To tell you I stream music using Spotify or use Safari to browse isn’t really letting you in on any secrets of how I get through my day or giving out any tips on what apps I can’t live without.
Instead of looking to the more conspicuous apps that I use everyday and always have open, I want to let you in on some of the apps that don’t seem so integral at first blush, but that I just can’t make it through the day without. (more…)
I like puzzles, and I like trains, so it happens that I’m often mistaken for a seven-year-old boy or a very active octogenarian. I don’t mind, though, because sometimes I get to combine puzzles and trains, and that’s pretty cool. This isn’t Jigsaw.PuzzleStorm, though, so it’s got to be something a lot better than a 1000 piece locomotive, right?
That’s where Rails comes in, a labor of love from developer BeLight Software. Build your own rail yard and get your trains to their destination in this reboot of the DOS classic. But will the gameplay stand up after all these years? We’ll find out! (more…)
If you’re a devotee of Login Items, you may have begun to feel a certain heaviness in your Mac’s startup. Login Items tells OS X what it should launch when you turn your computer on, and I’ve been known to throw just about everything I’m going to need for the day in there. Too much, though, and you may begin to notice a lag.
Holding off on launching all of those applications would go a long way to helping, but I’m the impatient type. It seems Delay Start, a tiny app with one function, will do the waiting for me, though, so I can stagger how my apps are opened and stop bogging down my Login Items quite so much. We’ll see how much of a difference this uni-tasker can make. (more…)
There are plenty of screen capture apps, but they all seem to do too much or too little. If you haven’t found an app for creating and editing screen shots beyond what comes standard in Mac OS X, it’s likely because what’s available either gets in your way or doesn’t have enough features to make it worth a switch.
I’m right there in the same camp as you. I take a lot of screen captures and have tried a handful of different apps, but nothing’s ever stuck. Maybe Monosnap, a tiny screen capture app with a pile of features, will change all that. We’ll take a look at Monosnap and see if it has the chops to make me switch from the default OS X tools. (more…)
HyperDock is a fantastic app that brings some great features from Windows to the Mac. HyperDock’s developer hasn’t been lazing around, though. Next down the pipeline is HyperSwitch, a sister app to HyperDock that relies entirely on your keyboard.
HyperSwitch puts a lot of the great features of HyperDock at your fingertips, quite literally. Though still in beta, this promises to be a great app if its predecessor is anything to go by. Will HyperSwitch manage to dethrone HyperDock? Let’s try it out! (more…)
Our giveaway is now closed; congrats to our winners!
There sure are a lot of keyboard shortcuts to remember, especially in some of the bigger third-party apps. I’ve pretty much given up memorizing them all, and usually just look to the menus to find what I want. The problem is that always going to the menu, especially if I’m in an app that uses a lot of menu commands like an image editor, is that I’m being constantly pulled out of the workspace and away from what I’m actually doing.
MenuMate is a nifty little app that will sit in your menu bar or disappear altogether until its needed, but once triggered, it gives you all your application’s menu items to choose from, right where you’re working. We’ll try out MenuMate and see if it’s the timesaver it claims to be and really solves the shortcut problem … and then give you the chance to win a free copy of MenuMate! (more…)
With the announcement that Google Reader will be discontinued as of July 1, 2013, a lot people are scrambling for another feed reader service. If you’re one of them, you may be looking for more than just a web app to replace Google Reader and want a desktop app for your Mac to create a better reading experience. The problem is that so many Mac feed readers depend on Google Reader and won’t work without it.
We’ve gathered some alternatives you can start using right now ahead of the big shutdown. Some of the best feed readers out there are on the list, and we’ve got a good range of full-featured and minimalist, paid and free. Hopefully you’ll find something that can fill the Google Reader-sized hole in your heart.
Have you ever been transported to a faraway planet after your particle accelerator melted down and become best friends with a giant mud alien? If you have, call me, we should talk, because that is too cool, but let’s be honest with ourselves, you’re probably never going to do anything that cool.
If you want to pretend, though, you should maybe play Another World, because it has all that, a pterodactyl creature, and more. A refresh of the 1991 game, called Out of This World in North America, the 20th anniversary edition of Another World has all the charm and unexpected comradery that made the original so poignant. But is Another World still worth another look after all these years? (more…)
I’m subscribed to a bunch of different cloud storage services, so I have all these extra folders all over my computer. Nothing actually seems to be where it should and it can be hard remembering where I stuck something during my last round of “organization.” I’m on the look out for anything that can really get my Finder organized and save me from myself.
That’s where ClawMenu comes in, as a sort of hybrid of Finder and Launchbar. A place to add shortcuts for your applications, folders and files, it’ll allow you to browse all of that mess, too. How does it stand up against the real thing, though? (more…)
Video games are becoming much more about art, and while gameplay will always remain an important aspect, the look of the game can weigh as heavily. That’s why I was excited to find Draw a Stickman: EPIC, because the artstyle and the gameplay seemed equally inventive, both relying on your own drawings to work.
That’s putting a lot of pressure on the player, though. Can my little stickman shoulders bear the weight of all that responsibility? We’ll get drawing and see how I — and the game — hold up.
