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Our sponsor this week is Doxie One, the little scanner that makes scanning simple. Doxie One scans your paper – simply, automatically, and with no computer required. To scan, just push the button and insert your sheet. Doxie scans anywhere with a simple, elegant design.
Doxie’s different than other scanners. It’s small – about the size of an empty paper towel roll – so you can tuck it in a drawer when you’re not scanning. Setup is easy: Connect power, insert an SD card (included), press Doxie’s button, and you’re ready to start scanning.
When you’re ready to organize, sync scans to your Mac or iPad, just like a digital camera. Doxie’s elegant Mac app creates multi-page searchable PDFs you can save to your computer, send to your favorite apps like Evernote and Dropbox, or share via iMessage. Doxie even works with your iPad with both Apple’s Lightning and 30-pin SD Card Reader accessories.
Doxie’s app sends your paper to Evernote, Dropbox, and even to friends or colleagues with iMessage on iPhone, iPad, and OS X – so it’s easy to share, back up, and access your paper everywhere you go.
Doxie is paperless for everyone – now shipping for just $149. Reserve one now.
We’re focusing on apps to help you with writing this month, and software art practice Dark Heartfelt Software makes some of the best. They’ve already had great success with minimalist writing apps Grandview and Launchwrite, which force you to focus on the current word and sentence rather than the entire document. Now they’ve released a new app, Notesdeck, which allows you to edit and consolidate notes across four different cloud services and between your Mac and iOS devices.
We got the chance to interview the man behind Dark Heartfelt, Michael Petruzzo, about his apps and design process. Read on to hear about Notesdeck, software design as art, App Store frustrations, and more.
When you’re always looking for the greatest new app, sometimes you forget about the awesome apps that power your life. The apps you use day in, day out to make money, stay in touch with family and friends, be creative, stay informed, and more are the most important apps, way more important that that new app that might come out tomorrow and just might revolutionize your life … or not.
Funny thing is, apps that you use all the time can fade into the background, and you’ll almost never think about them. It’s easy to take for granted the apps we use most. From your web browser to tools like Dropbox and Alfred or the launcher of your choice, there are apps you use every day without thinking about it, but you’d be hard pressed to live without them.
Today’s Thanksgiving in America, which makes a great time to stop and think of the things you’re grateful for, no matter where you call home. Our team has rounded up some of the apps we’re thankful for this year, and we’d love to hear from you. What Mac apps are you the most thankful to have around this year? Perhaps an older app that’s stood the test of time, or a newer app that’s recently become essential to your workflow. Either way, we’d love to hear about it in the comments below!
Our Productive Macs Bundle giveaway is now closed, and congrats to our winners Wbadger and Oli! If you haven’t grabbed a copy of the bundle yet and didn’t win, you’ve still got 4 days left to get a copy before the bundle deal ends :)
Want to start out 2013 on a productive note? Why not get started now? For the next 10 days, the latest Productive Macs bundle is on sell for $29.99. It’s quite an amazing bundle for that price, including TextExpander, Path Finder, TaskPaper, Optimal Layout, and more.
TextExpander alone makes the bundle worthwhile if you don’t already have it. It’s an essential productivity tool that can help you type repetitive text quicker, fill out forms in seconds, and more. Throw in Path Finder, a utility we recently called a full alternative to Finder that “provides so many additional features that you’ll almost definitely find at least one that’s invaluable”, and you’ve got quite a productivity bundle already. That’s not to mention the excellent plain text to-do list TaskPaper, Concealer for securing your private data, Optimal Layout to help you arrange your windows in the best layout on your Mac, and more, and this is a bundle you can’t miss.
That’s quite a shelf of productive apps.
Best of all, we’ve got 2 complete bundles to giveaway to our readers! Just leave a comment here before Tuesday, November 27th, and we’ll randomly pick two winners. You can also share the giveaway on Twitter, App.net, or Facebook, then comment with a link to your post, and you’ll get an extra bonus entry for each time you share it.
And if you don’t win, you’ll still have a chance to get the bundle, or you can go ahead and pick up a copy of the bundle right now if you can’t wait. It’s sure worth it!
It’s Thanksgiving week here in the United States and even though a lot of developers wait for Black Friday to discount their creations, there are already a lot of great games and utilities available. Included in the list are Pixelmator, Bastion, MoneyWiz, BioShock 2, and Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare. That’s only a few of the video games (I tried to even them out a bit) — there are a lot more in the full list, so treat yourself to a good time while you’re off from work on Thursday. (more…)
Have you ever wanted to save websites to PDF or image files in bulk? Then you’ll like our sponsor this week is W3capture, which is an app designed to make it easy to save websites in the format you want.
Whether you’re wanting to create full-sized screenshots of websites or want to create a thumbnail image of your new HTML design, W3capture has you covered. It lets you convert any page online or HTML file on your computer into a PDF file or jpg, bmp, svg, or png image. You can even choose whether or not you want to capture any Flash or other plugin based content on the sites.
Just add a list of the sites and files you want to save, then select the screen size you want to simulate. You can include the entire length of the page, or limit it to the size you want. Then, you can choose the final format of each site you’re saving, as well as any headers or footers you want to include, and W3capture will get to work. It’s your one-stop shop for saving webpages the way you want.
Go Get It!
W3capture normally costs $18, but if you’d like to get a copy of W3capture your Mac this week, it’ll only cost you $9 with our 50% sponsorship coupon. Just enter the coupon code AppStorm when checking out, and the discount will be instantly applied to your order.
Then, Ondesoft is running a Thanksgiving promotion this week, giving away free copies of their Audio Recorder and discounting many of their other apps. Be sure to grab your free copy of Ondesoft Audio Recorder before the end of the week!
In recent iterations of iOS — Apple’s mobile operating system for iPhone, iPod Touch and iPad — and in recent versions of OS X on the desktop, you will undoubtedly have noticed a move towards visual elements that mimic real-life objects. The ruled, yellow notepaper for the Notes app, the torn-paper effect at the top of the stitched, leather-bound Calendar app, and more are examples of this.
These software design elements mimicking real world objects have introduced a new word into our vocabularies: skeuomorphism. Such effects have, however, divided opinion, and it is just possible that we will see Apple shift away from these elements in future.
It’s been nearly 4 months since OS X Mountain Lion was released, and millions of Mac users around the world have already upgraded. Many of us upgraded our Macs as soon as it was in the App Store, while others were running it weeks earlier thanks to Apple’s developer program.
Mountain Lion brought many nice new features to OS X, from the Notifications Center and social network features to new apps like Reminders and Notes. Unfortunately, the new upgrade also left behind some older Macs, and many still don’t like the addition of more iCloud and iOS features in OS X.
I personally have been very pleased with Mountain Lion, and found the upgrade to be a great new change, but not everyone feels the same. That’s why we’re wondering: 4 months into the upgrade cycle, have you switched to Mountain Lion? Or are you still using Lion?
Is the cat that’s currently powering your Mac enough for your needs? We’d love to hear your thoughts in the comments below!
It’s week three of November and we’re back with another set of app deals. Featured in this edition are Star Wars: The Force Unleashed, Cloud Outliner, Sketcher, SkySafari, and more. There’s even a whole section dedicated to Star Wars. (more…)
Our sponsor this week is Jaksta Music Miner, an app that makes it incredibly simple to record streaming audio on your Mac. If you’ve ever wanted to record audio from a live conference or an online radio broadcast, you’ll love Jaksta Music Miner.
Jaksta Music Miner makes it incredibly easy to record any audio you come across online. Just start Jaksta Music Miner and set it to monitor your audio. Then, start playing the audio you want to record in your browser, and Jaksta will automatically recognize it and save it to your computer. It’s that easy.
Once your audio is recorded, Jaksta Music Miner will automatically tag the audio with relevant metadata and save it to your iTunes library. Now, all you’ll have to do is sync it with your mobile devices or play it directly from your Mac whenever you want to listen to it again.
Go Get It!
If you’ve been looking for a great way to record streaming audio on your Mac, then you should definitely try out Jaksta Music Miner. You can download a free trial, which will let you record 10 streaming songs to your Mac. Then, when you’re ready to purchase a copy, you can get it for just $14.95 this week, 25% off its normal price, with the coupon NOV-JMM25. Just enter that coupon code in the Source Code field on the order form, click recalculate, and you’ll see the discount applied to your order.
