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Hello again, readers.
Here we are trying to make the weekend closer for you. In this edition you’ll find out about the Aereo problems, the folding of the Ambrosia Software development team and the rumored roadmap for the upcoming Office releases. Then, of course, we’ve also got the best deals of the week for you to spend your hard-earned cash wisely. Don’t miss our reviews for the discounted apps, which are linked through the favicon right next to them.
Have a nice reading!
We just closed our giveaway, and would like to extend our congratulations to our winners: Rob, Guy einy, and Danic!
There’s so many ways to enjoy music on your Mac these days, but one of the old standbys that still works great is internet radio. There’s online radio stations of every genre and style, and radio is still a great way to find new music when you’re tired of playing your iTunes songs on repeat.
And if you want to listen to radio on your Mac, you just about can’t do better than Radium 3, the newest version of the popular internet radio app. We called it a sleek menubar radio app in our review, and it’s the way I personally listen to online radio throughout the work day.
Radium is a rather cheap utility at just $9.99 (or $6.99 during its still-running Easter sale), but we’ve got something even better for our readers this week: 3 free copies of Radium!
All the internet radio you want, right from your menubar
To get your chance at one of our 3 free copies of Radium 3, just comment below and let us know your favorite internet radio station. You can get an extra entry by sharing our giveaway on your favorite social network, then leaving another comment below with a link to your post.
We’ll close the giveaway this Friday, April 12th, so hurry and get your entry in!
Envato staff or those who have written more than two articles or tutorials for AppStorm are ineligible to enter.
Odds are, you have more devices laying around your house than ever before: a smartphone, most likely, along with, perhaps, an eReader, tablet, iPod, or gaming device. Keeping them all in sync is frustrating at best, impossible at worst. That’s where our sponsor this week, SyncMate, comes in.
SyncMate Free lets your Address Book and Calendar between your Macs, PCs, and mobile devices of all types: Windows Mobile phones, BlackBerry, Android (including the Kindle Fire), PSP, and more. You can even sync your online accounts, keeping everything synced between your Dropbox, Yahoo!, and iCloud accounts. You’ll also be able to view the messages on your mobile devices.
Then, with the Expert Edition, you can also sync iTunes media, iPhoto photos, notes, bookmarks, and sticky notes between all of your devices. You’ll also be able to sync folders in realtime between computers, and export text messages from your older Android, Windows Mobile, or Nokia phone. You’ll also be able to convert mobile media formats like .3GP to standard formats for newer devices. That might be just what you need to get everything moved from your old devices to a shiny new iPhone.
Go Get it!
Ready to make syncing all your devices simpler? Then you should go try out SyncMate. You can download the free version of SyncMate from their site, then upgrade to SyncMate Expert for $39.95 when you want more features. You can even get lifetime updates included for just $11.95 extra, if you’d like.
It's been over 2 years — and two OS X releases — since the Mac App Store was launched on OS X Snow Leopard. In that time, it's become ubiquitous in the world of Mac Apps, and most new apps we try out and review are exclusively on the Mac App Store. In fact, a good number of the apps I use daily are exclusively on the Mac App Store.
For the most part, the App Store is a great addition to the Mac, making it easier for developers to sell apps and giving us a centralized place for users to find apps and get updates. But, it's not all perfect: there's restrictions to what App Store apps can do, and some developers have backtracked from switching to the App Store, moving new versions of their apps back to exclusive sale on their own site.
As app users, it's not too often that we get the choice of where to buy apps. If developers sell on the App Store, usually the app is only on the App Store, and otherwise, it's only on their own site. There are apps that are an exception, such as the Omni Group's apps, which are sold on both the App Store and on their own site.
That's why we're wondering: When you can choose, would you rather buy an app from the App Store or from developers' own sites? Fill out the poll, and let us know why you choose what you do in the comments below.
We’d like to say a special Thank you! to our weekly sponsors from March for sponsoring our site and for the great apps they make. If you would like to feature your app on our site with an advertisement, be sure to check out our available slots on BuySellAds or register for a weekly sponsorship for your app.
If you haven’t already checked out our the great apps that sponsored our site last month, be sure to check them out now!
Pagico
Most of us need to use several productivity apps every day: one for todos, one for notes and files, and maybe another for your projects and more. Having to switch back and forth between these separate apps is a drag: it’s hard to make connections between dots, and your data is scattered all over the place. Pagico is here to help.
Pagico is like GTD with data management capability – it not only manages tasks, but also notes and files. By neatly organizing everything by projects, you can have your vacation itineraries stored right next to restaurant menus, or action items right on top of meeting notes.
PassLocker
You know you shouldn’t use the same simple password on every site online, but password managers can be so complex to setup, not to mention expensive. Perhaps you should try out PassLocker which is a new take on a password management app.
PassLocker is a nicely designed menubar app that makes it dead-simple to generate random passwords for your online accounts and save your account info in one place. You won’t have to install any browser plugins to use it, and there’s no extra features or settings to make it complex. It’s just a simple way to manage your passwords.
Magic Mind
Do you find yourself looking for calming music or background sounds to make your day at work less stressful? Magic Mind is an app that can help you out.
You can choose from 28 background sounds, including thunder, crickets, birds and more, to help you relax while tuning out other background noises. You can custom mix sounds and adjust the volume of each individual sound to get it sounding just like you want.
Disklens
Spotlight is one of your Mac’s best built-in tools, letting you find apps, files, emails, and more in seconds. Once you try to dig deeper, though, you’ll quickly find Spotlight’s interface to be limiting. That’s where Disklens comes in. Disklens builds on Spotlight’s powerful search engine, adding a convenient user interface on top that’s aimed at maximum efficiency in the daily routine of locating information on your Mac. It’s Spotlight, supercharged.
And a special thanks to you, our Mac.AppStorm.net readers, for reading and sharing our articles. We couldn’t do it without you!
Recently I’ve gotten interested in time management techniques and apps, and I’ve gotten to review a few Pomodoro Technique apps and even had an interview with the developer of one of them. If you’re easily distracted and have a tendency to procrastinate, there’s nothing better than a little pull on the ears to keep you on track and away from distractions, and those tools are great for that.
But what about when those tools become more distracting and harder to use than they are helpful? Having all those great features and animations can actually slow you down, as I have found. So the question is, are these tools actually necessary, and to what extent? Let’s explore a few of the ins and outs of the problem.
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And we’re back to Thursday’s News and Deals roundup!
The selection of news, deals and reads for this week looks superb, seriously. We’ve got Ulysses III coming to the Mac App Store and Reeder going free, Rdio’s new video streaming and Amazon’s cloud sync service.
Don’t miss our interesting reads for this week, because they are great! Alfred extensions, iCloud, App Store pricing, DuckDuckGo and more should give you enough reading material for the weekend.
Are you the kind of person that wears out the CMD, C, and V keys on your keyboard before anything else? Then perhaps you need a clipboard manager, an app that can help you get more out of copying and pasting on your Mac. That’s exactly what our sponsor this week, ClipBuddy, is designed for. And best of all, you can get ClipBuddy for free this week!
ClipBuddy remembers everything you’ve saved to your clipboard: text, images, and more. It then lets you quickly go back through everything you’ve copied, and paste exactly what you want into your apps. You can search through your clip history to find what you want, complete with info about when and where you copied from, so you’ll never lose anything even if you forget to paste it into your notes app. Then, there’s hotkeys and more to let you paste what you’ve copied easily.
The Ondesoft team continues improving ClipBuddy with updates, new features, and more. It’s recently gotten Dropbox sync, import and export options, settings to hide the dock icon, and more.
Go Get It!
ClipBuddy usually costs $29.95 from Ondesoft’s online store, but for this week’s sponsorship, we have a special deal. You can get a free copy of ClipBuddy just for liking it on Facebook or sharing it on Twitter. Head over to the Ondesoft ClipBuddy giveaway site for the info you need to get a free copy of ClipBuddy.
Did you wonder if we’ve forgotten about news this week? Worry no more, your weekly dose of news is here!
Is just that the holiday weekend is coming, and the city I live in becomes a jungle when it comes to finding a good gift. Also, we knew some really cool deals would be coming for Easter and we decided to hold off on publishing for a day.
The AppStorm team wishes you a Happy Easter — a few days in advance, because, you know, we love to anticipate great things!
One of the many new additions to OS X in Lion was AirDrop, a simple way to share files between Macs over WiFi. It sounded like a great solution, but turned out to be a bit more complicated than it seemed at first.
For one thing, the Macs would have to be on the same network, and without tweaking, AirDrop only works over WiFi. You’ll have to head over to terminal and do some tweaking to get AirDrop working over Ethernet. Then, it doesn’t work between OS X and iOS, making it only useful for sharing files between Macs on the same network — which in all likelihood means you already have another file sharing system in place.
There’s apps that one-up AirDrop’s functionality, such as Instashare, which hope to take the idea to the next level by bringing cross-platform sharing and more to the idea behind AirDrop. And there’s always the hope that Apple will do more with AirDrop in future versions of OS X (and perhaps iOS).
But as it is right now, have you used AirDrop? Is it something you use all the time, or did you just try it out for the novelty of it, and then quit using it soon after? We’d love to hear your thoughts below!
