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Last year, Adobe launched their Creative Cloud subscription service along with the newly released Creative Suite 6. Creative Cloud lets you download every one of the full apps from Creative Suite Master Collection to your Mac or PC, and share creative files online for $49/month. That’s still pricey over time, but a huge savings over the initial cost of buying Creative Suite Master Collection outright for $2,599.
If you already have a copy of Creative Suite, though, upgrading to the latest version often still works out cheaper if you have a smaller edition. I had Creative Suite 5.5 Design Standard, and upgraded to CS6 Design Standard for far less than a Creative Cloud subscription would have cost me. Another option is buying a one-app version of Creative Cloud, which is one way, say, to get Photoshop for $19/month.
Creative Cloud apps get updates more often than their traditional Creative Suite counterparts, so Photoshop users especially already have new features over those of use with Creative Suite. It’s one of the many ways Adobe is trying to push us all over to the subscription side.
About 15% of you said you plan to get Creative Cloud in our poll last year, and more said you’d consider it. That’s why we’re wondering how many of you actually use Creative Cloud. Has it worked out good for you, or are traditional upgrades still your preferred way of getting Adobe apps?
Is your Mac running slow? Are your applications crashing? Are you running out of space on your Desktop? Get your Mac back in shape with an incredibly fast disk utility that will optimize and clean your hard drive, speed up Apple Mail, free memory, organize your Desktop, and more. That utility is MacOptimizer, our sponsor this week, which its developer describes as a “must have app for every home and business”.
MacOptimizer can clear your system of temporary files, unnecessary language files, and the extra files on your desktop: everything that’s eating up the precious space on your SSD. It can also optimize and repair your Mac so your OS and applications run faster, and run system maintenance tasks to keep your Mac running smoothly. Best of all, it gives you easy access to hidden OS X settings and other useful tweaks that make it easier to work on your Mac.
We found it to be a solid app that did what it said it would without causing problems in our recent review, and you’ll likely find your favorite use for it once you give it a try. It’s a polished way to get your Mac working the way you want.
Go Get It!
Ready to give MacOptimizer a try? It usually costs $29, but this week is on sale for just $19 for this sponsorship. It’s a great chance to grab a copy of MacOptimizer to keep your Mac fit and tweak it to work just the way you want.
It’s not every day a good game comes to the Mac. In fact, there aren’t many who consider the platform to be one for games. Thanks to the Mac App Store, some quality titles are slowly making their way to Apple’s computers. One consistent publisher has been LEGO with its editions of popular fiction — Star Wars, Pirates of the Caribbean, Harry Potter, etc. This week LEGO released yet another beautifully-built game, this time for fans of The Lord of the Rings. But the game releases for the week don’t end there. Let’s take a quick look at the top two games that just arrived on the Mac App Store. (more…)
We’ve just closed our giveaway, and our lucky winners are Joel, Richard, Marc, Paul, and Noah!
If you read Mac.AppStorm yesterday, you likely saw Pedro’s review of Tadam, a new minimal tool staying productive with the Pomodoro method. It’s a simple little menubar app that helps you time your work and breaks, elegantly.
Tadam is a rather cheap utility, at just $3.99, but we’ve got something better: 5 free copies of Tadam to giveaway to our readers. Just enter a comment below and let us know what other Pomodoro method apps, if any, that you’ve used before. You can also share the giveaway on Twitter, Facebook, or App.net, and share the link to your post in a new comment for an extra entry.
Hurry and get your entry in; we’ll close the giveaway a week from now on Wednesday, February 27th.
Envato staff or those who have written more than two articles or tutorials for AppStorm are ineligible to enter.
If you’ve ever wanted a more advanced to-do list app for your Mac, you’re bound to have tried OmniFocus or Things – or both. They’re the two most popular – or at least most talked about – task management apps on the Mac, with a somewhat similar feature set and seemingly equally fanatical fans.
OmniFocus 1 first came out in early 2008, while Things 1 came out in early 2009. Each have received a number of updates over time, and Things just released their second full version last year. OmniFocus 2, on the other hand, is one of the apps we’re anticipating most in 2013.
Both apps sync online, are designed to work with the GTD method, let you schedule tasks and organize things, though in their own manner. They’re really both great apps, though Things shines a bit more right now in the design and ease-of-use department, and OmniFocus is definitely the more geeky and “hackable” of the two.
So, which is your favorite of the two? Or have you foregone both Things and OmniFocus, and spent your GTD dollars on other apps?
For the record, I’m an OmniFocus guy, and can’t wait to get started using OmniFocus 2 ;)
Looking for a way to make your Mac’s background a bit more exciting? Then you should give Live Wallpaper, our sponsor this week, a try. It’s been the #2 paid app in the US Mac App Store, and is still the #9 top paid app today, months after getting released.
Live Wallpaper lets your Mac showcase more than just a pretty picture. It lets you see the date, time, weather, and custom text, integrated into a beautiful picture or animated background. It’ll work on multiple monitors, too, giving you a great way to take advantage of your extra screen real estate. Even if you use full-screen apps or spaces on OS X, Live Wallpaper will work just the way you’d expect – like your default OS X wallpaper.
Live Wallpaper includes over 20 themes, with more being released all the time. You can fully customize the themes in Edit mode, changing the background and moving around the time and other objects in the theme. Or, you can download custom themes and talk to other users on the Live Wallpaper forum.
Go Get It!
If you’ve been wanting a simple way to liven up your Mac’s desktop, and make it a bit more useful at the same time, then be sure to try out Live Wallpaper. It’s just $0.99 in the App Store, plenty cheap enough to try out and see if it’s what you need to keep your Mac’s desktop from growing too boring. Plus, it just might be enough to keep you from ever having to switch over to Dashboard again.
We just closed our Mac Essentials Bundle giveaway. Congratulations to our winners: @haggen, @_weslly, and @mkke0!
Presenting The Lifehacker Mac Bundle: 9 Elite apps that will make your Mac unstoppable! Get your hands on TechTool Pro, Path Finder, TextExpander, and 6 other apps valued at over $300 for only $49.99!
Here at AppStorm we’re giving you the chance to win one of three copies of the bundle, read on to find out more!
We just closed our book’n'keep giveaway. Congrats to our winners: Cody, Kim, and Michael!
There’s a lot of little things you need to keep up with to make sure your business’ bookkeeping is straight. That’s what the new app book’n'keep from the team behind Employment:app is designed for.
book’n'keep is designed to make accounting simpler for the sole enterprise. When you’re working on your own business, the last think you want is to have to spend too much time managing the accounting, when you could be designing new products and giving better service to your customers. That’s why book’n'keep helps you keep track of all of your receivables, payables, payments and assets, store detailed info on your customers and suppliers, keep track of due dates and payments, and more. It’ll even sync via iCloud so all of your data is on all of your Macs!
The bookkeeping app for the sole proprietor
book’n'keep usually costs $29.99 on the Mac App Store, but today we have 3 free copies for our readers. Just comment below and tell us a bit about the business you’ll be managing with book’n'keep if you win the contest, and you’ll be entered for a chance to win! You can also share the giveaway publicly on Facebook, Twitter, or App.net and share a link to your post in a second comment for an extra entry in our giveaway.
We’ll be closing our giveaway on February 20th, 2013, 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.
If Apple keeps up with its new annual OS X release cycle, then we should be expecting to see a new cat roaring on our Macs before the end of 2013. Mountain Lion was released last July, and its claim to fame was bringing more iOS features to OS X. iCloud, Notes, Dictation, Reminders, and more came as a reminder (pun not intended) that iOS was Apple’s more well-known and widely used operating system these days.
There’s little more from iOS we can imagine that Apple would bring to the Mac, aside from Siri and possibly Maps (oh, and iBooks), but there’s quite a few power user features that iOS users are clamoring for in iOS 7. If anything, it seems that Apple needs to bring some Mac features to iOS this year.
That’s not to say there’s nothing for OS X 10.9 to conquer this year. At the very least, I’d love to see a vastly improved iCloud and Messages, perhaps Siri, Maps, and iBooks, and some much needed love for older OS X apps like Automator. It’d also be great to be surprised with some new, OS X only features, stuff to make Macs stand out even more than they already do from the competition – and Apple’s iOS devices. iWork and iLife could desperately use a new upgrade as well, though that’s hardly a core part of OS X.
With Jony Ive the head of Apple’s software design, it’ll be interesting at the very least to see what design changes, if nothing else, show up in the next version of OS X. So what are you hoping to see in the OS X 10.9? It may just be wishing, but we’d sure love to see what you hope to see from Apple this year in the comments below!
There’s so many things we all need to remember. That’s why you need a robust notes app that works the way you do. NotesTab Pro, our sponsor this week, is a great notes app that runs in your menubar and has enough features to make it terribly useful but not enough to get in your way.
NotesTab Pro lets you quickly take notes and sync them to all of your devices, right from your menubar. There’s quick editing buttons and keyboard shortcuts to let you add formatting to your notes and quickly create and find the notes you need. Want more editing space? You can even take NotesTab full-screen to have more space to see your notes. When you’re all done, you can save them to view later, or share the with others online with OS X’s native sharing options.
We called it “The Best Note-Taking App in Your Menu Bar” in our recent review of NotesTab Pro, and it keeps getting better with new updates, most recently adding indenting and auto-hyperlinking support.
Go Get It Today!
NotesTab Pro usually costs $4.99 in the App Store, but it’s on sale today only for just $2.99! That’s why you should hurry and get your copy of NotesTab Pro before the sale ends! Then, you can also get NotesTab for your iPhone, iPad, or Windows 8 tablet as well, to keep your notes with you everywhere.
