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Weekly Poll

Weekly Poll: Do You Own a Game Console?

Matthew Guay on May 22nd 2013

gaming

It’s the season for game console news, with both Sony and Microsoft recently unveiling their new game consoles, and Nintendo having beaten them to the punch by releasing the Wii U last winter. That’s, of course, at the same time that mobile devices and Macs are becoming more popular for gaming, and with AirPlay through an Apple TV, your iPad or Mac can power some serious widescreen gaming.

That doesn’t make consoles obsolete, of course. iOS devices have great touch and motion capacities, but the Xbox’ Kinetic gesture controls and the Wii’s motion controller — not to mention the gamepads used in all consoles — give console gaming a serious leg-up. Then, there’s the exclusive titles — from Mario to Halo — that are only on consoles.

That’s why we’re wondering if you have a game console, or if the announcements of new consoles have you thinking about buying one. We’d love to hear your thoughts on console versus Mac/iOS gaming in the comments below!

Weekly Poll

Weekly Poll: What’s Your Favorite Built-in OS X App?

Matthew Guay on May 16th 2013

You’re the oddball. There’s that one built-in Mac app that everyone else replaces, and yet, you love it. It’s built-in, works great, and you can’t figure out why everyone else doesn’t love it. But they don’t. They rave about the alternate apps, and act like Apple didn’t even include any app that could possibly do that thing.

All the while, you’re being productive each day with the built-in app you got for free, and you’re wondering why everyone else is wasting their time and money on alternates.

For me, the built-in amazing app is Preview. Everyone’s always looking for a great PDF app, or simple image editor, or annotation app … and here’s one of the best, built-into OS X for free. For our writer Pierre Wizla, it’s Mail.app, and he’s showed us how to turn it into the best email app.

So what’s your favorite built-in app in OS X, one you love more than alternates and think is a hidden gem in OS X? Looking forward to the discussion below!

Weekly Poll

Weekly Poll: Have You Ditched Creative Suite Yet?

Matthew Guay on May 8th 2013

At this week’s Adobe MAX event, the firm behind the leading creative apps for Macs and PCs announced that Creative Suite is now dead. Its replacement? Creative Cloud, the new subscription version of Adobe’s apps. They’re still native Mac (or Windows) apps, like you’ve used for years, only this time, you buy them via a $50/month subscription instead of paying hundreds or thousands upfront for a full suite.

That’s not all bad news; if you used to upgrade every year or so to the latest Master Collection, you’ll likely save money with Creative Cloud. But if you used the same version of Photoshop for years without upgrading, it’ll be much more expensive (over time, at least) to upgrade in the future.

Then, though, on the Mac, it’s rather easy to skip Creative Suite these days. There’s amazing image editors like Pixelmator and Acorn, vector apps like Artboard and Sketch, Apple’s own Final Cut Pro and Logic Pro for video and Audio, PDFpen and Preview for PDF documents, and more. There’s even Adobe’s own more affordable Photoshop and Premiere Elements if you need just the basics of what Adobe offers.

If you’ve switched, we’d love to hear what apps you’re using instead of Adobe’s staple apps in the comments below!

Weekly Poll

Weekly Poll: What Apps Do You Wish Would Come to the Mac?

Matthew Guay on May 3rd 2013

windows

It’s been a long time since Mac users had to wish that leading apps would come to their beloved platform. If anything, it’s the opposite today, and has been for some time. When I used a PC regularly, I’d wish there were apps like Things and Transmit, Pixelmator and — of all things — Preview (really).

But as many great apps as there are on the Mac today, there’s still some programs that haven’t made the leap over to our favorite platform. Whether it’s games that are still PC only, ancient DOS based business tools, or drivers for an old scanner that’ll only run on XP, many of us still run Windows regularly to be able to use legacy stuff — and some not so legacy stuff. After all, even though Macs have Office, Access has never made the leap, either.

It’s not just PC apps, either. I for one would love some popular iOS apps on my Mac. First off, iBooks: I’ve stuck to buying books in Kindle simply because I can read them on my Mac, too. Then, I’m sure a ton of other iPad apps would be more than welcome on the Mac.

So, if you could pick, what apps would you want to see brought over to the Mac first? We’ll look forward to hearing your comments below!

Weekly Poll

Weekly Poll: Skeuomorphism or Flat UI?

Matthew Guay on April 26th 2013

Apple’s known for sleek metal+glass gadgets, with clean lines, no stickers, and nothing that isn’t absolutely necessary. It’s also known for software filled with faux linen, leather, felt, candy-colored buttons, and previously, transparency, pinstripes, and brushed metal.

Microsoft, on the other hand, has set itself on a new design course, with plain colors, flat lines, and sharp typography. The new design style, previously called Metro, is a stark departure for Windows’ previous glassy Aero style, or the bubbly plastic XP Bliss style.

Microsoft’s not known for innovating on the UI front, but their recent changes in Windows 8 and their other apps has set off a wave of changes across the industry. Moving away from skeuomorphism, many newer apps like Loren Brichter’s Letterpress and Ulysses III‘s “Pure Mode” have a design that’s reminiscent of the Metro design. And now, with Jony Ive taking over UI design at Apple, many have speculated that OS X 10.9 and iOS 7 will gain a flatter UI with less skeuomorphism than Apple’s known for.

We’re wondering which you prefer. Do you love UIs that look like something real, say, a bookshelf, or does the new Metro text-first design style appeal more to you? We’d love to hear your thoughts about it in the comments below!

Pictured: Microsoft’s Outlook.com calendar web app and Apple’s Calendar.app in OS X Mountain Lion

Weekly Poll

Weekly Poll: What Apps Grew On You Over Time?

Matthew Guay on April 16th 2013

It’s happened to all of us: you download a new app, and are all excited over its features … only to find that it really doesn’t work for you. So it lingers in Launchpad, and in all likelihood is never opened again. That is, until you one day open it by chance, and try it again. Perhaps it got an update, perhaps you were just bored, or perhaps you kept hearing people praise it and figured you missed something the first time around.

And boom, you’ve got a new favorite app. That app that didn’t work for you the first time suddenly fits like a glove. It’s perfect for you, and you wonder why you didn’t see the light sooner.

That happened to me with Alfred. I downloaded it, couldn’t get what the fuss was all about, and went back to Spotlight. Then, I tried it again a couple months later, and thought it was nice enough, so I got the powerpack. Soon, I couldn’t imagine working with Alfred, and I’m even more addicted to the awesomeness that is Alfred 2 and its workflows.

It also happened to me with PopClip, as I’ve written about before. With it, the update that added actions flew under my radar at first, but once I tried it out, I was hooked.

So, what apps grew on you over time? We’d love to hear your stories below!

Weekly Poll

Weekly Poll: Do You Prefer Purchasing Apps From the App Store?

Matthew Guay on April 8th 2013

app store

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.

Weekly Poll

Weekly Poll: Have You Ever Used AirDrop?

Matthew Guay on March 28th 2013

AirDrop

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!

Weekly Poll

Weekly Poll: What Apps Could You Not Live Without?

Matthew Guay on March 18th 2013

Imagine you’re walking out of the Apple Store with a brand new MacBook under your arm, or perhaps you’re carting out one of the brand-new wall mounted iMacs (yes, we’re wishing we had one of those — say, the top-speced 27″ one — too). You plug in your Mac, savor the familiar-yet-new startup ding, then connect to the internet. You’re ready to start loading up your Mac with the best apps, and you can’t wait to get it feeling like a productive machine.

Only this time, there’s a twist: you can only install 5 apps. That’s right: you can install anything you want from the net or the App Store, but you’re limited to using the built-in apps and up to 5 more apps you install. What apps would make the cut?

The past few weeks, we’ve been featuring roundups of our team’s favorite apps in the Apps We Use series, and we’ve got a ton more workflows to feature over the upcoming weeks. Some of us have extremely streamlined workflows consisting of only a few apps, while others have a ton of apps they use to get their work done.

If I could only install 5 apps on my Mac, I’d install:

Dropbox, since all my files live in it
1Password, since I wouldn’t be able to login to almost any site without it
OmniFocus, which holds almost everything I need to do
Sublime Text for writing, since it’s great for plain-text writing as well as coding
Transmit for FTP, to publish articles to my site (which uses the flat-file CMS Kirby)

There’s a ton more apps I use daily and that I’d want to use, but these would be the minimum I’d need to keep working. Now, how about you? What 5 apps would you install if you could only have 5 apps on your Mac? Let us know in the comments below!

Weekly Poll

Weekly Poll: Do You Use Microsoft Office for Windows on Your Mac?

Matthew Guay on March 11th 2013

microsoft office

If there’s one enduring set of apps that’s practically a requirement to use in most business and education settings, it’s Microsoft Office. Love it or hate it, Word, Excel, and PowerPoint are the de facto standards for their categories.

On a Mac, you’ve got a ton of options these days. You could obviously use Office for Mac, though it’s often a bit behind its Windows counterparts despite coming out for the Mac before Windows was even around (though sometimes it does seem ahead of the Windows versions — see the Publishing layout options in Word for Mac). Then, there’s Apple’s iWork apps, though you might end up with some compatibility issues if you have to regularly share heavily formatted documents (but, for most purposes, iWork really is fine, while being nicer to use than Office. Really). There’s also OpenOffice and its new counterpart LibreOffice, though they come with their own slew of issues. You could also use web apps for free these days instead, from Google, Zoho, or even Microsoft itself.

Or, you could use Office for Windows on your Mac, either in Bootcamp or in a virtual machine. That way, you could use Office 2013 today on your Mac, or stick to an older-and-trusted version of Office in an old XP virtual machine. I personally have Office 2010 in a Windows 7 virtual machine, as well as an Office 2013 trial in a Windows 8 virtual machine for testing and more. We’d love to know if you use Office for Windows on your Mac. If so, we’d love to hear how you use it, and what version you’re using in the comments below!

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