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Communication
A lot of us are stuck in a world of multiple means of connecting with people, but one of the core methods that will remain for the foreseeable future is the telephone. Granted, this devices is a far cry from what it was even a few years ago, but nonetheless, it is something that will be around for a while. We’ll need to make phone calls. We’ll need to receive phone calls.
The underlying function has remained the same, but the technology surrounding hasn’t and has been changing so rapidly it’s almost impossible to keep up with. More intelligent management of you phones is a great area to explore if you’re juggling multiple phones. Phone Amego aims to be your friend and help you to better manage your calling and call receiving.
Despite how much everyone hates it, they simply cannot eliminate email from their personal and most importantly professional lives. It’s the ideal form of communication because it’s instant, unintrusive, good for both long and short form communication. And it’s very economical – often times it’s free. So, email isn’t going anywhere.
Folks use various email clients to tackle email overload and the choices in that front are aplenty. I’m not new to Postbox. I have tried it since version one and revisit the app every time there is a new version. So, when there was an opportunity to take a look at the impending version 3.0, I jumped in to get a glimpse of all those new exciting features. And boy, there are so many. Come, join me to take a sneak peek!
These days, it sometimes feels like I sign up for a new social network every single week. So many people I know work on a daily basis with Twitter, Facebook, Google+, Tumblr, Flickr, LinkedIn, Foursquare, YouTube…the list goes on. Often, managing those networks is as big of a task as the actual work you have to get done. As a result, we’ve seen growth in an obvious market for apps and services that consolidate those networks and let you manage what gets shared and where.
Life Stream is a (very) young contender in this space, developed by Bloop. It attempts to integrate all of your social networks into one stream of social media information. How well does it execute this premise? Hit that “more” link to find out.
Twitter. 5 years ago that was a word that described the sound a songbird makes. And while that’s still the first definition in almost every dictionary you check, in the public mind it means something else entirely. It’s a social network, one composed of short little messages intended for public consumption. Like any good ecosystem, Twitter has changed the definitions of more words than just its name. Now we have “tweet,” “retweet,” “follow,” and of course “hashtags”. More than vocabulary, the sphere of influence Twitter has created has its clients buying into the ornithological metaphor as well. You’d be hard pressed to find a Twitter client that doesn’t have a bird or something bird-related in its icon.
It’s true of the Twitter client we’re going to talk about today. It’s called Wren, and has an adorable yellow bird as its icon. However, the similarities with its Twitter client brethren ends there. Wren is something different. By some people’s definition, it shouldn’t even be called a Twitter client. It has no timeline, no “river of information” to wade through. And yet I contest it is a Twitter client, one that every Twitter user should take a long, hard look at and see if it’s the missing piece in their Twitter workflow. Let me show you what I mean.
One of my favorite things about Mac OS X is the menu bar. More specifically, the fantastic apps that are developed to work with it. You can find a menu bar app for pretty much anything – from the weather to your Twitter feed! They make it super fast and easy to keep up with information without opening a full-blown app and leaving what you are doing.
Today we are reviewing FaceTab and MailTab, two apps from developer FIPLAB that pretty much let you run Facebook and Gmail from your menu bar without losing any of the features that you get on their web interfaces. Want to hear more about them?
I’ve been a Gmail user for better than five years now. Throughout that time period I’ve been in search of an email application for my desktop, and have continually been disappointed. As my frustration grew, and the Gmail interface improved, I all but conceeded that I would just use the web interface forever.
Then, the Sparrow beta was released. I was intrigued. It looked like something very different and it was geared towards Gmail users. The buzz around the Web sucked me in, so I decided to give it a try and really enjoyed the experience. There were a few bugs, but overall it was a refreshing way to manage email.
Their first official release – Sparrow 1.0 – popped up on the App Store recently, and I decided to give it a go. I was excited to see the final product of something I thought had a ton of promise, but could it become my new email application?
Trillian from Cerulean Studios may be familiar to Windows users, as it has a history dating right back to year 2000. Originally a client for IRC (Internet Relay Chat), over the years it added support for a range of instant messaging service including AIM, Yahoo!, MSN and ICQ to the point where Cerulean claim “Trillian connects to everything.”
In this review, we’ll look at how well it has made the transition with a recently launched Mac OS version, and how it stands up against the strong competition!
The end of 2010 saw the release of the new Skype 5 Beta for Mac. While a lot of the functionality has already been available in the PC version for a while now, it’s the Mac version that matters to us, right?
The initial beta wasn’t unanimously well-received on account of the unusually spaced interface and clunky changes, but it’s improved significantly between the original beta and the full version now available.
I got my hands dirty with the build for about a month, testing the pros and cons, and I have to say, Skype’s now-out-of-beta release has a pretty strong ‘pros’ list.
The world of IRC is an interesting one. Despite a large and extremely active user base, most people have no idea what IRC is and how it’s different than the type of instant messaging we’re used to today.
Today we’ll give you a crash course in chatting using the IRC protocol and take a look at one of the most popular Mac IRC clients around: Colloquy.
When I first started using Twitter, I relied on the browser interface, and that seemed good enough. And then I discovered Twitterrific, which provided a better-designed and more enjoyable experience. And then I got an iPhone, and – as they say – that changed everything. After a few hours using the original version of Tweetie, I found it very difficult to use any other client, either on the desktop or my iPhone. Thankfully, not too long afterwards, Atebits released the desktop version of Tweetie, and all was well in Twitterland.
This status quo remained for a long time: Tweetie on iPhone, Tweetie on desktop. But then things changed. Specifically, Twitter bought Tweetie. A few months passed, and then a new version of the iPhone app was released. I’m not entirely sure why I didn’t like it – but I know I wasn’t alone in feeling this way. The King had been deposed. A recent update to the desktop version changed little, and I found myself wanting a change – I decided to leave behind the world of Tweetie-now-become-Twitter…
And so began a quest for a new Twitter client – really for a clutch of Twitter clients: for iPhone, Macbook, and iPad. This market is pretty full now, and I’ve tried most of them. Here I’m going to give a tour of Kiwi, which is a fairly recent addition to the list of desktop apps available.
