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If you test anything on the internet, and you have to do it in multiple browsers, you know what a pain that can be. You have to have a couple of computers on hand or be running Windows on your Mac. There are tools that make it all a bit easier, but nothing makes it entirely painless.
Sauce is trying to take the edge off a bit by adding support for nearly 100 browsers right on your Mac. How can this be? Devilry? Magick with a K? Maybe. We’ll find out and see if it weighs the same as a duck.
In 2002, a book entitled Getting Things Done was published by author David Allen, to widespread critical acclaim and quickly began to amass an almost cult following. In it, the author set forth a method for improving the efficiency of work processes by employing time management techniques, task prioritisation, and concentration on the most important tasks. Ten years, and many improved work-flows later, Allen’s theory remains as prevalent as ever, but not necessarily in the state he first imagined.
Despite being the title of Allen’s book, Getting Things Done, or GTD, has since become the byword for any method of improving productivity, regardless of relevance to the author’s original. Allen’s paper-based method has become outdated in the ten years since its publication, and, largely in response to technological advance and the Internet, other more relevant GTD theories have emerged, such as David Sparks’ Paperless.
With the myriad of electronic devices that now dominate many work flows and work places, making distractions easier to come by—ahem, Twitter—new ways of boosting productivity have come about. However, not everybody has time to read, implement, and stick to a special system. So, how do we bridge this impasse? It’s simple: take away the Internet, or at least part of it. Intrigued? Find out more after the break.
There surely isn’t any shortage of apps for viewing and interacting with your Instagram feed right from your Mac. We’ve even presented a comparison of a few of them to you not so long ago.
Today we’re going to present you yet another newcomer to the Instagram Mac client market that is a bit different from the rest, in that it lives in your menu bar and is considerably simpler (and cheaper) than the rest. It’s called Instabar, so would you like to take a look at it?
I rely on RSS feeds as my main source of news and interesting stories on the Internet. But I don’t have time to go through every single story blurb to see what I’d like to read in full. I know I’m not alone in my awful noise to reading time ratio. The developers of Cream, a new lightweight RSS reader, seem to get this, and so they baked a recommendation engine right into their app.
Cream sports a modern, clean interface and design, but I’m not sure that it’s quite ready for the prime time. Let’s explore what it does well, and where it falls short. (more…)
It’s easy to get lost among all the new content that we are around everyday. Throughout the day I usually find through many different ways (Twitter, RSS and what not) tons of articles and blog posts that I would like to read, but can’t do so right then and there. That’s why apps like Instapaper, Pocket and Readability exist, so that you can save articles for later without getting them lost in the sea of content out there.
But having an account with each of these services can get pretty confusing, and even if you only use one of them, using it in your browser is not always convenient. Today we’re reviewing Words, an app that can help you access and keep those articles that you bookmark, directly in your Mac. It’s especially interesting now, as it’s the only way to read Instapaper offline on your Mac now that the former Read Later app has been turned into the new Pocket for Mac. And, we’ve got 8 free copies for our readers to try it out, so keep reading!
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Almost every web site begins life as a specially formatted text file. Initially, the web consisted of static HTML files usually create in text editors. Soon the rise of the WYSIWYG (what you see is what you get) web editors to sought to hide this code and present an editor more like Word or other popular word processors. This would allow the creation of web pages without the need of learning HTML.
Building better development environments is one of the holy grails of computing. At heart all computing is zeros and ones, but no one programs at that level. Instead we use higher level languages to bring concepts into execution and let the computer translate those languages to code the computer understands. On the web, much of the interactivity you see that drives everything from photo galleries to web apps like Google Docs is coded in JavaScript. It’d be too complex for someone with no experience to use on day one to design their own site, but it’s not so complex as to be unapproachable. But surely there’s an easier way to make an interactive site without having to become a developer.
That’s where Lucid comes in. It’s a new tool from The Escapers that’s designed to help you code JavaScript-powered sites in a simpler graphical interface. Let’s take a look.
Ever wanted to search through a user’s old tweets? Or maybe you’ve thought about archiving your timeline (for posterity, vanity, or perhaps future analysis). Problem is, there’s no easy way to do it. Twitter provides no such tools to its users (not directly, anyway). Thankfully, there are plenty of third-party services and apps for archiving and searching both your tweets and other public timelines.
Tweet Cabinet is the first app of its kind that I’ve seen for Mac. It keeps a local archive of as many users’ public timeline as you desire, allows advanced searching within this archive, and does not require authentication — you don’t even need a Twitter account to use it. But it feels underdone, with a poor user interface and limited non-search filtering options. Let’s take a look at whether there’s enough here to make the app worth your while.
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Dropbox has been the go-to for cloud storage for many of us for many years now. Unfortunately, it’s not the easiest cloud sharing service there is, and for those of us who like to keep our files all together, that’s a problem. There are some pretty prominent services, perhaps most notably Cloud.app and Droplr, that allow easy drag-and-drop sharing from your desktop, but Dropbox hasn’t kept up.
Currently in free beta, Droplings is a new app that allows you to share in a similar way to the other cloud services, but from Dropbox. Droplings uploads files to your Dropbox Public folder and creates a download page for your file, just by dragging your files to your menubar. We’ll take a look, after the jump! (more…)
The official Google Drive Mac app made a somewhat underwhelming debut. While it features full Finder integration and syncing options that matched those of the Mac Dropbox client, it fails to leverage the power of Google Drive on the web — which includes a full office suite and a plethora of sharing and file management options. And neither the Mac app nor web app are particularly user-friendly.
I’ve wondered why it has to be so hard. Apparently the developers of Archy felt the same way, so they created an app to make Google Drive and Docs easy. The app’s still in beta, but I can already say confidently that they succeeded.
I’m a huge news junkie. I run multiple RSS apps on my Mac, including Pulp and Reeder, each for different sets of RSS feeds that I subscribe to. In those rare moments that I get to step out of the office, whether I’m standing in line at the deli down the street or riding a bus downtown to meet up with my brother for lunch, I’m usually on my phone checking even more news feeds. Simply put, I drink heartily from the fountain of information that the Internet provides.
I recently stumbled across a somewhat unique RSS aggregator, and I wanted to show it to you today. Retickr is an app that lets you put together custom playlists of news feeds and display the top stories from them as a scrolling ticker on your screen. The idea is relatively novel and the execution is unique, but does Retickr have what it takes to become an arterial channel of information?
