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Apple’s Safari browser remains an incredibly popular choice for Mac users everywhere, and is highly regarded for keeping up to date with the latest advances in web technology. Personally, I use and love it for the simplicity offered – it’s fast, lean, and feels like a clutter-free window to the web.
On the first day of WWDC, Apple announced the release of Safari 5, the latest incarnation of their browser. Today we’ll be taking a quick look at what’s new, and whether it’s worth getting excited about.
It seems fairly clear now that Google has won the RSS war. There aren’t many serious contenders for the title now that Newsgator has closed down their own aggregators and shifted their users over to Google Reader. Bloglines, though it has a pretty good web interface, seems to have suffered by comparison.
There are of course other options out there (Fever is a favourite among the more tech savvy), but of these three who were a while ago the main contenders, Google seems to have come out with the greatest number of users and the most rapidly developing platform.
Today we’ll be taking a look at a desktop companion to the Google Reader juggernaut. Gruml is a relatively new RSS reader for the Mac that syncs well with the service, and offers plenty of customisation options. Join us after the jump for a quick tour of its main features.
We spend more and more time reading web pages. So much of the information we take in each day comes from the sites we visit, whether that be in the course of work, pleasure, or study. If you have the time to spend on following a trail of links and reading whatever crosses your screen, just as it grabs your attention, you’re luckier than most of us.
Mostly we have to rely on some system for saving things of interest so that we don’t lose out. Today we’ll be taking a look at one tool in particular; QuietRead.
Cruz is an exciting new browser from the creator of Fluid that integrates some innovative multi-window and social networking features into your web surfing experience.
Cruz is still on version 0.4, so it’s not necessarily fair to evaluate it as a finished product, but we still wanted to show off what it can do so far. Let’s get started!
With the days of the static desktop almost in the past, moving around with your computer has become easier than ever. However, getting everything set up right at home, work, Starbucks or an airport can be time consuming and repetitive. Enter NetworkLocation, an application with the goal of automating this process.
NetworkLocation aims to to adjust your settings when you might forget to – like muting the volume when in a coffee shop, or changing the timezone when you head out across the country. Through the use of Apple’s Core Location technology, first seen in the iPhone and recently implemented in Snow Leopard on the Mac, the application is able to detect your location via nearby Wi-Fi networks, internet connections and connected devices. Hopefully this $29 application can save you enough time every day to make the price worth it.
Wouldn’t it be good to organise all your social networks in one window that sits right on your desktop. Socialite combines the power of Twitter, Facebook, Flickr, Digg, Google Reader and RSS feeds in one convenient location.
Socialite organises your social networks together so you can easily manage all your services. It also allows you to use most of the functionality of the websites within the application (e.g. Twitter’s new ‘Lists’ feature).
Flickr is arguably the most widely used photo sharing website around, with hundreds of thousands of photos hosted online and a fantastic API resulting in many third party apps.
Today we will look at Flickery, a Mac desktop client which pretty much does it all, from managing your account to searching the Flickr photo library. Flickery has been developed by Eternal Storms Software who also brought us Hierarchical Dock and GimmeSomeTune.
As a precursor to this review, I’d like to mention that Vibealicious will soon be releasing version Notify version 2.0. Around half the features covered are those planned for inclusion in the updated version. I have been lucky enough to beta test the forthcoming app, which has a number of changes that make Notify far more than just a regular email notifier.
Notify does what it’s name says – it tells you when you have a new message in your inbox. Version 2.0 goes beyond that, from viewing messages on multiple accounts to quickly responding to messages. This review will run through what you can expect from the app at the moment, along with what’s coming in the next few months.
A wide range of different iPhone apps are available for reading news – whether via RSS, or another method. Today I’m taking a look at Broadersheet, a $3.99 iPhone application that aims to be your portable electronic newspaper, aggregating the content that interests you most from a range of different sources.
A few features make it stand out from the crowd: it’s intelligent, and learns which stories interest you most as you rate them, you can read stories offline, and also view a simplified version of a website – optimised for the iPhone’s screen.
I’ll be looking at these features in greater detail, and assessing whether it’s a good solution for reading news on-the-go.
Delicious is a fantastic service for organizing, sharing, and finding great bookmarks on the web. However I’ve never thought much of the bland appearance of the site and as a result I’ve never felt the urge to sign up. Until now.
After finding out about Delibar, a new Delicious client for Mac from Shiny Frog, I’ve realized the potential of Delicious bookmarking and Delibar feels like the perfect way to do it. Delibar lets you search, share, discover, and organize your Delicious account right from within the Menu Bar on your Mac. This review will take a look at exactly what Delibar is capable of.
