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Some days, it seems to me that we’re in a technological era that demonstrates simultaneous trends of increased utility and decreased complexity. The strive for simplicity is apparent in Mac software, and the effects are often increased productivity and clarity. The best example of this that I can come up with is a growing number of Mac apps that set out to do one thing really well, rather than the swiss-army-knife applications of the past (not that there isn’t still a time and place for those).
Today, I’m going to take a look at one such application called SnipEdges. Developed by Houdah Software, SnipEdges is a new kind of global snippet manager. It uses the confinement of your screen as its management method, rather than a hierarchical window, and it does so to great effect. Let’s dig in, shall we?
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Music is a great thing. It speaks to the soul and talks about the many troubles and triumphs of daily life. Isn’t it nice having all those websites like lyrics.com to find out what the words to your favorite song are? I’ve always use web-based services like that myself, but apps are giving us some new choices and Strophes is one of the latest you may have heard of.
Developed by Alfredo Devvi Bovi, the app aims to be your new solution for instantly finding lyrics to any song you’re listening to, whether it be in Spotify, Rdio, Radium, or iTunes. You can even search for songs that you don’t have in your library or are listening to in your browser. Let’s see if this is the end-all solution for song lyrics, or if you should keep searching for a better solution.
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We’re big fans of apps which reside in the Menu Bar here at Mac.AppStorm. Personally, at least two of my most essential Mac apps live up there in the top right hand corner of the screen. However, with the proliferation of useful, lightweight Menu Bar apps, things can begin to get a little crowded in no time at all.
Well, for this admittedly niche problem, there’s an elegant solution in the form of Surtees Studios’ Bartender. Its a utility which promises to give users about as much control over the Menu Bar as one could reasonably hope to have.
This post is part of a series that revisits some of our readers’ favorite articles from the past that still contain awesome and relevant information that you might find useful. This post was originally published on June 28th, 2011.
The Super Nintendo Entertainment System was a phenomenally fun console that successfully ate up a large portion of my childhood. There are so many classic games from this era that have long been forgotten. If only there were a way to download and play those 16-bit masterpieces on your Mac. Oh wait, there is.
Today we’ll flood your memory with enough digital nostalgia to make you teary eyed by showing you where you can grab these games and play them today. Be sure to read the fine print though as emulating old Nintendo games on your Mac is risky business!
Everyone who has ever designed for the web in Photoshop appreciates its power, but will tell you tales about how time consuming it is to export portions of a design. Usually it involves a lot of copying and pasting, and at some point you need to take a frustration break or get completely lost.
It’s amazing that only recently an inconspicous utility hit the market that helps you minimize your workload significantly when exporting PSDs for the web. Teasingly named Slicy, the app adds the icing to any web design project. We’ll take a look at their recipe of success.
As most programmers are already aware, Git is a very powerful open source version control system. There are a handful of popular version control systems (VCS) to choose from, but most power users lean toward Git or Subversion (SVN). Schools of thought vary on which is best, but it is universally accepted that professionals of all kinds can benefit from a good version control system. Even for those who don’t write or program professionally, a good VCS can help catalog changes in all sorts of personal projects. Launching into Git for the first time, however, might not be the most pleasant experience for the average first-timer.
Tower changes that and makes Git a tool that everyone should have loaded up in their repertoire.
If you use TextExpander much, chances are you don’t actually think about the app itself that much. You’ve added your own shortcuts to it over the years, and now you type them in and they’re automatically expanded without you even thinking. It just becomes another part of your Mac.
This week, Smile Software released the first full new version of TextExpander since 2010. It adds several new features, but if you’re already using TextExpander 3, a quick glance at their new features list might not even make it seem like its worth your time to upgrade. After all, when’s the last time you opened the TextExpander window, anyhow?
Turns out, there’s more than meets the eye in TextExpander 4.
Although many developers are porting or even rewriting applications designed for Windows to the Mac, many these days still find the need to run Windows on your Mac. I find that need every single day at work. While there are three main ways to get the job done, Parallels has always been my favorite.
Parallels Desktop 7 is a dramatic improvement over the previous version, and brings along a few cool new features. If running alternate operating systems on your Mac is a priority, read on as we dive into the latest version of Parallels Desktop!
As more of our documents get moved off our local drives and into the cloud, it can be difficult to stay on top of them all. I keep stuff scattered around in my Gmail account, Dropbox folder, and laptop, among many other places, and can have a hard time remembering where a particular item is.
The developers of Found recognized this problem and created an interesting solution. Using a search concept similar to Spotlight, Found searches not only your local machine but also common cloud services. Any app designed to help you find files needs to do so quickly, using an intuitive interface. How does Found fare under these important conditions?
I don’t know about you, but whenever I’m working at writing a new article or any other kind of work, switching windows and doing something else makes me lose focus on what I was previously doing. This problem usually interferes with another thing that I love doing while working, which is listening to music.
Most of the time, switching albums or artists while I’m working gets to be quite distracting and time-wasting. I jumped at the opportunity to review today’s app, Tracks, because it provides a very quick and distraction-free way of managing iTunes, among a few other things. Want to check it out?
