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Keeping up with music can sometimes feel like a chore, especially if you aren’t in your younger years of exploration anymore. Currently, with the Internet providing us with the opportunity to meet so many new artists from around the world, we have so much music at our disposal, and we’re bound to like some of it more than other.
That’s why there are services like Last.fm and Pandora, which use your previous history of listened music as a tool to bring you music that fits your tastes. Today we’re reviewing something similar that bundles the functionality of many music services into a simple and cool-looking Mac app called Discovr Music.
One of the best, and perhaps most undervalued features of Mac OS X is one that was introduced in 10.5 Leopard: Time Machine. As Macintosh users, we often forget just how good we have it when it comes to matters like this. I was recently discussing backup options with a Windows using friend of mine and none of the options we could find for him came even close to the ease of use and painlessness (not to mention the system level integration) of Time Machine.
Nevertheless, after I started using Time Machine in Leopard, I quickly found one major drawback. Every hour, regardless of what you are doing, Time Machine starts a backup. It slows the system down, if you back up to a Time Capsule as I do, it slows the network down, and it’s unnecessary. I really only want one incremental backup per day, but this isn’t possible by default. This is where TimeMachineScheduler comes into play.
If you’re a web developer, then you know that manually creating image sprites is a pain. Even worse is the process of trying to position those sprites just right within your CSS. It’s a necessary evil, but don’t you wish you could skip it?
Today we’re going to take a look at a Mac app called SpriteRight that promises to completely automates this process. Will it successfully turn sprite creation into an easy and even enjoyable task? Read on to find out.
Have you ever wondered why your Mac slows down after a couple months of use with no maintenance? Well, one of the reasons is because sometimes temporary files, which are supposed to be deleted, are kept without receiving any real use anymore. That, and of course, all the stuff that you have probably installed lately.
Luckily, we have a few apps that can help you keep a clean computer and a garbage-free hard drive. One of the newest options is an affordable alternative called CleanGenius. Is it any good? Let’s see!
A big part of design is inspiration. Graphic and web designers don’t work in a vacuum, they browse around to see what’s come before, and use other designs as references and starting points. Collecting these little pieces of inspiration and reference can quickly crowd your browser’s bookmark folder or your computer’s pictures folder, so the developers of Sparkbox sought to create an easy tool for capturing and organizing these images. Let’s find out if Sparkbox can really help organize your digital inspiration!
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As more of our digital lives are transferred from our computers to the cloud, many have claimed that there is a declining need for local storage. As netbooks gained in popularity, manufacturers found that consumers were willing to sacrifice gigabytes for portability. As high performance ultra-portables like the MacBook Air have shown, high performance Solid-State Drives are ready for consumers and have begun to slowly replace the once ubiquitous Hard-Disk Drives in consumer machines.
However, we still love to pack our computers with music, movies, photos, and other space-hogging files. Unless mobile carriers suddenly reverse the current trend of limiting data consumption, cell phone subscribers will not be able to comfortably stream all the content to their mobile devices that they would like. That means that smartphones will need to continue to carry enough on-board storage for average users to conveniently pack enough entertainment until the next time they plug their phone into their computer. The same principle holds true for our desktops and laptops: While the idea of streaming all of your content from the cloud seems quite appealing, it isn’t feasible for many people. Until ISPs stop limiting bandwidth and the cost of renting space in the cloud for huge media libraries and miscellaneous documents becomes cheaper, most users will have to rely on local storage.
In the world of screenshot utilities, SnapNDrag Pro stands out as a lightweight, yet versatile and powerful tool for grabbing screen images. Its simple user-interface and flexible method for taking screenshots earns it high marks for getting the job done quickly and easily.
Join us as we take a closer look to see why this app from Yellow Mug Software could be just the screenshot utility you’ve been looking for.
I love iTunes. As Apple’s native music player and iOS powerhouse command station, it is unlikely that anything will ever wholly replace iTunes for me. It’s an integrated hub for surfing the iTunes music store, buying iOS apps, making playlists, the Ping network (even though it’s somewhat barren), managing the media and content on my iPhone and iPad, and more. But in spite of my love for iTunes, I will be the first to admit that with a music library the size of mine, it can be a bit slow, unwieldy, and bloated when all I want to do is play some tunes.
When I began reading up on Sonora, a beta-phase app coded by Indragie Karunaratne and designed by Tyler Murphy, I was impressed with the obvious target niche that Sonora was appealing to. At the risk of sounding “scoff-y”, independently developed music players rarely appeal to me because they so often claim to be an iTunes replacement–which, for the reasons listed in the above paragraph, is unlikely for me. Sonora, on the other hand, markets itself as a companion player, humbly leaving the heavy lifting of music purchases and iOS management to iTunes and providing a lightweight player for the express purpose of playing music. Hit the jump to read more about Sonora.
Ecoute, created by PixiApps, has been a moderately popular alternative to iTunes for over a year now. With version 3, developer Louka Desroziers and interface designer Julien Sagot hope to catapult their audio player’s status from semi-popular indie app to major-league success. So is the latest version of Ecoute ready for the big time?
One area that hasn’t really been exploited in the app market is that of apps for musicians. And by that, I don’t mean apps for recording and producing, I’m referring to apps for songwriters.
Maybe there’s a reason for that? You could use a simple text editor to write songs, but what if you could also have an app that helped you make the songwriting process more organized, and gave you a few tools to make songwriting easier? That’s what Songwriter’s Pad claims to do. Let’s take a look and see how it fares.
