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If you’ve got a job that requires invoicing the time you worked on certain tasks, it can become quite a chore to keep up the tracking of each of them, hence the justification for project managing and time tracking apps. They lend a helpful hand if you want to track your work time or simply if you want to know more about where your time is going.
The downside is that most of these apps tend to be pricy and overcomplicated. It’s refreshing to see an app that takes a more simplistic approach to the task of time tracking. Chronos is one of them, and we’ll be checking it out today.
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John Calhoun’s original Glider — dating back to 1988 — may well be my favorite game. Quintessentially Mac in style, it put you in charge of a paper airplane in a rundown, dilapidated house. You needed simply to stay afloat, lifted by air vents, and try to reach the window leading to freedom.
It was a game of wits, and patience, and it’s one of the most innately-charming pieces of entertainment I’ve ever encountered. The shareware series earned a dedicated fan-base and awards from Mac magazines through its five main installments, culminating in a commercial release (Glider PRO, 1994), then gradually faded into the background … that is, until Glider Classic for iOS was released in late 2011, which was followed up last year by a Mac version simply called Glider.
Let’s see how this throwback stands up — both to modern standards and to the nostalgia of Glider games past.
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I love making videos, but I don’t love editing them together. I always have the best of intentions at holidays and birthdays and family gatherings, but it all falls apart once I’ve gotten the footage onto my Mac. I just never seem to do anything with it, and I’m the first to admit that a big part of my problem is my video editor.
I recently tried out Shotcut, a free and open source video editor. I’m no video professional, but then, most of us aren’t. Let’s see how it works out for a layperson just trying to put together some family videos without pulling out her hair. (more…)
Productivity apps and methods are perhaps among the most abundant Mac apps out there, but they all take the same kind of approach to getting things done: they only help you accomplish tasks, without really lending a hand in choosing what’s really important. You can get a dozen tasks crossed off by the end of your day, but if they’re mundane and unimportant, what good is that?
Today we’ll be talking about an app called Eisenpower, that incorporates a method to help you prioritize and classify your tasks, in order to realize what’s really important and what isn’t. Interested?
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Reminders are a super way to keep you on track, especially if you can get into a work rut like me and forget there’s an entire world outside of your computer. I don’t just need to be reminded to check my to do list or go to the gym, though. I’ll be typing away and completely forget that it’s time to go home or, perhaps worse, that my laptop is running out of power.
A neat little app to help with all of that remembering, Notifi will create notifications based on your preferences. You tell it what’s important, and it let’s you know when you need to make a move. Notifi isn’t the only app of its kind, though, so can it hold its own? (more…)
Endless Space is a 4X strategy game in the vein of the Civilization and Masters of Orion series, which means you’re going to explore, expand, exploit, and exterminate. Build a mighty galactic empire by stripmining colonized planets and dominating rival civilizations through military might, diplomacy, or cultural influence.
So does Endless Space stand up against those big names of the 4X genre? (more…)
Archival tools aren’t usually the first thing you’d think of when looking for a cool new app to download. Sure, anyone with a history with PCs likely remembers installing WinZip as one of the first programs on a new computer — and then ignored the “trial over” popups for months after. But today, when you download a zip file in Safari it’s automatically extracted, and most of us aren’t trying to cram as much as possible into 700Mb CDs these days.
But there’s still space for archival tools. If you want to save space on your backups, easily extract archives in formats that Finder doesn’t support, encrypt your archived files, and more, you’ll need a better tool.
That’s what the freshly released Archiver 2.0 does. It’s a simple yet powerful solution to your advanced archive needs.
9 years ago, the Mac gained something that has graced buildings since humans learned to write: bookshelves. The original Delicious Library featured a digital faux-wood bookshelf as its main interface — one that’s instantly familiar to anyone who’s used iBooks or Newsstand, but that was brand-new when it was released. Fast forward a few years to 2007, and Delicious Library 2 brought a fluid interface powered by Core Animation, with pop-over inspectors that look vaguely like a preview of the pop-over menus that would become so common in iOS and later on the Mac.
The Apple Design award winning app to catalogue all of your stuff seemed to be abandoned, going 6 years without a new release and over a year without an update of any kind. But the Delicious Monster team is back with the freshly released Delicious Library 3. It’s shiner – and more animated – than ever, and it’s certain to be the most fun way to catalogue all of your stuff in 2013.
Can it push the future of Apple interface design forward again this time, though?
Despite the prevalence of services such as Dropbox, Flickr and Photo Stream, email is still the most popular way of sending photos to friends and family. It’s something we take for granted, yet many of us don’t tend to save the photos once we’ve seen them in our mail app.
Lost Photos is a rather unique utility that searches through every single email you’ve sent or received and extracts any photos it finds, ready for you to archive and preserve. Does it work? Read on to find out.
Maybe you’re the kind of person who can’t leave well enough alone and are always customizing OS X. Or maybe you’re the opposite, maybe you want to have that same sort of devil may care attitude but are afraid of digging a hole so deep, even Spotlight can’t find you.
I’ve been in both camps, and while I definitely prefer to be in full control of the experience on my Mac, I don’t want to get myself into a bad situation either. MacUtil, a neat little OS X tweaking app, can help both groups: those who love to personalize their OS and those who don’t know where to start. (more…)
