Currently Browsing
Reviews
Productivity plays an important role in our daily lives and, therefore anything that can enhance it is of interest and deserves closer inspection. For that very reason, we recently reviewed two productivity apps based on The Pomodoro Technique.
Today I decided to take a look at Zonebox, an app aimed at timeboxing tasks. Timeboxing is another popular time management technique, which essentially consists of assigning time limits for the duration of a task. Although initially used by teams in software development, it’s gaining more and more traction among individuals as a means of boosting their productivity. Read on to see how Zonebox can help.
I am a man of simple tastes, which is precisely why I love my Mac and the apps on it. I don’t want to have to read through lengthy tutorials and spend an hour of my time learning how to use an app before I can start playing around with it — to me, it should just be install the app, open it up and start using it. And it’s precisely this that drew me to Moneywiz.
I find that money management apps tend to overwhelm the user with their interface and countless features and aren’t really designed with the customer in mind. Moneywiz, however, defines simplicity, yet it does this without compromising on functionality and features. It is, in my mind, the slickest and most usable money management app on the App Store. Here’s why.
Evernote may be a brilliant tool for creating text, audio, and image-based notes that live in the cloud, but it’s still not so great when it comes time to actually browse through all of your notes — especially the older ones.
Bubble Browser tries to fix this problem, organizing your notes via colorful bubbles and presenting them in a three-panel browser that make it easy to explore Evernote visually. It’s a bit lacking in a few areas, and could do with more features, but its cool interface and straightforward navigation may be worth the price of admission alone.
(more…)
We’ve probably all set an app to perform a task, convert videos or download a big file, and then walked off to do something else. When you get back, though, the worst possible thing that could happen did; your computer went to sleep, you lost all of your progress, and you have to start over.
Sure, you can change when your Mac goes to sleep in System Preferences, but you have to remember to change it back or you could end up in worse trouble. Let’s face it, though, you’re not going to remember to constantly change those preferences. You don’t have to, though, because Wimoweh is going to keep your Mac awake. Let it know what applications to be on the look out for, and it won’t let your Mac sleep. But how does it stand up to competitor Caffeine? We’ll find out! (more…)
Whenever working on a number of projects in tandem, it’s far too often that I end up sinking too much time into one task and end up with not enough time to complete the others. It’d helpful to have some sort of way to keep track of how much time is being spent on each task, and that’s exactly what Snail is made for.
A simple menubar app, Snail is meant to be a non-obtrusive way of scheduling tasks and then measuring how long it took you to complete each task. It’s a totally new take on project management for the Mac, one we knew we’d have to try out.
(more…)
If you love reading online articles, but don’t usually have time to read them in full when you’re using your browser, then you’re like a heavy user of a reading later service. There’s three popular web apps to help you save articles to read anytime: Pocket, Readability, and Instapaper. While all these services have native apps for your iPhone and more, only Pocket has a native Mac app (one that used to be the best Instapaper app for the Mac).
So what’s an Instapaper or Readability user to do, if they want to read their articles on the Mac? There’s two new apps that are great options: ReadKit and Words App. We’d looked at Words before, but found its interface rather lacking for a full reading app. Their dev team went back to the drawing board, though, and their newly released Words 2 is easily one of the nicest ways to read longform articles on your Mac. If you didn’t try it out the first time around, you should definitely take a look at Words 2.
Here’s why.
As a podcaster, having an audio editing tool that is simple, quick, and easy to use is priceless. So when Rouge Amoeba, the Mac developers known for popular audio tools like Audio Hijack Pro and NiceCast announced version 2 of their Fission audio editor – I took note.
Although it distinguishes itself from the crowd with the promise of “fast & lossless audio editing”, Fission still faces fierce competition from both ends of the spectrum. To carve out a meaningful niche for itself, Fission 2 needs to be a worthwhile option against the likes of professional tools like Logic Pro, and free options like Garageband or Audacity. So does it succeed? Read on to find out!
(more…)
You’ve probably already got a great notes app with syncing for moving chunks of text around, but what about the other stuff? Let’s face it, when you’re sending stuff from your Mac to your phone, you’re mostly just trying to get the directions to your cousin’s wedding or send the link to that awesome Harry Potter fanfic you’re halfway through.
BeamApp, a lightweight menu bar app, has you covered. With simple sharing to your iPhone, you’ll wonder what you ever did without it.
Puzzle games are a dime a dozen, and to set itself apart, a puzzler is going to have to be pretty special. More than just exchanging pigs for birds or coins for jewels, a great puzzle is more than a gimmick. It challenges how you think.
A great puzzle game will also challenge how you see games, and that’s what the developers at Cipher Prime are working on. Their newest offering, Splice, isn’t just a great puzzle, but it may also change your definition of what a game can mean. Don’t get me wrong, all of the great puzzling fun is there, but it’s more than a place to sink a few minutes. Splice will create an experience that frustrates you but also surprises you with its beauty and genius. (more…)
If you are the kind of person that enjoys keeping and showcasing a beautiful and clean desktop, you may be interested in finding out how you can inject some life into it with a simple application.
If so, let us introduce you to Live Wallpaper. Live Wallpaper is a small application that gives your wallpaper added functionality. Granted, it may not be as intricate as other applications like it, but let’s take a look at how it fares on its own.
