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Productivity
Making an icon can be a tedious task in itself. Just designing a high-quality icon can be hard enough, but then you’ll still have to export it in all the sizes needed and make sure you don’t miss anything.
Icon Slate is an app designed to take the hassle out of a tedious task and makes the task of creating and exporting icons much more easier. With Icon Slate, you don’t have to worry about all the problems that can occur when you’re manually resizing, scaling and exporting your icons as the app really does make it all very simple.
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In the past few months, I’ve found myself looking for a better way to take note of things. Right now, I’m using Simplenote, but just the Web app and not a native one. So that means there’s no Launchpad icon unless I use something like Fluid, which I really don’t want to do at this juncture since I already have too many little Web apps in my collection. To that end, I turned to the Mac App Store.
Welcoming me was Notefile. It was sitting happily in the New and Noteworthy with no user ratings, so I thought I’d give it a try. As always, you’re going to be wondering whether it’s worth the $4.99 and your time. Carry on reading to find out. (more…)
I’ve tried more than a few Facebook menubar apps, because while I want to keep in touch, I don’t want to be constantly refreshing a browser or checking a separate window. It throws off my workflow and I inevitably end up playing Farmville, even if I just went there to look at a picture of a panda waving.
Keeping me off Facebook and on task is Glow for FB. It notifies me whenever something happens, but unlike a lot of other Facebook menubar apps, I can’t update my status or browse my News Feed. Glow removes that temptation while still keeping me connected. With this week’s release of Mac OS X 10.8.2 and new Facebook integration, though, there may not be a lot of use for Glow in the future. We’ll take a look and see if it has anything special to offer. (more…)
Photographers and digital artists alike always try to keep their images organized neatly. If you’re a designer, this is typically vital to doing your job as well. There are a bunch of different ways to organize these files on your Mac, from Adobe’s Bridge (included with Photoshop and other software) to iPhoto, Apple’s default solution for OS X. I’ve never been a keen user of either of these because the former is too complex in areas and the latter can often dawdle here and there.
To find an app that would suffice for my needs, I took to Google and have been looking around for a few months in vain. A few weeks back, however, a friend recommended Shiny Frog’s Pixa, a new beta app that’s in constant development. The promise is to help you organize images “the easy way”, but does Pixa live up to it? Let’s find out. (more…)
I tend to just take quick glances at my calendar, checking the dates of events coming up or looking to see if I can fit something new in. Sometimes it’s a huge pain to open the app on my phone or computer, so I end up guessing whether I have anything on a particular date — which is a recipe for disaster.
What I need, I realized a few weeks ago, is a good menubar calendar that I can call on at a moment’s notice with a simple click of the mouse or tap of the keyboard. Qbix’s Calendar Plus fits the bill, and to sweeten the deal it includes great customization options. Let’s check it out. (more…)
Apple has been moving towards a more “mobile feel” with Mac OS for a while now. Lion introduced a few features like the Launchpad, Mission Control, and even some multi-touch gestures to make your Mac feel much more like an iPad or an iPhone.
The recently released Mountain Lion builds on that, by providing even more snappy goodies to the OS like increased compatibility with mobile devices through iCloud, a Game Center, social network integration, and, most notably, a newly introduced notification system called, quite fittingly, “Notification Center”.
How does it work? Where is it moving towards? What’s gonna happen to other apps, like Growl, that have done the same thing for quite a while now? Let’s take a look.
Some apps just don’t make sense at first. Grandview was definitely one of those for me. I love writing apps, and own almost every one available for the Mac. Yet, I could never wrap my head around the reason for Grandview.
Until I tried it out today, since its free right now in the App Store. To my amazement, it clicked for me. I’d still say it’s not for everyone, but here’s what I like about Grandview, and why I just wrote this article in it.
Macs may be used by everyone from NASA to the White House, but they can’t shake the perception that they’re designer goods. People readily accept that Macs are good for creatives, but not for real business work, no matter how many times they’ve been proven to simply be great computers for anyone that cares about a good computing experience.
But maybe it’s because Macs are really just so good for creatives. There’s so many little things in OS X that make it great for writing, for one thing, that I think you can easily say it’s the best OS for writers. (more…)
Some say this day would never arrive, some even called it abandon-ware, but Things 2 is finally here. Cultured Code, the developers behind Things for Mac, iPhone and iPad released an updated version of their suite of productivity apps today. Also arriving with the set of updates is Things Cloud – Cultured Code’s sync service that keeps your copies of Things updated on all of your devices.
Let’s take a look at Things 2 for Mac as well as Things Cloud and explore what’s new since we first covered this task manager back in 2009 and what might tempt you to make the jump from another task manager.
Keeping open multiple application windows, even multiple browser tabs, can eat up a lot of memory and slow your machine down. But when you’re busy, it’s difficult to sacrifice the ease of having every application and website you need one click away for that extra speed boost.
Click.to makes that trade off a little easier by gathering all of those applications into a single menu interface. By allowing you to access everything in one place, it’s no longer necessary to keep a tab for every web app and a window for every application going at the same time. But how much functionality can Click.to really provide in a single popup menu? We’ll take a look! (more…)
