Since transitioning to an SSD earlier last year, I’ve become accustomed to dealing with a smaller amount of hard drive space in my MacBook Pro. Moving from 256GB down to 128GB felt like a risky thing to do at the time – the last thing I wanted was the constant headache of a hard drive that’s full to the brim.
The reality is that I absolutely haven’t noticed the decrease in size. I trimmed down my Applications directory, moved all my iMovie content off to an external drive, and started a new photo library in Lightroom (my old Aperture library was becoming an out of control nightmare to manage).
These few changes freed up over 100GB of space and, by being mindful of what I download, save, and store on my internal drive, this space is still more or less completely free.
Downsizing to a smaller drive hasn’t once caused me a problem – I’ve found that when it comes to internal drives, bigger isn’t necessarily better. But would you be happy to sacrifice all those extra gigabytes? Let us know in today’s poll, and share your thoughts in the comments.
Many people have bandwidth limits with their ISPs, and with the amount of tempting content on the web these days, it can be hard to stick within these limits. Software such as SurplusMeter is great for tracking your bandwidth usage, but there’s no way of seeing what is using up your bandwidth.
Enter Rubbernet, a new app from Conceited Software which tracks what apps are accessing your network connection, and how much bandwidth they are using. If some third-party software is accessing your network without your permission, you can find out and try to stop it.
Not only is this useful for monitoring bandwidth usage, but it can be used to detect any software which might be secretly sending out personal data of yours. A great concept for an app, but does it work in practice? Let’s take a look.
I know that many of our readers are big fans of TextExpander, and rightly so. It’s a wonderful application that can save – quite literally – days of your time over the course of a few years. Although we usually focus exclusively on Mac software here, today I’d like to take a few moments to introduce you to TextExpander’s mobile counterpart.
TextExpander touch aims to replicate the text-expanding magic on your iPhone or iPod touch, and it does so surprisingly well! You can store snippets, then quickly retrieve them to send to Mail and Twitter clients, or use them in any other app via copy-and-paste.
In addition, you can use your TextExpander touch snippets directly in over 80 apps that support it, including Twittelator, TwitBird Pro, Osfoora, Elements, Simplenote, WriteRoom, Nebulous Notes, Pocket Informant, Things, and Todo (you can see a complete list here).
For more information, take a look at our review, or grab your own copy from the App Store for $4.99. It’ll be one of the best five bucks you spend this year.
Let’s face it, passwords are a hassle. Everyone advises against using the same ones over and over again, but it’s just so very convenient only having to memorize a couple of them. Recently, a lot of apps have come out that promise to get rid of this problem by helping you remember all of your passwords, but most of them aren’t very convenient to use.
The app that we are reviewing today, Concealer, isn’t very different from the competition, but it does add a few unique features. Check them out after the jump!
Evernote is one of my favorite apps. It’s simple, useful, and the take it has on “notebook” apps is pretty unrivalled by any other piece of software.
Recently it caught my attention that everyone who uses the app often does so for a complete different reason. I know I have my own very specific use cases, and today I’d like to offer them as suggestions for our fellow Evernote-loving readers. And so, without further ado, here are some of the most useful functions I’ve found for Evernote!
If you’re anything like me, your downloads folder is a huge mess of disorganized PDFs, Word documents, Keynote presentations and text files with uninformative names like form.doc and scan0111.pdf.
To clean up this mess, Ironic Software developed Yep, promising iPhoto/iTunes-like management for your documents
I’m a die-hard Alfred fan, and when I’m being good and giving my documents appropriate names, it’s a huge help. However, when I’m downloading and reading dozens of documents on a short deadline, all my good habits go out the window with my to-do list.
Yep claims to be the document organizer for the lazy and forgetful among us, find out if it delivers after the jump!
The role of the interface designer is not one that should be taken lightly – Without a great interface, chances are that you wouldn’t be using the apps you currently are. If the Safari address bar was hot pink and created in MS Paint, would you still use it? Probably not.
Luckily, it isn’t, and you can use your Mac in pleasure, thanks to countless UI designers working tirelessly to perfect their application designs.
There are numerous wonderful mail clients for Mac OS X, and everybody has their own preference, for whatever reason. However, I think you’d be hard-pressed to find anybody who doesn’t marvel at the Sparrow interface – It really is something else.
Today, we’ll be chatting to Sparrow’s designer, Jean-Marc Denis, about his work, inspirations, and the interface design scene.
Although there are tens of different solutions you can appeal to for handling your day-to-day GTD routine, the one corner of the market that has seen less attention is the student subset. Although workarounds can be accomplished with all the major task management systems out there, it’s clearly preferable to have a solution that is dedicated to managing your education specifically.
This is the void that iStudiez Pro aims to fill. Available on the iPhone since April of 2009, this powerful app has recently made its way to the Mac App Store, and following the recent 1.01 update we wanted to take a look and see how well it’s made the transition to the desktop!
We’ve collected the top four reviews, roundups and how-to articles from across the AppStorm network in April. Whether you’re interested in Mac, iPhone, iPad, Web, or Android apps, there’s bound to be something you didn’t spot over the course of the month. Now would be a good time to explore a part of the AppStorm Network you’ve never seen before!
Thanks for reading AppStorm, and I hope you enjoy looking over some of our favourite posts from last month!
When it comes to apps in the getting things done (GTD) realm, OmniFocus stands head and shoulders above the rest. It’s powerful, it’s flexible and it can sync with the iPad and iPhone versions as well. But as great as it is — and we’ve already told you that it’s pretty cool — it can still use a few tweaks here and there to make it a bit more workable.
So with that it mind, let’s take a few moments to share a few tips and tricks for OmniFocus. You may not need all of them, but if just one tip makes you more productive, then it’s worth it, right?
