I work from home on my own computer, so of course I have a bunch of apps to get me through the day. You know, I listen to music, send and respond to email, and am constantly using one browser or another. To tell you I stream music using Spotify or use Safari to browse isn’t really letting you in on any secrets of how I get through my day or giving out any tips on what apps I can’t live without.
Instead of looking to the more conspicuous apps that I use everyday and always have open, I want to let you in on some of the apps that don’t seem so integral at first blush, but that I just can’t make it through the day without. (more…)
If you need to work with different computers and devices throughout your day, then you are most likely familiar with all the cloud services that are around, like Dropbox, that allow you to keep your documents everywhere, always ready to be downloaded and uploaded again.
But then we’ve all been in those situations where we just forget to switch a file we are working on to our cloud folder so that it gets synced. Wouldn’t it be cool to have an app that automatically uploaded everything recent for you, regardless of its location on your computer? That’s what Quicksand’s all about. Let’s check it out!
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I like puzzles, and I like trains, so it happens that I’m often mistaken for a seven-year-old boy or a very active octogenarian. I don’t mind, though, because sometimes I get to combine puzzles and trains, and that’s pretty cool. This isn’t Jigsaw.PuzzleStorm, though, so it’s got to be something a lot better than a 1000 piece locomotive, right?
That’s where Rails comes in, a labor of love from developer BeLight Software. Build your own rail yard and get your trains to their destination in this reboot of the DOS classic. But will the gameplay stand up after all these years? We’ll find out! (more…)
Phone calls and voicemail are things of the past. Now we have Skype, text messaging, Twitter, and Facebook. In all their popularity, though, these services don’t manage to modernize voicemail, they just eliminate it. That makes sense: most people don’t even care about that feature of their phones anyway.
Still, what if we took voice messaging to a new level? WaveDeck did that on the iPhone and now we have Pling, which brings that experience to the Mac as well. Is it all we could ask for? (more…)
If you’re a devotee of Login Items, you may have begun to feel a certain heaviness in your Mac’s startup. Login Items tells OS X what it should launch when you turn your computer on, and I’ve been known to throw just about everything I’m going to need for the day in there. Too much, though, and you may begin to notice a lag.
Holding off on launching all of those applications would go a long way to helping, but I’m the impatient type. It seems Delay Start, a tiny app with one function, will do the waiting for me, though, so I can stagger how my apps are opened and stop bogging down my Login Items quite so much. We’ll see how much of a difference this uni-tasker can make. (more…)
Are you the kind of person that wears out the CMD, C, and V keys on your keyboard before anything else? Then perhaps you need a clipboard manager, an app that can help you get more out of copying and pasting on your Mac. That’s exactly what our sponsor this week, ClipBuddy, is designed for. And best of all, you can get ClipBuddy for free this week!
ClipBuddy remembers everything you’ve saved to your clipboard: text, images, and more. It then lets you quickly go back through everything you’ve copied, and paste exactly what you want into your apps. You can search through your clip history to find what you want, complete with info about when and where you copied from, so you’ll never lose anything even if you forget to paste it into your notes app. Then, there’s hotkeys and more to let you paste what you’ve copied easily.
The Ondesoft team continues improving ClipBuddy with updates, new features, and more. It’s recently gotten Dropbox sync, import and export options, settings to hide the dock icon, and more.
Go Get It!
ClipBuddy usually costs $29.95 from Ondesoft’s online store, but for this week’s sponsorship, we have a special deal. You can get a free copy of ClipBuddy just for liking it on Facebook or sharing it on Twitter. Head over to the Ondesoft ClipBuddy giveaway site for the info you need to get a free copy of ClipBuddy.
App.net is an up and coming social network and microblogging service that’s proving to be a worthy competitor to Twitter, with features such as being completely ad-free and an increased character count (256 characters compared to Twitter’s 140). Instead of generating revenue via ads, App.net users pay a small subscription charge to use the service. App.net user numbers have increased dramatically over the last few weeks ever since it launched a free tier service, allowing these paid subscribers to send out invitations for others to join the service with limited accounts, free of charge. Essentially, App.net became a freemium service.
Although the network is still fairly new, there has been active development of App.net clients for the Mac and in this roundup we look at five of the best apps currently available. And if you’re not on App.net yet, keep reading for a shot at some free App.net accounts we have to giveaway! (more…)
There are plenty of screen capture apps, but they all seem to do too much or too little. If you haven’t found an app for creating and editing screen shots beyond what comes standard in Mac OS X, it’s likely because what’s available either gets in your way or doesn’t have enough features to make it worth a switch.
I’m right there in the same camp as you. I take a lot of screen captures and have tried a handful of different apps, but nothing’s ever stuck. Maybe Monosnap, a tiny screen capture app with a pile of features, will change all that. We’ll take a look at Monosnap and see if it has the chops to make me switch from the default OS X tools. (more…)
How many hours do you spend in front of your Mac each day? The internet is where we find our entertainment and where we go to work. It’s easy to lose track of how much time you’ve spent sitting in front of the screen, and if that number gets to be a big number of hours per day, then you ought to change a few habits, don’t you think?
Today we’ll be showing you a few apps for minimizing bad habits with your computer usage. We’ve got it all: apps that remind you to take a break once in a while from your computer, apps that help you stay focused on your tasks so that you can have more time for yourself, and utilities for reducing eye strain. Let’s do this!
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Managing a team of people, often from around the world, is no easy task. But these days, it’s become a reality for many. To help with this problem, group chat tools like Campfire or Hipchat have become popular options, but they’re not without their limitations. Namely, there’s a lack of good applications that interface with them.
Into that void, the developers of Kickoff stepped in to create a Mac and iOS app with the intention to give teams an elegant solution to their collaboration problems that goes beyond basic group chat. So, could Kickoff change the way your team works? Read on and find out! (more…)
