In today’s day and age where mobility is essential, we’ve seen a huge proliferation of increasingly smaller laptops, led by the MacBook Air’s success. With smaller laptops come smaller screens. While this is great for mobility it does come with a cost. Screen real-estate!
Not everybody is fortunate enough to work on a big beautiful 27″ iMac or a shiny new Retina MacBook Pro (I know I’m not). Most, whether by choice or necessity, work on small screens, and more often than we realize find ourselves jugling windows around or Alt-Tabbing between them.
Thanks to SnappyApp, a delightfully simple app that’s proven to be oh so useful, this has mostly become a thing of the past for me. Read on to find out why.
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Our sponsor this week is Yate, the Mac audio tagging app for serious taggers. If you want an easy way to add more info to your music files than you can in iTunes, it’s an app you should be sure to check out.
Organizing and tagging your audio files can be very tedious and time consuming. Yate aims to make it much easier. It lets you import audio tagging info from MusicBrainz or Discogs, and can help you quickly add missing album art info. It lets you add more metadata to your songs than you ever could with iTunes or OS X’s File Info. Then, you can add these changes to all of your songs at once with Actions, saving you the time of manually updating each song in an album.
Best of all, Yate integrates with iTunes, and was recently updated to work with the latest iTunes updates, so it can automatically sync your song tags with your iTunes library. You can use it to tag all of your mp3, m4a, and FLAC files, and keep your library up to date at the same time. If you ever need to change or revert tags you’ve added, Yate can take care of that, too!
Go Get It!
If you’re ready to start getting serious about tagging your music files, be sure to download Yate and try it out. You can test it for free for 14 days, then purchase a license for $30 to keep using all of its features. And if you have any trouble getting it going, be sure to get in touch with the Yate team; they’re great at making sure their customers can get the most out of their app, as we found while writing our review.
Welcome to this week’s issue of App Deals. There are a lot of great apps floating around the sales racks, including Boom, Typeli Notes, and Quake 4. Keep reading for the full list of deals. (more…)
Our Giveaway is now closed, and congrats to our winners! Stay tuned for more great giveaways we have coming up soon!
Earlier this year we reviewed Gemini, the duplicate finder, and came to the conclusion that it was a pretty great app. It worked incredibly well at finding any duplicated files on whatever disk you threw at it. That’s not to say it didn’t have its faults, but the folks at MacPaw have worked hard on flattening out the creases and have produced a great free update to their beautiful app.
Let’s take a look at the new features in Gemini, and see why it’s still one of the best ways to clean up duplicate files from your Mac. Plus, we’ve got 5 copies for our readers, so keep reading to see how to enter our giveaway!
Microsoft isn’t usually the first company on our radar as Mac users, but with their upcoming release of Windows 8, they seem to be actually thinking different, for once. Windows 8 is easily the most dramatic change Windows has ever seen, taking it quite far away from its original Macintosh-inspired design. At worst, it takes some inspiration from the iPad in being a touch-centric UI, but otherwise, everything new in Windows 8 is a Microsoft-based design.
New innovation is always cause for excitement, and even if we love Apple, we’re always excited to see other companies pushing the bounds and making great new products. Windows 8′s new square and typography centric design is at least an interesting step in a new direction. It might be one that leaves most PC users behind, but it’s also one that piques our interest, at least a bit.
Has Windows 8 caught your interest, and are you looking forward to trying it out? Do you think it could tempt you away from OS X and iOS? We’d love to hear your thoughts in the comments below!
Photography can often be a troubling trade when little things don’t go according to plan. After all, if you only have one chance to take a photo, you had better get a good one. Post processing has become a big part of modern photography, from amateur tools like Snapseed to more professional apps Photoshop, Aperture, or the increasingly popular Lightroom.
But simply owning Photoshop or Aperture isn’t enough. You must keep it up to date and use the best plugins for your trade. I’ve been doing a lot of concert photography lately, so I decided it was time I got a better way of reducing noise (a high ISO is required with my fairly slow lens). Imagenomic’s solution, Noiseware, seemed most appropriate, so I began with the 30-day trial. During that time, it was useful enough to sell me on getting a full license. Let’s take a closer look at what makes this plugin better than Photoshop’s built-in noise moderation.
It is hard to believe, but we are already in October. In the gaming industry, this time of the year is known as review season due to the many video game releases around this time. This year, for example, it all started with Borderlands 2, followed by Resident Evil 6, XCOM: Enemy Unknown, Dishonored, and more. Sadly, none of these games are for OS X.
Worry not though: there are many new games coming to the Mac App Store, so we will have your back when it comes to your gaming needs throughout the season. This time, however, we will be talking about one silly little game known as RC Mini Racers. It may not be the most immersive game you’ve ever seen, but it may help you kill sometime while you take a break from work, or wait for those “triple A” titles to launch.
As decent app news (apart from mundane updates) can sometimes be difficult to source some weeks, we’ve redesigned our weekly news roundup to give you both a flavour of app and Apple happenings throughout the week. We will try and keep all rumours to a minimal (unless they are highly relevant or pretty much confirmed), as there are plenty of other blogs out there on the Internet that cover Apple rumours in a bit more detail.
What we here at Mac AppStorm would like to focus on is high-quality, accurate and interesting news pieces from both the world of Mac apps and Apple as a company. So, without further ado, let’s see what’s been happening this week. Hope you enjoy it! (more…)
Keeping on top of all the bills that come in can be difficult. Have you ever wished you had an app to help you stay on top of them without much trouble, that didn’t cost an arm-and-leg like most financial apps? If so, you’re in luck.
Bills to Pay is exactly what the title hints at: an application in which you note the bills you need to pay. A newcomer to the App Store, Bills To Pay is priced at $5 which is low enough for anyone’s budget. But is it worth the admission price? Let’s find out.
This post is part of a series that revisits some of our readers’ favorite articles from the past that still contain awesome and relevant information that you might find useful. This post was originally published on September 21st, 2011.
I used to absolutely love menu bar apps. Years ago, it was a fairly tiny niche of the Mac app market that contained only a few really solid gems. These utilities provided a quick and easy way to control iTunes, run a quick maintenance script and get back to what you were doing.
At heart, menu bar apps were essentially thought to be little things that perhaps didn’t quite merit a full on application but still merited a permanent, always-on spot on your Mac. Things have changed though and I find myself becoming annoyed when I download an app and find that it has no alternative to the menu bar mode.
Should developers move past the trend of offering menu-bar-only apps in favor of giving users the power to decide? Let’s discuss.
