As always every Wednesday, here are our weekly picks of the best deals on the App Store for this week.
Happy downloading! (more…)
Bills are an inevitability of life, but spending a lot of time trying to keep track of them isn’t. It’s not unlikely that, throughout your life, you’ll have to pay mortgage payments, phone service contracts, credit card repayments, etc, and all at different intervals, costs, and dates. It can be a confusing financial landscape, but staying on top of things is something you have to do.
Enter Chronicle, a bill management software now in it’s fifth version that eases the process of keeping track of your due payments, and ones past. With the app, you can add payments of all sorts, be reminded when they’re due and log them once they’re paid. It’s on sell for just $9.99 to celebrate the new launch, and it’s a pretty nice, all-in-one solution, so let’s take a look. (more…)
Since 2008, Apple has shifted the design of all MacBooks with a unibody aluminum shell, starting with the original MacBook Air and continued with the MacBook Pros. Today, if you buy a MacBook, you’ll have to get one with an aluminum unibody, as that’s all they sell now. Apple’s hailed the design as stronger yet lighter than previous designs. It’s certainly proved popular with customers. Every high-end PC, it seems, tries to one-up Apple’s unibody design.
Plastic cracks and scratches, and rarely would hold up to any heavy blows or falls. Aluminum is much more resilient, but is still susceptible to scratches from hard objects and even bends from hard falls. It’s far from the hardest or strongest material on the planet. Just search for bent MacBook Air, and you’ll find some horrifying pictures online (of course, if a plastic notebook took the same blows, it likely would have cracked and shattered instead of just bending … but still).
That’s why we’re wondering how your unibody MacBook Pro or Air is holding up. Have you gotten some small scratches and bent corners, or does yours still look factory-fresh? Is the unibody design working better for you than other laptops you’ve had in the past? We’d love to hear your thoughts in the comments below!
The Sims series is an undeniable icon of PC gaming, selling more than 150 million units and earning a place amongst the best-selling video game franchises of all time. Controlling the lives of virtual people (the “sims”) has become somewhat of a phenomenon and, while hardcore gamers might laugh it off, The Sims has introduced gaming to whole new demographics.
The Sims 3 was released in 2009 as the latest base game of the franchise and the first to be simultaneously released on both Mac and PC. In this review, we’re going to take a look at a game that remains immensely popular on the platform and that’s role in it’s franchise makes it an icon of Mac gaming.
Our weekly sponsor this week is Pixelmator, the most beautiful image editor designed for the Mac. Its got more features than ever, has been designed for the Retina Display, and for a limited time, is available for only $14.99!
Pixelmator has been a leading Mac image editor for years now, and even won an Apple Design Award in 2011. The team hasn’t sat still since then, quickly adding new features and enhancements to the app. The most recent update brought a number of new features to Pixelmator, including iCloud support, a Retina Display ready interface, a ton of great new effects in a dedicated Effects Browser, alignment guides, and Mountain Lion native sharing.
That’s in addition to the great editing features that users already love in Pixelmator. With advanced layer support, drawing and retouching tools, file versions, web export features, and more, there’s something for everyone to love. Best of all, it’s built on the best OS X technology, letting it take advantage of your GPU to speed up your work and helping you work faster with Automator integration.
Go Get It!
If you’re ready to get started editing photos and creating beautiful digital art on your Mac in an app that’s designed to make the most of OS X, head over to the App Store and pick up a copy of Pixelmator before the summer sale ends! Pixelmator usually costs $59, but you can get it for just $14.99 right now. You can even download a free trial from their site to try out all of Pixelmator’s features for free for 30 days.
So, you got a Macbook Pro with Retina display. Congratulations, we are all jealous of you — no seriously, we are. But as you look at those pixels or, well, the lack thereof (that you can see anyhow), you are probably wondering what is the best way to showcase that amazing looking 2880×1800 resolution display. If so, you are in luck. This roundup will give you some of the most amazing Retina-ready wallpapers.
We’ve gather 100 wallpapers to choose from, in every category you can think of. We’ve also heard your problems with loading the page when there are too many big images, so we’ve place the wallpapers in thumbnails. Then, we’ve put all the wallpapers found in this roundup in a handy zip file that you can grab after the break. How’s that for a great wallpaper roundup?
Most of my solo work time passes with music in the background. Sometimes I’m playing music from my iTunes library, and sometimes I’m streaming music from online radio stations or subscription services. Controlling it all can be a pain. Whether I’m writing a review for AppStorm or balancing Excel spreadsheets at work, I normally have to switch back to the music program to pause a song if someone walks in. If a song comes on that I’m not in the mood to listen to, then it’s even worse since I have to swap to the player to skip and then back to my work. Even this brief interruption can take me out of flow and require time to pick up where I left off.
Skip Tunes is a simple menubar app that offers a solution. It runs in your menu bar to let you control the your music from the menu bar or with keyboard shortcuts. How well does it work? (more…)
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…)
Offloading PSDs and other digital art for a price is an art in itself. There are so many different ways to distribute your unique creations that things can get crowded. Stock digital art is a popular thing on the Internet and there are many who would pay for a unique, well-designed item. I’ve personally been a supporter of Envato’s own GraphicRiver or AudioJungle for the delivery of said items, but there are more apt solutions than these — you just have to look for them.
And that’s where Folio makes its grand entrance. If you want a quick way to upload your art, whether it’s a user interface for an iPhone app, vectors, or even audio, this could just be the best tool for the job. Unfortunately, it’s invite-only right now and they took a good month to send me one. That’s not to say you shouldn’t try it though; I’ll take a deeper look after the break. (more…)
