Firstly, I must start this review with a confession: Even as an experienced IT professional, and despite the advice I frequently give out to friends and relatives, I don’t back up my data anywhere near as much as I should do. I have an Apple Time Capsule at home, but that has ended up being used more as a central data store for my home than anything and, whilst I know it is important for me to back up regularly, I just don’t seem to get around to it all that often.
Then, the inevitable happens, and a disk fails to boot or mount one day, sometimes even without warning. In these cases, sometimes Apple’s own Disk Utility can help, but more often than not if the problem is serious, it just won’t cut it. Disk Utility is great, but when there are major problems on a drive, it generally spits out some cryptic error message and does nothing to help you fix the problem.
I experienced exactly this problem with a media drive connected to one of my Macs at home some time ago, and so it was with great interest that I discovered Alsoft’s DiskWarrior. The drive had been misbehaving for some time, occasionally losing files that had been added the day before, but now the drive wouldn’t mount at all, and I was worried. There were some irreplacable photos and videos stored on this drive, and I wanted to try and recover them the best I could.
Today’s review is a little bit technical, as it is specifically aimed for web programmers and designers, or anyone that would like to learn more about CSS. More specifically, we’ll be looking at the newer version of it, CSS3, which comes with a few new goodies like the ability to implement gradients, shadows, border shapes, and other new features in your styles.
These new features, however, are not as easy to code out manually, and making it compatible across multiple browsers is even harder. Today we are reviewing an app that can help web developers to implement these features without getting into too much trouble, as it can help you create new styles and generate the code to implement them. It’s called CSS3 Toolkit, and let’s check it out!
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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 December 20th, 2011.
If you’re a fan of CSS preprocessors, then you know that despite their usefulness, they can be a bit of a pain to work with at times. Most of them require some sort of Terminal voodoo to compile, which immediately scares off a good portion of potential users.
As always, the Mac development community has come to the rescue with some amazing tools that completely take the effort out of the process. Follow along as we take a look at five great apps that will help you work with LESS, Sass, Stylus and even some non-CSS languages like CoffeeScript and HAML.
We’ve collected the top four reviews, roundups and how-to articles from across the AppStorm network in February. Whether you’re interested in Mac, iPhone, Web, Android, Windows, or iPad 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!
Our giveaway is now closed, and congrats to @grizzly19 and @JO5EVR for winning a copy of Roxio Toast 11! Stay tuned for our next giveaways!
If you’re looking for a better way to backup your DVDs and burn media to disks from your Mac, you’ll be excited about today’s giveaway. We’ve got two copies of Roxio Toast 11 Titanium to giveaway to our readers from our friends at StackSocial. They’re featuring a 50% discount on Roxio Toast 11 already, so it’s only $50 this week from StackSocial, or you can enter here to win a copy totally for free.
Roxio Toast 11 Titanium lets you backup your CDs, DVDs, and Blu-ray disks, or create new ones from your own media or media you’ve ripped with Roxio Toast. It can also convert a wide variety of video formats to play on any of your devices. You can check out all of Roxio Toast 11′s features in the video below:
Tweet to Enter
If you’d love to win one of 2 free copies of Roxio Toast 11 Titanium, it’s easy to get your entry submitted. All you have to do is click the link below and send out the resulting tweet (or just copy and paste), then leave a comment below with a link to your tweet. That’s it!
We’ll announce the winners on Monday, July 9th. Good luck to everyone who enters!
Envato staff or people who have written more than two articles or tutorials for AppStorm are ineligible to enter.
The first Mac I ever used was a Bondi blue iMac G3 at a friend’s house sometime in ’99, though I don’t remember much about the experience other than admiring the translucent case. Months later, though, I began using an Apple product on a daily basis: a Newton MessagePad 100, given to me by an uncle after the company he worked for decommissioned them.
It ate AAA batteries and weighed a ton, but it was a rather cool device to play with even without internet or new apps. I wrote a journal (turning off the writing detection) and used it for keeping a calendar, and messed around with every menu and dialog in the system, discovering a hidden temperature indicator in the process. Sadly, it got stolen from our house several years ago, so I don’t have it around.
The best part of having a Newton was discovering little Newton things years later in Apple’s later projects. The trash animation in the Notes app on iOS looks just like the trash animation when throwing away a note on the Newton. Plus, the smoke puff when removing an icon from your OS X dock looks just like the delete animation on the Newton when you drew a w type squiggle over anything on a note.
Did you ever get to use a Newton? Have you found yourself looking for Newton features in other Apple products? Or do you wish you could have tried one out? We’d love to hear any Newton stories you have in the comments below!
It’s been an exciting month at Mac.AppStorm, with a new editor, a ton of exciting giveaways, and more great articles from our team. We’d like to say a special Thank you! to our weekly sponsors from the past month, for sponsoring our site and for the great apps they make. If you would like to feature your app on our site with an advertisement, be sure to check out our available slots on BuySellAds or register for a weekly sponsorship for your app.
If you haven’t already checked out our the great apps that sponsored our site last month, be sure to check them out now!
Magican
A Swiss army knife of Mac utilities, Magician is a great way to monitor and clean up your Mac. It’s a free app that boasts advanced features that you’d expect from a paid cleanup app, like clearing up space from old files and caches and monitoring your Mac’s temperature and fan speed. It’s a great app you should try out if you’d like to take better control of your Mac.
Onde Audio Recorder For Mac
It’s simple enough to record audio from your Mac’s microphone using QuickTime, but what about recording audio from other apps? Recording say, a Skype call for a podcast can be tricky without the right tools, and even then, it usually takes a ton of tweaking to get everything right. That’s where Onde Audio Recorder comes in. It lets you just select the apps you want to record audio from, as well as any mics or audio inputs, and then saves the recording the way you want.
TaskBurn
Completing your todos can get a bit boring, so why not add some flame to your tasks? That’s right: TaskBurn lets you literally burn your todos off your list, so they won’t be filling up your plans for the day any more. It’s a serious task manager with iCloud sync, task groups, and more, with the extra addition of a fun animated design to keep your productivity sizzling.
employment:app
HR tools and other business apps are often outdated and boring, looking like they were designed a decade ago, and are often only made for PCs. employment:app is a refreshing change, with a modern Mac UI, iCloud support, and advanced reporting and export options, in addition to the tools you’d expect to manage your employees and their documents.
And a special thanks to you, our Mac.AppStorm.net readers, for reading and sharing our articles. We couldn’t do it without you!
Today is not only the 4th of July, but also a great day to pick up some App Store bargains! Let’s see what’s on offer.
Pinterest is a great tool, used for many different purposes. Whether you use Pinterest for image curation, education, saving recipes, planning weddings or any of the hundreds of uses, sometimes using the web application just isn’t really ideal. For those of you that prefer a desktop application or simply a supplement to the web application, PinBar Pro is definitely a tool worth checking out.
PinBar Pro is a menubar app for Pinterest, offering you the ability to view your feed, re-pin/comment/like pins, add new pins, and more. The application also has pop-up notifications, a rarity in the world of Pinterest applications. You can utilize the application directly in the menubar or you can choose to try out the desktop mode, which offers a larger screen and further options for utilizing Pinterest. Read on to learn more about PinBar Pro and whether you should try it out.
In the past few months, I’ve enjoyed using the popular music streaming service Rdio to listen to my favorite tunes on my Mac, in the car with my iPhone, and in coffee shops with my iPad. As I never wished to create a Facebook account just so I could use Spotify, Rdio seemed to be a great solution and it also included a much more decent user interface throughout all the apps – the designers worked hard to make sure the experience didn’t fall short in this area.
Last week, however, someone seems to have stumbled in a hole, for the service announced on it’s blog that they were refining the look of their web and Mac apps to be lighter, apparently both on the eyes and bandwidth. Sadly, it’s far from pleasing to my eyes. In fact, I’ve found it to be worse than Spotify. Please allow me to explain… (more…)
