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 June 15th, 2011.
Puzzle style adventure games have never exactly been my “thing”. I’m not a hardcore gamer, but when I do play, I usually stay away from these types of games. After deciding to expand my horizons, I looked around in this genre and spotted Machinarium. The screenshots of the game immediately drew my attention. The visuals were absolutely stunning and enough to get me to venture off into the realm of puzzle/adventure gaming.
Machinarium is a point and click game that takes place in a magical industrial environment full of amazing sights and sounds. You must solve puzzles of varying complexity within the environment in order to move forward in the game. Does the gameplay measure up to the graphics? Read on to find out.
I, like quite a few people, am not a huge fan of Apple’s default media software, QuickTime, which comes bundled in with every release of OS X. Although it gets the job done for some things, I find that the range of codecs and built-in features is a little limited and not enough to suit my needs (and videos!). There are plenty of alternatives out there on the Internet, and with Front Row gone from all future releases of OS X starting from Lion, now is really the time to start looking around for an alternative.
So without further ado, here are my 5 top free alternatives to QuickTime.
We’ve collected the top four reviews, roundups and how-to articles from across the AppStorm network in May. 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!
We’d like to say a big thank you to last month’s Mac.AppStorm sponsors, and the great software they create! If you’re interested in advertising, you can purchase a banner advertisement through BuySellAds, or sign up for a Weekly Sponsorship slot.
Thank you to the fantastic applications we had sponsoring each week during the month, all of which we personally recommend you download and try out!
- USBMate – Every time USBMate is run, it will clean and optimize your connected external disks and USB flash drives, purging them of all the temporary files that your system throws on there. It will also automatically check your drive for any AutoRun viruses and take the appropriate actions to get the drive back in perfect shape.
- MindNode Pro – With MindNode Pro, you can collect, organize and outline your ideas into attractive mind maps. Most of us don’t think in bullet points, instead ideas come to us in a scattered, organic fashion that challenges traditional note-taking methods. With MindNode Pro, you can capture your ideas as they come to you in a way that helps you make sense of the complex nature of brainstorming.
- Chronicle – If you’re looking for a way to get more organized with your bills, Chronicle is your answer. It’s beautiful, easy to use and powerful enough to keep you on track. Set up bill payment reminders, track and reduce debt, keep a full payment history, view graphs of your spending, and more! From Mac.AppStorm to Macworld, reviewers everywhere are giving this app high rankings.
Finally, thanks to you for reading AppStorm this month, and for checking out the software that our sponsors create. I really appreciate it – you make the site what it is!
As always every Wednesday, here are our weekly picks of the best (and free) deals on the App Store for this week.
Happy downloading!
There was a time when my desk was perpetually covered in Post-It notes. I used to have to write down every little task I needed to complete for a project, and then keep track of them in an admittedly chaotic manner. Fortunately for people like me, various methods such as Getting Things Done have inspired fantastic productivity apps that make our lives more organized.
Such productivity apps are a dime a dozen, but today we are going to be looking at two task managers that set themselves apart. Producteev and Wunderkit are two powerful task managers that offer a similar set of features. I’ve spent the last few weeks playing around with each of these apps, and we are going to look at how their features stack up against each other.
This debate has raged on for years in the photography community. Lightroom and Aperture are aimed at very similar audiences and they share very similar workflows that allow you to quickly browse, sort and edit your photos without the pain of opening and saving each file individually like you would with Photoshop.
Adobe fans stick to their guns that Lightroom is the most powerful solution for the professional photographer’s workflow, but others have found exactly what they’re looking for in Aperture’s awesome organizational features such as automatic face recognition.
When it boils down to it, if you were forced to pick one and only one, which would it be? Would you side with Adobe or Apple? Vote in the poll and then leave a comment below defending your answer.
By accident or by design, Growl is most likely installed on your machine; if it isn’t, you should probably look into it. Many applications offer support for it and some even come bundled with it. Growl is one of those applications that one thinks should be native to OS X, but sadly, it isn’t. Though as Mountain Lion rolls out its own notification system, the future of Growl seems to be precarious. We’re still huge fans though and thought you’d enjoy a nice big dose of Growl goodness.
Here we have a group of sexy, sleek, and shiny Growl themes ready for you to download, install, and use at your discretion. At the bottom of the article, there are a few extra Growl notification styles that have not been coded. You can use these as inspiration. If you keep an eye on them, the designers may end up coding them.
Our featured sponsor this week is Magican, a great way to monitor and clean up your Mac’s system.
Magican is a Swiss army knife of Mac utilities. It’s positively overflowing with incredibly useful ways to help you keep your Mac running smoothly. Search out and delete useless files, remove bloat from caches and old binaries, watch your active processes, adjust your fan speeds, see suggestions for great free and discounted apps; this app does it all.
The crazy part that you simply won’t believe is that this is a free application. You read that right, there’s easily $40 in value here but the developers have seen fit to simply give it away.
Go Get It!
Magican is available as a free download on the developer website. Go grab it right away and get your Mac back in shape.
We’re definitely not short on ways of communicating with people on our computers. Everyday, tons of new social networks and other types of services come out, trying to catch our attention, and sometimes even becoming part of our workflow. But no matter how many of these new services you use, your email is likely still the epicenter of everything you do on the Internet.
Especially around a work setting, using email is a primordial part of everything you do. So, what if you could have an app that gives you the right information on what you are doing with your email, so that you can then focus your productivity around what really needs it? We’re talking about an app called Mailsum. Read on to see what it can do.
