Thanks to everyone who took part in the giveaway this week, and special thanks to Brett Terpstra, the developer of Marked! I’m excited to let you know that the winners have now been chosen. If your Twitter user name is listed below, you’ll be receiving an email shortly with instructions for claiming your prize:
Congratulations to the lucky winners. Sorry to those who missed out, be sure to check back for more great competitions!
For decades now, voice control over any type of hardware has been the epitome of immersive user interface. From Star Trek to Iron Man, you have seen the benefits of vocal commands used over and over in many forms of science fiction. To date, technology still tries to mimic the essence of voice control from its sci-fi roots.
Like 3D, voice control has been a fun gimmick for computers, video game peripherals like Kinect and even televisions. More often than not, the software fails to capture the greatness that voice control could one day be. Recently however, Apple introduced the iPhone-4S-exclusive voice control behemoth known as Siri — which soon became the most popular feature of the handset. Why hasn’t this extremely helpful and rather cool piece of software made it to OS X yet? Better yet, why should it?
Video editing programs are big and bulky and take a lot of resources to run. I regularly use Adobe After Effects and Premiere, but my computer isn’t always happy about that. It doesn’t make sense to use Premiere or After Effects for the little tasks, but I don’t particularly care for iMovie so I often find myself having to open up Premiere just to do a simple conversion or little edit, which doesn’t make a great deal of sense. I’ve been looking for a light-weight program to take care of the little edits and Shave Video is definitely one I like.
Shave Video is a simple and quick program that’s great for basic cutting, chopping, splicing and conversions. Shave Video is useful no matter your skill level. Novice users can complete simple edits like cutting a scene from a phone-video. Professional editors will appreciate the simplicity of the software for use in prep work or batch conversion. Read on to find out how the program works as well as what I really thought of it.
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 April 23rd, 2011.
Time management is be a daunting task for many of us. I excel in writing down my appointments and time blocks into iCal, but if I don’t assign an alarm to them, I miss them. More than that, knowing that I have a lot crammed into a day discourages me to even open iCal – which doesn’t really improve the situation!
With Blotter, you can display your iCal content on your desktop and so keep an eye on your important stuff much easier – and surprisingly enough, find that there just might be time to do everything properly.
I was very reluctant to adopt Final Cut X and Motion 5 due to a number of reasons, one of the biggest of which was my favorite plugins working with the new software. I am very happy to say after many months, plugins are now available and coming out strong.
Let’s go on a little video lover’s escapade into the world of digital video and check some cool plugins! I even threw in a plugin for those who have not switched over to FCP X.
Here’s Mac AppStorm’s picks of the best deals on the App Store for this week, 11 – 18 April (there is also a little surprise waiting at the bottom of the page as well…).
Happy downloading!
(more…)
If you travel a lot or have a job that keeps you working in different places throughout the day, a decisive factor when you purchased your computer might have been the battery life. MacBooks generally have pretty good battery run time, but in order to keep it functional for as long as you can, you might have to give your battery a little maintenance over time.
Today we’re going to present to you a free app called Battery Health that can give you tips and information regarding the battery of your MacBook. Want to check it out?
Lately the world of Mac software has seen quite the surge in photo editing apps, many of which are banking on the retro photo craze that helped fuel Instagram to a huge user base and billion dollar sale. This increase in the average user’s interest in photography will surely lead to a lot of questions about how to keep all of those images nicely organized into separate libraries and/or albums.
It seems like a perfect time to take a refreshed look at what Mac owners are using to keep their photographs organized. Are you a fan of the simplicity of iPhoto or do you require the professional kick of apps like Lightroom and Aperture?
Vote in the poll and let us know about your organization process in the comments. If your favorite app isn’t listed, also be sure to let us know what it is.
Perhaps no other app category changes as fast and as much as the Twitter client one. They seem to merge, disappear, lose support and come up with new ones more than in any other app category. If you are into Twitter as much as we are, you probably already know the usual popular clients like Twitter for Mac, Twitterrific, TweetDeck, Echofon, etc. We’ve covered most of them before.
But today we are here to show you some cool new Twitter clients that have either gotten popular recently, or have come out in the past few months. Most of them have a unique take on Twitter, like trying to make it a more simple and mindful experience, but you’ll also find a few clients that are in direct competition to the ones mentioned above. Jump in!
There are many tools available for organizing bits of information on your Mac, but if your goal is to get a grip on those many images and screenshots you assembled, there’s a new player on the horizon you should check out.
Pixa is a companion app for all designers and graphic artists who scavenge the web for inspiration and images of all kinds and then lose track of them on their hard drives. With Pixa, a whole new level of organizing your image files is possible.
