Posts Tagged
best
Cloak is a fantastic little VPN that protects your privacy and allows you to browse the Internet safely on your Mac. Unfortunately, you must pay a price for quality.
Or must you? The team at Spotflux doesn’t think you should pay for privacy, so they have developed a great little VPN that works on Mac, Windows, iOS, and soon Android. As with anything that’s free, there must be a downside, right? Let’s find out. (more…)
Gone are the days of pocket notebooks, or journals that people threw their many emotions and adventures into, or little metal-bound notepads that bear many lists, from wishes to tasks. A new era is upon us, the age of digitalisation. With it, traditional scribblers are called to conform to the rules of modern note-taking, journaling, and really, writing anything at all down. Because in this age of high-definition displays and shiny new phones that appear on the shelves of our favourite electronics store every few months, there’s not time to pull out the little notebook when the smartphone is right there.
This isn’t a mobile blog though, so where am I going with this elaborate point? Well, the Mac has applications for all these things too. Whether it be for journaling or jotting down a quick thought, the Mac App Store is full of solutions to help you make these tasks easier. It’s definitely a big market, and if the developer knows what he’s doing, a New and Noteworthy app can end up being your daily tool. Let’s take a look at the best ones there are for putting your thoughts in the safe confines of your Mac’s hard drive, or iCloud, or just some other cloud. (more…)
The critically-acclaimed iPhone task manager Clear just came to the Mac earlier this month. Even though it received a lot of great support from reviewers across the Internet, users responded harshly to this release. Some claimed that it “doesn’t live up to its hype”, others that it was merely a start, and some went so far as to bash every living feature of its being. For the price, can you get more? Jimmy Do, developer of Mochi, thinks so.
Do introduced the app in August, put it on sale for 99 cents last month, and then updated it with printing and bug fixes and raised the price back to normal. In other words, it’s been around for a few months and the developer cares about updating it — two good signs. Mochi takes the same simple approach as clear, only with a bit more detail in the areas that count. It’s not to be considered a competitor to the colorful task manager, but rather an alternative. Does it live up to such expectations? (more…)
When you’re looking for a good way to introduce a product, create a trailer for a film, or even edit a photo, Apple has some good software to offer its Mac users. iMovie, iPhoto, GarageBand and other members of the iLife suite are included with OS X. Many users really enjoy these and think of them as prime benefits of owning a Mac. However, there are more professional versions of such software available from Apple. Final Cut Pro, for instance, is a truly professional way to edit a short picture or even a full independent film; Logic Pro brings every single audio tool to your fingertips; and Aperture is nearly on par with Photoshop, just aimed at a different price range.
The product we’re interested in today is Motion, a companion to Final Cut Pro. It’s designed to help you create motion graphics, moving versions of brochures you’d already have designed in Photoshop or Pixelmator. This software can help small businesses create advertisements for their new products at beautiful high definition. However, not everyone wants to create one of these from scratch, so what about a template for it? Our parent company Envato’s VideoHive now offers a section for just that. But there are currently 35 templates available, so which one is best for you? Let’s take a look at eight of the most well-designed.
iTunes is probably one of the most used applications on Mac. It comes pre-installed, plays music well, and has the iTunes Store where many people shop for new music. It’s the way we manage our iPods, iPhones, and iPads, lets us watch movies, listen to music, and more. It’s priceless to many first-time Mac users, even if it does have a few flaws.
Of course, there are those who enjoy alternatives. While iTunes should still be used for syncing one’s library to an iPod or iOS device, a lot of third-party substitutes do a fine job of playing music and other content. A more beautiful way to play music is something the Mac could use — iTunes isn’t really the most aesthetically pleasing right now — and until the iTunes 11 update is released, why not take a look at the additional solutions? (more…)
Last month I wrote a how-to article on the website builder Rapidweaver. While RapidWeaver is a great piece of software with numerous options to create great looking websites, it also has a huge number of plugins available for users to try and use with their site.
In this article I’ve rounded up some of the best plugins available to RapidWeaver users to help you get the most out of your site. Read on to see my top ten RapidWeaver plugins.
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This post is the answer to the first question that any new Mac user will ask: which apps are the best? The next time someone asks you this question, don’t think twice, just send them here.
We’ve spent hours and hours browsing the web, combing the Mac App Store and wandering through our own archives for the absolute best Mac apps around and we’ve found a whopping one hundred of them that we think you’ll love. Whether you’re looking for a screenshot utility, a todo list or even a great game to play, we’ve got you covered. We’re not merely offering a mindless list of links either, we took the time to tell you what each app does and why we love it so you can make an informed decision. Happy downloading!
