There isn’t too much you can say about solitaire on its own. It’s the card game your coworker plays instead of writing formulas for Excel spreadsheets on Windows, but that doesn’t mean we can’t turn solitaire into something more than a time waster. Proof of concept: Mondo Solitaire from Ambrosia Software is solitaire done right. You aren’t just playing the same game of Klondike over and over - instead you’re offered over 300 variants of solitaire madness to choose from. If you include the beautiful game board that looks like it should bundled with Apple’s own Game Center, then you have yourself one premium handful of card games.
Posts in reviews
Mondo Solitaire: Deliciously Beautiful Solitaire For Mac
HazeOver Lets You Concentrate By Fading Inactive Apps
Sometimes it’s hard to concentrate on a Mac and get things done. With all those open windows – the Twitter client, the browser, music from iTunes, Google Reader – it’s easy to get lost in the information stream and distractions and lose focus on what you were doing. HazeOver, a free Mac app by Maxim Ananov, wants to provide a solution to this problem by offering a simple way to eliminate the visual clutter: fading the background application windows you’re not looking at.
The idea is very simple: the app in the foreground stays untouched, the inactive windows are slightly dimmed to create an effect that will let you concentrate on a single app. So say I have to get an article done in the browser but tweets keep coming in the background through the Twitter app, chances are I won’t look at it like I always do because HazeOver generates this “dimmed background” that will help me stay focused on Chrome.
I don’t know how well the system will work for you, but the app certainly behaves as advertised. Once installed and opened, it will automatically fade inactive windows as an app comes in the foreground. But what if you’re that kind of user who keeps multiple apps running side-by-side for multitasking? You might be out of luck due to HazeOver’s lack of customization settings.
Still, the app is a free download and you can try it out here. Check out the demo video below. Read more
Spout Brings Kinetic Typography to Twitter, Facebook and RSS
Spout, a new app for the iPhone and iPad by collect3, aims at bringing the beauty of kinetic typography (animations made exclusively of words with different font faces, colors, and sizes) to your favorite social networks and news sources. Spout, available at $0.99 in the App Store, works exceptionally well to visualize news and status updates as typographic animations running smoothly and incredibly fast on screen. Seriously, this thing displays tweets and messages like in those typography videos you might have seen before on the Internet. It’s just so cool.
But is it useful, too? Not so much. The effect is really neat, but Spout isn’t anything more than a beautiful visualizer with few interactivity options. Sure, you can login with your Facebook, Twitter and Google Reader accounts to stay on top of tweets, status updates and RSS entries, but there isn’t much you can do to play with the information displayed by the app. You can load a specific Twitter user or search, enter multiple accounts and choose to display real names or usernames for tweets – but as far as “productivity” goes the only thing you can do is load a tweet in a popup and then forward it to Safari. I can see, though, how the developers built Spout to be an interesting typographic experiment, rather than another client Twitter might not even like. Spout will look great on your desk and it makes for a great demo to your friends, but don’t expect to use this as a replacement for Twitterrific or the official Twitter iOS app.
That said, Spout has beautiful animations and works just as advertised. For $0.99, you should give it a try.
TapeDeck For Mac Records & Captures Audio, Supports Pro Hardware & Monitoring
Much like TinyVox which we looked at recently, you’d think TapeDeck would be its older brother (though the two aren’t related). TapeDeck for the Mac is a cassette deck for OS X, enabling you to quickly label and record audio from the built in microphone or connected pro hardware, and can allow you to monitor (playback) audio as it’s being recorded. If you have the jack for your Mac’s line-in port, you’ll be able to quickly save off audio to a .m4a file which shows up as a cassette in the tap box (the drawer that holds your cassettes). You can organize recordings by color, add notes, select audio quality per recording, and choose either stereo or mono (mono only records audio on the first of the two channels you’re recording to). It’s old school meets… new school?
DropBook Integrates Facebook With Your Desktop: Review & Giveaway
DropBook is a little more difficult to show off than most apps in part because of its deep integration with your desktop and menubar. It isn’t an app that traditionally sits in your Object Dock, rather, you get a translucent Facebook icon that sits in the lower left corner of your screen which you can drag pictures and favicons/URLs into to instantly share content to your wall. As content is dragged into the Facebook icon, a window appears that shows you the attachment or link to your content. If it’s a picture, you can send it to your album of choice including your profile pictures. On your Mac, a lot of content is bound to be bundled in iPhoto, and you can drag multiple selected photos for a multi-upload. You currently can’t add tags to photos, which might be a deal-breaker for those uploading lots of pictures.
Due, The Best Reminder App for iPhone, Now Available on the iPad
Due, a popular reminder and timer application for the iPhone we at MacStories reviewed several times in the past, was updated last night to include a native iPad version that, together with OTA sync through Dropbox introduced in version 1.3.1, now allows you to have your reminders, timers and logbook always in sync and available across a variety of devices.
Due for iPad sports a completely new interface for the tablet that reminded me of the official Twitter app at first with a vertical navigation bar on the left and a middle panel to add and customize your reminders and timers. The bar on the left lets you switch between the sections of the app, as well as the Settings which now have their own dedicated tab. As you may know Due syncs with Dropbox upon launch and exit, so if you’re running both the iPhone and iPad versions at the same time don’t expect changes to occur simultaneously. It’s highly recommended that you only use one version of Due at a time to avoid sync conflict issues. That said, sync is pretty reliable and fast enough to enable you to switch from a device to another within seconds.
New design aside, Due for iPad follow the steps of the iPhone app to offer an easy to use solution for your reminders and timers. Many of the interface elements are the same so you’ll feel comfortable when using the new Due for iPad. This update also introduces a number of fixes and various improvements, such as the possibility to relaunch the app in its previous state (reminders / timers tabs), double tap to edit reminders and timers, extended undo support. When adding new reminders, the app will now open the “quick panel” automatically to customize snooze and repeat quickly – this one is a very welcome addition to further streamline Due’s workflow and usability.
Due keeps getting better on each release, and this iPad version plays an important role in making Due a ubiquitous way to have your reminders and timers available all the time. You can get the app for $4.99 in the App Store, and check out the full list of changes and fixes below. Read more
On Stage: iPod Companion App with Wikipedia Integration
On Stage, a new app by German developer Fabian Kreiser, is a lightweight companion to the iPhone’s iPod application that, together with a custom UI design, comes with neat Wikipedia integration that also supports Sophiestication’s Articles out of the box.
If you’re looking for a more powerful iPod replacement that does a bunch of things like Wikipedia lookup and recommended artists, make sure to check out My Artists, which we reviewed a couple of times on MacStories. On Stage is a smaller alternative with a feature set focused on letting you pick music from the iPod library and display Wikipedia information for the playing album, song, or artist. The app also displays lyrics like in iPod.app but has a function to retrieve lyrics online if missing. Read more
iPad 2 Camera Examples & iMovie
The iPad 2 is outfitted with a pair of cameras that allow for intimate FaceTime and HD recording sessions, but how do these cameras rank on the still photo front? Several blogs have posted some pics already, but I wanted to do a few examples of my own (including a homemade movie) that really shows off what you can expect to do with your new tablet.
Frenzy Public Beta Available: A Dropbox-based Social Network
Back in September we talked about Frenzy, nothing more than a teaser at the time that was promising to bring a “Dropbox-based social network” to the Mac. Today, Aptonic Software (makers of popular utility Dropzone) has released the first public beta of Frenzy for Mac and, indeed, it works like a private social network powered by the Dropbox backend. We took the app for a quick spin earlier today and we were impressed. Read more