This Week's Sponsor:

DEVONTHINK

Store, Organize, and Work the Smart Way

Posts in reviews

Security Cam for iPhone Keeps An Eye On Your Stuff, With Motion Detection

Now this is an interesting app I’ve recently discovered in the App Store. Months ago, I began thinking about setting up a homemade wireless security system in my house; I saw that the system could be easily put in place with a couple of hundred dollars, and I was getting serious about purchasing all I needed to get it up and running. As usual with my personal projects I dream about and save in my “someday” list, it didn’t happen. Work got in the way, priorities changed, I didn’t set up a home security system. As my to-do list suggests, I may actually do it “someday”.

Home security and monitoring, anyway, is a personal requirement (and hobby, I guess, or obsession) that can change according to one’s needs, workplace and items to protect from unwanted eyes and hands. This is why I think Security Cam, a $0.99 app for iPhone, may be just what the average user is looking for. Read more

DesignScene: An Inspiration Browser For Graphic Designers

It’s hard not to be inspired from others in the community who started with virtually no experience, and end up building really great utilities for the iPad. Roger Wong and his code partner David Wheeler took arms in 2010 to build an iPad app worthy of being featured as an “App of the Week” on the App Store. The year long development process from HTML junkie to a decorated iPad developer has ended with the fruition of DesignScene, the graphic designer’s browser for finding inspiration on the social web. Some would believe this is a new clone of Flipboard, but I’ll be quick to dismiss that having read Roger’s motivational backstory. Hard work pays off, and again I’m reminded of Mike Rundle’s “be curious” recommendation to success.

DesignScene is very cool, and I’ve been personally looking for something that was purely focused on art and discovering new content. Featuring over thirty sites, DesignScene pulls in regularly updated feeds to provide you with the freshest content from around the web.

Read more

Window Cleaner Hides Inactive Apps To Prevent Desktop Clutter

The desktop isn’t iOS. On our Macs, we tend to open lots of apps and create new windows every minute, and we rarely remember to close them once we’re done with them. Unless you’re a serious window management geek who has installed scripts and utilities to keep your Mac’s screen elegant and neatly organized, free of useless and inactive windows, then I guess you’re looking for a simple, automated way to prevent “window clutter” from taking over your machine.

Window Cleaner, a $0.99 utility available in the App Store, does one thing very well: it hides app windows that have been inactive for a certain amount of time. The app, which lives in the menubar, comes with a Preferences panel that allows you to set an amount of minutes after which inactive windows will be hidden. You can opt to start the app at login (recommended) and “whitelist” applications that you want to be open all the time, like DVD Player or Movist, for instance.

This app just works, and even though I guess it’s possible to achieve similar results with a bit of Applescript – the average user will appreciate the advantages offered by a user interface and automatic Mac App Store updates. One thing that I would like to see in Window Cleaner is the possibility to set per-app expiration times, instead of a single amount of time to hide all apps.

Go get Window Cleaner here.

This Free App Lets You Control Music with Gestures

The app is called SongSwiper, it’s available for free in the App Store and it was updated yesterday to include Retina-ready graphics for the iPhone 4 and iPod touch 4th gen. SongSwiper is basically a controller for music playing from the standard Apple iPod app, but it allows you to control songs with swipes and taps instead of buttons, as in the iPod application.

The app looks a lot like Bowtie or Coversutra for OS X in the way it displays the artwork for a song currently playing. Unlike the aforementioned Mac apps, though, SongSwiper can’t live on top of your desktop – you’ll have to open the app every time if you want to enjoy its feature set. You can change between songs with a single swipe left or right, or adjust volume with a swipe up / down. To play and pause, double tap on the artwork. You can shuffle, manually pick songs from your Library.

SongSwiper might be the perfect app for those who use the iPhone in their car a lot and find it easier to swipe on the screen rather than having to point to a specific little button. The app’s free, so you should give it a try.

New Music Notifications with Nomis

We cover lots of music apps on MacStories, we even had a Roundup at the end of 2010. What can we say, we’re all big audiophiles here at MSHQ. Today we’re showing you another music app, but this one is unique and a first to the app store. It’s called Nomis, by Taprockets - an independent company in Germany - and it reminds you of new releases for all your favorite music artists. It’s very easy and simple to use. Read more

TV Show Tracker 2.0 for iPhone: One To Add To Your Homescreen

Not having cable, keeping tabs on the shows that appear on cable TV bites because I have to constantly check in on online schedules (all on different networks) just to see when the next episode of House is going to air. What sucks is that when having only Hulu as my prime source of entertainment, December was a month devoid of any content as weekly shows began to grind to a halt. With the exception of Saturday Night Live and a maybe two other shows, I’m paying for nothing. Shows will come back, but when?

We’ve already covered TV Show Tracker on MacStories, but the 2.0 update is worth mentioning since it delivers a much improved interface, a notification system alerting you before or after a show ends, inline video previews of episodes, and quick iTunes links so you can rent those shows quickly from the interface. TV Show Tracker consolidates all of the shows you watch into an instant access panel where you simply search for the popular program you watch and add it to your list of shows. TV Show Tracker displays the artwork for the program’s season, displays previous and upcoming showtimes, and keeps tabs on what episodes you’ve already seen. This is an app to add to your homescreen if you’re at all interested on keeping track of your favorite shows – it’s super convenient to have only the show listings you care about all in one place.

Read more

Delivery & Smaller: Object Dock Batch CSS & Javascript Compressors

Javascript & CSS developers looking to batch minify their files may already use the command line, but others will prefer an OS X inspired drag & drop solution. These YUI Compressor’s will gobble down your web files and spit them out with a smaller byte footprint, though the choice between these two compressors may be difficult because they’re… very similar. Quickly running through the features, we’ll leave you to decide if Delivery or Smaller will be better for your workflow.

Delivery:

Delivery is the least expensive (free), but provides the fewest options when minimizing your files. Dragging in Javascript & CSS files onto its Object Dock icon, a couple badges emerge notifying you of how many files you’re compressing, along with how much space was saved at the end of the operation. Delivery uses two compression algorithms, and decides between the one that will leave you with the smallest files. While you don’t have a choice for output (there are no preferences), Delivery places the compressed files back in their working directory with .min appended to the file names.

Smaller:

More expensive at $15, Smaller offers a GUI and allows you to compress files to a new location if you desire. As you add files to a graphical queue, you initiate the minify process (and you have the option to obfuscate Javascript as well) manually, but you don’t get a nice badge notifying you like Delivery. We like Smaller though as you can acknowledge the minimize process before committing, and has preferences that allow you to chose the resulting suffix.

Conclusion:

We suggest you give them both a try, and I have to thank our web guru Alessandro Vendruscolo for the rundown. Overall we like Delivery because it’s free and takes less actions to use, while Smaller gives you some additional options that removes the terminal barrier for web designers. You can check out Delivery and Smaller at their respective home-pages for more information.

Browser+ for iPad Aims To Reinvent Safari

I have been trying a lot of alternative browsers for the iPad over the past months. Since my good friend @kenyarmosh suggested me to give a spin to iCab Mobile (for iPhone and iPad), my interest for well-crafted, feature rich and innovative third-party browsers reached a new level. And while I’m still digging into all the features offered by iCab (which is, without a doubt, the most powerful alternative to Apple’s default browser), I have also been testing other simpler, minimal browsers that aim at offering a different take on browsing the Internet on the tablet.

Browser+ HD for iPad, in spite of its not-so-appealing name, is the freshest and simplest browser I have found in the App Store so far. What Browser+ does is simple: it takes standard elements of web browsing such as tabs, address bar and history and completely re-imagines them as if they were built from scratch for the iPad. Pretty much like Flipboard did for web content that has to be consumed on a tablet’s screen. Browser+, sold at $0.99 in the App Store, doesn’t come with all the functionalities found in Apple’s Safari or iCab Mobile, but what’s there has been recreated to fit better on the iPad. Read more

Wunderlist Review: Untethered Task Management Freedom

I attribute Dropbox to a few successful college projects because of how easy it is to collaborate by sharing files. Everyone understood the concept that they can drop a file into a shared folder, and everyone could see it. However, when we get to delegating tasks or making sure everyone is on the same page, e-mail and Facebook messages can only get so much done. Wunderlist is the solution to both free personal and collaborative task management, easily rivaling some of the more common GTD apps available for OS X and other platforms. Intuitive syncing, low barrier of entry, and seamless integration with most of your devices finally delivers a solution to customers who want more than a task list, and want it for free.

Read more