When I purchased my Macbook, I partially did it because I knew Mac OS X was the operating system of choice of many musicians. Many friends of mine kept talking about how GarageBand, Logic and ProTools were so great, stable and useful on Mac OS so, together with many other motivations, I decided to make the big switch. I couldn’t have made a better choice in my entire life, but this is my personal story. The story of every artist and band out there is that Mac OS provides a huge amount of awesome tools and apps to record songs, annotate ideas, store files and manage the whole music experience. There’s no arguing about that.

Now, what if there was a single application that combined all of these things into one, simple, powerful package? Wouldn’t it be amazing to have all your recordings, collaborators, lyrics drafts, podcasts and ideas in one application? It’s not iTunes guys.

Meet Minim 2.

Read more

I’ve never used financial apps that much. Maybe ‘cause I don’t have a good relationship with numbers at all, maybe because I just didn’t find the right app for me. The truth is, I never felt the need of having a financial manager anyway. Then I realized that keeping track of my expenses was actually an important thing, so I decided that I should start using some software to help me track my budget and some other stuff. I started using MoneyBook, and I’m still using it right now: awesome interface, easy to use, feature rich. It’s just perfect to me.

But what about the Mac? I heard that are a lot of different financial apps out there, some of them even support online banking, some have a stunning UI, but - seriously - none of them really suited to my needs. Guess I just wanted the perfect Mac version of MoneyBook, but don’t tell this to Silvio Rizzi or he’ll drop the iPhone development scene to create Mac apps. But finally - just like happened with MoneyBook - I found the app that works for me. It’s simple yet powerful, with all the features that I need and a very good interface.

It’s called Chronicle 3.

Read more

Many people buy a Mac computer and think they would never have to do some maintenance, like they used to on Windows. This is partially wrong. Sure, there are no viruses / trojans / malwares but you have to clean up some stuff and free up some space from your hard drive as time goes by. Caches, log and language files, the infamous universal binaries: this stuff is using a lot of your drive’s space.

Today I’ll talk about what’s in my opinion one of the best (or maybe, the best) maintenance app for Mac OS X, CleanMyMac.

Read more

Some people call it comeback, other resurrection, some poets often say “like a phoenix who rises from its own ashes”. Call it whatever you like, but when it’s about Mac and iPhone applications I prefer to call it “hard development and learning from your mistakes”. We recently saw Read It Later coming out with an amazing 2.0 version knocking out Marco Arment’s Instapaper iPhone app, now it’s the turn of AppZapper, the famous app uninstaller which has finally reached the long-awaited 2.0 update and it’s here to stay on the throne of application uninstallers. But there’s so much more about it that we can’t keep on calling it “an uninstaller”.

I’ll call it an “applications manager”.

Read more

Last week, we reviewed Concentrate, an application to help you focus on particular tasks by managing your entire workspace; for example, it will launch Pixelmator, change your iChat status to “Busy: Working!”, and block out Tweetie and YouTube so you can finish designing that icon for your client. It’s a great system for keeping you on task - but at the same time, it’s like a digital Mother Superior watching you over your shoulder with a yardstick. What if you’d just like a little help focusing on one application with the freedom to use other applications at will?

Let’s think about your options.

Read more

If you’ve ever been wondering which Twitter client you could have used if Loren didn’t come up with his amazing app Tweetie, I think we have the answer now. It’s called Itsy, it was unknown until some days ago when someone talked about it on - guess what - Twitter and it could be your new favorite Twitter client for Mac OS X.

Read more

A few months ago I stumbled upon this new browser for Mac called Stainless and I immediately realized the developers had big plans for it. The browser was fast, stable, it featured a simple and uncluttered UI and some good features which made it stand out from the crowd. I really appreciated the “tabs as single processes” thing, inspired by Google Chrome.

But now that Chrome is out on the Mac as well and Mozilla is working hard on the next version of Firefox (the much anticipated 4.0 version that will hopefully refresh the whole interface) is Stainless still the new kid on the block of Mac browsers worth a look, or is it just a geek alternative to Safari, Chrome, whatever? Could it be your new default browser?

Read more

So,you bought a Mac and you think you’ll never have to mess with caches, logs and disk space wasting space anymore, right? Well, this is wrong. You should know, in fact, that your Mac will store these kinds of files overtime, and these files will start wasting a lot of of your hard drive if you don’t use a 3rd party cleaning software, or just do it manually. That’s why apps such CleanMyMac exist. Today another similar app has been released, it’s called Purity, it’s created by Tim Parnell (one of the devs of Tinygrab) and it’s amazingly simple.

Read more