The world of desktop applications have seem to be saturated with apps that promote better organization of all the things you need to get done (Things, Daylight, OmniFocus). But how many have you seen that can successfully keep you focused on these items cluttering your queue? Concentrate has taken a good stab at this with its flexible and simple form to keep you on track.
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Attention Management Through Concentrate. Reviewed.
Socialite: A Cocktail Made With Social Networks
More than a year ago, a small company called The Cosmic Machine put their first app, EventBox, in public beta. EventBox was a great app in many ways: it was a nice Twitter client and had a slew of other great services. As time passed, the developer, who was amazingly responsive, added new features, like photo upload, identi.ca, OneRiot, and Digg (which had been removed earlier). There was, however, one major problem: EventBox could only let you use one Twitter account.
The developer began to target this issue and decided that since it was such a large rewrite, he would fix some other limitations with the app as well. He rewrote the majority of the app and decided to release this second beta as MultiBox for the time being. MultiBox lacked some of the basic features such as the Unread and Flagged folders, but brought amazing stability and user interface improvements as well as multiple Twitter accounts and a bunch of other new additions.
Multibox was impressive; so much so it apparently attracted the attention of the famous Realmac Software, developers of LittleSnapper and RapidWeaver. Realmac decided to buy out EventBox and give it a new name: Socialite. The following is a review of this new app, albeit with a slight bit of longing for the old EventBox.
WideMail for Snow Leopard Public Beta Available
This is the news many Mac users were waiting for. WideMail, the popular plugin which brings full-screen capabilities to Mail.app, is finally available as a public beta for Snow Leopard. I’ve been using Letterbox for a while now (since I needed full-screen mode but WM wasn’t available) and I’m quite satisfied with it. However, after a few tests I must admit this WM update seems really interesting and has more features than Letterbox.
Record Your Internet Radio With Snowtape
Snowtape is an internet radio player for the Mac, a one-of-a-kind app that looks good as it blasts your tunes. Sporting a slick, dark, interface, Snowtape is like an iTunes for your iRadio, helping you browse through thousands of stations and even import your own.
Currently available for OS X 10.5 with an iPhone companion (not reviewed here) on the App Store, Snowtape is the place for internet radio.
Cinch Brings 7’s Windows Management to Mac OS X. Is It Really That Bad?
There’s this great feature of Windows 7 everyone was talking about 2 months ago, which enables you to easily resize your windows by simply dragging them into specific “zones” of your screen: drag it to the left / right and the window is automatically resized to fill half the screen, drag it to the top to make it full screen. Sounds pretty cool, actually. Now, what if some less known developers make an app that emulates this resize thing..on Mac OS?
Here comes Cinch.
Spark App Released
Spark, a new application for Mac OS X I had the chance to beta test, was finally released tonight. Here is the official (and cute!) website.
Spark is a very lightweight notes taking / to-do list app, which you could decide to either run in the dock or in the menubar. The interface is very nice and straightforward: you can add tasks, attach notes to them and organize tasks in bigger projects. Another great features is the iCal syncing: everytime a Spark task changes, so it does in iCal. Cool.
Spark is a freeware, it has a clean and well-designed UI and it could become the ultimate solution for those who are looking for a simple, uncluttered to-do manager app for Mac.
It’s Time to Close That Mail.app. Welcome Notify 2.
I never used a mail client other than Mail.app on Mac OS for my IMAP account. Thunderbird is slow and buggy and Postbox feels too much like a Windows app, though it could be nice if just the devs would refine the UI. On the other hand, Mail.app is powerful. From mailboxes to rules and plugins (just to name a few, Letterbox, Mail Act-on and MailTags) Mail gets its job done with a huge set of awesome features, speed and stability. But there’s another market on Mac OS X, that of mail notifiers: they usually sit up in the menubar and provide an easy and minimal to way to instantly check for new mails. Now, what if we merge these two kinds of applications, creating both a minimal, lightweight mail notifier and client?That’s exactly what Notify 2 is.
Espresso, the All-In-One Caffeinated Web Editor. Reviewed.
[This article was written by Raj Ramamurthy. You can check out his personal website here.]
For a long time, Panic’s Coda has been the best, in both functionality and fashion, application for all in one website editing on the Mac.
MacRabbit, a software development company well known for it’s ADA winning CSSEdit, released their competitor to Coda that is putting some heat on the number one: Espresso.
Appropriately named the “Coda killer”, Espresso packs a real punch.
Choosy: Choosing the Right Browser for You Since 2008
Though a few months ago I wrote a huge roundup about the ultimate list of browsers for Mac which featured more than 40 of them, there are actually 4 main browers: Safari, Firefox, Opera and Chrome. The rest is either made of variations / beta versions or just shit. That said, if you’re a designer or a developer it’s very likely that you need to test the websites you’re creating under different rendering engines. But what a pain can be to manually open overtime a different link in a different browser? A huge pain.
Here’s where Choosy comes in.