I’ve never used Time Machine.

Ok, this can sound crazy, but I never felt the need of goin’ through the whole Time Machine process to backup files I can manually backup when I want. But you know, everyone has his favorite tools, so the choice it’s up to you.

Anyway, I think developing a backup utility for Mac should be a very hard task: I mean, even if I don’t use Time Machine, the rest of the world seems to love it. For this reason, creating from scratch an application to backup your Mac files it’s definitely difficult: you have to create something unique and make people want it.

Today I’d like to talk about a beta application I discovered yesterday, Parachute.

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There’s something great about indipendent Mac developers: sometimes they exactly know which application would be interesting. That’s what Malarkey Software did: they knew it would be awesome to download entire Flickr photosets.

And here comes Photo Grabbr.

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Say you own a Magic Mouse or a multitouch Macbook: gestures are great, aren’t they? You can perform actions by simply tapping / moving your fingers on the multitouch surface and this is a huge time saver in my opinion. Gestures are even better than keyboard shortcuts sometimes.

Now, Mac OS has a big problem with gestures: you can’t assign custom gestures to the applications you like. I mean, why can’t I tell Tweetie to refresh with a simple gesture? Now, I’d hate to say so but..

..There’s an app for that.

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Say you take screenshots of your desktop or open applications now and then to show off via IM or Twitter. Sure, you know how to take that screenshot: Cmd-Shift-4 (for an area) or Cmd-Shift-3 (for the whole screen). But getting it out onto the web? What a hassle to fire up an FTP client or twitpic.com just to drop off one little picture!

Enter TinyGrab.

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As you can guess, I’m an heavy user of the AppStore: I love to discover new released apps, read the changelog of every app that gets an update, share apps with my friends. But, the AppStore is not perfect: many bloggers wrote about the problems the Store has but the biggest, in my opinion, lies in the core itself: discover new apps is difficult.

With more than 100.000 apps available and the new rules Apple rolled out last week, it’s become impossible to find fresh and interesting apps. Seems like only top grossing apps get to the front page.

Anyway, I think a solution to this has just been released. And it’s called App Popular.

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I am a blogger, and my daily workflow often consists of repeating and boring tasks. That’s a given: I have to upload pictures, shorten URLs, send emails,install new apps. But if you’re not a blogger like me, it’s very likely that you repeat common tasks too.

Now, Mac OS is an excellent platform from this point of view: everything is simplified but yet powerful and thanks to some tecniques like Applescript or Smart Folders you can let the OS do stuff for you. But still, I missed an real application which would do tasks for me. By “real application” I mean an app that would sit in my Dock and not some scripts or complicated folder rules.

Here comes Dropzone.

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Flickr, that awesome “social network”  for sharing photographs, is probably one of the best resources for finding inspirational photos, screenshots, whatever a camera / computer can take. Now, Flickr is no doubt one of the best resources for bloggers to find photos to use in their posts: just as Wikipedia says “the service is widely used by bloggers as a photo repository”.

As you may have understood reading MacStories, whenever an application that uses the APIs of a webapp is released, I go download it to write a review about it. So, what about an application that brings Flickr “discovery” experience to our Mac desktop?

Meet Viewfinder.

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Blogging apps for iPhone suck.

Let’s face it: iBlogger is ugly and cluttered and the official WordPress app (which has recently been updated to 2.0) is slow, buggy and way too simple. How could this be even possible? I mean there are 100.000 apps out in the App Store and we don’t have a “Tweetie” for bloggers. You know, the champion who beats all and sits on the throne.

Well, the problem is that developing a blogging app is hard (yes, way too harder than developing a Twitter client) and needs a terrific support from the developer: we’re talking about an application which lets you blog from your iPhone and you know, people want stable and up-to-date apps. If WordPress didn’t make a decent app, how could a single developer make it?

Now, Squarespace (that awesome less known platform Web AppStorm reviewed here) has just released its official iPhone app and - guess what - it’s amazing.

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