Posts tagged with "mac"

My Must-Have Mac Apps, 2013 Edition

Must Have Mac Apps 2013

Must Have Mac Apps 2013

For the past three years, I’ve been running a series called “My Must-Have Mac Apps” that, once a year, would list the apps that I found indispensable on my Mac. This year, considering the changes that I went through from a workflow perspective, I thought it would be appropriate to start focusing on iOS as well. The first installment was about the iPad; today, I’m going to talk about the Mac.

As I wrote when Mavericks was released, I don’t need my Mac as much as I used to. I can do most of my work from iOS (particularly from my iPad mini), but that doesn’t mean that I don’t need a Mac for some tasks or that I’ve stopped using it altogether. I still have to use a few OS X-only apps and tools to get work done – stuff that wouldn’t be possible on an iPad, no matter how hard I try.

I may not be covering new Mac app releases on a weekly basis anymore, but, honestly, 2013 has been the year of iOS 7, with thousands of third-party developers shifting their focus to Apple’s mobile platform in order to update and redesign their apps in time for September. And the fact that Mavericks didn’t bring a radical new design or groundbreaking user features didn’t help either, as developers of Mac apps chose to release updates that focused on under-the-hood improvements and general optimizations.

And yet, in spite of a new design direction and several changes to built-in apps, iOS 7 still doesn’t come with valid alternatives to the stuff OS X is great at: a filesystem with easy management of files that can be opened by multiple apps, precision editing with a cursor, command line utilities, system-wide automation tools, and more. For as much as the iOS ecosystem is maturing and changing at an incredible pace, I haven’t stopped using my Mac and there are some things that can only be done on OS X. And therefore, like every year, I have put together a list of the apps that I consider my must-haves – apps that I install every time I set up my Mac and that I use regularly.

This year, I’ve simplified the list and gotten rid of extra layers for apps that I’m no longer using. You can compare the 2013 list to last year’s one and follow links from there to go back to previous years. You also won’t find last year’s section for price and Mac App Store stats at the bottom: developers often make price changes and release new versions of their apps outside the Mac App Store, so, ultimately, those stats couldn’t be properly contextualized over time.

The list below is organized in four sections: Main, for apps that I use several times every day; Writing, for tools that I employ to research and craft articles for MacStories; and Image & Video Editing, listing apps that allow me to put together screencasts, GIFs, and images for the site. Each app is listed with its App Store/website link and, at the end of the article, you’ll find my Mac app of the year.
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Introducing A 27-Year-Old Computer To The Web→

Jeff Keacher:

Reviving an old computer is like restoring a classic car: there’s a thrill from bringing the ancient into the modern world. So it was with my first “real” computer, my Mac Plus, when I decided to bring it forward three decades and introduce it to the modern web.

In 2040, will people try to connect 27-year-old iPads to the web?

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#MacStoriesDeals - Black Friday 2013: Best Deals for iPhone, iPad, and Mac Apps & Games

Black Friday is upon us once again! #MacStoriesDeals is the best place to find great deals for Mac and iOS apps and games, Apple hardware deals, and some great book and audio specials.

There are thousands of software and hardware deals online. We carefully pick the best ones and collect them in a single post with links to buy or share discounted products. You don’t need to be overwhelmed by Black Friday deals because we take care of finding the best stuff for you.

Bookmark this post, and come back every day to find updated deals for each category. Updates will be listed as new entries at the top of each category.

You can find us as @MacStoriesDeals on Twitter.

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Overview: Apple Updates iLife and iWork Apps, Makes Them Free for New Customers

Perhaps today’s most interesting announcements weren’t new iPads or Macs, but Apple’s range of software. It’s been a while since the iWork suite of apps have received updates on the desktop, and iLife apps such as iPhoto, iMovie, and GarageBand looked outdated as soon as iOS 7 arrived on iOS devices in September. You’re probably wonder what the skinny is around all the new apps and whether you qualify to get those apps for free. This won’t be an exhaustive overview, but ask and you shall receive.

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Bartender 1.2 Brings Full Mavericks Support, Drag & Drop Improvements

One of my must-have Mac apps, Bartender is a fantastic utility that helps you reduce clutter in the OS X menubar by grouping menubar icons into a single Bartender icon that can be viewed and closed at any time. From my previous coverage:

Providing its own custom bar to collect other icons from third-party apps, Bartender lets you organize your menubar apps while retaining the functionalities they come with. The app automatically finds third-party apps running in the menubar; it allows you to completely hide them, or show them in the Bartender bar. If you choose the latter option, your menubar apps will stil remain fully working with popover windows and keyboard shortcuts.

I rely on Bartender to keep a clean menubar that doesn’t show dozens of icons at once but that, at the same time, has running applications hidden out of view. There are some apps that I don’t need to be constantly looking at – such as Dropbox or Hazel – and with Bartender I can leave them running, but in an optional menubar that it’s there only when I need it. In this way, I can keep utilities that I use all the time (such as Evernote’s quick entry popup or Fantastical) in the main OS X menubar.

Bartender 1.2, released this week, adds full OS X Mavericks support and a number of minor improvements that, however, are welcome additions for daily Bartender users. For the upcoming Mavericks – set to be released this Fall – Surtees Studios added support for multiple displays and menubars, as well as reduced power usage to take advantage of Mavericks’ new power-saving technologies. I haven’t been able to test Bartender on Mavericks yet, but the app has never been a problem, in terms of performance and usage, on my mid-2011 MacBook Air running Mountain Lion, so I’m looking forward to seeing if differences will be notable on OS X 10.9.

Alongside bug fixes and improvements to the list of apps supported by Bartender, a feature that stood out to me is the possibility to correctly drag & drop files onto icons hidden by Bartender. In version 1.2, keeping apps like Droplr or CloudApp in the Bartender bar and dragging files from the Finder onto the Bartender icon will automatically reveal the hidden menubar, allowing you to keep dragging files onto the app you want. I have tested this with Droplr, and it works reliably.

I recommend Bartender to anyone who uses menubar apps and utilities on a daily basis. Keeping a clean menubar isn’t a beauty contest – I think it’s simply best to have the primary tools you’ll always need readily available, keeping those that are only seldom used out of sight, but still managed by a smart app. Bartender is smart, reliable, and on sale at $10 until September 30th. A free trial is also available from the developers’ website.

Droplr Draw Adds Lightweight Annotation Features To Droplr for Mac

Skitch is my favorite image annotation tool on the desktop and Marco Arment’s Bugshot is on my iOS Home screen, so when I saw the announcement of Droplr Draw last week I knew that it was something I needed to check out. Even if I’m a big fan of Skitch’s feature set on OS X – unlike some, I do like the Evernote integration – the app doesn’t provide the fastest way to capture, annotate, and share a screenshot, and Droplr Draw seemed promising.

Droplr Draw isn’t a separate app: it’s a feature of the Droplr for Mac app for existing Droplr Pro subscribers. Droplr Draw lets you a take a screenshot as you normally would with Droplr, add some annotations to it, upload it, and share it to Droplr. It’s essentially an extra layer between the Finder and Droplr’s cloud that instead of taking a file and returning its public URL opens an editing window first.

Droplr’s Draw view is extremely simple. There are four tools (arrow, rectangle, oval, free form) and a Text button to add annotations to an image with only one color (light blue). Annotations can be moved and resized on the canvas, but there are no settings for thickness, additional shapes, colors, or strokes. Once you’re done adding text or shapes, you can hit the Upload button, and Droplr will upload your file and copy the resulting URL in your clipboard.

The decision to launch Droplr Draw as a feature of the existing Droplr was a good call because Draw isn’t advanced enough to justify a standalone app. As I mentioned above, the app lacks any sort of settings or annotation options, making it an inferior solution to Skitch or even Apple’s Preview.

In my workflow, I have tried to annotate screenshots, coming to realization, on a couple of occasions, that I needed to adjust colors and thickness and that Droplr Draw couldn’t allow me to do that. More importantly, you can’t add images to Droplr Draw as the only available trigger is “Capture and Draw” from the menubar; if I receive a screenshot via email and I need to send it back with annotations, I’d need to take a screenshot of the screenshot if I wanted to use Droplr Draw to annotate it.

Droplr Draw isn’t a Skitch competitor, but it’s a nice addition to Droplr Pro for simple and quick annotations. It doesn’t break any new ground, but it’s a good feature to have in a screenshot sharing service. I’m looking forward to an iOS version.