Posts tagged with "mac"

Realmac Software Releases Ember - A Digital Scrapbook for Your Mac

Realmac Software, makers of great apps such as Clear, Rapidweaver, Analog, and Analog Camera, have released Ember for Mac today. Last month, Realmac detailed in a blog post what the future of LittleSnapper was and the team explained:

Over last few months, we’ve been getting a few emails asking about LittleSnapper - with some folks wondering if the app is still under development.

As it happens we’ve been heads-down-working on LittleSnapper for some time, and I’m absolutely thrilled today to dispel any rumours of the app’s demise and announce today that we’ve been hard at work on the next version of LittleSnapper: Ember for Mac.

Remember the original Ember? It was a great webapp (saved screenshot) that let you browse and add images to collections for inspiration: I used it all the time before Dribbble became so popular. Back in June of 2011, the Realmac team shut down the service and it was a major bummer for me – but it was understandable. Today, Ember is back as a Mac app, and it works great. Users of the old LittleSnapper are going to love Ember because it’s much more than a simple name change, but rather more like a ‘Pro’ version of the old software.

LittleSnapper users can easily import their libraries upon launching the new Ember app. The only thing you need to do to prepare for Ember is to make sure you’re using the most recent version of LittleSnapper, as only LittleSnapper libraries opened with LittleSnapper v1.8.5 can be imported into Ember. After that, Ember will be populated with all your goodies (Ember also supports importing multiple libraries if you need to do so).

Ember is a great place to store photos, images, drawings, websites, app screenshots, or just about any image that inspires you. Just drag, snap or import the images that you want to keep, then organize them into your own relevant collections. Ember lets you annotate the images you need to give feedback on with drawing and text tools that allow you to give feedback / edits on images; if you need to, you can rotate and crop your images so they are correctly sized and aligned.

Images can be shared via AirDrop, Messages, Twitter, Facebook, Tumblr, Flickr, and CloudApp. In terms of library organization, tags help you sort and projects keep them all neatly organized, while smart projects work just like OS X Smart Folders – you can set the parameters on what they filter and collect.

If you’re looking for inspiration and items to add, Ember has a few options. You can use the built-in web browser (it’s responsive!) and snap from there with built-in tools; the browser has a smart element detection that automatically suggests areas to snap as you roll over a webpage. Under the Subscriptions tab, you can subscribe to a site’s RSS (like Dribbble’s popular feed) and the app will refresh the feed on launch (or manually). Ember has browser extensions that will import snaps from Chrome and Safari there is a menu bar tool for quick and easy snaps from anywhere on your Mac.

Ember can also auto-detect iPhone and iPad screenshots. Drag the PNGs from your iOS device and Ember will automatically sort them into “Phone” and “Tablet”. Preferences let you set your image and text editor of choice, plus snap shortcuts, among other things. Ember will let you open images in your default browser, use Notification Center to let you know when you have new subscription images, and many more nice little touches.

When discussing Ember’s release, Federico asked me what I thought about the lack of sync an/or iOS apps and I answered: “For me, it doesn’t come into play at all with this app because I can import iOS screens. Most of my inspiration/design browsing is from my desktop computer and, if I really need to snap a screenshot from iOS, I can save it to Dropbox so when I get home I can import it into Ember. In a way, that’s like having sync.” Now, I do think syncing ember data across Macs (via Dropbox or iCloud) would be nice but that’s not yet available but could be in a future update.

Ember is a very polished app with a fantastic UI, slick animations, full-screen mode and it’s simply a fun app to use and organize images with. If you’re a digital creative person and want to organize your screenshots, inspirational images and reference files, Ember could be what you need. Ember for Mac is available today via the Mac App Store for $49. The price may be a little steep for some, but Ember is powerful, sexy, smart, and worth every penny.

Enhancing Reminders with AppleScript and Macros

As The Omni Group keeps working on OmniFocus 2 for Mac and Apple continues seeding new betas of iOS 7 and OS X Mavericks to developers, I have been reconsidering Reminders’ simplicity and enjoying the built-in iCloud sync, which, unlike other types of iCloud, is working fine for me. However, two things I miss from OmniFocus are the possibility to integrate the app with a web browser through bookmarklets and the system-wide Quick Entry panel; I use both tools on a daily basis to easily save a browser’s tab into OmniFocus’ Inbox, or to bring up a text field where I can jot down an idea and know that, no matter the app I’m using, it’ll be saved into OmniFocus. Luckily for me, Apple’s Reminders app comes with a good AppleScript Dictionary, which is likely something that Reminders’ core mainstream audience won’t ever care about, but that we can leverage to extend the app’s capabilities and input areas beyond Mountain Lion’s leather-and-paper window.

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Automating Mail Signatures and Senders with AppleScript and Keyboard Maestro

Mail Keyboard Maestro

Mail Keyboard Maestro

I’m aware of the fact that it’s a common trend to call email a “nightmare” these days, but the truth is – email works for me. I have multiple addresses set up, I have my filters and smart folders to automate the process of filing and finding emails, and I’m enjoying the renewed interest of iOS developers in building email apps that solve old problems in new ways. But there is one thing I don’t like: Apple’s Mail app and how many clicks it takes to switch between configured accounts and signatures. As you can guess, I came up with a way to automate the process using AppleScript and (optionally) Keyboard Maestro.

I receive several messages every day to different email addresses, but I always want to reply with the same address and the same signature. Apple’s Mail app makes it easy to see all messages sent to all accounts with the unified Inbox, but it makes it surprisingly hard to set default accounts and signatures that should always be treated as, well, default ones. I don’t want to click on menus for accounts and signatures: I want to hit ⌘R and receive a new Reply window with the account and signature I want already set. Read more

Apple’s Desktop Pictures→

The public unveiling of each new version of Mac OS X has brought a new default desktop picture, and a new hunt to find a full-res copy of that wallpaper before the official release. The introduction of OS X Mavericks was no different, only this time instead of a space-themed galaxy or nebula, Apple decided to bring Mac’s default look and feel back to earth.

Thomas Brand takes a look back at Apple’s history with Mac OS and OS X default desktop pictures.

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Search For Rdio Lyrics with Keyboard Maestro

Macro

Macro

In spite of the existence of various Mac apps to display lyrics of a song that’s currently playing in iTunes or Rdio, I often find myself having to manually look them up through a web browser. It’s not uncommon to see a dedicated lyrics app being unable to fetch lyrics for a certain song, and, unsurprisingly, that always seems to happen when I’m in the mood for learning new lyrics. Having to Google lyrics and type a song’s name is a tedious process that ought to be automated, so that’s what I did. Read more

Quickly Append Browser URLs To Evernote with Keyboard Maestro

I often come across webpages and interesting links that I can’t check out right away, but that I also don’t want to send to Instapaper, Pinboard, or my OmniFocus inbox. They are, put simply, “stuff to check out”; I append these URLs to an Evernote note carrying the same name:

Macro

Macro

As I detailed in my review of Drafts 3.0 for iOS, appending text from an iPhone or iPad is easy with Agile Tortoise’s app and a combination of Evernote actions and browser bookmarklets, but I had to think of an equally straightforward workflow for the Mac. Unfortunately, the lack of a Drafts app for OS X forced me to resort to AppleScript to achieve the same kind of functionality, but the deal was (partially) sweetened by the new features introduced in Keyboard Maestro 6.0, released back in May.

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