Posts tagged with "mac"

Evernote Teases Major 5.0 Redesign of Mac App

“Remember Everything” platform Evernote has today announced the next version of their Mac client: Evernote 5. With an extensive preview on Evernote’s website, the company has revealed some of the features and design choices behind the complete redesign of the desktop app.

Evernote 5 will primarily focus on improving the way users manage and access their notes, tags, and notebooks. With a new sidebar, users can drag items into the Shortcuts area; user shortcuts are accessible using CMD+1/9 keyboard shortcuts – just like bookmarks in Safari. Advanced users will still be able to “show lists” in the sidebar, but, overall, according to Evernote, the redesign will be focused on making the sidebar more visual, compact, and easier to use. In fact, the new sidebar will also list the five most recent notes for quick access.

Evernote says there are over 100 new features in v5.0. These include a new iPad-like Cards view for notes, improved sharing, a new look for the notes editor, more keyboard shortcuts, new views for tags and notebooks, and more.

Evernote highlights Atlas, a completely new feature to browse notes by location on a visual map.

Atlas is a brand new way to visually explore your notes in Evernote. Evernote helps you remember where you were when you took notes to help you have richer, more vibrant memories. Evernote Atlas reads the location where your notes were created and intelligently presents them to you on Place Cards based upon their proximity to each other.

Evernote 5 will undoubtedly be a major upgrade; hopefully the company won’t take away features from power users in its focus to make the app more accessible for everyone. Furthermore, Evernote says Atlas will work with notes created by Food and Hello, but it’s not clear if and how Evernote plans to better integrate version 5.0 with its ecosystem of apps – namely Skitch and Penultimate, acquired in the past year.

A beta of Evernote 5.0 will be available next week. Check out the feature list over at Evernote’s website, and a first teaser video below. Read more

Bartender 1.0→

Bartender 1.0

Bartender is one of my favorite OS X utilities. It is a menubar app to contain other menubar apps in its own menubar. I can confirm it’s not some kind of Inception. As I wrote in my original look at the beta version:

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.

If you tried the app while it was in beta and abandoned it because it didn’t support system icons, now’s the time to check it out again. Bartender 1.0, released earlier this week, comes with full support for system icons that you can customize individually. It also supports the Notification Center icon if you’re on Mountain Lion. Items can be manually rearranged if you, say, want to keep Spotlight in the main menubar, but Notification Center on the rightmost side of Bartender’s bar.

There’s a good selection of keyboard shortcuts, too. You can create hotkeys to show the full menubar or the Bartender bar; you can also customize the appearance of Bartender’s icon, its position, or its autohide settings. Menubar apps with interface elements, such as Fantastical, Currencies or Take Five, usually work out of the box even inside Bartender, but you can apply a fix if they’re not working. Alternatively, you can choose to show those apps in the main menubar for a few seconds when they receive activity – for instance, when Sparrow’s icon is highlighted for an incoming message.

Bartender is a great utility to hide menubar items you don’t use often but still want to keep running. Get the app here for $15 – there’s also a four-week free trial available.

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Tweetbot for Mac Review

When the first alpha of Tweetbot for Mac came out in July, I said I would take a look at the app again. Here we are, three months later, with the final version of Tweetbot for Mac available on the App Store.

I concluded my review of the public alpha version with:

Right now, Tweetbot for Mac is, in my opinion, already superior to any other client for OS X — and it still can be improved. More importantly, Tweetbot makes better use of Twitter features than Twitter’s own Mac app, and that says a lot about the importance of third-party clients in this ecosystem.

In calling the alpha version of Tweetbot a “superior” product, I took quite a stance. I had been using the alpha for weeks before the public release, and I had the perspective and context to make a conscious and reasonable decision about my statement. I knew I was going to like Tweetbot and use it on a daily basis. Three months later, that’s still the case.

I’ll get to the point right away. Tweetbot is, in my opinion, the best Twitter client for Mac. From my perspective, no other app gets closer to the amount of polish and functionality that Tapbots poured into their latest creation, making it the most powerful, fast, and elegant Twitter app I’ve seen on OS X to date. In hindsight, it’s also a superior product than Twitter for Mac, which, as you may recall, used to be my go-to client. Three months ago I reviewed an app that I knew was going to be great.

In thinking about how I should approach this new review, I came to the conclusion that you don’t need me to go through the backstory of Twitter clients on the Mac. Here’s what I wrote, again, for context:

Ever since Loren Brichter (creator of the original Tweetie, who sold his app to Twitter and went on to work there) left the company, Twitter for Mac — what I had deemed as the best Twitter client for OS X — fell into an unexplainable state of abandon and lack of updates. You would think it’s in Twitter’s best interest to keep a native client up to date with the latest features of the service; and yet, after a solid first version — which came after years of speculation on Tweetie 2 — Twitter started ignoring the app, failing to bring several of Twitter’s new features (such as inline media and updated search) to the desktop. It only got worse recently: after many updates to Lion, Twitter for Mac has started showing new bugs and glitches that haven’t been fixed by Twitter, alongside the ones that have always been there and were never corrected. And then with the release of the Retina MacBook Pro, Twitter’s lack of support for high-res text and graphics became the proverbial final nail in the coffin of what used to be a great app.

Twitter for Mac still hasn’t received an update since last year. Some say it’s no longer in development.

In my review of Tweetbot Alpha, I briefly touched upon features that were missing from the app:

For instance, there is limited support for keyboard shortcuts, there are some rough edges around the interface, and one of my favorite features of Twitter for Mac — being able to navigate and switch sections with gestures — isn’t yet available. Indeed, Tapbots say that features like better management of multiple windows will be coming in the future, and they confirmed in a blog post that they are planning “ on making everything as beautiful and pixel perfect” as they can. Don’t be surprised if, in this version, some pixels will look misaligned or out of place. Eventually, it will all be fixed.

It is with this standpoint that I want to look at Tweetbot again: you don’t need me to know what Tweetbot is or what it looks like. Between the Mac and iOS, we’ve covered Tweetbot extensively here at MacStories.

What follows is my review of Tweetbot 1.0 based on how I use the final version of the app. The little features and the details I’ve come to rely upon, and the overall functionality that makes Tweetbot the best Twitter client for Mac. Read more