Posts tagged with "mac"

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

Gain Magical Control Over Your Music Player With Flutter

It’s a bit like Minority report. Just raise your hand and your computer responds with an action. Motion-based controls with your hands, now more common with modern gaming consoles (PlayStation Move and XBOX Kinect), still feels a bit futuristic.

On personal computers and modern tablets, peripheral input and touch-based gestures won the race against camera-based gesture recognition. Still, some developers are in love with the idea of controlling devices without any actual hands-on. In small doses, this can be fun and useful. This is the case with Flutter, developed by a large team of developers at BotSquare.

Flutter is a small tool for recognizing motion gestures on OS X, which recognizes you via a webcam (iSight or external) to control your favorite music player. After downloading it, you have work through a tutorial to get to become familiar with the hand gestures. Flutter then sits in the background, with your Mac’s iSight camera on (obviously required for running Flutter) and awaits your actions.

The current version of Flutter (0.1.237 — don’t be afraid, it’s not a beta version, the developers just want to add more features before calling the app 1.0) supports three gestures: a flat open hand, and a fist with your thumb either pointing to the right or the left. Do those gestures in front of your webcam, and Flutter will recognize them and do the action associated with them. To make sure the app recognizes your hand’s action, you have to keep it one to four feet away from the camera.

With the open hand gesture, you can play and pause your music. Using the thumb either pointing to the right or left you go to the next or previous track. The Flutter team is working hard to implement more gestures such as volume control (I suggest a single index finger pointing upwards or downwards respectively for this one).

All three gestures work well in the current version — you just have to get used to the fact that you often need to move your hand a bit to make the camera notice it. Knowing where to position yourself at first so that your hand is inside the viewing area of your camera can be tricky at first. But after a while you also get used to it; when Flutter recognizes you it’s easy to use, looks like magic, and can be a very intuitive way of controlling your music player (the app currently supports iTunes, Spotify, VLC, and QuickTime; no Rdio support unfortunately).

Through the app’s drop-down menu, you can turn the camera on and off (for privacy and energy saving reasons), set Flutter to automatically launch at login, as well as report bugs and re-watch the aforementioned (very interactive and easy to understand) tutorial. The app also sends notifications to the Notification Center when you change apps to let you know that you’re still able to control the newly activated player with Flutter.

Flutter is a small app, although it’s not something I would recommend because not everybody needs it. However, I can imagine that lots of people would want to try it for the novelty of it. It’s a magic little piece of software that can be fun to use.

Flutter is available for free on the Mac App Store.