Posts tagged with "mac"

Latest Dropbox Beta Brings Redesigned Menu

Announced last night on the public forums, the latest beta of Dropbox 1.5 for Mac brings a completely redesigned popup menu, support for Mountain Lion’s Notification Center, a new installer, and better performance.

Sporting a new modern look, the redesigned popup menu is reminiscent of “popovers” that have become extremely popular among iOS developers. The new menu takes a more visual approach at displaying changes in your Dropbox, with icons for added or deleted files (that you can click to quickly go to Dropbox), a play/pause button for sync, and a large “Open Dropbox folder” to launch a Finder window at the “root” of your Dropbox.

This new popup combines all the functionality from the older tray menu with a new view of your Dropbox’s event stream, letting you see your (or other people’s) latest changes. In addition, you can use the events to easily view, share, or restore files.

Alongside the new appearance of Dropbox in the menubar, the team also says version 1.5 will bring full Notification Center support and a new, simpler installer for Mac users. The new installer works as advertised: you can simply double-click the icon for Dropbox to “update” itself to a new version. Unfortunately, while enabled in Notification Center, I haven’t been able to test the new notifications on the desktop, as I assume the functionality isn’t quite ready yet in this beta.

Personally, I think what Dropbox is showing in this experimental build is very promising. The popup menu was in need of a serious upgrade, and I’m looking forward to seeing how it will evolve throughout the next betas.

To download the latest Dropbox experimental build (and send feedback to the developers), you can head over the Dropbox forums.

#MacStoriesDeals - Friday

Happy iPhone 5 day! iOS 6 was released yesterday, here’s a link to all of our coverage. Here are today’s @MacStoriesDeals on hardware, iOS, and Mac apps that are on sale for a limited time, so get them before they end!
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Uberlayer Is A Handy Tool For Pixel-Perfect Design

Twelve Twenty, the Dutch maker of the print-size checking OS X app Will It Fit and the iOS calendaring tool Get Together, recently published their third app, Uberlayer. Uberlayer is a small tool for UI and web designers on Mac OS X to quickly overlay images of a new design work onto your desktop.

Let’s say you just designed a mockup of an update to an existing website or application. Drop it onto Uberlayer to bring it on the screen. Using shortcuts you can move it around in pixel steps, make it more or less transparent, and activate click-through options. If you make the design half-transparent and you have the current version of an app or website just behind it, you can easily check how the current design changes will affect the overall look of the whole product. Using the click-through option, it’s easy to select certain parts you want to change to copy or delete them in the “real” version of your product.

I tried Uberlayer on my personal website by trying out a different style for an ad I currently have on it. This is what a half transparent “uberlayed” image looks like:

It’s actually pretty hard to describe how the app works using only words and pictures. If you’re curious, I recommend you head over the Twelve Twenty website and check out their Uberlayer demo video. I think Uberlayer can be a useful tool in a web or application designer’s workflow. Uberlayer is $1.99 on the Mac App Store.

Living Earth HD — My First Mac OS X Weather App

I’ve never seen the need for a desktop weather application. I’ve always considered it way easier to fire up Chrome, go to the website of my favorite German weather forecast provider, look up the forecast, then get to work. So why should I clutter my menu bar or even my desktop with another app I have to update and look at to justify its purchase? On iOS the situation is completely different: I need a weather app on my iPad for quick glance without the hassle of typing in a web address into Mobile Safari.

Living Earth HD is one of the newest iPad weather apps featuring an interactive 3D animated world globe with live weather forecasts. After testing it, I realized that this concept didn’t suit me on the road, although the app looked pretty awesome on a Retina Display. I want precise forecasts I could quickly glance at, just like Weather HD 2’s new Quick View feature. So although I like Living Earth HD for iOS, it didn’t have any chance to become my default weather app. Two weeks ago, Ryan and Moshen from Radiantlabs published a port of Living Earth HD to Mac OS X, which I will refer to as Living Earth Desktop throughout this review. I got curious and started testing it. After more than a week now it is still in my menu bar, right beside the Dropbox and Tweetbot icon, which means it’s a really good app.

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