Posts tagged with "mac"

ZeroNinetyNine’s Second Mac App Store 24-Hour “Bundle”

ZeroNinetyNine had great success with its first bundle, which we covered last month. In the first ZeroNinetyNine deal, 11 apps from 8 independent developers participated. During the 24 hours of December 1, 2011, every app in ZeroNinetyNine received a place in the Top 20 of Paid Apps in US Mac App Store, and also conquered the tops of Mac App Stores in France, Russia, China, Canada, UK - all over the world. Partners in ZeroNinetyNine sold more than 100,000 apps in just 24 hours! These are very good numbers and now they are trying to do better by offering a second “bundle.”

The second ZeroNinetyNine 24-hour “bundle” includes 12 apps for 99¢ before they return back to their everyday prices. Since the Mac App Store doesn’t allow apps to be bundled and sold together, ZeroNinetyNine has found a unique way to do so by designing a well-designed holding page with all the applications in their “bundle”. Several independent developers have simultaneously dropped the price of their apps for one day sale on Mac App Store for just 99¢ per app.

The apps that are included in this one-day 99¢ sale are:

Some of the apps retail for as much as $34.99.

If you have a few dollars sitting around or some iTunes credit left over from the holidays, check out these killer deals. Also, be sure to sign up on the ZeroNinetyNine page to be notified when the next deal will be coming out.

Sonora Public Beta Now Available

Just a few hours ago I listed Sonora, a new music player for OS X, among the new Mac apps to watch in 2012. I did not know Sonora was ready for the public beta, which is now available for everyone.

Being a beta, don’t expect the app to not crash sometimes, display strange errors, and lack the amount of polish you’d expect from a finished product. Still, some functionalities exclusive to Sonora have already been implemented and they’re working: full-screen mode for Lion, built-in Last.fm scrobbling, iTunes importing, music and queue controls from the top bar. I particularly appreciate the design of the icons in the navigation bar, which is very iOS-like for some reason (same for the popover controls). Songs you add to Sonora’s queue can be rearranged, or you can clear the queue entirely. The app supports Growl notifications and album artwork can be embedded in the song metadata.

That’s it for the first public beta of Sonora. Clearly we still don’t have an iTunes competitor here – the road ahead is very long when you consider the amount of stuff you can do with iTunes – but Sonora 0.6 shows some interesting ideas with a lot of potential. We’ll be following the development of this app in the next months very closely.

Download Sonora’s first public beta here.

Day One for Mac 1.5: iCloud Sync, Markdown, Full-Screen

Following the 1.5 update that brought iCloud sync to iOS earlier this week, journaling application Day One (my review) has been updated on the Mac as well, adding sync with Apple’s iCloud just like its iPhone and iPad counterparts, but also bringing several additional functionalities, especially in the text editing and exporting areas.

Day One 1.5 can read and save files to iCloud automatically, in the background, all the time. As on iOS, existing entries from Dropbox will be merged with iCloud if you decide to use Apple’s service, but you can’t use iCloud and Dropbox simultaneously. Sync is blazing fast in Day One, with iCloud constantly pushing changes across devices as you type. This is true on the Mac as well, as journal items are pushed almost in-real to and from OS X.

The core features of Day One for Mac remain intact in this update. The menubar quick entry menu is still there, as is the Tweetie-like navigation in the main journal with access to days, calendar, favorite items, and reminders. You can set a passcode for the entire app while keeping the menubar’s quick entry panel (possibly with a keyboard shortcut) working and fully functional; you can also navigate between months and years easily through the journal’s main interface.

Among Day One’s new features the most notable one is undoubtedly Markdown and MultiMarkdown support. Folks accustomed to John Gruber’s popular plain text formatting tool will be up and running with Day One in no time; Markdown support has been enabled in Write and Read modes, meaning you’ll see visual live previews of Markdown formatting (*italic* will be displayed as *italic*) as you type. The layout of Read and Day modes has been improved, and there are other new cool additions such as font size controls and Sans/Serif /Monospaced fonts waiting for you to be activated in the Preferences, which are now accessible from a new cog icon in the bottom left corner of the app. Also new in 1.5 is hover preview in Days and Starred views, which will give you a nice-looking popover to get a quick peek  at single entries in your journal.

With Markdown formatting for easier writing, live previews, new font options, popovers and an overall refined UI (transitions and various refinements, including a full-screen mode for Lion), Day One 1.5 sure looks like a winner.

It’s not just sync and the good looks. Day One 1.5 comes with more options to get your data out of the application, too. Auto Backup has been enabled, allowing you to sync with iCloud, but back up the database to another location on your Mac (such as Dropbox). Furthermore, entries (or entire days) can now be exported to Markdown format (.md) besides plain text.

Other minor features from 1.5 include:

  • Auto Bold First Lines (Titles)
  • Live sync UI updates
  • Command S to Save
  • Printing
  • On Startup Preference
  • Journal Merging
  • Spelling and Grammar Preferences
  • Keyboard Navigation and Controls

With better export options and auto-backup to any folder, Day One 1.5 offers the same strong foundation of the iOS version, but delivers more in terms of quantity of functionalities and quality of writing environment. Day One still is the best app to archive your thoughts and keep a daily journal, period.

Day One 1.5 is available on the Mac App Store.

Mac Apps To Watch In 2012→

Mac Apps To Watch In 2012

Mac.AppStorm has published a nice list of upcoming Mac apps to watch in 2012. The list includes some MacStories staff favorites like Coda, TextMate, Spotify and Caffeinated. Other new apps worth keeping an eye on are Mou (Markdown text editor), Wunderkit (from the creators of Wunderlist) and Chocolat.

Today we want to reverse things and start looking forward instead of reviewing what has already come. We’ll introduce you to ten apps that are going to make big waves in 2012. Interestingly enough, most of them happen to be geared towards designers and web developers so if you fit that description, you’ll definitely want to take a look! We’ll also look at an awesome new Google Reader app, what’s in store for Spotify and even get a glimpse of the gem that 6Wunderkinder has been keeping up its sleeve.

I had some additions I wanted to share, but I decided to run a quick poll among my Twitter followers first. Surprisingly, it appears we all share the same apps we’re looking forward to.

OmniFocus 2, confirmed in 2011.

A new app by Bjango, aimed at designers (WIP icons above).

Alien Blue for Mac, confirmed months ago.

Two new music apps, Sonora and Enqueue, currently in beta.

OmniOutliner 4, also confirmed and possibly featuring new cloud syncing capabilities.

Someone even mentioned Things with cloud sync. There’s also an interesting list of “rumored” software, such as iBooks for Mac, a new iWork, Aperture 4, and Flipboard for Mac (or the web?).

2011 has been a great year for third-party Mac software. From the looks of things, I think 2012 is going to be fantastic.

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The OmniFocus for Mac 2.0 Wish List→

The OmniFocus for Mac 2.0 Wish List

Sven Fechner of Simplicity is Bliss:

I hardly use the project or task notes as the UX choice made is too clunky for me. It is clearly a concept coming from OmniOutliner, which, using the Kinkless GTD Scripts, was the original source of inspiration for OmniFocus. However, it doesn’t really work for longer notes, any font size you chose for the note section is either too small or too big, if you insert attachments things start looking awkward, … In my eyes there are quite some challenges with the way notes are handled in the current OmniFocus UI.

I’d like to cut and paste Fetcher’s entire list of ideas for OmniFocus 2.0 here, but his complaints about notes (in both OmniFocus and OmniOutliner) hit the nail on the head and sum up the issues about giving ideas or tasks additional details.

The one challenge that OmniFocus and other apps face is mitigating how you manage an “everything box.” OmniFocus ultimately becomes and should become a sort of outbox where you follow up on email, gather your errands for the afternoon, and follow decisive actions to complete a project. Where the lines begin to blur is with contexts and details. Contexts are the sort of tags that specify either the person, thing, or place you need to be in to complete a task, and details are the additional reference materials or notes associated with a task.

If your task is concise and straightforward (you should never have to think about the action), you shouldn’t need any supporting details. This changes however if you need a reminder for an article (Paste attached note as a quote in “Apple Q1 2012 Results”) or if you need to attach a picture, lines from an email, or need to type out what someone gave to you in paper form. OmniFocus could really use a boost in how documents are attached. An icon inline with text or a full blown image that can get cut off due to column-width aren’t good ways to display supporting details for tasks and projects.

There are other good opinions in the article too. I personally don’t need or want themes in OmniFocus, but I would love to see better email handling and the ability create projects based off templates of pre-written tasks (you can sort of do that now, but it’s messy).

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