Out of the ashes of The Unofficial Apple Weblog, which shut down last week, a group of former TUAW writers have formed Appleworld.today. I’m so glad to see Dave, Kelly, and Steve start their own thing.
MPU Two-Pack
This week we released two episodes of the Mac Power Users.
MPU 239 includes a workflow interview with Adam Christianson from the Maccast podcast about his history with Apple, life as a programer, and experiences through the years podcasting and Mac User Groups.
MPU 240 is the February live feedback show. Topics include financial management apps, more on FileVault, antivirus, upgrading your Mac, and we are joined by professor Bonni Stachowiak, who uses screen casting software for student feedback. Katie and I also reveal easy ways to push our buttons.
WesterosCraft
I’ve heard the stories about MineCraft and I’ve witnessed nephews and nieces obsessing over videos of people playing MineCraft but I’ve never really got it. Part of this is the fact that I am a geek and grew up in an era when all we could think about was getting smaller pixels. 8-bit led to 16-bit led to 32-bit and so on. We were always pushing the envelope for the next leap. So when I first heard of MineCraft and its blocky graphics, I thought it was some weird throwback that would never last.
Boy was I wrong on that front. MineCraft is as much, if not more, of an obsession as anything my childhood could throw down. This past weekend I stumbled upon this video where a group of players decided to build a replica of Westeros from Game of Thrones. The word got out on the Internet, lots of MineCrafters showed up, and they did something truly remarkable. Now I get it.
Sponsor: The Omni Group
This week MacSparky.com is sponsored by The Omni Group, one of the premiere productivity software companies for the Mac, iPhone, and iPad. If you are looking for serious solutions for serious problems, look no further. The Omni Group’s applications include:
OmniFocus
My beloved task manager that lets me practice law and publish books and videos without completely losing my mind.
OmniOutliner
This is simply the best outlining application for the Mac and iOS. When I need to organize ideas, I break out OmniOutliner.
OmniGraffle
This diagramming and graphics tool lets me build stunning graphics in a few minutes.
OmniPlan
If project management is your game, look no further.
The Omni Group has its own sync solution, OmniPresence, to keep all of these tools working between your Mac and iPad and, most recently, they’ve announced they are putting all of these productivity apps on the iPhone as well.
Check out the Omni Group and let them know you heard about them from MacSparky.com.
Photo Management and the Mac
For so long, photo management between our Macs and iOS devices has felt like the mythical white whale. We are all taking more pictures than ever and at the same time using multiple devices, making photo management a nightmare. It didn’t help that iPhoto and Aperture lingered, feeling like relics of a bygone era and every independent company that tries to come up with an innovate web-based solution seems to fold up before it gets any momentum.
However, at WWDC in 2014, Apple promised they are taking photos to the cloud and they really get it this time. They even explained they were working on a new photos app for the Mac, called, appropriately, Photos that would let us seamlessly work between devices.
Then there was silence.
In fact, there was so much silence that I began to wonder if there was a problem. Today, the most recent developer build of Yosemite showed up with the Photos app for Mac, ready for testing. I’m so eager to see this work (and so tired of iPhoto) that I loaded it up and, after making appropriate backups, pressed the button to move my iPhoto library into Photos. I’m not going to go into great detail about it. Others have. I will say however, that the app feels pretty good for a beta and already runs much faster on my Mac than iPhoto ever did with the exact same library.
Am I feeling a glimmer of hope?
There is going to a public beta at some point and nobody outside of Cupertino has tested it enough yet to really render judgment but right now it feels like Apple has a contender for solving the photo problem.
Yosemi-fied Tweetbot
Today Tapbots teased the pending release of Tweetbot 2 for Mac, which will be a free upgrade for existing users. For a long time, Tweetbot was my Twitter app of choice but I spend a significant amount of my Twitter time on the iPad and the application still has that retro, pre-iOS 7 vibe. I know the gang at Tapbots is manic about their UI design and won’t update the app until they can get it right. That’s one of the reasons we love them so much. I just couldn’t wait any longer.
Then I read Federico Viticci’s manifesto on Twitter clients and decided to try the official Twitter app for awhile. I’ve been doing that now for about 6 weeks and I don’t find it terrible, but I also don’t find it particularly efficient for the way I use Twitter. It definitely has not won my heart over the way Tweetbot did several years ago.
I view an update to Tweetbot as a promising sign that Tapbots will give a similar upgrade to Tweetbot for iPad. Alternatively, I’d be just as pleased if Tapbots would just build iPad support into the existing iPhone application. The developer tools make it a lot easier to build an alternate layout for iPad or the larger iPhones. Marco Arment appears to have stumbled into the iPad version of Overcast. Either way, an updated Tweetbot on Mac and long-overdue version on iPad would make my day.
Sonos: Blue Note Edition
Oh boy. This one will be hard to resist.
MPU 238: 10 Mac Apps. 10 Mac Utilities
Katie and I frequently get asked to share our favorite apps for setting up a new Mac. This week’s Mac Power Users episode answers this question as we explain our 10 favorite apps and 10 favorite utilities. We also take time to stop and explain a tip or two with each pick. Enjoy.
Condense, OCR on the Fly
Have you ever had an image of some text on your screen that you wanted to quickly turn into actual text? I seem to bump into that issue often and have a complicated workflow involving screenshots, conversion to PDF, and other steps. At least that used to be my workflow. Now I just use Condense. This Mac app makes easy work of yanking text out of a picture of words. You push one button in the app that puts a crosshair on your screen. You drag that over the offending word-picture and Condense pulls out the text.
There are settings to strip out carriage returns, correct for angled text, and set the contrast. You can also have it automatically save the captured text to the clipboard. It will paste anywhere else on your Mac as plain text and in the few days I’ve been using it, I’ve found it remarkably accurate.
I think what I like about Condense most is that this is a problem I encounter often and, for some reason, it never occurred to me that an application to fix this was both possible and so useful. I like that developers can still surprise me. I discovered Condense this week (thanks to @mkhudon) and I’m impressed.
Productivity App Sale
There are quite a few good iOS and Mac productivity apps on sale right now. Here are the ones I’d buy:
Fantastical 2
For iPad, $9.99 reduced to $4.99
For iPhone, $4.99 reduced to $1.99
For Mac, $19.99 reduced to $9.99
Fantastical is in my dock. This is a great alternative calendar app with its legendary text parsing tools and a really functional user interface. I particularly like the event list view. I’ve tried to replace the built-in iOS calendar multiple times and Fantastical is the only replacement that has stuck. I’ve covered this app before.
Duet Display
For iOS, $15.99 reduced to $7.99
I bought this one today. I’ve tried several of these apps that turn your iPad into a remote display for your Mac over the years. This one is the fastest I’ve used yet.
Workflow
For iOS, $4.99 reduced to $1.99
I have so much to say about Workflow but haven’t had time to give it proper treatment, yet. (Well … here is a little bit.) Stay tuned for more from me on Workflow but for now, just buy it for two bucks.
Byword
For Mac, $9.99 reduced to $5.99
Sweet, sweet Byword. I use it every day.
Dropzone 3
For Mac, $4.99 reduced to $1.99
There are a lot of menubar apps made to hold apps and perform magic on files. I started using Dropzone about six months ago and it’s a keeper. This is another app I use multiple times a day and now it’s just two bucks.
MindNode Pro
For Mac, $19.99 reduced to $9.99
Ready to get serious about mind mapping on your Mac? Look no further.