To use EasyScreenCrop, launch the app and directions for using it will appear on your screen. Left click and then select the area you want to capture. Release the mouse button and the image goes to ~Pictures/EasyScreenCrop.

The main purpose of the app is to act a supplementing tool; if you have the default screenshot utility save images in another format (maybe JPEG) and/or at a different location and need a little something on the side to store screenshots elsewhere, you can use EasyScreenCrop for saving images in PNG format.

The major flaw with the app is that you have to always launch it from the Launchpad. There are no keyboard shortcuts to activate the app, and with the lack of an interface, this is a huge barrier in its usage. It hinders the user from quickly launching the app. A shortcut is something the developers should consider adding on priority.

The question is, should this $0.99 app have more features, and if yes then what? There are already many apps available that let you capture the entire screen or an active window. Keeping in mind the minimalism of this app, perhaps a time delayed screenshot would be a good idea. Time delayed screenshots are supported natively in OS X, but you will find few other apps in the Mac App store that do the same. For some, the $0.99 might seem like a splurge, but for a quick and clean utility on the side, this isn’t bad provided a keyboard shortcut is integrated. Testing was carrried out on Mac OS X 10.8.

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Images from your system can be added from the Pick from file button. You can choose images from Flickr by clicking the Flickr button just below it. Multi Monitor Wallpaper has a built-in browser for Flickr. Once the image is selected, return to the home screen and click Edit to manage the layout. You will see several options for adjusting the image along with a preview of the area. Tests showed that the best image fit was with the spread screen layout. You can adjust the an image manually or use the existing functionality to do it.

There are two tabs for dragging and adjusting; Image and Screens. Each allows you to pan the respective item to fit the image or move the displays together/apart. An image can be zoomed in or stretched out but this might pixelate it. Remember that even a high resolution image might seem some loss in picture quality since it is being spread across two screens instead of one. Conversely, if the displays aren’t large, you might not notice the change in quality.

It isn’t clear how many displays Multi Monitor Wallpaper supports, but as far as functionality goes, it works great. The image you create is saved to your desktop in the app’s own format and you can re-use it in the future if you like. Although it might seem like a splurge at $1.99, it makes it easy to set wallpapers across multiple displays, which is something you might normally spend a lot of time on if you were to do it manually.

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Glow for FB adds an F icon to the menu bar, and you will need to authorize it to connect to your Facebook account. Access the app from the menu bar and select the Messages option that is unchecked by default, and it will open the authorization window. The app obviously asks for authorization, since it will access your notifications, friend requests and messages.

The app icon glows blue whenever you have new notifications. While it does support Notification Center, it doesn’t send you alerts like the stock apps do. The notifications are all aggregated in the Notification Center side panel, but the app remains unobtrusive as much as possible and the glowing icon is the only indication of new activity. You can choose to disable the alerts for Notification Center or present in more concise manner by unchecking Detailed Notifications.

Glow for FB can be paused for 10 minutes (much like the do not disturb feature in Notification Center). Double clicking the Menu Bar icon opens Facebook in your default browser, and you can change the app’s behavior to respond to a single click from the options.

The app is excellent regardless which version of OS X you’re using; it supports Notification Center, but can perform just as well without it. It is an excellent way to keep up with your Facebook activity while staying as productive as possible.

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News Notifications runs in the menu bar and allows you to add multiple feeds. It comes with three pre-added feeds with an option to add your own. By default, News Notifications shows one item at a time from a particular feed and checks for new items every 1 minute, but you can change it to your liking. Remember that you still have limited space in the Notification Center, so if you pull something like 10 or 20 items from a particular feed you will be scrolling through them. If you continue to use the Notification Center for other apps, you might want to consider changing the order the notifications; go to System Preferences>Notification Center to change the order.

News Notifications sends notifications that you can swipe to dismiss and lists the new items from your feed in the Notification Center. Clicking an item in Notification Center will open it in your default browser.

Strictly speaking, News Notifications is one of the few apps that demonstrate how you can make better use of Notification Center so perhaps criticism would be a bit harsh just now. It works perfectly well and the interface isn’t bad. However, it would’ve been a lot better, if you could easily identify different feeds. At present, the app writes the name of the feed before the news item, but it is difficult to read. If you have an iPhone, you will appreciate the freedom of being able to do this with a simple app rather than using a Cydia tweak. Lets hope more developers find a way to develop apps for the Notification Center and put it to more diverse use.

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Simple ShutDown Timer provides a simple interface and asks you to enter the date and time for shutting down, restarting or putting your system to sleep. Moreover, it asks you to enter your account password to authenticate the shutdown. Although the app asks for the administrator password, your account password is the one that works here. Once you’ve set the date & time and selected one of the three options, click Schedule the Task button.

Simple ShutDown Timer tells you that the task has been scheduled and then quits. The app doesn’t run in the background or in the menu bar. Once the task has been scheduled, you cannot change or overwrite the shutdown schedule.

Simple ShutDown Timer is a useful app and can be improved by perhaps adding a feature to trigger a shutdown, restart or sleep action when a particular app quits. This should be helpful in the event you have apps that quit when they have executed a function, but don’t support system shutdown. A good example of such an app would be the stable version of the uTorrent Mac client. Although the shutdown when download completes option is available in the beta version of uTorrent, there may be plenty of other apps out there that have yet to add this feature.

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When launched, RocketShip adds a rocker icon to the menu bar. The icon is only for accessing the app’s preferences and to indicate whether or not the app is running. Shortcuts, when used, have nothing to do with the icon. From the menu bar icon, select Shortcuts to start.

Click the plus sign at the bottom left to add the first item and from the dropdown menu on the right, select what type of item you want to add. You can open files, folders, Finder, an app, a website, the browser or a script. Once you’ve selected the type, click the little arrow next to it and browse to the location of the file, folder, script or application or enter the URL if you picked the website option.

Next up, click the area that says Click and tap a key and then press a letter. You will find two buttons namely Option and Command just below this area, which tell you which modifier keys are enabled to work with the shortcut. You can enable either Option or Command, or both.

If you select Option and hit the P key, the final shortcut you will use is Option+P. The app warns you when you create shortcuts that conflict with existing one, but will let you create it anyway if you so chose. Hitting the shortcut key will launch the app associated with it and the shortcut you’ve just used will be displayed in the lower left corner of your screen.

You can turn off the shortcut preview by visiting RocketShip’s Preferences and unchecking the Display notifications option.

Launchit! is a free Mac app that is similar to RocketShip. So, if you don’t want to spend $1.99, you can give it a try instead.

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When you launch the app, it takes you through a brief tutorial and then adds a share button to the Menu Bar. Sharetastic immediately picks up what you’ve copied to the clipboard (copied items may be text, folders or files) and lets you share them to one of the supported services. Depending on the type of item you’ve copied, the sharing options will vary accordingly.

Once you’ve copied an item, click the share button on the panel and options for sharing it on other services will be listed. A cog wheel at the lower right corner lets you access the app’s preferences, and also to view uploaded items.

When you select one of the share options, the app that you’ve shared to opens with the item to share added as an attachment. If you’ve chosen to upload an item, Sharetastic will inform you via the Notification Center when your upload is complete.

To enable a shortcut for one of the services Sharetastic supports, or a universal shortcut for the app itself, visit its preferences.  From the General tab, you can set a shortcut for the app and set it to start at login. The Accounts tab allows you to add shortcuts for one of the services. Sharetastic is not for enabling or adding accounts; to do that, you must visit the relevant app or System Preferences.

Sharetastic is an excellent rendition of a way to make use of the new Share function in Mountain Lion, and no doubt Facebook will soon be added to the list of supported services once it is enabled in Mountain Lion this fall. At $1.99, the app is a great deal.

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If you’re unfamiliar with the Pomodoro technique; it is a method used to make the hours more productive. Time is divided into small intervals of 25 minutes each, and after each interval expires, you are allowed to take a break. Tomatoes works on this same principle but gives you the flexibility to change the duration of the time interval.

If you don’t want to work with the default time setting, visit Tomatoes’s preferences first and in the General tab, change the time. Make sure Use Pomodoro Technique Language is unchecked. Enable sound alerts from the Sound tab.

Return to the app’s main interface and click the plus sign at the top right to add a new activity. Enter a name for the activity and choose the number of intervals it will take to complete this task. If you entered a custom time, you will have to enter the Expected Units required to complete the task. If you went with Pomodoro’s native 25 minute interval, you will be asked to enter the number of Expected Pomodoros required to complete the task.

To start working on a particular task, right click it and select Set Timer on Current Activity. When you start the timer by sliding the On/Off switch at the top, the ‘units’ of this task will be counted. In the event that you have to pause work on the task to do something else, click the little dropdown menu just below the timers and select one of the two reasons, Internal Interruption or External Interruption, for pausing the task.

Tasks can be archived, marked as complete, edited and deleted, and removed from the activity timer from a task’s right-click context menu. $4.99 might seem a bit costly but if a Pomodoro is what it takes to make you productive, Tomatoes is well worth it.

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Desktop Tidy adds a file cabinet like icon to the Menu Bar that tells you time remaining until the next tidying round, allows you to access the files that have been moved from your desktop and open the app’s preferences. Files can be restored to the desktop, grouped by folder, type or alphabetically.

Once installed, visit Desktop Tidy’s preferences and start customizing the Options tab. Select a folder for moving your desktop items and a period after which the app will do a clean sweep of your desktop. Remember that you can restore the files any time you want. If you want those restored files to be ignored when the app next cleans the desktop, check the Automatically add files to ignore list when restored. In the Overwriting panel, choose how the app should treat files with the similar name. Add a postfix to the new files name and keep both files is a good option since it will ensure different versions of the same file are not overwritten.

Next, move to the Quick Filters tab and define which types of files and which formats should be cleaned and how they should be categorized. For the average user, the default categories and formats should be sufficient but you can add more using the plus sign at the bottom. For each category, you can add file formats.

Finally, the Ignore tab is for telling Desktop Tidy which folders it should leave alone. You can update this any time. As you add more folders to your desktop, they are listed in this tab. The ones that are checked will be ignored. You can also set the app to ignore hidden files, all folders and aliases.

The Growl tab lets you control which actions you will get an alert for. Across all four tabs, you will see the Launch Desktop Tidy at login option at the bottom. If you need the app to run the periodic clean up, you should check the option so you don’t forget to launch it.

FolderTidy (previously-called Clean My Desktop) is a similar app that we covered a while back and can be compared to Desktop Tidy. It now costs $3.99, but does not let you add your own categories or formats.

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iPhone users can download Fleksy for free, but without upgrading to its pro version (through an in-app purchase of $4.99), you won’t be able to copy or export the text you type within the app, and this makes the free version of Fleksy a mere demo of the way typing is done in it. The app is designed to be used as an easy and new way of typing on iOS, but it also focuses on visually impaired people, and comes with features like speaking every word you write and every alphabet you touch on the Fleksy keyboard. So, how exactly can you type on the app’s keyboard? There is an extremely thorough tutorial within Fleksy to answer that question, but here are all the main points that you need to know.

1. To begin, just start typing and whenever you think a word is close enough to your intended word, swipe to the right. This will bring up a suggestion bar, while also changing your typed word to the first suggestion. Although the app is great at guessing the word right in the first try, you can choose any other suggestion easily by swiping downwards. If you want to move backwards in the suggestions list, an upward swipe will do it.
2. Swiping to the left of the screen will erase the last word you wrote.
3. To start a new line, swipe to the right and keep holding your finger at the end of the swipe.
4. Punctuation can be added to a sentence by swiping to the right once the cursor is at an empty space.
5. To access the app’s numeric view, hold your finger over the keyboard and drag it to the bottom left corner, to the area marked ‘1/2’.
6. If you want to type a word that is not in Fleksy’s dictionary (a name, for example), tap and hold each letter of the word until it is spoken out loud by the app. Once you have formed the word in this way, swipe right, and the word will appear on the screen without change. After that, swipe up to add it to the Fleksy dictionary.

The app speaks out every word you type, and you can also make it read everything you have written by going to the stock Settings app and enabling the Raise to Speak option in the Fleksy menu. That option makes the app read out the text when you raise your iPhone to your ear while typing in Fleksy. If you are on the app’s pro version, you can copy the text you write in Fleksy, or there is the option to export it to SMS or email directly.

Fleksy provides a refreshingly new method of typing for iOS users, and has the potential to become popular among both blind and other people. The app is optimized for iPhone and iPod touch, and the developer has also promised to release Android and Windows Phone versions of Fleksy in the future.

Download Fleksy for iOS

[via TechCrunch]

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Note: PhotoMagic is a paid application worth $9.99. We are giving away 5 standard licenses to our readers. More information on taking part in this giveaway is provided at the bottom of the post.

Interface wise, PhotoMagic is excellent. The tools are not only easy to figure out, but it’s also visually appealing. Images are added via drag & drop or by using the open image button at the bottom left. The image and all effects applied to it are previewed live in the large preview area on the left. Below this area, next to the open image button, are the crop tool, the rotate tool and the horizontal and vertical flip tools. The FX button allows you to compare the before and after effect on your image and the dice button adds effects randomly.

The column on the right comprises entirely of the effects you can apply. The three round buttons at the top let you print, share (on Facebook and Flickr) and save the final output image. The three rounded rectangular buttons below them allow you to move through the effects. The first button reveals the color effects, the second on the lighting effects and the last one is for frames. The three types of effects can be added inclusive of each other i.e. you can use all three effects on a single image at the same time. You can’t, however, combine two effects of the same type i.e. you can’t use two lighting effects on a single image. A small dropdown menu at the bottom of this column lets you filter the effects based on their categories.

PhotoMagic’s output is excellent and the variety of effects it offers are not found in a single app. Although the interface is appealing and the effects are good, $9.99 is steep.

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Giveaway

We’re giving away 5 Mac licenses for this app. The giveaway will last for 48 hours. Participation is simple. Follow @addtips on Twitter, tweet/retweet the giveaway and in the comments below, provide a link to your tweet. Alternatively, you may comment on our Facebook or Google+ page, where the comment should preferably be under the shared post and not on the page itself. Our editors will pick the five winners randomly. Good luck!

Update: The giveaway has been closed and promo codes have been sent to the winners. If you entered for the giveaway, please check your Twitter Direct Messages, Facebook Messages or Google+ feeds.

Read PhotoMagic: Add Color And Lighting Effects & Frames To Images [Mac] by Fatima Wahab on AddictiveTips - Tech tips to make you smarter

To create a profile of your own in Recood, you will have to sign up using your Facebook or Twitter credentials, and if you don’t want to do that, there is the option to create a new account using your email ID and a new password. The News menu of Recood displays all the latest app activities from your friends and people you follow. The main section of Recood displays the public shares recently made by other users. You can choose to re-share any video in the main feed, or there is the option to hit the like button and add the item to your favorites. For more details regarding any particular video, just hit the small arrow located at the right of its bottom bar. In the video’s menu, you will be able to view its comments & likes, the name of the filter used to shoot it and the time that it was uploaded to the Recood network. If you decide to leave a comment of your own on a video, you can mention anyone using @ before their username.

To get down to business and begin shooting a new video, hit the big video camera button from the bottom bar. A few filters are available in the app for free, and they include Chaplin Style, Film Noir and Sepia. Others have to be unlocked using Recood credits, but luckily you get 1,000 of those when you purchase the app, and most of the effects can be bought using a thousand app credits. Once you have chosen a filter, it’s time to play around with the FX Trigger. Each effect in Recood is accompanied by a trigger that can be used to add some extra flair to your videos. The trigger adds some quirk to your video that somehow intensifies the effect you are currently using. By default, only 10 seconds of the shot video can be saved, but you can extend that limit to a full minute by hitting the Extend button on the post-recording screen. When everything about the video is according to your liking, hit the share button and choose the location and description you want to associate with it. It is also possible to publish your work to Facebook, Twitter and YouTube if you have chosen to link those accounts with the app.

Recood Pro can be downloaded for $0.99, and the in-app purchases shouldn’t prove to be too big of an issue for most users. The app is optimized for iPhone and iPod touch, and can be downloaded from the following link.

Download Recood Video Camera Pro for iOS

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