Tag Archives: App

100 Best Mac Apps Of Year 2012

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Another year has gone by and it’s been a good one for OS X apps. Continuing our tradition from previous years, here is a list of some the best apps we covered during the last one. 2012 was split between two versions of OS X; Lion and Mountain Lion. Each of these versions had their own share of features that inspired developers to create apps. We came across a fair number of Mac apps meant to deal with the problems users experienced when they upgraded to Mountain Lion. Apart from these OS-centric apps, we reviewed the usual utilities for everyday work; productivity apps, music players, to-do lists managers, system tweakers and more. With the new year now in full swing, you might want to see if a little something from last year will help you enjoy a better user experience. Read More

View Your Twitter Feed On Mac Screen Saver With TwitterTicker

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Mountain Lion came with Twitter and Facebook integration and there still aren’t a lot of ways for users to take advantage of it. Even the integration itself is very basic with no support for keyboard shortcuts, and surprisingly, there isn’t a crazy number of apps in the Mac App Store to take advantage of it either. TwitterTicker is a free Mac app that makes a screen saver out of your Twitter feed. The app is very basic and allows you to choose how many recent tweets should be shown and how long each tweet should stay on the screen. The tweets themselves are displayed with subtle hints to make them easier to read, Hash tags are brighter than the rest of the text and links are slightly dull to highlight the main text of the tweet. Previews for images uploaded directly to Twitter are shown; however, links to images uploaded to Instagram etc. are not. Read More

The Official Google Search App For Windows 8 Now Available

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The best thing about Google services is that you get roughyl the same usage experience on all platforms. From time to time, developers do write dedicated clients for various Google services (just yesterday, we covered a third party Windows 8 app for Google Maps, called G Maps), but nothing's better than an official app that packs all the features you'll ever need. Google released their official Google Search app for Windows 8 today. The Windows Store app allows you to use Google’s search engine, Voice Search and other Google services without having to launch a browser. Read More

Hubbl: Social iPhone & Android App Discovery & Suggestions With A Slight Twist

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When it comes to numbers, the App Store boasts the largest mobile app repository out there. With close to a million apps available for iOS users, it makes sense that Apple has divided the App Store into various categories so that you can discover apps of interest with ease. However, with the passage of time, all the categories have become so saturated that it is now close to impossible to come across a good app that hasn’t been able to gain popularity yet. The revamped iOS 6 App Store features enhanced recommendations and an interface modeled after that of the popular app discovery engine Chomp. Having said that, app discovery is still a genre that merits apps of its own. You might think that an app focusing on letting users find new apps for their smartphone can’t be too different from others of its kind, but Hubbl for iPhone proves this wrong. Despite being a really useful and social app discovery platform, Hubbl comes with a rather unique interface and discovery methods. The app also has an Android variant available on the Google Play Store. Read More

noozy: Zune Style Android Media Player With Podcast & Sound Processors

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Elegant and power-packed Android music players are plentiful in the Google Play Store, and quite a few of them try to replicate the looks and functionality of Microsoft’s Zune player, such as the previously-reviewed InstaMusic and Fede’s Music Player. The latest to join the club of Metro-style Android music players is noozy – a sleek freemium that not just possesses powerful audio playback capabilities (courtesy of enhanced sound technology imported from the Noozxoide Laboratories), but also supports playing videos. In addition, the app lets users subscribe to, stream & download podcasts, listen to live audio broadcasts from noozy.live & last.fm services, and keep a close tab on the world's leading tracks, artists & albums. noozy also happens to be a great online music discovery tool that suggests tracks based on whatever you’re currently listening to. Users can get listen to samples of recommended tracks, browse complete albums of suggested artists, and purchase their favorite albums from various global music stores. Die-hard music lovers can also keep an eye on their favorite artists’ biographies, top tracks, album reviews & playlists, and get recommendations for similar artists. We’re not done with the app’s features yet; continue reading past the break to find out what else noozy has on offer. Read More

Retinizer: Make Mac Apps Display Text In Retina Resolution

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When Apple unveiled the MacBook Pro with retina display, it meant two things. One, that your eyes might just bleed on the sharpness of images rendered and two, that there might just be a problem with apps that didn’t support it. Some users of course assumed that developers would upgrade their apps within a matter of weeks in order to present the best possible image to Mac users. This was widely inaccurate; although many apps were upgraded, a larger portion of them do not support retina display and they appear pixelated on the retina MacBook Pro. Retinizer is a free Mac app that offers a solution for some of these apps. Retina display translates into sharper pictures and text that is crispier and much easier to read. So what Retinizer does is ‘retinize’ the text in these apps to make them appear crispier as if they were optimized for the retina screen. Read More

Factura: Organize Files On Mac By Copying/Moving Them To Subfolders

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Of the many things people procrastinate about and like to put off until there’s no choice left but to do it, organizing files is probably somewhere in the top ten. For the most part, files are moved to a folder that isn’t in the way and gives you a hint of what kind of files might be in it. Over time, it is filled with just about every kind of file there is, until you can barely tell what the folder was first created for. If you think finding files in a folder like this is difficult, try organizing that data and you will realize just how big a mess you’ve created. Factura is a free Mac app available in the Mac App Store that helps streamline organizing files. It is slightly redundant, but makes moving/copying files from one location to another and renaming them somewhat easier. The app provides a quick view option as well, so that you don’t have to open them separately in Preview. Read More

Disk Scope: Scan Mac Hard Disk & System Libraries For Memory Usage [Mac]

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Disk space fills up as time passes and while this is to be expected, cleaning it out isn’t easy. It’s hard to track down which folder is consuming the most space. To help determine memory usage on a Mac, there are tools like DaisyDisk and DiskScanner, both of which present a graphical view of space consumption by folder. What both these apps have in common is that they drill memory usage down to the folder, but some users consume more space in the system libraries, i.e., the downloads, documents, Applications, Pictures, Music etc. If you would prefer a simpler breakdown of memory consumption for these folders only, Disk Scope is a free Mac app that does the trick. It scans a hard drive and displays memory consumed both graphically and numerically, additionally letting you clear your Mac’s cache. Read More

Growly Write: Free Text Editor That Retains Formatting Of Imported Files [Mac]

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Text editors, for the most part, have to be feature rich, or at the very least, provide a minimum number of features to make themselves useful. Too many features, and users might have trouble figuring everything out. It can also lead to a huge clutter of controls that you will never use. The default text editor in Mac, TextEdit, supports some very basic features, and many users still opt to find other text editing tools because this default app doesn’t meet their requirements. If, for any reason, you aren’t satisfied with TextEdit, Growly Write is a free Mac app that is a text editing tool with a very reasonable number of features, sans a gorgeous UI. The app’s features cover the basics for editing text, and allow you to open most common formats like RTF, DOC, DOCX etc, without losing the document’s original formatting. Read More

FixIt II: Remove Unnecessary Characters & Spaces From Forwarded Emails

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Forwarded emails, or just very very long threads of them, get ridiculous at one point. You are rarely going to go and scroll through an entire conversation, and even if you do need to check back on what was previously said, it would help if you didn’t have to deal with the formatting that is added when emails are forwarded or replied to, i.e., the long lines along the left or the “>” characters. FixIt II is a free little app for Mac that helps you clean up some of the formatting that’s added to these chain messages and long conversations. It allows you to choose what you want to clean, and once your message has been reformatted, it is automatically copied to your clipboard for pasting. Read More

How To Use Scrollable Widescreen Images As Wallpapers For iPhone/iPad

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If you have ever used a non-stock wallpaper on your iOS device, the release of WS Wallpaper in the Cydia store is sure to come as a welcome news for you. Not many images exactly match the iPhone’s default screen dimensions, and most of the time, users have to manually make adjustments before the photo can be used as a wallpaper for the Springboard of their iDevice. WS Wallpaper is a Cydia app that automatically adjusts any image to match the resolution of your iPhone’s screen. However, that is just a small secondary functionality offered by the app, and its real purpose is to let you use widescreen images as wallpapers on your iPhone or iPad. If you are wondering about how the app manages to fit in a complete widescreen wallpaper in one view, then you should know that it doesn’t! WS Wallpaper makes wallpapers scrollable, and that means the wallpaper view will keep changing as you navigate between the pages on your Springboard. Read More

Shade: Hide Desktop Clutter For Better Screenshots & Cleaner Work Area

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There are lots of ways to manage desktop clutter; besides actually cleaning things up, you can use apps like Folder Tidy and Desktop Tidy to sort and move files on your desktop by file type. You can also do something that’s much much easier: sweep it under the rug, i.e., hide it all behind a nice wallpaper so you don’t have to look at it while you work. Shade is a free Mac app available in the Mac App Store that adds a second wallpaper in front of all your desktop icons and hides them from view. App windows stay visible on top of this second wallpaper that is superficially imposed on top of the original one, and allows you to take a nice clean screenshot if you like or just work more easily without being distracted by the many items littering your desktop. Read More

Sharetastic Makes The Share Feature In Mountain Lion Omnipresent

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Mountain Lion’s new features were guaranteed to give developers lots of new ideas for apps, and they’ve definitely come through with apps like iTunification, Now Playing and Hiss, to name a few right off the bat. These three apps are similar in what they do, but perform an essential function for the new OS. Sharetastic is a Mac app worth $1.99 in the Mac App Store and is perhaps the first of its kind. The app imitates the new share feature that has been integrated across all stock apps in Mountain Lion; it runs in the Menu Bar and supports 11 services: Aperture, iPhoto, Reading List, Email, Message, Flickr, Sina Weibo, Twitter, Tudou, Vimeo, AirDrop - that you can copy and share items to. Items are automatically added whenever you copy something to your clipboard. The app supports shortcuts not just for toggling its panel in the Menu Bar but also for quickly sharing an item to one of the services it supports. Read More

Tomatoes: Pomodoro App That Lets You Add Tasks & Time Units To Measure Output

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The Pomodoro technique is usually good for getting most people to be productive, but at the heart of it, a Pomodoro is really a timer that’s running out on you and while it’s boosting your productivity, it is still just a timer. If the Pomodoro technique is one that works exceptionally well for you, then you might want to stop using an ordinary Pomodoro app and try one that helps you work better. Tomatoes is a Mac app worth $4.99 in the Mac App Store that allows you to add tasks, associate ‘Pomodoro units’ with each task and quantify how long you need to get a task done. Tasks and time units are recorded and archived accordingly. Tomatoes lets you add tasks and focus the time you’re spending on a single task at a time. A timer in the Menu Bar shows time left till the current time unit expires. Read More

Get A “Now Playing” Alert From iTunes In Notification Center

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A while back, we covered a little tip for viewing song alerts in the iTunes Dock icon. As useful as that tip is, with Mountain Lion’s Notification Center, alerts are handled differently. iTunes has been left out of though; with the release of Mountain Lion, there was no update for the iTunes app that would allow it to send alerts to Notification Center. iTunification is an app we covered that made up for this, but there were two problems with it. The notifications did not show up under iTunes in the Notification Center panel, and you also had an unnecessary icon in the Menu Bar. Working around both these problems is Now Playing, a free Mac app that does everything iTunification does, but without the Menu Bar icon. The alert you see when a song changes and the app’s notification in the side panel are also better, carrying no name of the app itself. Read More

iTunification Gives You Notification Center Alerts For iTunes [Mac]

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iTunes is a fully functioning media management suite, but the rate at which apps are being developed that let you control iTunes from the Menu bar, it seems we may as well forget the whole idea of having an app and just stick with something in the Menu Bar. That isn’t possible, however, since iTunes is more than an ordinary app that plays media files. What’s surprising is that, while there are a slew of apps available for controlling iTunes from the Menu Bar, Apple itself seems to think the minimized iTunes player is all that’s needed and has neglected to add, for instance, Notification Center support for iTunes. iTunification is a a free Mac App that makes up for this. Since iTunes does not support a notification system, this isn’t a question of re-routing Growl alerts to the Notification center. The alerts have to first be generated through a system and then sent to Notification Center, and iTunification does both that. The app also has a ‘Do Not Disturb’ mode that lets you turn it off temporarily. Read More

Desktop Tidy: Clean Files From Desktop & Sort According To Format

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A clean desk is a sign of  a troubled mind, and that is possibly one of the best reasons to let your desktop get cluttered with files and folders. The only problem is that as your desktop continues to gather clutter, it gets difficult to locate a file and sometimes to work. Mac users might still be able to locate files with the help of Spotlight, but that doesn’t make the desktop any easier to work with. If lack of cleanup time is what keeps your desktop looking like a mess, Desktop Tidy is a good solution. It is a Mac app worth $4.99 in the Mac App Store and it periodically cleans your desktop. You can define the time period for cleaning up the desktop and the app will take care of the rest. Files and folders are categorized based on their type and moved to a different folder. You can select any location for this folder and add additional file formats to the ones that already exist. Since not all items on your desktop are trash, the app lets you select items that should be ignored during the periodic clean up. Read More

PhotoMagic: Add Color And Lighting Effects & Frames To Images [Mac]

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Adding effects to photos doesn’t sound like a complex idea but as Instagram can testify, it is actually a billion dollar idea. Regardless of what Instagram is worth to Facebook, its user base is proof that amateur photography is something we can’t get enough of and photo effects play a huge role in this. PhotoMagic is a Mac App worth $9.99 in the Mac App Store and it is a simple app that lets you add a large variety of color filters, frames, textures and light effects to an image. The output image is very similar to what you get from Instagram except you have more effects to choose from. Altogether, the app has 72 color effects, 17 lights effects and 90 frames to choose from. The output is saved in JPG format and images you create can be shared on Flickr and Facebook. The app also has a crop tool that allows you to crop an image on one of four preset sizes. Read More

Current Caller ID By WhitePages Is A Social CID App For Android

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WhitePages, one of the leading people & business contact lookup services, has just launched a rebranded and revamped version of their famous Caller ID Android app with a fresh look and a plethora of new features. With what’s now being titled in the Google Play Store as Current Caller ID, Android users get to see a wonderful blend of an intuitive caller ID UI with real-time informative content based on your callers’ location, social network updates from Facebook, Twitter & LinkedIn, and the extent of your interaction with them. In addition, the app helps you easily and instantly identify callers – whether individuals or businesses – by pulling contact information from no less than 300 million registered phone numbers stored in WhitePages’ extensive and constantly-updated database, and displaying it right on your Android’s caller ID screen. Current Caller ID is more than just a gorgeous-looking social caller ID app; it is also laced with plenty of cool infographic content that helps you sneak peek into your calling and texting habits by showing you detailed statistics pertaining to your most frequently called and texted to numbers, your favorite time of making these interactions, and the mode in which you interact with a particular contact the most. Continue reading past the break to find out what else Current Caller ID for Android has on offer. Read More

6 New Features In OS X Mountain Lion’s “Preview” App

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In our extensive review of Mountain Lion, the latest installment for OS X, we briefly reviewed the new features that have been added to the stock apps. There are quite a few additions to almost all apps and many changes, like the addition of a Share button and the integration of iCloud, are ones that you will see implemented all across the OS. While some apps deserve more spotlight than others, we feel Preview, easily one of the most used stock apps, could do with better detailing. We found Preview to have 6 noteworthy features that we could only mention but not discuss earlier. The news that Preview now allows you to fill PDF forms has travelled fast and is perhaps now one of the more known features of Mountain Loin; however, Preview was zapped with these additional five tricks as well. For convenience, you can now rename files from the title bar, for peace of mind, you can now restore older versions of files, insert pages or images to a document from your camera or a scanner, annotate images or files with more shapes like ovals and call outs and finally, save files directly to iCloud. Read More