Now with a Powerful Launcher for Your Mac
An interesting app I’ve just found on Google Code, Telephone is an open source project that lets you make phone calls over the internet with many SIP providers including Google Voice.
Telephone seems very simple and easy to use, it integrates with Address Book and has support for Growl notifications as well. You can head over the official project page here or read some frequently asked questions.
Axure, the populad wireframing and prototyping tool for Windows, is being ported to Mac OS X, but you probably already know that. What’s new is that the developers have announced a full featured beta available for download here, which will expire on April 15, 2010 and that should give you a complete overview of what Axure for Mac will look like.
From the official blog post:
“The beta has all of the features from Axure RP 5.6 for Windows including shared projects. It also has a number of UI enhancements like a new properties pane and redesigned interactions dialog.”
The devs have also announced a final release by the end of March. We’ll keep you posted about it.
Is there still room for another GTD app on Mac OS X? Probably. I think there’s still a huge room for creative and well developed apps, not for yet another clone of Things.app.
Thanks to Gerald Aquila and Wolfgang Bartelme I’m very proud to give you an exclusive sneak preview of a much anticipated application for Mac, Firetask. The app is currently in the early beta stage, so I’m attaching a very few screenshots as many things are likely to change before the official release.
Firetask will take a different approach from all the other GTD apps for Mac: it will be focused on simplicity, providing a clean and slick interface to not overhaul the user with tons of menus and tabs. In Firetask for Mac (and remember, there’s an iPhone app too which we reviewed here. The Mac version will sync with the iPhone one) you’ll be able to create tasks and give them a specific status, priority, category and assign them to a project.
The interface will be a mix of notebook-like pages and dark elements, plus some nice icons in the sidebar to quickly navigate.
I’m really looking forward Firetask for Mac, because it’s going to be different. I’m sorry I can’t tell more about it, but I’ll be sure to write another preview or review it as soon as it will be available. Can’t wait.
The iPhone is more than just a phone to me. It’s an assistant, a device that I use to keep track of multiple things in my life (money, stats, followers, weight, smoked cigarettes) - each thing with a dedicated application. In the age of database driven applications, this is no doubt the best situation Jeff Raskin could ever imagine: a device that transforms in a new one everytime, according to the application that’s running on it.
But wouldn’t it be great to track all of this data in a single software? You know, at the end of the day they’re just numbers. I’ve slept 5 hours, I’ve spent 10 Euros in beer, I ate 3 eggs two days ago. They’re different situations, but they’re just numbers. And that’s why Sahil Lavingia (developer of Twizzle and Color Stream) started developing Dayta, the already popular One Week App: a single app that could keep track of data, no matter the context. Just data, and days.
And I tell you what, it works.
ThermoCLine is an interesting utility developed by my friend @elasticthread which allows you to perform a lot of action from a command line interface anywhere on your Mac. You can go to folders, start Google searches, do some math, shorten URLs and even tweet.
It requires a little bit of setup (you have to copy some files, assign a keyboard shortcut with Fastscripts to the required Applescript) but after that, it’s pure awesomeness. The .zip files comes with a huge explanation of how the app works and with a list of commands as well, so you won’t miss anything TCL offers.
You can download the app here. Don’t forget to follow @elasticthreads on Twitter and give him some suggestions for new features.
Bitspace, the cloud powered music application we reviewed here, is finally out of the closed beta stage. In case you missed you missed our post about it, Bitspace enables you to upload your music files and listen to them from any browser that supports HTML5 (Safari and Chrome, I’d recommend).
You can create a new account and enjoy the free trial for 30 days, or head over the Pricing page and choose the plan that fits your needs. Here’s the official announcement blog post.
A few weeks ago Apple implemented the “iTunes preview” feature for single apps pages in the App Store. From today on you’ll be able to browse the whole App Store, including categories, from your browser.
You can go here to see the new feature.
The fact that I’m based in Italy doesn’t really help out with the management of MacStories advertisement. Being part of the BuySellAds network means that I have to deal with USD payments, which I have to convert everytime in Euros to see how much my income actually is. Which better tool than the iPhone to get a quick overview of currency conversion? There are hundreds of currency apps out there, including the popular Convertbot from Tapbots and Convert.
Today I’ll take a look at a new application that showed up this morning in my inbox, iCurrency Pad.
This Mosspuppet thing is just great. Go read the latest post here.
“When you think about it, Microsoft’s successful attempt to come up with something new and innovative to secure their place as a contender in the mobile phone space is really pathetic.”
