As you can guess, I’m an heavy user of the AppStore: I love to discover new released apps, read the changelog of every app that gets an update, share apps with my friends. But, the AppStore is not perfect: many bloggers wrote about the problems the Store has but the biggest, in my opinion, lies in the core itself: discover new apps is difficult.

With more than 100.000 apps available and the new rules Apple rolled out last week, it’s become impossible to find fresh and interesting apps. Seems like only top grossing apps get to the front page.

Anyway, I think a solution to this has just been released. And it’s called App Popular.

Read more

I am a blogger, and my daily workflow often consists of repeating and boring tasks. That’s a given: I have to upload pictures, shorten URLs, send emails,install new apps. But if you’re not a blogger like me, it’s very likely that you repeat common tasks too.

Now, Mac OS is an excellent platform from this point of view: everything is simplified but yet powerful and thanks to some tecniques like Applescript or Smart Folders you can let the OS do stuff for you. But still, I missed an real application which would do tasks for me. By “real application” I mean an app that would sit in my Dock and not some scripts or complicated folder rules.

Here comes Dropzone.

Read more

Flickr, that awesome “social network”  for sharing photographs, is probably one of the best resources for finding inspirational photos, screenshots, whatever a camera / computer can take. Now, Flickr is no doubt one of the best resources for bloggers to find photos to use in their posts: just as Wikipedia says “the service is widely used by bloggers as a photo repository”.

As you may have understood reading MacStories, whenever an application that uses the APIs of a webapp is released, I go download it to write a review about it. So, what about an application that brings Flickr “discovery” experience to our Mac desktop?

Meet Viewfinder.

Read more

Blogging apps for iPhone suck.

Let’s face it: iBlogger is ugly and cluttered and the official WordPress app (which has recently been updated to 2.0) is slow, buggy and way too simple. How could this be even possible? I mean there are 100.000 apps out in the App Store and we don’t have a “Tweetie” for bloggers. You know, the champion who beats all and sits on the throne.

Well, the problem is that developing a blogging app is hard (yes, way too harder than developing a Twitter client) and needs a terrific support from the developer: we’re talking about an application which lets you blog from your iPhone and you know, people want stable and up-to-date apps. If WordPress didn’t make a decent app, how could a single developer make it?

Now, Squarespace (that awesome less known platform Web AppStorm reviewed here) has just released its official iPhone app and - guess what - it’s amazing.

Read more

Although I’m in love with Yojimbo, there’s no doubt that Evernote is the most famous “notes organizer / digital scrapbook” app around.

Built on a solid and intuitive web interface, Evernote is the favourite choice of many Mac users out there, both in its free and premium version. I could write an in-depth review in the next weeks, stay tuned.

Anyway, if there’s one thing Evernote.app for Mac misses, that’s multiple account support. I mean, you can change your account settings in the Preferences, but you’ll have to do it everytime. Wouldn’t it be great to have a little utility to quickly switch between accounts?

Thanks to Jazzaround developers, we can.

Read more

Since SIMBL has been updated for Snow Leopard, I re-discovered many plugins for Mac OS X. Afloat is one of those plugins I tried and deleted because of crashes / bugs.

Now, with a stable SIMBL release for 10.6, I’d like to focus on Afloat, an amazing windows manager for Mac OS X.

Read more

There’s an application every Mac geek can’t live without: the Terminal. Developed with hardcore users in mind, the terminal is the best way to get things done “the hard way”, via text commands.

Now, Terminal is not the best looking Mac application. Indeed, it’s pretty simple and basic. Outdated, many people would say.

Wouldn’t it be great to have a gorgeous, system-wide terminal?

Read more