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Posts in reviews

SoundTracking: More Than Just “Instagram for Music”

Last week I decided to refine my cloud storage and music streaming setup: I bought a Dropbox Pro 50 account and extended my Spotify subscription until September. In case you don’t know, I store my iTunes library on Dropbox so I can sync my iOS devices effortlessly across all the computers I’ve installed Dropbox on. But why using iTunes and Spotify together for storing and streaming music? For as much as I love Spotify – in fact, it changed my music listening habits since I started using it – not every artist I like is available on it. That’s why I care about keeping a well-organized iTunes library with the albums and songs not available on Spotify. This library is pretty huge and stored on Dropbox together with apps, books, movies and anything else that usually goes into iTunes.

With a 16 GB iPhone, the combination of iTunes + Spotify (which also happens to have an offline cache option) gives me the possibility of having any kind of music ready for listening whenever I like. SoundTracking, a new app for iPhone I installed a few days ago, aims at giving you the tools to share the “soundtrack of your life” and discover new songs shared by your friends, directly from your iPhone.

At first, SoundTracking might sound like an “Instagram for music” – that would actually make sense after all the Instagram alternatives and third-party apps we’ve seen recently, not to mention the Instagram for video SocialCam. SoundTracking starts from the same simple concept of Instagram: you open the app, tap on a button in the toolbar and share media with your social graph in seconds. In SoundTracking, that means you’re sharing the song and artist you’re currently listening to with friends using the app you discovered by logging into Twitter, Facebook and Foursquare. But the similarities with Instagram stop at the basic concept, as SoundTracking goes really in-depth to allow you to not only share, but also discover new music and people with your same music tastes worth following. Read more

Clocky - A Beautiful World Clock App for Mac: Review & Giveaway

Yesterday I was browsing the new apps in the Mac App Store and came across Clocky, a world clock app that sits in your menu bar. Clocky was developed by Studio Dalton, who also did Lighty for iPhone, a very nice flashlight app. Clocky is already in the Top 100 apps in the Mac App Store and number 12 in Utilities.

Clocky shows the current time in the cities you’ve added, there are 479 to choose from. To add a city, click the ‘+’ sign and use the drop down menu or start typing. Even with almost 500 cities, I found some cities, such as Federico’s town of Viterbo, not on the list. If you want to delete a city, simply select and delete, or drag the clock out of the app. You can also click and drag the clocks to rearrange them. Read more

LogMeIn Ignition Update Includes File Manager: Manage Files Between Computers & iPad/iPhone

LogMeIn Ignition For iPad

LogMeIn Ignition For iPad

While I could have jumped on this update as soon as it was announced by the LogMeIn crew, I wanted to go hands on with LogMeIn Ignition’s new features before passing final judgement of whether the new file sharing capabilities are simply cool or deservedly awesome. Using LogMeIn’s free client, all of your computers are accessible to your iPad and iPhone by simply logging in with your username and (strong) password. Similar to how you navigate between open pages in Safari, you can navigate between File Managers on different computers in LogMeIn Ignition to copy & move files between computers, to your iPad, or from your iPad. It works extremely well, and I was able to move files between two Windows boxes and my iPad while tethered to a 3G enabled device. You can open a variety of file types in LogMeIn (I tested .PDF, .TXT, and .RTF files), and once those files are on your iPad you can choose to open files in other applications if permitted (GoodReader is handy to have around for this). Even if LogMeIn Ignition can’t open the file, you should still be able to move and copy files between computers. Interestingly, you don’t even have to copy files to your iPad to open them - LogMeIn Ignition temporarily caches the file and enables you to keep the cache or discard it as needed. You’ll have to get used to navigating LogMeIn Ignitions’s File Manager, as tapping on folders highlights the folder for copying & moving while tapping on its blue arrow will reveal its contents. I think LogMeIn Ignition will refuse to copy certain folders based on size (if the total contents won’t fit on your iPad) or type (I couldn’t copy the entire C:\ to my iPad for example). Otherwise, navigating and using the available tools to manage your files was straightforward.

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MacStories Product Review: XtremeMac InCharge Portable

Our iPhones and other portable gadgets require a lot of power to keep them running. The iPhone’s legendary battery life could still use a good boost if you’re consistently uploading Twitter pics and recording audio for those Macworld Expo interviews, and even that old BlackBerry you still keep around could use  a lift. Back in the hotel, wouldn’t it be nice if you and a friend could share an outlet to charge your USB powered gadgets while cameras and other recording tools create a rat’s nest of wires to your Mac? XtremeMac’s InCharge Portable provides a duo of USB ports that are ready to charge your gadgets, but even better is the trick up its sleeve.

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Monitoring Space On My Backup Drives with Daisy Disk

I’m serious about backups. If you’ve been following me on Twitter, you might have read I recently subscribed to Backblaze for my offsite backups: Backblaze is a service that, starting at $5 per month, can save the contents of your Mac on the service’s remote and secure servers. You can restore at any given time, and access all the service’s functionalities and settings from the preference panel that you can install on your Mac. Combined with Dropbox, Backblaze has become my ideal solution for offsite backups that don’t reside on my local setup, and thus are less likely to be subject to damages and other kinds of problems –  say my home office got robbed, Dropbox and Backblaze wouldn’t be affected by the issue.

But I don’t just rely on online services for my backup needs. For as much as storing files online is convenient and fast enough these days, I’m a strong believer that local, incremental backups on external drives need to be performed at a regular daily schedule. For this reason, I bought an AirPort Extreme station months ago to put to better use the external drives I own: Time Machine backups to an AirPort disk on my local network all the time, other media is automatically copied through Hazel to another disk shared via WiFi. With these shared disks, the extra advantage is that everyone in my house who’s connected to my same network can access media (and backup through Time Machine) whenever they want. On top of that, I’ve got two USB / FireWire 800 drives that I use for SuperDuper – which keeps a bootable copy of my Mac and runs its automated backup session every night. Read more

MacStories Product Review: JOBY GorillaMobile Ori for iPad

For those still holding onto the original iPad, have you ever thought about stepping your game up when it comes watching a family movie or utilizing the iPad as a bookstand? That folio case you have isn’t going to elevate the iPad above those popcorn jaws, and you certainly aren’t going to get a stable viewing angle on a leather cover as you tap through a recipe book. Even with a slew of gadgets and arms, the iPad is only as flat as its case. JOBY will help your iPad avoid disaster with a product that’s quite transformative.

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Mondo Solitaire: Deliciously Beautiful Solitaire For Mac

There isn’t too much you can say about solitaire on its own. It’s the card game your coworker plays instead of writing formulas for Excel spreadsheets on Windows, but that doesn’t mean we can’t turn solitaire into something more than a time waster. Proof of concept: Mondo Solitaire from Ambrosia Software is solitaire done right. You aren’t just playing the same game of Klondike over and over - instead you’re offered over 300 variants of solitaire madness to choose from. If you include the beautiful game board that looks like it should bundled with Apple’s own Game Center, then you have yourself one premium handful of card games.

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HazeOver Lets You Concentrate By Fading Inactive Apps

Sometimes it’s hard to concentrate on a Mac and get things done. With all those open windows – the Twitter client, the browser, music from iTunes, Google Reader – it’s easy to get lost in the information stream and distractions and lose focus on what you were doing. HazeOver, a free Mac app by Maxim Ananov, wants to provide a solution to this problem by offering a simple way to eliminate the visual clutter: fading the background application windows you’re not looking at.

The idea is very simple: the app in the foreground stays untouched, the inactive windows are slightly dimmed to create an effect that will let you concentrate on a single app. So say I have to get an article done in the browser but tweets keep coming in the background through the Twitter app, chances are I won’t look at it like I always do because HazeOver generates this “dimmed background” that will help me stay focused on Chrome.

I don’t know how well the system will work for you, but the app certainly behaves as advertised. Once installed and opened, it will automatically fade inactive windows as an app comes in the foreground. But what if you’re that kind of user who keeps multiple apps running side-by-side for multitasking? You might be out of luck due to HazeOver’s lack of customization settings.

Still, the app is a free download and you can try it out here. Check out the demo video below. Read more

Spout Brings Kinetic Typography to Twitter, Facebook and RSS

Spout, a new app for the iPhone and iPad by collect3, aims at bringing the beauty of kinetic typography (animations made exclusively of words with different font faces, colors, and sizes) to your favorite social networks and news sources. Spout, available at $0.99 in the App Store, works exceptionally well to visualize news and status updates as typographic animations running smoothly and incredibly fast on screen. Seriously, this thing displays tweets and messages like in those typography videos you might have seen before on the Internet. It’s just so cool.

But is it useful, too? Not so much. The effect is really neat, but Spout isn’t anything more than a beautiful visualizer with few interactivity options. Sure, you can login with your Facebook, Twitter and Google Reader accounts to stay on top of tweets, status updates and RSS entries, but there isn’t much you can do to play with the information displayed by the app. You can load a specific Twitter user or search, enter multiple accounts and choose to display real names or usernames for tweets – but as far as “productivity” goes the only thing you can do is load a tweet in a popup and then forward it to Safari. I can see, though, how the developers built Spout to be an interesting typographic experiment, rather than another client Twitter might not even like. Spout will look great on your desk and it makes for a great demo to your friends, but don’t expect to use this as a replacement for Twitterrific or the official Twitter iOS app.

That said, Spout has beautiful animations and works just as advertised. For $0.99, you should give it a try.