Posts in reviews

FaceMan Is Like Photo Booth For Your iPhone

I should have seen this coming. With iOS 4.3 rumored to introduce Photo Booth-like features for FaceTime or the Camera app, a developer created a full-featured alternative to Photo Booth that’s called FaceMan and it’s available now in the App Store at $0.99.

Put simply: FaceMan is great. It comes with 20 effects from the most popular Squeeze and Bent to a geek’s dream like Broken TV and LED; it’s got a slider to adjust the strength of effects; it can do both photos and videos WITH effects applied. Videos don’t have audio right now, but it’s coming with the next update, almost ready to be submitted to Apple. The interface is clean and polished, supports the Retina Display and you just need to flick through pages of effects to pick one and snap a picture. I did, and the terrible result can be viewed in the screenshot above. Full effect list includes: Swirl, X-Ray, Stretch, Heat, Sketch, Sepia, Dent, Led, Emboss, LightTunnel, Bulge, Squeeze, BrokenTv, Mirror, Toon, BlackAndWhite, AsciiArt, ModernArt, 100Me and NightVision.

Last, you can share photos on Twitter, Facebook, email and Tumblr. The app has a dedicated album to view all the photos and videos without having to open the iOS camera roll. I don’t know what else will Apple add in their own Photo Booth app, but FaceMan is an excellent alternative, available now. And it does videos. Go get it.

Movie Stiller: Video Stabilizer for iPhone

In the past, there have been a couple of times I wished that video I shot with my iPhone turned out to be stable. Camera shakiness, in fact, is the first problem for users addicted to shooting flicks with their mobile devices; and especially in situations when you need to be quick to capture a special moment, you’ll be disappointed to find out the video is un-watchable due to your not-so-stable hand. Whoever hasn’t experienced this at least once either has non-human hands or uses a tripod.

Movie Stiller, a new app from Creaceed (the same developers behind Prizmo), aims at helping you get better videos by stabilizing the ones you have in your Camera Roll. Once you fire up the app, choose a video and wait for Movie Stiller to load it and compute it; in the Settings, you can set a stabilization strength, a default scale and process rotation. Movie Stiller works like this: the more you stabilize a video to avoid shakiness, the more Movie Stiller will add black borders around the current frame. You can then make the image bigger to avoid borders, but that will let the video lose some details. Thus the need of achieving an optimal setup depending on each video.  In my tests, I’ve found the app to work fairly well with videos that had “average shaking”. Don’t expect to optimize your adventurous tornado shoot with Movie Stiller.

The UI of the app is minimal, but stylish. A few taps are needed to get through the stabilization process and you can also export directly to the Camera Roll once it’s finished. Overall, it’s a pretty nifty app to enhance the quality of videos that “could have been better”. Get it here at $2.99.

Free “Plus” Widget Turns Dashboard Into A Launchpad

Launchpad is a feature of the upcoming Lion operating system that will allow users to have quick access to all their apps and folders through an iPad-like overlay interface. A few weeks ago, we saw developers already trying to imitate this functionality on Snow Leopard as I covered QuickPick, an app that brings a Launchpad-like UI to OS X 10.6. Plus, a new widget by Junecloud, takes a similar approach to QuickPick but it’s free and works with the system’s Dashboard.

Plus can turn anything into a Dashboard widget. That’s right: a widget to create other widgets; sort of meta, and it works. You can in fact drop multiple instances of Plus on to the Dashboard, and make each one a different shortcut to something else. Like an app, a screenshot, a document, a web address or a folder. Anything that you can drag out of the Finder can be dropped into Plus and become a widget of its own; Plus even lets you decide the size of the item’s preview. With a bit of organization and time, you can thus turn the Dashboard into a grid of most used apps and shortcuts, although you won’t be able to expand folders within the overlay the way we’ve seen in the Launchpad preview.

All things considered, Plus is a cool widget that’s being given away for free and definitely works as expected. Give it a try.

NoteTote: Download Files Remotely Using Simplenote

Previously known as MobileDL and now available at $8.99 in the Mac App Store, NoteTote is an interesting solution to trigger downloads remotely on your Mac using the iPhone, iPad or any other device that has access to Simplenote. For as simple as it sounds, all you have to do to start a download on your Mac is paste a URL into a specific note. NoteTote, in fact, upon logging into the service with your credentials will create a “special” NoteTote_Downloads note that will always stay there, monitored by the app running on your Mac’s menubar. While you’re away from your Mac and you want to start a download remotely, open the Simplenote app, paste the link and that’s it. On a regular interval (which can be adjusted in the Preferences) NoteTote will look for URLs inserted in the special note and try to download them. All of this while you don’t have access to your Mac. Read more

Extra Security For Your Mac with Hands Off

Available at $0.99 in the Mac App Store, Hands Off is a very simple, yet clever utility that will come in handy if you’ve always wanted an easy way to block access to your Mac when you’re not around – without having to turn the computer off or log out. How does that happen? Well, Hands Off can block the keyboard and the trackpad with a shortcut that can be activated at any time. Say you’re going away from your Mac for a few minutes and you don’t want your kids, or anyone, to press keyboard keys and create problems, Hands Off can help you by completely blocking keystrokes and trackpad recognition. When in “Locked” mode, the keyboard and trackpad won’t do anything.

For extra security or “keyboard cat” prevention, Hands Off is just great. You can use “readable hotkeys” (CMD instead of ⌘), change the global shortcut and even turn on Growl notifications. Combine this with Prowl, and you’ll get remote notifications if someone ever finds the right combination to unlock your Mac’s keyboard and mouse.

Hands Off works as advertised, although I noticed things can get pretty messy if a VNC client tries to remotely access your Mac when the computer is locked. I had to kill the app from the VNC client before actually being able to use my Mac, but it took a minute for the app to quit because it started beachballing in the dock. I guess an update is needed to fix this little inconvenience with VNC clients and local blocking. Anyway, Hands Off just works and it’s available at .99 cents.

Go get it.

MacStories Product Review: Sonos S5 Wireless Music System

I can’t live without my music. Every day, I need to get my “fix” either through iTunes, Youtube (it’s good for rare live performances) or Spotify. I also scrobble the songs I listen to towards last.fm, although I’m no huge fan of the service as a social platform. I just keep an archive of my musical tastes in there. Still, as far as music is concerned, most of the times it’s not the system or the platform that really matters. It’s the quality. And for quality, you need good gear.

Over the years, I’ve always tried to save money and purchase great-quality earbuds to ensure high-fidelity playback while on the go. I’m still happy with my Sennheiser CX 300 bought years ago, but home stereo systems have been a dilemma for me, in spite of my obsession for top-notch hardware. I’ve changed setups too many times, jumped from speakers to stereos and all-in-one solutions without really sticking to one for more than 6 months. When music becomes an obsession, good gear is a necessity. Recently, the audio technologies implemented by Apple in iOS forced me to reconsider everything once again.

See, wireless streaming spoiled all the fun I had accomplished. First came audio via Bluetooth, then Airport Express stations and AirPlay. I changed devices: I went from a classic iPod to an iPod touch to iPhone + iPad. I subscribed to Spotify Premium to use the mobile app (with streaming and offline access), I became addicted to Apple’s own iPod app and third party replacements like My Artists, or external controllers like Coversutra, Bowtie and SongSwiper. Put simply: music became deeply integrated with iOS, and iOS grew at the same time to accomodate features like AirPlay. Music became connected.

So when I was offered the chance to review the Sonos S5, I immediately said “yes” and eagerly started waiting for the two review units to show up at my doorstep. The Sonos S5, for those unaware of this mythical gadget, is a wireless speaker internally powered by a series of amps that a) provides great sound quality and b) is truly connected with iOS, OS X and the Internet. The S5 offers the best of both worlds: local playback backed up by high-quality manufacturing and remote functionalities that allow users to “log into” the speaker and customize the entire experience. After the break, you’ll find my impressions of two months with two Sonos S5 units and a Sonos ZoneBridge connector. Read more

FolderWatch Monitors and Syncs Folders On Your Mac

Available at $2.99 in the Mac App Store, FolderWatch is an easy-to-use yet powerful utility that can monitor any folder on your Mac and sync it back to a different location. In FolderWatch, you can specify an unlimited amount of “sources” (e.g. folders) that the app will monitor for changes, like new files or folders within them. Once a “destination” is set, FolderWatch will run in the background and make a carbon copy of the source to the other folder, server or external drive you have set.

FolderWatch, indeed, can copy files to any location that can be added to your Mac’s Finder. Any networked drive, local server, FTP location mounted in the Finder can be selected as a destination. Personally, I am sending backups of media and Linkinus chat logs on to an external USB drive connected to the AirPort Extreme that powers my home network. Everything happens automatically, in the background;  you can choose to make these copy sessions persistent on each change in the destination (backup will start as soon as a new or updated file is recognized) or trigger them manually with the “Sync” button.

The app can also skip files through filters you can create / delete when adding a new rule, and delete files in the destination folder that do not exist in the source. This will let you easily achieve some sort of sync between folders on your OS X machine that’s quite handy. It’s not as complex and feature-rich like FileSorter and Hazel, but it all works smoothly and requires  a very few clicks to be set up.

FolderWatch is available at $2.99 here. More screenshots below. Read more

DoublePane, The Keyboard-Only Version of Cinch

With Cinch you can grab windows from anywhere in the desktop and drag them to various edges to snap them left or right, or make the windows fullscreen. With DoublePane, keyboard shortcuts dictate all of your happy snapping, with the same abilities using your control, option, and arrow keys. The keyboard shortcuts are static, which may cause incompatibilities in apps like Linkinus that also use those keyboard shortcuts. I would like to see an option in the future to return the window (or undo) position with the down arrow, and for custom shortcuts. The app is a lightweight addition to your Mac which will certainly improve your workflow, and it can be had for only $2.99 on the App Store.