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Posts in reviews

I Finally Closed My Google Reader Tab. Reeder for Mac Is That Good.

RSS readers for Mac have been ignored for too long. After an enormous, and maybe initially unexpected, success on the iPhone and iPad, developer Silvio Rizzi set out to create the best new desktop RSS reader. A very simple goal. Perhaps the most difficult to accomplish.

See, they say RSS is dead. Some claim saying “something is dead” is dead. Truth is, Twitter users, Instapaper lovers and Foursquare dwellers don’t know what “dead” means anymore. Especially when it comes down to apps and services, everything can be dead or excellent in a matter of a few weeks. Just take a look at Instragram’s numbers. RSS isn’t for my father or my average non-tech savvy friends, but it definitely isn’t dead. It was just looking for a new desktop house to spend his retirement days in.

Here comes Reeder for Mac to redefine the rules, conventions, UI decisions and navigation schemes of RSS on the desktop.  Read more

Spaced: Beautiful App With The Latest News From Space

NASA is holding a press conference tomorrow “to discuss an astrobiology finding that will impact the search for evidence of extraterrestrial life”, and what better way to check on the coverage of the conference than Spaced app for iPhone and iPad?

I found this app in the App Store this morning while I was looking for my daily software fix. I’ve always been interested in reading space-related material, but I’ve never really subscribed to a set of sources with my RSS reader or bought magazines for that matter. I just followed a bunch of people who regularly tweet that kind of news and I don’t mind giving Reddit’s space section a read every two days or so. Read more

Paperless: Customizable Checklist App for iPhone

I’m not really that kind of user who’s into checklists, but I can spot a good app when I see one. I daily depend on OmniFocus and Simplenote for my projects, tasks and notes – yet I can see why many users prefer checklists (or just “lists”) on their mobile devices: they’re simple to play around with, yet they allow for a certain level of complexity.

Paperless for iPhone is based on this very same concept: it’s a simple app everyone could use, but it also lets you customize the way it works to achieve more complex setups. Read more

Notica: A Visual Database For The Most Important Things In Your Life

We love discovering and talking about new apps for the iPhone and iPad. In fact, we love covering apps so much that sometimes we feel a little guilty when we can’t seem to find the right app to feature on MS. This week though, also thanks to a huge Black Friday sale that kind of forced us to buy new apps, we’ve got plenty of material to feature.

Notica is a new iPhone app by Cleversome which aims at enabling you to collect the most important things, people and moments of your life inside a gorgeous and intuitive interface. Notica is a little, elegant app you might just fall in love with in a couple of minutes. Read more

Review: Cloud Calendar, Google Calendar Client for iPad

While searching for interesting alternatives to Apple’s own calendar application for iPhone and iPad, I stumbled upon Cloud Calendar by Clean Cut Code. Cloud Calendar is a new calendar app for iPad that’s specifically meant to work with Google Calendar – and being Google’s calendar solution part of my workflow already, I decided to give it a try.

Cloud Calendar is undoubtedly a very good app to manage your calendars on the iPad, it comes with an elegant interface design and it’s intuitive enough to let you add new events with one tap. It still needs some additional customization options though, the ones that could probably break the app for “calendar power users” that can’t live without edit mode in shared calendars. It’s a very good app overall, so read on past the break for all the details. Read more

Read It Later 2.3: New Article Parser, Better Attribution

Before falling in love with Instapaper, I was a loyal Read It Later user. I used the service for months and couldn’t be happier with it. So what made me switch to Instapaper? The fact that Marco Arment’s software had a better text parser – that little magic that takes content from the cluttered web and presents it in a beautiful, readable and uncluttered fashion.

Read It Later introduced a few minutes ago a new “insane” article parser, which doesn’t stop at text but extends the service’s capabilities to images and embedded videos. Plus, developer Nate Weiner has refined the whole text parsing process to make RIL smarter and faster at fetching articles.

Am I going to ditch Instapaper and jump on the Read It Later bandwagon all over again? No, but I’m going to give this a deep week-long second try. Read more

Put Things Off 2: Fun, Beautiful Task Manager for iPhone

I wrote many times in the past that most users don’t need the complexity and feature set of GTD apps such as OmniFocus (for Mac and iOS) and online project management tools like Basecamp. Even if apps like OmniFocus and, to an extent, Things have their loyal userbase, most people just want a simple and effective app to manage their daily activities and reminders.

Put Things Off, recently updated to version 2.0, tries to merge task management with straightforward “reminder” functionalities to create a mix that’s beautiful to look at and simple enough to capture lots of App Store dwellers’ hearts. Read more

MacStories Weekly Game: ChuChu Rocket! HD

I never had the chance to play the original ChuChu Rocket! 10 years ago on the SEGA Dreamcast. I didn’t have a Dreamcast back then. In fact, I think I was playing with the PSX back in 2000, and I’m sure I had a Game Boy Color. A few years later I bought the GBA, a Game Cube and a PS2 – but I never bothered grabbing a Dreamcast to check out the gems released by SEGA and other 3rd party developers. I regret that, mostly because I’m still lacking knowledge in true masterpieces such as Shenmue (although this one’s been re-released on the Xbox) or Jet Set Radio.

Luckily enough for me, looks like iOS devices are somehow here to save the day and allow us to re-enjoy games first appeared years ago and now ready to come to life again under the power of multi-touch. That’s exactly what’s happening with ChuChu Rocket! HD for iPad: released a decade ago and subsequently redesigned to appear on the Game Boy Advance, the game’s now running on the iPad taking advantage of its larger screen and touch controls.

So why is this a Weekly Game anyway? Because it’s as genius as it was 10 years ago, and it’s a truly addictive puzzle game. Read more