I’ve made a couple MacStories screencasts before, and while I can’t particularly say they are good, (in fact, they’re hilariously bad), they’ve all been done with Screenflow. That is, until recently. While it’s not the fault of Screenflow that’s the problem - rather me, who has not a proper Mic nor recording skill - Screenflow never felt right. I don’t know, I could never find the proper documentation I wanted, I couldn’t get the effects I wanted, and perhaps it was lazy on my part to not actually play around with it for a couple of weeks, but I could just never get into the _flow_. When Camtasia came along, they bombarded me with documentation, easy to follow tutorials, and ultimately, it’s become my #1 choice in screencasting software. Having used Camtasia and Screenflow together, if you know one you can use the other quite seamlessly.
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Camtasia for Mac, Screencasting Made Simple
Basecamp and Backpack, Quintessential Business Tools – As Seen from Web, Mac and iPhone.
As soon as I started searching for contributors who wanted to write for MacStories, I also started looking for a good application to manage that kind of team. A team that doesn’t deal with designs or clients, but with tons of text, screenshots, milestones and news. I guess managing a blog’s team is one of the most complicated things to do on the web (especially if you work in different countries) because from what I can tell so far, there’s no dedicated software to for bloggers. Not a great one at least. For this reason, and because I read a lot of posts about the subject,I subject, I decided to try the applications from 37signals, Basecamp and Backpack. I heard that there were some very good clients too (both for Mac and iPhone), which is really important to me.
In this article we’ll take a look at Basecamp and Backpack, the third party apps Cody and I are using to interact with them, and some additional tools we discovered. We believe you’re gonna start using the 37signals products too.
Discovering GTD Once Again with Omnifocus
I remember when I started using my Mac in a professional context, I went around asking for “the best application” to manage tasks on a Mac. Many people suggested Omnifocus from the Omnigroup, and many told me to give a spin to Things, the new kid on the block from CulturedCode, which featured a clean design and a very streamlined interface. I went for Things, as you may have read in my review some weeks ago.
Things is a great piece of software. It doesn’t get almost anything wrong in any section, it could be the perfect GTD application, but – sadly – it’s not. Indeed, I came to a point where I needed to sync my Things database between the Mac and the iPhone not only within my local network, I desperately needed to access my tasks while on the go. And if you’re a Things user, you should know that’s not possible, though Cultured Code promises it will come soon with an update. So I decided to try Omnifocus again, and here we are today. Turns out Sync is only one of the features that made me switch, as I found way more than simple over the air sync in Omnifocus.
Sneak Around on your Mac with Tiptoe
We’re all familiar with Private Browsing. While I use it for my financial activities, people will use it for more nefarious deeds. Imagine if we can take everything on our Macs, and apply Private Browsing to it. You know, like iChat for example? So if you’ve ever wanted to be super sneaky on your Mac, perhaps to keep your little brother from blackmailing you with your latest GF talk, then Tiptoe is for you.
WebSaver, A Universal Web Display
Imagine the entire Internet as your screen saver. That’s WebSaver, a SandwichLab utility designed to bring you the best of the Internet right to your dormant Mac computer. If you’ve ever wanted The Numa Numa Guy as your desktop background, we’ll here’s your chance. Just don’t let the Star Wars Kid know.
Reconsidering Dropzone
Dropzone is an application by Aptonic which I reviewed back in November here, and it was quite a positive review. I was impressed by the app, which was (is) a small utility that sits in the dock and enables you to perform many actions by simply activating them via drag & drop. Want to share a link? Drag it from Safari onto the Dropzone icon and boom, it shortens the URL using bit.ly and it automatically places it in the clipboard. With this same process you can install applications by dragging the original .dmg file, mount and unmount external hard drives, set desktop pictures and more. It’s extensible, it’s magical.
DestroyTwitter, unMac your Client
When people think of Twitter clients on the Mac, we immediately associate with clients wrapped in the fuzzy warm blanket of Cocoa. Sometimes these clients appear as HUDs that nestle in the menubar. Professionals might turn to the popular Adobe Air client Tweetdeck to keep track of trends and various search terms. Many of us would be lifeless without Tweetie, but before we finally sink our teeth into the latest MacHeist offering, I’m going to DestroyTwitter.
Scrup, Free and Open Source Alternative to Tinygrab and Droplr
Sharing picture across the internet could be a real problem sometimes. Not because there’s a lack of tools to do it, no - that is the real problem: there are too many apps that enable you to take a screenshot and upload it somewhere, and people don’t know anymore which app to use. We reviewed apps such as Tinygrab and Droplr before, but the one we’re talking about today is quite awesome and surely different from those ones.
Scrup by Rasmus Andersson (designer at Spotify) is simple and open source utility that, once installed and running on your Mac, can upload screenshots to your own webserver and automatically paste the url into the clipboard for easy sharing. You just have to upload a .php file to your server, insert some credentials in the Preferences of the app and you’ll be all set. Scrup runs in the menubar, it shows nice thumbnail previews of your “scrups” together with date and time.
It works just as good as many other paid and famous apps. Scrup is free and available over at GitHub’s official project page here. Also, be sure to check out Django Scrup, a django-based web receiver for Scrup that forwards the screenshots to Amazon S3.
Put Core Location to use with NetworkLocation
One feature that people are often unaware of in their Macs is something called Core Location. Core Location is what automatically sets the time zones on your Mac for you when traveling around the world by looking for nearby WiFi hotspots and gathering local intel. In conjunction with Google Maps and NetworkLocation, you can establish rules that aid in automatically performing tasks when you reach your daily destinations.