How do you control your music?

I don’t know how many times I’ve been asked this question since I started blogging on MacStories. I still haven’t found a good way to control my music, besides the good & old “go to the player of choice and press play”. Yes, I’ve never been able to stick with a dedicated desktop controller for iTunes or Spotify, as I kept switching back and forth between new apps (Tracks), popular alternatives (Coversustra) and even mobile applications (Remote). As I mentioned many times before, I found a good compromise in Ecoute, which is a neat app that enables you to play your music library without launching iTunes and it even displays a nice controller on the desktop.

There was this other app, anyway, that many people were using and enjoying: Bowtie. Bowtie has been sitting on the much popular beta stage for months, but has been finally released as a 1.0 version - both on the Mac and iPhone. Was the wait really worth it?

Read more

Link

“Is your application larger than necessary because of needless data stored in image resources? What is making your PDFs four times the size they ought to be?

ShrinkIt is a simple, small Panic internal tool that will automate the process of stripping needless metadata from PDFs by re-saving them using Apple’s PDF processor. Just drop a bunch of files (not folders) onto it — such as the contents of your app’s Resources folder — It’ll find the PDFs and do its magic on them. The original files will be renamed with the prefix “org” for safety, but you’ll likely want to delete those. That’s it!”

An app meant for developers, but I’m curious to see how much space I can free from my /Applications folders.

I’ve always wanted a quick and easy way to convert movies to other formats. Ok, I know that there are tons of apps that allow you to convert videos to every format and such, but I’m not really that kind of user that requires God knows which bitrate customization. I just want it to work fine, in a simple and usable interface.

iConvertX (which has been updated to the 4.0 version) is a very straightforward application that does nothing but convert videos to other formats. You just have to drop a file onto the main window, choose a destination and the new format. Simple as that. It supports more than 20 file formats including .mov, .flc, .avi, .mp4, .divx and .mkv, but some of them require Perian to be installed. You can adjust some options before starting the conversion, like data and frame rate, key frames and “optimized for”. I didn’t do anything with this stuff, but you guys know what to do.

iConvertX

iConvertX

iConvertX

The app is built with simplicity in mind, and as far as I can tell - it works. You can purchase a license at $3.75 here, or either use it up to 5 times for free. Now, let’s hope the devs will ship an icon together with the app.

I’m sure that there are tons of apps like this out there. Have you got a suggestion? Feel free to share in the comments.

There are a lot of Mac apps that can track almost every little piece of your life: your finances, your tasks, your music, your dog, your girlfriend. Ok, maybe not the last one, though I’m sure someone’s thinking about it. But anyway, from today on you’ll be able to track what your fingers have done on your MacBook’s trackpad.

Anatoly Zenkov (art director and designer from Moscow) has developed MousePath, a simple .jar application that records your mouse / trackpad movements and displays them on a blank sheet as black lines and dots. Lines are the actual movements, dots are the moments of inactivity.

Isn’t this genius? Below there’s my path of 50 minutes of work today.

MousePath

You can download the app here. Thanks to Door Sixteen for the heads up.

Do you remember Instapaper Threestyled? It was that great userscript by @elasticthreads I once talked about here. Well, since Marco Arment updated Instapaper’s web interface some weeks ago, that update broke the userstyle.

Fortunately, elasticthreads has been working on a completely new style for Instapaper, which is perfect both for browsers (in my case, Safari) and a Fluid app. It’s called Instapaper Greystyled, and you can download it here. (Fluid version)

Instapaper Greystyled

Be sure to have Greasekit installed or the userstyle won’t work.

You hate Things, you can’t stand The Hit List, you don’t want to use a web based application. You want minimalism in your GTD app. Or maybe, you just want a simple to-do list application, because that’s how you get things done.

TaskMate by Ryan Conway is a straightforward Mac app that lets you enter tasks, delete them and mark them as complete. Nothing more, just checkboxes.

TaskMate Mac

When Apple will bundle a Tasks.app with Mac OS X I’m sure it will be something like this.

Also, it’s free.

Have you ever felt the need of collecting data into one single application? I have. To tell the truth, sometimes I wish there was an application that could collect everything (links,images, videos, music, documents) into a single interface, but I recognize that might end up being a nothing more than HD.app. So, here come database driven applications like iPhoto for images, iTunes for music or Yojimbo for..anything else. You should how much I love Yojimbo (here’s my post of some months ago about it) and you should also know how much I wish the developers of Yojimbo listened to the users. Yojimbo it’s great, but as you keep using it you realize it’s somehow outdated. Bookmarklets work fine, the Quick Input panel is useful, same applies for the Drop Dock…but it’s not fluid. Particularly after many months of serious usage, my installation of Yojimbo is starting to fall under the huge amount of data I’ve put into it. So I’ve come to a conclusion: certain file types must go elsewhere. I hence decided that documents, in the form of .PDFs and iWork files, should have been stored into another app. But that wasn’t easy you know: I wasn’t able to find an app that was exactly meant for collecting documents or at least, I wasn’t able to find the right app for me.

fast forward 30 days

iDocument totally came out of nothing. A follower of mine replied to me on Twitter saying “Hey, check out this app!”, and there I opened the link. Is iDocument really worth your money? Or, can iDocument really save you from those hundreds of documents cluttering you hard drive?

Read more

Since I started the “It could be a Mac app” series on MacStories I discovered a lot of new web applications. Some have a cool interface but are unusable, some are ugly and useful, some are stunning in every single part. Indeed, I try to focus on this kind of apps, beautiful online services that combine a great UI with great features. Now, I’ve also been talking a lot about “the cloud”. Well, most everyone in the web community is talking about the cloud, as it’s what we call “the future”. Data is moving to the cloud, applications are moving to the cloud, we are indeed moving our workflows to the cloud.

But apparently, what is keeping people to entirely move to cloud-powered apps is the most obvious reason: the reliability and speed of internet connections. How much time would uploading a 50GB media library require? Hours, or days for many people. That’s why people are still skeptical about “the future”, because they can’t trust their means, and sometimes they don’t even trust the services they’re sending data to. But, this doesn’t necessarily mean you can’t try cloud apps now at small doses. Or, in an ideal scenario - at large doses.

Today I’d like to talk about a web application that it’s slowly changing my way of consuming music. It’s called Bitspace, and I believe it’s what iTunes will probably look like in a matter of a few years.

Read more

myPhotos is not a database. It is not a place where you store photos to. Rather, it allows you to organize the onslaught from the hundreds of pictures that have probably been dumped on your system over its lifetime.

At least, that was its intent.

Read more