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FLUD, “Sexy News Ecosystem” - More Like A Pulse Clone.

Oh boy. Another visual newsreader on MacStories. Yeah, sorry about that guys - but I had to cover this. I know that you’re probably getting tired of reading about this new trend of visual newsreaders (where by “visual” one means squares with titles and thumbnails, arranged in a list) and that you’ve had enough with dozens of clones of clones in the App Store, but this one had to be covered.

Rememeber Pulse? That Pulse. Remember its UI? Remember its features? FLUD is embarassingly similar to it, in a way that I wonder how Apple approved it.

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iPliz for Mac Controls your Files via Email

It’s always best to have a backup plan. It’s one of those days; you woke up on the wrong side of the bed, you’re late for class, and in the process of scrambling to hike the mile across campus, you forgot to save a copy of your report to your netbook. Just imagine for a minute how bad this actually is: you forget to save a file in Dropbox, stuff your thumb drive into your backpack, or even email yourself a copy of that fifty five page college thesis all at the same time. That report amounts to 50% of your grade, and you can’t return to your dorm out without being late to only the most important session of the semester. So what do you do?

Most people would panic, but being the Mac savvy connoisseur that you are, you pull out that fancy netbook of yours and email yourself with the name of your report. In seconds, you’re sending commands between your email client and your Mac that allow you to find the file, upload it to your current machine, and print it out in the nick of time. iPliz is a niche application for users who don’t employ the best backup strategies, but the ability to email your Mac for files is just cool.

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Courier: Great New Mac App from Realmac Coming Soon

Courier is an awesome new app from Realmac Software (which I’m lucky enough to have already tested) set to come out on OS X “in about a week”. Or at least that’s what the teaser website says.

I can’t really say what the app does yet, but as you can see in the video (embedded below, together with the final icon) support for websites like Youtube, Vimeo and Flickr will be part of the application. All I can say is that Courier is great, and will probably turn out to be one of the best apps released on Mac this year.

Check out the video below, follow @courierapp for exclusive news and stay tuned for a review on MacStories as soon as the app will be available.

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Stash: All-in-one Private Browser & File Manager for iPad

In case you still haven’t noticed, the iPad has no default file manager. Apple decided to hide the entire filesystem on it (and on the iPhone, way back in 2007), and they’ll keep rolling with their decision for quite a while, I guess. Apps are the new folders, each app database a file manager. iFiles, 1Password, Gusto, Fast PDF: if you want files on them, you either import them from the cloud (Dropbox, anyone?) or transfer them using iTunes.

Now, if you’re a Mac user I guess you’re pretty used to hearing the term “anything bucket”. As explained by Shawn Blanc, an anything bucket like Yojimbo is an application capable of capturing every bit of information and store stuff in a single place. A place that you can organize with tags, albums, smart albums and user-based criteria. On iOS such a thing is not possible: there’s no way to quickly send data to other applications, not until Apple implements a proper services menu. As things stand now, you can forget about having stuff like OmniFocus’ quick entry panel or Yojimbo’s capture shortcut on the iPhone.

Still, developers are trying to build something similar to what we have on OS X. Stash is a new iPad app by Hedonic Software that can collect any kind of file and even lets you create multiple libraries, either public or private ones.

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Meet Trackr, A RSS App Which Lets You Upload Stuff to Dropbox

Lots of review requests show up in my inbox every single day. Some of them are from great developers who produce great apps and deserve coverage. Some of them are just from weird dudes asking for “a post on your website” about their latest Angry Birds clone.

Then there are the strange ones.

You know, those apps the developers present as a “new take on something” but that, actually, they can’t explain either. I read those emails and often ask myself “How the hell did he think of doing this?”. Most of the times I don’t write about those…things. But this one, this one deserves a quick mention.

Trackr is a RSS feed reader which lets you download files and upload them to Dropbox.

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Folio, Universal PDF Reader - 3 Codes Up for Grabs

When the iPad came out, GoodReader sold like hotcakes. It was one of the very few apps that allowed iPad users to read .PDF documents on their new device, and it was priced at $0.99. It still is, actually. GoodReader was full of features, maybe too much for an app that didn’t really care about having a “plesant” UI and user experience. For weeks, people were forced to use GoodReader - there was no better alternative.

Eventually Apple shipped iBooks with PDF support, and a couple of new interesting 3rd party readers were released in the market. Fast PDF, for example, is the app I’ve been using all along to transfer documents on my iPad (and iPhone) and read them.

Folio, universal for iPhone and iPad, aims at becoming your default choice for importing documents, read them and organize them.

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