Tracks: A Spotlight for iTunes

I’ve got a strange relationship with music, both in my life and on Mac OS X. Personal situations aside, my digital problem is the following: I’ve got a 100GB music library and I can’t find any real good application to manage it. iTunes is somehow slow and unresponsive sometimes (but we all know why), Vlc is too poor and outdated, I don’t like desktop controllers at all. I’ve found a good compromise in Ecoute, which is both a desktop controller and a music player itself, which is pretty great actually.

On the other hand, I could talk about a webapp that is deeply changing the way I listen to my music, but let’s leave it for later this week. So here I am today, talking about this Mac app called “Tracks” which I’ve been using for some days now.

Read more

Opera Mini for iPhone. Really?

Link

“Opera Mini is renowned for its compression technology, which results in significantly faster Web-page loading and reduces data surcharges. With favorite desktop features in its arsenal, such as tabs, Speed Dial and the password manager, Opera Mini is designed with usability in mind.”

You know how this is going to end? I know.

Multitasking — What Does It Mean?

Great read over at Louie Mantia’s blog.

“While a computer can simultaneously run two applications at once, this does not mean a human can perform tasks in both applications simultaneously. For example, you cannot type two different messages in two different windows at the same exact time. While you are able to easily switch to another chat window or tab, you are not actually performing both tasks at the same time. Similarly, you are not able to read a tweet and read an article in your RSS feed simultaneously.

On a sidetone, take this into “real life.” You know when you’re with a friend in a busy coffee shop, and there’s a bunch of people talking? You focus on what your friend is saying while filtering out all the other people. It’s really hard (if not impossible) to truly listen to two people talking at the same time. Similarly, it is with your eyes. Try playing Super Mario Bros. while reading a book. Yeah, that didn’t work out so well. Your eyes are required in two locations. Remember when you were a kid and someone told you to try to rub your tummy and pat your head? Similar stuff, here. It’s impossible to give your full attention to multiple things. You can, however, sacrifice and divide your attention.”

Here, File File! Puts Your Mac on Your iPhone. And It’s Stunning.

There’s one feature I’ve been missing on my iPhone for months now: the ability to easily access all the files on my Mac. Ok, it may sound weird from me to say that I need file access to my desktop computer but, truth be told, you don’t know how many times I’ve wished to stream my movies from the Mac while I’m in bed, or just open a document while I’m out. Sure, there’s Dropbox. But you know, it’s not that I can put everything on Dropbox, or I’ll have a cloud computer and I’ll be 3 years ahead from you. I desperately needed a good solution to access my Mac from my iPhone. And please don’t tell me about those apps out in the App Store, because they just suck. Plain and simple.

Then, when I was about to lost my hope, I watched a video. It was a new app, called “Here, File File!”. Ok, what a weird name I first thought, as the video was loading. The video started. 30 seconds, my jaw dropped.

Here I am, talking about this great piece of software Here, File File! is.

Read more

Trillian is Now: A Great Alternative to Adium

You know, I have to be quite honest when I say that Adium was never meant for me. Some people love the customization, others love that it’s open source, but the big green duck was never cute enough to enthrall me in its myriad of customization options. While I wish Apple would step up their game and bring things such as Facebook to iChat (which in my opinion, is the most pleasurable to use), there really hasn’t been a major alternative to Adium on the Mac.

Well this is certainly changing, and new Mac users coming from Windows will be happy to know that Trillian has finally arrived in alpha.

Read more

Arq: Easily Backup Your Mac to Amazon S3. Review and Giveaway.

As soon as your business grows, so does the need of backing up everything. You can’t be serious about your business if you don’t backup and save important stuff just in case something goes wrong. As soon as MacStories started growing some months ago, I began to look out for good solutions to daily back up my files and various databases, and I was looking for a cloud solution. Sure, there’s Dropbox for that. Really guys? Would you suggest Dropbox for people who need to save files with incremental backups everyday? You know that it costs a lot and that, in the best case, you have to manually drag & drop every folder inside it? (unless you create your folders in /Dropbox from the start). No, that doesn’t work for me. I need something cheap, that runs in the background as soon as I make some changes, it has to be reliable, fast and secure. The unicorn of backups, basically.

Most like every new app I’ve recently discovered, everything happened on Twitter: I don’t remember quite well, but it was some night ago when someone tweeted “this new beta of Arq rocks!”

Today I’m going to talk about Arq from Haystack Software, an application that has already become a fundamental part of my workflow.

Read more