Letters, the New Email Client for Mac OS X

I knew there was something going on around Mail.app and a secret project an “all-star team” was discussing, but Ars Technica has just made the thing real. Seems that people like Brent Simmons, Gus Meuller, Cabel Sasser and John Gruber are indeed working on Letters, the app that probably will replace Mail.app as our default email client.

The story is very long actually, so I suggest you to read the whole post over at Ars, and this could be a real revolution. A team of Mac OS X third party developers and bloggers that team up to create the perfect Mail application?

You just made stop thinking about the Tablet. And that’s definitely something.

Organize Your Mails with MsgFiler. Review and Giveaway.

I have a huge email library. I tend to keep every important message that I receive and move it to a folder or sub-folder. Indeed, despite all the people that seem to appreciate those applications that let you assign tags to mails in order to browse everything with tags, I still think the folder structure puts every other solution to shame. I just couldn’t think of any other way to store and organize messages right now, but maybe Apple will prove me wrong someday. Anyway, considering that I daily mess with dozens of messages and I’ve got to move each message to a different folder, I was looking for some app that would have made the process easier, faster and almost invisible. Many followers suggested me to try Mail Act-on, but after a brief test I have to say Act-On is aimed at people who have 40 + folders.

It’s surely a feature rich application with a lot of stuff you can play with, but I wanted something simpler, an app that could let me move messages in a few steps without leaving the keyboard.

Meet MsgFiler.

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Tweeteorites: Fav’ed!

So you use Twitter because you have a blog and you want to promote your articles. Or, you want to talk with your girlfiend while she’s working. These are only two examples of how people use Twitter, the first ones I can think of now. Pretty much everyone who uses Twitter on a daily basis knows everything about it, from retweets and replies to lists and DMs. But what about Favorites? On Twitter, you can mark a tweet as favorite, like you can do with photos on Flickr or Deviantart. I didn’t use this feature until a few months ago, when I realized I could start faving tweets rather than sending them to Read it Later. And yes, as soon as I started following @Digeratii and @PatrickPatience I had to start using favorites.

Besides the “saving links for later” thing, people use favorites to collect the best, most ironic and, sometimes, sarcastic tweets they find in their timelines. Just take a look at my favorites tweets to get the idea of the stuff I think it’s worth a “fave”. Now,it’s pretty obvious that by using only Twitter itself you don’t have a way of “discovering” favorite tweets around the world, and that’s why websites like Tweeteorites and Favstar came to life.

Today I’ll take a look at Tweeteorites, a web service that allows you to browse and saving tweets into your favorites, and its official iPhone application, which has been sitting in my homescreen for many weeks now.

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Snowtape Winners Announced

Thanks everyone for the support and the comments! Also, I’d like to thank the Vemedio team for giving us these 2 licenses to give away.

Henwli

Teuneu

You’ll receive the license straight in your inbox in a matter of a few hours.

Cheers!

How To Optimize Images on a Mac: ImageOptim VS PNGPress

If you’re a web designer / developer you should understand the importance of optimizing images for the web. Even saving a few kylobytes on each image could be a life saving practice when your website goes under an unexpected huge amount of traffic. But if you’re on a Mac, there aren’t many applications that let you do that: most of the tools I read about were just online services or Windows programs.

Fortunately, I stumbled upon these two apps, ImageOptim and PNGPress, that share the same purpose but are very different both in the execution and results. Let’s see what’s the best for you, and why you should consider start using one of them now.

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Favorite Tweets of the Week Jan 18th – Jan 24th

I usually tweet a lot of stuff: apps tutorials, news, videos, reviews, hacks and so much more. Everything that’s Apple-related and it’s interesting, it’s worth a tweet.

To keep up to date with all these links you can follow me on Twitter, but in case you missed here’s a small compilation of the best tweets of the past week.

You can find me on Twitter as @storiesofmac.

Enjoy!

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TouchPad, The Magical Wireless Trackpad

When I’m sitting on the couch or lying in bed, fussing around with a keyboard and mouse can be a pain. Certainly you might have the talents to manage such contraptions on your cushions, but I don’t have the patience for it. Fortunately, I don’t need to have the patience for it, since the great folks over at Edovia have decided they were sick of it too. With their release of TouchPad, they’ve integrated three peripherals - your Apple Wireless Keyboard, your Magic Mouse, and your Apple Remote, into a single iPhone app.

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Flickit Pro: The New King of Flickr Clients for iPhone. Review and Giveaway.

if you’ve been reading my tweets lately, you should know that I’ve moved back to using Realmac’s LittleSnapper as my image library organizer application. I’ve also written a huge review about it, be sure to read it if you missed it. To sum up, I basically needed an app that could help me in a) collecting my whole image library, made of desktop screenshots, website snapshots and apps screengrabs, and b) sharing it across multiple social networks. LittleSnapper supports Ember app and Flickr, but I initially decided to use Ember as my social website of choice: I purchased a Pro account, started uploading stuff, gained a bunch of followers - I’m totally happy with it. Still I was missing something. Ember is no doubt one of the websites I visit more during the day, but it’s not a great place for photographers. As I wrote in my LS review “Ember was built with Mac and iPhone users in mind”, meaning that you’ll find tons of Apple related stuff there. I mean, take a look at my profile: it pretty much sums up the whole essence of Ember. And if you consider that Ember is developed by Realmac Software, that’s perfectly reasonable.

Now, I’m not a photographer, but I’m quite into discovering beautiful shots and adding them to my favorites. Also, I sometimes take random pics with my iPhone and edit them with that amazing app called TiltShift Generator (you should check it out, seriously). So I thought, what’s better than Flickr for that? There’s nothing better than Flickr when it comes to having a large community of passionate photographers that share their shots. I made the decision in 3 days: I deleted my old account, opened a new one with a nice vanity url, uploaded my whole Ember collection (just to be sure people who don’t use Ember could enjoy it as well), started following some people I know, purchased a Pro account. I don’t want limitations of any sort for the stuff I like. Then, I realized the one thing missing from this almost bullet proof setup was an iPhone app. But I already knew which app was the best one around.

It’s called Flickit Pro, and it’s gonna make you enjoy using Flickr from your iPhone once more. With feeling.

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