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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Billings: The Only Boss a Freelancer Would Ever Need.

It’s not a secret that many web designers and developers out there are on a Mac platform. Especially in 2009, it seems like many professionals and freelancers have switched from Windows to Mac OS X in order to have better performances, security and, most of all, more time to do stuff. They wanted to save time, they wanted to avoid those virus and malware crappy things Windows has - for this reason many people did the “big” switch and bought a Mac. You can’t blame them: with tools such as Coda, Textmate, Textexpander and the famous Pixelmator, they had every good reason to switch to a Mac computer. Now, besides web development and graphic applications, what about the software that can help managing the financial and invoicing aspect of a freelancing job?

Today I’d like to talk about Billings from Marketcircle, an award winning app for Mac and iPhone which is gonna be your one step solution for anything freelancing related.

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Too Many Ideas? You Need Some Action Method.

The Action Method is a task-management system provided by the company Behance that’s available to use through the web, an iPhone application, and print products. Since more and more people turn to such products to keep track of their tasks and projects, it’s time to take a look at this system as an alternative to other project management software like Basecamp and Active Collab. (disclaimer: As with all PM systems, the Action Method is robust and complex. This review touches on the surface, so check out the free demo to see all it has to offer.)

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