Schoolhouse, the Mac App for College Students. Reviewed.

The Mac platform is blessed with tons of excellent productivity tools, outliners, and task managers. Despite this, the majority of these apps have been founded on the GTD philosophy, and while that’s not necessarily a bad thing, I’ve always wanted a separate application for managing tasks that specifically relate to school. You could certainly do this in an application like Things or The Hit List, but it can get quite messy since you’d have to create tags for classes, then you have to manage assignments alongside your business stuffs, and you just get bogged down in everything rather than the schoolwork you want to focus on.

Enter Schoolhouse, an application dedicated to providing you with the management tools needed to stay on task and get those assignments turned in on time. It also features an incredibly smart grading tool that can calculate weighted and unweighted grades, which is an amazing time saver compared to doing it by hand on the Ti-83.

Keep on reading to find out what makes this app one of my favorites.

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iPhone OS 4.0 Features Leaked

everythingiCafe

Seems like the features of the upcoming iPhone OS 4.0 were revealed to BGR.

“There will be multi-touch gestures OS-wide. (Would make sense for that as the rumored OS for the iTablet is close if not the same as the iPhone)

“A few new ways” to run applications in the background — multitasking.

Many graphical and UI changes to make navigating through the OS easier and more efficient. We haven’t had this broken down, but we can only hope for improved notifications, a refreshed homescreen, etc.

The update will supposedly be available for only the iPhone 3G and 3GS, but will “put them ahead in the smartphone market because it will make them more like full-fledged computers” more than any other phone to date. Everyone is “really excited.”

The last piece of information is the most vague, but apparently there will be some brand new syncing ability for the contacts and calendar applications.”

True or not, we should expect some big changes from the new firmware.

Some Things for Mac, Some Things for iPhone. Reviewed.

There’s an interesting paradox floating around the Mac OS X scene: there are a lot of interesting apps to manage tasks and make your to-do workflow easier, but most of these apps are difficult to manage. What a nice situation: getting things done with an application that requires 2 minutes just to set up a new task. And trust me: it’s full of apps like these out there. Now, the situation isn’t that tragic fortunately: it’s also true that there are many excellent apps, both for Mac and yes, the iPhone.

Today I’d like to talk about what’s in my opinion the best to-do management and task organizer app currently available for Mac and iPhone: Things. I’ll explain how I’ve set it up in order to manage MacStories’ activities and scheduled tasks and how I made it work as a team project management app as well.

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iPhone Software Sustainability and the Death of Mac Software

John Casasanta from Tap Tap Tap and Macheist has posted an article regarding the sales figures for Convert since its August ‘09 launch. He then analyzes the current situation of Mac development, and how in his opinion the App Store is affecting it by providing higher revenues for developers and a more focused, yet powerful way of distributing applications.

From the post:

“The App Store has proven to be a super-efficient distribution system. In a nutshell, you can earn a lot of money even with 99¢ apps because you can reach so many people. Conversely, the Mac shareware market has always comparatively been very inefficient. Developers depend on services like VersionTracker, MacUpdate, i use this, and even Apple’s own Mac OS X Downloads site, etc for small publicity/sales spikes. But all of these sites (including Apple’s) get far less attention than the App Store.

[…]

Because of the much smaller reach and resulting far lower number of Mac software sales compared to iPhone, developers have had to compensate by keeping prices at a much higher point. But this is also what’s kept the market down and now on a decline, unfortunately.”

Is the Mac market really..dead? Or is it just going through an evolution that might revitalize it with the release of 10.7? No doubt things are going to change, or everyone will start developing iPhone apps. But what will happen when the iPhone market will be saturated?

Oh yeah, there’s the Tablet one.

Obligatory Apple Tablet Thoughts

Great piece over at GoSquared’s Liquidicity blog, surely worth a read.

From the post:

“Apple’s responsible for kickstarting the touch screen revolution with the iPhone, so why would they do anything other than push themselves as far as possible along the trajectory they’ve already begun? When you consider the possibility of Apple building a device that not only sits alongside your iPhone, but replaces your MacBook, the game changes. Whatever Apple’s tablet finally shows up as, I’m pretty sure it’ll be more “this is the end of keyboard and mouse computing as we know it” than “oh it’s a big iPhone”

“I Need More Space, Apple”. Hyperspaces: Review and Giveaway

There are two features of Mac OS X I really couldn’t live without: Exposè and Spaces. Built-in into Leopard and Snow Leopard, Exposè and Spaces are indeed two applications that make managing all your open windows and workflows easier and painless. They’re not two “linked” apps, but basically everyone combines them in order to get the best results. If you don’t what Spaces and Exposè are, you should seriously take a tour into your Mac OS X Utilities folder and System Preferences. Sorry if don’t go into the details of these two apps, but I suppose you already know them.

Now, there’s a developer out there who thought Spaces could be a lot better. And by a lot I mean, a lot. Meet Hyperspaces: a very simple yet powerful addition to Spaces.app.

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How To: Install Aqua Inspiriat Theme on Snow Leopard

Mac OS X’s Aqua is a great user interface. In my opinion, Mac OS X has the best UI design ever seen until now, but you probably know this if you read MacStories. I always talk about applications that get the most out of Mac OS X interface, so there’s no doubt I deeply admire the work Apple has put into creating a beautiful and usable design - refined overtime. On the other hand, it’s very likely that you’ve grown tired of Mac OS X standard UI elements and you’d like to apply some modifications. You’ve also heard that it’s possible to install custom themes on OS X, so you would like to give it a try but you’ve scared of the whole process and you don’t want to mess up everything.

In this post I’ll guide through the necessary steps of installing Aqua Inspiriat for Snow Leopard, the theme I’m currently using and one of the finest examples of Mac customization and compromise between standard design elements and modifications.

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