Outside: Even If It’s Raining, It’s Beautiful.

I quite fancy the native Weather.app for iPhone: it’ simple and intuitive, providing some basic info about the weather and forecasts. And obviously, there are hundreds of clones out in the App Store: some apps are useful and “professional”, other are just pieces of shit thrown together into an .app bundle. That’s the truth.

Today I’d like to talk about an app that has made it to the first page of my homescreen in a matter of 5 minutes and which has changed the way I “look at the weather” on my iPhone: Outside.

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Gift Box, The Notepad for Shoppers.

It’s almost Christmas and everyone’s rushing to buy last-minute gifts for relatives and friends. If you ask, I bought all the gifts I wanted in one afternoon because I’m lazy and I didn’t want to waste my precious time but thing is, there this app which really helped me out during the whole process of choosing stuff for my friends and telling my mom what I wanted for Christmas. Yeah, I’ve been a good guy and my mom’s great, if you ask.

Anyway, let’s move on and talk about the neat app Gift Box is.

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Cinch Brings 7’s Windows Management to Mac OS X. Is It Really That Bad?

There’s this great feature of Windows 7 everyone was talking about 2 months ago, which enables you to easily resize your windows by simply dragging them into specific “zones” of your screen: drag it to the left / right and the window is automatically resized to fill half the screen, drag it to the top to make it full screen. Sounds pretty cool, actually. Now, what if some less known developers make an app that emulates this resize thing..on Mac OS?

Here comes Cinch.

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Birdhouse, the Tweets Drafts Manager. Reviewed.

The developers of Birdhouse specifically state that it’s not for looking at your friends Twitter updates. So what does it do?

Well, Birdhouse is a “drafts manager” for your tweets. It’s supposed to be used as a notepad for whenever you get an awesome thought in your head that might go away. Although Birdhouse only does one simple task, it does it very well. Keep on reading to find out why.

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Spark App Released

Spark, a new application for Mac OS X I had the chance to beta test, was finally released tonight. Here is the official (and cute!) website.

Spark Mac

Spark Mac

Spark is a very lightweight notes taking / to-do list app, which you could decide to either run in the dock or in the menubar. The interface is very nice and straightforward: you can add tasks, attach notes to them and organize tasks in bigger projects. Another great features is the iCal syncing: everytime a Spark task changes, so it does in iCal. Cool.

Spark is a freeware, it has a clean and well-designed UI and it could become the ultimate solution for those who are looking for a simple, uncluttered to-do manager app for Mac.

Go download!

It’s Time to Close That Mail.app. Welcome Notify 2.

I never used a mail client other than Mail.app on Mac OS for my IMAP account. Thunderbird is slow and buggy and Postbox feels too much like a Windows app, though it could be nice if just the devs would refine the UI. On the other hand, Mail.app is powerful. From mailboxes to rules and plugins (just to name a few, Letterbox, Mail Act-on and MailTags) Mail gets its job done with a huge set of awesome features, speed and stability. But there’s another market on Mac OS X, that of mail notifiers: they usually sit up in the menubar and provide an easy and minimal to way to instantly check for new mails. Now, what if we merge these two kinds of applications, creating both a minimal, lightweight mail notifier and client?That’s exactly what Notify 2 is.

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An Interview with Matthew Rex About Stacky App, Mac OS X Stacks and the “Year of the Mac”

As soon as I heard my friend Matthew Rex was working on a Mac application together with Tim Davies (I interviewed both of them on MacStories, here and here) I started wondering how awesome that app could have been. Then, I heard it was called Stacky and it was about a new way of managing Mac OS X stacks.  So I seriously got excited and immediately shot a mail to Matthew asking him to answer some questions about Stacky, Stacks and other random stuff of Mac development and his 2009 achievements.

He was kind enough to reply with great responses and some cool hints at what Stacky might look like. Also, remember to follow Stacky and its creators on Twitte: @stackyapp, @matthewrex and @tmdvs.

Enjoy!

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