Posts tagged with "mac"

Preview: Fantastical, Upcoming Calendar App for Mac

How do you improve the default OS X calendar application? How do you set out to create an alternative that can be appealing to power users, and accessible for calendar novices at the same time? While beta testing Fantastical, an upcoming Mac app by Flexibits, I thought these were the questions the developers tried to answer with their latest creation. Like in Twitter clients, developing a third-party calendar isn’t an easy task: you have to make sure it will work with all those calendar protocols out there, but most of all you have to know you’ve got something on your hands that will stand out from the crowd – especially when Apple itself ships a full-featured iCal.app with OS X that does its job just fine for most users, and doesn’t require an additional purchase. As usual, though, I believe there’s plenty of room for alternatives if you’re willing to take a risk and believe in your product. And it shows when testing Fantastical: Flexibits believes in its new app so much they wrote “your Mac’s calendar will never be the same again” on the teaser website.

Indeed, Fantastical does some things the default Mac calendar client can’t even imagine. First off, it’s elegant, minimal and unobtrusive, yet beautiful to look at. I know the very own purpose of a calendar app isn’t that of letting you stare at it, but when compared to this or this you’ll notice the difference. User interface, however, is functional to Fantastical: it’s minimal because Fantastical wants to be simple to use, and it’s gorgeous for as much as it’s powerful inside. Fantastical uses a natural language parser that will let you write down events in plain English, and have the app correctly recognize the input in various fields. Example: Meet with Cody tomorrow at Apple Store, Viterbo 5 PM to 6 PM. Adding this sentence to a new iCal event does nothing. But writing it in Fantastical? It creates a new calendar event with “Meet with Cody” as the title, “tomorrow” as the relative date, “Apple Store, Viterbo” as the desired location, and 5 PM to 6 PM as the timeframe. It’s almost unbelievable how well this thing works and how deeply it improves the way I can add events using nothing but English. I don’t have to navigate with my keyboard and mouse, I just write and hit Enter to process the event and add it to my default calendar. Sure, I could still do things manually and adjust dates or location with the cursor, but since installing the first beta of Fantastical I haven’t found a reason why I should.

The language parser is the big feature of Fantastical, but there’s lots more. Without revealing too much right now (let’s save it for a final review, shall we?), I can say Fantastical’s huge advantage over several third-party calendar apps for OS X is that it works perfectly in conjunction with Apple’s iCal, which is responsible for keeping all your calendar configurations. You can start using Fantastical seconds after launch without doing anything, as the app fetches the accounts you’ve already set up in iCal. This means Google Calendar, MobileMe, CalDAV, Exchange, Yahoo Calendar – they all work out of the box. And if you want, you can make a calendar the default one so that adding new events will be as fast as hitting a shortcut, and write.

I wasn’t sure I was going to use Fantastical much initially, mainly because I didn’t think a replacement for the standard calendar interface was needed on a Mac. But after trying it, I have to say Fantastical is the calendar app to look forward to. You can sign up for updates here, and stay tuned for a complete review on MacStories soon. Read more

Spotify 0.5 Goes Live with iPod Sync, New UI

Officially announced yesterday, Spotify began rolling out the promised 0.5 update for the desktop client a few minutes ago, featuring an updated UI and the much anticipated playlist and MP3 sync for iPod Classic, Shuffle, and Nano, alongside wireless sync for iOS and Android devices running the Spotify mobile application. The updated desktop client, available now for download here, comes with a slightly redesigned user interface that’s inspired by the latest iOS and OS X Lion builds: there’s lots of “linen background” going on, redesigned toolbar icons with a more flat look, new translucent buttons to reveal and expand the album artwork, as well as a general polish that clearly brings OS X graphical elements to mind. If you’re familiar with iOS and the latest Lion developer builds, you’ll feel right home with the new Spotify. I like the app’s new look.

Spotify 0.5 can sync playlists, local files and purchased tracks to an iPod (non-iOS) via USB or iOS device wirelessly. The interface to manage sync is quite simple and intuitive, as there’s a new Devices tab in the sidebar that lists all the iPhones or iPods you’ve connected to Spotify. Once connected, the app will display all your playlists, starred items and local files in a new window, allowing you to choose whether you want to sync “all music” to a device, or only specific playlists. Whilst iPhones and iPod touches get the possibility to sync anything as they’ll be able to stream songs later using the mobile app, classic iPods can only receive local files – meaning MP3s Spotify has found on your computer or songs you’ve purchased through the service’s new store. Songs and playlists that are not found will display a “Get Missing” button that takes you to the embedded web store. Tracks start at 50p, but Spotify is also offering MP3 bundles at a higher price.

Overall, Spotify 0.5 looks like a really solid update that shows the path the company has taken: becoming the ultimate music player on the desktop and mobile thanks to a combination of streaming, cache, purchases and sync. Check out more screenshots below. Read more

Analyst: Mac Lineup To Be Refreshed “In Upcoming Months”

Following the updates to MacBook Pros (February 2011) and iMacs (May 2011) that brought support for Thunderbolt and new Sandy Bridge processors, AppleInsider relays a report from analyst Shaw Wu with Sterne Agee claiming that all the remaining Macs that didn’t receive an update will be refreshed in the “upcoming months.” These updates include new versions of the Mac Pro, Mac Mini, MacBook and MacBook Air.

Analyst Shaw Wu with Sterne Agee issued a note to investors on Wednesday claiming that all Mac products that have yet to see a refresh this year are “due for refreshes” soon. In his note, Wu told investors that Tuesday’s iMac refresh stands as “a worthy upgrade” and should help “reinvigorate” Mac’s desktop business, which has declined to 27 percent of Macs shipped. Sales of Mac desktops actually dropped by 12 percent year over year last quarter, compared to 53 percent year over year growth for portable Macs.

The report of a refresh for the original MacBook is particularly interesting, as the model was rumored several times in the past to be heading towards discontinuation, leaving the MacBook Air as the entry model in the Mac family. However, Wu seems to believe that Apple is considering an update for the line that was last refreshed in May 2010. The Mac Mini and Mac Pro were updated in June and July 2010, respectively, whilst the popular MacBook Air line was unveiled with an all-new design last October at the Back to the Mac event. Speculation in the past weeks pointed at a refresh for the Airs soon to enable Thunderbolt support and bring Sandy Bridge CPUs on board, possibly in June.

Notificant Now Delivers Beautiful Reminders Across iPhone, Mac and Web

Released back in January on the Mac a few days after the Mac App Store grand opening, Notificant for Mac was a pretty sweet way to create reminders and timed notifications on the desktop, and have them always available thanks to the web app counterpart developers Caramel Cloud built. As the name of the company suggests, Notificant is a heavily cloud-oriented product: the Mac app is simple and unobtrusive in the way it lives in the menubar, but it leverages the power of the cloud and client sync to fire off notifications across computers and web browsers with incredible reliability and speed. And today, with the release of Notificant for iPhone, Caramel Cloud wants to extend the capabilities of the platform to the iPhone, delivering notifications anywhere, at any time.

Notificant for iPhone follows the path traced by the Mac and web apps, offering users a clean and elegant interface to create and manage upcoming notifications. Once you log in with your Caramel Cloud account, you’ll be able to choose a custom sound effect in the settings, as well as decide to show an icon badge on the homescreen. The main screen is organized in two tabs: Archive lets you access past reminders and re-schedule them if you want to create a new notification off an old one, whilst the Upcoming tab lists all the notifications that you set and are about to fire off across the cloud to your registered computers and mobile devices. To add a new notification, you have to tap on the + button in the upper right corner. In this new screen, two other tabs allow you to set a delivery date and time; the text entry box at the top lets you write down details of your reminder, as well as shorten any link you’ve inserted. Similarly to Twitter, Notificant’s reminders have a limit of 160 characters (Twitter’s limit is 140). In my tests, I’ve found Notificant’s reminders created on the iPhone to be as reliable and precise as those added on the Mac and web app – which is great, as it means the system put in place by the developers is working correctly and doing its job throughout the cloud. A welcome addition to the iPhone app would be a refresh button in the main page to quickly remove notifications and check for new ones – of course, it’d also be great to have a native iPad app in the future. I’m sure Caramel Cloud is considering the option.

Notificant for iPhone makes reminders simple, and available anywhere. It’s simple, well-designed, and focused on one feature: enabling you to be notified of the things you care about. Get the app here. Read more

Fontcase 2.0: Rewriting The Rulebook On Typography

Fresh off the letterpress, Fontcase 2.0 succeeds its previous design with grace and elegance, wowing us like any great font would with a tailored design built for the 22nd century. Re-imaging the font case with the kind of class only a design built for Lion could brag about, comparing fonts underneath the new Fontcase hood embraces a simpler restyling with basic (yet intuitive) drag and drop finesse. Curate your fonts with the font manager that’s re-writing Apple’s Font Book into an interface anyone from the casual web developer to the mindful graphic designer can appreciate: the focus is always on previewing fonts, and never on extraneous UI or flashy features. There are, however, some delightful surprises waiting inside the second generation of this svelte, font briefcase.

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CloudApp 1.5 Released With Lots Of New Features

Popular desktop sharing tool CloudApp – the app that was once teased “every Mac user’s dream” – is receiving a major update today that sees the release of the app in the Mac App Store for the first time since the January 6th grand opening, and the addition of several new features built on top of a complete rewrite aimed at making the app more stable, faster, and better integrated with OS X. CloudApp 1.5, available for download here, is a milestone update that turns a simple utility to share screenshots and files on the Internet into a full-featured “clipboard in the cloud” that now works in real-time, and can plug directly into a Mac’s system clipboard.

The first version of CloudApp, released last year, allowed users to quickly share almost anything on a Mac (links, images, documents, .zip files) by hitting a hotkey that sent selected items to the cloud, automatically returning a short URL to share with your friends on Twitter, Facebook, or email. What made CloudApp stand out from the crowd of Mac sharing utilities (like Tinygrab or Droplr) – elegance of the design aside – was the powerful Raindrop system that enabled developers to build plugins that connected CloudApp with other third-party applications like Chrome, Aperture, Photoshop and iTunes. With a single desktop shortcut, users could instantly share a .png of the Photoshop project they were working on, post a link of a song playing in Spotify, or shorten the URL of the frontmost browser window. And if you selected multiple files in the Finder and hit the shortcut, CloudApp would upload them simultaneously, too. Not to mention the fact that there was an option to automatically upload any new screenshot taken with the Mac’s Grab utility, and check out most recent files’ view count in the menubar. CloudApp 1.5 still has all these features, only they’re backed by a new Streaming API and a second hotkey that doesn’t require Raindrops, but simply uploads the latest item in your Mac’s clipboard, whatever it is.

As seen in the latest Cloud2go update, the Streaming API means files and shortened URLs pop up everywhere (desktop app, web, mobile clients) as soon as they’re shared, and the view count in the menubar and webapp updates in real-time as well. The app is constantly communicating with its servers to push recent items and display how many users have clicked on your links. Alongside bug fixes, however, the biggest new feature is the separation of the Raindrops’ keyboard shortcut and system hotkey: whatever you copy with the standard CMD+C action can be accessed and uploaded by CloudApp using a second shortcut that gets the latest entry directly from your Mac’s clipboard. This is incredibly handy in my opinion as you don’t have to rely on app-specific raindrops and conditions – you just copy something like you normally do and hit a shortcut to upload. It works everywhere, and it’s fast. The Raindrops are still there, though: they’ve been improved with an official SDK and update notifications, and I’m told new raindrops to upload new files from a specific Finder folder and QuickTime recordings will be released soon.

Overall, CloudApp 1.5 is a solid update that dramatically enhances the functionalities of the app. While retaining the simplicity that made the app popular in the first place, CloudApp 1.5 adds a series of new features that extend the app’s capabilities to a whole new level, making it extremely integrated with Mac OS X. Get it here.