ChronoSlider: A Simpler Timer & Alarm App

Remember how useful those kitchen timers where, the ones that you had to spin around to get them counting? They could be used for a lot of things outside the kitchen, and they were very fast and easy to setup. It seems like we haven’t been able to get the… read more

30+ Genuinely Useful Mac Apps for Designers

It’s hard to believe that we’re coming up on a year since the Mac App Store was first announced. It seems like only yesterday we were itching to get our hands on a marketplace full of great utilities, games and other goodies all custom tailored to the Mac platform.

While… read more

Weekly Poll: How Many Menu Bar Apps Do You Run?

How Many Third Party Menu Bar Apps Do You Run?

Last week we published an article that got a lot of meaningful discussion going about menu bar apps. In it we outlined the all too common problem of the overflowing menu bar for MacBook users and discussed whether or not… read more

Life Stream: All Of Your Social Media Networks In One Place

These days, it sometimes feels like I sign up for a new social network every single week. So many people I know work on a daily basis with Twitter, Facebook, Google+, Tumblr, Flickr, LinkedIn, Foursquare, YouTube…the list goes on. Often, managing those networks is as big of a task as… read more

Thanks to Our Weekly Sponsor: Studiometry

Our sponsor this week is Studiometry, an amazing professional project management tool from Oranged Software.

Studiometry is a powerhouse of professional organization tools. Whether you’re managing contacts, generating estimates, tracking work, or billing clients, this one app has you covered in a single beautifully cohesive workflow.

Small businesses, freelancers, large… read more

SwiftRing: A Unique Mouse Gesture App for OS X

The basic concept behind SwitRing isn’t exactly new, mouse-activated gestures have been around for ages. In fact, I used to be quite fond of using the gestures feature in Quicksilver. It’s nice to be able to whirl your mouse around as if it were a magic wand and have that… read more

RadioLine: Internet Radio Right at Home on Your Mac

Despite the rise in popularity of TV on demand, Internet and Twitter, I still like listening to the radio. It offers such a wide variety of songs and different kinds of programs that, for example TV, doesn’t offer. Call me a dinosaur if you will, but I would much rather… read more

Should You Upgrade To Lion Or Stick With Snow Leopard?

There’s a lot to like about both of Apple’s most recent operating systems: Snow Leopard is stable, fast and mature enough to ensure that any significant bugs are probably fixed by now, while Lion brings new trackpad gestures, additional eye candy, new ways of managing and launching apps, along with… read more

Win a Copy of TranslateTab: 30 Licenses Up for Grabs!

Translate Tab is a super slick menu bar implementation of the popular Google Translate service. You can translate words, phrases, paragraphs or even entire sites into 57 different languages without leaving your desktop.

We’re super excited to announce that we have a whopping 30 TranslateTab licenses to give away this week!

TranslateTab

Tweet… read more

Bit.Trip.Runner: Retro Platforming at its Finest

Platformers are perhaps one of the most popular, the oldest and overdone genres in gaming. They have been re-thought a bunch of times over the years by adding a few new gimmicks to them, but most of them seem to have lost their touch and are no longer fun the… read more

SongGenie: Tidy Up Your iTunes Library Once And For All

I am a very fussy person when it comes to my iTunes library. I like to have it completely organized and I can’t stand it when there are gaps in the song information or when cover art is missing – it’s one of my pet peeves. A tidy iTunes library… read more

The Menu Bar Blues: Should Menu Bar Only Apps Die?

I used to absolutely love menu bar apps. Years ago, it was a fairly tiny niche of the Mac app market that contained only a few really solid gems. These utilities provided a quick and easy way to control iTunes, run a quick maintenance script and get back to what… read more

Six Apps and Services That Want to Make You Quit Using iTunes

While I’ve used iTunes for the longest time, and it works pretty much as my media center; I have to come to terms with the fact that it isn’t as great as it could be. It’s heavy, slow, glitchy and at times I find it very annoying.

Ditching iTunes is… read more

Weekly Poll: How Often Do You Play Games on Your Mac?

How Often Do You Play Games on Your Mac?

Ten years ago, the single most used argument I heard against Macs was the lack of available games. It used to be the case that PC gaming was almost entirely dominated by Windows machines with Mac users being much more likely… read more

Essentials: Access Anything Quickly On Your Mac

Essentials is an interesting and useful app that takes almost every type of information you could want and makes it only a keyboard shortcut away. It doesn’t impose structure on you but instead gives you a broad use utility that you can use however you want.

What can you do with… read more

Thanks to Our Weekly Sponsor: Translate Tab

Our sponsor this week is Translate Tab, an awesome way to access Google Translate right from your menu bar.

Translate Tab is a super slick menu bar implementation of the popular Google Translate service. You can translate words, phrases, paragraphs or even entire sites into 57 different languages without leaving your… read more

Skedaddle: That Shoebox Where You Keep Your Clutter

Desktop clutter is a popular discussion topic for many computer users, and our AppStorm community here is no different. We’ve had a lot of discussion on the merits of keeping an organized digital workspace, as well as tools that will help you do it. OS X has built-in functionality to help you… read more

Smartr: Making Studying (Ever So Slightly) Fun

As a student, I know exactly how boring studying is. You spend all day locked in your room, poring over a textbook thick enough to stop a bullet at 30 yards, and trying to concentrate on those printed words while resisting the temptation to let your mind wander.

Sound familiar? I’m… read more

What Is an iPod? The Identity Crisis of Our Favorite Device

9to5Mac recently posted an article titled, “Does Apple have to kill the iPod?” that has a lot of people talking. Though I definitely don’t agree with all of the logic presented, the overall topic is one that I’ve been considering myself for quite a while.

The entire line of iPods seems… read more

Signature: Sign Your Digital Documents

I don’t think that I’m alone in the annoyance I feel when I’m asked to sign something over the Internet. This usually means having to to print PDFs so that I can sign them, after which I have to then re-scan them. Even though it’s a situation that we… read more

Win a Copy of Sparrow for Mac: 500 Licenses Up For Grabs!

Enter to win 1 of 500 copies of the full, paid Sparrow Application – Courtesy of Hover!

For the next 48 hours, Hover is excited to offer you the chance to win one of five hundred Sparrow licenses! To be in with a chance of winning, just enter your email address… read more

Wren: Thoughtful, Intentional Tweeting and Nothing Else

Twitter. 5 years ago that was a word that described the sound a songbird makes. And while that’s still the first definition in almost every dictionary you check, in the public mind it means something else entirely. It’s a social network, one composed of short little messages intended for public… read more

Alfred Custom Web Searches: 5 Examples to Get You Started

It’s definitely no secret that Alfred is one of AppStorm’s all-time favorite apps. Several of us use it daily and thoroughly enjoy the extended capabilities it brings to OS X.

One of these awesome features is the ability to set up custom searches. These allow you to quickly launch a search… read more

10 Apps That Started Life on iOS

This year, with the launch of Lion, Apple has been all about “Back to the Mac” – Taking great features from iOS, and porting them over to OS X. For the most part, this has been fairly successful. For this reason, it makes sense that many iOS developers would… read more

Weekly Poll: Which Input Device Do You Use for Your Mac?

Which Input Device Do You Use for Your Mac?

Once upon a time, the Apple Mouse was just another reason for Windows PC users to hate Macs. Putting aside bizarre physical designs like the hockey puck, Macs seemed stubborn in their insistence on a primitively simple input device. When PC… read more

Wunderlist Revisited: Is It the Best GTD App Yet?

Back when I first started writing for AppStorm, I got to review a very pretty GTD app that had just come out called Wunderlist. Back then, it was just getting started and it barely even had a Mac and a Windows app.

A little more than 6 months later, Wunderlist now… read more

Tame Those Background Processes with App Tamer

At any given time, there’s a lot going on in your computer’s brain. You may be focusing on writing an important email or watching a video, but that doesn’t mean your CPU is likewise focusing its attention. It’s still assigning valuable resources to that open web page you have in… read more

GarageBand Part 1: Getting Started With Virtual Instruments

GarageBand is an awesome beginner-friendly music application which can be used for capturing and manipulating audio, making music with virtual instruments and recording your own professional sounding podcasts, plus more. All that’s required is the desire and patience to learn!

To get started with GarageBand, we shall begin by first discussing… read more

Three App Categories That Truly Improve Mac OS X

As you would expect from the editor of a Mac blog, I’m a complete app addict. I have random applications for everything from cataloguing recipes to counting characters in a TextEdit document. Some of these I use on a daily basis, but many of them admittedly sit and collect dust… read more

Movie Draft Se: a Screenwriting App That Won’t Hurt Your Wallet

FADE IN on a young writer seated at his desk, his face alight with the joy of inspiration. He scribbles furiously on a notepad, trying to capture the magic of his movie idea. Outside his office window, a full moon prods him on.

Later, with his idea captured in handwritten notes,… read more

Win a Copy of Day One for Mac and iOS: 5 Licenses Up for Grabs!

Day One is the most stylish Mac journaling application around. In addition to being gorgeous, it also has tons of great features including menu bar entry, iOS sync, reminders, a calendar view and password protection.

Day One

Win Day One for Both Mac & iOS!

This giveaway has an awesome bonus. Each winner… read more

Instaview: A Fun and Flexible Instagram Viewer

Instagram is a great mobile app for sharing pictures with other people. It has grown quite a lot recently, and since it lacks a first-party desktop app, developers have had their hands full designing apps that bring the Instagram experience to the Mac.

We’ve talked about plenty of these apps, but… read more

AppleScript: Creating Complex Dialogs with Ease

Simple enough right? This dialog will work, but it takes advantage of many of the default settings that we may or may not want to use. For instance, by default, the user can only select one option. At this point, I usually hit up Google to see what options accompany… read more

30 Truly Useful Mac Apps for Professional Writers

As a full-time professional writer, I’m always on the lookout for utilities that will improve my workflow and help provide a much needed boost in efficiency.

Today we’ll take a look at thirty of the best utilities around to help serious writers in their work. Whether you want a better… read more

Weekly Poll: Which Browser Do You Use?

Which Browser Do You Use?

As new technologies like HTML5 and CSS3 become more prevalent, your choice of browser is becoming more important than ever. Browsers differ not only on their overall UI experience and feature base, but also in their support of newer standards and practices in web development…. read more

NotifyMe: Your To Do List In The Cloud

Almost all of our favorite to-do list apps these days have cloud components, either in the form of a free or pay-to-use browser-access service, or Mac/iOS apps that sync over the air with a pay-per-year plan (not to mention the future implications of iCloud). But what about a free-to-use system… read more

Secure your Passwords on the Cheap with MyWallet

Think fast, how many web app accounts do you have? Now, how many software licenses? What about bank accounts or email addresses? I’d wager at least several dozen. That’s a lot of user names, passwords and numbers to remember. To help Mac users keep track of their myriad digital profiles,… read more

How To Save Hard Drive Space On Your Mac

Now that the iconic plastic MacBook series has come to an end, many Mac owners will be considering purchasing a MacBook Air as their primary computer. The Air is an awesome choice and will provide a user experience and build quality second to none, but those blistering SSD speeds do… read more

What Is Apple’s Next Big Thing?

The past decade has been a remarkable one for Apple. They’ve revitalized and reinvented their product line several times and have even shifted a large portion of their vision and focus to devices that didn’t exist in the 90s.

Innovation has been the name of the game since Jobs took… read more

Macchiato: See Markdown Formatting As You Type

Most people have started to cringe at the idea of installing yet another text editor on their computer, especially one that promises distraction-free writing environments and Markdown support. It starts sounding familiar to apps like iA Writer, WriteRoom and Byword.

You must keep in mind that the word processor isn’t the… read more

Jing: Create and Share Screenshots and Screencasts

An explanation for a task in an online world can be a tricky thing to pull off. It’s just difficult to explain how to do something on your computer without actually showing how to do it. Wouldn’t a screenshot with some notes be helpful? Or maybe a screencast to really… read more

Are New Music Streaming Services a Threat to the iTunes Empire?

Once upon a time, physical media sales ruled the music landscape. Wal-Mart thoroughly enjoyed its reign as the largest seller of CDs on the planet. Then iTunes came along and took online music distribution from a niche to the most popular way for people to buy music.

Now a new breed… read more

8 Great Platformers On The Mac App Store

Platform games were among the first games to be designed (after, of course, the simplicity of Pong). Ever since, people have been playing platformers for their low learning curve and, in many cases, their sheer addictiveness. Just because some of the best platform games are more than two decades old (I’m… read more

Weekly Poll: Do You Think Tim Cook Will Be a Good CEO?

Do You Think Tim Cook Will Be a Good CEO?

Last week Steve Jobs announced that he was stepping down as CEO of Apple Inc. and passing the torch to his successor, Tim Cook. To put it mildly, Mr. Cook has some pretty large shoes to fill.

The last time Jobs… read more

Thanks to Our Weekly Sponsor: Stuf 2

We’d like to take a moment to say a big thank you to this week’s sponsor, Stuf 2.

Stuf is a super advanced clipboard manager. Not only does it give you full access to your clipboard history, it lets you easily copy and paste between Macs over your wired or wireless… read more

Smart Converter: A Simple Solution To Video Conversion

Our Macs are capable of so much: we can play games, design graphics, record music, the list is near endless. So why is it still so awkward and time consuming to convert video and audio file formats? The answer lies with both the various proprietary licenses which each format brings… read more

Wikibot: Wikipedia On Your Desktop

If you’re like me, Wikipedia isn’t just a resource, it’s a source of entertainment. I spend hours clicking through articles, learning everything from topics that concern me (music and social media) to niche subjects that could not be further from my field of expertise (Alexander the Great and Narcissus). While… read more

Keep a More Organized Dock with TabLauncher

There are plenty of ways to open and switch apps. There are app launchers, the dock, Spotlight, Mission Control, the Launchpad, and the Cmd+Tab app switcher. We all use a different method, all of which have their own strengths and weaknesses. For the most part, I simply use the dock,… read more

Ask the Mac.AppStorm Editor #13

It’s time for another “Ask the Editor” post today. A big thank you to everyone who sent in their questions – it’s great to have the chance to help you out with your Mac-related queries and quibbles.

Today I’ll be offering some advice about apps for creating and managing bibliographies, keeping… read more

Win a Free Copy of Fanurio: 5 Licenses Up for Grabs!

Fanurio is a time tracking and billing software application, highly appreciated by freelancers for its intuitive interface, flexible timer and ability to produce detailed invoices. Whether you need to round time, use multiple currencies or create invoices with your own layout, Fanurio has the right tools to help you get… read more

5 Industries That Steve Jobs Helped Change Forever

For the second time since its inception in 1976, Steve Jobs has stepped down as CEO of Apple Inc. According to Jobs, the day has come when he can no longer fulfill his duties. He passed the reigns to Tim Cook while staying on as Chairman of the Board and… read more

Rockmelt: Finally, Social Browsing Done Right

We’ve all seen and used “social browsers” in the past. The idea is nice but the result is often a bulky, awkward and cluttered browser that you wouldn’t dream of using full time.

Rockmelt is here to change that. This browser might be the first ever to successfully integrate the… read more

Take Your Menu Bar to Go with MenuPop

Macs these days span the extremes, from 11-inch MacBook Airs to 27-inch iMacs. It’s a prevalent first-world problem: there’s not enough space on your laptop, but everything’s too far away on the big screen. When you’re working on a large screen monitor (or two), especially when you work in design,… read more

Versions, Autosave and Resume: The Unsung Heroes of Lion

There are a few new features in Lion that you might not have heard about or used yet: Versions, Autosave and Resume. Versions aims to bring the functionality of Time Machine to your documents. This means that you can view several versions of your documents with the changes that happen… read more

20+ Mac Window Management Utilities

As most laptop users are aware, running multiple applications on that thirteen inch display is a pain. Things get crowded very quickly and there isn’t much you can do besides drag and resize each window- slowly and painfully. Or can you?

In this post I’m going to blast through all the… read more

Weekly Poll: Do You Still Use Dashboard?

Do You Still Use Dashboard?

When Dashboard widgets first debuted in OS X Tiger, I was immediately hooked. It was a lot like the precursor to iPhone app addiction. There were all these cool little utilities that performed tons of useful and entertaining functions. In no time at all I… read more

Thanks to Our Weekly Sponsor: NetUse Traffic Monitor

We’d like to take a moment to say a big thank you to this week’s sponsor, NetUse Traffic Monitor.

NetUse provides the best way to monitor your network traffic on the Mac. Utilizing the SNMP feature of any modern Internet router or gateway, NetUse monitors and collects real-time Internet usage statistics… read more

Kickoff: A Native Collaboration App for Small Groups

Kickoff certainly had a bumpy launch a few weeks ago. The app got so many downloads that their server broke within a few hours of launching, and, as a result, many users where seeing problems with the app, such as crashing or no syncing between accounts. Then they got some… read more

Book Review: Creating Flow with OmniFocus

This is something different for Mac.AppStorm: not a review of an app, but of a book about an app. The book is Kourosh Dini’s Creating Flow with Omnifocus. Dr Dini, a psychiatrist, musician, and author, has written regular blog posts about using OmniFocus, the Omni Group’s brilliant, but often daunting,… read more

iMovie ’11 Screencast: Working With Themes

And here we are again, with another installment in the iMovie ’11 video tutorial series. Today we look at iMovie’s themes. Themes are a unique part of iMovie that really let you take your home movies to the next level. But there are a couple of tricks to be aware… read more

The Windows App Store: Serious Threat or Business As Usual?

Windows 8 will be chock full of shiny new features, among which is of course a centralized app store. Let’s put aside our feigned shock and awe at this announcement and discuss whether or not this represents a potential threat to OS X or if it’s merely the technology industry… read more

Optimize Your Blogging Workflow with Markdown and Marked

When I first started writing for Appstorm, I immediately grabbed a copy of MarsEdit, since I had read such great things (on AppStorm) and finally had a reason to use it. I know HTML, but I hate looking at all those tags when I’m writing, so I did most of… read more

See All Your Appointments Quickly And Easily With CalendarBar

Organization is crucial for greater productivity and we all know the famous saying, “A failure to prepare is a preperation to fail.” On Macs, you’ve got a whole range of programs designed to help you become more productive and improve your organizational skills. You can use the traditional option of… read more

New UI Patterns in App Design: A Blessing or a Curse?

Software design has made some interesting strides lately. It’s possible that we’re beginning to see Apple’s role in setting UI standards give way to the innovation of third party developers.

Unfortunately, this shift makes for a much more complicated scenario for developers and designers. Tempers rise, fingers are pointed and… read more

Four Great Ways To Declutter Your Desktop

I have something of a confession to make – I’m very particular when it comes to computers. While I can walk around with two week’s beard growth or drive in a mud splattered car for most of the summer without a care, my Mac has to be ‘just so’. After… read more

Weekly Poll: How Many Apps Are in Your Dock?

How Many Apps Are In Your Dock?

The beloved Mac OS dock has been around for ages. Before Alfred, Spotlight or even Quicksilver, the dock was our solution for quickly launching applications. In fact, seriously old school Mac users will remember Launcher, a similar utility dating back to before OS… read more

MobileRSS: Getting Back to Basics

It seems like there’s been an influx of RSS reader reviews here on AppStorm recently.  With great new (and sometimes novel) readers like Pulp or Reeder, we can’t help but get excited about them.  However, every now and then an RSS app comes out that doesn’t dabble with novel formats… read more

Thanks to Our Weekly Sponsor: Timing

We’d like to take a moment to say a big thank you to this week’s sponsor, Timing.

Timing is the best way to keep track of the time you spend with your Mac. It automatically tracks which documents you are editing, applications you use, and the domains of the websites you… read more

Chronicle 4: Never Forget Another Bill

The popularity of online bill paying simplifies our lives in many ways (not to mention the tree savings), but without a solid piece of mail arriving at the door, it can be tough to remember the due dates for the many bills we pay each month. While you could set… read more

Make Your Photos Pop with Colorize

If you scan the features page on the Adobe Photoshop CS5 website, you’ll find descriptions for almost 70 different features, everything from “Automatic lens correction” to “Fluid canvas rotation” to “Puppet warp.” But anyone who’s ever used Photoshop knows that 70 features is just the tip of the iceberg, and… read more

rooSwitch: Swap Out Any App’s Preferences in a Flash

Do you ever wish you could set up an app’s preferences, then create another profile with a completely different set of preferences?

rooSwitch is a unique app that does exactly that. Read on to see how you can put this incredibly useful app to work.

What Does It Do?

The concept here is… read more

SecretBox: Your Private Data Vault

These days we have so much information that needs safe keeping. With so many reports regarding identity theft breaking on a daily basis, security of digital items is as important as your physical goods. Alleyways across the Internet are at times darker than the real world, and all it takes… read more

Has Apple Made Hardware Specs Irrelevant?

Since the dawn of home computing, those in the know have measured a machine’s worth with a look at the system’s specifications: A Sinclair Spectrum ZX which sported 128K of RAM was better than the 48K version and, likewise, a 500MHz iBook G3 was naturally superior to its clamshell ancestor,… read more

30+ Awesome Utilities to Boost Your Mac’s Functionality

The Mac App Store has brought about a whole mess of new utilities that make your Mac more functional than ever.

Today we’re going to dive and find thirty particularly useful utilities that you’ll definitely want to check out and consider downloading.

Performance
MiStat

MiStat shows detailed information for your CPU, memory, disk… read more

Weekly Poll: How Often Do You Use Mission Control?

How Often Do You Use Mission Control?

In Lion, the Spaces feature has been replaced by Mission Control, one central location with some major window management capabilities (Exposé shortcuts are still available).

We recently published an article on Making the Most of Mission Control and would love to know how… read more

Thanks to Our Weekly Sponsor: CheckUp

We’d like to take a moment to say a big thank you to this week’s sponsor, CheckUp.

CheckUp is an awesome utility designed to help you monitor the behavior and health of your Mac in real time. Like the dashboard of a car, CheckUp gives you a quick reference for important… read more

Galcon Fusion: Real-Time Strategy Gaming for Mac

Galcon Fusion is a strategy game sometimes described as “Risk, in space, in real-time.”  Players begin with a planet that generates a certain number of ships per minute (based on size), and must strategically use those ships to overpower the forces of opponents in order to seize control of all… read more

Task Till Dawn: Schedule File Actions On Your Mac

Automation is one of my favorite topics. There’s something about sitting back and watching my Mac perform tasks for me that makes me smile every time.

Today we’re going to take a look at Task Till Dawn, a simple and free little automation tool that will allow you to schedule files… read more

The Shorter Oxford English Dictionary: A Better Mac Dictionary

If you, like me, are a word nerd, there’s a good chance that you’ve already run a search for ‘dictionary’ in the Mac App Store. Doing so brings up a number of dictionaries in various languages, a few games, language courses, and a surprisingly small number of English dictionaries. Perhaps… read more

A Great Facebook App: The Impossible Dream?

Native Mac clients for social networks are a massive market – Twitter is the obvious example here, with a vast number of awesome apps. Even Instagram has a few nice solutions. But what about the biggest social network out there, Facebook? It has over 750 million users, and there’s no… read more

Simplify: Control Spotify from Anywhere

Today we’re going to take a look at Simplify, an attractive and convenient way to interact with Spotify from your desktop.

Read on to see if you should download Simplify to help manage your Spotify addiction!

Meet Simplify

As you likely already know, Spotify recently hit the U.S. causing a wave of new… read more

5 Producteev Premium Accounts Up for Grabs

Last week, Producteev for Mac hit the Mac App Store and received an extremely positive review from AppStorm. This week we’re following that up with an awesome giveaway of five one-year Producteev Premium Accounts (each worth $220!).

Here’s a quick rundown of what a premium account has to offer:

Unlimited Users
Priority… read more

VirtualDJ Home: Awesome Free DJ Software

VirtualDJ was first released in 2003 and over the years has grown into a real success story for Atomix Productions, providing professional DJ’s and hobbyists with effective DJ software. Originally sold in shops, this multi-platform ‘Home’ version is now available for free in the Mac App Store and sees the… read more

Building Your Own Website: Sandvox, RapidWeaver or Flux?

Remember iWeb? This former iLife member’s lofty goal was to translate the intimidating task of building a website down to the “drag and drop” simplicity of the Mac experience.

Apple’s brief foray into the world of DIY websites was impressive at first, but aged quickly and was eventually abandoned altogether…. read more

Five Hidden Gems From the Developer Folder

A few weeks ago, I wrote an article about text-to-speech in OSX, and one commenter suggested I check out Repeat After Me, a text-to-speech utility hidden in the Developer folder.

While checking it out, I discovered that the Developer folder holds a stash of useful applications and utilities I’d never heard… read more

Weekly Poll: How Would You Rate Lion in Terms of Bugs?

How Would You Rate Lion in Terms of Bugs?

Now that Lion has been out for a while, many of us have downloaded it on our primary computers and are now using the operating system full-time. As far as stability goes, the reports that we’re receiving are a bit scattered.

For… read more

Thanks to Our Weekly Sponsor: Box Shot 3D

We’d like to take a moment to say a big thank you to this week’s sponsor, Box Shot 3D.

As a graphic designer, I am constantly faced with the task of creating 3D product mockups. Unfortunately, 3D modeling programs are extremely expensive, quite cumbersome and can take years to master. Box… read more

Opera: The Awesome Browser That Nobody Uses

You can ask just about anybody what browser they’re using, and they will very likely respond with Safari, Firefox or Chrome. I have never met anyone who actually uses Opera for everyday browsing. This is not surprising seeing as how its usage share is 2.4%. And yet, nearly everybody… read more

Tagalicious: Ordering the Chaos

I’m the kind of person that likes things to be neat and organized, but I don’t like it enough to put a lot of effort into making it happen. I’m mostly content to be moderately irritated by things being out of order in exchange for not having to waste time… read more

Moom: Window Management Rethought

One thing that the latest version of Windows does well is managing application windows. With easy keyboard shortcuts you can flip through visual representations of each of your open programs and instantly resize or move windows. There are several Mac applications available that emulate some of these features, a number… read more

5 Ways to Experience Flickr on Your Mac

Whether you’re a photographer, designer, writer or any other creative sort, you’ve probably either uploaded images to Flickr, downloaded images from Flickr, or both. It’s easily the most ubiquitous photo sharing site on the planet.

Today we’re going to take a quick look at some awesome desktop apps that will… read more

Producteev For Mac: The Ultimate Free Task Management Solution?

Producteev has long been one of my favorite web-based task management solutions. Before Producteev, there were fully-featured GTD solutions and there were free solutions, and the two almost never overlapped.

Then Producteev came along providing free web and iPhone apps, automatic task syncing, multiple workspaces, due dates, labels, and a lot… read more

Lion Gestures: Trackpad vs. Magic Mouse

When Apple first included the trackpads on the Macbook Pros a few years ago, we got to use some gestures in the trackpad with Snow Leopard like two-finger scrolling and going back a page with a three-finger swipe, but the full potential of the trackpad gestures was not yet exploited… read more

Making the Most of Mission Control

For years Apple has been tweaking and rethinking the way we interact with open windows and applications inside of OS X. Exposé came along and allowed us to quickly view all open windows or even hide them completely. Then Spaces entered the scene and allowed us to create a number… read more

Our Favorite Apps: What the AppStorm Crew Couldn’t Live Without

To help you get to know us, we thought it would be a great idea to showcase some of the apps that our staff uses on a daily basis. These are all the favorite or most useful apps for some of our regular contributors, editors and other staffers.

We asked… read more

Weekly Poll: What Do You Think of Natural Scrolling in Lion?

What Do You Think of “Natural” Scrolling in Lion?

Along with a ton of great new features, OS X Lion brings about at least one fairly controversial change: the default behavior for scrolling has been reversed. It used to the case that if you wanted to scroll down… read more

Thanks to Our Weekly Sponsor: Raskin

We’d like to take a moment to say a big thank you to this week’s sponsor, Raskin.

There are very few Mac applications that one can label as truly unique, Raskin is one of them. It represents an entirely new way of interacting with and managing your open applications and windows…. read more

Manage Your Writing Projects with Ulysses 2.0

I am a fiction writer with a (mostly) completed novel, several novels in progress, dozens of short stories, a couple of screenplays, and a million sketches for future projects. I am also a marketing specialist who writes white papers, brochures, and websites, and an academic who drafts long articles, essays,… read more

Access Anything In Seconds with Launcher

You’ve no doubt heard about quick-launcher apps, they are utilities that are triggered by a keyboard shortcut and that let you do things like open apps or files a lot faster than if you did so by going into the menus. You just have to trigger the bar, type in… read more

How and Why to Make a Lion Boot Disc

Though my initial knee-jerk reaction to the news that Apple were making Mac OS X Lion available only through the Mac App Store was one of disapproval, upon reflection the decision makes sense from an environmental standpoint at least. There will be trees saved without those retail boxes needing to… read more