While some of last year’s entries remain undoubted staple components to any good Steam library, they’ve been joined by a host of fantastic games from both AAA and indie developers. Whether you’re a long time Steam user or planning on making a start with OS X gaming, here’s the must-have collection of games that you may well want to add to your wishlist for this summer’s sale.

Team Fortress 2

Team Fortress 2

Kicking off with a classic, Team Fortress 2 is a game that should be in every Steam user’s library. That’s not an exaggeration either, since the game is free-to-play so you can jump into it without paying a penny. While released all the way back in 2007, the game still has a incredibly strong community of players and continues to receive regular updates.

Team Fortress 2 sees players take on one of several unique classes and affiliate themselves with either the RED or BLU team, working collaboratively to win a round of varying objective in one of several game modes. With a focus shifted from traditional individual statistics like kill/death ratio, Team Fortress 2 creates an entertaining collaborative experience. The fairly-recent addition of a co-op mode now sees players have the option of teaming up against waves of NPC enemies in the hope of completing a Tour of Duty and attaining some unique loot.

Price: Free

The Walking Dead

The Walking Dead

The Walking Dead is one of the most critically-acclaimed releases of the last year, and is a fantastic adaptation of the universe laid out by the comic book franchise of the same name.

A primarily point-and-click game, The Walking Dead sees players follow the story of Lee, a convict and former university professor, in the middle of a zombie apocalypse. Encountering different characters and locations along the way, The Walking Dead tells a thoroughly engaging story where the decisions you make can have an influence on future events.

You can check out our recent review of the game where we awarded the game a full 10/10.

Price: $24.99

Portal 2

Portal 2

Another entry retaining its title from last year and a personal favourite of mine is Portal 2. Portal 2 sees players assume the role of Chell, a test subject in the abandoned Aperture Science research facility. Following on from the events of the first game (Portal, also available for OS X through Steam), players will navigate through the dilapidated facility in an attempt to escape, only for those plans to be upset by an awakening maniacal AI.

Portal 2 is an excellent game that runs fantastically on OS X, and in fact was the first title released simultaneously on both the Windows and OS X versions of Steam. It’s highly recommended you pick up a copy!

Price: $19.99

Don’t Starve

Don’t Starve

Don’t Starve is a hardcore indie survival game with one goal: don’t starve. Surviving is based on your ability to keep three metrics — hunger, sanity and health — in tact by reaping resources from a procedurally-generated world. You’ll encounter a unique set of beneficial and obstructive resources and mobs in the nearby environment that’ll keep you on the edge of your seat as you try to avoid death for another night.

Playable on OS X through both Steam and Chrome, Don’t Starve has garnered consistently positive reviews and it’s easy to see why. The developers are even continuing to update the game with new content and gameplay mechanics, so even after playing for a while, there’s still more to discover.

Price: $14.99

Half-Life 2 Series

Half-Life 2

Half-Life 2 is an iconic game that was brought to the Mac with the initial release of Steam on OS X. In the game, players follow the stories of Gordon Freeman and the resistance, fighting off the invading Combine that have taken control of Earth following the events of the first game (Half-Life, also available on Steam for OS X). Half-LIfe 2 has an engaging storyline that’s built on by an unprecedented ability to simply let you take in the atmosphere of a post-apocolyptic world.

Half-Life 2, alone, is a fantastic experience and it’s continued with Half-Life 2: Episode One and Half-Life 2: Episode Two. As a package, this series should undoubtedly top your Steam library and have you furiously waiting for the next instalment.

Price: $9.99 (for Half-Life 2 only) / $19.99 (for The Orange Box, including Half-Life 2, Episode One and Episode Two with Team-Fortress 2 and Portal)

Borderlands 2

Borderlands 2

Borderlands 2 is the follow up to Borderlands, where the game’s new protagonists must kill Jack, the main antagonist of its predecessor, in the hopes of bringing peace back to Pandora. Launching late last year to wide critical acclaim, Steam offers access to everything you need to enjoy Borderlands 2, including the sale of the game’s DLC season and accompanying guide.

Price: $29.99

Prison Architect

Prison Architect

Prison Architect is a simulator where players can construct their own maximum security prison and ensure its smooth operation.

Currently in Alpha on Steam, Prison Architect throws players some empty land to build their prison, hopefully evolving from a small cell block into a bustling metropolis capable of handling any prisoner that needs the facility. You can choose to go down an intensive Alcatraz-esque route or throw your inmates a bone and let them enjoy a relaxed rehabilitation.

Price: $29.99

Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare

Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare

Widely regarded by fans as the best in series, Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare is the earliest instalment of the Call of Duty franchise available on the Mac.

Call of Duty 4 sees players compete a campaign that kicks off the the Modern Warfare storyline (unfortunately only followed up by Windows-only Modern Warfare 2 and Modern Warfare 3), and offers access to the incredibly popular multiplayer gameplay that sees players enter combat on a literal virtual battlefield.

Price: $19.99

Call of Duty: Black Ops

Call of Duty: Black Ops

Call of Duty: Black Ops is another, yet distinctly different, instalment of Call of Duty on the Mac. Forming a storyline that runs separately from Infinity Ward’s Modern Warfare series, Call of Duty: Black Ops sports a campaign where players assume the role as an elite special forces member in a variety of conflicts, including part of the Cold War and Vietnam War. As is expected, Black Ops also features a popular multiplayer mode that affords the game its high replayability and is extendable with DLC packages.

A personal favourite game mode of mine in Black Ops is, however, Zombies, which sees players work co-operatively to battle of unlimited waves of the undead across a variety of maps (again extendable with DLC).

Price: $49.99

Unlike other games in this roundup, Call of Duty: Black Ops is sold separately as individual Mac and Windows editions. Make sure you’re buying the OS X version so you can actually play it on your Mac.

Left 4 Dead 2

Left 4 Dead 2

Left 4 Dead 2 is set in the zombie apocalypse and sees players in the role of one of four survivors aiming to take out the undead. Left 4 Dead 2 builds upon Left 4 Dead (also available on OS X through Steam) but with a variety of new infected, survivors and weaponry.

If you’re a fan of zombie/horror games, this one’s for you.

Price: $19.99

Counter-Strike: Global Offensive

Counter-Strike: Global Offensive

Counter-Strike: Global Offensive builds upon the historic Counter-Strike franchise — a series that originated as a Half-Life mod — with new maps, weapons and characters. Fans of classic Counter-Strike will enjoy revamped versions of classic content, available as one package as part of Global Offensive.

Counter-Strike: Global Offensive sees players join a terrorist or counter-terroist team and then battle it out on a variety of objective-based game mode over a number of maps.

Price: $14.99

Sid Meier’s Civilization V

Sid Meier’s Civilization V

Sid Meier’s Civilization V is a turn-based strategy game where players take control of a civilization and lead them from primative beginners right into the space age by conducting diplomacy, entering war and discovering new technologies in the process.

A variety of DLC is available for Civilization V through Steam, including the soon-to-be-released Brave New World expansion which hits virtual shelves on July 12th.

Price: $29.99 (base game only)

Grand Theft Auto 3D Universe series

Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas

Grand Theft Auto III, Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas and Grand Theft Auto: Vice City are all available through Steam, offer an OS X-compatible perspective on the 3D Universe of the highly-popular and equally controversial franchise. With the 3D Universe considered the real breakthrough for the franchise and with Grand Theft Auto V due out later this year, the series available through Steam is a great way of starting out with the franchise.

Price: sold separately from $9.99 to $14.99 each

Who Said Macs Aren’t for Gaming?

Grab these games and you’ll have a fantastic Steam library with many hours of fun ahead. Of course, these are only a selection of the entire OS X catalogue available on Steam. If you’ve got any favourites not featured, be sure to share your recommendations in the comments below!

There’s opensource freeware software, the bundled apps that are essentially free with your Mac, dirt cheap apps on the App Store, and incredibly expensive apps like AutoCAD and Adobe’s Creative Cloud apps. And everything in between. You could spend nothing on software, ever, if you really wanted to, and use just what comes on your Mac and other free apps you could download. Or, today, you can spend a fairly small amount and get quite a few really good programs, with the wealth of apps on the App Store today.

On the other end, though, even as apps seem to be getting cheaper, there’s more in-app purchases and subscriptions that’ll eat up your money. You’ll find yourself paying to unlock that feature you really wanted, or subscribing to Office 365 so you can collaborate with people at work. Or, you’ll pay for an Evernote subscription after you find it so useful as a free app.

We’ve all got different budgets for software, and we’re wondering how much you usually spend. Think of all your software purchases and subscriptions, and let us know about how much you spend per month. I’d personally be somewhere in the $20-$50 range, but then, I buy a lot of software for testing and more. Where are you on this scale, and has that gone up or down over the years? We’d love to hear more about your app spending in the comments below.

At least, it’s supposed to be, theoretically. In real world usage, though, iMessage doesn’t always work perfect. It works best between iPhones, in my use at least, but can often get things messed up when syncing to the Mac. Then, Messages.app itself on OS X is a rather anemic messaging program, despite including support Jabber and other chat services that were traditionally included in iChat. It works for chatting, but if you need to dig deep into your chat archives to find a file someone sent you, you’re going to have a tough time.

That’s why the folks at Flexibits — the people behind my favorite calendar app, Fantastical — made Chatology. It’s the companion app for Messages.app that can make iMessage a power-user tool.

Supercharged Search for Your Chats

Messages.app works fine for having conversations between Macs (regardless of its issues with syncing chats you had on your iPhone while your Mac was asleep), and if you use it with your teammates at work or just with your family to share pictures and special moments, you’ve likely got quite the backlog of old chats. Chatology can distill all those records down to find the exact messages you’re looking for, letting you search through your chat text or sort through chats by their date and time.

Essentially, it gives you a nice way to sort through your Messages archive, which are actually stored in your /Library/Messages/Archive/ folder, organized by date and conversation. Chatology takes those archives and lets you search through all of them lightening-fast while maintaining the separation between conversations that makes things make more sense. You can search through everything, drill down into chats that happened Today, this week, this month, or in the past year, or view just specific conversations on a certain day.

Just looking for images or the site your colleague shared? You can filter and see just images or links contained in the chats. Unfortunately, though, there’s no way to isolate other attachments in the chats, and there’s also no way to bulk-export the images in chats. You can drag-and-drop images out of Chatology, see where they are in the chat context, or see them in Quick Look, but there’s no way to save all of the images at one time. Let’s hope this part gets improvement going forward, as it could be a seriously powerful feature for those who want a way to archive all the pictures their friends have shared in iMessage.

Just Replace Message.app’s Search Already

But the best part of Chatology is how nicely it integrates with Messages. If you leave it enabled in the settings, Chatology will automatically open with your curser in its search box when you press CMD+F in Messages.app. That makes it a no-brainer to use Chatology as your only way to ever search for your messages. And it’s a rather ingenious integration into one of the default OS X apps that doesn’t even have any options for extendability.

Once you find what you’re looking for, you can export the conversation as a plain text file, select text and share or save it with your OS X services, or open the original chat conversation in Finder. From there, if you open the chat log file, you’ll be able to see the conversation back in Messages — otherwise, there’s no way to jump back in Messages to the spot you’re looking at in Chatology.

An App for a Purpose

Chatology isn’t for everyone. If you don’t go digging through your chat archives on a regular basis, and just use it for casual chit-chat, then you might not get much out of it. But if you collaborate with your team in Messages, share lots of pictures with your family, and more, you’ll likely have already wished Messages.app had a better search tool. Chatology is exactly what you need.

One of our goals at Flexibits is solving problems to help reduce or eliminate frustration.

The Flexibits Team

That’s why the Flexibits team made Chatology. They found that Messages search was buggy at best, so they decided to fix the problem with their own app, one that works with Messages so well you could almost be tricked into thinking that it’s built-in. And the Flexibits team isn’t stopping there: they’ve still got a replacement for your Mac’s Contacts app coming out soon, but just wanted to hurry and get Chatology out since it was so useful for their own team.

If you’ve ever had trouble finding an old message in Messages, download the free 14-day Chatology trial and see if it hits the spot for your messaging search needs. If it makes your chats and collaboration more productive, its $19 price won’t seem that bad at all.

One new app that can make communication simpler, in many ways, is Collaaj. It’s an app that lets you communicate to others using video, audio, and your Mac. It’s the collaboration of Skype combined with the simpleness of email, in a way that’ll help you get your point across to others better than you could with just text and images but without having to be online at the same time.

Using Collaaj

Collaaj is designed to let you create videos or audio to communicate and show something on your Mac screen. For example, let’s say you want to show someone a design you are working on. Instead of just sending them the design, you can record a video or audio to explain to them what you are trying to do in the design. This gives it a whole new meaning as sometimes you cannot always communicate through just an image what you really want your audience to know. There are four different ways that you can record using Collaaj.

Different options to record

The first two ways involve using a screen capture and either video or audio. You can have a screen capture and just use your voice to explain what is in it or any other information you want to let your audience know, very similar to screencasts. If you want more than just audio, you can use your webcam instead to take video of yourself explaining the image you are showing to people.

Using video and screen capture to record

The other two ways to communicate involve only video and audio and take away the screen capture feature. If you decide you just want to record a video that you want people to see, you can just fire up the app in webcam mode and record yourself. If you are camera shy, there is an audio record feature where you can just get your voice captured and send it out. In my opinion these two features are not as effective as the other two, but nonetheless, I am sure it could be helpful to have.

Using video to record

Interacting With Others

What makes Collaaj so effective is the fact that you can use it to interact with others. Just because it is more of a one way app, where you are sending people something that you are trying to communicate to them, that doesn’t mean that they cannot respond. Once you are done with recording, you have two options on how you want others to see your recording. You can either make it somewhat private where only the people you send the link to, can see it, or you can make it so that anyone can see it. Create a title for the recording then add a short description and you can then upload it, and it is now on the web for others to see.

Getting your recording ready to upload

When people get the link to view your video, there are a few different ways that they can interact with you. There is an option for them to leave comments or even “like” your recording. There are also some sharing features where they can share it to Twitter, LinkedIn, or Google +. There is also a link that is made so that it can be shared with others, and you are also given an embed code so that the recording can be integrated into other sites.

Different interactive features

Variety of Uses

What made me really like Collaaj is the way that it could be used in my line of work as well as for others. It is a great tool to be able to explain a concept to people or to add meaning and depth to an image, that you normally can’t portray when you just show someone the picture. I can see this being used by educators, especially math teachers who want another way to be able to explain a problem to students. I can see designers using this to explain their work, as well as business people.

There are a number of different ways that Collaaj can be integrated into many different lines of work. I like that they integrated features where you can embed your recordings on a website as well as some of the interactive tools that they give you. It gives you the opportunity to really use it as a collaborative tool to work with others.

Final Thoughts

I found Collaaj very easy to use and it came in very handy for me in when I tested it out with others. When I showed it to a few of my colleagues the overriding comment that I got was that by adding video or audio, it really enhanced the image that you were showing people.

There are three different price plans to choose from, ranging from free all the way up to $15/month. It really all depends on how and what you plan to use Collaaj for in your life. I think most people who will use it casually can easily get away with the free plan, while even small to medium sized business could get away with the $5/month option.

Collaaj even has an iPad app that adds more features to the app than what the Mac side can offer. It gives you the opportunity to create screencasts and actually write and draw, while having audio and video. Although you can do this on the Mac, the iPad gives you a lot of the features to make this happen from within the app itself. It is free to use, so I would check it out if you are interested.

Overall, this is a great product to have on the Mac, web, as well as on the iPad. It was very easy to use and I found it as a nice way to be able to get my message across to people that I may not have had the chance to come in face to face contact with. If you are one who does a lot of screencasts, or works remotely, I would definitely give Collaaj a try.

Creative Cloud is a controversial release, since longtime Adobe customers want a way to buy a permanent license, or at least wish for more subscription options so they don’t have to get everything. But for now, Creative Cloud is what it is — and it’s a big upgrade to all of Adobe’s main apps.

Here’s how Creative Cloud will work for you, if you’ve already got a copy of Creative Suite and want to upgrade and get the latest features.

The Upgrade Decision

First off, you’ve got to decide if you want to buy a Creative Cloud subscription. There’s a number of updates to each of the major Adobe apps; be sure to check the Creative Cloud blog post for a summary of what to expect. Many of the Adobe apps, including Photoshop, have already gotten updates in Creative Cloud since CS6′s release, such as options to copy designs as CSS and more. So, if you have CS6 — and especially if you have an older version — there’s a lot to look forward to in the new versions.

The Creative Cloud subscription options

Then, you’ve got to decide what you want. You can either purchase a subscription to one app for $9-$19/month, depending on the app (Muse is on the low end, Photoshop is obviously on the high end), or you can purchase a full subscription that’ll get you every app Adobe makes for $49/month with a year commitment. If you own CS3 or newer, you can subscribe to one app for just $9/month or the whole suite for $29/month for your first year, and if you own CS6, you can get the whole suite for $19/month for your first year. Oh, and students can get it for $19/month as well, and all of these “upgrade” offers end July 31st. That’s all: there’s no suites to pick between, it’s just one app or the whole shebang.

What The Cloud Means for You

Your all-access pass for all things Adobe

Again, remember that Creative Cloud’s apps aren’t web apps. They’re still normal Mac (or PC, if you happen to be on Windows) apps that you’ll install and run locally. They’ll work when you’re offline. They still use the same keyboard shortcuts as before, and can still save files to your Mac directly or to other cloud services like Dropbox. Nothing at all’s changed there. In fact, with just a rough glance at Photoshop CC running on a Mac, you could easily think it was Photoshop CS6.

All that’s changed — what makes it different than just being CS7 — is that you’re subscribing to the apps. Instead of paying for the apps directly as you would have in the past (say, $1-3k for a new copy, or $300-600 for an upgrade), you pay per month for your Adobe apps. Along with that, you’ll get some extras: 20Gb of online storage (again, you don’t have to use it), a Typekit Portfolio subscription, a Behance profile and ProSite, and up to 5 websites hosted on Adobe’s cloud. Essentially, these are just extras to sweeten the deal, and are the only “cloud” aspects of Creative Cloud. Everything else is normal programs that you install on your Mac as before.

As far as Creative Cloud file storage goes, anyone can sign up for a free Creative Cloud account, with 2Gb of free storage and 30 day trials to each of Adobe’s apps (and full access to Adobe’s free apps). A full Creative Cloud subscription will get you 20Gb of storage, as mentioned before, where you can store your creative files if you want to. Again, you don’t have to store anything in Creative Cloud’s storage if you don’t want to: your choice. If your subscription dies, Adobe’s promising that they’re working to provide ways to access your data; my guess is that they’ll let you keep your cloud storage as read-only if you quit subscribing, just to quelm everyone’s fears, but that’s yet to be seen.

Subscribing to Creative Cloud

Ok. You’ve decided to bite the bullet and subscribe to Creative Cloud. If you’ve ever bought software from Adobe before, you’ll find they’ve really streamlined the process. You’ll just sign in with your Adobe ID, choose the subscription you want, verify that you’re eligible for an upgrade or educational offer if you chose one of those, add your payment info, and you’re done. That’s it.

The simplest Adobe purchase ever

Your browser will redirect you to the Creative Cloud account homepage, which will show any files you’ve already uploaded if you had a free account. Minutes later, you’ll get an email welcoming you to Creative Cloud with a receipt for your purchase. With that, you’re done, ready to get the greatest and latest apps from Adobe.

You’re in!

For the test here, I’ve personally purchased a Creative Cloud subscription, using my own CS6 license to get the $19/month discounted subscription, both of which I paid for myself.

Downloading Your Creative Cloud Apps

The App Store where you’ve already paid for everything.

You could go ahead and download any of the Adobe apps you want, from Photoshop to Premiere, but you’d best start off with the Creative Cloud app. It’s your hub for all things Creative Cloud: the place where you’ll download your Creative Cloud apps, install Typekit Fonts to your desktop, share designs on Behance, and more. It’ll install automatically when you install a product, since it’s the new way Adobe has you install apps and updates, but you might as well just install it first and go from there. Just head to the Creative Cloud download page in your Download Center, click Install, and if you already have any Adobe apps installed, it’ll start installing it through the Adobe Application Manager.

A OS X password entry later, you’ll have the Creative Cloud app ready to roll from your menubar. Select the Creative Cloud icon, enter your Apple ID, accept the terms of service, and you’ll be ready to install your Creative Cloud apps and more directly from the app. Select the Apps tab first; surely you want to try out the apps you just paid for, right? Here, you’ll see all of the Adobe apps you’ve already got installed, including previous versions of Photoshop and more, and you’ll be able to see if they’re up-to-date. Interesting, Acrobat and Media Encoder didn’t show up, but everything else did.

Your Creative Cloud hub

To install your new Creative Cloud apps, just scroll down and find the one you want, then click Install. You may be asked to go ahead and enter your Mac’s password to install the app, or you may be asked to do so later on after the app is downloaded, depending on the app. Adobe’s made installing Creative Cloud apps as simple as installing an App Store app: one click, one password entry, and that’s it. The next thing you’ll notice is a push notification when the app’s installed; no more clicking required. Creative Cloud’s app works fairly good for downloads, but it’s far from perfect: there’s no way to pause downloads, and it won’t download multiple apps at the same time, but rather queues them up for download. There’s also no way to search for the app you want to install, though you can filter the apps by category (say, graphics or audio).

Here’s the good thing, though: the Creative Cloud app will let you download and install the new versions of Photoshop and more as new apps, without overwriting your old Creative Suite apps you may have installed. That way, you can keep the Creative Cloud apps and your older traditional Adobe apps installed side-by-side, and try out Creative Cloud for a month. If you don’t like it, you can get your money back, uninstall the Creative Cloud apps, and everything goes back to normal. If you subscribe for a year, then uninstall the Creative Cloud apps, it’s the same.

If you have CS6 installed, the Creative Cloud app will bring your updates to those apps, including compatibility plugins for the new CC formats to make sure you’ll be able to open your files in the older apps without having to save in older versions for compatibility. (And if you’re curious, yes, the icons for the CC apps are only slightly tweaked versions of their CS6 equivalents).

If you’re going back and forth from the Creative Cloud app to other apps as you’re installing your apps and getting everything setup, you might find the menubar app annoying since you can’t CMD-tab back and forth from it. Just drag it from the top of the popover, and it’ll turn into a traditional window. You can then get it back in the menubar from the settings gear in a click.

There’s a lot more to come

You’ll also quickly notice that everything isn’t there yet. The Creative Cloud app won’t sync your files to your desktop yet, which makes the cloud storage rather useless at the moment — though when it comes, it’ll save versions of your files as you’re working, so you can always go back after you’ve made changes, which alone is reason enough to consider using it. Then, you’ll notice that Typekit font download, unfortunately, isn’t available yet, and while Behance profiles are already integrated enough that you can make your own account straight from the Creative Cloud app, you can’t start projects or even update your profile picture from the app.

What is ready today is the new Creative Cloud apps, with the updates to Photoshop, InDesign, and more that we’ve been waiting for. App setting sync is also ready, so you’ll be able to keep your PC and Mac’s Photoshop settings synced right now. You’ll also find a wealth of video tutorials from Adobe about each of the apps, ready for you for free in your online Creative Cloud dashboard, something you never found back with Creative Suite. Adobe’s trying to make sure everyone gets the most out of everything in Creative Cloud, so if you learn a new app, everyone wins this time.

You can signup and get the new apps today, and let us know how the install process goes for you. We’ll be digging deeper into the Creative Cloud apps going forward. And hey, if Creative Cloud doesn’t seem like it’s the solution for you, don’t worry. We’ve got a huge roundup of the best Creative Cloud alternates coming out soon!

Visual Watermark is an easy-to-use professional watermarking app that incluedes over 10 integrated composite watermarks, 250 built-in fonts, an interactive Watermark Designer, and more. You’ll be able to design unique watermarks, preview how they look on your pictures, add it to all your pictures at once, then save it for future use, all in a modern UI that makes it straightforward to use.

Visual Watermark is designed to work great with your Mac. You can import iPhoto libraries directly, or drag-and-drop your own images into the app. Its photo editing algorithms are optimized for speed, so it’ll only take a few seconds to process all of your photos. Then, it makes it simple to publish your photos online, with automatic downsizing to the resolution you want when it adds the watermark to your images.

Get Your Copy of Visual Watermark Today!

Best of all, Visual Watermark won’t cost you much to use. You can get your own copy of Visual Watermark starting at $19.95, with a 30 day satisfaction gurantee. Get started today and see why thousands of photographers, designers and bloggers worldwide have chosen Visual Watermark.

At E3 earlier this month, Telltale Games unveiled 400 Days, a DLC expansion that follows the events of game’s first season. In today’s review, while we wait for that July release, we’re going to take a look at what the first season is all about and hopefully convince those of you yet to have played it to, well, play it … or at least get excited about what’s coming up next.

Out of the Frying Pan

The Walking Dead is a largely story-driven game where the evolving events are the main feature here, rather than opting for the action that many other zombie/horror games lean towards. Ultimately, The Walking Dead has as linear a storyline as most other games and without encouraging you to run off and shoot a bunch of zombies, the game manages to really immerse you in what’s happening.

The Walking Dead takes place over five episodes, with a special follow-up instalment due in July.

Throughout the game, the story can be manipulated lightly by choices you’ll make as a player. Things you say and decisions you make will be noted, and can influence how other characters react or even who shows up in the future scenes. In the end, you’ll get the same result; decisions you make will have a very visible effect at times, but nothing that’s going to lead you off into a whole other storyline. However, decisions you make will enact enough minor changes to the storyline to make you feel immersed and in some sort of control of a storyline that, realistically, isn’t changing that much. In this way, The Walking Dead manages to engage you enough in the stellar storyline that you might otherwise have missed if this had been as static an experience as other games. Little details can change your gameplay in ways that will have you either regretting or celebrating your previous choices, something that, to date, only real life has been able to truly emulate.

And, yes, The Walking Dead has zombies!

Clementine and co.

During your tenure with The Walking Dead, you’ll meet a variety of characters that will enter and leave your life at times dependent on some of the choices you make. Early on in the game, you’ll meet Clementine, a character that you’ll never control but who forms a consistent narrative throughout the entirety of the game. Of course, other characters will come and go, the context of which may very well be up to choices you make as the player.

With the overarching sense that your actions might be influencing how a character reacts rather than an expectation that whatever happens was meant to happen, The Walking Dead manages to create an unprecedented level of affection (or, conversely, a very real hatred) for the characters that make deciding on actions and dialogue a concious decision, rather than one made by just randomly pressing a button.

A lot of the actual story consists of a dialogue tree you decide on.

The Walking Dead is a physiological experience. Not only will you see the results of your actions play out on screen but major decisions you make are collected and compared with those made by other players so that, following the conclusion of an episode, you can see how many people made the same choice as you and how many didn’t. When matters truly become about life or death, this can be a daunting experience and might well leave you feeling like a terrible person when you found out everyone else chose option B.

Presentation

The Walking Dead is all about the story. It’s not an FPS or some other sort of action game, and the presentation reflects that fact. As the world and storyline is certainly not dynamically generates with story events set nearly in stone, the game’s audio creates a striking and, at times, horrific atmosphere.

The Walking Dead has a presentation that pays tribute to the comic origin.

On the other side of things, the game’s graphical style resembles and remembers its comic book origins. The game doesn’t feel cartoonish but, equally, the graphics don’t try to be anywhere near photo-realistic so even those who tend to stay away from horror need not be instantly turned off by a game that will obviously involve killing some zombies.

Final Thoughts

The Walking Dead is a truly unique experience. It’s less of a game and more an interactive story, but not in the “we’re just going to play out a movie and get you to press a button every so often” way. The story doesn’t branch off massively, but by relying on player choices, The Walking Dead does a fantastic job at retaining a level of immersion that many games fail to create. You really will care for some of the characters and you really will hate some of the others, meaning decisions are truly a psychological experience that makes you really think about how the NPCs will react and whether you’ll be in the minority when the statistics are presented at the end of each episode.

“Clementine will remember that” is a phrase that will haunt you at night.

With the conclusion of the season, you can pick up The Walking Dead for $24.99/£20.99 from Steam (although it is also sold separately on iOS, PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360, if those platforms are more appealing for you). The 400 Days DLC is expected out in July and a second season is said to be due with a targeted release of this autumn. Stay tuned for a look at these later on in the year.

The Walking Dead sets the bar high. You’ll enjoy hours of immersive gameplay and might even come out of it with a lot of questioning of your own motives, making the game well worth its $24.99 price tag.

But practically no one was expecting that Apple would spend a serious amount of time during the keynote talking about web apps. And yet they did. Apple, the company that almost entirely makes software just for its own devices took the time to show us how great their new iWork for iCloud apps worked in Chrome on Windows 8. iWork has always been seen as a distant runner-up to Microsoft Office, the 900lb gorilla in the room whenever you talk about apps for word processing, presentations, and spreadsheets. The very fact that the iPad doesn’t have Office has been used as an advertisement point for Microsoft’s Surface ads. But we all thought the discussion was long-since beyond Office, and we’ve all learned to get along very well without it, thank you very much.

Apple isn’t in the business of leaving well enough alone, though, and they’re taking their own Office competitor directly to Microsoft’s homefront. If you’ve stuck with Office simply because others won’t be able to preview your files if you use iWork — or if you’ve stayed away since you occasionally need to edit from a PC — here’s why iWork for iCloud just might be the best thing to happen to iWork yet. It’s a bold foray into Microsoft’s territory, just as Microsoft launches its own Office apps on the iPhone.

Apple: The Best Web App Company You Didn’t Know Existed

It was nearly two years ago when I first was able to try out Apple’s iCloud web apps, during an early (presumably accidental) login before they’d been fully released. I’d tried — on a PC netbook, of all things — to login to iCloud, and there for a half hour was able to try out the apps before the site said it was “Coming Soon” again. The Mail, Contacts, and Calendar apps then were much the same then as they are now: near-perfect copies of their sibling apps on iOS 5. A year later with iOS 6, we got Notes and Reminders added to the fold, apps that again nearly perfectly matched their iPad counterparts, complete with skeuomorphic leather and stitching.

Now, apps that look as nice as Apple’s own iPad apps that ran smoothly in the browser were impressive then, but they’re really still impressive today. Web apps tend to be basic, limited tools, especially when they’re from software giants that use them as a selling point for their native apps (hello, Microsoft). Regardless of your perspective on skeuomorphic design, the iCloud web apps are still some of the nicest looking web apps out there. They’re full-featured, at least compared to their iPad counterparts, they’re slick, and they load surprisingly fast considering how graphically intense they are. They still look like iOS 6 today (if anything, they’re the most skeuomorphic apps in Apple’s lineup now, as is starkly apparent even from their icons), but that’s one thing we’d expect to change before iOS 7′s launch this fall. Either way, they’re very nice web apps that are ad free and full-featured.

The problem is, they’re practically unknown since everyone that has an iCloud account, by extension, has an Apple device with native apps that do the very same thing. They give you a way, say, to see your iPhone notes and reminders on a PC, but somehow I doubt very many people use them for that. iWork in the browser, however, just might change that equation.

Your Apple Apps, Everywhere

iWork has been the nicest looking office suite for quite some time, with Keynote leading the way in beautiful presentations. It’s never been as powerful as Office — try using Numbers for a statistics class, and you’ll decide that Excel is still worth its price — but then, most of us don’t need all of Office. We need to make documents that look sharp without tons of fuss. Done. We need to keep track of finances and tabulate data, and perhaps turn that into nice charts and more. Done. We need to make presentations that won’t have those watching rolling their eyes? Done (well, if you don’t go overboard).

The iWork apps for OS X and iOS are getting a bit long in the tooth, without a major new version since 2009, but that’s going to be remedied this fall according to the WWDC keynote (and we have no idea what to expect from that upgrade as of yet). But even as-is, the iWork apps actually great. They’re the best Office alternate on the Mac — seriously, you don’t want to be using LibreOffice — and they just cost $19 per app. With App Store licensing, you can run the whole iWork suite on up to 5 Macs in the same household for just $59.97. That’s what Office 365 — Microsoft’s new subscription version of Office — will cost you for 6 months. That starts making iWork look even more enticing.

The traditional argument against iWork that you need Office compatibility to be able to share documents with others isn’t even the best argument. I’ve edited my Microsoft Office files in iWork and shared them in Office-only environments after exporting to Office formats — even in university, where Office is absolutely, religiously required — and had no problem. No, they won’t work for every use case, but they will work for most.

And now, the free iCloud-based iWork web apps take away the problem of only being able to edit your files on a Mac or iOS device. It’s the one little extra that’ll make relying on iWork only a less nerve-wracking proposition.

The iWork Web Apps in Action

It’s obviously not fair to fully review the iWork for iCloud apps today, as they’re still in beta and aren’t even accessible at the normal iCloud.com (though you’ll find them just a login away at beta.icloud.com). For now, there’s no printing support, no way to share a link to a document with anyone else, no chart and table editing, and no version history, but all of those are promised to be coming in the final release. Even then, there still may be no simultaneous document editing like Office Web Apps and Google Docs offer; Apple hasn’t mentioned that at all.

But then, that’s hardly an issue if you’re just looking for apps to create and edit your own documents, something that iWork for iCloud already excels at. Login, and you’ll see all of your iWork documents that were already synced to iCloud ready to be viewed or edited, with popover hints that are reminiscent of iPhoto for iPad’s help popovers. The overall design is very similar to iWork on the iPad, though with a more subdued interface and no fake wood, canvas, or leather — perhaps indicative of how iWork for iOS will look this fall. Office files are welcome, too, and a drag-and-drop to your browser will get them ready for editing in iWork.

Dive into each of the apps, and literally everything else you’d expect is there. There’s all the same document templates, picture effects, shapes, backgrounds, and fonts that you’d expect from iWork on an iPad (which, yes, means you can use Zapfino on a PC in your browser). Keynote feels the most full-featured, with all of its slide transitions working perfectly in the browser, even on a PC. Keynote’s long been the app to use if you want the nicest looking presentations, and now you can get the same experience from any computer — even for full-screen presenting.

Pages, in the same way, is nearly full-featured. You can’t set your page size right now, and you can’t add columns to your document if they’re not already in the template you started with. But, you can add images, give them shadows and boarders like you’d expect in Pages, and move them fluidly around your document, something that’s entirely impossible the Word Web App and Google Docs. You’ll also get great text formatting, again with all the Apple-standard fonts you’d expect.  When it comes time to share your documents, you’ll be able to download them in Pages, Word, or PDF formats, just as on the iPad. And if for some reason you’re editing in two places at once, don’t worry: Pages kept the changes refreshed between different browsers almost instantly in our tests, which means it could work for simultaneous editing with others in the future if Apple wanted to add that.

Even Numbers, the spreadsheet everyone regards as anemic compared to Excel, manages to shine as a simple yet functional (and rather full-featured) online spreadsheet app. It includes all the user-friendly templates and the page-rather-than-tables focused UI that you’d expect from Numbers, and throws in a very nice new functions pane that makes it easy to find functions and understand what they’re fore as you’re entering them into your spreadsheet. It’s not going to take the world of statistics by storm, but for the rest of us needing to make a budget, it’s still the best spreadsheet out there.

iCloud.com as an App Platform?

Even two years ago, though, iCloud had a tiny bit of iWork: file viewers and exporters. You’ve always been able to see your iWork documents in iCloud.com, and download them in iWork, Office, or PDF formats. The apps, of course, take it to a whole different level, but even the file viewing and exporting was nice.

What’s still missing is a way to access the rest of your iCloud documents from your browser. Hundreds of 3rd party apps are using iCloud to sync their iOS and Mac apps, and yet we users can’t access our files from those apps outside of Apple’s platforms. What would be very nice — and a much stronger affront to cloud services like Dropbox and Microsoft’s Skydrive — would be at least a way to access the files from all of your apps in iCloud.com, perhaps in a similar interface to the old iWork files access in iCloud.

But, what if Apple opened iCloud.com itself as an app platform, letting 3rd party developers make their own apps that could run in the browser alongside Mail, Calendar, and the iWork apps, perhaps using some of the Javascript libraries and more that power Apple’s web apps? That could be a very interesting to make iOS  and OS X apps extend their functionality to the browser, letting us all get all of our data anywhere while staying in Apple’s beautifully walled garden — with a small, web-shaped gap.

OS X Mavericks has a number of great new features, from tabs in Finder to new apps to better notifications. It looks like it’s going to be quite the great 10th release of OS X, and we’re definitely looking forward to it. But one of its headline features is something that you can actually get today thanks to the app we’re giving away this week: AirParrot.

See, in Mountain Lion you can use AirPlay to push your desktop to your Apple TV if you have a recent Mac, and Mavericks extends that by letting you use your TV as a full second display. But if you’re serious about using your TV as an extra screen for your Mac, AirParrot offers all of that and more for any Mac running Snow Leopard or later, or PCs running XP or later.

AirParrot lets you stream your desktop to your Apple TV in full HD, as a copy of your desktop or as a full second screen. Or, you can use it to stream just one app to the TV, while you’re using the other apps on your Mac’s screen. It’s packed with all the features and settings you’d need, including options to overscan, hide the cursor, change the streaming quality, and more, unlike OS X’ default one-size-fits-all AirPlay.

All of that normally costs $9.99, but we’ve got 10 copies to giveaway to our readers this week. Just leave a comment below letting us know why you want to use AirParrot, and we’ll randomly pick 10 winners at the end of the week. Or, for an extra entry, you can share our giveaway on your favorite social networks and share the link to your social network post in a second comment below.

Hurry and get your entry in; we’re closing our giveaway on Wednesday, June 19th!

Envato staff or those who have written more than two articles or tutorials for AppStorm are ineligible to enter.

What was, perhaps, more of a surprise was Evernote winning a Design Award for their Mac and iOS apps. Evernote’s hardly a new app, and is likely the most recognizable name for the public of all the apps that got a Design Award. But its apps today are so much better than before — speedier, beautiful design, and plenty of useful integrations — that it really shouldn’t be surprising that Evernote finally won an Apple Design Award. It’s been quite the journey for the notebook that’s so much more than just a notebook, one that’s cumulated with quite the amazing past half-year of app releases.

From XP Tablet PC Edition to the iPad

The original EverNote, complete with a Flash-based tutorial app

Evernote’s journey began before most of us were using touchscreens — when Macs still used PowerPC processors, and Windows XP was the most popular OS. It started in late 2004 with a spinoff of Parascript‘s Pen&Internet subsidiary (which had made, among other things, riteMail, an app for drawing emails rather than typing them). Its first order of business was releasing Evernote 1.0. Or rather, EverNote 1 and its sidekick, the $34.95 EverNote Plus that included handwriting and shape recognition. The first version was released to the public in mid-2005, and earned a 3.5/5 rating from PCMag, which noted that it worked well on Tablet PCs and was coming soon to Pocket PC and Palm OS. The Evernote team wasn’t a stranger to Apple — some of their team had developed software for the Newton back in the ’90′s — but Microsoft’s platforms were dominant enough that it only made sense for Evernote to focus on them.

Even from the start, Evernote was designed to help you remember everything. The notes originally styled as a continuous strip of paper, where you could store all your notes and easily find anything you’d ever written down — literally, with a stylus on a tablet PC — or clipped from the internet or other apps. It was a great idea, but one that didn’t make nearly as much sense when it was tied to a PC that you in all likelihood weren’t carrying around 24/7.

Fast-forward a few years, though, and the world of computing had totally changed. The iPhone was released in 2007, Macs had switched to Intel processors a year earlier and were gaining popularity (Windows Vista made switching even more appealing), and cloud storage was becoming more of a part of everyday life with Dropbox’ initial release in early 2008. It was against this backdrop that Evernote for Mac was launched as a fully native Mac app, designed from the ground-up to be a best-in-class Mac notes app. It had all the features you’d expect, and much of the functionality you’d find in Evernote today. Interestingly, Brett Terpstra noted then that Evernote was going to add a way to track all of your tasks, a prediction that wasn’t fulfilled until this year.

The Trying of Evernote’s Faith

Even as Evernote was firing all cylinders, though, there was an underlying problem: Evernote was running out of money, fast. By mid-2008, it was time to either raise money or call it quits. Evernote had been a freemium app all along, but instead of the original paid version Evernote had long-since switched to a subscription model — and that wasn’t bringing in enough to run the company yet. As Inc.com covered in their feature on Evernote when they named it Company of the Year in 2011, a 3AM email offering half a million dollars in funding saved the company just one day before they would have otherwise had to shut down.

Evernote: a functional ugly duckling

Money wasn’t a problem after that, but the service still had its challenges to overcome. Evernote tried to do everything, but — especially at first — it wasn’t always the best at anything. It could recognize text in images amazingly well, but didn’t give you a way to export the text it recognized (which everyone expected from an OCR app). It could store everything you threw at it, but didn’t make sense really as an app to store all your files. And, especially on the PC, it would slow to a crawl as your notes database grew, which made it not so useful for storing everything. Evernote had the features we needed, but it felt like a lumbering giant, even as it was still a startup.

Then, it added more features, through acquisitions and new apps. Evernote made their own iOS, Android, WebOS, Windows Phone, and even Blackberry, in addition to their Windows and Mac apps, browser extensions, and full-featured web app. They made extra apps like Evernote Peek to help you study on the iPad, Evernote Hello to help you remember people you meet, and Evernote Food to do the same for your favorite foods. They went on a buying spree, adding Penultimate and Skitch to their roost, and turning Readable into Evernote Clearly. It seemed Evernote was ever-growing, potentially making the service better for users, but at the same time making it more confusing with so many disparate apps and use cases.

The whole Evernote family

Clarity Through Design

“About a year and half ago, we began to fundamentally shift our product thinking. We moved from focusing purely on features to becoming obsessive about the design and experience of everything we build. We’re on the right track, but there’s still tons of work left to do.”
Andrew Sinkov, Evernote

Today, over 50 million people use Evernote, it’s integrated into dozens of the best apps, and Apple chose Evernote as a 2013 Apple Design Award winner. Clearly, Evernote did something right since its crisis of faith.

The award-winning Evernote 5

And indeed it has. As the Evernote team mentioned in their blog post about receive the award, they’ve doubled-down on design over the past 18 months, and it’s shown. Their original focus on features was swapped for an obsessive focus on design, one that’s now readily apparent in their work. During that time period, they’ve shipped Evernote 5 for Mac, iOS, and Android, all with a beautiful new design and spiffy performance that makes notetaking fun and productive. It was such a break from Evernote’s old style that it surprised us all, and showed how much Evernote had matured. The redesigned menubar Quick Note tool on the Mac that came a few months later was enough to get me to switch back Evernote after having left it behind years back.

Adding beauty to complexity on iOS

Not just that, but Evernote’s finally been able to pull together some of the loose ends and add features that they’d promised years back, like a better way to handle todos. The new Evernote Reminders is an obvious extension of the service that aims to help you remember everything, and it looks as good as it works. That’s the overriding theme in Evernote’s apps today: they look sharp, work exactly like you’d expect, and are fast enough to make taking and finding notes totally painless. Even with their acquired apps like Skitch, they’ve managed to turn around their lackluster attempts at new versions of the apps, turning them into apps that are still useful on their own or in the greater context of Evernote.

Having so many apps, even, doesn’t seem quite so crazy now, since it gets more useful when you can use your data in more ways. In our world of smartphones and tablets, Evernote finally makes sense where it never really could in the days of XP Tablet Edition. You can collect info from any app you want on your phone, tie together your web services and Evernote through tools like IFTTT, then easily sort through it all on a tablet or desktop. Login from the web, and all of your data is just a click away from any library on earth. Instead of it being painful to pore through all that data, Evernote’s search is accurate and fast enough that you’ll likely find anything you need in seconds even if you don’t faithfully use tags and notebooks. And most of us have found the balance between storing files that go with notes (like PDFs and scans of business cards) in Evernote, and using Dropbox or iCloud when they make more sense.

There was a method to Evernote’s madness, one that, like Apple’s, lands at the intersection of technology and design. Evernote today stores all of our stuff, makes it accessible everywhere, and looks great doing it. Unlike other services that come and go within a couple of years, Evernote is planning to stick around for the next century or longer — and of all startups, it likely has a good chance at doing that if it keeps improving this much over the coming years. It’s good enough now that it’s one app that you should give a second shot if you’ve tried and left it years ago. That’s more than a good enough reason for Apple to finally give their most prestigious recognition to the notebook app that does it all — and actually does quite the good job doing it all now.

It’s been a big week for Apple fans. We’ve got betas of iOS 7 and OS X Mavericks, new iWork web apps and the promise of a new iWork and iLife this fall, the long-rumored iTunes Radio service, MacBook Airs with insanely long battery life … and best of all, a brand-new Mac Pro at long last. Cook, Ive, and the rest of the team have been hard at work cooking up the greatest-and-latest software and devices, and it seems they’ve done quite the good job.

iOS 7 is getting most of the headlines, but I was actually the most excited to see what’s new for the Mac with the next version of OS X. The name was quite the surprise, with Apple switching to location names in California rather than cat names. The feature lineup isn’t too bad, either, with a strong focus on decreasing power consumption, keeping ram free, and making networking simpler (both through AirDrop and with Windows networking). Finder got a long-needed overhaul, finally gaining tabs and tags, while Safari takes the lead again as the fastest and most integrated Mac browser.

But that’s not all. There’s brand new apps – Maps and iBooks – and Notifications have been simplified and improved. Best of all, there’s supposed to be unified notifications with iOS 7 and OS X Mavericks, so you won’t have all your devices ringing with notifications at the same time.

So, from all that, what are you the most excited about? Looking forward to discussing everyone’s favorite parts of the next version of OS X in the comments below!

This nuisance is even more discernible to those who are always engulfed by long-term projects. They land in our task managers and constantly discourage us when we ponder on their duration. Several techniques have been developed to improve our focus, such as the Pomodoro technique; however, some people just can’t be productive through a premeditated method. They demand something else.

And that’s what the new version of our old pal Vitamin-R 2 provides to its users.

What makes you tick?

The new version of Vitamin-R 2 is no revolution. The application wasn’t turned inside out, and it is unlikely that you, if a previous user, has much to adapt to. The new design is very welcome, although still keeping some friction in its usability, appears to have preferred to retain the muscle memory of its previous users.

Welcome to actually getting things done. And a menubar sneak peek.

The philosophy behind Vitamin-R 2 hasn’t changed either, only its focus was enhanced and boosted. As we wrote almost 2 years ago, our brains are more efficient when working on a short-period single task without interruptions. Since we’re always drowned in exhausting projects, we usually carry out random tasks without a pattern or order. By suggesting time slices, Vitamin-R 2 helps us to disassemble our tasks so they become feasible within our time limits and more productive.

Please your brain and get things done

Vitamin-R 2 sits in your menubar, waiting for you to add a goal. After the first one is drafted, it clears the path which could lead you to procrastination. Still, the objectives aren’t like tasks in Vitamin-R 2, in the first you fit the steps, while in the latter you hang the big picture. The span for each of your steps is up to you and as with every achieved objective you move a step forward. There’s always the savor of conquest rather than squeezing ourselves and forcing a poor outcome.

At first, it is an intimidating application, probably with more to set up than you really need (most of the notification just annoyed me). Meanwhile, this is part of Vitamin-R 2′s mission in not providing an alternative, but yet to offer the tools for you to seek your solution.

Keeping your time sliced

Coming up with your goals is the sole part of Vitamin-R 2 that requires slightly more attention. The principle is to jot down what you’re about to do now and stipulate a time period to complete the task. For example, using Vitamin-R to write this article, I add an estimate for each paragraph instead of the “Write the Review” smothered in cobwebs on Things.

Talking about it, you can drag tasks from Things, Omnifocus or The Hit List straight to Vitamin-R 2′s window to create an objective. It even marks the task as done in the referenced application.

Set a specific and reachable objective for your time slice.

In the next step, you’ll be inquired to eliminate your current distractions, your open application can be either hidden or closed. Next, you define the size of your slice. A slider gives you control of the length and allows you to visualize the hour it elapses. You can also use the motivation and resistance meters to find out how the time fits with your current state of mind, and settle if you want a timed or open break before moving towards your next objective.

A quick look at two important panels. Where you set the duration of your slice and where you deal with your distractions.

As you work your goal through, a flood of notifications may draw away your attention and, as most functions, you can remove them in the Preferences. It’s by the moment your time slice ends that Vitamin-R 2 gets interesting. First you can rate your performance, which will be converted into statistics so you can check your results later. If you didn’t complete the action, you may leave breadcrumbs to remember where you to start over or jot down the problem that held you back from fulfilling your objective.

Adding more complexity

Vitamin-R 2 also offers a place where you can toss whatever comes to mind. These are the Pads and are allocated as Now, Later and Scratchpad. You can also change the objective in a fourth panel. All of them are very flexible and the FastType syntax helps to format your thoughts quickly. Still, this is the kind of feature I can’t see myself using due to already having well-established applications to scrawl notes, yet it may be essential if you prefer to keep everything in a single spot.

Another quick look at statistics and the Now & Later Pad.

Don’t be shy to poke around Vitamin-R 2 a bit further, since it also wraps a file with all your latest achievements in a Log Book, which can be exported in CSV, or Statistics, which comprehends plenty of ways to survey your productivity. But the trophy for extra features goes to the sound library Vitamin-R 2 offers, including such noises as white noise or ticking clocks in order to create a pleasant environment for you when external factors sidetrack you.

Customizing your way through

Vitamin-R 2 exceeds in the amount of roles, so much that it could end up choking you. Its assorted windows and sorting options may consume a precious amount of time in terms of productivity. However, try everything out until you find what works for you. It’s exactly the malleability of Vitamin-R 2 that put it above a simple Pomodoro Timer.

Yep, there are even more settings out of frame.

The Preferences allow you to adjust or eliminate any of the tools, for example, I removed all the sound effects and nearly all notifications, also automatized most of the time sliced. Through this same menu, you may reset keyboard shortcuts, customize pads, set the aforementioned integration, sync with Dropbox and configure distractions.

The last time slice

We’re all somewhat unproductive, we just can’t bare to leave that Twitter notification unreplied to. Omnifocus won’t turn you into a productivity guru; that comes down that rather than the creation of new habits to overwhelm your former ones. Being productive is, come what may, a sacrifice, while procrastination forms a vicious cycle. Still discipline itself is not enough without the knowledge of our paths and goals. It’s about learning how to reach our goals.

On that account, despite bringing some discomfort, applications like Vitamin-R 2 are effective in matching up with their sayings. It is not a panacea as well as productivity is not the promised land, regardless of the propaganda. Working altogether with our brains for the sake of our tasks instead of being whipped by deadlines will always be the most effective way to achieve a goal.

Notwithstanding all the meddling you may carry over your shoulder, Vitamin-R 2 is a useful tool if your biggest obstacle is yourself.

However Close.io, from developers Elastic Inc, believes it can change this. In short, it has a simple vision:

Never again should a great company fail because of a lack of sales.

Close.io may not be the cheapest offering on the market (plans start from $59 per user monthly) but if it helps a company keep track of all its sales targets, then I think this is a small price to pay for such a useful service. Let’s dive straight in and see what it has to offer.

Introduction

Close.io comes in both a web version and a desktop version for Mac and Windows. Although the web-based version offers pretty much all the features of the desktop version (apart from calling, which we’ll come onto in a bit), I’d go for the native app (which is completely free) as personally I prefer working from an app rather than my web browser.

The main interface of Close.io.

The main screen of Close.io shows you your sales opportunities for the team and any tasks that need completing. In my example, as you can see in the screenshot above, I’ve got 2 sales opportunities worth potentially $3,500, both of which require a date estimate (as you can see in the blue bar). From the main screen, I can also filter opportunities by assigned user and their status (either In Progress, which splits down into Active and On Hold, Won or Lost).

Filtering your opportunities by status.

Close.io features an in-built notification system which alerts you to new events within the system, such as incoming calls, e-mails, tasks due and missed calls. Adding new sales leads is fairly simple — just click on the New Lead button in the bottom-right hand corner and give it a name.

Adding a new sales lead.

You can enter all the information about the sales lead, such as a contact telephone number, an e-mail address and a postal address. Close.io will also let you assign tasks and possible opportunities to that lead as well — opportunities can be customised by status, confidence (on a sliding scale from 0 – 100%), value, estimated closing date and the sales rep responsible for it.

Calls and Emails

One of the nicest features within Close.io is the ability to call your sales opportunities from directly within the app. With the Professional plan, which costs $99 per user monthly, you get a U.S. based number (mine is in the 650 area code, but you can also set up international numbers if you get in contact with the developers) and unlimited calling minutes, which if you make a lot of international calls can save you a considerable amount on your phone bill.

Calling a contact using the built-in phone function.

With the Enterprise plan (which costs $149 per user monthly) you can also record calls (which are saved within the Close.io system) and forward calls to a different number and route them through a PBX system.

Close.io allows you to choose your own number, along with a few other options (such as call recording and voicemail).

Another fantastic feature within Close.io is the integration of e-mail right into your sales leads. This helps avoid endless folders and flags in your inbox or (in my case) endless Post-It notes stuck around your monitor. The app supports both SMTP and IMAP e-mail systems (I noticed, however, that as of yet there is no native Exchange support, which may be a disappointment to businesses looking to implement this software) and Close.io will automatically import all of your e-mails and associate them with any sales leads already created within the app.

Sending an e-mail to a sales lead within Close.io.

As long as a contact’s email address is set up within Close.io, you can e-mail them directly from the app and all e-mails related to that sales lead will be kept in one place. I found this feature incredibly useful as I (like probably all of us) have wasted plenty of time hunting through my sent messages trying to find that one e-mail (note to self: be more organised). It’s probably worth pointing out here that e-mail is standard on all of the Close.io plans and you can integrate the service with your existing e-mail client — meaning you don’t necessarily have to import all of your e-mails into the app.

Searching Within Close.io

One of Close.io’s most touted features is its smart search function. There are very few apps out there nowadays that allow you to ask what I call “natural questions”, or questions that you would ask another person, but Close.io is one of these. So, instead of putting in weird search requests with loads of operators, booleans and all that malarkey, just ask it what you want to know — the answer will be displayed straight away.

Search results within Close.io.

So, I could ask it questions like:

• Who have I sent e-mails to in the last week who haven’t responded yet?
• Show me leads in California with a 70% or more chance of closing who I haven’t called or e-mailed in the last week.

Close.io will display the results instantly — it’s that smart. For sales teams who don’t want to mess around with complicated search functions, I can see this feature being a real plus to anyone using the service.

Activity Reports

To help keep track of every employee’s activity and individual sales goals, Close.io features a useful activity report which tracks the number of leads (both created and contacted), opportunities (by the number created, won or lost), calls made and e-mails sent and received. The reporting section is very easy to use and if your company works off commission, then the detailed reports can make it extremely easy to calculate.

Activity reports are filtered by user.

Reports can be backdated but one thing I didn’t spot was an export feature — the easiest way I found was to take a screenshot of it for further use. There is also a useful “pipeline” report, showing any upcoming projects and the total number of leads and opportunities, which is extremely useful for project planning.

Conclusion

Close.io may not seem the cheapest piece of software out there on the market but it is certainly one that does its job properly. Although aimed at businesses, I found the interface extremely well designed and a breeze to use, something which I really appreciate as a reviewer. It seems to be that because software is business-orientated, the developers feel the need to slack on the design front, but the developers have kept this in mind and designed a very pretty and functional app.

Yet the one thing I most appreciated about Close.io is that it can find its way into almost every single business activity. Sure, it’s meant for sales departments but it doesn’t matter what you are selling — from aardvarks to zucchinis, the app will help you keep track of all those leads without the need for extra software.

The app gains a solid 9 out of 10 rating for this very reason, and because Close.io is developed by salespeople, the creators really know their stuff and want to mirror their experience in this great little app. Sure, you could probably find a better deal elsewhere, but you’d probably be compensating on a lot of useful features. And if a little piece of software helps you drive up sales targets and gets your product out there more, whilst still helping you keep track of everything from the (dis)comfort of your own office, then I’d say that’s worth paying for.

Read on to find out more.

File Tags

Tabs are now present in Finder – finally.

In a major update to the way files are managed, OS X now includes the ability to tag files. This a core part of the file system and as such, these tags are given their own section of the Finder sidebar and can be searched for within the Finder. As you might expect, multiple tags can be applied to a single file making it a robust alternative to folder based sorting. Tags can be added when saving a new document via the system standard “Save” dialog box. Files in iCloud can also be organized using tags. In addition to adding them when a document is created, tags can be added by dragging a file to a tag in the Finder’s sidebar or by a new option included in finder’s toolbar.

iBooks

iBooks finally has a home on the Mac.

iBooks users no longer need to watch jealously as their Kindle-using counterparts enjoy reading on the Mac with the introduction of the long awaited iBooks for Mac. This is an obvious and natural continuation of Apple’s work to unify their content offerings across devices. Similar to the rest of Apple’s newly updated apps, iBooks does away with its skeuomorphic design in favor of an interface which looks right at home on the Mac, utilizing the Mac’s standard controls. As one might expect, books and reading positions are synced via iCloud. Finally, the Mac now joins the iPad in being able to read books created with iBooks Author which will no doubt be appreciated in classrooms around the world which have deployed Macs instead of iPads.

iCloud Keychain

Imagine an Apple created 1Password clone – that’s iCloud Keychain in a nutshell. Passwords and Credit Card information are securely stored using industry standard AES 256-bit encryption. In addition to storing your passwords, iCloud Keychain will also help you create new ones with a password generator built right in. Of course, as it’s made by Apple, iCloud Keychain has the notable advantage over competitors like 1Password of being integrated in Safari across all their devices.

Maps

Craig Federighi demos Maps for OS X at WWDC 2013.

Despite the debacle created over Apple’s switch away from Google Maps on iOS last year, they appear to be forging forward taking the next logical step in bringing Maps to the Mac. Much like iBooks, this is not unexpected and as such, it works in much the same way as its mobile companion with standard features like real-time traffic, bookmarks, Flyover, and local search. Points of Interest are also complete with addresses, phone numbers, website links, photos — and even Yelp reviews. Maps brings with it a new “Send to iPhone” feature which allows you to plan a trip on your Mac and sent it to your iPhone where you can receive turn-by-turn voice instructions. Developers will also be able to integrate these new maps into their OS X apps with an SDK which will be detailed further during WWDC.

Notifications

When it comes to notifications, Macs have always been second-class citizens compared to iOS. That’s no longer the case with the improvements made to Notifications in OS X Mavericks. Users will now be able to interact with notifications without entering into the corresponding app, this means you’ll be able to respond to messages and emails, as well as FaceTime calls within the notification itself. You’ll also receive a summary of any notifications received while not at your Mac.

Calendar

Calendar features a much-improved UI.

Goodbye leather. Goodbye stitching. The new calendar on the Mac is really much closer to what iCal used to be, which is exactly what most people wanted. Its interface has done away with all of the hated skeuomorphic elements, replacing them with OS X’s built in controls. Notable feature improvements include travel time which automatically calculates the time to get from different appointments, weather forecasts, location auto-complete, and maps which are all housed inside of the app’s improved Inspector. Apple also went more than skin deep in removing Calendar’s limitations inspired by the physical object, implementing continuous scrolling between months and weeks, allow the user to stop anywhere in-between.

Safari

Compared to the other apps which are receiving updates as part of OS X Mavericks, Safari’s improvements are minor – on the surface at least. “Top Sites” has been redesigned with a nod to Apple’s new flat design trend and the ability to add sites from your bookmarks. There’s also a sidebar which lets you see your bookmarks, Reading List, or Shared Links from your Twitter or LinkedIn friends alongside the page you’re currently on. Thanks to the new Nitro Tiered JIT and Fast Start technologies, browsing in Safari will also be noticeably faster. There’s also plenty of new power saving secret sauce which Apple promises will help deliver long battery life on new and older machines alike.

Multiple Displays

In a nod to their power-users, Apple improved OS X’s handling of Multiple Displays exponentially with Menu Bars and the Dock displayed across all your displays and Full-Screen Apps which don’t impact the content of other displays. In addition to wired displays, Apple now supports using AirPlay and Apple TV to wirelessly turn your HDTV into a fully functional additional display. Much like iCloud Keychain obsoletes 1Password for most users, so does multiple display to AirParrot.

OS X Server

In another nod to OS X’s power users, OS X Sever has gained a few notable improvements. OS X Sever users can expect new, and as of yet, unspecified features in Xcode Server which will allow greater collaboration within development teams. This is another area which Apple will likely elaborate on as WWDC continues. Caching Server 2 has also been updated including speed improvements for the download and delivery of software through the App Store, Mac App Store, and iTunes Store. It can also now cache on your server for faster downloading to iOS 7 devices.

Other Improvements

The default Desktop on OS X Mavericks

Finder Tabs – Finder can now take its rightful place as the best file manager of 2005 with the inclusion of tabs. Seriously, this has been a long time coming. They work just like tabs in your web browser; nothing special here, but appreciated nonetheless.

Energy Saving – During the keynote Apple executives made a big fuss over the energy saving technologies built into OS X Mavericks. The behind the scenes technology here is pretty complicated, but the increase in battery life should be noticeable.

Performance Enhancements – OS X Mavericks has also received many behind-the-scenes performance enhancements which should speed up just about any Mac. These include Compressed Memory and Safari Power saver which increase performance system wide.

Desktop Backgrounds – Like any new operating system release, OS X Mavericks includes a pretty cool new default Desktop Background, supposedly taken at Mavericks in California.

Conclusion

OS X Mavericks will be released sometime this Fall.

Small additions like iBooks and Maps coupled with game-changing ones like the inclusion of tags in the Finder, make OS X Mavericks the biggest update to OS X since Lion. Whether it’s due to new features or simply performance enhancements, most users will find something to get excited about in OS X Mavericks. And although we haven’t yet had a chance to get our hands on a preview copy of the OS, OS X Mavericks should pan out to be a must-have upgrade when it’s released this fall. Or, if you’re a Mac developer and can’t wait to get your hands on it, you can download the beta today.

One of the other great features of ADN lies in its storage capabilities. Each free account gets 500MB of storage with a 10MB file-size limit, while each paid account gets 10GB of storage with a 100MB file-size limit. I think that even the free account’s offering is really generous. Combine ADN’s open API with its storage capabilities, and you end up with ingenious little Mac gems like Swing.

What Is Swing?

Swing is an app that lives in your Mac’s menubar. Click and drag a file onto it and Swing will upload it to ADN and copy the file’s URL for sharing directly to your clipboard. Because it sits in your ADN storage, you get access to all 10GB (or 500MB) of storage in your account. It’s important to note that this is more like Droplr than it is Dropbox; you can’t gain access to all of the files stored in your ADN account, but you can upload to it.

This is how Swing looks. Clean and simple.

Furthermore, you can share your uploaded file anywhere. The link isn’t married to App.net. If you want to share a file with a colleague, but don’t want to worry about attaching it in an email, you can just click and drag the file onto Swing and then paste the resulting URL straight into the email. (Again, people who use Droplr or CloudApp will already be familiar with this mechanism.)

You might be wondering why you would want to use Swing, then, over Droplr or CloudApp if you already use either of those services. To put it bluntly, ADN’s Terms of Service protect your documents. They don’t own them and they aren’t going to do anything with them. Droplr and CloudApp don’t function in quite the same manner. The bottom line is simple: When it comes to protecting your data, Swing and App.net offer you more peace of mind.

Some Details About That URL

Swing’s URLs are public, but because of their complete and utter complexity, it’s highly unlikely that anybody could find it unless you shared it with them. Let me give you an example. I’ve uploaded a résumé of mine (a .doc file) and Swing returned the following URL to me: https://files.app.net/1/99636/a49coEC8pqbln0EldoiwwYTH2bzL37uaHYaQJuvPDCoPgyOzuNishRDhZBxyTHgq_CUZKx9dlFu61iGZIBKKzsR2bKNPvFo3n1BGdKkUuGwXMYZz1jAGP3MUbphDfdBmOxjR-tV1IrkkekOZFhuJ6_fkfoq4RqcjcOUQGVWfzW_A3X_hyvfh4l-dK-mq2fqZC

Try guessing that one.

Yes.

Swing does offer a handy URL shortener though. Their variation on it is swng.it, which is actually kind of catchy. When you enable it, it will quickly check to see if you’ve uploaded any documents with Swing already and ask if you’d like their URLs shortened. I said I would, and now my résumé is accessible via this URL instead: http://swng.it/HHyFx

What Design Details Make Swing Better Than the Competition?

Swing also presents a list of all the files you’ve copied to the clipboard, which is labelled All Swings. From there, you can choose to copy the URL for an older file, or you can delete files you’ve uploaded with Swing. Swing doesn’t provide access to every file you’ve ever uploaded to ADN (if you’re looking for that, give FileBase a try), but it does give access to every file you’ve ever uploaded to it.

As this list grows, it becomes more useful as a reference tool.

In a smart move, if you have two Macs, Swing keeps track of all your uploaded files on both Macs. It’s not Mac-dependent, so if you use a Mac at work and a Mac at home you’re good to go. And because it’s sold on the Mac App Store, purchasing Swing and keeping it updated on both Macs is always easy.

There are a couple other nifty features. You can set up a keyboard shortcut to upload anything on your clipboard to Swing. If I was to copy the text in this document and then hit a defined keyboard combination of my own choosing, I’d upload all of the text onto Swing for easy sharing. This would also apply to anything like copying a picture from Google Image Search.

The preferences aren’t loaded with a million features, but what they do offer is really useful.

Finally, uploading a folder with Swing is great because Swing automatically compresses the folder to a .zip. Your folder is still easily opened on any computer, but it takes up a lot less space in your ADN storage.

Room for Improvement

There are some other really handy features in the app, but not all of these features are implemented perfectly right off the bat. For example, Swing allows you to automatically upload any screenshots you take with your Mac for sharing. There’s a lot of potential for this, and it generally works. That being said, there is a huge flaw. If you’re a power user and you have an app that automatically renames or reorganizes screenshots as you take them, Swing won’t recognize them and they’ll fail to automatically upload. The developer is working on a fix, and I don’t think this is going to be a permanent issue (nor should it deter you from picking up the app).

Multiple accounts are supported and easy to set up, but it’s not as easy to switch accounts.

There is one other change I’d like to see in the app. Swing supports multiple ADN accounts, which I think is fantastic. But if you want to switch accounts, you have to open Swing’s Preferences menu and double-click on the account you’d like to use. Ideally, I’d like to be able to click on an account’s avatar in Swing’s menu bar or set a user-defined keyboard shortcut to cycle through accounts. I know this won’t apply to anybody (how many people have more than one account for ADN?), but for those of us that do, it’s a big feature.

Become a Swingster

The guys behind Swing affectionately call the people who use their app “Swingsters.” I have no problem heartily recommending you join our ranks. I’ve been using Swing for the past week and think it’s another fantastic example of the possibilities with App.net. If you’re on ADN, you need to Swing.

Just in time for WWDC, we’ve got a must-have tool for all developers sponsoring us this week: Dash. It’ll make your life easier by keeping all of the documentation you need right at your fingertips. Dash supports 80+ API documentation sets, ranging from Cocoa and Android to HTML and CSS, so regardless of what language or framework you’re using, Dash has you covered.

Alongside the beautifully crafted documentation sets, you’re also able to store your own snippets of code, with snippet expansion and variable placeholders that bring unparalleled flexibility to your code snippets. This combination of documentation and snippets makes Dash the go-to app for all your programming resources needs.

Dash integrates with your favorite IDEs and apps, from Sublime Text and Xcode to Alfred and Vim, so that you can convenientely search for what you need from wherever you want. Regardless of what your current workflow is, it should be easy to integrate Dash into it.

You can also easily generate your own documentation sets for your own projects. Pre-made generation tools are available for Objective-C, Python, Ruby or Java, as well as instructions on how to generate documentation sets for anything you need. Documentation sets generated by popular tools like Doxygen or Appledoc are also supported, as well as all the documentation sets available at CocoaDocs.

Get Your Copy of Dash Today!

Dash usually costs $19.99, but just for WWDC it’s on sale for just $7.99 this week. You can download Dash for free from the App Store to try it out, then purchase the full version for $7.99 this week only as an in-app purchase. That’s a small price to pay for the time it’ll save you in developing your next hit app!

There are three ways you can follow the event:

1. Our ScribbleLive blog, manned by Mark Myerson, which will automatically update, and you can provide your own thoughts and comments in the live stream.
2. Our Twitter accounts, @macappstorm and @ipadappstorm (both manned by James Cull). All our tweets will be marked with the hashtag #appstormwwdc — please feel free to use this for thoughts and comments so we can see them.
3. Our App.net accounts, @macappstorm and @ipadappstorm (both manned by Jordan Merrick). Again, please use the hashtag #appstormwwdc for any thoughts and comments.

We’ll start at 5:30 PM (GMT) so see you there!

Reading apps, unfortunately, haven’t gotten much attention at all. Yes, there’s a number of apps for reading articles later on your Mac, some of which are even very nice (I’m particularly fond of the new ReadKit). But, sadly, none of them are totally new. They’re not changing the way we read on the Mac, the way iA Writer and Folding Text and others have changed the way we write on the Mac.

This weekend, that’s just changed with the brand-new beta app Slicereader. Designed by Mutahhir Ali Hayat, a programmer at Hog Bay Software that works on FoldingText and Oak Outliner, Slicereader is the most innovative reading app on the Mac yet. It’ll change how you read longform text. Here’s why.

Chopping up Your Text Into Tiny, Readable Bytes

No matter what reading app you’re using, it’s easy to lose where you’re at in your text. Inevetibly something else will grab your attention, and when you come back to what you’re reading you’ll have to re-read for a bit to find where you left off. There’s also the problem of a wall of text making it difficult to get started reading in the first place.

Writing apps have already worked on solving this, and Slicereader does the same for reading — albeit with tweaks that make the most sense for a reading app. At first glance, Slicereader looks much like any focused writing app, with a light background, dark grey large typography, and nothing else. It shares more simularity with iA Writer than any other app, since it has zero settings, a built-in font (the suprisingly elegant Linux Libertine), and hard-set font size, color, and line width.

Poke around a bit, and you’ll notice that it only shows one paragraph at a time, and lets you move between paragraphs with your arrow keys, a two-finger swipe, or your spacebar. Top that off with a circle graph of how much you’ve read in the bottom right corner, and you’ve got the simplest reading app for the Mac yet.

Slicereader makes it easy to read, no matter how much text you’re reading. You’ll be able to focus on each paragraph, one at a time, and can move between them in any way you want. The first character of each sentence after the first is darker, as a small aid to help you find the sentence you’re reading. And rather than a daunting page or word count, the small graph gives you a quick way to see where you are in your article without the data overload other metrics can give. Best of all, it looks sharp.

It’s slightly reminscent of the iPhone app Fish, a short book that led you through its inspirational and thought provoking sentences one at a time. Applying a similar idea to anything you want to read, though, is a nice leap forward.

Adding Your Reading Material

It’ll take a tiny bit of work to get your articles into Slicereader. You’ll need to first copy the text you want to read, perhaps from an article in your browser, then press CMD+N in Slicereader and paste in your text. You can add the title in the top field, or Slicereader can just show the first line in your text as the tile — an option that’ll work great if you copied a full article from your browser. Alternately, you can drag-and-drop any plain text file into Slicereader to import it to your reading list. This is a great way to import, say, books from Project Gutenberg, or to proofread your own writings before publishing them.

Or, there’s one other way you can add your articles: through your OS X Services menu. You’ll first need to open your Keyboard Preferences and enable the Slicereader service under Services -> Text. Then, just select the text in any app that you’d like to add to Slicereader, right-click or click the app menu and select Services, then Read in Slicereader. Or, just press Shift+CMD+R to send the text to Slicereader from any app, once you’ve endabled the service

Switching between your articles is simple — and you won’t ever lose your reading position. Just press CMD+L and select the article you want to read, or search for the article by its title. You’ll see the now-familar graph of your reading progress on each article, and can even edit the article’s title or text from the list. When you open the article, it’ll open right at the same paragraph you were at when you stopped reading last time so you can pick up where you left off.

Going forward, Mutahhir told me he plans to first add a bookmarklet to let you add articles directly to Slicereader, as well as potentially adding integration with Safari’s Reading List and/or other reading services. For now, though, a quick copy/paste into Slicereader isn’t way too difficult.

A Beta You Should Try

Slicereader, as mentioned already, was just released as an early beta over this weekend, so it’s not finished yet. There’s a few tiny bugs, but none that impact the way the app works overall. It’s fast, feels smooth, and definitely gives you the nicest reading experience I’ve ever had on the Mac.

It’s opinionated software — something designed specifically for one use case — and that’s where the best results typically come from. It doesn’t try to do everything, but instead tries specifically to make reading longform text better, and that’s awesome. As mentioned already, it’s great for proofreading your own writing — something I’m already using it for — and it’s equally great as your own native Mac replacement for Instapaper.

Go try it out, and you just might fall in love with it too.

There’s no need to wait, though, if you’re wanting a top-quality streaming music experience on your Mac today. There’s tons out there — even Google’s jumped into the fray now — but one of the best, Rdio, just got a major update to its apps this past week. It’s got a nicer design, has great new social integration that actually makes sense by letting you keep up with what’s popular among your friends. And it’s got a great music selection.

Our writer Nathan Snelgrove takes the redesigned Rdio for a spin over on Web.AppStorm, so jump over to the article there to see what’s great in the newest version of one of the best streaming music services online today.

Continue Reading at Web.AppStorm…

The Sparrow-shaped gap on the App Store has yet to be filled. There’s tons of promises of new email apps, but few have made it onto the scene yet — at least on the Mac. There’s the old standby alternates like Outlook and Postbox, but they don’t replace the minimalist approach to email that Sparrow embraced. The iPhone can claim Mailbox, Triage, and numerous other new email apps, but on the Mac, most Sparrow fans have stuck with the aging app, while others have taken a look back at Apple’s admittedly nice Mail.app.

That’s changed this week, though, as Airmail was released to the App Store. We’d taken a look at it months back when it was still in beta, but now that it’s fully released, can it replace Sparrow for diehard fans?

A Slick, Custom-Designed Email App

Airmail, at first glance, seems incredibly similar to Sparrow. Depending on how you have it setup, it’ll look almost exactly like Sparrow. You’ve got large icons on the left for your inbox, starred messages, and to switch between accounts, a middle column with your messages, and your email on the right. Each column can be turned on or off as needed. There’s scroll-down-to-refresh, Tweetie-like, search, conversation view with the older emails stacked in a thin row under the main message. It’s slick and modern, and would definitely seem to be the closest Sparrow copy we’ve seen yet.

It doesn’t stop there, though. Airmail offers far more customization than Sparrow. You can see all of your folders/tags on the expanded sidebar, and in a very nice touch, you can even see all of the folders on all of your accounts when you’re in the Unified Inbox view. You can browse through emails either with your arrow keys or with Gmail keyboard shortcuts, and can choose if you want to delete or archive with the delete key. Right-click, and you’ll get options to add tags to a message or file it away in a folder — slightly confusing since it shows both tags and folders on Gmail accounts, despite the fact that Gmail doesn’t support folders and other email services don’t support tags.

Sparrow fans will be glad to see that there is a Quick Reply option, albeit one that works as a pop-over and is opened by pressing CMD-E. It works fine for sending quick replies, but frustratingly there’s no way to expand the quick reply box into the full reply view to add more info.

Speaking of the compose view, there’s everything you’d expect there, from formatting options to drag-and-drop attachment support. Airmail supports sending attachments via Dropbox and soon Droplr in an upcoming update, so you can that from the settings if you prefer to not send attachments directly through email.

And speaking of settings, Airmail has plenty of them. You’ll find settings to change the app’s theme, set how often it checks for mail, add signatures (and remove the default Sent from Airmail signature), and more. One of its nicest touches is in the mail account settings, where you can set it to only download emails from the past year, 2 years, 3 years, or forever — something that might make switching a tad easier if you don’t need everything downloaded from your full Gmail account.

It Still Feels Pre-Release

Airmail’s combination of style and features would actually be nearly perfect if you’re willing to tweak things a bit and deal with a plethora of settings. The only problem is, everything doesn’t work quite right. Airmail works great when it works, but it failed far too often in our tests to make the cut. It’ll often take 10+ seconds to show emails when you first open the app, even those that are already downloaded and were visible the last time the app was opened. Sending an email was hit or miss, some taking minutes after hitting send to get actually sent, when Sparrow and Mail.app were sending messages nearly instantly on the same internet connection. Incoming messages, as well, would at times show up instantly, while other times show up long after Mail.app and Sparrow had received the messages. Push notifications alerting us of said messages came in even later.

Then, there’s a number of smaller oddities in the app. Buttons often don’t register a tap at first, and folders take several seconds to show their contents. Worst of all is the animation when you open a new message. It’s jarring and frustrating, though thankfully the developer has mentioned on Twitter that this should be changed in the future.

Conclusion

Airmail has many nice things. It follow’s Sparrow and other modern Mac app’s style, and includes enough unique features like the option to only download messages sent within the last year that set it apart. It’s customizable to a degree that few apps are, has Gmail keyboard shortcuts and a Quick Reply option. Go down the list of what makes Sparrow great, and you’d almost think it could be the perfect replacement for it, if it could just get its bugs and performance problems squashed.

That’s not the only problem, though. The main problem with Airmail is that it tries too hard to be too many things. It’s so close to Sparrow’s style, it was quite obviously built to fill the gap Sparrow left in the market. But Sparrow thrived on being simple and making it easy to get a first-class Gmail experience on the Mac. Airmail, with its myriad preferences and unwieldily menus, falls far short of that. It offers no clear advantage over the current version of Sparrow — one that still works faster than Airmail today — and would give you little reason to choose it over Apple’s own Mail.app if you want to tweak an email app to your preferences.

Airmail could be great, but it needs to find its identity. Sparrow’s great, but we need someone to push email forward and take it beyond what we’d expect today. On the Mac, there’s still no app doing that. Airmail could do that, but it needs far more than it has today. It looks nice, but it need more than that.

Even when using an iMac, data security is vital to keep sensitive information private. Using Filevault for encryption is one way to go, but it encrypts the entire drive. If you plan to secure only certain folders, you’ll have to look at third party alternatives. And there are quite a few free and premium apps that help solve this problem.

I’m a vocal advocate of TrueCrypt, yet, I found Espionage’s offering very interesting. Is it as good at securing my Mac and simple to use as they promise? Time to check it out!

Why Espionage?

Since our last review in 2009, Espionage has gone through many changes including a complete rewrite. I started using TrueCrypt to secure my portable drives and I’m a big fan of the app. It’s open source and is cross platform. I juggle between a Mac and PC, so a cross platform encryption app made a lot of sense.

There are a few downsides to using an app like TrueCrypt though. It’s definitely not the prettiest app around and the workflow can be a bit cumbersome. Beginners and casual users might find the steps involved to be confusing at times. That’s when apps like Espionage comes in to make our lives easy.

Espionage combines the ease of use and elegance Mac apps are known for. If a Mac is your primary computer and if you are looking for an app to simplify the process of securing files and folders, Espionage is what you need. It hardly needs any ground work or heavy lifting from your end. A quick drag and drop is all that you need to do to secure your content.

The Process

As you might know, the journey to encryption universe begins with the creation of a master password. Make sure it’s strong with a combination alphanumerics and special characters for obvious reasons. If you are in doubt, the app has a password strength indicator and warns you when the password you have chosen isn’t secure enough.

Getting Started

Not having to deal with the creation of secure containers and stuff is a big relief for me. Nothing beats a simple drag and drop. The app sits on the menu bar and the encryption process starts as soon as you drop a folder. As you might be aware, the duration of an encryption depends on the volume of data and the processing power of the system. During my trials, I found it to be pretty decent.

Announcing the various stages of the encryption process as and when they happen is a nice touch. At the end of the encryption, the folder and the files located in the drive are moved to the trash. You’re alerted to this fact with a detailed growl style notification.

Accessing Files

An Encrypted Folder with the Toggle Button

Predictably, the files and folders secured by Espionage won’t be visible in the finder. You can quickly access encrypted files by way of a quick toggle action. To manage the settings of individual files and folders, click on the info icon right next to them. Again, a fabulous GUI works wonders when it comes to tackling otherwise complex actions.

In a single click, spotlight accessibility to files and folders can be managed. Enabling spotlight access will result in secured files showing up in search results. So, you might want to think twice before opting for it.

Actions Menu

Are you a forgetful person? Then use the timer feature to auto lock folders after a preset duration. The fine grained nature of the auto lock settings is an example of the extent to which Espionage has simplified securing data.

For the paranoid amongst us, the ability to set and use multiple master passwords should help rest easy if and when the unlikely event of forced disclosure at gunpoint occurs!

Final Thoughts

I simply love Espionage. It’s simple, affordable and does a fabulous job of taking the pain out of securing private data. The elegantly designed user interface plays a great deal in making Espionage such a pleasure to use.

The use of the fairly standard info icon for accessing the advanced features section is an interesting design decision though. For me atleast, it appeared to be another useless shortcut for help section or a tip. Replacing it with a new icon that actually evokes curiosity would be great.

I am in the process of moving data from a couple of my computers around and as soon as that’s done, I’m gonna entrust the task of protecting my files to Espionage!

Sure, they’re both widely successful, and the App Store especially has change the way we approach buying apps. But the App Store has also made it tough for developers to make upgraded versions of apps economically feasible, leading them to add in-app purchases for new features, or add their own subscription-based services to make money. Of the two, though, iCloud has been the most problematic, leading developers like The Soulmen to have to rewrite major parts of iCloud sync code to get it to work in their apps (Ulysses III, in this case).

We’re all hoping Apple significantly improves iCloud this year, and perhaps there’ll be major announcements about both it and the App Store next week. But there’s also alternates now. Aside from just relying on Dropbox for sync, the Omni Group has built their own iCloud competitor, OmniPresence, and Paddle is making it simpler for indie devs to sell their own apps with in-app purchases, outside of the App Store.

In-App Syncing on Your Own Cloud

Dropbox made syncing folders simple, and we all got used to that. But its model breaks down on iOS, because there’s not a user-accessible file system. You have to go back and forth between, say, the Dropbox app and the app with the file you’re editing, leaving duplicate files in between. iCloud “solved” this issue by syncing files directly between apps, leaving traditional folder systems behind.

But that’s old news for most of us. iCloud is great — magical, even — when it works, but more and more developers have come out saying how trying it’s been to make iCloud work for them. But who wants to leave behind something so promising that every customer assumes will “just work”?

The Omni team has been working on their own solution: OmniPresence. When it’s running in an iOS app and on OS X, changes will be pushed between apps just like iCloud promised. Your files will stay in syn thanks to Omni’s own sync server, or you can run the sync service on your own server — goodbye cloud lock-in. You can even add any folder on your computer to OmniPresence, something that’s not possible with either Dropbox or iCloud.

Here’s OmniPressence in action:

It’s designed to work great with multi-file documents — the exact type that The Soulmen found troublesome in iCloud. It’ll sync the changes, not the whole file each time, so your data will sync faster and changes will appear on all of your devices far faster than with other services. It’s what iCloud promised, on your own cloud.

Your own personal non-Dropbox

You can start using it today on your Mac to keep your own documents in sync sans iCloud or Dropbox, and it’s already integrated with the Omni Group’s iOS apps. Going forward, developers can add OmniPresence support to their own apps using Omni’s opensouce framework. It might not be so useful for you just yet, unless you use any of the Omni apps in your workflow, but it’s promising as another option for app syncing going forward.

Selling Apps Doesn’t Have to be so Hard, Either

Aside from iCloud, the App Store made it simple to sale your apps for OS X. Everyone from big companies like Adobe, AutoCAD, and Apple itself all the way down to the one-developer startups have equal footing (or nearly so) on the biggest software marketplace on the globe. It’s made it easier for new Mac users to discover great apps, and even long-time Mac users have come to love the unified updates and simple purchase and installation the App Store brings.

But it’s not perfect. Apple can be slow at reviewing apps, fussy about what you include, and it takes 30% of your sale price off the top. All of those add up to make it a rather frustrating place for developers. That’s where Paddle for Developers comes in, with an alternate to the App Store — one that might be even more appealing if you’re not using iCloud to sync your app’s documents anyhow. Paddle gives devs an API to easily add in-app purchases to their apps with just 2 lines of code. With that done, users can download your app’s trial, then buy a copy inside the app in a few clicks. That’ll only cost you 5% of your sale price plus $0.55 per transaction — pricing that works out cheaper than the App Store’s 30% cut if your app costs anything over $2.

For the rest of us, there’s already a ton of apps in Paddle’s burgeoning store. You’ll find popular apps that we love, such as Boom, Hype, Voila, Ondesoft’s tools,  and more. If you’re looking for a place to find deals on apps — or just a central place to apps that aren’t in the App Store — it’s a great place to check. Plus, everything’s a trial by default. Unlike the App Store, you won’t have to buy right off the bat.

Don’t Count Apple Out

Of course, neither of these solutions replace the App Store and iCloud. Together, they’re a powerful duo — one we only wish was a bit more developer friendly. Apple will almost assuredly continue improving both of them going forward, and we’ll be watching closely to see what’s announced at WWDC. It’s still good, though, that there’s competition that’s taking these two platforms on directly. That’s never a bad thing.

So, if you’re a developer, here’s two services you should consider if you’re tired of working around Apple’s solutions. And for the rest of us, expect to see both of these pop up in apps you’re trying out soon.

But Adobe’s not the only one making a subscription play this year. Microsoft’s now doing the same thing with Office 365, and Autocad, Mathematica, and other major developers have done the same for years. The difference is, Adobe’s making a subscription-only play: individual purchases are no more, and subscription is the only option.

That doesn’t have to be such a bad option, though. Here’s why.

Economics at Play

It’s a brave new world for software

Think back to the days before the App Store, before we all expected to get full-featured software for less than $10. Go back a bit further, when we purchased software on DVDs, or CDs, or (even further back) on floppies. That’s when Adobe — and Microsoft — got their start in the software business. They made software, burned it onto disks, sold it in boxes in computer stores, then in a year or two made a new version and sold it as an upgrade. Rinse. Repeat.

Now, we expect to be able to download all of our apps on all of our devices, get updates frequently, and want all of it as cheaply as possible. Somehow, a $2,599 suite of software sold in a box set or as a monolithic download doesn’t quite fit that model.

Apple adapted by slashing the prices of its pro apps and putting them in the App Store. Microsoft, even after building their own App Store in Windows, decided to do the same thing Adobe did last year: selling Office in a boxed suite as before, right alongside a new subscription offering. And Adobe, now, a year after rolling out the subscription Creative Cloud, dropped their boxed offerings and went subscription only. They’re still selling CS6, but that’s the old version now, and anything new is going in the subscription versions only.

Subscriptions are nothing new. Microsoft’s corporate customers have bought Software Assurance subscriptions for all of their software for years. Many corporate software licenses have worked off subscriptions for quite some time. But for consumers, we’re used to paying upfront for our software — and increasingly, we’re used to having dirt-cheap upfront prices.

The new model: free apps, plus paid monthly services

That’s not bad, per se, but it can be hard to build a sustainable business on $9.99 apps (ask Sparrow). Many service-based apps like Evernote and Dropbox already cost $5-$10/month, as do web apps like, say, Dribbble Pro, App.net, 500px, and more. Others like Byword 2 are selling cheap on the App Store, but adding new features as in-app purchases. Everyone’s having to find some way to make the App Store economics work for them so they can still build a sustainable business.

Adobe and Microsoft are following suite, making their pro tools equally cheap … per month. And hey, if we’ll pay it for web apps and storage, why not for productivity tools?

Apps and More

What’s made the change more confusing is that Adobe and Microsoft have both made their switch to subscriptions sound like they’re switching to web apps. That’s not the case at all. Microsoft does have a nice basic version of Office online, and Adobe has a basic Photoshop photo editor online, but both of those are free. That’s not what Office 365 or Creative Cloud, respectively, are at all. There’s really no reason either of them are using “the cloud” in their branding, except that people are already more willing, apparently, to pay for web apps, and then each subscription gives you included “cloud” storage.

Instead, with both of them, you get the latest versions of the traditional apps you install on your computer, just like you would have before with Office and Creative Suite. Nothing changes there. The only difference is, you’re paying per month rather than all upfront, and you’ll get some extras bundled in for free. Your computer will have to be online at least once every 1-3 months so the apps can verify that your subscription is valid — but then, you’ll likely be online anyhow.

And here’s what you’ll get with each subscription:

Office 365 brings you every Office app available — Word, PowerPoint, Excel, and Outlook on the Mac, with the addition of Access and Publisher on the PC — and lets you install it on up to 5 PCs or Macs. You’ll also get 20Gb of storage in Skydrive (which could possibly keep you from needing to pay for Dropbox Pro), and 60 minutes of Skype calls each month. That’ll cost you $9.99/month.

Creative Cloud brings you every single Adobe app (so essentially the same as Master Collection) for up to 2 Macs or PCs. You’ll also get a Typekit Portfolio plan (worth $49/yr), which will also let you download extra fonts to your desktop soon (which I’m terribly excited about). Creative Cloud gives you a Behance Prosite (worth $99/yr), 20Gb of cloud storage for your creative files, and more. All of that, for $49.99/month.

Is it a Bad Deal?

You get everything. Literally.

Now, the prices will feel different to everyone. Office 365 is perhaps the simplest, since it’s rather cheap to begin with, and if you need to use Office on 5 computers anyhow it works out very cheap. Compared to the boxed Office options — which now only allow you to install a purchased copy of Office on one Mac or PC per purchase — it definitely makes more sense if you need Office. You could question whether you absolutely need Office today, but for it’s one of those suites that most people are rather required to use.

Creative Cloud is a bit different. First, $50/month is expensive, but several thousand dollars upfront for Creative Suite was even more expensive — at least at first. If you’re just getting started with Adobe’s apps, you’ll find the new pricing much more manageable. It’s existing users who’re complaining, since upgrades did often work out cheaper. Plus, many of us got started with cheaper initial purchases of Creative Suite with education discounts, then cheaply upgraded from there.

Price of Creative Suite and Photoshop CC over time, versus Master Collection or Photoshop + upgrade price over time

If you run the math from starting from scratch with Master Collection and Creative Cloud, Creative Cloud will continue to work out cheaper for over 25 years if you’d have purchased upgrades anyhow. If you’d have purchased one of the cheaper suites such as Design Standard, though, Creative Cloud will start costing more per year after 4-5 years. Throw in the extras like Typekit, though, and you might find it makes more sense.

Right now, there’s a number of discounts available, and if you own CS6, you can upgrade to Creative Cloud for just $19.99/month, or $29.99/month if you owned an older Creative Suite. That pricing is just for the first year, but it definitely makes switching cheaper. And, it’s tough to say if they’ll have discounts going forward, but it’s at least possible. And don’t forget: you’ve got every Adobe app, not just the ones in the suite you used to buy.

There’s also one other option: single app subscriptions, which run from $9.99-$19.99/month. If you only need Photoshop, that’s the way to go.

Why Switch?

Now everyone has a cloud.

At the end of the day, the pricing for Microsoft and Adobe’s subscriptions either works out better, or only slightly worse over time. They’ve both thrown in extras to sweeten the deal, and made subscriptions at least a bit more generous in licensing.

If you would have upgraded to the latest Creative Suite anyhow, there’s no reason to avoid Creative Cloud. You’re just paying each month instead of upfront. Adobe’s already added new features to their Creative Cloud apps over the past year (such as CSS export in Photoshop), and they’ve got a slew of upgrades coming in a couple weeks with the new CC launch. There’s no reason to think Adobe will stop innovating on their apps now; if anything, they’re doing more with this release than they did in CS6. It just takes a change of mindset for us as consumers, one that’d perhaps be a bit easier if the pricing was more in our favor.

But again: the new pricing is far, far better for people just getting started. It’s those of us who already put our bet with Adobe that are finding the new pricing tough to swallow, since we were used to upgrade pricing. If you were waiting on buying Photoshop since it was so expensive upfront, now it’s much easier to justify getting it.

The End of Pirates?

Among the oddest and greatest complaints about Creative Cloud is that people won’t be able to pirate Photoshop anymore. Numerous professionals have written posts about how they got started using pirated Photoshop as a kid, and how that got them their current jobs using licensed Adobe apps (one of many examples here). They theorize that Creative Cloud will make it harder to pirate Photoshop and other Adobe tools, and thus will lead to less people learning how to use it professionally, leading to the end of Photoshop’s ubiquity.

Right. First off, odds are Photoshop and other Adobe apps will still be cracked and pirated. That’s not endorsing it, it’s simply a fact. Even with Creative Cloud, you’ll still have to download and install the apps, as already mentioned. That’s the same way Photoshop works today, and chances are that if the current version (which already phones home to make sure its valid every so often) can be cracked, then the Creative Cloud version will be crackable.

Then, if anything, Creative Cloud makes Photoshop and other Adobe apps more affordable to students and others on tight incomes. Anyone now can use Photoshop itself, now, for $19.99/month (and students can get full Creative Cloud for $19.99/month). That’s a far cry more affordable than paying $700 upfront. There’s also Adobe’s own Photoshop Elements for $79 — and yes, a one-time payment for a perpetual license — which is one of the best alternates to full Photoshop since it works so much like its full-featured sibling.

So don’t worry. I’d tend to say that Photoshop has the same odds of staying the industry leader — and choice of pirates, for better or worse — despite the move to Creative Cloud. And the very same goes for Microsoft Office — though if anything, Office is more threatened by alternate apps these days than Adobe’s apps have ever been.

The Subscription Decision

Should you subscribe to Creative Cloud, or Office 365? Really, the decision is the same one you’ve made every time you’ve purchased a Creative Cloud or Microsoft Office upgrade. You’ll have to weigh the new features, see if they’re worth it for you, then decide to either stick with what you have or upgrade.

If you would have upgraded to the latest Creative Suite anyhow, there’s no reason to avoid Creative Cloud.

Office 365, of course, isn’t quite the compelling option for Mac users yet since it’s still stuck on Office 2011. If you need to buy Office today, then it’s a great deal since you’ll get the next version of Office when it’s released. Otherwise, you’d be best to hold off until the next version of Office for Mac is released, and then subscribe if you want to upgrade.

Creative Cloud, on the other hand, has already added new features to CS6, and is a worthy upgrade even before the new CC suite apps are released on June 17th. If you would have upgraded to CS7 anyhow, you might as well take advantage of the upgrade offers right now and give Creative Cloud a shot.

Either way, the switch to subscriptions shouldn’t be the biggest news about both of these suites. In Creative Cloud’s case, at least, it’s a better deal for most users, and it makes using Adobe’s pro apps much more approachable for those getting started.

And in an odd twist, Office 365 and Creative Cloud both make it easier for PC users to switch to the Mac. It used to be that Office and Creative Suite were the most expensive PC apps people would need to re-buy if they switched to the Mac. Now, both Office 365 and CC give you PC and Mac versions of the apps in your subscription, so it’ll cost PC users nothing to switch — or to add a Mac to their PC workflow. That’s a pretty nice extra in itself.

But should you be scared of subscriptions? Only if you’re scared of paying for software. It really, in the end, won’t work out much different than buying software and then paying for upgrades. And you might just get some nice extras with it, too.

Let’s see if Leviathan: Warships indeed lives up to its hype.

All Aboard!

There are two ways to play Leviathan: Warships, online and offline. Online and offline play are really similar, and you won’t need an account for offline play, but you will be missing out if you don’t venture into the deep waters of the online battles. If you’re shy your first time out, there’s a great tutorial that will run you through how to manage a ship.

You’ll get a mission brief and objective, but you’ll do alright as long as you remember to blow up the other guys.

Leviathan: Warships is a turn-based strategy game, but you know, with ships. You’ll control your ship’s forward and reverse movement, its orientation, and how and when it fires. Your ship will also have some shields that, while not impervious, will provide significant protection in the short term. The onboard guns will fire at will if you like, but you can also aim them at enemies within range. Your ship will take damage–that’s almost inevitable–and individual systems can become damaged, such as propulsion. Give it enough time, though, and you’ll be on the move again after your crew has made repairs.

Just as your fleet can be damaged, so can the enemy, and you’ll want to target and disable their guns and important systems. With each new mission, you’ll have a goal to complete, and the quicker you can get the enemy out of your hair, the better time your fleet is going to have. The mission objectives will vary of course, and they range from simple recovery missions to protection details, where you’ll be putting your ships between the enemy and an important asset. Do a good job, and you’ll get neat Leviathan badges. Do a bad job, and you’ll end up in Davy Jones’s locker.

Shoot up the other ships before they get you.

Online and offline play will look really similar, at least in the beginning. I got all of the same maps and missions when I played on my own and then against some friends. That’s not exactly a con, since I was able to familiarize myself with the missions and didn’t look a dunce when it came time to show my stuff. When you’re setting up an online game, you also have the option of setting limits, such as how long you can take to make a move, preventing your friends from spending an hour moving their ships around, or the stranger you’ve been matched up with from taking days to get back to you.

Ship vs. Ship

I’ve been rather circumspect about online play, but that’s really where it’s at. Not only can you go up against your friends, but you can also get DLC with bonus online play maps. If you just need more missions and more ship fighting excitement, online play can’t be beat.

Take some time to aim your weapons, and get ready for a fight.

I loved that not only could I play against my friends, but I could team up with them, too. I created a sort of federation, and we played against the CPU. There’s a great global chat that allows you to keep in touch with your mates (if they’re not in the same room as you) and coordinate attacks and ship movements, important because smashing into an ally causes as much damage as a blow from an enemy. If that doesn’t work for you, challenge your friends and fight it out against each other.

I know what you’re going to say. Your friends aren’t cool enough to play a totally awesome game like Leviathan: Warships. Yeah, I hear ya. Cool turn-based strategy games with ships, energy shields, and minefields aren’t for everybody. You’re not getting left out, though. Leviathan: Warships can match you up with open games, or you can start a new game on one of the servers and wait for some people (who are obviously cooler than your friends) to join in.

Outfit your ships and create a dangerous fleet to take down your foes.

Final Thoughts

Lovers of turn-based strategy aren’t going to be disappointed with the complex maneuvers of Leviathan: Warships. I’ll be honest and admit that I’m not a fan of war or ship simulators, and usually look elsewhere for strategy fun, but the trailer was so amazing (definitely check it out at the download link!) I had to give it a shot. I wasn’t disappointed at all.

There’s so much here to engage the mind, while still remaining a lot of fun. I’m usually shy of online play, but it’s really what makes Leviathan: Warships a standout. Whether I play the computer, my friends, or strangers on the Leviathan servers, each battle and map are a new experience each time I play.

So instead, we each have our favorite writing apps, export our text as HTML, and paste it into WordPress. It works, but it’s far from seamless.

That all changes today, with the hot-off-the-press Byword 2. It has built-in publishing to WordPress, Blogger, Tumblr, Scriptogram, and Evernote, and a handful of other improvements. If you need a focused Markdown writing app and a blogging app, it’s the one app you need.

Byword’s Legacy

Byword’s already one of the most popular Markdown writing apps on the Mac, right along with iA Writer. If you already write in Markdown regularly, chances are you already own one of them if not both. We called Byword a “beautifully minimal writing environment” in our original review of the app, and as you may have noticed in our roundups of Apps we Use, many of our team uses Byword as their default writing app. Of the two, Byword’s always been the more configurable, with a light and dark color scheme, font and font size options, and — most notably — a rather nice Rich Text editing mode that’s often forgotten by those of us who prefer writing in plain text.

Once you’re done writing, Byword let you export your document in Microsoft Word format, PDF, RTF, HTML, or LaTeX, or just copy your text as HTML to your clipboard to paste into another app. With formatting preview, a rather amazing assortment of powerful keyboard shortcuts for text editing, and equally powerful iOS apps synced via iCloud, Byword was everything you needed to write, save in almost any format, or take your text to another app.

Publish is the new Print

However, it wasn’t everything you need to publish. You could, of course, copy the HTML from your Markdown in one click, then open your blog’s online admin, make a new post, and paste the content in, but that’s quite a few steps. That’s where the new Byword Premium comes in. It’s a new $4.99 in-app purchase addition to Byword. Byword 2 is a free upgrade for existing users, but to get the new publishing features, you’ll need to purchase that extra.

For that one purchase, you’ll get the option to publish to as many WordPress, Tumblr, Blogger, and Scriptogram blogs as you want. You’ll get an option to purchase it when you first run Byword 2, or you can buy it anytime later from the menu. Once that’s done, you’ll just need to login to your blog(s), and you’ll be ready to publish.

Next time you want to write a blog post in Byword, just type it up as normal, then press CTRL+Option+CMD+P, select your blog, then enter your post title. You can (thankfully) set the post as published or draft, add tags, and depending on your CMS, set the post’s category and permalink. Then, hit Publish, and seconds later it’ll be safe on your site in HTML format. Publishing worked great in my tests, and took literally 5 seconds or so to publish a normal length post.

It’s nearly perfect, but is missing one major thing: image support. You can’t upload images from Byword right now, and even if you drag-and-drop images into Byword or enter them in Markdown formatting, they won’t be uploaded. The Byword team says they’re working to “better support other media in your posts” going forward, but for now, if you want to include pictures or other media in your posts, you’ll need to publish as draft, and then add your pictures from your browser.

Byword as Your New Notebook

If you don’t write blog posts regularly, there’s still a reason you might want to buy the Publishing upgrade: Evernote. Among the blog options, Evernote is the odd-man-out, since Evernote is primarily the place to store your own private notes (unless you’re using a tool like Postach.io to publish a blog from Evernote). It even feels a tad odd with the way it’s integrated in Byword, since it’s in the Publishing options.

Regardless, it’s a great option to have around if you like to write in Markdown, use Byword by default, and don’t care to keep Evernote open all the time. You can now write anything down in Byword, then publish it as formatted rich text to Evernote (complete with a title of your choice — though it’ll use the file name by default — and any tags you want to include).

The integration isn’t perfect. You only get to pick the notebook you want to use when you add Evernote to Byword, and you can’t pick which notebook you want to save to individually each time. You’ll have to go to the options and change that if you want to. There’s also no way to save your raw Markdown text to Evernote, as it converts it to rich text by default. But, it does give you a great way to quickly save notes to Evernote without having Evernote open, in a way that works better if you’re used to writing in Markdown anyhow. And that’s very nice to have.

There’s More, Too

The new publishing options in Byword are great, but they’re not all that is new in Byword 2. You’ll also find a new option to copy your text in Rich Text format, which is great if you want to write, say, an email in Byword. Just write it with normal Markdown formatting, copy as Rich Text, then paste it in your email app.

The preview view has been updated as well. It’ll now keep your current scroll position in your document when you view it in the preview. You’ll also notice a new Publish button in the bottom of the preview, which gives you a nice way to first write, then make sure everything looks perfect, and finally publish, all without clicking back and forth.

Finally, all the changes in the Mac app are in the iOS apps too, so you can now use Byword for iOS to publish to your blogs and Evernote as well.

The New State of App Upgrades on the App Store

If you use Byword to pen blog posts, or would love a new way to save notes to Evernote straight from your default writing app, then purchasing the new Byword Premium upgrade shouldn’t be a tough decision at all. It’s a $4.99 in-app purchase, which is quite a reasonable price for the new features.

The new version of Byword is free if you’ve already purchased Byword in the past; otherwise, you’ll first need to buy Byword for $9.99, and then buy the Premium upgrade for $4.99, making the total package $14.98. Without the Premium upgrade, you’ll still get a best-in-class Markdown writing experience, and if you wanted a blogging app, the extra cost shouldn’t be that frustrating.

It’s interesting to see Byword, one of the early Mac App Store successes, coming to its second version which it’s giving away for free to those who already bought the app, while adding the actual new features in an in-app purchase. We can debate all day if in-app purchases are the best way to add new features to apps, but at least it gives our favorite app developers a way to add major new features while still giving the free-forever upgrades that App Store users have come to expect. It’s a new way of life in the App Store economy, and if this is an example of things to come in other productivity apps we love, it’s not a bad start.