Mac apps - page 36

With a plethora of options available for any taste, it’s a better time to be a digital music fan than ever before. iTunes Match. Spotify. Rdio. Soundcloud. Grooveshark. There’s a streaming music service for every taste, a place for every song in the cloud no matter how obscure.

With all of these competing services floating around, though, finding music in your library isn’t as easy as it once was, though… mostly because you probably don’t have a central music library. Some of your favorite albums are on iTunes, while others might only be available on Spotify, or knocking around as demos on Soundcloud.

Wouldn’t it be great if there was an iTunes-like media manager to consolidate all of your music? An app you could use to just find that song on all of your services, no matter where it’s stored: just type it in and hit play?

There is. It’s called Tomahawk. And it’s awesome.

After nearly a year of private beta testing, Cultured Code has finally implemented cloud sync in its popular to-do app Things. Now available as a public beta for the Mac, iPhone and iPad, Things Cloud can be enabled and tested for free by any customer.

When task management apps started adding cloud sync over a year ago, Things users were left behind while the developers at Cultured Code took a laboriously long time to get their sync solution off the ground. Now that iCloud is out and cloud sync is a staple feature of nearly every productivity app, has Things missed the bandwagon?

Apple has brought the iOS 5 Notification Center to the Mac with OS X Mountain Lion. The new interface displays incoming notifications from different apps in one place, mimicking the functionality of the Mac app called Growl. You’ve most likely used Growl before whether you know it or not, as the tool integrates with many popular Mac apps for displaying notifications through popups.

With the birth of Notification Center on the Mac in Mountain Lion, one would assume that Growl has been sherlocked. According to the app’s developers, that is not the case. In fact, Grow will make Mountain Lion’s notification system even better.

Apple has informed Mac developers that the deadline for sandboxing apps has been extended to June 1st. The date was postponed last November and set to take place on March 1st. Apple has been working on technical specifications for third-party developers since.

For those that are unfamiliar, “sandboxing” is essentially confining an app’s system access to its specific functions or entitlements, thereby hindering the possibility of an app behaving maliciously on a system level. Developers now have more time to appropriately implement sandboxing into their apps for the Mac App Store.

Sometimes the morass of Mail windows on a Mac can just become too much. Various apps have tried to help manage this in various ways: Sparrow by bringing the streamlined Tweetie aesthetic to mail, Postbox by in-line quick replies, and so on.

Even so, more often than not, when I close Mail for the day, I’m closing about a dozen or two blank or half-written email windows that have been opened during the day, then forgotten. Why can’t sending an email be as painlessly fire-and-forget as sending an IM? Enter QuickMailer.

The VideoLAN organization has released VLC 2.0 “Twoflower” with a completely revamped interface, hundreds of bug fixes, performance enhancements, experimental BluRay support, and more. We told you that version 2.0 had hit the final design stage last week, and it’s finally ready to download!

I’m always looking for ways to enhance my music listening experience on the Mac. For the last several months I’ve been using Bowtie to control iTunes with keyboard shortcuts, and Ecoute is another great alternative for managing iTunes in a minimal, simplified way.

When the developers of Skip Tunes contacted me, I was intrigued by the app’s menu bar interface. For quick access to simple music playback controls, it doesn’t get much better than this.

Nik Software has released its Snapseed photo editor in the Mac App Store. We told you a couple days ago from CES that Snapseed was headed to the Mac, and the app is now available for $19.99.

Snapseed has been an incredibly popular photo editing app on the iOS platform, so much so that it even won an Apple “App of the Year” award recently. The beautiful design and robust set of features we’ve come to expect from Nik Software is now available on the Mac.

This is FlickrBucket, a cute one-dollar uploading utility I found on the Mac App Store this week.

Intuit has announced that its popular finance application, Quicken, will be updated with Lion support in “early spring” of next year. The 2007 version of Quicken for Mac will be updated with Lion compatibility and Intuit promises that it will focus more on Mac development in the future.

Quicken for Mac doesn’t work on Lion because Apple discontinued support for Rosetta apps that are based on PowerPC architecture. The updated version of Quicken for Mac 2007 will finally run natively on Intel hardware.

Literature & Latte, the development company behind the popular word processing app called Scrivener, has announced that an iOS version of Scrivener is in the works for a 2012 release.

Fans of Scrivener for Mac will be happy to know that the app is now in development for the iPhone and iPad. The professional writing tool will likely offer the most robust word processing experience for iOS to date.

As we reminisced in our previous poll, 2011 has been a monumental year for the Mac App Store. There have been countless new releases and updates that we’ve covered on the site, and the Mac app ecosystem has reached a whole new level of excellence.

We told you to choose the 10 most innovative Mac apps of this year, and your votes garnered some interesting results. Here are the 10 most innovative Mac apps of 2011. And now we need you to choose your number one.

Have you checked out the sweet bundle of apps that we’ve scored over on Deals.CultofMac.com? The package includes 11 awesome Mac OS X apps for a crazy price of $50 (retail value of $486). The bundle is filled with goodies that will make the Holidays on your Mac a ton of fun – I’m personally a fan of PhotoStyler and TidyUp. With the Winter 2011 Phenom Bundle you can either gift individual apps from your own bundle or better yet, get the entire lineup for your friends and family!

This weekend we’re giving away three bundles of the Winter 2011 Mac Phenom Bundle for free so that three of our lucky readers can have some extra Christmas cheer. Entering the giveaway only takes a few seconds, so don’t miss out on your chance to win.

Here’s How To Enter:

2011 has been a big year for the Mac app community. The Mac App Store was released to the public on January 6, 2011 and millions of free and paid apps have been downloaded since then.

After looking back at all of the great apps from this year, we decided to put together a list of the very best. But we need your help, so tells us what apps you think deserve to be included in our top 10 roundup.

Following the release of Twitter 4.0 for iPhone, TweetDeck has released a new, HTML5-based version of its Mac app in the Mac App Store. Unlike TweetDeck’s previous Adobe AIR apps, this new version is simply a web-based client.

Apple has released its professional music applications for the Mac, Logic Pro and MainStage, in the Mac App Store. These two additions follow other high-end tools that Apple has brought to the Mac App Store, including Final Cut Pro X.

Logic Pro is available for $199 while MainStage costs $29.99. Both apps have also been updated with new features and improvements.

Alfred 1.0 is now available in the Mac App Store for free. The popular launcher utility recently received its major 1.0 update with a whole host of new features and improvements.

Popular email client Sparrow has received a significant update today. Sparrow 1.5 brings several improvements to the beautiful Mac app, including integration with Dropbox. Users can mail attachments with either Dropbox or CloudApp.

Version 1.5 also introduces improved search tokens and several other bug fixes. The update is available in the Mac App Store as a free download for existing customers.

We told you about the recent release of Alfred 1.0, the popular app launcher tool for the Mac. The developers from Running with Crayons have created a robust, sleek, Apple-like tool for controlling nearly every facet of your Mac.

Most Alfred users understand how to open apps and files, but there are many things Alfred can do that may surprise you. The recent versions of Alfred support third-party extensions, and that opens up the door to all kinds of possibilities.

Alfred is a relatively new launcher app for the Mac, and the tool has received a warm welcome from the Apple community since it launched in beta form last year. Today the development company behind Alfred, Running with Crayons, has launched Alfred 1.0, and the update brings with it many new features.

While Alfred offers many of the same launching abilities as other apps, like Quicksilver and LaunchBar, version 1.0 reinforces that Alfred is way more than your typical launcher tool for the Mac.

Insider sources are telling The Daily that Microsoft is planning to bring its Office suite to the App Store. Specifically, the Redmond company has an Office business app for the iPad in the pipeline.

Apple offers its own iWork productivity suite on iOS, including Pages, Numbers, and Keynote. Microsoft apparently wants a piece of the word processing action, and its sights are set on Office for the iPad.

The new beta of Skype for Mac and Windows integrates with Facebook to allow video calling between two people. As part of Skype’s new partnership with Facebook, users can access their friends’ Facebook status updates and messages within the Skype app.

AOL has completely redesigned its popular messaging service, AIM, from the ground up with a beautiful, new look for the iPhone, Mac, Windows, Android, and web.

The new apps look absolutely stunning, and several compelling features have been added. AIM’s free apps integrate with popular social networks, like Facebook and Instagram. There is support for Facebook Chat and Google Talk. Users can video chat and group chat. Conversations are synced across apps, and messages sent offline are saved for sending when connectivity is restored.

Coming up on 15 years ago, I tied my first tie with the help of a tiny little Geocities web page, and if I had to pinpoint one moment when I first realized the true extent of the ocean of digital information at my finger tips, it would be that one.

I wonder if TieSight will prove to be an identical sort of watershed moment for some other pimply teenager headed out on his first ‘fancy’ date… not for the web, but for the App Internet. It’s just that wonderful.

Who doesn’t love a good deal on Mac apps? The Fusion & Carbon “10 Reasons to Fall in Love and Get Things Done” Productivity Bundle offers 10 great Mac apps for only $30.

It would normally cost you over $360 to purchase all ten of these apps, and this great deal will only be offered for 6 more days. Time to act fast!