How many of us have said “I really should start a journal,” only to find that even the simple task of sitting and writing for a few minutes is too hard to fit into our daily schedule? With Penzu, there aren’t any more excuses — it turns anything with a screen into a synced, secure journal. And right now a Penzu Pro Digital Journal Lifetime Subscription is just $39, a full 58% off the normal price.
Procrastinators beware: the clock is ticking loudly on some excellent soon-to-expire deals, including the Summer Essentials Mac Bundle, the Striiv Fusion activity and sleep tracker, and more.
Sorry to break it to you, but your Mac isn’t living up to its potential. The good news? We’ve rounded up 10 amazing Mac apps in a Summer Mac Essentials Bundle that can streamline efficiency & run faster, transforming how you email, take photos, stream content, transfer files, and more. Bought separately, they’re valued at $234, but we’ve bundled them up for $19.99 total. Grab the bundle today and start doing this with your Mac:
Whether you’re transcribing an interview, replying to emails, or writing the next Great American Novel, it’ll go a lot faster with Dragon Dictate speech recognition software for Mac.
SAN FRANCISCO — If you watched the Worldwide Developers Conference keynote earlier this week, you’d think it was a big love fest. But there’s a section of the audience sitting there in a cold, cold sweat.
Attendees are mostly software developers, and some of them are very nervous that Apple will announce something that will ruin their business overnight.
“The WWDC keynote is terrifying for developers,” said Josh Michaels, an independent software developer from Portland, Oregon, who runs Jetson Creative. “The uncertainty is the worst part.”
Take ReplayKit in iOS 9, a new feature that records games and app videos without the need for any external cameras or hardware.
Sounds great, unless you are Everyplay or Kamkord, a pair of young companies that raised millions of dollars to record games and app videos in iOS.
“They’re f**ked!” said a game developer at WWDC who asked not to be named.
When we discover an amazing app that helps your Mac run better, faster, and more efficiently, we can’t help but share it with you. And when we discover nine of them, you get this bundle. Enhance your Mac experience with our package of some of the best apps out there for your computer. Each one is worth between $14.95 and $49.95, but we’re selling all nine for a total of $19.99 for a limited time only. Here’s what you’ll get:
This post is sponsored by Systweak Software, maker of Duplicate Photos Fixer Pro.
There was a time when people could keep track of their photos with a few shoeboxes in the closet. Now we live in the digital age where an average person will take thousands of photos each year — that’s a lot of shoeboxes.
Digital photography uses a lot less paper, but it still creates a big mess. Maybe that explains why Duplicate Photos Fixer Pro is currently ranked No. 7 on Apple’s list of the top 10 paid downloads in the Mac App Store. Its popularity speaks to just how common the problem of unwanted duplicate photos is.
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BitTorrent’s not just a way to torrent anymore.
Released a couple years ago, BitTorrent Sync proved itself to be a great way to keep your files synced between machines without trusting a service like Dropbox with your data.
And now? BitTorrent Bleep, a serverless chat app, is here to show you you can do without Snapchat or iMessage.
This post is brought to you by Systweak Software, creator of free performance-boosting Mac app Tweak and Tuneup.
To get the most out of your Mac, you should occasionally purge all the unwanted files that can negatively affect your system’s speed and efficiency. It’s crucial maintenance, but manually deleting all the unnecessary files can be a drag — especially if you waste a lot of time searching for instructions or reading out-of-date tips.
Forget that. Free Mac app Tweak and Tuneup is a suite of speedy tools that scan your Apple computer, quickly locating and deleting junk files to free up loads of disk space and restore your machine’s full speed and power.
This post is brought to you by iFlicks.
Are all your videos hidden in a bunch of folders or stored haphazardly in the cloud? Wouldn’t you rather they were all as easy to sort and locate as your iTunes content, with metadata like movie posters and cast credits?
Using iFlicks 2, you can easily import your video collection into iTunes. This gives you the ability to watch your third-party videos directly in iTunes or transfer them to your Apple TV, iPad, iPod or iPhone. On top of that, iFlicks downloads metadata (information or visuals related to your videos) and lets you tweak the metadata manually. Managing your video collection in iTunes has never been this easy!
This post is brought to you by Macphun, creator of Noiseless.
iPhones double as great cameras, but they do have limitations, especially when you’re taking pictures at night or simply in low-light conditions. The photos can appear grainy when viewed later, enlarged on your pristine Mac screen.
Noiseless is a new photo-editing Mac app that cleans up your pixelated or grainy images and helps you create refreshed, clear pictures for your photo library. And you can download a free preview of this powerful photo app for free.
Apple’s Contacts app is the worst. It’s slow, it has a hard time working with services like Google or Exchange, and it just plain doesn’t connect with Calendar. Even though it integrates into all our other apps, most of us would be super-happy to replace it.
BusyContacts, a new app from the folks behind BusyCalendar, is that replacement app, whether you’re an average consumer, a busy office manager or an entrepreneur looking to wrangle your contacts and busy schedule.
“Many people are frustrated with the shortcomings of the built-in OS X Calendar and Contacts,” said John Chaffee, president and co-founder of BusyCal, “which are very basic and don’t work well when syncing with non-iCloud services.”
BusyContacts (and BusyCal) are powerful alternatives to these built-in apps, giving users greater control and flexibility along with better compatibility with Google and Exchange, while still playing nice with iCloud.
The next generation of stock trading is upon us thanks to Robinhood, a new iPhone app that came out this week.
Most brokerages charge between $7 and $10 for individual stock trades, but Robinhood eliminates fees entirely by cutting out the middleman. You’re in charge of your trading, and you don’t have to be well versed in the ways of Wall Street to use the app.
The interface is dead simple, and it makes the possibility of trading stocks a reality for more people than ever before. There’s a pretty huge waitlist right now, so you won’t be able to use it right away. But if you’re interested, claim your spot in line.
Available on: iPhone
Price: Free
Download: App Store
I just recently got into writing in Markdown, a special syntax that lets you easily convert to HTML for publishing on the web. There are several decent Markdown editors out there, but the best one I’ve used has to be Typed, a new app from Realmac Software.
The discreet word count view, keyboard shortcuts, and preview options are all great, but my favorite feature is Zen Mode. Typed goes fullscreen and plays six ambient, soothing music tracks in the background to help you focus. Don’t knock it till you try it.
Realmac is most well known for making Clear, a quality todo app for iOS that’s pretty popular. Typed serves a little more of a niche market, but for those interested in a minimalist, easy to use Markdown editor for the Mac, it’s an excellent choice.
Check out this video walkthrough for a more detailed rundown of the app’s main features.
Available on: Mac
Price: $19.99
Download: Realmac Software
CloudApp touts itself as your “clipboard in the cloud,” and today it received a major update.
In case you’re unfamiliar, CloudApp is a menubar app for the Mac that can upload just about anything copied to your clipboard with a keyboard shortcut. It then creates a shortened URL for sharing and lets you track how many hits the link has received.
CloudApp 3.0 is now the easiest way to make animated GIFs on the Mac, thanks to a new feature called Cloud Motion. The CloudApp team has also revamped its pricing for paid plans along with a brand new way for teams to collaborate using the app.
Mailbox has quickly become one of the most popular email management apps on iOS, and now the public is about to get its first taste of what it can do on the desktop too. The company announced this morning that the first public beta of Mailbox for Mac is now available, and they’ve added a couple of new features to go with it.
While looking at social media on your favorite iOS devices is smooth, making the transition to the Mac just isn’t quite the same. Though there are plenty of top-notch applications for looking at Twitter or Snapchat on iOS, the social media gems on Mac can be hard to find.
In today’s video, we’ll show you the top social media apps for Mac so you can transport the fun from iOS to your desktop in the most efficient ways possible. Here’s how to enjoy the fun of Snapchat, Instagram and more, all on your Mac by downloading some killer social apps.
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On the Mac, 1Password is a perfect Swiss Army Knife of tools for the forgetful and lazy, guaranteeing that they never have type in a password, address field, or credit card number into an online form ever again.
But on iOS, 1Password has been a more convoluted thing. Lacking deep integration with other apps, 1Password for iOS has never been as good as it’s Mac counterpart. But with iOS 8, that’s about to change, thanks to a 1Password app extension that any third-party app can use.
AirDrop, the wireless file sharing technology built into OS X, is fantastic when it works for the occasional file, but it can be a bit finicky.
For power users who constantly find themselves sharing files online, we recommend Dropzone, a great little Mac App that can significantly boost the ease with which you share files between computers, and drag-and-drop files in general.
Now, Dropzone has gotten even better. With Dropzone 3, the app gains a new Drop Bar for temporarily storing files, AirDrop support, as well as integration with Imgur.
If you love Reeder 2 on your iPhone or iPad, great news: the best news reading app out there has come back to the Mac, after almost a year being MIA.
The iOS App Store gold rush might be played out for all but the luckiest developers, but there’s another part of the Apple empire where coders can find breakout success: the Mac App Store.
“Compared to iOS, it’s definitely easier to have a hit in the Mac App Store,” says Andreas Hegenberg, the creator of successful gesture-based Mac app BetterTouchTool. “I think it’s still pretty easy to develop a Mac App Store app that can feed you very well. But it all depends on how you define a ‘big hit.'”
While games rule the increasingly cluttered roost in the iOS store — with many unimaginative developers looking to get rich quick with yet another Flappy Bird clone — the Mac App Store is home to more pedestrian offerings like accounting software and productivity tools.
The Mac App Store might not mint a new millionaire each day, but the developers we spoke with said writing this type of bread-and-butter software can provide a reliable source of income. Here’s why.
MarkDrop is a new Markdown editor for the Mac that displays a minimalistic editor on the left and a preview window on the right that updates in real time. The app prides itself on a clean interface, and you can share via PDF, HTML, or print.
It’s happened to everyone. You’re typing on your Mac, and you suddenly get a phone call on your iPhone. But you only have two hands. On a deadline, you grab your iPhone, and try to talk to whomever is calling by clenching your phone against your shoulder with your chin, but it suddenly slips, and slides down your tucked shirt and into your underpants. And now, here you are, screaming at your crotch to call you back while shaking an iPhone down your pants leg. How embarrassing.
What, that hasn’t happened to you? How strange. Must just be me. Either way, though, wouldn’t it be cool if you could just route incoming iPhone calls to your Mac? Now you can, thanks to Dialogue.
Going paperless is a goal of mine. I’d love to be able to keep all my important documents, like banking paperwork and medical records, all safely and cleanly tucked away into the digital ether. And, while productivity apps are fairly common in the Mac App store, when Apple made document-organizing app, doo, an Editor’s Choice app this week, well, it certainly piqued my interest.
