A selection of favourite Mac apps

December 31, 2013
by Riccardo Mori
Software

Looking back at my 2013 with regard to Mac applications, one thing that has struck me is how stagnant it has been. If we put aside the Games category, my purchases have been scarce overall, and there hasn’t been any particular ‘whoa’ moment or remarkable new application to enter my workflow. One possible exception could have been Everpix, but we all know how it ended. (If you don’t know what Everpix was, check this brief review I wrote not long before the company shut down.)

So I thought I’ll take the chance to mention a few essentials I’ve been relying upon for a while, the majority of which are tried-and-trusted applications you’ve certainly heard of, but there are also a couple of little unsung heroes.

I’ve talked about this batch of utilities in detail two years ago in What I use: the essentials. I still use and greatly enjoy these applications and I really couldn’t work without any of them. TextExpander, Dropbox, f.lux and Hazel in particular are what I consider ‘mission critical’ apps.

Other long-time favourites

What would I do without Bare Bones software? I’ve been a happy user of BBEdit since version 3.0 and it has been my text editor of choice ever since. When I go back to my vintage Macs, it’s often to write in BBEdit. On my main machine I find I use TextWrangler more, but I turn to BBEdit for more complex projects and when I need to handle very big text files. When it comes to powerful search & replace tools and multi-file searching, BBEdit’s prowess is unparalleled.

It started as a Bare Bones product, then Rich Siegel gave it a home of its own: Mailsmith is a versatile email client I use on a daily basis together with Mac OS X’s Mail app to handle a bunch of secondary email accounts. I love Mailsmith because it deals with thousands of messages without a problem, and because I can perform very fine-grained searches, a really useful feature when you’re subscribed to a few interesting mailing lists and you need to find a particular email buried in your archives.

My image handling and editing needs are fulfilled by Graphic Converter (€34.95 / $39.95), another essential I’ve been using since version 3.0; and Acorn ($49.99 or $29.99 if you upgrade from a previous version). With these two powerful-enough tools, I really don’t need Photoshop. Recently I even discovered that Graphic Converter can handle vector files (I rarely deal with them, that’s why it took me so long to figure it out). Both these app are worth every penny.

To watch videos I still rely on an old version (0.6.8) of Movist which, despite being more than three years old, still works fine under OS X Mavericks. When Movist fails to handle a certain video file, I turn to VLC, of course. To convert video files, instead, Handbrake is a must-have tool.

The only social networks I’m active in are Twitter and App.net. For Twitter, I was a Tweetie user since the beginning, and used it until it no longer worked. But another long-time favourite client has been Twitterrific, which I use both on my Macs and iOS devices. It serves me quite well — though I think it’s time for an update of the Mac client — and I see no reason to change. (For App.net I happily use Wedge. Others prefer Kiwi, which is more feature-rich and polished, but for my needs Wedge is just fine.)

Another long-time favourite, which I’ve been using since the Mac OS 9 era, is of course Transmit. On Panic’s site you can read: “You need to transfer files. Maybe to an FTP or SFTP server, or the cloud via Amazon S3, or using WebDAV. You maintain a website, do backups, or upload photos. You need Transmit, the #1 Mac OS X FTP client.” It’s all true. Transmit is the most reliable and delightful FTP client I’ve ever used, and another of my ‘mission critical’ apps.

Speaking of mission critical apps, I simply cannot function without MarsEdit. If you write a blog, you need MarsEdit, period. And its developer, Daniel Jalkut, is a gentleman. Friendly, kind and helpful. A pleasant interlocutor. 

To handle PDF documents, I’ve been using Skim for longer than I can remember, and I think it replaced Adobe Reader in my workflow somewhere between version 7 and 8 of Adobe Reader. I also use Mac OS X’s Preview more often since it started to get better (from Mountain Lion onwards). I still rely on an old version of Adobe Acrobat Professional on my Power Mac G4 Cube when dealing with difficult PDFs that give me a hard time with text selection and whatnot.

Another great, dependable little utility I use frequently is Thomas Tempelmann’s Find Any File. As I wrote in this old article, When I need to perform searches that dig deeper into the system, or I need a more readable & customisable search results window, I resort to Find Any File, which I love because its UI is based on the Find File application in the Classic Mac OS, and also because it lets me search for files even inside application packages and in places of the System where Spotlight is not allowed to snoop. I’ve used it since it was in early beta, and has a permanent spot in my Dock.

I can’t emphasise enough how amazing Icon Factory’s Xscope app is. Even though I’m not a Web designer or developer, in so many circumstances Xscope has proven useful to measure on-screen elements to perfect the look of my humble website, or to extract the colour values of an element I needed to replicate elsewhere for consistency.

To remove apps I no longer use, or demo/trial versions of software I download and don’t find useful, I still rely on AppZapper. I also use it as a search tool, especially when I need to know where an application keeps all the usual related luggage that gets disseminated in various folders during installation or after the first launch. (Read this old article for more information.)

Recent entries

As I said, 2013 hasn’t been a year of great Mac software discoveries for me. But a few nifty apps worth mentioning are:

  • Glui — A simple, lightweight, and very useful app to capture and annotate the frequent screenshots I take, whether I need to feature them on my blog or send them to a developer for feedback (and even interface localisations). Before that, I used to rely on LittleSnapper by Realmac Software (now Ember), but Glui is really fast and well-designed, the perfect tool when you quickly need to take a screen capture and add a note on the fly.
  • ReadKit — After Google discontinued Google Reader, I could no longer use my beloved Reeder, so I started looking for alternatives. ReadKit is a capable replacement. If you come from Reeder, ReadKit has a familiar interface, and it connects to a lot of services (Instapaper, Pocket, Readability, Pinboard, Delicious, Feedly, Fever, NewsBlur, Feed Wrangler and Feedbin), so that you can have “everything in one place” as the website says. I particularly love using ReadKit to read and navigate my increasingly huge Pinboard archive.
  • Mou — For a specific project I’m working on (which I hope to announce very soon), I needed to have a text editor with Markdown capabilities — side-by-side preview, most importantly — and I found Mou to fit my needs quite well. I’ve also heard great things about MarkDrop if you’re looking for this kind of software. MarkDrop features, among other things, full Droplr integration.
  • DaisyDisk — An amazing tool to scan and explore my Mac’s internal and connected disks, it has proven to be essential to discover a lot of junk that was taking up precious gigabytes. Thanks to DaisyDisk, I’ve successfully reclaimed more than 35 GB on an external drive in a specific occasion where I had to salvage some files on a failing hard drive and I didn’t know where to copy them. I can’t recommend it enough.

Special mentions

  • Raskin — Raskin is the only application I use to navigate the filesystem on my Mac other than the Finder. Read my brief review for more information.
  • Disco — If you still handle optical discs and need a reliable tool to burn CDs and DVDs, I suggest Disco. Works with both PowerPC and Intel Macs. It’s not developed anymore, but it still works great and I never encountered any problem with it. Read my review for more information.

And that’s it, I think. I may have forgotten something, but these are really the key third-party apps I use, most of them on a daily basis. For questions and/or suggestions, you can reach me on Twitter and App.net (I’m @morrick on both), or send me an email. Happy 2014 to you all, dear readers!

That Writer Pro affair

December 28, 2013
by Riccardo Mori
Software

It’s been a rocky launch for Writer Pro by Information Architects. The application is presented as an austere (I won’t use the term minimalist) writing environment for writers. It has a clean interface, and implements four ‘modes’ that represent a typical writing workflow: 

Writer Pro’s simple workflow is built around how you work: Start with your ideas in Note, flesh them out in Write, progress to Edit for refining, then move to Read when you’re done. Rather than a limiting modal interface, these Workflow states act as environments to focus you on the task at hand. A document’s state syncs via iCloud across connected devices, and each state has a task-specific font and color.

The most notable feature in Writer Pro is Syntax Control: working in a similar way as iA Writer’s Focus Mode, Syntax Control “dims everything but the chosen syntax, helping you to control your writing style.” [I’m quoting again from Writer Pro’s website]. By way of a slider, you can highlight sentences, adjectives, nouns, verbs, prepositions, conjunctions, to check your writing style (if you’re using too many adjectives too often, if you’ve made repetitions, and so on). It’s a neat idea, and when Writer Pro was announced a few days ago, it made a great impression on me.

As you may have read (among other things, I’ve read this article by Jonathan Poritsky, this article at The Verge, and all the links in this post by John Gruber, who links to what’s probably the best summary of the whole situation), iA took a very protective attitude towards Syntax Control, a feature whose implementation the company considered original enough to submit a patent application for it. I don’t know if what prompted this protective attitude has been a suggestion from an overzealous lawyer in iA’s legal department, but what quickly developed over these few days has definitely been a series of public relations’ faux pas, raising criticism among developers and tech bloggers. Finally iA has decided to backtrack, publicly stating that they will drop their patents pending regarding Syntax Control. 

Back to Writer Pro now. Yesterday my friend Donovan Bond asked me over Twitter if I had purchased the app, and my reply was: I was interested, but all the fuss that ensued has left me a bit put off. I mostly use Daedalus and the old iA Writer. I believe that other people in my position — prospective buyers of Writer Pro who followed the recent brouhaha over the ‘Syntax Control situation’ — are probably feeling the same way. I think it’s understandable. 

While I may have lost a bit of enthusiasm towards Writer Pro, at least for now, I still believe it’s a solid app worth considering, that its value may become apparent over time, not after trying it casually for a few days. Instead, I also happened to read some other type of criticism towards Writer Pro from people who, expressing their disagreement about iA’s behaviour, have decided that they won’t buy their products, that they don’t intend to support iA in any way… and that Writer Pro isn’t worth the $20 anyway.

I’ve been wondering whether this attitude is fair or not. I don’t think it is.

Is the app expensive? By iOS App Store’s standards, yes it is. There is also a companion Writer Pro for Mac, which also costs $20. That is not particularly expensive for a Mac software. Of course it makes sense to want to purchase both apps (to take advantage of iCloud syncing, for example), and in that case $40 may feel too much for some. And I’m not arguing that. But what doesn’t feel right to me is dismissing an app, its value and its potential because its developer has acted in ways we don’t like or agree with. 

What does the developer’s attitude have to do with how well an app is designed and built? In a rush to protect its work, iA has undoubtedly made a few mistakes and attracted criticism, and some of that criticism was valid and constructive, there’s no denying that. But how iA acted shouldn’t negatively affect how we consider a piece of software. 

Sure, iOS complicates matters because you can’t try an app before you buy it. And when an app costs $20, you have to rely on how well the developer presents it. You have to take a leap of faith, so the process that leads to a final decision (you purchase the app, or you decide not to) is not entirely a cold, rational one. It’s understandable that some people choose not to purchase an app on principle[1], their message being something along the lines of: I dislike the developer’s attitude, so I won’t support them by giving them my money. In many cases, and speaking in general, I’m all for acting on principle — there are services and social networks I don’t subscribe to exactly because I don’t like certain policies or behaviours of the companies behind them.

But disparaging an app or a product because of something the developer said or did, well, ultimately doesn’t make a lot of sense to me. The whole Writer Pro affair was a bit sad to follow. Again, iA’s attitude deserved criticism, but I also noticed how quickly many have jumped on the iA-bashing bandwagon. I’m glad iA reversed its decision regarding the Syntax Control patent in the end, and that iA did so after considering the most constructive and informed criticism. What iA doesn’t deserve, however, is people trashing Writer Pro in the light of what happened around it. I may be okay with saying I won’t buy Writer Pro because I think iA are a bunch of morons and I don’t like their attitude, but I think it’s unfair to say I won’t buy Writer Pro because I think iA are a bunch of morons, I don’t like their attitude and the app is not worth $20 anyway. In the end, who knows, perhaps Writer Pro is really not worth $20, but I wish people weren’t so always ready to pass judgement. 

 

 

  • 1. Or rage-deleting one, like some did with Camera+ after its developer attacked other developers in the release notes accompanying a recent app update. ↩

 

Frequent crashes

December 15, 2013
by Riccardo Mori
Briefly

In his first-impressions piece about the iPad Air, when listing the negative aspects of his iPad experience, my friend Fabrizio Rinaldi writes:

Crashes. Safari crashes A LOT. The Springboard crashes. And too many times (at least 6 or 7 just today) everything freezes and I have to restart the device. When I’m working, this is no fun at all. Just a few minutes ago the screen turned black and the white Apple logo appeared. Go to hell white Apple logo.

I’ve noticed this issue, frequent crashes, coming up increasingly often on the Web and in the social networks I frequent, and I wanted to compare it briefly with my experience since updating both my iPhone 4 and my iPad 3 to iOS 7.

I updated my iPad 3 to iOS 7 as soon as it was available, and the iPhone 4 a few days later[1]. So, on both devices, I’ve been using iOS 7 for roughly three months now, going through each minor update released in the meantime. On the iPhone, I’ve only seen one crash where the screen would suddenly turn black and the device would self-reboot. It was unexpected and it scared me a little. If I remember correctly, it happened while I was navigating the multitasking interface, trying to switch from the app I was using to another that I’d used a while before but was still appearing in the multitasking interface.

On the iPad, in three months I’ve only seen crashes like those experienced by Fabrizio happen twice. Again, they were quite unexpected, and in each case I was doing something different. Once I was simply swiping across my screens of apps, in another case I was browsing the Web using Coast (by Opera, a cool browser I’ll talk about in another post).

One thing I’ve noticed in all these iOS 7 crashes is that the self-reboot process is really short compared with the cold boot when you take a powered-off iPhone or iPad and you turn it on, or when you force-reboot it by simultaneously pressing the Power and Home buttons. The screen goes black, the white Apple logo appears briefly and then you’re back in the Springboard, with no animations or transitions.

I don’t know for sure why these crashes have happened so rarely on my iPhone 4 and iPad 3 as opposed to the “6 or 7 just today” in Fabrizio’s case (just a few days ago one of my contacts on App.net was complaining that his iPhone 5s crashed at least five times in the same day). I did notice one thing, though: the vast majority of these complaints come from people with the latest iOS devices: iPad Air, iPad mini with Retina display, and iPhone 5s. The common denominator here is the A7 processor and the 64-bit architecture. Maybe these crashes have something to do with the A7 being particularly fussy when running apps still not 64-bit optimised. I definitely do not have the expertise of a technician here, I’m just making an educated guess. It would be interesting to know how iOS 7 has been treating other people with older devices.

 

 

 

My simplified app evaluation system

December 11, 2013
by Riccardo Mori
Briefly

Tristar

In the past few days, there’s been some chatter about (iOS) apps prompting the user to rate them in an insisting, and thus annoying, fashion. I very much agree with John Gruber’s suggestion. It’s something I did in the past in some extremely annoying cases: apps that offer the Leave a Review — Remind Me Later — No Thanks alternative, you choose No Thanks, and a few days later the “Rate this app” prompt appears again.

But I wanted to take the opportunity to share the little simplified system I’ve been using for a while now to evaluate iOS apps in general.

I very rarely take the time to actually write a review. It’s not because I don’t want to, or that I’m lazy. I just don’t have time to do that. But if I like your app, I will certainly mention it on App.net or Twitter (I will let my followers know and I will look for your app or developer App.net/Twitter account to let you know). If I’ve found it particularly useful or ingenious, I will take some time to write a brief review here. 

What I often do, instead, is to leave a star rating on the App Store. But only using three of the five star options:

  • 5 stars: Great app!
  • 3 stars: Average app. Not lousy, but not stellar either.
  • 1 star: Terrible app.

 

If you think that’s unfair or not-nuanced-enough, I’m sorry, but looking back over five years of purchasing apps on the App Store, the sheer majority of apps I’ve encountered have invariably fallen in one of the three evaluation tiers mentioned above.

I think it’s a very honest evaluation system, and every star-rating I do is always pondered and usually happens after having used an app for a while. The only notable exception: if your app bugs me with frequent “Please rate this app” prompts, you’ll get one star no matter how great your app is.

Drones and consumers

December 9, 2013
by Riccardo Mori
Briefly

You know how some people display a shift in their behaviour just by getting behind the wheel? They ‘become’ motorists, and they can lose perspective in certain situations, letting their stress manifest in attitudes they’d probably not display as pedestrians or cyclists. I believe that a similar thing happens with the consumers category. For the consumer, the first imperative is getting what he/she wants, and everything else, everyone else, is an obstacle, a nuisance. And, much like motorists, consumers too can lose perspective.

Since Jeff Bezos announced that Amazon will work towards the creation of an Amazon Prime Air service, where drones will deliver packages into customers’ hands “in 30 minutes or less”, one of the most fascinating things for me has been people’s reaction to the announcement, more than the idea of using drones as delivery vehicles.

Putting the feasibility of such project apart for a moment[1], I was a little taken aback by the number of people who have no problems with this idea; some of them are actually excited by the prospect. It’s not their fault, it’s the consumer hat they’re wearing.

Consumers seem to have no problems with Amazon drones crowding the sky in their cities: the important thing is that they get their stuff, pronto. 

In an era where privacy concerns are on the foreground more than ever, where people get (righteously) angry for being increasingly tracked online and offline, when they wear their consumer hat they seem to have no problems with Amazon drones programmed to know their exact location and show up at their door — er, window — to deliver the goods. (Who cares if a drone gets hacked and stuff like that, right?)

Consumers are excited by having their order in their hands “in 30 minutes or less” and they don’t even wonder how. The first thing I asked myself when I read that, was: how can an Amazon drone be 30 minutes away from any potential customer address? 

There are people who already go to local shops to browse, even asking for buying advice, then they don’t purchase anything and order the stuff online (then they mourn when small shops go out of business, trumped by giant retailers… like Amazon). Imagine the scene: a consumer browses a local bookshop for a particular book, he finds it and sees that it costs $20. He doesn’t buy it, he goes home, orders it on Amazon, pays $15 plus a certain surcharge for drone delivery, and he’s all happy because he believes he has saved money and, wow, the book has been delivered by drone in less than 30 minutes! Maybe he’ll even blog about it, gushing about how “we’re living in the future”. You think it’s a far-fetched scenario. I know at least two people who would do something like that. Without even realising the huge, inexcusable waste it all would be.

Maybe it’s true what some tech sites are saying, that Amazon drones have only been an effective publicity stunt and that Amazon Prime Air is a service that’ll never be. Whatever the case, for me it’s been a great insight into consumers’ reactions and loss of perspective. Somewhat predictable, but sad nonetheless. 

 

 

  • 1. A quote from this article on Inc.com: The thing is, Amazon Prime Air won’t be available for many years. Even Bezos said last night that the earliest Amazon Prime Air could be in service is 2015 because that’s the soonest the FAA could update its laws. But the Wall Street Journal reports that the FAA isn’t planning on beginning the certification of commercial drones until 2020. ↩