Showing posts tagged App Store

Applidium — Vim

sparrow – The New Mail for Mac

Sparrow Icon

Been using Sparrow for a while now. I love it. Tailor-made for Gmail (as well as Google Apps Mail). Slick UI. It’s fast, gorgeous and sophisticated.

Sparrow is to Gmail what Tweetie for Mac was to Twitter. But even better.

Sparrow’s UI is built upon Gmail’s concept of stars, labels and threaded conversations. This is perhaps the most innovative — yet intuitive — UI in an email client that I’ve ever seen.

I love it.

Sparrow Icon

Update: My beta version (that I had installed from the Sparrow website) stopped working.

And since I had it installed, the Mac App Store said I already owned the app (so I couldn’t buy or download it). The App Store is the only way to buy Sparrow, so I had to delete it first.

Turns out there’s a new logo. I must confess I liked the old one better. (Good thing I archived the beta before I uninstalled it. Now, I’ve saved the beautiful icon artwork. Unzipping and open package…)

Mac App Store – Free Findings

I’m constantly downloading new application, and I’m a big consumer of applications. I by great apps all the time. So, I was thinking to share some of my new findings with you.

I’m going to focus on free (or really low-priced) applications.

FlashFrozen

FlashFrozen App Logo

This is a small application that sits in your menu bar. Its only mission is to monitor Flash processes on your computer. If Flash goes crazy, FlashFrozen will kill it.

It’s a small, focused app. This app won’t hog your system. Right now, it uses only 8.5 MB of RAM. The CPU usage is almost impossible to measure — it uses less than 0.0 %. The size of the app itself? 508 K.

I think most computer users know that Flash sometimes has a bad habit of going nuts and use a lot (or sometimes all) of your system resources. I think this happens almost randomly — almost always without any obvious reason.

Anyway, FlashFrozen takes care of all this weirdness. It will immediately kill all Flash processes that uses too much of your system resources.

You decide how much Flash will be allowed to use. You can set the limit to 10, 20, 30, 40 or 50 % of your computer’s total CPU usage.

I think FlashFrozen is a fresh alternative to ClickToFlash, and other traditional Flash blockers. It looks for misbehaving Flash processes, and takes care of them.

Great work for an app that doesn’t bother your system at all. It just sits there nicely.

Price: Free.

Remind Me Later

App Icon

Another menu bar application. Gives you a quicker way to enter reminders. No need to open iCal when you need to write down a new task or appointment — just click the menu bar, and write the task and time in plain English.

Price: Free.

Tracks

App Icon

Tracks gives you better control over iTunes.

Rate songs, skip or pause, search your iTunes library, and much more — all from your keyboard. You pick the shortcuts, and after that, they will become global shortcuts, available everywhere in Mac OS X.

Also, if you want, Tracks can notify Last.fm about what songs you are listening to in real-time.

Tracks is very similar to CoverSutra. I can’t decide which one I prefer.

I have purchased both applications in the past, but right now, Tracks is free on the Mac App Store. So, I suggest you go there right now and download it, while it’s still free!

Price: Free.

NoseDial

I do this all the time when it’s too cold outside to take your gloves off. I call people with the nose.

This app is supposed to make this process a little easier.

Prizmo

Finally! Been looking forever for an app like this.

Take a photo of a document, and Prizmo translates the image to plain text. Finally! This will be worth every penny.

Spotify – Free App for iPhone (iTunes Link)

Introducing Spotify for iPhone. This is marvellous. It’s a free app, too. However, you need Spotify Premium to use it, but that’s just fine to me. Now, there’s another (really, really big) reason for upgrading to Premium.

And also, kudos to Apple for approving the app — even though it’s a direct competitor to the business model of iTunes Store and, in extension, the iPod part of the iPhone/iPod touch itself.

So, this is great news. Apple has come a long way from revolutionizing – first – the computer industry. Then the music industry. And then the mobile phone industry.

Apple proves to the world once again that they are ready for competition and different approaches — even if it means something like allowing a competitor to release its software for free on their very own platform. And thank you Spotify Ltd. for innovating the music industry.

So, because of all this, there’s now Spotify for iPhone. Just listen to it: Spotify. For. iPhone.

Phil Schiller’s Response to Steven Frank’s iPhone Boycott

Steven Frank boycotted iPhone, since he was disappointed (to say the least) about the way Apple rejects or approve applications for the iPhone. Not to put words in someone else’s mouth, but basically, Steven’s opinion is that Apple neglects iPhone developers with the way the App Store and its approval process is constructed.

Steven is most famous for being one of the two co-founders of Panic Inc. – a software company, who develops software for Mac OS.

Because he was so dissatisfied with the way the App Store works, he simple ditched his iPhone in favour of a Palm Pre. He wrote a blog post about this.

Later, this happened.

stevenf:

[…]I checked the inbox on my Android phone and found myself staring at the words “Philip Schiller”.

Needless to say, I had a minor freakout.[…]

This is the more incredible aspect of all this: No one less than Apple’s own Senior Vice President of Worldwide Marketing – Phil Schiller – personally replied Steven.

(Reblogged from stevenf)