Posts Tagged "apps"
Jetlinked: 20 Beautiful Mac apps
Designreviver has a nice list of 20 Beautiful Mac apps that is worth checking out. There are only a few picks I disagree with:
- Pixelmator’s black icons on a HUD window background have always bothered me and seem like a bad UI choice
- iStatmenus is pretty, but never feels very Mac-like
- TuneUp is the antithesis of a beautiful Mac app. It leeches onto iTunes and looks & feels more like a Firefox plugin than a Mac app.
But the list has a few lesser-known entries as well, so it’s worth reading for a few gems that you don’t see on every other list (I’m typing this in blogo which I hadn’t heard of before…).
JetLinked: Installing applications on the Mac still broken
Lukas Mathis has posted some thoughts on the issues Mac newcomers have with .dmg files. I also talked about this issue a while back in a post on the most common issues switchers have, but it’s worth noting it again. I agree with his followup post that adding another file format isn’t really the way to go either – DMG files are a great feature to have – once you’ve understood them. But from a usability and customer support perspective, a simple zip file seems to be the better choice.
I’d still be interested to see what kinds of customer support issues you run into with zip files though:
- Do people using alternative browsers, that don’t automatically open “safe” files like Safari does, struggle with them?
- Do users who prefer to manually download updates have several versions of the same app sitting in their Downloads folder?
- Are there any issues if users have a 3rd party archive tool installed (I’m looking at you StuffIt)?
But despite those questions, I think there is a valid reason to reconsider whether .dmg files should still be considered “best practise” for app distribution.
Read MoreBack to School Shopping Guide Part II: Essential Apps
No college student can get by nowadays without a few productivity apps to help them keep track of assignments, files, notes etc. There are a ton of different apps designed to do this sort of thing, but a lot of them are either aimed at business users (and priced accordingly) or don’t just feel to feature-laden and dense to be really practical for quick notes in classes.
So here’s a few productivity apps that students might find are worth checking out. Affordable, intuitive and ideal for quick notes, references, links and more.
Read MoreJetlink: 3 great sites for finding OS X Apps
A question that never stop being asked is where new Mac users can find OS X equivalents of their favorite Windows apps. Whilst some people would say to just head over to VersionTracker or MacUpdate, I’ve found they’re usually a bit overwhelming: I don’t want to sift through every update, utility or abandoned freeware if all I want is to find a semi-decent FTP client.
So here are 3 sites I’d recommend anyone new to the Mac should check out if you’re looking for the right app for the job:
Read MoreThree iPhone apps (that exist today) that I would pay for.
Despite being built with an unofficial set of tools, the sheer quality of some of the apps available through Nullriver’s installer is amazing (also probably a testament to the iPhone API’s Apple has created).
These apps look and feel just as good as some of the included iPhone applications. If you want to see how the iPhone SDK is going to change the way we think of mobile phones as a computing platform, check out these 3:
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