While it can’t do the actual writing work for you, Scrivener can help you to manage your project with ease, keep everything together and support your individual writing process – no matter if you are absolutely organized or love the chaos. The following review will give you a first hand insight into the mighty piece of software, enabling you to get an idea of what it can do for you and hopefully motivating you to pick up the pen – pardon me – the keyboard, again.

What Does It Do, and Who Is It For?

Scrivener, by Literature & Latte, combines the features of a word processor with the power of a digital organizer and project management tool. Imagine your desk during a writing project: yellow stickies cover your monitor, notes are strewn across the desk, photos are peeking out from folders, and somewhere in this chaos is your notepad that has that essential idea from last night jotted down.

With Scrivener, you can put all this information into one single piece of software and get it off your desk: text, images, web references, PDF documents and even audio clips.

Scrivener does not limit you to a specific writing method; it is intended for a very large user-group, ranging from novelists and screenwriters, academics and students, through to journalists and technical writers. To appeal to all these groups, Scrivener offers you a broad selection of tools – outlines, virtual corkboards, information storage capacities, internal linking – that you can use or discard depending on your very own writing style.

Getting Started

Every time you open Scrivener, you are greeted by a start up screen offering various options. If you haven’t created a project yet, you can do so now.

Startup Screen

After entering all the necessary data for your project, the actual working area opens up. Scrivener is divided into three main areas: the left pane displays your project’s structure with the actual writing parts (chapters etc.), researched resources (links to web pages, PDF documents, images) and whichever other content you choose to include in your project.

The middle part of the window is where the writing takes place, but depending on your selection it can also show the cork board with your content displayed on little index cards or it can display the outline view. Every one of the three views allows you to edit content directly.

The right pane holds additional information for your selected content: the top index card provides a synopsis, the General tab allows you to label and categorize your content and below that you can add notes, link to resources and provide keywords.

Main Window

Meta Data

The Outline and the Cork Board

You can manage and enter your content any way you like – Scrivener provides the tools for structuring, but it doesn’t force any specific structure on you. Depending on your own taste, either the outline view or the cork board view will appeal to you more. Both allow you to quickly lay out your project. If you don’t know how to start your novel or article yet, but have a clear idea of the middle part, then write that one first. You can re-order any content at any given time by simple dragging and dropping.

You can link content to content, to research or to external sources. You can qualify parts of your story by status (Draft, Revised, etc) or by type (chapter, volume, concept, and so on). Really, there are no limitations as to how you can arrange your content and so Scrivener adapts itself to your writing style.

Outline View

Corkboard

The Writing

Writing in Scrivener is like in any other word processor – simply start typing. While many writers will prefer the plain text style, you can always bring up the Ruler and add more styles to your text. You can also highlight it and, a feature I especially like, you can add annotations to your text which will appear in red.

Writing

If you enter the Ghost Notes mode, the annotations will pale as soon as you move the insertion point away. They are less distracting this way, but can still be found quickly. While you can of course always add notes to the document notes pane on the right, sometimes you want to address a specific sentence or paragraph in your document and it’s much easier to just write the note down with it. In the preferences you can specify whether you want these notes to be exported and printed with the document or if they will only be visible during the editing process.

Now, what if you need to refer to some research you’ve done, or to another chapter, while you write your current text? Nothing easier than that: Scrivener offers you the ability to split the screen (vertically and horizontally) to fit more content there and save you from switching back and forth between documents all the time.

Split View

But you haven’t seen the best part yet – full screen writing! If you have ever used WriteRoom, you will be familiar with the concept: there’s nothing on your screen except your text. No menus, no distracting graphics. I find this working environment especially useful if you need to stay in a certain mood for whatever you write.

Imagine a love scene or the dramatic revelation of the plot you’ve been building up throughout your story – the only thing you need and should concentrate on are your words on the screen.

Full Screen

You can adjust the full screen view any way you like. While hovering at the bottom of the screen with your mouse pointer, an options bar will fly up, allowing you to show the keywords HUD and the inspector. In addition, you can adjust the transparency of the black background overlay, the width of the page you are working on and – very, very cool for when it’s getting late at night and everything starts to blur before your eyes – you can increase the text size.

Full Screen With Options

Another helpful feature is the word and characters count. Articles often require a minimum number of words or they are limited to a maximum. If you are a participant of NaNoWriMo (National Novel Writing Month), the number 1,667 has meaning for you (it’s the number of words you need to write every day on average to successfully complete NaNoWriMo). Except for the cork board view, Scrivener always shows you the word and character count, helping you to stay on track. You can even set word goals in the outline view.

Counts

Scriptwriting

Scrivener is not just a tool for novelists, but also for scriptwriters. All you have to do is change the writing mode to screenplay and Scrivener immediately provides you with pre-formatted options. You start by describing the shot.

After that, it’s just a matter of key-combinations or quick manual picks: you can set the characters names, enter dialogues, actions, parentheticals, transitions … you name it! Not sure of how you can use the files after you are finished? No worries, Scrivener lets you export your play into FinalDraft format.

Script

Resources

Most writing projects will require some amount of research. Often, we will find valuable information online. While you can bookmark pages and come back to them when your story needs it, you also access the information in a much simpler way: simply drag and drop the website into the research folder in Scrivener’s left pane. The application will automatically create a link, which you can rename to your liking.

Resources

But you are not limited to web pages: you can also import images, PDF files and even audio clips. Especially for larger writing projects where you have to research locations, people, and whatever else you need, it’s a real time saver to have all the information accessible right from within Scrivener.

Exporting

So you are finished with your writing project and need to export it to give it to your editor or someone else to read and publish. Scrivener offers a wide variety of export formats, ranging from RTF, Word and HTML through to FinalDraft, OpenOffice and plain text. You can choose whether or not to export notes and meta-data with your document. As you may have spotted on the screenshots, there are additional export options in the right pane of the Scrivener window, allowing you to insert a page brake before a new chapter or to exclude certain text parts in your drafts.

Conclusion

That concludes the really-quick-introductory-crash-course on Scrivener. It’s not exhaustive, since there are many, many more useful options that can’t all be covered in one review. It starts with keyboard shortcuts and ends with preference settings that allow you tweak the application even further. You will discover many of these options as you are working with Scrivener and, if you ever get stuck, be sure to check out their active and extremely helpful forums.

I hope that this short overview has given you an impression on how Scrivener can help you with your personal writing projects by adapting to your own style instead of forcing a specific method on you. And if you find that you need a more structured and guided approach, you can always try out StoryMill, Contour, CopyWrite, CeltX or Montage. There is a 30 day trial period for Scrivener and the developer really means 30 days of use, not just 30 calendar days from the day you open the app for the first time. That should be plenty of time to give it a try, and don’t forget to have a Latte ready for when you’re writing!

Here are the applications included in the bundle:

• PathFinder – The ultimate file manager for your Mac.
• Shovebox – A place to put… everything!
• Supercard – Application development does not get any easier.
• StoryMill – Want to be writer? You need StoryMill.
• MiniOne Racing – Addictive and fun game, Mario Kart for your Mac!
• inkBook – Great notetaking app, with support for tablets!
• VideoConverter Pro – Easily convert your movies to watch on your iPhone/iPod.
• Slideshow – Create standalone presentations for Mac and PC!
• MacGourmet Deluxe – Hosting a Dinner Party? Avoid a poisoning lawsuit.
• Finance 6 – Organize your finances and stay in control of your accounts.

TheMacSale is on offer for two more days, and ends on the 15th March. Be sure to get your purchase in before then if a few of the applications included particularly appeal!

What do you think of the deal? Is it one that you’re likely to be purchasing in the next few days?

Delicious Library is an app that will enable you to catalogue your books, music, software, toys, gadgets or video games. With barcode scanning, plenty of export options, and a gorgeous interface, it’s a solid application that’s worth checking out.

Entering the competition is really simple. All you need to do is follow us on Twitter and post your Twitter username in the comments.

Good luck, and we’ll be announcing the winners in one week – on Thursday 18th March.

I freelanced for a very long time before I ever used such an application, and my experience is that having one makes life a whole lot easier: I know where I’m spending my time; I’ve calculated hourly rates that work for me, so I know which projects are worth continuing with, and which I should set aside; and I’m easily able to generate good looking, professional invoices.

There are many different applications available for Mac users, as well as some great online options. I tried a few, before settling on Marketcircle’s Billings 3, which has been my time tracking app of choice for most of the past two years. Stunt Software released On The Job 3.0 a little over a year ago, and although it’s been mentioned a few times on Mac.AppStorm, we’ve never given it a proper review. So, with no further ado, join me after the jump, and I’ll tell you why I’m switching.

Subtle, Simple Interface

On The Job’s main window is elegantly designed, its colours well-considered and easy on the eye. It’s basically a two-pane layout, with a list of your clients down the left hand side, including an indented list of jobs and invoices for each. The right hand panel changes depending on what’s selected on the left, showing either the overall details of a client or of a specific job, or a preview of the selected invoice.

The Main Interface

The other aspect of the interface is a timer control in your menu bar. Click on the symbol and it drops down a menu that lets you start and stop the timer, or swap from one job to another.

The Menu Bar

When the timer’s running, you can choose from two different animations for its controller button at top-left of the main window: either a subtle pulsing or a spinning wheel of colour.

The Spinning Timer

Day-To-Day Usage

Adding a new client is easy: just click on the ‘+’ at bottom-left, select ‘New Client’ and enter the client name in the text box that’s added to the left panel. You can then enter details for address, pay and mileage rates, specify how invoices will appear and what details they will include. If your new client is already in your Address Book, you can simply click on the address card icon at the far-right of the client name, and a panel slides down to let you search and select from your contacts.

Entering Client Details

Once your client’s details are added, you can add new jobs with that same ‘+’ icon:

Adding a Job/Folder

When you’ve added a job, clicking on it brings up a new entry panel at the bottom of the window, making it easy for you to input details of this particular job, including a description, notes, or a custom hourly rate.

Entering Job Details

Every time you start the timer for a job, a new session is added. You can see details of all the timed sessions by clicking either on the ‘i’ at the start of the selected job’s title, or on the ‘Timing Sessions’ button.

Timing Sessions

You can also use the ‘Quick Add’ button to add a timing session manually – say you have a client meeting without your Mac, so the timer’s not running: just use this when you get back to your desk to add the time to the job.

That’s really all you need to know to get going with On The Job, and to start saving money by keeping a more accurate record of where you’re spending your time… But there’s more to this app.

Handling Invoices

When it comes to getting paid, it’s really easy to produce professional invoices with On The Job. Just use the ‘+’ button again and select ‘Create New Invoice’. A panel slides down to let you select details of your new invoice.

Creating an Invoice

When you’re sure the right elements are included, click on ‘OK’, and you’ll be taken to On The Job’s invoice editor:

Editing an Invoice

Working with the Template Editor, it’s simple to either modify one of the existing templates to meet your needs or your tastes, or to design your own template by setting a background image or PDF layout.

Templates

Making changes to a template is as simple as dragging items you want added from the list on the left into position on the page, or deleting from the page anything that you want removed.

Once you’re done editing your invoice, you can choose to send it directly to Mail (where it will be added as a PDF to a blank message), to save it to your machine as a PDF, or to print it out immediately.

Other Clever Touches

One thing that really bothered me about Billings was that it doesn’t support multiple currencies. The app takes its currency setting from your Mac’s System Preferences (the ‘Currency’ setting, under ‘Formats’ in the ‘Language & Text’ preference pane). So whenever I’ve needed to bill a client in a different currency, I’ve had to temporarily change this setting so that I could create the invoice, and then remember to change it back again. That’s a drag. With On The Job it’s much simpler: you just set up the currency in the client profile, and you can have as many different currencies as you have clients – that’s much better in a real world situation where a freelancer might do business with clients all over the globe.

I appreciate that On The Job gets out of the way very quickly. That menu bar item actually allows you to do quite a lot, so you can close the main window and just get on with whatever it is you need to do, knowing that when you change projects you can pause the timer session on the job you’ve been working on and switch to another without needing to open the app’s main window. That works well when you just want to be getting on with things with as little distraction as possible.

Generating invoices is very straightforward and flexible, and it’s easy to edit the available templates and come up with something that works very well for you. By contrast, I’ve found Billings’s invoicing more difficult to work with.

The Missing Piece

But there’s one thing missing for me: an iPhone app. Billings didn’t have one until quite recently (and I’ve not tried that yet, because it’s on the pricey end of iPhone apps). There’s been some talk on Stunt Software’s Get Satisfaction board about whether there’s going to be an iPhone app, but the discussion still looks pretty inconclusive.

If you’re on the road a lot, this might prove to be a very important consideration, leading you to think more seriously about Billings or one of the online time-tracking options, such as Harvest. But if you’re after an application to use only on the Mac desktop, then On The Job is a very good option, and well worth a try.

We’ll be considering applications that help you take notes, use the Dock and Finder less, quickly share files, and search easier. Even if you don’t buy into the minimal philosophy, there may be something that you find very useful!

Notational Velocity

Notational Velocity

Let’s start with an application I’m rapidly becoming very fond of. Notational Velocity is a simple utility for storing text notes, searching them, and automatically keeping them in sync with your iPhone and a web service called Simplenote.

If you regularly make text notes, and don’t need anything more powerful with image support, Notational Velocity is an absolute must-see. It’s also completely free.

Developer: Open Source
Price: Free

Instapaper

Instapaper

More of a bookmarklet than a standalone application, Instapaper lets you save a webpage with one click for viewing at a later date. All formatting is stripped away, so you’re left with just the main body and text of the article.

The post can be viewed on your desktop, or automatically synchronised with an iPhone/iPod touch, or Kindle if you prefer.

Developer: Marco Arment
Price: Free

Fluid

Fluid & Google Docs

Although I’m not completely in love with Google’s interface, there’s something very reassuring about knowing all your data is stored safely on their servers. Using Fluid in combination with Google Docs is a brilliant way to simplify what’s stored on your hard drive, and make your documents accessible from anywhere.

Fluid can essentially create a local application for a particular website, complete with it’s own Dock icon and specific browser instance.

Developer: Todd Ditchendorf
Price: Free

WriteRoom

WriteRoom

If you’re a writer, WriteRoom is definitely worth giving a try. You may not fall in love with it, but the simplicity and lack of distraction offered is impressive. The interface strips away anything else on the screen, providing you with a virtual “room for writing”.

It’s possible to create documents directly within the app, or use it to edit text from other software on your Mac.

Developer: Hog Bay Software
Price: $24.99

Quicksilver

Quicksilver / LaunchBar

Both of these apps (or the similar Google Quick Search Box) provide a way to quickly search your computer, launch and control applications, or perform various actions on files. It’s a way of interacting with your computer using on the keyboard, stripping out various steps in any particular task.

Although QuickSilver is no longer in development, it’s supported by a large community of Mac users and many different plugins are available.

Price: From Free to $32

Adium

Adium

My personal approach is to throw away all the disparate instant messaging applications on my system completely – I don’t use IM on a day-to-day basis. The slightly less radical alternative is to use Adium; a functional, all-in-one client for your Mac.

Not only does it work with almost any chat network, the interface is very easy to customise. It only takes a few clicks to have a completely zen-like messaging setup.

Developer: Open Source
Price: Free

VLC

VLC

Although it may sound unusual to have a video player in this roundup, VLC is a fantastic exercise in simplicity. It’s capable of playing almost any video format you throw at it. All complexity is removed, and you’ll never be asked to install a codec or download an extra piece of software.

Developer: VideoLAN
Price: Free

TaskPaper

TaskPaper

Another application from Hog Bay Software, TaskPaper is probably the simplest to-do list app you could imagine. It has much in common with Notational Velocity, with a natural interface and a equally well-designed companion iPhone app.

Rather than require you to change the way you work, TaskPaper is versatile enough to be used however you see fit.

Developer: Hog Bay Software
Price: $29.99

Other Minimal Tips

Here are some more useful tips and techniques to follow for keeping your system clean, windows uncluttered, and working space as basic as possible:

• Hide your Dock – It may feel unusual at first, but gives you more screen estate and is still there whenever you need it!
• Turn off notifications – You don’t need to hear a “ping” every time an email arrives.
• Minimise windows into application icon – This became an option in Snow Leopard and made me a happy man. It keeps your Dock completely free from the clutter of minimised windows.
• Avoid menu bar icons – If you don’t use a particular icon regularly, consider removing it from your menu bar.
• Use Dropbox – It keeps all your files in-sync with a web server, and makes for a brilliant backup service.
• Disable OS X features you don’t use – If, like me, you never use Spaces, make sure that it’s disabled. The same goes for Dashboard, Expose, and other similar apps.
• Use iWork and iLife – I’m a huge proponent for using iWork over MS Office. Also, iLife is so well-integrated with the operating system, it makes managing media incredibly simple.

Discovering More

As ever, I’d recommend Minimal Mac as a great blog to follow for all things simple. It’s full of useful tips and hints for using your computer in a different and interesting way.

Also, feel free to share your own “minimal” suggestions in the comments. I’d love to learn about a few new applications that you find useful!

If you just screwed up you forehead trying hard to think of everything, maybe Delicious Library is something for you. It will help you keep track of all those items by just holding them in front of your Mac’s in-built camera. Intrigued? Read on!

The Best Up Front: iSight Scanning

Delicious Library is an app that will enable you to catalogue your books, music, software, toys, gadgets or video games. Before you stop reading, don’t worry – it’s not via the tedious process of typing in every single item manually. Like me, many of you have probably tried that already and got fed up with it somewhere in the first or second hour of cataloguing, knowing you still had days ahead of you.

With Delicious Library, all you need is a well lit room, the barcode of the item you want to catalogue (on the back of the book or DVD cover) and your Mac’s built in iSight camera. Activate the barcode scanner within Delicious Library and then start scanning.

Within less than an hour, you can have 100 books or DVDs catalogued, complete with cover art, synopsis, additional information and even customer reviews – and all you had to do was hold the item in front of your computer.

Getting Started

When you launch Delicious Library for the first time, you can either start with an empty or sample library. Either way Delicious Library subscribes to your iTunes library by default and even when you selected to start with an empty library, your iTunes content will be listed.

Default Library

Adding new items can either be done manually or by using the iSight camera. When using the manual approach, all you have to do is to select the proper category and type in the name of the item.

Delicious Library will automatically start a separate library for Books, DVDs etc. After a quick search, Delicious Library presents you with some choices and you can pick the one that comes closest to what you want.

You can change the location of the search. By default, it is set to US, but you can also select France, Germany, Canada, United Kingdom or Japan.

Entering Manually

If your item has a barcode, you can also use the barcode scanner. Activate it by clicking the tiny camera icon in the lower part of the application window and a new window will pop up on your screen. When holding your book, DVD or game in front of the iSight, make sure that the area to be scanned is well lit but does not reflect.

It might take you a try or two to figure out at which angle and distance to hold an object so it’s recognized fastest (you will get a light “dong” sound when the scanning process was successful).

iSight Scanning

By looking up the barcode number, Delicious Library can find out pretty much exactly which kind of item you want to catalogue. It works quite well with current books and digital media, but with older books or DVDs it might get confused.

Out of my three Babylon 5 trilogies (9 books) it only recognized 5 books correctly, but then they weren’t sold in huge numbers and published 11 years ago. In case the app fails to look up an item correctly, you can always try the manual approach or even add a blank item and fill out all the information by hand.

But Delicious Library doesn’t only convince with great functions, it also comes with some neat effects. If you have your speakers turned on while adding items, don’t get a shock: by default the app announces the title of an item when adding it to the shelf.

When it becomes too annoying after a while, you can switch that option off in the settings. But there’s also lots of eye candy when adding or removing an item (which is of course a lot more impressive when watched live than on the screenshots):

Eye Candy

Organizing Content

As mentioned above, your iTunes content is automatically added to your Delicious library and the app creates new libraries for different types of items. If you’d like quicker access or an overview of specific items, you can create smart shelves that work pretty much like smart playlists in iTunes: by selecting the defining characteristics of the items.

Setting Rules

It might take a while to figure the logic out, but it’s worth the time. For example, the rule “Series is/contains House” will not display the seasons belonging to the TV show. Creating the rule “Title contains House” will accomplish that, but also list all albums by the band Lifehouse. Adding the rule “Type is iTunes Show” finally creates a shelf that only displays items belonging to the TV show House.

Items can be dragged into normal shelves, but not into smart shelves. Additionally I noticed that you can’t drag items from any of the iTunes shelves onto other shelves, which becomes very annoying if you want to have a normal shelf with a random collection of items (movies you want to play during a movie night with friends, for example).

Another quirk in the application is the display of TV shows. Even though being correctly displayed in iTunes, some shows show up multiple times. Sometimes it seems to be due to a slightly different naming in the ‘creator’ field.

Since it shows up correctly in iTunes, I’d expect Delicious Library to handle it as well, which it unfortunately doesn’t and makes the TV show shelf, the most important one for me, unusuable.

Viewing on Your iPhone

We’ve been informed that the iPhone app was actually pulled from the App Store a while ago, so it’s unfortunately no longer available to download.

Exporting to the Web

Additionally, you can export your content – all of it or only selected shelves – to MobileMe, iWeb, any FTP site or locally into a folder on your hard drive. There are only two templates to chose from, but if you just want to have your library available from wherever you are, it will do.

Export Settings

The exporting process for a complete and well filled library takes quite some time – a few minutes even for a local export. Even an export of only a few shelves (3 in my example with 20 items) can blow up the size of the images folder in your web export to over 2MB. So make sure you have a fairly fast and stable internet connection when you plan to upload your entire library.

Your Generated Website

Lending

Of course good books, movies and games are best enjoyed by sharing them with friends, family and colleagues. While most people return the items on time and on their own, some lose track of them and as Mikail Gorbachev already put it: “Trust is a good thing, but control is better.”

Therefore, make use of the Friends feature built into Delicious Library. You can add any person from your address book and by default, people sharing your last name are added (parents, siblings).

To mark an item as shared with a person, simply drag and drop it on the name. You can set a return date for the item, it will receive a nice “Loan” badge on the detailed view and it will be displayed slightly transparent within it’s shelf, marking it visually as unavailable.

Checking Out a Loan

Once an item has been returned, just check it in again. It’s a great way to keep track of those CDs and books you’d otherwise have lost forever!

Conclusion

Delicious Library’s greatest strength is the ease and simplicity of adding items. The barcode scanning is amazingly accurate and allows you to catalogue a large collection of items in a relatively short period of time.

While it impresses with this functionality and eye candy, it doesn’t always display content correctly (TV shows in my case). I’d also like an easier method of adding notes or additional information like with DVDpedia (which can be navigated very easily by keyboard and offers a ton of beautiful web export options, but lacks the accuracy when scanning).

When considering Delicious Library and similar apps, also take into account that with Delicious Library you get one app that can handle pretty much everything from DVDs to apparel, all in one database.

Embedding this MacTastik strip elsewhere? Please provide a link back to this post and to NCWinters.com

Tags, from Gravity Applications makes tagging files universally across your Mac a breeze. This review will look into how Tags can help you keep track of your files, and why you should be tagging.

Adding Tags

The best thing about Tags is how incredibly well integrated it is into the whole system; almost anything you could want to tag can be, right from within the application.

Adding a tag is as simple as hitting ‘Control + Spacebar’ from just about anywhere, when you’ve got something you want to tag selected or open. For example, it could be a file or folder in the Finder, some photos in iPhoto, a movie in iTunes, or a contact in Address Book.

Once pressed, a tagging window appears in which you can quickly tap in the appropriate tags. Any tags you’ve used before will autofill as you type, and there is also access to a ‘Recently used’ and ‘Favorites’ selection.

Adding Tags

Sometimes this tagging window can take a number of seconds to load as it works out what you are wanting to tag, but it is usually pretty quick. Regardless, any time spent waiting would be less that what it takes to organize files into a folder structure.

Tag Browser

Tags has a built in Tag Browser to help sort and organize your tags if the need arises. Within this, you can view all your different tags, and view files by tag name. There is great filtering option, where I can select the ‘photography’ tag, and then ask it to refine to the search to only include ’ski’ photographs by clicking the related tag to the right.

There is also an attractive preview section of the tag contents, however it would be great to have more viewing options as found in the finder, such as icon grid or Cover Flow.

The Tag Browser

Search Bar

Tags includes a fantastic search bar feature, which not only does a great job of looking for files corresponding to tags, but also (in my opinion) offers a far superior search bar than Mac OS X’s built in Spotlight, searching everything else in the system as well.

The Tags search bar has so much going for it. It supports browsing through files and folders from within itself; that is, you can have a look at what’s inside a folder or ‘All Results’ without having to open a Finder window.

Even more impressive, you can Quick Look files within the search bar, scroll through longer lists of results, and drag and drop files directly from the search bar!

The Search Bar

Preferences

In the Tags preferences, you can tweak a few important settings. You can of course change the hotkeys for the Tag window and the search bar.

In addition to this you can set exactly what you would like to be searched through and ignored, including letting you search the Library and System folders which Spotlight does not let you search.

Preferences

Why Tag?

So why bother? Certainly, this system is not for everyone, but it is a very powerful and useful alternative to using an organized folder structure.

One of the main reasons for using tagging to sort your files is that you can organize all types of files into overlapping categories. For example, if you were working on a project that involved slideshows, emails, documents, and contacts, you could tag all of these with the same tag. This way, when you search for that tag, all of your files from every different app are all brought together for you just with a few keystrokes.

Another great reason to tag is if you love to throw all of your files into the Documents folder and need an easy way to keep them organized!

Conclusion

Tagging files is a great way to stay organised if a folder structure never appealed to you, and Tags is a well polished app that is very well integrated into the system. It is fast, easy to use, and has a brilliant search bar feature which I could almost use tags for alone.

This app is not for everyone but for those who can’t be bothered organizing files into folders or want to try something different, I would certainly recommend giving it a go. Tags is available for $29 with a 15 day trial free for download. Let us hear your thoughts on this app, and whether it will be changing the way you organize files.

Today I’ll be showcasing 6 places where you can find the perfect icon. We’re focusing on the absolute highest quality, so you can rest assured you won’t find any second rate design here!

1. The Iconfactory

Creators of Twitteriffic and Ramp Champ for the iPhone, and CandyBar, xScope and IconBuilder for the Mac, The Iconfactory sure know how to put a good design together. Their regular icon collections are no exception, and you can view and download several years worth of work in the freeware section of their website.

You’ll find all manner of system replacement sets, seasonal goodies, and a few tie-ins for particular films or television series.

2. RAD.E8

Sascha Hohne has long been a highly regarded icon designer, and now works for Apple. I’m a huge fan of his work, and have been using the latest release of his “Minium” icon set on my Mac for several months now. I’d thoroughly recommend it as a complete system replacement set.

You’ll find a selection of his earlier work at Deviant Art, and a few wallpapers to accompany Minium.

3. We Love Icons

A simple website with hundreds of interesting designs, We Love Icons is definitely worth spending a few minutes browsing through. Most are available in both native Mac formats and PNG, so it should be easy to apply them after downloading.

The guys behind this site also host a useful online conversion utility – iConvert – for moving icons between different formats. This can be useful, depending upon where you’ve downloaded them from.

4. Iconpaper

iconpaper is an extensive site, not just limited to icons. You’ll find wallpapers, skins for various applications, dock backgrounds, OS X themes and much more. There are 81 pages of really beautiful icons to flick through, so you won’t be short of inspiration.

5. deviantART

deviantART is an enormous website, with icons being only a tiny subset of the artwork stored there by designers and artists around the world. That said, there is still a wealth of wonderfully designed icons. The link above will take you straight to the relevant section.

Because of the vast breadth of content available, it will take a little longer to search through deviantART than the other sites mentioned. It’ll be worth it when you find just the icon you’re looking for.

6. Forums

There are several forums dedicated to sharing and creating new icons and graphics for OS X, and they make a great place to search for a particular icon replacement. A few that I would recommend are:

• MacThemes – One of the longest running forums, with thousands of members and icon releases on a regular basis.
• Macristocracy – It’s quite a mouthful, but a gorgeously designed forum with an active community of designers and some really useful icons.
• Galaxy GUI – Not quite as polished as the first two forums, but with a decent archive of content. I particularly love the PNG thread.

Conclusion

Messing with OS X icons is probably something only to be attempted by people who really appreciate design, or are completely fanatical about the look and feel of their Mac. And if you’re reading this, then you probably fall squarely into one of these categories!

For a few hints and tips on how to change icons after you’ve found the perfect one, read our how-to on the subject.

If you’d like to suggest another website, blog, or forum for locating top-notch OS X icons, please do so in the comments. I’d love to hear your suggestions.

For years I did what most of us do: stored messages in various well-pruned folders. I then moved to rely on Gmail’s labels and its awesome search capabilities. Eventually I moved on from Gmail to FastMail, started using Mailtags, and took the step of tagging my messages, getting rid of folders, and dumping everything into a single archive. Sadly, Mailtags hasn’t quite made the jump to Snow Leopard yet (and I’ve had problems with the beta), so I’m waiting for a full and final update to be released. Until that happy day, I’ve been pleased to spend the last week experimenting with Rocketbox, and I can see this little app becoming a fixture in my email workflow.

Getting Started

Rocketbox installs as an add-on to OS X’s built in Mail client, and you really wouldn’t know it was there unless you looked quite closely. See how there are stripes added to the standard search box?

Your New Search Box

That’s it. That’s the sign that Rocketbox is installed and in use.

You can turn Rocketbox off if you ever want to use Mail’s built-in, Spotlight-supported search: just click on View and then untick ‘Use Rocketbox’, and the stripes, and the features, will disappear.

The first time you run Mail after installing Rocketbox, it will index all of the messages on your computer. It can’t reach up and index messages on your email account’s server, so you need to have selected to download a copy of all your messages for offline viewing – check the setting for the account you want to be able to search in Mail’s Preferences, in the Advanced Tab under Accounts. The indexing may take a few minutes; the time it takes of course depends on the number of messages you have on your machine.

Indexing

When the process is done, you’ll be left looking at Rocketbox’s main window. But let’s not start there…

Searching

As soon as you start interacting with that now-striped search box in Mail, you will see that there’s more going on…

A Basic Search

That’s one of Rocketbox’s headline features, auto-suggested search-by-person. It’s a great way of getting a quick overview of exchanges with a particular contact, wherever those messages are hidden among your store. Say I selected the first name on the list: that would bring back Rocketbox’s main window, displaying a list of all the messages I’ve exchanged with our esteemed editor.

Search Results

You will see that, down the left hand side, there are three sections: ‘Flags’, ‘Accounts’, and ‘Mailboxes’, and there’s a count beside each different kind of Flag, or in each Mailbox or folder in which messages were found that match the criteria. Clicking in the tick-box to the left of any of these items will narrow the range of results shown.

Most of the window is taken up with previews that show the headers and first few lines of each message. It would be great if Quick Look worked in this list of results, but as yet it doesn’t – please, Mr Developer, add this soon… For now, you have to double-click on any message you want to read, and it will be displayed as usual in Mail.

Sorting

This is all extremely straightforward, and likely to be familiar to anybody who’s ever searched in Mail.

Added Power

Where Rocketbox comes into its own (though I must say, “You had me at ‘auto-suggested search-by-person’!”) is with the range of queries that it supports. These allow you to fine tune your search and will make the job of finding particular messages in that vast email haystack much, much easier. Here’s a clip from the app’s website showing the different kinds of search operators available:

Search Operators

A quick search for…

…instantly brought up exactly the same results as previously. Adding ‘body:rocketbox’ narrowed the search down to just three messages.

Running the same search without using Rocketbox took about 8 seconds longer, and returned – of course – no results, because Mail doesn’t support search queries of this kind.

Equivalent Results in Search

A fairly specious comparison, I know, but it does demonstrate the greater power of searching with Rocketbox.

Conclusion

For the past several months, I have been using Postbox to manage my email. I’ve particularly liked its Topics, which of course are tags by another name. Recently, I’ve felt frustrated by the amount of memory it uses, so I decided I would come back to Mail for a while. That more or less coincided with the arrival of Rocketbox.

As I said before, Mailtags isn’t quite ready for Snow Leopard yet, so I was a bit worried, making the switch back to Mail, that I would struggle to find and keep track of messages. Rocketbox adds enough power to Mail that I’m willing to trust to it – as I trusted Gmail’s search back in the day.

This is a small application, focused on a single task, but it adds a whole lot of search power to Mail. It’s very speedy, and adding the ability to search with various operators makes it much easier to track down precisely what you’re after.

• MacJournal ($39.95) – A good choice for any amount of writing, whether that’s just a quick note, an in-depth blog entry or a full-on book. It recently featured in our note taking app roundup.
• RipIt ($19.95) – We recently reviewed RipIt, a DVD ripping application. An all-round winner, and a gorgeously designed app.
• Clips ($27) – Featuring in our recent clipboard utility roundup, Clips helps you better manage copy-and-pasting on your Mac.
• CoverScout ($39.95) – A well-designed and useful application for quickly locating missing cover art in your iTunes library. I’ll be purchasing the bundle for this application alone!
• Flow ($25) – Flow is an FTP app that we have reviewed in the past. We really liked the range of features it packed.
• Tales Of Monkey Island ($34.95) – The obligatory bundle game, this one promises six episodes of pirate-filled adventure. Unlikely to be the “killer” app that makes you purchase the bundle!
• RapidWeaver ($79) – Unlocked after a certain number of bundles are purchased, RapidWeaver is a brilliant web design tool for the Mac. Check out our review for an in-depth look at it’s feature set.

You have seven days to purchase the bundle and, as usual, the final two applications are only unlocked after a certain number of sales are reached. Don’t worry – the target is always met!

What’s the verdict? Will you be picking up the bundle for $19.95?

With LicenseKeeper, an application that is specially designed to help you in these cases, storing and retrieving license information becomes painless. Today we’ll be taking an in-depth look at what LicenseKeeper is capable of, and whether it’s right for you.

Why Use a Dedicated App Like LicenseKeeper?

The short answer would be: convenience. LicenseKeeper offers a clean, simple interface that makes the tedious task of keeping track of your licenses easy. You can store all the information – serial keys, license files, even attachments – in one place and don’t have to go email hunting or dive through print-outs anymore.

It may not sound like such a big deal in itself, but everyone who has needed to reinstall an operating system or set up a new machine will understand how much time and nerves can be saved by just opening one application and having everything at your fingertips.

Getting Started

Once installed, you need to get your licensed apps into LicenseKeeper. There are multiple ways to achieve that: you can import applications by manually selecting them or by just dragging and dropping them onto the LicenseKeeper window. You can also manually enter information for an application if you don’t have it currently installed:

The Main Window

Conveniently, LicenseKeeper fetches the application icon and version automatically. The latter is especially useful if there are updates to your apps that require you to have a certain version to be eligible for a free update. If you don’t have an app currently installed or don’t know where to find the version information, LicenseKeeper can help you out with that.

Importing License Information

The functionality of importing licenses automatically from emails is very convenient and surprisingly simple to use. You can finally skip all the copy and pasting or even manual typing of serial information. All you have to do is to find the one email that contains your license information and select it in your email client – LicenseKeeper supports Apple Mail, Entourage and PowerMail.

Once you have the email itself selected – really, just the email, no text within the email – switch over to LicenseKeeper, make sure the correct app is highlighted, and click the “Attach Email” button. LicenseKeeper scans the email for you and automatically extracts the serial number and inserts it into the appropriate field. Very sweet!

If you have purchased bundles, for example through MacHeist or other sites, and your serials arrive all in one single email, LicenseKeeper will select the first serial it reads.

Apart from this option, you can also import license information from other sources (including Yojimbo), as long as you can export it from there in a tab-delimited or comma-separated format. As a long-time 1Password user I tried to export my information from there, but failed to provide LicenseKeeper with a format it could read properly.

Additional Information

When importing information by email, LicenseKeeper not only adds the serial information, but it also updates your registration information, the publisher data and the purchase info. Updating means that if the email address you used when buying an app is different from the email that is stored in your address book, LicenseKeeper will automatically add the correct one in the registration information.

It does not automatically pull the price for the app, that you have to add yourself. Very welcome is the option to change the currency – so if you’ve purchased in Euros, you are no longer forced to have the $ sign sitting in front of the price.

Attachments

Some application provide a dedicated license file, which will unlock the app. You can store this file as well in LicenseKeeper. Either use the “Attach Document” option or just drag and drop the file into the attachments area. You can attach pretty much any document type you like; text, PDF, or even the application itself as a DMG or ZIP file.

All the information is stored in a library file in your Application Support folder in your Library (~/Library/Application Support/LicenseKeeper). When you right click the library file and select “Show package contents” you can access the attachments this way as well.

Attachments

Conclusion

If you are looking for a dedicated software license management app, then LicenseKeeper is definitely worth a look. It’s very easy to use and focuses on what it promises to do without burdening you or your system with too many additional options.

Especially convenient is the option to store files as attachments alongside the serial information. This way, you could theoretically keep your software and the licenses all in one place.

The downside? For an extra $20, you could pick up 1Password. This is able to handle storing your software serial codes, as well as automatically dealing with all your online passwords. Certainly worth considering if you don’t mind spending a little more.

Now would be a good time to explore a part of the AppStorm Network you’ve never seen before! Don’t forget, you can always keep track of the whole network via the AppStorm Dashboard.

Best of iPhone.AppStorm

Best of Web.AppStorm

10 Great Recreation Apps to Get You Active

By taking a minute to check your computer before heading outside, you can up your game — no matter what your plans are. These ten great recreation web apps will help you find something to do and make the most of it, or make the most of what you already do!

Real-Time Web Analytics with Clicky

Clicky, however, is a real solution; providing real-time analytics for your site. Real-time tracking could even be considered just the icing on the cake, considering Clicky offers enough additional features and options to make the competition hang their heads in shame. I’ll take a look at Clicky, it’s features and why it’s used by sites like Smashing Magazine and Mashable.

Top 10 Free E-Card Sites for Valentines

Everyone may have their own plans to make Valentine’s Day special; you may intend to send flowers, cakes, cookies, sweets, hampers, and many more gifts but e-cards have their own uniqueness. There are ample choices to be selected from which are also much easier to send quickly.

We’ve rounded up the top ten free websites to send e-cards this Valentine’s.

The Top 8 Free Online Image Editors

While you won’t have the extensive capabilities Photoshop has, this list of the top eight image editing web apps will likely offer more features than necessary for most people in most instances.

Build Hot Promotions with Wildfire

Wildfire seeks to change the difficulty involved in launching and running successful social media marketing campaigns, making it easy for almost anyone to jump right in and successfully execute a quality promotion using today’s social media outlets.
I’ll take a look at Wildfire today and see what they’re bringing to the table of marketing.

Best of Mac.AppStorm

Share Your Ideas

Is there something in particular you’d like to see on the site next month? We’d absolutely love to hear your suggestions for articles, topics and giveaways – just let us know in the comments. Thanks for reading AppStorm!

CleanMyMac – CleanMyMac represents a sophisticated all-in-one-suite utility that helps keep your Mac clean and healthy.

MiniBooks – A handy iPhone app from FreshBooks that lets you track your time and invoice your clients while you’re away from your computer.

Billings – Billings’ simple workflow and intuitive interface makes quoting, invoicing, and time tracking effortless.

Daylite Touch – Daylite Touch is a business productivity manager for the iPhone and iPod touch, winner of a 2009 Macworld Best of Show award, designed as a companion to Daylite on the Mac.

Pages Templates Pro – With Pages Templates Pro, you can even turn your envelopes and invoices into a key part of a successful advertising campaign.

Embedding this MacTastik strip elsewhere? Please provide a link back to this post and to NCWinters.com

Congratulations to the following winners of our TapeDeck giveaway. Your license will be on the way very soon!

• Maik Prus
• Vitor Hugo
• Hector Lee

Competition Details (Now Closed)

It’s competition time again, and today we have three licenses of TapeDeck to give away. TapeDeck is a retro audio recorder for OS X, organising your recordings into virtual “tapes”, with a thoroughly unique interface. We posted an in-depth review of TapeDeck last week, and are thrilled that we have a few licenses to offer our readers!

Entering is very simple. All you need to do is:

1. Post a link to this competition – either on your website, or via Twitter
2. Leave a comment, letting me know where you posted the link!

The competition will run for one week, and we’ll announce the winners on the Friday 5th March. Good luck, and have a fun weekend!

This is where BusyCal from BusyMac proves to be something of a lifesaver. If you are familiar with iCal, the transition to BusyCal shouldn’t be too difficult. Plus, you will enjoy some added bonuses such as powerful synchronization tools and live data built into the Month view.

iCal Pro?

Some refer to this app as “iCal Pro”, which, after a few minutes of playing with the application, I can completely understand. Once opened, you will notice the very close similarities to Apple’s default application, initially with the nearly identical layout and ‘Month’ view.

iCal - For Posterity!

The Main BusyCal Interface

However, BusyCal also supports the new ‘List’ view, initially featured in the iPhone’s iCal Application:

List View

Also, their Week view differs slightly, and in my opinion, BusyCal improves greatly on the one available in plain old iCal. I like seeing the ‘Month’ view like boxes at the top, dividing the ‘Week’ view column:

Week View

Sync Runs in the Family

The biggest feature of BusyCal is the ability to easily and reliably synchronize your events and to-do’s between other Macs using iCal or BusyCal, to the web with Google Calendar, or to your mobile device.

While BusyCal uses Apple’s Sync Services, which is similar to the way iCal synchronizes, their development team seems to have the syncing nailed to a far more reliable level.

A huge reason Mac users have switched to BusyCal is the ability to instantly share calendars across a local network. The instant you make changes, or add events, they appear on the other computer. It seems to be the promise of MobileMe in the real world. Now, I don’t wish to be harsh on Apple’s somewhat reliable MobileMe service. For many Mac users, it will work perfectly, synchronizing your data between your computers, the web service and your iPhone/iPod Touch. However for those who need nearly instantaneous ‘push’ features, it can tend to fall behind.

BusyCal also offers a very reliable Google Calendar sync option. The changes are pushed up to Google, and remote changes are pushed back down to BusyCal. If you are looking for something to replace your MobileMe subscription, Google Calendar and Google Sync Services are free and provide sync connections between your computer, online and your iPhone/iPod Touch. Also BusyCal can subscribe to online calendars, just like iCal.

Subscribing to a Calendar

If you click Calendar in the Menu Bar and select Find WebDAV Calendars… you will be sent to BusyMac’s WebDAV Calendar page, which allows you to subscribe to sports and holiday calendars.

Now, before heading straight to comments to tell me that iCal supports Google Calendar as well, I wish to emphasize that reliability is key, and with CalDAV (through personal experience) things can get out of sync quickly and without notice. While iCal does support CalDAV, it doesn’t allow for you to store To Do’s or synchronize alarms or create new calendars on your computer that are sent to Google. All of these features are what makes using BusyCal a better option for heavy Google Apps users.

One last note on syncing, BusyCal does not currently support Exchange accounts, which iCal in Mac OS 10.6 Snow Leopard does.

Spicing Up Your Calendar

Not that calendars need to be exciting, but iCal is very minimal and simple when it comes to similar applications. Like Outlook (Windows) or Entourage (Mac), it isn’t exciting to look at.

You can easily add graphics by dragging photos directly from your computer or a web browser. Resize and click away to save the heart for Valentine’s day, or the picture of the US’s first President, George Washington for his birthday. These images are also synced via the local network to other BusyCal users. However, they cannot be sent through the internet to appear on Google or any computer just using iCal.

Sticky Notes

Another feature I have found extremely useful is the ability to show live weather feeds right in the calendar. It is really nice not to have to turn on the Weather channel on the TV, or even to have to open up an app on my iPhone. I can easily check to see if I’ll need flip flops or an umbrella as I browse my appointments. There is even an option to show the moon phases, and quickly jot down sticky notes.

In-Built Weather

Other Nice Features

To Do’s in iCal can be handy, as they allow synchronizing between GTD (Getting Things Done- for more information check out David Allen’s book, or our roundup of GTD apps for your Mac) applications like Things or OmniFocus.

BusyCal makes tracking what you need to get done each day even easier. One major upgrade over iCal is the ability to show tasks in the actual day (should a date be assigned) compared to just in the To Do pane. While To Do’s can only be synced between other BusyCal or iCal users (Google Calendar and MobileMe don’t support them yet), it is a step in the right direction for keeping what needs to be done in check.

While iCal allows for calendar publishing to private servers and MobileMe, this app will help you connect to other BusyCal users across the net. This allows for synchronizing over the internet and not just your local network.

Backing up with iCal is supported through Time Machine. BusyCal uses its own database system, so it will keep separate backup files, which in turn should be saved within Time Machine. Restoring occurs from within the Backup tab of the Preferences.

Backup Support

Should something go awry, you can reset the sync history from the Help menu and completely reset the entire application by holding the Option/Alt key during launch.

Startup Options

A final feature, which may spark a love of this application, is the ability to change the font size and typeface. If you are just tired of Lucida Grande 11, you are welcome to change it to fit your personal style.

Conclusion

After trying several applications, from the far too powerful Daylite, to the far too simple iCal, BusyCal has found a special place in my dock. The synchronization features are top notch and reliable. I love the ability to connect with my Google Apps Calendar, and LAN based syncing is flawless.

The design is kept similar to iCal, which makes it very easy to understand and jump right in. It even continues to keep iCal up to date should you ever need to go back. Over time, the keyboard shortcuts have made it easy to add banners, sticky notes and To Do’s without a hiccup.

BusyCal offers a great alternative to iCal, with more power and syncing tools. While it isn’t exactly made to mesh with the Windows world, both families and Mac centric businesses can benefit from its shared calendar features. It’s priced at $49 for one user, or $79 for a family license.

I highly recommend this as an iCal replacement, but definitely take a look at some of their competitors: NowUpToDate, Entourage and Sunbird. If you are just looking for an ability to sync to Google Calendar, BusySync is a great option, as is the pricier SpanningSync, which also synchronizes your contacts with your Gmail Account.

So, what do you use to manage your hectic day?

This article will take a look at how to get going on IRC using Linkinus, what the app can do, and some advanced tips and tricks.

Getting Started

The first time you launch Linkinus, you will be asked to enter a username you would like to use. If you are already registered on an IRC network, you can enter passwords here as well.

After completing that, the main window will reveal itself with a collection of various IRC networks that you can join. Double clicking on one of these will connect you up with the network.

From here you can browse a full list of channels, or join a specific one. Unfortunately, you can’t search the channel list until it has fully loaded which can take a while. When setting up with IRC its a good idea to know at least what type of channels you wish to join so you know what to look for.

Welcome Screen

Features & Functionality

Linkinus packs a fantastic set of features, many of which aren’t found in other IRC clients. Here’s some of the ones which stand out:

Groups

If you have multiple chats open at the same time, rather than switching between them, you can actually view them side by side by selecting them all while holding down the command key.

This is great, and even allows you to save different Groups for instant access to multiple chats at a later time.

Groups

Remain Connected

Linkinus can stay rolling on IRC after you quit the application by keeping a small icon in the menu bar. This way, when you open it up again later, all messages that took place while closed will be there as though you never left.

Stars & Highlights

Highlighting is a common feature across most IRC clients. If someone uses your name, it will be highlighted so that you don’t miss the message. Linkinus also includes a nice feature called ‘Starring’ which is the equivalent of bookmarking a message for later reference. To star a message, all you have to do is click on the username next to it.

Embedded Graphics

I was very impressed when I saw someone share an image inside IRC. Unlike most other clients which simply provide a link, Linkinus actually embeds the graphic inside the chat so you can see it without having to open a new window in your browser. This even works for elements like YouTube videos!

Embedded Graphics

Preferences

The Preferences in Linkinus are filled with a huge range of customization. In fact there are so many different options they couldn’t fit them all in the toolbar (not usually a good sign!)

You can change the style of how the app displays, including alternative themes, or edit status messages, colors, and sounds. You can also have Linkinus work seamlessly with Growl notifications, and so much more!

Something that is worth sharing that annoyed me when I first set up Linkinus is that all server messages create their own chat with a badge of unread messages next to them. To make these go away, or at least hide them, go into the ‘Miscellaneous’ tab and switch “Show Incoming Notices” to “In the network’s console”. This should take effect after you close all open server chats and relaunch.

Preferences

Fun Tips

It’s great to see the team at Conceited Software have a sense of humor. They have included a fun set of scripts you can use inside your chats – some useful, and some just purely entertaining.

For example, typing “/abrb” will leave a random funny message such as “brb – The FBI just called, I’m wanted for a special mission.” Along with these, you can get quotes off Homer from The Simpsons or Bender from Futurama, reverse your text, or even flip it!

These scripts also serve a useful purpose though, letting you know the weather, Googling for you, or listing your current open applications in the dock.

Scripts

Support

Being an IRC application, Linkinus offers excellent support from right within the app itself. Just log into their channel, and you can ask a question to anyone of the 40 or so helpful users and developers in there. They also offer a great wiki for starting out.

Conclusion

There are a couple of minor things which annoy me about Linkinus. The first is that when typing long messages, the text field doesn’t grow taller as it does in other apps, meaning you can’t see your entire message at once until posted. The second is even more minor, but I can’t say I’m a big of the sound alerts included in the app.

Linkinus is definitely an excellent option to check out if you use IRC or want to try it out. I occasionally use it to get instant feedback or technical support from lots of helpful and willing people on specific topics.

This is a very full featured IRC client, and worthy of its €19.99 (approx. $27 US) price tag. They have a free 15 day trial, so have a play and let us know what you think of it, or how you like to use IRC!

If that’s the case, take a look at our roundup of some of the most used note taking apps for Mac. We will cover both basic and complex applications, leaving you the choice of what fits your needs best.

Be sure to take a look at our companion roundup over at iPhone.AppStorm, looking at note taking apps for the iPhone.

Stickies on your Dashboard or Desktop

Stickies on your Dashboard or Desktop

No time to check out a new app (or no money to buy the one you like)? Well, if it’s simple note taking you want, why not use the apps that come with every Mac? Go to your dashboard and try out Stickies. You can put as many stickies as you want on your dashboard, give them different colors and change the font face.

Alternatively, if you are not a dashboard person, there is the “normal” app right in your applications folder that will display notes on your desktop. You can make those notes translucent so they won’t cover up whatever windows you have open. It’s quick, it’s simple and it’s already on your computer.

Notational Velocity

Notational Velocity

An incredibly simple solution, Notational Velocity is a really wonderful application for storing simple notes. They’re saved as text files (or HTML if you prefer), and the application fully supports synchronization with Simplenote and/or Dropbox.

Save-as-you-type means that you don’t need to worry about regularly saving a note you’re working on, and searching for notes is built-in as the primary way to navigate and control the software. It’s completely free, and I’d highly recommend it!

Shovebox

Shovebox

Unobtrusive but always present, the app sits in your menu bar and waits for you to shove (drop) information onto it. Supporting many different file formats, Shovebox helps you to stuff information into one place and sort it quickly by putting it into folders and tagging it.

The QuickJot window can be called from anywhere on your computer and allows for quick text entry. Additionally, Shovebox has an iPhone app that syncs with the desktop version, allowing you to take (your) notes wherever you are.

iPhone version

Spark

Spark

Spark goes for a very minimalistic approach and, if you really only want a place to quickly jot down notes, the tiny app will let you do just that without burdening you with a flood of options.

You can enter notes, give them a title and add a due date if there is a time constraint. Additionally, you can arrange your notes into groups, but that’s about it. For simple note taking, it’s also really all you need.

Caboodle

Caboodle

Somewhere between the more powerful organization apps that follow and the simple note taking apps mentioned before lies Caboodle. While being able to handle multimedia files, it focuses mainly on text notes and their organization.

The user interface is clean and intuitive; overall the app reminds of the now unfortunately no longer maintained Journler. If you don’t feel comfortable with a full blown information organizer but need a little more than just text notes, give this app a try.

Yojimbo

Yojimbo

More than a simple note taking app, Yojimbo is a comprehensive information management app which allows you to store all kinds of files. Through a quick input panel, you can enter information into the app from whichever application you happen to run at the moment.

Two nice features are also the Yojimbo Drop Dock which sits to the side of your screen and on which you can drop items and have them automatically sorted into collections, and the ability to print PDFs directly into the app. If your needs require more than simple note taking, give Yojimbo a look.

Together

Together

As the name implies, Together helps you not only with simple text notes but with all sorts of files. Similar to Yojimbo, Together has a tab called “Shelf” which sits at the side of your screen and allows you to quickly input information.

The application has powerful organization features which include not only smart collections and tags, but also color codes and ratings. You can also easily import web content by archives or printing to PDF. Overall, Together, seems to allow for a more granular organization of information, but give it a try to see if it fits your work flow.

SOHO Notes

SOHO Notes

A very powerful information and note organizer, similar to Yojimbo and Together, but has the additional functionalities of actually recording voice memos, videos and photos right from inside the app.

Also, the dedicated iPhone app called NoteLife syncs not just via WiFi, but actually makes good use of MobileMe, so you don’t have to remember to sync the desktop and mobile databases every time you added information. If this information exchange is essential to you, you should definitely take a look at this app combination.

myDiary

myDiary

Don’t get fooled by the name or the simple user interface of myDiary. Beneath that somewhat colorless shell is some raw information management power. As the name suggests, myDiary offers password protection to keep your data private, but you don’t have to restrict yourself to diary entries.

You can write notes, add images (also take them right inside the app), attach videos and many different file types. While it may not sport the best eye candy, myDiary is worth serious consideration if you are looking for an information manager not too cluttered but also not too simple.

Circus Ponies NoteBook

Circus Ponies NoteBook

Circus Ponies NoteBook combines eye candy and functionality into a beautiful user interface. The app can help you with managing your notes, but also holds up when it comes to more complex tasks like project or task management, writing/preparing a paper, collecting multi-media files etc. The app comes with various templates which will help you get started quickly.

So, throw away that legal pad and put Circus Ponies Notebook on your Macbook instead. Additional hint: if you are just switching from the PC and are used to Microsoft OneNote, this application will most likely make you feel right at home.

MacJournal

MacJournal

Similar to the other, more powerful information organizers mentioned above, MacJournal has an additional feature that makes it stand out from the crowd: blogging support for such popular platforms as LiveJournal, Moveable Type, Wordpress, TypePad and Blogger.

In this regard, this application might be of heightened interest to you if you collect information for your blog anyway – with MacJournal, there’s no need to jump between different applications when you try to get your next blog entry written.

DEVONnote

DEVONnote

DEVONNote is often viewed as the note organizing app for the Mac and should be mentioned in this list as well. For simple note taking needs it’s overwhelming. It does require quite some time to go through all the options and settings, which is necessary to be able to harness the entire power of the application, which includes clipping data from different file formats, interconnectivity of notes via wiki links, integrated browsing and much more.

Make sure to compare between the three versions – Note, Personal and Pro – to find the right level complexity for your needs.

Evernote

Evernote

Evernote provides a rather unusual approach to note taking – it stores the information in the cloud. You are not restricted to text notes, quite the contrary: Evernote lets you add images, webclips, snapshots or even voice recordings.

But the true strength of the solution lies in its support of many different platforms: you can add information via a desktop application that runs on both the Mac and the PC, but Evernote is also available for the iPhone, Android, Palm, Windows Mobile or Blackberry. Really, there’s no technical excuse for you not using it.

Mobile Apps

WriteRoom

WriteRoom

What is a note, really? It can be just a line of text, a photo or – if your needs a little extraordinary – it might be an entire chapter for a book, an article or a dissertation. WriteRoom prides itself with offering a distraction free writing environment and it does so by offering a full screen writing experience.

So, if you feel that big idea forming in your head, start up WriteRoom and be sure that the app will do nothing to sidetrack your thoughts. By the way, it does have an iPhone companion and can sync with it through SimpleText.ws.

Mobile App

Scrivener

Scrivener

As with WriteRoom, Scrivener is made for big notes and suits the needs of writers and researchers especially well. It brings with it a ton of options to store all kinds of files and import information even from websites without any hiccups. It’s strengths are in the organizing and outlining features (storyboarding) that will appeal to anybody who has to write lengthy texts.

Made with writers in mind, Scrivener can help you to keep track of all the information you will acquire for your piece and offers a development environment that can help to bring your novel or research paper to a happy ending. It also imports text written on WriteRoom for the iPhone via the SimpleText.ws sync.

Conclusion

This is by no means an exhaustive list, but it should give you a good start into the field of note taking. It comes all down to you knowing what you need your note taking app to do for you!

If you use or prefer another system, be sure to let us know in the comments.

Thoughts is a very handsome new writing/notebook app from the memorably named green&slimy, an Austrian team of two (which of course raises the question of who is green and who slimy). The hook for readers of Mac.AppStorm will obviously be the app’s styling and design features, but let’s see if it’s actually any good for a working writer.

Getting Started

Thoughts is organised around the idea of multiple notebooks. You could have separate books for particular projects, or perhaps if you used the app as a journal you might have a notebook for each month of the year. A nice visual touch is the Shelf, which displays your various notebooks on a virtual bookshelf.

Your Notebook Bookshelf

That’s sweet, though it’s a bit of an odd design choice to have this virtual shelf expand only horizontally – as you add new notebooks, they appear in alphabetical order and the shelf stretches endlessly to accommodate them, so that once you have a few you’re forced to scroll sideways to find what you’re after.

Why not have a grid system and an option for choosing how many notebooks are displayed per line? That’s a niggle, though: the Shelf is a nice idea and it’s good to look at. Just how useful it is as you add multiple notebooks is less clear. For one thing, for those of us who prefer to work with the keyboard, having to use the mouse to navigate to a particular notebook and then double-click to open it is a drag.

When you open a notebook, there’s a nifty animation of the cover opening (of course it’s difficult to get a good screenshot of an animation!):

Opening a Book

Interface

Once you’re in a notebook, your screen is divided in two: down the left-hand side is a Sidebar with a list of pages. If I was using Thoughts ongoing, this notebook would have a page for each of the articles I’ve written for Mac.AppStorm. If you used it for a journal, you would likely have a page for each day of the month.

At first I was a bit confused by this setup: when I saw a list of pages, I expected these might be a reflection of actual print pages (as in other writing apps). The usage here doesn’t quite match that; rather, it reflects the central organising principle of notebooks and pages – each ‘page’ in the Sidebar might actually take up several print pages.

Writing

There is a keyboard shortcut to show/hide the sidebar, so it’s easy to expand the writing space for more focused engagement with your text.

The More Focused Interface

You can also display a mini-calendar in the sidebar, which could be useful for keeping track of when you write – looking back over the previous week and seeing that you managed to get something down each day might be very motivating. As might be seeing that you’ve not written a thing in the past three weeks! Clicking on a date in the calendar takes you to any pages in the open notebook edited on that day.

There are also simple controls for adding or deleting pages in the sidebar, and a searchbar that lets you quickly find anything in the current notebook’s pages.

Edit Mode

You’re then taken into a WYSIWYG rich text editor, with controls for all the usual text functions: font and colour selection, justification, bold, italics, underline, line-height and various list formats. You also have buttons to insert links, tables or images into your page.

WYSIWYG Editor

Each of these features is quite simply implemented, but probably enough in most circumstances. You can get a bit more control from the Format menu.

Sharing Your Pages

Exporting your notes from Thoughts is straightforward: just click on ‘File’ and then ‘Export Page’ and a handsome panel drops down for you to choose from four different export options:

Sharing

Another way to share your notes is by clicking on ‘File’ and then ‘Mail Page’, which will open Mail.app and create a new email message with your page attached as a PDF format. It’s a limitation of the operating system that restricts this to working only with Mail.app and not with other email programs (like Postbox, which is my default).

Conclusion

Thoughts doesn’t set out to be a full-featured word processor. It’s not aiming to replace Pages or Word or Mellel. More accurate comparisons would be with other notebook applications, though I find myself struggling to find quite the right app to compare. Notational Velocity aims to be something different – a quick-entry store for your notes; and Circus Ponies Notebook, though it shares Thoughts’s notebook theme, is much more powerful.

So to whom is Thoughts aimed? It’s a very simple app, though it’s good looking and nicely designed. On first glimpse I thought ‘Coo-uhl!’, but as I’ve used it to write this review, I’ve found it to be finicky. Text entry feels slow (there’s an odd lag in entering text – just a tiny fraction of a second, I’m sure, but noticeable nonetheless), and though at first the design was attractive, the more I use it, the more irrelevant and distracting it feels.

I currently do all my writing with TextMate, and that’s what I’ll be heading back to as soon as I’m finished here. In fact, when I reach the end of the following, final paragraph, I will be selecting all the text, copying it, and pasting it into a new document in TextMate, because I prefer to compose in plain text, and that’s one format that you can’t export from Thoughts.

What comes to mind as a final comparison is different kinds of paper notebooks: to my mind, TextMate (or WriteRoom) is like a Field Notes notebook – simple and functional, and beautiful in and for those qualities. Thoughts, on the other hand, is like one of those posh, embossed, gold-leaf covered artsy notebooks you can buy in art gallery shops. They make pretty gifts, but I don’t know a single writer who would choose to do any real writing in one of them.