Apple Accessories

Web development — and app development — is an ever-growing industry. Over at ThemeForest, there are thousands of website themes available because developers spend time coding them. But it’s not easy to construct one of those masterpieces. It takes knowledge, effort, and the right tools.

Here at Mac.AppStorm, we try to make sure you know about the latest and greatest in software machinery. The best software tools. Today I’m going to introduce you to ten of the best code and markup editors available on the Mac, from free feature-packed apps to paid workhorses. They’re first and foremost designed to help you code and write markup, but most are customizable enough that they can be great writing apps, too.

Let’s jump right in.

What are Your Favorites?

Well, that’s our list of this year’s best code/markup/text editors for the Mac, but we’d love to know what you use and why. Let us know in the comments below!

I’m a big fan of Dropbox, but I don’t think it’s necessarily the easiest to use of the various cloud storage services I subscribe to. That said, if I could find a way to make it work better for me, I’d probably use it a lot more.

Spotdox extends the functionality of Dropbox, giving it that extra oomph and making it work just that little bit better. Putting all of your files in your browser so you can upload anything to Dropbox at anytime, Spotdox wants to make Dropbox go the extra mile. Will a little extra access make me love Dropbox more and turn Spotdox into a winner?

Making Dropbox Better

Spotdox is a tiny little app that runs from your menu bar or Dock. You won’t really even notice it on your Mac, and the app itself doesn’t do a whole lot. You won’t use it to browse Dropbox or access your files or anything like that. You will need to have it running at all times, though, so make sure you keep it open.

With the Spotdox app running on my Mac, I can access my computer with a browser.

You’ll use Spotdox to access your Mac’s files from your browser, but it doesn’t just have to be your Dropbox files. When you launch Spotdox for the first time, it will ask for authorization to connect to your Dropbox account, and each time I tried to use Spotdox, I let Dropbox know it was okay to connect up. When Spotdox is connected to Dropbox, the menu bar icon will glow blue.

The app will connect you to Spotdox’s website in your browser. Pretty much all of the files from your Mac will be viewable in your browser on the Spotdox website, and your Spotbox homepage will have links to the contents of what are likely to be the most used folders on your Mac. You’ll see your Home folder, Hard Disk, and Documents, Downloads, and Desktop.

View the files in any folder on your computer.

Click on any one of those to see its contents. You won’t be able to interact with your files on the Spotdox website in the same way that you could in Finder, and that’s probably a good thing for security reasons. What Spotdox does is show you what files are where and get file previews. You can get a little more information, too, like file size, extension, when it was last updated, and a few notes, like the dimensions of an image.

You can’t move your files around or delete them, but what you can do is add a file to Dropbox that isn’t currently in there. Once I got my head wrapped around what Spotdox actually does (and doesn’t) do, I was sort of blown away. Forgot to add some files to Dropbox, but now you’re on a different machine and really need them? Spotdox can help. Remembered to shift your files to Dropbox, but you did something foolish and interrupted the upload? Spotdox to the rescue!

Preview a file, get more info, or copy it to Dropbox.

But What Is It?

What Spotdox won’t do is move files from your Downloads folder to your Documents or allow you to delete or edit anything on your computer. Which is great. Unless you’ve got a good reason (and there are good reasons, don’t get me wrong) you don’t want to just log on to some website and start messing around in your actual files on your actual computer. That’s weird and a little bit scary, again unless of course you have a good reason for doing it, know what you’re up to, and trust the company accessing your data.

That’s not what you’re doing here. Instead, you’re uploading the file to Dropbox, in a special Spotdox folder. The file isn’t actually getting copied to your Dropbox folder, and it won’t get moved there until you sync with Dropbox. Once you’ve got the file into Dropbox from the Spotdox website, you can download it to another computer via Dropbox or share it with colleagues.

Remove files from Dropbox, too. They’ll be added to your Downloads folder.

If your Dropbox account gets filled up from all the uploading you’re doing, no worries. Spotdox can access all of your Dropbox files and send them to your Downloads folder if you want. This allows you to add files, like images or videos, to Dropbox away from your computer and send them to your main machine, bypassing the need to email stuff to yourself.

Security and Final Thoughts

I was concerned about security issues with something like Spotdox looking at all of my files, and if security concerns are a dealbreaker for you, I don’t really blame you. But it’s maybe not as bad as it could be. Spotdox is only looking at thumbnails, previews, and your file structure. Yes, that is a lot of information, and if you have credit card numbers or passwords in a text file, that’s probably going to be visible in a preview, and that preview image exists somewhere on Spotdox’s servers. They assure users they get rid of everything after about ten minutes, though, so your stuff isn’t hanging around indefinitely, and any file transfers you initiate are handled by Dropbox, not Spotdox.

If you’ve ever made it away from home and realized you’d forgotten to email that very important file, Spotdox can be a huge help. The caveats to that are that you’ll need to have both your computer and Spotdox running, but if you can manage that, it’s a great little productivity booster, especially if you rely on Dropbox to get your stuff done.

It’s the season for game console news, with both Sony and Microsoft recently unveiling their new game consoles, and Nintendo having beaten them to the punch by releasing the Wii U last winter. That’s, of course, at the same time that mobile devices and Macs are becoming more popular for gaming, and with AirPlay through an Apple TV, your iPad or Mac can power some serious widescreen gaming.

That doesn’t make consoles obsolete, of course. iOS devices have great touch and motion capacities, but the Xbox’ Kinetic gesture controls and the Wii’s motion controller — not to mention the gamepads used in all consoles — give console gaming a serious leg-up. Then, there’s the exclusive titles — from Mario to Halo — that are only on consoles.

That’s why we’re wondering if you have a game console, or if the announcements of new consoles have you thinking about buying one. We’d love to hear your thoughts on console versus Mac/iOS gaming in the comments below!

Earlier this year, I made the move to a MacBook Pro being my primary machine after years of having a desktop with a supplemental laptop. This change really just acknowledged the way I already used my computer since I seldom sat down in front of my several year old desktop. Over time I’d moved to doing almost all my work on my MacBook. In fact, for much of the last six month before making the change, the most common way I accessed my desktop was by remoting to it from my laptop.

This change lets me be more mobile and that brings a lot of freedom when working, but also adds a few challenges with having a computer that’s meant to be on the go. Over the last couple of years while gradually making the switch from my laptop being a supporting machine to my primary computer, I’ve come to use several apps that help simply the job. Let’s look at a few of them.

Conclusion

The increased power and resources available in laptops today makes them a viable option for a full time computing platform. The ability to take your work away from the desk when traveling or just when you need a change of scenery make the decision even more appareling. While laptops face additional challenges in network connectivity and battery life, these apps can help make them less problematic.

It’s now my turn to tell you about all the amazing apps I’ve found and kept using to this day, after years of reviewing tons of wonderful software for Mac.Appstorm. Some of these won’t surprise you; in fact, they might have been repeated several times by other authors that have posted in this series. However, I hope you get some cool ideas as to how you could use some of these apps, or perhaps pick up a few new apps that you hadn’t heard of.

I’ve broken these apps down into categories of what I generally do with them. Hopefully that’ll make this easier to read and relate to. Let’s do this!

Just Alfred

I have to admit I wasn’t really a fan of Alfred until a few weeks ago, when I decided to get into it after I read Pedro Lobo’s Alfred articles. Now I have Alfred with the Powerpack and workflows for everything: creating a reminder, rebooting into my Boot Camp partition, creating new notes in Evernote, and a long etc.

The other features of this launcher are of course a huge plus as well, I have a bunch of custom sites setup to be launched with a keyboard shortcut, and the clipboard and snippets integration have completely replaced a bunch of apps I used in the past like CopyLess and SnipEdges. Nowadays, I couldn’t use my Mac without it.

Note Taking

I’m a hardcore Evernote user, I’ve been a fan for years and have notes on everything from long overdue to-do lists, to a huge catalog of audio notes for songwriting. It works for me as an immense archive with neat organization, and the newest Mac update has made it even more of a delight to use.

However, there are times when I’m concentrated on work and I don’t have time to open up the app and set up my new note with tags, corresponding notebook, format and more. That’s where apps like Scrawl and Noteworthy come in. They’re simple little menu bar note apps that let me scribble things quickly without getting too distracted. Neither of them are perfect, but they work as a temporary storage place for my notes so that they can later be moved over and organized in Evernote.

Entertainment and Procrastination

I love Spotify. Not only does it let me stream music from the web, but it has also replaced iTunes as my library music player, since it also gives me access to the music in my hard drive. The in-app plugins make it even better, giving the app integration with services like Last.fm and sites like Pitchfork. Really, I only open iTunes nowadays to download podcasts, transfer new music and sync my iOS devices.

As far as social networks go, Tweetbot is by far the best Twitter app I’ve used. It’s pretty, very easy to navigate, supports Tweet Marker, integrates well with its iPhone counterpart, and it even lets me send articles to Readability right from the app. It’s a dream come true and totally worth the money. For interacting with Instagram, I use Carousel, which gives me a very native-like glance at my feed.

Work, Work, Work

For writing, there’s nothing else like Byword for me. It’s fast and easy to get started working on it, it provides a very clean and pretty writing environment for keeping distractions away. Markdown, exporting, line and paragraph focus, those are all just a few more goodies that make Byword one of my favorite apps.

On those days where I’m dreading work and putting it off with procrastination, I use Eggscellent. It’s a task/time-tracking app that makes you productive through time intervals of breaks and hard work, similarly to the Pomodoro Technique.

The Rest

• TicToc: A simple menu bar app that tracks the time you spend on given tasks. It’s useful when I’m not working with Eggscellent and would like to just know how much time I’m spending writing or watching my YouTube feed.
• Seashore: A pretty basic image editor based on GIMP. It’s very easy and fast to work with, and it fills my ocassional image editing needs.
• Broom: I have an old low-end Macbook, and as a poor college student, I’m always hurting for HDD space. Broom lets me easily see which files or folders are taking up large amounts of space, so that I can delete them or move them over to a DVD (no, not even an external HDD).
• JiTouch: This app extends the functionality of the trackpad by giving you customizable gestures for pretty much anything. I almost exclusively use it in my web browser for switching and closing tabs, but just with those two things, it’s something I couldn’t live without.
• F.lux: It lowers the intensity of your screen’s glow at night so that you don’t strain your eyes or get into weird sleep cycles. Some people can’t stand it, but I find it quite soothing.
• Chocolat: The perfect text editor. It’s a shame I don’t have much of a need for it, since I love using this app.

Closing Thoughts

As I’ve mentioned previously, the best tool is the one that doesn’t get in your way. Some of you may find my picks inadequate, but for the moment, all of them are working out great in my workflow. In a few months, who knows? I tend to switch most apps pretty quickly, with only a few being mainstays in my computer (Evernote and Byword, for example). But what about you? What do you think of my picks, and where would you differ? Let me know in the comments!

Typographic artwork is very popular at the moment with all sorts images being created, from maps to movie posters. They look really cool but don’t you just wish that you could do it yourself using any picture you want?

Wordify brings creating these types of graphics to your Mac in a very simple to use app that will convert any image you want into a typographic piece of art. It gives you beautiful results, and actually looks great doing so.

Word Art, for Real

Wordify lets you drag images directly to the main window to start converting into typographic artwork

As soon as you launch Wordify, you’re presented with a small window onto which you can drag an image. There’s a selection of templates to get you started, ranging from shapes to animals. Wordify works best when using portraits of people or images shot on clear backgrounds as you get the best effect from it but in my testing I was able to get some pretty good results from photos on multicoloured backgrounds.

If you’ve not got any pictures to use, Wordify includes some templates to get you started and see how the app works

The app is sparse when it comes to controls and only has three button on display once an image is loaded, one of them for deleting the image. The other buttons start the text rendering and provide access to the settings.

In Your Own Words

Once you’ve selected an image to use, you’re then able to customise some of the text options

There aren’t many options in the way of settings but what you can customise is useful nonetheless. The default text used is, rather fittingly, “Here’s To The Crazy Ones” but can be changed to any text you wish. Only unique words are rendered so if you paste in your favourite quote and it contains the same word a few times, you’re not going to see it more than others. So, there’s no way to get a phrase — even just two words — to be guaranteed to show up together.

You can specify the text to use and Wordify will randomly place the words with varying sizes throughout the image

You’re also able to customise the font, size and colour of the text generated. A nice touch is the option to completely randomise the font used if you’re not too interested or would like to see what your image would look like in different fonts. I like this option as you get to mix up all the different fonts that you have available, resulting in some really great looking artwork.

You can see a preview of your image being generated within the app’s window once you start the conversion

Instead of just outputting an image for you to use, Wordify shows you a preview of the artwork being generated and, once finished, results in a PDF that’s approximately 10×8 inches. Not only can you print it at home but because it’s a PDF, there’s no loss in quality so you can scale it up to almost any size you wish. If you think the artwork is truly special, you’ll find no shortage of online printing companies that can print your typographic piece onto canvas or large poster formats.

Room For Improvement

Whilst you can pick any colour you’d like for the text, you’re limited to just using some RGB sliders without being able to specify an exact colour

The app does have one or two weak points that are worth mentioning. Although you can specify any colour you want for your text, there’s no colour picker or even palette. Colours are controlled by a red, green and blue slider but with no feedback on the exact colour you’ve chosen. If you’ve got a very specific colour you’d like to use then you’ll need to have a keen eye to make sure it’s the same.

Some fonts (such as Wingdings) are symbol fonts that contain no readable characters so you’ll often find random symbols appear within your artwork. I’d like to see the option to specify a number of fonts to use rather than everything in my font library.

Generated PDFs are also just opened, in my case, with Preview. Whilst Wordify generates the PDF, the actual saving and management of it is done within your preferred PDF viewer. I find this a little counterintuitive as the file that’s generated is a temporary PDF, you need to save (or move) it using Preview if you want to keep it. It would be a little easier if the app simply saved the PDFs to a folder rather than sent them to Preview first.

You can alter the colour and fonts used, creating some remarkable pieces of work

Conclusion

Wordify is an interesting app and despite it’s lack of customisable options is quite fun to use. Not every image you use will come out great but once you get used to the types of images to use, you’ll have plenty of fun. The fact that Wordify saves artwork as lossless PDF files means that you can create some truly great posters and have them printed to put up on your walls.

With Adobe’s “no CS7″ announcement, everyone seems a little shaken up. Some are even looking for good software alternatives already. If you’re one of them, this app may catch your attention.

Let us introduce you to MotionComposer. MotionComposer is Aquafadas’ answer to Adobe’s Edge Animate or Tumult’s Hype, so if you are a web developer having a tough time animating websites with HTML5 and CSS3, it’s an app you should be checking out.

MotionComposer HTML5 Preview window.

MotionComposer Overview

We’ve all played around with lines and lines of code trying to conjure up the coolest HTML5 and CSS3 animations, but we can all agree that this can be a little hectic and time consuming. That’s why apps like MotionComposer exist.

MotionComposer gives you the ability to create your animated vision using a friendly UI that generates the code for you. You won’t have to deal with any code, which makes this app perfect for non-developers.

MotionComposer’s intuitive UI

Working with MotionComposer

The first time you open up MotionComposer, you will be greeted with the welcome screen that helps you get started with the product. You will find the intro video to be the most useful. (I like videos, anyways.) Technically, by watching their introductory video, you can get a good idea on how to operate this application and create something basic – add to that the fact that you can use pre-made templates, and you’ll be set.

Once you start your first project – whether you use a pre-made template or start with a blank document – you will get a very clean UI that isn’t as daunting and as intimidating as most design/development apps. This is great because users won’t have to spend so much time learning the ins and outs of the app.

MotionComposer gives you a canvas and timeline UI that most users will be familiar with. You can interact with these pieces easily. The other parts are as intuitive as the timeline and canvas, but they do tend to be more option-heavy. Most of your time will be spent on the Inspector tab where you can edit slides and document settings as well as Components (layers/items) gradients, effects, opacity, and other properties. This area gives you a lot of flexibly when creating your content, and it is all labeled and divided into understandable chunks.

The upper section of the app let’s you add media, text, rectangles and preview or publish your work. This is where knowing what you can do with a rectangle comes in handy. If you round all the borders of the rectangle, you can make a circle. You can create many shapes and other things with CSS3, but MotionComposer only gives you the rectangle. It would be nice if it gave you access to other CSS3 shapes. It would be even cooler if you could create your own elaborate shape.

Transforming a rectangle into a circle.

MotionComposer’s Missing Tools

As cool as it is to play around with MotionComposers capabilities, though, I can’t help but to notice a few things missing. For starters, custom fonts aren’t supported. The app only allows you to use web-safe fonts, so if you want to get creative with your typography, you’ll need to use pictures instead of fonts.

That isn’t it. The ability to add shadows, or glow effects to elements is only supported for your Flash export. Why? You can achieve these effects with CSS3, so why doesn’t the app support that? This goes for text as well. If you want to add shadows or some kind of style to your text, you won’t be able to do it with this app.

MotionComposer’s publish settings.

Which brings us to this question: why is there no code editor? Sure, some may not want to deal with code, but what if you want to learn how to do this by hand? MotionComposer could serve as an amazing learning tool, but sadly there isn’t even a preview of the code.

The code editor would be useful if you want to add your own styles, too. You could add a crazy gradient to your text and then animate it. Of course you can do this after you export it, but that will probably have you deal with other factors of your animation.

MotionComposer’s exported project.

The Verdict

MotionComposer has a lot of room to grow, but it is hard not to see the advantages of using an app like this one. You can create amazing HTML5 banners, ads, sliders, and so on with ease; you could even make a simple piano, if you so desire. However, if you plan on doing bigger, more elaborate things, you might want to spend your money on another app. Which is interesting considering that MotionComposer’s main competitor is 100 dollars less and doesn’t require you to have Flash player.