A few months before Steve Jobs took to the Macworld stage unveil the iPhone—the device that’d take the PC’s former role as the computing device at the center of our lives—Bill Gates took to the CES stage to announce Microsoft’s device for the future of computing: the Home Server.
It wasn’t such a terrible idea, and if anything, was the first time Microsoft was hinting that, in the future, something other than the PC would be the center of your computing life. Data was now more important than the apps you used to manipulate said data, and with everything from your pictures to your purchased movies, music, and books being digital, you needed a lot of storage space to keep up with it all. Your laptop—even Microsoft saw that the future was mobile, even if they didn’t see that it’d be powered by tiny devices—didn’t have space to keep it all.
Thus the Home Server. Make a consumer-grade desktop PC without a screen, let it automatically backup all the PCs on the network and let you remotely access files, sell it for around $500, and Microsoft’s dream of “a PC in every home” could suddenly become “a server in ever home.” Said dream came complete with a children’s book to ostensibly sell the idea to parents who’d balk at the idea of dropping half-a-grand on a box that, for all intents and purposes, would appear to do nothing to the average user.
Meanwhile, we the people outsourced our backups to Backblaze and our file sharing to Dropbox, and iTunes and Amazon were just as happy to let us keep our digital purchases in the clouds to redownload on a whim. PCs were complicated enough to manage, and they sure weren’t fun—and a server was only more complexity that would only be welcomed by geeks. Smartphones quickly became the center of everyone’s digital lives, with our data stored in the imperceptible cloud, and Microsoft’s been trying to remind us ever since that we really, surely still need their software in our lives. Remind me who needed those massive storage banks at home?
And yet, the actual idea of the Home Server wasn’t such a bad idea. It wasn’t game changing on the scale of the iPhone, but the fact still is that backing up and sharing digital files is a pain. Upload speeds are still slow, most of the time, and who really wants to pay $100 a year for a 100Gb hard drive in the cloud when you could buy a 1Tb hard drive for less? But then, you’ll still want your files on the go (and at home) from your smartphone and tablet, and most people don’t really want to fiddle with a server (or otherwise they’d have already repurposed an old desktop into a Linux server).
That’s an overly lengthy intro to set the stage, but essentially it all boils down to the fact that backup and file sharing are still hard, and we need something simpler. Some way to share your files from a device you own solves the uploading speed problem, and if it could be as simple to use as Dropbox or Droplr, it’d surely be a winner.
That’s why I’m intrigued by the Sher.ly project. It’s an app that lets you share files from your own computer, NAS, existing online storage accounts, or the Sherly box—a Raspberry Pi-powered mini home server of sorts that can even run other Linux apps if you so wanted. It’s a self-hosted way to backup and store and share all the files you want, in an app that, at least at first glance, looks nice enough that you’d want to use it. And, yes, it’s got mobile apps, so it’s solving the file problem for the devices you’d really use, not just traditional computers—and here’s to hoping that, come iOS 8 release day, its iOS apps will integrate as a storage provider so you could easily use it to store files in any app.
Sherly’s a Kickstarter project by people with a proven track record, and it’s already passed its minimum goal with over twenty days to come. It should be coming, for real.
It could be another letdown in the attempt to make hosting your own files make sense, but I happen to think this one’s going to do better than the others because it’s simple. Dropbox made sense to everyone because it’s just a folder that automatically syncs and shares what’s in it—none of the complexity of other file sharing tools. iCloud has people backing up their iOS devices because it just automatically does it in the background. Sherly, while still being perhaps more aimed at the “Maker” crowd that’d be interested in making their own Raspberry Pi powered devices, looks simpler than any other personal server type system I’ve ever seen. It’s just about making it easy to privately share files—large files at that—with the devices you already use, without having to pay per-gigabyte in the cloud. And if you get their oh-so-cute Sherly box to store your files, it, too, promises to be so simple it only requires 3 taps to setup, and then will work as easily as any other cloud storage app.
Simple stuff is almost always better. I can’t wait to take the Sherly app for a spin.
One of the most difficult things about reviewing apps is that there’s some things about an app that just can’t be quantified. Feature lists might make one app look better than another, but specs never tell the full story. It’s true with computers, camera, smartphones, cars, and yes, it’s true with software.
And so I’m subjective. I’m most likely to write on Techinch about the software I love and rely on daily. I try out tons of apps, and the ones I stick with are the ones that fit my needs like a glove. Other apps might have more features or something that makes them appeal to others, but the apps I use daily have the stuff I need.
And that, perhaps, means I end up ignoring other apps. This was brought to my attention vividly when discussing the new OmniFocus 2 for Mac on Twitter. I mentioned at random that OmniFocus’ recurring task features were “better” than any other app I’d tried—and at the time, that was what I remembered from the last time I’d taken Things for a serious try at managing my tasks. Turns out, Things has far more granular options for recurring tasks than OmniFocus, but the reason I’d remembered it as being worse was because I don’t like the way it handles recurring tasks (i.e. by putting them all in the Scheduled list, which oddly only shows recurring tasks rather than any tasks with a due date).
Things didn’t fit what I needed. That doesn’t mean it’s a bad app, it just means that OmniFocus is better for my needs. And if I’m going to review a todo list app, I’m far more likely to share with you why I love the app I rely on daily, especially with the limited time I have to review apps. If I were to review Things, as I likely will when the next version comes out simply because it interests me, I’d be careful not to misrepresent its features as I accidentally did on Twitter—and then, after that, somehow I bet I’d go back to using OmniFocus since it’s just home to me.
Somehow this has been hanging over my head this week, and kept me from publishing my full review of OmniFocus 2. And that’s silly. We’re all opinionated, and yet, being opinionated can be a great thing. I really do try to keep my biases at bay when reviewing apps, but if there’s anything that’s going to get me motivated to hit Publish on a new article here, it’s going to be something that excited me—something that either solves a problem in a new and unique way (like the Keep Everything app I reviewed recently, even though it’s not exactly part of my daily workflow since I rely on Instapaper and Evernote already), or something that’s such a big part of my life (like OmniFocus or Ulysses III) for whatever reason that I can’t help but want to share it.
I’ll review other stuff, but it’s those things that excite me—that do something good enough that you can overlook the other features they don’t have—that keep me wanting to write about apps. Without Techinch being my full-time job, there’s only so many apps I can review, and I’m far more likely to want to take the time to write about an app when it’s something that really excites me enough that I want to share it with you.
OmniFocus 2 for Mac is finally here, and it’s great. I’ve written an in-depth tutorial on getting started with OmniFocus on Tuts+, so whether you’re 100% new to OmniFocus and would like help getting started with it, or have used it for years but want to learn your way around the new version, here’s the tutorial for you.
It’s a big day for Mac app releases; OmniFocus 2’s been announced for release today, and then Pixelmator 3.2. Pixelmator wasn’t nearly as overdue for a new version as OmniFocus; after all, v3 was just released 7 months ago, and a point release in January brought support for the Mac Pro and other improvements. v3 brought Layer Styles and and liquify tools, while v3.1 added support for 16-bit per channel color—but that latter most-coveted feature for pro photographers was only available on the Mac Pro. Now, that gap with Photoshop (and other competitors like GIMP and Acorn) is closed, as today’s release of v3.2 brings 16-bit per channel support to all Macs.
Along with that, you’ll find a much improved Repair tool in this update that is a much stronger rival to Photoshop’s Content Aware Fill. Select the Repair tool, draw over the objects you want to remove, and it’ll automagically try to replace them with the picture’s background. You can now change the size of the brush, along with its speed-vs-quality, and can get quite good results with it if you’re willing to tweak your brush and settings depending on the picture. I tried removing the parents in a screenshot of the picture used in Pixelmator’s Repair tool demo video to see if I could reproduce their results—removing the father was as simple as they showed, but removing the mother took about 4 tries before I got decent results. Either way, that’s still rather impressive.
In Photoshop, the thing I use Content Aware tools for most is for extending a pattern or section of a picture (for example, making a continuous rectangle pattern from a smaller square, or extending the sky upwards after expanding an image’s canvas). For that, I’ll select the area I want to add that pattern to, and delete it with Content Aware delete. 9 times out of 10, that works perfectly. In Pixelmator, you can use the Repair tool in much the same way, this time just drawing over the area you want to fill—but it won’t work if the area you’ve selected is transparent (the default if you’ve just extended your canvas). You’ll first need to fill that area with a color, and then select it with the Repair tool and let Pixelmator work its magic.
And then, there’s a final extra goodie: a Lock Layers option. This tiny little feature will make sure you don’t accidentally edit the layers that should already be finished, and is a handy tool that was again widely requested.
If you don’t already have a copy of Pixelmator, and aren’t already reliant on Photoshop, it’s the best $29.99 you could spend. It’s simply incredible how much of Photoshop’s functionality is packed into this tiny app these days.
Oh, and if you’re just getting started with Pixelmator, be sure to check out the new Tuts+ tutorials on Pixelmator. Pixelmator has enough of Photoshop’s features that you can follow many Photoshop tutorials in Pixelmator, but going through some Pixelmator-specific tutorials is a great way to get acquainted with its features.
Instagram got us all using filters on our photos, but its filters are often too heavy-handed, and if you just want to slightly tweak your color and brightness for a more natural photo, you’ll need to look elsewhere. The incredible VSCO Cam has been my photo editing app of choice for months now, with its vast range of filters and individual tweaks you can add to photos to make them far nicer than your original shots.
Then, the past couple of weeks, another app has stolen my heart: Litely. It’s filters are even more subtle, bringing out the original colors and details without making your photos look ‘shopped. They’re beautiful, and far lighter than Instagram’s filters—surprisingly enough, since it was made by the designer behind a number of Instagram’s original filters. Plus, Litely’s interface has a number of neat tweaks (pinch out over a photo to see the original compared to the new tweaked image, and move your phone around to see the rest of the image via parallax) that make it quicker and more fun to use than most other filter apps.
But filters alone aren’t enough. Dan Rubin just released a brilliant video on The Guardian that showcases a half-dozen apps—AntiCrop, TouchRetouch, Average Camera Pro, Cortex Camera, the aforementioned VSCO Cam, and the still-in-beta SKRWT—and shows how he uses them together to get beautiful shots in a number of scenarios. You can’t turn your iPhone into a dSLR, but put a few apps together like this and you can get quite a nice photography workflow to get the best photos possible from the camera you always have with you.
Check out the full video on The Guardian to see Dan Rubin puts these apps to use together to get surprisingly good photos from his iPhone, then go download some of the apps and try them out on your own. I’ve got my App Store wish list filled with them right now, and can’t wait to try out SKRWT.
There’s millions of beautiful photos and subtle textures out there, enough to keep your desktop wallpaper fresh for years to come. I’ve always been partial to fiftyfootshadows’ wallpapers, and that along with Simple Desktops’ pattern and color based wallpapers and Kuvva’s more artistic shots could keep me happy.
But then, the Metropolitan Museum of Art released several hundred thousand high-quality scans of the art in their collections, for free download. OS X used to ship with several art wallpapers, but nothing can compare to this library. There’s paintings, textiles, photographs, and more, all ready to download in high resolution—and perfect for desktop wallpapers.
They’re for academic purposes, first and foremost, so while Apple couldn’t bundle these images with OS X without licensing them, you’re perfectly free to download them to use as your desktop wallpaper or perhaps as a slideshow on your TV. You can even subscribe to an RSS feed of the art of the day, perhaps for creative inspiration or to get something new for your desktop. All you’ll have to do is download the images, and then perhaps crop them to your desktop aspect ratio so they’ll be centered and show the section of the art you want—and then be inspired by the works of the masters as you do your own creative work.
Google already has put together quite a collection of extremely high resolution scans of art and 3D walkthroughs of museums in their Cultural Institute, but you can merely browse those images online. The Met’s collection is great to browse online, but that one added bonus of downloadable images makes it especially nice.
So go find some new-to-you artwork to spice up your desktop from the Metropolitan Museum’s collection, and enjoy. I’ve got a cropped version of Paul Klee’s May Picture as my wallpaper right now; it was rare (and low quality) enough online before now that Google Images can’t even locate it from a snippet of the picture, and now it’s gracing my Mac. Modern art suddenly makes perfect sense as desktop wallpaper.
There’s something nice about tools you own. Apps that you can keep using even if they were pulled from the internet, services you keep running on your own servers, tools in your garage. They’re yours, and they’re not going away.
Your copy of Pages will still work as long as your Mac works, even if Apple decides to quit making iWork. The bookmarks you’ve saved to Firefox years ago are still there, and would still be there forever even if Mozilla went out of business.
But if Google decided to shut down Google Docs, or if Delicious disappeared (as has nearly happened far too many times now), you’d suddenly have no app with your documents or bookmarks respectively. Unfortunately, the same would be true even for desktop software today if it’s subscription based, as the latest versions of Office and Photoshop are. If the companies behind them decide to shut them down, they’d be gone forever. That’s what was so angering about Google shutting down Google Reader; it took away the tool so many of us used to read the news. It was here today, and we’d nurtured our own reading lists for years, but then the next day it was gone.
You can carefully keep an old Nintendo 64 restored and running to keep playing your old games, but no amount of tender love and care can keep services and subscription apps running if the team behind them decides to pull the plug.
That’s why it’s so nice to own the tools you rely on. Post Google Reader’s demise, I switched to Fever, a self-hosted RSS reader app that runs on my own server and would continue to run even if it’s never developed further. It’s mine.
The other side to my news reading setup—a reading later app to save longform articles and pour over them at length later—however isn’t mine. For that, I use Instapaper, a service I love and am in the process of writing about right now. But even it was sold last year, despite having a profitable business model, and its main competitor Pocket has taken on venture funding without any apparent source of revenue since it’s 100% free. It seems ripe to join the ranks of web apps that get bought out and shut down, as sad as that would be. Instapaper has a far brighter future, it seems, but still: wouldn’t it be nice to have a reading service that’s 100% your own?
And then, think of bookmarking. Even if you’re using traditional bookmarks, and all your links are on your computer, how often do you try to visit a site only to find it’s no longer online? There’s the Wayback Machine, but even it’s not a guarantee you’ll bring back the content you’d wanted. If only you’d saved a copy of the site instead of just a link.
Perhaps that’s too long of an intro for an app review, but it’s those two use cases—self-hosted reading later and permanent bookmarking—that make Keep Everything such a neat app, one that feels a huge need but might not seem so exciting at first glance. I rarely review apps quickly after having them recommended to me—I haven’t even reviewed all the apps that I use in my daily workflow—but Keep Everything is an such an obvious solution in hindsight that I had to write about it.
Here’s how it works. You add a link to Keep Everything either by dragging-and-dropping a link from almost any other application (literally: click and hold on a link in Tweetbot, drag it over to the Keep Everything window, and then let go), or by pasting in a link you’ve copied elsewhere. On iOS, you can actually just copy a link inside any app, and by some magic I’ve never seen before on iOS, Keep Everything will grab said link in the background and add it to your archive.
Once your link’s added, Keep Everything will download a copy of the page in question, storing it locally as a complete web archive and as a Markdown file. You can then read any site you’ve added in the article view (as in the image below), much like you’d read Instapaper or Pocket articles in apps like ReadKit. Or, you can click the Keep button and view a full original copy of the page just as it would have looked in your browser, even when you’re offline (as in the image above).
Internally, your sites are stored in a zip format with a .keep extension. Change that to .zip, and you can open the file archive and see its contents, which will include a Markdown text copy of the site, any include images along with a thumbnail, and a Safari-Compatible .webarchive file with the full code of the original page. Even if you no longer used the Keep Everything app in the future, you could still browse through the sites you’ve archived with the app.
You’ll likely just want to keep using the app, though, since it makes it so easy to view your archived sites, in their entirety or in a simplified view on your Mac or iOS devices, with everything synced via Dropbox. You can organize sites into categories, search through the full text of all your sites, and can even view and edit the Markdown text view if you want to use the text of the site elsewhere or perhaps want to add your own notes. After all, a full site archive tool like this is an excellent tool for research, and if you’re using it for that, you’ll be glad to find that it includes complete metadata for sites, including the original URL and the date and time you archived it, necessary info for citations. You can also export sites in PDF, as well as in the aforementioned web archives, to share them with colleagues.
Keep Everything’s not perfect. Its UI has a number of small oddities, including inconsistent font sizes in its Add Link button and odd copywriting in a number of places, and both the icon and name are nothing to write home about. It also, like every other reading later app, supports saving sites with videos but doesn’t actually download those videos to your computer, making it more of a bookmark and less of an archive for those sites.
But nevermind. What it does right—saving full copies of your important websites in a way that makes them easy to find, read, copy, and share later—is good enough to overlook that. It even looks nice, and its iOS app is especially simple to use. And by being designed for dragging-and-dropping links (or just simply copying them on iOS), it’s immediately integrated with every app you already use.
If you’ve wanted an offline bookmarking tool that’d save your full sites, or a read later service that doesn’t rely on an online service, Keep Everything is the app for you. The Mac app will set you back $10, while its companion iOS app is half that price, but you can try both out for free (links: Mac, iOS) and store up to 100 sites to make sure it’s the app for you.
Have fun archiving original copies of the most important stuff you find online!
For the past 12 years, Lost In Mobile has covered the major developments in the mobile world, from the early days of the Sony Clies all the to the iPhone 5s and the huge Android devices we enjoy today. It's not run by a corporation, and has no bias towards any platform. Instead, it's run by one guy who simply loves mobile tech, and pulls from his vast history with mobile devices to make sense of the future of mobile technology.
If you want to understand more about the history of today's smartphones, and learn about the new apps and devices that will be game-changers going forward, Lost In Mobile is a site you need to be reading. Be sure to check it out today!
Personal Note: Shaun McGill, the writer behind Lost in Mobile, is a great guy I’ve had the privilege of getting to know through his posts on Twitter and on his site, and I’m indebted to him for purchasing one of the first sponsorships on Techinch. Go follow his site; you owe it to yourself to keep up with the posts and insight he shares.
If there’s one reason I’m not as productive on an iPad as I am on the Mac, it’s keyboard shortcuts. I’m lost without keyboard shortcuts. If I’m launching or quitting an app, finding a specific file, editing text, entering passwords, emptying the trash, starting a new blog post, or almost anything else I do on the Mac, I’m using the keyboard, not my touchpad. iOS has the same great selection of Mac text editing shortcuts (which are awesome, and the lack of them on Windows makes me have an even harder time using a PC), but OS X and the extra tools like Alfred and native Mac apps like Ulysses’ tendency to have a ton of power-user keyboard shortcuts makes me so much more productive. And, the fact you can customize keyboard shortcuts make me feel even more lost on anyone else’s machine.
So there’s an ode to keyboard shortcuts. They’re awesome, and if you’re not a Mac keyboard shortcut power user yet, Matt Gemmell just put together the nicest guide to OS X keyboard shortcuts yet. It’s got tons of great keyboard shortcuts, including ones I’d never noticed before, all illustrated to make them easier to use. It even digs into great Alfred shortcuts to speed you up even more with it. Go check it out, and bookmark it, and watch your productivity soar.
Want the inside scoop on how we ran giveaways at AppStorm, and how I still run giveaways on Techinch.com? Here’s the secret: a spreadsheet and the =randbetween() function are all you need. Check my new Tuts+ tutorial for all the info you could need to run a full giveaway using social network entries and more, and then simply pick a random winner in a half-second.
