Dunno is a very curious discovery I made on the Mac App store today. It’s a little hard to describe what it actually is, because it falls in between categories. The best way to describe it would be a todo list that goes away, researches itself and gives you a whole heap of results without you having to lift a finger. The App itself is incredibly simple to use. Once opened, you only have one place to type, right at the top where it says [...]

‘Tis the season of updates! Macstarter’s favourite offline reader has been updated this week. Since the release of pocket, I have switched to it exclusively. Not only do I read a lot, but I’m finding that as I get older, I have a much lower tolerance for extraneous web “fluff”, such as adverts, flash based banners and everything else fighting for my diminishing concentration span. Pocket’s update has brought a couple of features that I personally appreciate. Firstly, we now get an ingenious page flipping [...]

I try to keep my personal life out of Macstarter. That is, during the day I’m a teacher of design, therefore on my own MacBook I have a plethora of design based apps, but I try my best not to turn Macstarter into a design biased site. Of course I myself use Photoshop occasionally, I use Illustrator a lot and I am simply in love with Blender 3D. Today, I hope you will allow me to indulge my nerdy designer self and talk about an [...]

One of Macstarter’s favourite App / service is Springpad. We talked about them over a year ago, and personally I save everything I need to save in Springpad. Whether it’s a piece of code, a web address, or (much more likely) a recipe, Springpad is either called on my web browser, my iPad or my iPhone. Talking about recipes, what I love is that my recipes folder is shared with my wife, so we have access to all our recipes together. And it’s that collaboration [...]

We talked about Paper a little while ago. I could start a whole new website with the things that I love about this App. As a designer, this App just fits my mindset down to the ground. Whereas other Apps, such as the awesome Procreate or the amazing Alias Sketchbook excel because they are full of features (and justifiably so), Paper’s complete lack of features, such as layers, brush sizes, opacity and so on make it brilliant. Rather than worrying about details, you get straight into [...]

I’ve been a Mac user (exclusively) for over 10 years now. The one thing I know that set’s my Macs apart from other brands or flavours of computers is that it hardly ever crashed. Heck, I hardly restart my Macs for months at a time. You can though, from time to time come up against a program that just doesn’t want to behave itself, or even worse, refuses to start up at all. To get a handle on wayward programs, or programs that won’t open [...]

I got a call yesterday from my sister-in-law. She’s a photographer and a Mac user. Now, if anyone was getting into photography in a semi – serious / semi professional manner, I would recommend a Mac any day of the week, both to work on at home, and to carry with you to a job. When it comes to working with photos, you have a huge variety of programs to choose from to catalogue, edit, touch up and do whatever you have to do. The [...]

At Macstarter, we are all about efficiency. One of the reasons I fell in love with Macs to start with was the fact that you could work so efficiently from one window to another without having to use a taskbar (as you get on Windows machines), and get around your open programs with ease. Things have changed recently, and if you think about it, it’s quite common to have a lot of windows open up on your Mac while you’re working. I am always telling [...]

We seem to live our lives in a browser window. Chances are, whatever the time of day or night, if you sit in front of a computer, the browser is something you’re going to switch on first. We tend to keep our browsing habits quite constant – that is to say, we tend not to venture into new territory as far as our web browser goes. Modern browsers are quite powerful to what we used to use a few years ago. Most modern browsers let [...]

Over the past few weeks I have noticed that my copy of Google Chrome has been acting a little slower, and a little flakier. Not thinking much about this, I happened to come across a great piece of advice over at Macworld about this very thing. Google Chrome does something called silent upgrades, which means that it can update itself without making any announcements to you. I absolutely love this feature, because over the past few months I have noticed little tweaks and improvements in [...]