I’ve been a Google Reader fan for years. For those of you who don’t know what that is, Google Reader lets you keep up with RSS feeds. For those of you who don’t know what that is, it’s basically a way for you to keep up with your favourite websites and any new articles / posts that might have appeared since you last visited the site. (in fact Macstarter has its own RSS feed that you can subscribe to). I came across a program called [...]

For today’s article, I thought I’d share a video of me using iA Writer. I just can’t say enough good things about this program. I’ve got to the point where I try to find reasons for writing stuff, just so that I can fire it up.     Seeing it on screen might be cool, but not as cool as typing your own words into it!

When I owned and used a Windows computer, I spent many an hour running anti-virus scans, malware scans, defrags, reg-checks and everything else associated with not-working. It drove me to buying my first iMac. Macs run smoothly and brilliantly. But that doesn’t mean that you should take it for granted. I normally use Onyx, which takes care of all my Mac maintenance needs. I was forwarded the other day a link for Magican, which promises to be a hassle free and friendlier way to maintain [...]

We at Macstarter are Zite’s biggest fans. I’ll tell anyone who asks, that an iPad only needs a few core apps to make it worth buying. One of those apps has to be Zite. For those of you who are not familiar with Zite, it’s a magazine style app in the spirit of Flipboard or Pulse. What I’ve always loved about Zite is that it learns what articles you like to read and gives you more of those articles over time. Yesterday Zite released their iPhone [...]

Normally, when I review a piece of software on Macstarter, I do so because it’s something that I use, on a daily basis. Every so often I review something that I think will genuinly help people get the best out of their Macs. On very rare occasions, I happen to come across software that just blows my socks off. Yesterday, I went to the Mac App Store, to update some software as the little number on the icon was bugging me. Sitting at the top [...]

A little while ago we had a look at Alfred. As a “launcher” it really was rather good. Simple, unobtrusive, and very nice to use. I’ve been a regular user of Alfred since then, and fits into my rather zen philosophy of trying to do the maximum amount of work with the minimum of effort. Alfred has now reached version 1.0, which you can download right now from the App Store. If you want to make use of the full power of Alfred, you should [...]

A tradition we have not normally shared with our readers from across the Atlantic is that of Black Friday. Our US readers will know that on this day, retailers lower prices to encourage us to buy their wares. I was pleasantly surprised yesterday to see the Dutch home page of Apple.com advertise Black Friday (although it’s not called that here). At the time of writing I could pick up most Apple devices with almost 10% discount. On some selected third party devices and accessories the [...]

Having been using IOS 5 for a good few weeks now, I can safely say that the update was a huge step forward for those of us with iDevices. One of the things I was looking forward to was the new Photostream service. The idea being quite simple. Take a photo with your iPhone or iPod Touch, and it would automatically show up in iPhoto in Photo Stream. Setting up Photo Stream is really quite easy. On your iDevice, you simply go to Settings > [...]

I’ve never made a secret of Apple’s Preview. It’s so lightweight, but it can handle any image, do simple editing and at the same time handle most PDF’s without a fuss. I especially love the way that you can re-arrange pages and join PDF’s together. Available (free for a short time!) from the Mac App Store, Gelatin will let you very simply drag two PDF’s directly onto the program window, and have it save as one. It’s incredibly fast and works as advertised. My one [...]

  Having written for Macstarter for almost 2 years now, I still would not dare call myself a writer. But there are occasions where I will force myself to sit down and just write. The problem with trying to do anything creative these days is, quite frankly, is distraction. Between chat windows, emails, notifications and everything else, it can be darn hard to keep a thought active in your head! WriteRoom ($9.99 / €7.99) from the Mac App Store is an oasis in a noisy [...]