I realised the other day, as we’ve done a few reviews on Macstarter, one of the must-have apps on a Mac has not yet been covered. Evernote is  an unbelievably useful App with the backup of a great website. Evernote lets you save notes, photos, videos, web clippings and basically anything that you need to save. We’ll cover Evernote in much more detail later on, but suffice to say, in this day and age where information seems to fly at us at an alarming rate, [...]

Making music on your Mac is a joy. Having GarageBand ready installed on your Mac means you can get down to the business of making immediately. SoundCloud is a great website, where you can upload your music, your ideas as well as follow other people (friends, family and professional musicians). A quick visit to the Mac App Store will allow you to download the SoundCloud App, which is a great way to get to your sounds, as well as listen to other people’s tracks. At [...]

A lot of Macstarter readers will be browsing this site on their MacBooks. I’ve said it before, nobody makes a better laptop than Apple. One of the reasons for their popularity must be the battery life you get with a MacBook. I’m pretty obsessive about my battery. Not only do I make sure that I’ve calibrated my battery, I have a need to check whether my battery is healthy or not. Luckily, there is a great App to do this for us. Coconut Battery is [...]

Today a colleague came to me, a little worried because she had been told that due to a new iCloud ‘policy’, all your music would have to be re-downloaded from iTunes and that this would cost you a lot of money. So what is the deal with iCloud and iTunes? Actually, it’s quite simple. If you have bought iTunes music in the past, this will be available for download onto other Apple devices you might have, like your iPhone, iPad or Apple TV. All you’ll [...]

A few weeks ago I reviewed the Just Mobile Alupen for the iPad. It seems like the stylus is THE thing to have for your iPad! Wacom, the makers of the amazing Bamboo and Intuos graphics tablets have also now produced their own iPad stylus. As of writing I haven’t had the chance to use their Bamboo Stylus, although I have to say, if their other products are the benchmark, then the Bamboo Stylus should be great to use. Whether you use a stylus or [...]

Earlier this week, Apple announced their new operating system called Lion. I’ve been using Macs for just over a decade, and started on OS 9. For those old timers out there, you may fondly remember OS 9 stylings (in all it’s retro glory!). Since that time, we’ve had a procession of big cats taking over our Macs, such as Puma, Jaguar, Panther, Tiger, the two Leopards – and now coming in July, Lion will be making itself available. So what’s the big deal. A lot [...]

I have become quite addicted to writing on the iPad. I have Pages, Office HD and a few other editors installed on it. But what I need more than anything is an editor which I can type in without any fuss whatsoever and have it sync online somewhere. Enter PlainText, which delivers exactly that. No frills, no fuss, just plain text. Your text is formatted superbly on the screen, with or without a folder view. You can organize your files easily into folders and rename [...]

We’ve reviewed a few Apps here on Macstarter in the past. The one criterion we follow on Macstarter when looking at Apps is that they must be fun, easy to use, and most of all, be brilliant. Today’s App we’re going to look at ticks all those boxes, and then some. It falls into a category of App called “I didn’t even know I needed that App but now I’ve used it how could I possibly live without it???”. Granted, that category name is a [...]

My lack of posts recently is down to me being rather bogged down at work at the moment. I’m pretty bad for letting the hours go by sat at my computer without breaks. Today, ironically on one of those breaks I switched on my App Store, and saw a curious App called Forismatic. It’s job is to simply deliver great quotations to your Desktop to momentarily inspire you. The App is free (a great price any time of the year!) and lives in your Menubar. [...]

A great buzzword over the recent years has been GTD or getting things done. Based on the book by David Allen (a great read by the way) it’s a method of how to be efficient in your work. Of course, over the years software companies have jumped onto the band wagon creating suites of GTD Apps that will revolutionise your life. Ironically, David Allen himself prefers a notebook and pen to jot things down that need to be done, rather than overblown software. I saw [...]