Alternative Apps
Ever since Apple “updated” their Mail application to include Notes and ToDos a few years ago I have loathed it’s very existence. Google “recursive inbox Apple mail” and you’ll see that I have a considerable constituency of like minded peers. Sadly because email isn’t a glamorous global position reporting social networking application, it was unlikely that a company was going to pursue creating a better way to manage email for the Mac.
By the same token I put off installing Adobe Photoshop on my new MacBook Pro because I don’t need a starship to drive to the cafe. The thought of spending time on the phone with Adobe to sort out licensing issues because I switched computers had me cringing almost as much as I do when my computer starts to crawl because the absurd Adobe updater is gleefully bouncing in my dock uninvited. My laptop is meant to be a field tool. And in the field, I need to be quick and agile.
So I set out on a hunt to see if alternative applications existed to these seriously entrenched pieces of software. I’m happy to tell you dear reader that I have returned triumphant.
Email is my primary form of communication. A new email client named Postbox quite literally started saving me time and effort the first day I implemented it. Postbox easily keeps track of email threads by collecting them and putting them in line when a new matching email comes into my inbox. For example, if I write an email to Michael Britt, and a back and forth conversation ensues, each email from him and me on that subject will be included with each new email that comes into my inbox. The folks at Postbox have thoughtfully collapsed the thread behind a “Show All” button which guarantees that it won’t get in my way, but is easily accessible when I need it. This alone has made a huge difference in maintaining efficient contact with people.
PostBox has another feature named “Topics” in which you can assign a topic to an email like “Important” or “Travel” or whatever you want. The action is as trivial as hitting a number key, and you can assign several topics to an email. You can then find those topics in an email box incredibly easily. Searching emails is fast and accurate after you index your mailboxes which takes a trivial amount of time.
There are lots of other little things to love about Postbox which indicate that its developers are forward thing. For example a feature I just discovered that I’m in love with is when you click on a phone number in an email it sends it to your Skype client. Brilliant.
I contacted Sherman Dickman, one of the founders of Postbox, he told me that he and Scott MacGregor, the creator of Mozilla Thunderbird, founded Postbox in December 2007. All the partners are former Mozilla employees. When I asked why they started Postbox he responded; “We started Postbox because we felt that there wasn’t enough innovation happening in the email space, and we were looking provide greater leap in utility, so ultimately, people could spend less time struggling with email, and more time getting things done.”
Postbox costs 39.95 but if you click here and then click on the “Buy Now” button PhotoCine News readers will get 10 bucks off automatically. Don’t turn your nose up at paying for an email client until you give Postbox a test run. I purchased my license within a few hours of testing it out. I’m not exaggerating when I say it has saved me hours out of my week.
My second alternate application is image editing software called Acorn. Gus Mueller who has a fabulous reputation for producing solid products such as VooDoo Pad has conjured what I have found to be a fantastic light weight image editor. I’ve been using Acorn exclusively on my laptop for the last four weeks and found that it does everything I need it to do in the field. Acorn starts up fast and has many of the features that you use day to day in Photoshop including layers.
Gus has thoughtfully kept the same Photoshop keyboard short cuts in Acorn. So implementing Acorn requires a very short learning curve. More often what you’ll find is that a similar Photoshop feature is implemented in a more user friendly fashion in Acorn leaving you wondering if you shouldn’t send a copy of Acorn to the folks at Adobe to pick up a few hints of good software design.
I asked Gus what would possess an independent software developer to take on the big industry gorilla. That wasn’t his intent at all. In his own words; “Acorn originally started out as FlySketch 2, it just changed so much in that process that I decided to rename it to a new product. I guess the inspiration was just that I wanted an image editor that wasn’t intimidating to folks.”
He has masterfully succeeded. If your as frustrated as I am with using Photoshop for quick image manipulations, especially for posting to online entities, use Acorn. It will quickly become your new standard in a category that quickly expanding. Acorn is very reasonably priced at 49.95 and comes with very responsive technical support from Flying Meat Software.
Another favorite alternate app is called Simplenote from Cloud Factory. People who make a living as a creative are assaulted by ideas as they go through their day. In my case, I was using Evernote to jot down these ideas on my iPhone, but I found myself becoming increasingly frustrated with the cumbersome process of using the Evernote interface. It’s a library when I all I want is a notepad. Simplenote for the iPhone excels at this task. Lightweight, fast, stable it is an idea maven’s dream. You don’t have to worry about titling or categorizing your thought, you just write it down. Simplenote is free and offers web access to your data, but for 8.99 per year you can get a premium account which offers excellent advantages for the price of a cocktail.
On the Mac side the legendary Notational Velocity, also a free app, has just been updated and syncs easily and flawlessly with your Simplenote account. Notational Velocity has been around for years and offers blazing fast search capabilities in a superb, simple interface. It is also open all the time on my computer because it only takes a sliver of memory and exists totally unobtrusive in the background.
Neither of these apps handle images or PDFs, but that’s the distinct beauty of them. They do one thing incredibly well and that is give you a place to record a fleeting thoughts which may one day turn into big ideas. To handle images, documents and PDFs I’m using my last alternate application suggestion called Leap from Ironic Software. One of the most vexing things I’ve found about computers is keeping track of the digital crap that occupies my hard drive. As a testament to this obsessive tinkering of where to put my stuff I can show you purchase receipts for every type of information management solution for the Mac from Devonthink to Notebook to Journler.
Leap takes a different approach. It leaves your stuff where it is and adds tags to it. I’ve only been using Leap for a few months, but it is already proving itself as an efficient tool for finding anything and everything. The idea behind tagging a document has really started to take off in the past four years. The idea is that by using several plain words to describe a file, you’ll typically use those same words when your looking for something in the future. More surprising is a study I read that indicated the high incident of crossover there is in these tags between different people. For example if I tag a document that has a recipe for etouffee I’ll use the words; new orleans, seafood, shrimp, rice, spice. The probability that someone I don’t know would use at least one of those tag words to describe the same document is over 90%. Leap is a fantastic product for finding stuff that puts the Mac’s Spotlight in the amateur league.
All of the products I mention here I’ve been using personally for at least a month, most I’ve been using longer than that. The praise I have for theses applications comes from real world use as opposed to a review based on a few hours of tinkering. It’s incredibly encouraging to know that there are choices and that they come from innovative, independent sources that don’t depend on focus groups or corporate compromises. Check them out and please support your independent software developer.
