newsonaut

Turning inner space into outer space

Apps category

Sunday, January 7, 2024

When you're in control, tracking is a good thing

There are tracker apps aplenty, but be sure sure to look at the fine print before you download them. Some of them siphon off your personal data and do god knows what with it.

Here are three that sync across Mac, iPad and iPhone. They have beautiful interfaces, a reasonable one-time price and respect your privacy. Find them all in your local app store.

Streaks — a habit tracker

You can set up pretty much any habit you can think of and decide how often you want to do it — or avoid it.

The only data collected — crash data — is not linked to you.

Fleur — an expense tracker

Keeping on top of all your personal expenses and incomes gives a great of feeling of control over your life. This app makes it a pleasure.

It’s a little more intrusive but the data is not linked to you — purchases, diagnostics and usage.

Book Tracker — yes, it tracks your books

Reading is one of the habits in my habit tracker. And now that I’m in the habit, I’m having fun getting my reading life organized.

It collects no data at all.


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Saturday, November 25, 2023

Default apps 2023

Inspired by Chris Coyier, who was inspired by MattCool.tech.

I'm struck by two things — how all-in I am with Apple apps, and how generic the names are for most of their apps.

Mail client: Mail

Mail server: Apple

Notes: Bear

To-Do: n/a

Photo shooting: iPhone SE

Photo editing: Photoshop

Calendar: Calendar

Cloud file storage: iCloud

RSS: Reeder

Contacts: Contacts

Browser: desktop Firefox, mobile Safari

Chat: Messages

Bookmarks: Firefox

Read it later: n/a

Word processing: Word

Spreadsheets: Excel, Numbers and Google Sheets

Presentations: Keynote

Shopping lists: pen and paper

Meal planning: Mela

Budgeting and personal finance: Numbers spreadsheet based on template

News: Reeder

Music: Triode, Poolsuite FM

Password management: Bitwarden

Code editor: VS Code

VPN: GlobalProtect

Special mentions: iA Writer for writing, Tot for temporary notes, Transmit for FTP, ImageOptim for photo compression, SnippetsLab for code snippets.


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Monday, May 8, 2023

The other places to find free Mac apps

They say nothing in life is free, but I've done my best to create a collection of Mac apps that are indeed free. At thriftmac, I'm closing in on 300 apps that can be used forever with all their features and no strings attached.

It would be more accurate to say that few things in life are free. In this case, I can think of only two other sites with collections of free Mac apps, and both also have paid apps.

The best of the two is MacMenuBar.com. It claims to have 800+ menu bar apps, with a collection of about 350 that are free. I like the fact that it's curated — not just a dump of every Mac menu bar app in existence.

The site is ad free, which is refreshing and perhaps a little suspicious. I know people might wonder why there are no ads on thriftmac. The reason is because it's a hobby that I've enjoyed over the years. Also, I don't like ads on other sites, so why would I foist them on my visitors? MacMenuBar.com does collect analytics but that could be just curiosity to know who's visiting. I've done the same myself.

The other site offering a collection of free Mac apps is MacUpdate. Under Recently Updated, click on See All, then choose Free under Price. You can further refine your search by category, when the apps were updated, popularity and downloads. As of this writing, you start off with 4,873 apps.

There will never be thousands of apps on thriftmac. I select the apps that I think are well crafted and will be widely appreciated. I currently have a list of about 30 candidates that I'm not sure about adding.

Yes, my selection is biased, but it is my site — and I'm happy for people to make suggestions.


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Monday, December 26, 2022

How to sign up for a free trial without fear

A truly free app in the App Store is a rare thing. Most have in-app purchases. In some cases, you have to sign up for a free trial right away if you want to use the app at all.

Yes, it's scammy, but this is the world we live in. The thing I fear most with a free trial is that I will forget to cancel before it ends and wind up with a charge on my credit card. These charges can be pretty expensive — over a hundred dollars in some cases.

So how do you sign up without fear? Right after you sign up, go straight to your list of subscriptions and cancel. The free trial will keep going for as long as it would have, and it will end automatically without you getting charged a cent.

Don't worry, you'll get plenty of reminders continuing past the trial. Apps may be hit and miss about reminding that you're about the be charged, but there's no doubt you'll get reminders about un-cancelling.


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Friday, July 2, 2021

espanso is a great app for expanding text

There are plenty of recommendations for text expansion apps for the Mac, but neglected in the reviews is quite possibly the most awesome of them all — espanso.

A text expander, for the uninitiated, is an app that allows you to create shortcuts that expand into longer words or phrases as you type them. If you're tired of having to type the same set of words over and over again, a text expander is a godsend.

There is a limited expander built into your Mac that can be set up in the keyboard system preference under the text tab. There are also several good apps you can buy — do a search on Mac text expanders and you'll find them.

You might have a little difficulty finding the unheralded espanso, so let me tell you more. One: it's free. Two: it has a ton of features that keeps growing. And three: it's available not only for Mac but also Windows and Linux.

I was at first turned off because you need to use Terminal to install it. I had been getting the dreaded command not found error in Terminal, which made the thought of installation even more off-putting.

Anyway, I finally got my command not found woes cleared up, thanks to OSXDaily. espanso is now installed and doing great things.

Let me be clear: it has a lot more going for it than being free. (The developer does ask for donations, so please make one if you can afford it.)

There is a ton of stuff you can do — the documentation is massive. My favourite so far is a clipboard trigger you can use to create HTML links. You copy the URL you want, type in the trigger (:a), and there it is — a link with the URL in it and the cursor sitting between the tags.

Plus, there are packages of text triggers you can install so you don't have to make your own. They range from emojis to HTML utilities. I installed one that creates a shruggie text emoticon because why not? So far I've resisted the temptation to install one that generates random dad jokes. You can pitch in by creating and uploading your own package using YAML.

And not to be overlooked is the espanso community, where you can get help from other espanso fans.

All this might seem like a lot of uber-geekery just to save some typing. But digging into the Terminal and doing a bit of coding is what makes computing fun.


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Thursday, June 10, 2021

Top iPad weather apps for Canada

After some digging, I discovered that iPad weather apps using Environment Canada data do indeed exist. They're just hard to find. The App Store search buries the good stuff under scammers and review-gamers. The one-star written reviews are your best warning — stay away from them.

You may have better luck using a search engine, although even these results are mostly more about making money from affiliate links or pushing you to download an ad-riddled app.

I found three of the apps in this list in the comment section of an article. Comments can also be cesspools of hawkers trying to sell their stuff, but there are still a few good people out there genuinely trying to be helpful.

In my mind, the best Canadian weather apps for iPad should have two things: accuracy and a nice layout. Accuracy means data from Environment Canada and a nice layout means, at the very least, no ads.

Here are the top five contenders:

1. Celsius: uses Environment Canada data

The first screen has a list of locations with the current weather plus the forecast high and low.

Tap and go to a second screen with details including hourly forecasts, seven-day forecasts, wind, humidity, dew point, visibility, pressure, sunrise and sunset. Radar is available but you have to find it on the Environment Canada website.

2. Météo: uses Environment Canada data

The list of locations and details are on the same page, making the layout more cramped than Celsius. It works better horizontally.

There are more details, though: hourly forecast, seven-day forecast, wind, AQHI, pressure, visibility, humidity, dew point, normal temperatures, yesterday's temperature, yesterday's precipitation, sunrise and sunset. Alerts, radar, satellite and lightning and available within the app.

3. WeatherCAN: uses Environment Canada data

This is the official Environment Canada app. It is an iPhone app that also works on iPad.

Locations are in a tap-down menu with details on the same page. Details include past 24-hour conditions, current conditions, sunrise, sunset, COVID-19 trends, hourly forecast, seven-day forecast, radar and weather-related messages such as news about World Environment Day, World Oceans Day or solar eclipses.

4. Atmosphérique: uses Environment Canada data

Locations are in a tap-down menu, with details on the same page in a layout that seems cluttered compared with the other apps. It only works vertically, and there is a banner ad at the bottom.

You can also find Atmosphérique Pro, which is end of life and refers you to Atmosphérique 4. I wasn't able to find it.

Details include seven-day forecast, hourly forecast, past 24 hours, radar, normal temperatures, sunrise, sunset, humidity, pressure, humidex, wind, visibility, dew point, yesterday's temperature and yesterday's precipitation, records and averages.

5. Weather Network: unknown source of data, but appears to be based in Canada

Locations are in a tap-down menu with details on the same page including two ads, one in the middle and one at the bottom.

Details include hourly forecast, 36-hour forecast, 14-day forecast, wind, humidity, pressure, visibility, ceiling, sunrise, sunset, yesterday's temperature, air quality and UV report (appear to be the same thing), pollen and radar.


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Sunday, March 7, 2021

Mini Diary has the basics for beginner diarists

I never thought I would be the type to keep a personal diary, but I've been wrestling with a big decision lately and decided to give it a try.

There is a nice free and open source app called Mini Diary that is perfect for beginners like me.

I like that it has a calendar on the side so you can keep track of your diary entries in chronological order.

It also has a search, a few formatting controls, and a word count. And I like that it has password protection.

I'm OK with writing about things — like this app recommendation — that other people could conceivably be interested in, and publishing them on this blog. But the personal stuff needs to stay private.

So far it's been going well. I've done three entries and feel confident that I will write more.

This reminds me of a Netflix series called about the death of a young woman from Vancouver at the Cecil Hotel in Los Angeles. Much of it was devoted to voice-overs and screenshots from the woman's Tumblr account. She was open with her feelings, and those thoughts live on as a testimony to her life.

That's not me, though. That stuff stays locked up in Mini Diary.


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Saturday, March 6, 2021

Apple's weird idea of free

Speaking of the Mac App Store, I am annoyed every time I look at the Top Free Apps section. It includes Microsoft Word, Excel, PowerPoint and Outlook.

There is absolutely nothing free about any of these apps. You download them, launch them, and they immediately invite you to set up a paid account.

You cannot do one single thing for free.

I can only assume that Apple is in on this scam, which makes it all the more disappointing.


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Friday, March 5, 2021

Free love at the Mac App Store

Sometimes there's a weird disconnect on the Mac App Store — in the section called Apps and Games We Love Right Now.

Let's deconstruct this a bit.

First the "love" part. According to Wikipedia, "mostly commonly, love refers to a feeling of strong attraction and emotional attachment."

To say that you love something is about the highest praise you can give it.

Then there's the "right now" part. I take this to be a way of amplifying the love — that it transcends all other considerations.

Finally, there is the "we". I have a vision of Apple employees making these choices, but that's probably naive. There's no way employees are being trusted to make independent choices without corporate approval. These apps have the Apple seal of approval.

All in all, it's a bunch of marketing bafflegab, but I'm sure most people would agree that the message is that these apps come highly recommended by Apple.

So it's only natural to check them out. After all, Apple, it would appear, has gone through the thousands of apps in the app store and chosen a few of the most outstanding.

The first one I looked was DaVinci Resolve, a video editing program. Maybe this was just coincidentally a bad choice, but it felt like I had entered an alternative reality.

The app has 19 ratings for an average of 3.2 out of 5 — kind of mediocre. And it's a generous 3.2, given the stream of complaints in the written reviews.

"I uninstalled and reinstalled and it still will not load"

"It won't let me add in any files"

"It did not work at all after multiple attempts."

"Cannot add files, progrm hangs... Complete dissapointment..."

"When i try an add things to a project it does not work please fix this"

And these complaints go back three years! In other words, this app suffers from major issues and the developer has apparently not fixed or even acknowledged them.

How, then, did Apple come to love DaVinci Resolve right now? Did Apple employees seriously look at the reviews and decide they loved this app anyway?

A new version came out about a week ago. Did it solve the problems? There is no mention that they even existed.

The most generous thing I can think of to say is that DaVinci Resolve is free, so just download it. Who knows? Maybe you'll get lucky and it will work for you.


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Sunday, January 3, 2021

Reclaim your habits with Streaks

I've used pencil and paper to keep track of my habits, and was doing well for a few months. Then came December.

First, I put off printing a new sheet at the beginning of the month, as is required with this method. Then I thought I would just sort-of remember my habits — they were habits, after all.

By the end of December, most of my habits were in disarray. In fact, there was one I couldn't even remember.

So once again, I checked out some apps. There are some really nice ones, but almost all of them want you to register, subscribe or both. I will do neither.

Which leads me to Streaks — you buy it for $7 (price varies by country) and it's yours.

It has a beautiful interface where you set up your habits. Mine are mostly things I want to do once a day, but there are other options and variations, such a certain number of times per week or month. You can also set lengths of time and distances.

Each habit gets its own icon. I was pleasantly surprised to see it choose the yin-yang symbol for my tai chi habit.

As you complete your habits, little charts and calendars keep track by showing your streaks. The longer you keep up the habit, the longer the streak – and the satisfaction that comes with that.

You can set it to send notifications so you don't forget. Another reminder comes in the form of a badge on the icon with the number of habits you still need to fulfil for the day.

I put the app on my phone in the same area as my news apps, which I obsessively check. That makes it even harder to ignore.

So far, I'm pretty happy with Streaks. I wish there were more apps like this — a simple service at a fair price.


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