Congratulations to the three lucky winners of Dropzone!

1. Okky Ghofoer

2. Marius M.

3. Ammon

The developer will be contacting you shortly with your free licenses.

Thank you all for taking part. Happy holidays and may 2010 be an awesome one for all!

Check out SUBERNOVA online project management tool:

Thanks to everyone who participated in Layers giveaway!

We have picked 2 lucky winners and they are…….

The Winners:

1. Brian N.
2. Carsten Langrock

The developer will be contacting you guys for your free licenses shortly. Congrats and I hope you enjoy using Layers!

For those who didn’t win this time, there are more giveaways coming up, the upcoming one is on Monday! So stay tuned!

Check out SUBERNOVA online project management tool:

Ever since the roundup of 21+ essential iPhone apps with sexy interfaces crashed my hosting server (!), I understand how much people love roundups of well designed apps.

This post is a round up of 50 handpicked Mac apps that have either well designed or have really sexy interfaces or both! They’re not arranged in any order, just random.

I know it’s a giant list to digest, so bookmark this for future reference! Also, leave a comment if you think I have missed out a Mac app of this category.

Pixelmator

[$59 | Website]

Pixelmator is a great alternative to Photoshop, low memory footprint and extremely beautiful.

Tapedeck

[$25 | Website]

TapeDeck is a powerful and fun new audio recorder for Mac OS X Leopard. It’s just like your old analog tape recorder, only better. A lot better.

Snowtape

[$29 | Website]

Snowtape lets you listen to radio stations and record them live. And more! Read my review.

Delibar

[$18 | Website]

I have a review for Delibar coming up next week, so stay tuned! Delibar is a full featured Delicious.com Mac client. Delibar focuses on giving Mac OS X users an easy and quick tool for searching, managing and sharing their Delicious bookmarks.

CleanMyMac

[$29.95 lifetime or $14.95 6 month license | Website]

CleanMyMac represents sophisticated all-in-one-suite utility that helps keep your Mac clean and healthy. With just two simple clicks you can delete useless files that basically pile up and waste your valuable disk space.

Swatch

[$4.95 | Website]

Swatch lets you group your colors together in ‘Swatches’ to later be used throughout your project. Working in CSS? Easily copy the hex value to paste right into your stylesheet.

Snippet

[$12.95 | Website]

An unobstrusive snippets management tool for your Mac.

Anxiety

[Donationware | Website]

Anxiety is a super-lightweight To-do list application for Mac OS X Leopard that synchronizes with iCal and Mail. Its aim is to provide a streamlined, easily accessible interface to add and check off your tasks, while remaining poised to melt into the background at a moments notice.

Capo

[$49 | Website]

Capo is a musician’s best friend. It lets you slow down your favorite songs, so you can hear the notes and learn how they are played.

Bodega

[Free | Website]

Bodega is like Apple’s App Store, but for Mac! Extremely well designed to say the least.

Blogo

[$25 | Website]

Blogo is a blogging app for Mac that supports Wordpress, Blogger, Typepad, Typo, Drupal, Joomla, and Expression Engine. This post is composed speedily with Blogo!

LittleSnapper

[$39 | Website]

LittleSnapper is a screenshot snapping and management app.

Things

[$49.95 | Website]

If you only have budget for only one Mac OS X to-do list tool, look no further than Things. There is also an iPhone app that can sync with Things for Mac

The Hit List

[$49.95 | Website]

Another to-do list tool for Mac, more fancy design, no iPhone app yet.

Notebook

[$49.95 | Website]

More than just an outliner or text processor, NoteBook is idea management software that supports Mac users at every stage of a project, no matter how large or small.

Coverstream

[€14.95| Website]

Control, search and browse music unobstrusive with a coverflow like interface. Gorgeous!

Tangerine

[$24.95 | Website]

Tangerine! lets you easily create playlists of upbeat music, or playlists for relaxing. It works by analyzing the BPM and the beat intensity of your music. Spend your time listening to music, not making playlists.

TuneUp

[$29.95 lifetime or $19.95 annual license | Website]

Your music collection is a mess. TuneUp fixes it. Automagically.

Coversutra

[$19.95 | Website]

CoverSutra gives you a handy and attractive way to control iTunes without having to leave your current application.

Notify

[Free | Website]

Notify provides a simple and elegant way of keeping track of what’s in your Gmail inbox. With support for multiple accounts, and a beautiful tabbed user interface, you can’t go wrong with Notify.

Just Notes

[Donationware | Website]

A simple, beautiful and powerful notes app. The nice user interface lets you focus on the important things – taking notes

Postbox

[$39.95 | Website]

Postbox lets you work with email the way you’ve always wanted. Powered by an ultra-fast email engine and a sharp-looking, intuitive interface, Postbox will help you focus, save time, and get more done.

NewsLife

[$14.88 | Website]

NewsLife is the simplest way to stay up-to-date with tons of websites without even having to touch your web browser until you see something you want to read.

Stuf

[£12.99 | Website]

Stuf is a clipboard manager with a beautiful HUD like interface.

Cha-Ching

[Free during beta | Website]

My personal favorite finance management app. Manage your finances quickly and easily with Cha-Ching 2 for the Mac. Quickly create a budget, enter transactions and track spending, all within a beautiful user interface that will make managing your finances a true pleasure.

Awaken

[CAD$15 | Website]

Gently fall asleep with the sleep timer and wake up on time with Awaken.

Fontcase

[$56 | Website]

A beautiful font management app!

DaisyDisk

[$19.95 | Website]

With DaisyDisk you can free up disk space by quickly finding and deleting big, useless files. The program scans any mounted disk and displays it on the sunburst map, where segments mean files and folders, proportionally to their sizes. The map is easy to read and navigate. You can also quickly preview any file and reveal it in Finder to delete.

iStat Menu

[Free | Website]

The most advanced system monitor for Mac, and dare I say the most beautiful.

Dropzone

[$10 | Website]

Dropzone is a Mac application that makes it faster, easier and more fun to get things done on your Mac. Share files and text, launch applications and extend via a powerful ruby based API.

Midnight Inbox

[$35 | Website]

Midnight Inbox helps you work smarter and with less stress, automating your inputs and organizing your tasks, files, and information so that you can always be in control. Collect emails, files, calendar and to-do items and notes automatically. Process all of your collected items into to-do items you can actually do when and where you are able. Organize those to-do items into projects you can track easily. Review your lists, projects, and collections to make sure nothing slips through the cracks. Do everything on your lists with a Zen-like focus.

Picturesque

[$29.95 | Website]

Picturesque is a simple app with a simple goal: to make images more beautiful. Whether you are in web or print, your images can benefit from a touch of Picturesque magic.

Aperture

[$199 | Website]

Aperture 2 delivers streamlined tools for moving photos from capture to output with uncompromising quality.

Lightroom

[$299 | Website]

Adobe Photoshop Lightroom 2 software is essential for today’s digital photography workflow. Now you can quickly import, process, manage, and showcase your images — from one shot to an entire shoot. With Lightroom 2, you spend less time in front of the computer and more time behind the lens.

ScreenFlow

[$99 | Website]

Capture the contents of your entire desktop at the same time as your video camera, microphone and computer’s audio. Sophisticated editing tools allow you to create incredible screencasts in no time.The finished result is a QuickTime or Windows Media movie, ready for publishing to your website or blog.

Tweetie

[Free (w/ads) $19.95 (no ads) | Website]

Very low memory footprint and pretty Twitter client for Mac! A standalone iPhone app is also available.

Socialite (previously known as Eventbox)

[Not Available Yet | Download Socialite beta 2 from here | Website]

You can manage your social life on Socialite, an all in one social media client where you can tweet, digg, Facebook, Flickr, read RSS feeds, Google Reader, Reddit and more.

Eventbox has been bought over by RealMacSoftware who subsequently renamed the app as Socialite.

Twistori

[$12 | Website]

Twitter visualization app for Mac.

Canary

[Free | Website]

Canary is a Twitter client that is beautifully designed, fun to use and has everything you’ll ever need. Canary’s user interface is slick and straightforward and helps you do what matters most fast and easily. It does more than you would expect it to and the best part: it’s free with no ads.

Delicious Library

[$40 | Website]

Catalog your books, movies, music, software, toys, tools, electronics, & video games

Tags

[$29 | Website]

File tagging app for Mac.

1Password

[$39.95 | Website]

I wonder what I’ll do without 1Password! 1Password can create strong, unique passwords for you, remember them, and restore them, all directly in your web browser.

Propane

[$20 during beta | Website]

A Mac client for users of Campfire. Campfire^™ is a web-based group chat tool from 37signals^®. It’s like Instant Messaging, only better because it’s designed for groups and runs in your web browser.

Espresso

[€59.95 | Website]

Espresso is a web development app by MacRabbit.

CSSEdit

[€29.95 | Website]

Also created by MacRabbit, CSSEdit lets you, as the name suggest, edit CSS!

Coda

[$99 | Website]

My personal favorite for web development! Text editor + file transfer + svn + css + terminal + books + more = whoah.

Billings

[$39.99 | Website]

Billings is an invoicing and time tracking app.

On The Job

[$39.95 | Website]

Similar to Billings, On The Job gets your invoicing job done.

Rapidweaver

[$79 | Website]

Rapidweaver lets you create beautiful websites quickly and easily!

xScope

[$26.95 | Website]

Want to measure stuff on your screen? xScope can help you get the job done.

Flux 2

[£40 | Website] Suggested by Irfan Q

Flux 2 is an extensible web development tool that enables developers to write HTML, CSS, PHP etc. FTP (including SFTP), Local Disk, and MobileMe are all supported in a completely rewritten publishing system.

Textmate

[£40 | Website] Suggested by svenlito

Peeps who uses Textmate stands by Textmate, they must have done something right as one of the most popular tools for developers.

Writeroom

[$24.95 | Website] Suggested by Powitsjj

For people who enjoy the simplicity of a typewriter, but live in the digital world. WriteRoom is a distraction free writing environment. Unlike the cluttered word processors you’re used to, WriteRoom lets you focus on writing. Also comes with an accompanying iPhone app ($4.99)!

Scrivener

[$39.95 | Website] Suggested by twiedi

Scrivener is a word processor and project management tool created specifically for writers of long texts such as novels and research papers. It won’t try to tell you how to write – it just makes all the tools you have scattered around your desk available in one application.

Vinoteka

[€29.90 | Website] Suggested by William

Vinoteka is a brand new wine cellar management software for Mac. Extremely easy and fun to use, Vinoteka offers a realistic interface to manage your bottles (wine, liquors or spirits) recreate your cellar and organize wine tasting sessions. No matter if wine is new for you or if you already are an expert, Vinoteka is here to make your wine experience the best.

Contactizer

[$119 | Website]

Contactizer Pro is an amazing all-in-one solution for managing, sharing and organizing your personal and business information. Contactizer Pro 3.8 makes your business management experience more efficient, productive and inventive. Following the prodigious success of its predecessor, OD4Contact, many users worldwide continue to choose Contactizer Pro for their calendar, organizational and management needs. Contactizer Pro, specifically built for Mac OS X, provides a wealth of powerful PIM features, all through an innovative, elegant and intuitive interface.

Check out SUBERNOVA online project management tool:

This is one app that I absolutely love in terms of functions and looks, 5 upon 5 stars. I finally took a break from iTunes and off to exploring more new music from the realm of internet radio stations. SUBERAPPS readers gets a 20% discount code! Read on.

When I was a kid, I used to love listening to the radio. I didn’t have much money to spend on CDs, so I bought empty tapes to record songs played on the radio so that I can listen to my favorite songs over and over again!

Times have changed very quickly, tapes are a thing of the past. You can now listen to radio on the internet. Internet radios are great ways to discover new music, wouldn’t it be great to be able to record internet radio so that you can keep the song permanently with you?

With Snowtape, this is possible – and more!

Meet Snowtape

Snowtape lets you listen to internet radio, record them and even export recorded songs directly to iTunes with just one click!

To me, Snowtape is like iTunes but for radio stations and even more beautiful.

Features

Radio Stations
Snowtape is able to store thousands of radio stations to let you explore the almost infinite world of internet radio stations. Found one you like? Mark it as favorite to quickly listen to that radio station later.

Record

Snowtape not only lets you record broadcasts from radio stations, it took recording even further by helping you cut the tracks at audio track boundaries automatically. This means that the songs you record are complete soundtracks stored in your repository as individual songs (with album artwork fetched from Last.fm!), rather than a long piece of audio track. Snowtape can also identify commercials or interludes, automatically excluding them from the recordings.

What more do you need to do? Just hit the record button and let it run on auto-pilot!

iTunes Integration

For every recorded track, Snowtape will check if the track is available on iTunes. If it is, it can bring you to the artist directly in iTunes with one click! I don’t know how this can be useful when you can export the recorded track to iTunes, saving you one buck or so. The only thing you might want to buy the track off iTunes is when the track wasn’t recorded properly which is rare, or you simply want to support the artist.

As you should know by now, iTunes also lets you play internet radio. But if you want to streamline and manage radio stations all on Snowtape, just drag the item from iTunes into Snowtape and it’ll do the rest.

Importing

Not only can Snowtape import radio stations from iTunes, you can also import URLs of any radio station and Snowtape will check if it is valid before importing.

Controlling Mini Controller

You can either run Snowtape in a window, or as a mini controller. As gorgeous as the app window itself, you can park the mini controller anywhere on your screen with full controls for playing, pausing and recording.

Want to control Snowtape on your couch? You’re covered! Just download the Snowtape remote from iTunes (for iPhone and iPod Touch at $0.99). The remote is everything you would expect from Apple’s remote for iTunes. Play, pause, record, volume control, select radio stations, favorites etc.

Conclusion

For $29, Snowtape gives you maximum satisfaction on your music needs, digital radio style. Download it and give it a try, and if you decide to buy, take advantage of the 20% discount by using the coupon code – SUBERAPPS.

I hope you enjoy Snowtape as much as I do!

Check out SUBERNOVA online project management tool:

I witnessed the entire revealing of the MacHeist nanoBundle on UStream while also watching the stream of comments go by, mostly about how disappointing the bundle is. Most of them say they won’t pay for it, but guess what? You don’t have to pay for it!

6 apps with a combined price of $154 cost nothing the next 6 days. Get it while it last!

I am only happy with WriteRoom in the bundle. Tried ShoveBox (still prefer Evernote) and Twitterrific (now prefers Tweetie), but not the rest.

Here are the 6 apps you can get yourself without paying:

ShoveBox (developer’s site)
ShoveBox catches all those little scraps of information that you can’t act on now but would rather not forget. It sits up in your menubar, waiting for you to drag in text, images, urls, and more.

Writeroom is all about eliminating distractions. Unlike the cluttered word processors you’re used to, WriteRoom lets you focus on writing. What’s more you can take your writing on the go with the accompanying iPhone app ($0.99).

Twitter + Mac lovers will be familiar with Twitterrific. It’s one of the first best performing Twitter app for the Mac. Twitterrific’s user interface is designed to let you view as much or as little information as you desire. The application shows a scrolling list of the latest tweets from either your friends or public feeds. Twitteriffic also has an iPhone version.

TinyGrab is a simple yet extremely powerful utility for Mac OS X and Windows. Harnessing the power of pre-existing and new OS screenshot taking capabilities, TinyGrab instantly uploads and allows you to share with a small URL— all in under thirty-seconds.

A “Tower Defense” game in which you must build walls and lethal towers to defend your village from the Orcs emerging from, what the village elders call, “The Glowing Portal of Really Bad Things That We Should Have Bricked-Up a Long Time Ago.” Sadly, the Portal is un-bricked and the Orcs are very, very hungry. If 20 Orcs make it to your village, you’re toast.

Mariner Write is a powerful, yet streamlined word processor for Mac OS X for everyone from professional writers, to educators, students, to the average user. Boasting an elegant interface, as well as hundreds of intuitive features such as the ability to read Microsoft Word documents and produce customizable headers, footers, endnotes, and footnotes, Mariner Write has everything you need to turn out great-looking documents.

Check out SUBERNOVA online project management tool:

A new Mac OS X Twitter app on the block, Lounge, is a multiple account Twitter app that allows you to do most things with ease, tweeting, replying, direct messages, favourites, retweet and even lets you learn more about a particular user by displaying a user’s profile, followers/following right in the app itself (very useful).

Lounge for Mac is currently in beta, you can download it free at the website. Lounge’s accompanying iPhone app is now at 1.0 and is currently available at the App Store.

Lounge’s User Interface

The user interface is straightforward with tweets on the right and functions on the left.

Features

Notice that all the frequently used functions are displayed on the left. You can also hide the sidebar by hitting a hot toggle key “Cmd+Opt+C”. Here’s an explanation of the various sidebar functions:

My 2 Cents: All the tweets by you
Favourites: Tweets that you marked as favourites
Friends: Your friends twitter stream
Replies: Your @replies
Vanity: All the tweets from the Twitterverse that mentions your user name
Everyone: Main timeline
Search: You can do a Twitter-wide search here with option to save result
Received: Private messages that you’ve received
Sent: Private messages you’ve sent
Followers: All your followers
Following: All tweeps that you follow

Reply Chains

One of the problem that most Twitter users face is that there is no obvious way to view what your friends are replying to when they send you an @reply, and vice versa. With Lounge, viewing reply chains is a breeze.

Tweeting Options

For every tweet, you can choose to retweet, link to tweet, copy tweet or tweet URL etc.

However there is no way for you to set the retweet format, eg. “RT @username” or “(via @username).

There’s is also no feature to let you conveniently shorten a URL. But keep in mind that Lounge’s Mac app is currently in it’s beta, if we’re lucky we might see these feature in future releases.

Check a User’s Profile

Checking a user’s profile is only a click away (click on the user’s avatar). There is no need to launch the user’s Twitter profile page as the information is shown in the app itself, which is a very neat feature.

Multiple Accounts

For people with multiple Twitter personalities this feature is a god-send as it streamlines all your account in one place. Switching an account is a click away. This is something I have been waiting for from Eventbox which is still lacking.

Growl

A growl notification is triggered each time Lounge checks for tweets. It’ll only show one latest tweet and tells you how many more new tweets were fetched.

You can only turn off growl notifications from Growl’s preference pane.

Preferences

This is all there is to the preference pane.

Set your hot key to activate Lounge window (very similar to Twitterrific and Eventbox) and an option to use your return key to send tweets.

Lounge iPhone App

The iPhone app is a a little half-baked when compared to popular Twitter iPhone apps like Tweetie and Twitterlator. There is no retweet or Twitpic functions, means that there is no easy way to retweet your friend’s tweet, or share a pic via Twitpic with your friends on your iPhone app. The current version is 1.0, hopefully the later versions will bring these major functions into the app.

User Interface

The look and feel is the same compared to the Mac app, which is a good move to tie both apps from different platforms together. You can do pretty much the same things that you can do with the desktop version.

Landscape Mode

One of the first I’ve seen, displaying tweets in landscape mode while letting you switch accounts with just one click.

Search

The search function lets you group a combination of different criterias and save it, much like using smart folders.

Ultimately, I’m not sure if you should buy this iPhone app now if you’re comparing features with Tweetie or Twittelator. But the perks about this app is that if you’re also using the Mac app, the next version of Lounge iPhone App (1.1) will let you synchronize various kinds of meta data so the transition from your Mac to your iPhone and back again will be seamless.

UPDATE (22 Mar 09):

Retweeting via the iPhone app is available but it wasn’t very obvious to me when I was using it – tap a tweet’s body in the tweets detail view and you’ll be presented with a number of options, retweet, link to tweet etc.

Check out SUBERNOVA online project management tool:

Here’s a lesser known feature about snapping screenshots of any window without having to use the crosshair to drag and select. Using this trick, you just need to focus the little camera icon on any window you want to snap a screenshot of. You don’t have to install any software, I have tested this on Leopard and Tiger and it works.

Focus the camera on one window,

to another.

How to do it?

1) Press “Cmd + Shift + 4″ on your keyboard
2) Press the “Spacebar” and you’ll see the camera icon enabling you to quickly snap windows

Have fun!

Check out SUBERNOVA online project management tool:

Although Apple designed Leopard such that it makes you more productive than ever, eg. quicklook, spotlight, there are still more room for getting more out of your Mac. With the help of third party apps like the following, working on your Mac on a day to day basis becomes faster, you get more done and feel happier. Trust me, saving a bit of time here and there, will save you tons in the long run.

Also, these apps made me realize that by using the keyboard rather than the mouse, you get tasks complete faster.

1 & 2) TextExpander (Mac) & Wide Email (iPhone)

Both softwares work similarly on both platforms, saving you time typing texts both on your Mac and on the go.

They allow you to insert pre-typed long sentences or paragraphs just by typing a few letters. For eg. if you assign “cu” to “See you later!”, typing “cu” will insert “See you later!” into any text fields. With a little bit of imagination, you can use this concept and apply to all areas of your activity on your Mac (Wide Email on iPhone only allows you to expand text for Mail).

I have tried both apps and I must say they increased my productivity tenfold.

TextExpander ($29.95):

Storing snippets and assigning abbreviations

Expands few letters into chunks of texts

A few uses for TextExpander

1) Frequently visited URLs (eg if you love to visit the apple store frequently. “;a” expands to “http://www.apple.com”)
2) Commenting on blogs (eg. “;n” expands to “your full name”, “;e” expands to “yourname@gmail.com”, “;u” expands to “http://www.yourdomain.com”
3) Emails (eg. “lf” expands to “Looking forward to hearing from you. Thanks!”)
4) Providing someone with your address (eg. “addr” expands to your full address)
5) If you’re a coder, even better, typing a few letters will insert long snippets of code, speeding up your work

Wide Email on the iPhone ($0.99):

Typing faster in landscape mode

Assigning text shortcuts

All your frequently used texts and their shortcuts

With so many other landscape email typing apps on the App Store, Wide Email have an edge as it lets you type long sentences (which could be cumbersome on the iPhone) by typing a few letters, similar to TextExpander. You can also store drafts for later sending and read or reuse a draft as a template. All these should have been shipped with the iPhone in my

3 & 4) QuickSilver (Launch Apps) & MsgFiler (for Apple Mail)

Why I group both QuickSilver and MsgFiler is because both apps helps you perform daily tasks just by typing a few letters.

QuickSilver (Free)

QuickSilver lets you launch apps quickly, eventually you’ll be able to launch any apps without thinking. That is true after prolonged usage of QuickSilver, you’ll wonder why you ever lived without it. I was skeptical about QuickSilver at first, thinking how much more faster can you launch an app when all your apps are already on the dock, isn’t it just a click and launch affair? But if you agree with me that using your keyboard is faster than using your mouse, then QuickSilver is for you.

Typing a default hot key combination on your keyboard <Ctrl + Space> you’ll launch the QuickSilver screen, for example if you want to launch Safari, quickly type “sa” which is basically the first few letters of the name of that app, when you see Safari’s icon on the screen, hit <Return> and you’ll launch the app. No more looking for that app on your overcrowded dock and attempting to point your mouse to it to launch it.

Other than launching apps, there are also other tricks you can perform with it.

MsgFiler ($8, free to use forever if you don’t mind the occasional nag screen)

If you think dragging your email messages into their respective folders in Mail is the only way to go, you’re wrong. MsgFiler gives you a much faster way to do it.

Select an email item, similar to QuickSilver, type the default hot key combination on your keyboard <Command + 9) to launch MsgFiler window, then type the first few letters of the name of the folder you want to file the email in and hit <Return>.

This saves you from scrolling through and finding the folder that you want the email to be filed, and then dragging the message in. Searching and hiting <return> is faster as with QuickSilver.

5) 1Password (Mac) 1Password (iPhone or Palm)

1Password desktop interface

1Password plugin on Safari

1Password securely remembers your personal details ($39.95 Single License for Desktop, Free for iPhone)
If you ever find yourself tired of filling out forms, entering login details, forgetting passwords, digging through your wallet to find that credit card number to make an online purchase, remembering your bank account number so that you can write it on a cheque, remembering your passport’s date of issue and expiry date when buying an air ticket, remembering FTP logins or software serial numbers etc, 1Password solves this part of your problem.
Not only that, you can also take the same data with you by syncing your iPhone or Palm with your desktop.
One great feature about 1Password is that the app installs a plugin on your web browser so that it saves your login information on any site without having you to manually recording it on the app.
Clicking on the “1P” icon on Safari for example will log you in immediately on any login page (if you have saved the login previously).
Hope you enjoy these apps if you decide to use them!

Check out SUBERNOVA online project management tool: