Tag: Mac apps

Here’s a christmas present for all you video gaming nerds who played the epic 8-bit and 16-bit console games of past.

OpenEmu – a console game emulator, lets you run all the pixel games seamlessly.

As the name suggests, it’s an open source project and a few days back, stable release of Mac app has been out.

To get started, download the Mac app from OpenEmu’s website. Also download the Starter Game pack, and drop them in the app to import. That’s all you have to do, to install a game, i.e. just drop the ROM file.

The app’s design is strikingly good, which is not something you expect from a console emulator. You can build collections, categorise your games and rate them.

Games can be played in fullscreen and can be saved for resuming at a later time.

You can even plug in your game pad/controller and use it just like that. I tried with my Xbox 360 controller and it worked fine, though I did needed to install the Mac-specific driver. Controls can be changed in the preferences window.

On a whole, it’s a polished and well made app. Also free, so why not give it a try?

Link: OpenEmu

I love how Apple baked IM functionality into iPhone’s Messages app instead of building a separate iMessage app. This is something I look forward in Google’s Hangouts. iMessage is a pretty good service by Apple, except that it just doesn’t work. It’s almost the most annoying thing, both on OS X and iOS, for many reasons.

To start off, server down times for iMessage have been very frequent. Adding to that, there are times when your messages would be delivered a little late to your recipient. The worst thing though, is searching through messages. Most of the times, the chat balloons get misplaced and overlooked. The app even gets freezed for no reason.

Flexibits, the company which made Fantastical, a popular Calendar app for OS X and iPhone – has now released Chatology, a better way to search your chat logs.

The interface is pretty self explanatory. You’ll see a three pane layout, showing messages sorted by time. You can choose the time period. If you’re specifically looking for images/links in a chat log, you can filter that way using options in the third pane. Search works fine, and the results are highlighted with the search term. It’s also much snappier compared to searching on Messages for Mac.

Chatology is a paid app, costing 20$. That’s probably a bit too much for an app which ‘fixes’ things, but if you use iMessage at work, exchanging reference material with your co-workers, then it perfectly makes sense to get this app.

You can give the app a try for 14 days. Hit the link below to download it (it won’t be available in Mac Appstore).

Link: Chatology for Mac

Read It Later, a popular app for saving articles for reading later, has reinvented itself this year as Pocket. I used to be a Readability fan, but then switched to Pocket as it was rebranded.

On desktop, Pocket is available as a webapp, but I always prefer Mac apps to their web counterparts. But wait, they’ve released their Mac app today, just what I wanted.

The best part of Pocket’s Mac app is that its interface will never come in your way – there’s nothing flashy or eye-catchy here. That’s important for an app intended to use for reading articles.

The standard two-column layout lets you swift through the articles, you will be able to watch videos too (if they appear in the articles).

You can’t change the background of the article, like you can in its Android app. But you do have control over text size and readability.

You can share articles through Twitter, Facebook, Buffer, Evernote and Email. It doesn’t use Mountain Lion’s default sharing options, but that’s okay.

The app automatically downloads the articles, so you can read them even when you’re offline.

It’s a free download and if you’re Pocket user, it’s a must try.

Link: Pocket for Mac