Despite customer outcry over Adobe’s switch from Creative Suite software in a box to Creative Cloud software as a service, the company reports that it added 221,000 paid Creative Cloud customers to its roster in the second quarter of 2013 for a total of 700,000 subscribers to date. That’s an increase over the 479,000 subscribers Adobe reported at the end of the first quarter. Those numbers, revealed as part of the company's second quarter earnings, are on track, and even ahead of Adobe's goal, according to Scott Morris, senior marketing director for Creative Cloud.

Adobe expects it will add more subscribers in the third quarter than in the second, aiming for a total of 1.25 million subscribers by the end of the year.

"Going into Adobe Max we had a lot of momentum, and that continued and accelerated once we made our announcements," Morris told Macworld in an interview. "If you look at how far we’ve come in a pretty short period of time, and if you look at our own internal goals and how we’re achieving them, we are really, really happy with the way adoption has gone."

According to Morris, customers who bought into the cloud subscription concept are committed, with 92 percent of them choosing a yearly subscription as opposed to a month-to-month—the better deal on the yearly subscription. Annual subscriptions cost $50 per month for individuals and $70 per month (per seat) for creative teams, though there are numerous discounts available for the first year. Month-to-month subscriptions cost more.

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Adobe has added some nice features to its new, subscription-based, pro-level Photoshop Creative Cloud; it also rolled all of the features of Photoshop Extended into the CC version. The inclusion of 3D tools aside, Photoshop CC isn’t the most feature-packed release ever, but it has some good stuff, especially in the realm of actions, filters, and enlargements. Unfortunately, Bridge CC, Photoshop's perennial file management sidekick, didn’t fare as well—it's had several useful features removed.

New features

Photoshop CC, which you download and install locally on your hard drive, fully supports Retina displays (Apple’s superhigh-resolution monitors); you’ll spot a new 200 percent option in the View menu (which lets you see Web graphics at the size they’ll appear in a browser). Several plug-ins also support these crystal-clear displays including Liquify, Save for Web, Merge to HDR, Vanishing Point, Adaptive Wide Angle, Lens Correction, and the Filter Gallery. And look for two tiny new icons at the bottom left of document windows: one for syncing your settings to the Creative Cloud for access on other machines, and one for uploading artwork to the collaborative, online Behance community.

One of the most useful new features in Photoshop CC is for conditional actions; it lets you record an action that chooses among previously recorded actions and runs the one that matches criteria you set (in order to account for variables such as document size, color modes, adjustment layers, and so on). The Image Size dialog box was simplified and includes a resizable image preview that lets you see the results of your settings before applying them. And a new Preserve Details interpolation method sharpens areas of fine detail in your image in order to produce higher-quality enlargements (this new method includes a noise-reduction slider, too). Happily, all interpolation methods now have keyboard shortcuts, and the new Fit To drop-down menu has a handy list of size presets.

Introduced in Photoshop CS6, the Field Blur, Iris Blur, and Tilt-Shift filters make creating blurry backgrounds easier than ever. In CC, those filters work with Smart Filters, so you can run them nondestructively. They also take advantage of OpenCL, a technology found in newer graphics cards that lets Photoshop tap into the card’s processing power whenever it wants. As a result, previewing and applying these filters is noticeably faster.

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As someone who makes a Mac app for tracking the differences between files, you’d expect developer Patrick Burleson to have some thoughts on the changes Apple has announced for its operating systems during this week’s Worldwide Developers Conference. So that’s what we talk to him about in our latest video chat with developers attending WWDC.

Burleson runs BitBQ, and he also works on Briefs, a Mac app for iOS prototyping. His Mac app for tracking differences between files, Changes, may well benefit from the changes coming in OS X Mavericks, the update to the Mac OS announced by Apple this week. And his iOS app Fitness Tracker will need some updating to look at home on the forthcoming iOS 7.

In this video, we talk to Burleson about his work on Briefs, his plans for his own apps, and his reactions to Apple’s recent announcements.

Apple on Wednesday dropped two quick updates to two of its apps. Fire up the Mac App Store, and you’ll find iTunes 11.0.4 and Aperture 3.4.5.

The iTunes update addresses a bug that plagued many: Constantly getting prompted to enter your iTunes password. It also fixes a crashing bug related to switching between wireless and wired syncing.

Aperture’s update addresses an issue that led to crashes when deleting items from a camera or memory card after importing those photos. The update now correctly ejects memory cards after using the Delete Items command.

The Aperture update includes other, unspecified bug fixes as well.

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Quark is getting ready to launch version 10 of its landmark desktop publishing software package, QuarkXPress. And while the company remains mum on the specific details of the brand new version and the precise date of launch, it is offering a sweet deal on the new update to anyone who purchases or upgrades to version 9 from any previous version by June 30. Those users get a free update to version 10.

In its 25 years as a software developer, Quark has had its share of ups and downs, but the program has managed to retain its focus as an industrial strength desktop publishing challenger to Adobe InDesign, created in 1999, and popularly dubbed as a "Quark Killer."

Over time, Quark has pushed to stay modern in a competitive marketplace. The new text engine in QuarkXPress 7 laid the foundation for hanging characters, OpenType, and advanced grid systems. QuarkXPress 8 brought new, more efficient design tools in conjunction with the company's digital publishing 2.0 strategy, concentrating on design-rich, interactive content for a variety of platforms. QuarkXPress 9 added support for publishing to mobile devices as well as layout automation. Quark's HTML5-based App Studio lets users create and collaborate on mobile interactive apps in the cloud that are built with QuarkXPress or InDesign, HTML5, and/or XML.

For now, Quark is keeping everyone in suspense about the particulars of version 10. "As someone who’s used QuarkXPress since version 3, I have to say I’m really excited about version 10," said Gavin Drake, Quark's marketing VP.  "For Mac OS X users in particular it’s going to be a monumental release incorporating the very latest technology inside and out to deliver a transformed user experience. We’ll be disclosing more in the coming weeks."

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Continuing its aggressive moves to replace the soon-to-be-defunct Google Reader as the RSS service of choice, Feedly on Monday announced it would provide its API to a number of established apps that previously used Google’s Reader API as the foundation of their offerings.

“We have been working behind the curtains with the developers of Reeder, Press, Nextgen Reader, Newsify and gReader as design partners for our Normandy project,” the company said in a blog post, referring to its undertaking to build and provide an API that’s more or less identical to Google’s—and lest you think it’s a totally altruistic move, Feedly previously used Google Reader’s API as the foundation of its own app, as well. “Today we are excited to announce that you will be able to access your feedly from all these apps before Google Reader retires and that the access to feedly API will be free.”

The company said that more than 100 developers had applied to be part of the first round of invitees to use Feedly’s API, and that the company is “working hard on the second batch” of invitees.

Monday’s announcement came as part of Feedly’s update on what improvements customers are asking for as they shift away from Google Reader. Among the top items: speedier service, better Web access, and enhanced Windows compatibility.

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Prototypes are important for all sorts of endeavors that pit a creative component against technical requirements—including, of course, software development. Before full-blown development starts, simplified models of a product help insure that all the parties involved are on the same page from the very outset, instead of finding out many months—and dollars—later that everybody was running in a different direction.

Briefs (Mac App Store link), from MartianCraft, aims at bringing powerful and easy-to-use prototyping techniques to iOS. It allows designers to build dynamic models of their apps that can be tested directly on a mobile device without the direct involvement of a developer.

Three years in the making

If the name “Briefs” rings a bell, it’s because its history is as colorful and picturesque as its feature set. Originally demoed at the 2009 C4 Conference in Chicago, it was initially meant to run entirely inside iOS, allowing users to create working mockups of apps directly on their mobile devices.

After nearly three years—and, apparently, much interaction with Apple’s App Store review folks—the final version of the app is split in two separate programs: Briefs proper, which runs on OS X and is where most of the design work takes place, and Briefscase, which runs on iOS devices and “plays back” the mockups created by its desktop-based cousin.

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Back in ancient times—throughout much of the 1980s and 1990s when just 1000 or so fonts were available for desktop computers—designers had a tongue-in-cheek saying among themselves: The one who dies with the most fonts wins! It made sense at the time because fonts were coveted by every designer as a creative resource of unparallelled importance, and prices were astronomical. While supply has risen and prices have dropped in more recent eras, one thing remains true today: Fonts remain incredibly important and valuable to anyone who puts words on paper or pixels.

Tiny programs

If your budget is low, or if you just want to experiment with a wide variety of type styles, check out the abundance of free and low-cost sources on the Internet. Warning: not all fonts are created equal. A font file that you install on your computer is actually a tiny program, with a variety of capabilities—including the ability to crash your applications.

Fonts come in three main formats: PostScript (Type 1) and TrueType are the oldest, and are fairly simple—but still capable of taking down your operating system. OpenType fonts can be far more complex, offering applications the ability to intelligently combine glyphs (characters) into new forms, add swashes to characters, convert combinations of numbers that look like fractions to true fraction characters, and so forth. OpenType is also capable of containing tens of thousands of glyphs, instead of the 256 limit of previous formats.

Aside from whether a font is programmed properly, quality is another issue. In some ways, crafting a font is similar to building a house. Anyone with a set of tools and some raw materials can put up a shelter that could be called a house. But the best houses are designed and built by people who have spent years studying and practicing the myriad techniques, history, styles, and materials. The same may be said about crafting fonts. Many masters around the world have devoted their lives to the true art of typeface design. Others are masters in crafting those designs into font files that you can use. Companies such as Linotype, Monotype, FontShop, and Adobe employ those masters to create the typefaces used by professional designers.

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Are you pissed off at Adobe yet? If the answer is yes, then you're not alone.

If you use at least one of the company's professional software packages derived from the late, great Creative Suite, then your life is about to change. Some 14,600 of your compatriots are so unhappy about it that they've officially put their names—often alongside an assortment of scathing comments—to an online petition that seeks to convince Adobe to back off its plan to transform its Creative Suite from traditional licensed software to a cloud service, and go back to the old way of doing business. Knowing that will never happen is at least partially fueling that customer rage.

Adobe used its Max 2013 creativity conference to announce plans to end the sale of its popular creative software—including Photoshop, InDesign, and Premiere Pro—in favor of a cloud-only subscription service.

By itself, the switch was not surprising. Ever since Adobe launched Creative Cloud last year, and outlined an elaborate subscription strategy that covered nearly every segment of the market, it seemed only a matter of time before everything went to the cloud.

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This week we offer you a double-header—one where we start with Jackie Dove speaking with Adobe’s Senior Marketing Director, Scott Morris, about the company’s recent announcement that it was ending perpetual licenses for upcoming versions of Adobe Creative Suite applications. Chris Breen then talks with Jeff Carlson about ways Jeff believes iPhoto could be improved.

Download Episode #355

Show Notes

Jackie writes about Adobe’s changes in Adobe Scraps Creative Suite Software Licenses In Favor Of Cloud Subscriptions. Computerworld’s Gregg Keizer suggests that not everyone is thrilled with Adobe’s plans in Backlash Rises Against Adobe's Subscription-Only Creative Suite Plan. And Jeff puts his thoughts about iPhoto into words in Four Things Apple Could Do To Improve Iphoto Right Now.

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You can find previous episodes of our audio podcasts at Macworld’s podcasting page.

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Adobe has used its Max conference this week to reveal that the company is making its first foray into creative hardware, with Project Mighty and Project Napoleon—a digital pen and ruler for iOS devices (see above). Still in the experiment stage, there’s no word yet about when we should expect to see Mighty and Napoleon hit the shelves, but we got our hands on working prototypes of the devices to try them out and take some photos of them in action.

Project Mighty is a cloud-connected stylus pen that currently works with unreleased Adobe apps that have been designed specifically for the hardware.

Adobe has chosen a twisted, three sided design for Mighty, which we found was brilliantly comfortable to hold and gave us precise control over the movement of the pen while we were drawing. The prototype we tested had a soft, rubberised tip, but Senior Experience Design Lead at Adobe, Geoff Dowd, told us that the company has been experimenting with different tip types, such as a narrower precision tip for more intricate drawings.

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Pixelmator on Thursday released version 2.2 of its $15 Mac App Store-only image editing app. “Don’t be confused by versioning numbers,” the developers wrote on their blog, because “it’s a major upgrade.”

Among the new features are a slew of new shape tools, a Smart Move tool, a clever Paint Selection tool, a Light Leak Effect, and plenty more.

Pixelmator 2.2 includes 40 shapes you can easily insert into your images, and they’re all customizable: You can give them solid or gradient fills, shadows, inner shadows, adjustable stroke styles, and a host of visual effects. The shapes include basic geometric objects, along with cameras, people, ghosts, clocks, and more. And, of course, you can create your own shapes and share them with other Pixelmator users.

There’s another new option that lets you treat text layers as shapes, too. That essentially lets you warp text in all the same ways, with all the same sorts of effects.

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In a move that should surprise no one, Adobe announced sweeping changes to its Creative Suite software line and year-old Creative Cloud subscription service. Signaling a new focus on integrating creative services in the cloud with its professional desktop software, Adobe launched a new cloud-based Creative Suite—with a new CC moniker, for Creative Cloud. But it will look familiar. Significant upgrades to all current Creative Suite 6 apps are coming soon, but they will be available only by subscription to Creative Cloud, not traditional software licenses.

Ten years after Adobe corralled its disparate creative apps into a cohesive interoperable suite with a common launch date, the company is propelling those apps into its Creative Cloud subscription service. With updated versions of 15 professional creative applications—for photographers, graphic and Web designers, and video and motion graphic artists—Adobe announced the rebranding at its Max 2013 Creativity Conference keynote. While this transition and collective suite upgrade was announced today, the apps will not be shipping until June 17.

“This is the decision of our company—to focus on Creative Cloud—and it is huge,” said Scott Morris, Adobe's senior marketing director. “It’s an even bigger decision than when we moved to Creative Suite years ago." And it is sure to be controversial. However, Adobe considers the response to its Creative Cloud strategy more than respectable so far, expects some pushback from customers, and is prepared to deal with the fallout. "In the same way [as Creative Suite], there will be customers who have a hard time with it at first. But today our customers are on Creative Suite—they got over it; they saw the benefit of it; and that’s exactly the type of transition we’re going through.” Adobe says Creative Cloud has more than half a million paid members, and more than 2 million total members since it launched in April 2012.

With this update, you can store, sync, and share files via Creative Cloud, on the Mac OS, Windows, iOS, and Android platforms and on Behance, an online creative community Adobe purchased last year that is now integrated with Creative Cloud. Behance lets users exhibit work, get feedback, and generate exposure. With Creative Cloud, Adobe seeks to tame chaotic creative workflows and direct communication conduits away from email and Dropbox toward Behance.

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After several years of sneak peeks, Adobe’s propensity for revealing aspects of its new video and motion graphics applications to a select audience prior their release qualifies as something of a tradition. The captive audience at this year's National Association of Broadcasters national convention—the favored venue—saw an abbreviated version of what will soon be released as the new cloud-based Premiere Pro CC and After Effects CC, and more.

As Adobe wraps all of its professional creative apps into the cloud, Premiere Pro benefits from universal cloud features such as Sync Fonts and Sync Settings that let remote videographers and artists get down to work right away in a familiar tool-based environment, regardless of where they’re working.

In Adobe's transition from Creative Suite to Creative Cloud, familiar apps get an upgrade while subscribers get a slate of extra services for their $50 monthly subscription. Access to Sync services, 20GB of online storage, the Behance community hub, automatic cross-platform downloading and updates to all programs in the suite, and training are some of the benefits built into subscriptions.

Today, at its own conference, Adobe Max 2013, the company is revealing more details about the new version of its desktop nonlinear editing and motion graphics programs. Here are some of the highlights of the video line.

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With the announcement of fresh updates to its flagship publishing applications—InDesign and Illustrator—Adobe redirects its attention to its roots in the print and graphic design arena. Today, at its own Adobe Max Creativity Conference, the company is revealing more details about the new version of its desktop nonlinear editing and motion graphics programs. Here are some of the highlights. In a departure from the intense focus on the mobile market that marked last year’s CS6 release, Adobe says that at least 75 percent of all program updates to the debut release of Creative Cloud desktop apps were devoted to its traditional image editing and publishing software.

Both InDesign and Illustrator—part of the original Creative Suite—will receive a series of upgrades, including a dark interface, support for Mac Retina displays, and signature Creative Cloud features like Sync Fonts, Sync Colors, and Sync Settings that let you sync and customize your software environment. Muse, the new visual Web program targeted to designers, builds standards-based sites using HTML5, CSS3, and JavaScript without users having to hand code.

In Adobe's transition from Creative Suite to Creative Cloud, the familiar apps get an upgrade while subscribers get a slate of extra services for their $50 monthly subscription. Access to Sync services, 20GB of online storage, the Behance community hub, automatic cross-platform downloading and updates to all programs in the suite, and training are some of the benefits built into subscriptions.

Illustrator CC

Working with display text is a huge part of working with Illustrator, and Illustrator CC introduces a Touch Type tool that provides expanded control over type. With it, you can move, scale, and rotate individual characters and change fonts or copy at any time. In addition, you can now use multitouch devices as well as a mouse or stylus.

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When it comes to image editing, Adobe Photoshop is in a class by itself. Despite its humble beginnings as a plug-in to a long-defunct commercial scanner, Photoshop now stands as Adobe's flagship and most famous app, and the default standard worldwide for professional print and online image editing and graphic design.

A new version, announced at the Adobe Max 2013 creativity conference, serves up major enhancements to the program inside and out.

In Adobe's transition from Creative Suite to Creative Cloud, familiar apps get an upgrade while subscribers get a slate of extra services for their $50 monthly subscription. Access to Sync services, 20GB of online storage, the Behance community hub, automatic cross-platform downloading and updates to all programs in the suite, and training are some of the benefits built into subscriptions.

What's in a name? Plenty, it turns out. Photoshop CC is the first version unilaterally tied to Adobe's Creative Cloud subscription service. There's no numbering system—at least for now: It's just called Adobe CC.

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I’m no graphic designer or image manipulation pro. I mean, I know my way around Photoshop well enough to smudge out a birthmark or to create a graphic for a Macworld story, but I’m not a power user. That’s why I’ve long preferred to leave Photoshop sitting silently in my Applications folder, while Flying Meat’s Acorn takes up residence in my Dock.

At its traditional price of $50, Acorn has never aimed to be a Photoshop replacement. Instead, it’s a Photoshop alternative. The developer describes the app as an image editor “built for humans,” and that description fits. Though Photoshop offers far more features, Acorn is no slouch: It supports layers, masks, alphas, and multistop gradients; it can import and export files in PSD (Photoshop) format; and it’s fully optimized for Retina displays, too.

With the release of Acorn 4, the app gains nondestructive filters; faster and smoother drawing tools; new shapes like curves, arrows, and stars; and some 150 other performance improvements and added features. These additions have the interesting, double-faceted effect of making the app both impressively more powerful and decidedly simpler for folks like me.

The basics

Acorn’s interface gets an overhaul in version 4. No longer are the drawing and editing tools coupled in a squat palette with their options, your layers, and everything else. Instead, there’s a narrow palette with drawing tools, a separate one with tool options and layers, and, of course, a stand-alone canvas.

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Reallusion’s CrazyTalk7 Pro is a powerful image morphing and character animation application with an easy-to-use interface that is fun and rewarding for hobbyists and professionals alike. Select any photo or illustration as your subject, and with just a few clicks, you can bring it to life by making it move and talk.

You can use prerecorded voice scripts and animation settings to apply to your own model, import recorded audio clips, or record your own right in the software. You can even use Apple’s Text to Speech features and write the script you want your characters to say.

CrazyTalk7, which has just come to the Mac after being a Windows-only program for a number of years, is available in two versions: Standard and Pro. The standard version ($30) is the only one available in the Mac App Store. However the Pro version ($150), reviewed here, is available via the Reallusion website.

The Pro version of CrazyTalk7 has more features and advanced controls than the standard version, and gives you a broader range of muscle/motion controls and key animation choices. Plus it makes available additional bonus materials such as motion templates and special character models. The Pro version also lets you use multiple audio tracks and apply more expressive facial and mouth characteristics with the program's Auto Motion feature. It  lets you create and save custom puppet profiles and provides detailed face key editing for better lip-syncing.

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For folks who want to digitize every paper note, receipt, or bill, a dedicated scanner—preferably one with a duplexing automatic document feeder—is a must. But if you aren’t a hardcore paper-hater and you occasionally need to get the contents of printed material into your computer, you may not need a dedicated scanner that takes up precious desk space. Instead, you can use an app like Prizmo 2. With Prizmo you use your iPhone camera, point and shoot camera, or DSLR to capture images of documents, and then the software uses optical character recognition (OCR) to turn the scans into editable text. Prizmo also works with scanner that lacks OCR capabilities from companies like Brother, Canon, Xerox, Lexmark, Epson, and HP.

Scanners have flatbeds or feeders that help keep pages straight, flat, and in focus. But images of documents captured with a camera can have problems—they can be crooked, have the wrong exposure, or be distorted—which makes it difficult for OCR software to correctly recognize the scanned letters. Even images that you takes pictures of can suffer from barrel distortion or be trapezoidal. Prizmo has many tools to help fix these common problems. You can open images already captured in Prizmo, or you can attach your iPhone or iPad to your Mac and, if Prizmo is on and active, photos taken with your iOS device will show up automatically in the application.

Prizmo has a clean, modern user interface. When you first launch the application and select new document, a large grey window appears that invites you to drop pictures onto it, or to click one of three icons to open an existing image file, import from a camera or scanner, or to browse your image libraries.

A dark grey tool bar sits along the bottom of the application window, the contents of which changes depending on the file type that you’ve chosen to work with: Text, Business Card, or Image. The tools on the toolbar let you rotate and crop the images and adjust the brightness, contrast, sharpness, and saturation of images to make them easier for the OCR engine to recognize. You can even calibrate your camera using Prizmo to improve the quality of the images captured. Once you’ve processed the scan, click on the toolbar’s Export icon to send the text to Mail, Evernote, Box, Dropbox, Google Drive, WebDAV, or a document saved in iCloud.

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“I’ve got a great idea for an app!”

That’s probably a sentiment most of us have uttered at some point over the last few years. But relatively few of us probably have any idea how to turn said concept into an actual app. Martian Craft’s Briefs aims to change that by providing a you with the tools you need to prototype your app, taking your idea from “under construction” to “that thing’s operational!”

Keep in mind Briefs isn’t actually for programming apps—it’s not a replacement for Apple’s Xcode. In my admittedly short time using it, the software it most reminded me of was actually Keynote: You arrange elements to mock up an iPhone app (or iPad app), deciding what screens you’ll need, how you get back and forth between those screens, and even what your app will look like on different iOS devices.

Each app prototype contains one or more timelines, which essentially represent a workflow for a specific iOS device: Your options are an iPhone, an iPhone 5, or an iPad. Each timeline is composed of scenes, which each represent a single app screen, complete with attendant buttons, sliders, text fields, and more. For each of these elements, you can specify what it looks like when disabled, or when a user is actively touching it.

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Text is incredibly powerful—whether you’re making a business card or a garage-sale sign, you’re sending a message. The look of that message influences the way the receiver reacts: If the message is visually pleasing, the reaction is generally positive, but if the text is hard to read, that feeling of difficulty transfers back to you, the messenger. Here we’ll cover the basics of everyday typography, font pairings that are pleasing to the eye, practical formatting tips that work with a variety of software, and common mistakes to avoid.

Basics of typography

Before diving into formatting, let’s get a grasp on the lingo. Point size refers to the actual size of the text. The base line is the imaginary line on which text sits. The x-height is the size of the main character body, excluding any ascenders (bits of the character that extend above the x-height, such as in f or h) or descenders (bits that extend below the baseline, such as in g or y).

Font family refers to the character design, whereas font style refers to variations of that same design, such as regular, light, bold, italic, and so on.

Fonts also come in different categories such as serif, which has lines extending from the main stroke of each character that resemble tiny feet (think Times or Hoefler); sans serif fonts don’t have feet (think Arial or Helvetica). Other categories include slab serif (same as serif but thicker in weight), decorative and display fonts (characters with ornate shapes or those that are really thick), and scripts (those that look like cursive handwriting).

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Pixel precision is an essential part of the software experience that users have come to expect from OS X and iOS. It requires a kind of accuracy that is usually best left in the hands of experienced designers who know how to manipulate every detail of images and icons to get the best possible result. This goal is time-consuming and expensive to achieve, however, and only really makes sense when an interface has completely taken form.

By the same token, there are some instances in which pixel-level perfection is hard or impossible to achieve due to a number of constraints, like overall file size, the need to support arbitrary resolutions, or, perhaps, the requirement for complex animations. In these cases, the old developer fallback is to use of vector images, which, being based on the mathematical representation of an arbitrary set of curves, are rendered on the fly and scale arbitrarily without loss of resolution.

Even though both OS X and iOS have excellent built-in programming interfaces for vector rasterization, their support for popular vector file formats like SVG is limited, often requires the use of external libraries, and makes it hard (though by no means impossible) to manipulate the resulting images in fine detail.

PixelCut’s PaintCode (Mac App Store link) aims at solving these problems with its ability to transform a vector illustration into a series of code instructions. The code can then be embedded directly into an app written in either Objective-C or C# using Xamarin and give developers significant flexibility in its use.

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Everyone needs a great text editor—for those times when you need to clean up funky characters in a big text file downloaded from the Web, remove duplicates in a list, or make a particular change to a bunch of files at once. When such text-manipulation jobs land on your desk, you can make short work of them with Bare Bone Software’s TextWrangler. Even better, this powerful tool is free from either the Mac App Store or the Bare Bones website.

TextWrangler reads almost any file (including code files such as HTML and Markdown that contain plain text), but it saves only to plain-text files, and it doesn’t support styled-text formats such as RTF or Microsoft Word documents. TextWrangler shares this “pure” text-editor approach with its professional-grade sibling, the $50 BBEdit. Like BBEdit 10, TextWrangler 4.5 is now Retina-display ready.

Programmers have always loved TextWrangler (and BBEdit) for ease-of-use features such as syntax coloring for various programming languages. New to this version are switchable syntax-coloring schemes. Code folding lets you view or hide the functions you’re working with, and TextWrangler gives you easy access to files on FTP and SFTP servers—you don’t even need to leave the program.

If you don’t know a syntax from a saxophone, you’ll still like TextWrangler’s many text-manipulation features, including case conversion, line wrapping and numbering, simple conversion of straight quotes to curly quotes (and vice versa), the ability to change quote levels in copied emails, and the ability to work with multiple files simultaneously. You can even insert the contents of another file into the one you’re editing. TextWrangler automatically saves your files as you’re working—if you quit the program with unsaved (or even never-saved) documents, they’re automatically restored when you next open the program.

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Regardless of how you use computers, chances are that you have encountered the problem of comparing two files at some point or other. Doing so all by yourself is often like playing the hardest game of “Spot the Differences,” which is why software for this purpose has been available for many decades.

Originally designed to help developers keep tabs on the way their source code evolved, file-comparison algorithms eventually found their way into more mainstream apps such as Microsoft Word and Apple’s Pages, where “track changes” have helped writers preserve their sanity for many years.

Black Pixel’s Kaleidoscope 2 takes the ability to compare two files kicking and screaming into the twenty-first century, extending it beyond text to encompass images and the filesystem itself.

Installation

Kaleidoscope reveals its attention to detail from the very beginning. The app’s designers have—very wisely—decided to forego a lengthy setup process in favor of a quick startup that gets the user in control right away.

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If you need to take a lot of screenshots, chances are you’re going to want more capabilities than you can get from the two methods provided with the Mac (the screen capture keyboard shortcuts and the Grab application). Snagit 2.1.5, by Techsmith, is a full-featured image and video screen capture application that should be at the top of your consideration list.

After installing Snagit (which ideally should be set as a login application), there are three default ways to invoke a capture. The unique capture palette normally hides at the right side of your screen, with only a small tab visible. Clicking the tab slides the palette out to display two capture mode buttons (image or video); a large red capture button; a button that toggles the cursor’s visibility in the capture; a button that places the capture on the Clipboard; a field that displays (and lets you change) the main capture hotkey; and buttons that open Snagit’s image editor, the help system, and displays additional capture options. If you don’t like the capture palette, Snagit also installs a menubar extra that has access to the same features.

Snagging it

The primary capture mode—and the one you will probably use the most—is the All in One capture. This single capture type allows you to capture the whole screen, a selected region, a window, or the entire contents of a scrolling window, including a web page. After you invoke the capture, crosshairs appear on the screen. As you move the cursor around the screen, a border appears around different regions on your desktop. If you move the cursor over a window, the selection area automatically resizes to the window’s dimensions. Moving the cursor onto a Web browser’s content area resizes the selection to the content, and if the window is scrollable, clicking a yellow arrow at the bottom or sides of the selection area automatically scrolls and captures the window contents. This scrolling window trick doesn’t just work with Web browsers; I used it to capture the entire contents of my Applications folder. If you want to pick your own screen region to capture, just click and drag the crosshairs. The All in One capture also has a small magnification window near the crosshairs, allowing you to select with more precision.

Snagit has three other capture modes. Window zooms out the screen so all windows are visible, similar to Mission Control’s window view; clicking a window captures it (at full size, of course) and restores the screen to normal. Menu captures any open menu and submenus, automatically isolating them against a transparent background. Webcam activates your display’s FaceTime camera, allowing you to shoot a picture of yourself or anything you hold up.

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At one time or another, almost everybody has the need to capture your screen. You might be asked by a tech support representative to grab a screenshot to help diagnose a software problem, or you may just want to save and share an amusing part of a Web page or Facebook post.

For the occasional user, Apple provides two free screen capture methods. The first, keyboard commands to capture the whole screen (Command-Shift-3) and a selected portion of the screen (Command-Shift-4), saving the images to a file, have been present in every version of Mac OS since 1984. The second is the Grab application (in /Applications/Utilities), which was introduced with Mac OS X. Both of these methods work reasonably well, but each has its own quirks and drawbacks for people who need to shoot a lot of screenshots, leading to the rise of many apps that provide additional features and convenience.

Ambrosia Software’s Snapz Pro X was among the first, tracing its lineage back to 1996, garnering many passionate users down the years; I’m one of them (it also won a Macworld Editor’s Choice Award in 2004). But Snapz (I’m shortening the name from here on for convenience) hasn’t aged well, hasn’t kept up with the times, and is no longer the best choice, in terms of features or in value.

Grab some pixels

You begin a screen capture in Snapz by pressing a user-designated hotkey or choosing the program’s icon in your Applications folder. The screen freezes and the program’s main window pops up, allowing you to choose from the four capture types. Screen captures the entire screen, or whatever screen you choose if you have multiple monitors. Objects captures the contents of any open window, even if the window is partially obscured. You can select multiple objects in a single capture. You can also select the menu bar, but not menus. The Selection capture type gives you crosshairs to select a portion of the screen; this is also the capture type you use to shoot menus (older versions of Snapz captured menus more cleanly using the Objects capture type, so this is a regression in the current version). Finally, the Movie capture type allows you to select a portion of your screen to record video and optionally two audio tracks: the system audio and a microphone track.

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