Are you among of the developers who spend more time replying to emails than adding more features to the app? New startups with small teams or individuals running the entire operation are often faced with the herculean task of providing support to the ever growing user base of the application. This is turn leaves less time to actually spend on developing the app. Ruben Bakkers, developer of Mailplane, decided to do something about it when his brilliant app garnered thousands of active users in a short time. Pestered with support emails, Bakkers designed the Replies App for Mac back in 2009 for personal use. He discovered how most of his replies were repetitive and that a considerable amount of time was wasted in rewriting them. Bakkers recently launched Replies for Mac commercially and we decided to take it out for a spin.

The biggest feature of Replies is the ability to search content within old replies and reuse it. All replies sent using the app are broken down into chunks of reusable snippets that you can be later inserted into a new reply. A new reply starts off with a default greeting at the top, signature at the bottom and the snippet box in the middle. Esc is the shortcut key to search for previous replies and selectively add content from them into the new reply. Attachments that were part of the reply can be imported too. In addition to that, you can add attachments by using the drag and drop feature or via the file browser window. More snippets can be added to the reply by using the Cmd + Return shortcut. Alternatively, an icon to insert snippet pops up when the cursor is placed in-between a word space or around a link break. Content reusability makes a lot of sense for customer support and Replies does a good job at helping you find the right content and insert it at the right place.

Personalization to a mail helps build relationships with the customers and  Replies keeps that in mind. It loads recent conversations with a customer that makes it easier to add personal details to the body of the mail. It never hurts to have the undo button in a mail application. With Replies, you can not only undo the send mail action for a few seconds after sending the reply but also undo other tasks such as dismissing a draft or archiving a message.

Replies has a three-pane user interface that Sparrow for Mac users will be familiar with. Left pane lists all the folders, middle pane displays the email subjects and its preview snippet, with the full email content being shown in the rightmost column. The folders in the leftmost pane are sorted according to priority; helping you respond to important mails quickly. This is pretty  much like the Priority Inbox feature that Gmail has; but only better.  Folders can be made smarter by applying a bunch of filters to have them sort the mail intelligently. Any new folders created using the app are synced across to the server. Another really handy feature is the ability to mark messages as pending or resolved. All these small things help you save a great deal of time in the long run.

Customer support can become a challenging task when the number of active users grow rapidly for an app. Replies not only helps you save time but also lets you send personalized and detailed messages to every customer. A lot of thought has gone into the Replies app and it is a good solid app to deploy for your customer support needs. The app comes with Full-screen support for Lion and after spending the last few days with the app, I can vouch for its stability and usability. Customer support junkies might find the app lacking advanced features but there’s only so much you can expect from the first release. For someone who develops and handles customer support for an app independently, Replies is a godsend and there isn’t better investment for your company than spending $79.99 for this app. Organizational licenses are available for $129.99 a piece. Go grab it now and show off your customer support superpowers!

Last year, Apple announced OS X Lion at its ‘Back to the Mac’ event. The focus of the event was how Apple had learnt from iOS and managed to improve OS X by incorporating features from it into Lion. The developers at Pilotmoon Software decided to take cue from it and went a step ahead further and brought the familiar Copy/Paste bar from iOS to OS X with PopClip for Mac.

PopClip is a neat little bar that makes copying/pasting text faster and easier on your Mac. One doesn’t have to jump to the keyboard right after selecting a piece of text to be able to copy it. The bar pops up after selecting the text and lets you copy it with a single click. Press and hold the mouse button for a fraction of a second and the paste icon jumps out of thin air, letting you place your copied text right at that cursor position. The size of the bar can be adjusted in the preferences. Apart from the cut/copy/paste functionality, the developers have added some interesting new features to the bar in the latest version. It now has web search, URL opening, spelling and dictionary integrated. Selected text can be searched on the web with a single click using the search button on the bar. If the selected text is a URL, clicking the link icon opens the link in the browser. The dictionary and spelling feature is self-explanatory. It would have been magical if clicking the dictionary button on the bar popped up the inline dictionary than open the Dictionary app. I hope that is something the developers consider bringing to the app in one of its next iterations.

The Copy/Paste bar was truly a revolutionary feature for iOS when it was first introduced. Looking back, you wonder why Apple themselves didn’t bring it to OS X Lion. Some might argue that sometimes the bar is bit intrusive on OS X as it pops up when you don’t expect it to and they do have a point, but leaving aside this small niggle, it has definitely enhanced my user experience on OS X. If you don’t like the bar popping up when working with apps like Photoshop, just include such apps in the ‘Excluded apps’ list in PopClip preferences. PopClip works with OS X 10.6.6 or later. It is available for $4.99 in the Mac App Store. A double thumbs up to the Pilotmoon Software team for this must-have nifty little app!

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Instagram’s popularity is something that remains a big mystery to me (and Aayush, too) considering it only allows iPhone users to upload photos. The service has taken off like a rocket and the onus of bringing it to other platofrms has been put on third-party developers. Instadesk was the first app to take the leap for the Mac platform, but apps like Carousel and Instaview have also made their way onto OS X. Let’s take a look at these three Instagram apps for Mac today and see how they fare.

Instadesk– Meritorious but Humdrum

Instadesk was the first Instagram app for the Mac after they released an API for third-party developers. Taking full advantage of the API, Instadesk brings the whole Instagram experience to the Mac (except photo uploads, which the API doesn’t allow yet).

Unlike the other two apps we’re reviewing, features a conventional & typical native Mac app look and UI. It more-or-less reminds me of LittleSnapper with its placing of different sources in the Sidebar. The sidebar on the left gives you quick access to your own Feed, the Popular feed, Tags and News. The photos are laid out nicely in a grid layout against a dark background. Clicking on a photo opens it up in its glorious full-size, and information about the photo is displayed in a sidebar on the right this time. Here, you can view the Comments/Likes a photo as received, as well as leave your own comment. Icons in the toolbar up top allow you to Like, Share, Download or Open the photo in the browser. You can browse through the different photos using the arrow icons or even your keyboard.

Instadesk also has a nifty slideshow feature that runs fullscreen and gives you a bunch of transition options to choose from. My desktop setup consists of a 15″ MacBook Pro connected to a 24″ Apple Cinema Display, and Instadesk allows me to run the slideshow in my secondary display while the primary display is left for other apps. You can even ‘Like’ a photo if you want and quickly get back to where you were, without interrupting the slideshow.

Overall, while Instadesk is a great app, it feels a little unpolished to me. Having tried the other two apps in the post as well, I’d personally much prefer the custom, streamlined look of those apps than this native, full-blown look. So while Instadesk is functionally great, the UI keeps me from recommending it to anyone. It is available on the Mac App Store for $1.99.

Carousel – Instagram for Mac Swiss Knife

Carousel wasn’t the first Instagram client for Mac to hit the market but it surely is the best one yet. Carousel takes the traditional approach to display your Instgaram feed in a slick and elegant UI resembling a photo album. The interface is almost a no-brainer and using it is child’s play. There are five buttons along the bottom that toggle your view between the feed, favorites, your photos, likes and a search feature introduced in the first point update to the app. The search tab lets you lookup users or even tags which is bound to appease the twitterati.

Each image in the feed is presented with the person’s avatar, timestamp and the location, provided  geolocation was turned on while taking the picture. Tapping the avatar/username takes you to the user’s profile but the best part is how Carousel presents a feed of images geolocated around the same area when you click the location on an image. I almost jumped up in glee when I first stumbled upon this feature. One can Like a photo by pressing the heart or comment on it by tapping the word bubble. Both these actions bring up a iPad-like popover that shows people who’ve liked the photo or commented on it, but you can skip the popovers by using the option-click modifier.

Carousel supports multi-touch gestures and also features a number of keyboard shortcuts that further simplify the app’s usability. Photos can be viewed in Preview by hitting the spacebar. This also means you can use Preview’s full screen feature to make the photo occupy all of your screen’s real estate. Other than this, you can save the photos to your Mac by using the good old Command-S keyboard shortcut. Notifications are available in the form of an icon badge and Growl is also supported. One can set the auto-refresh interval in the settings but there’s a refresh button in the app that lets you manually do the job. The app ships with a bunch of themes to give a refreshing new look to your feed.

The latest update brought with it the ability to pin tags, locations and people to the search tab making it easier to keep track of things you like. Carousel does a brilliant job at bringing the perfect Instagram experience to the Mac which justifies the $4.99 price tag it comes attached with. It is only limited by the Instagram API which currently does not allow users to upload images from third-party applications.

Instaview – Peppy and Fun

Instaview is the latest kid on the block in the Instagram for Mac arena. It takes a whole new approach towards displaying the Instagram feed on your Mac. Instaview, rather than presenting photos from people you follow in a single feed, lets create multiple windows showing different Instagram streams. So what is an Instagram stream, you may ask? A stream can be constituted by any one of the following–a user’s photos, photos you’ve liked, popular photos, located based photos or photos with a hashtag.

The stream is encapsulated within a photo frame to give it an old-fashioned look. There are a bunch of frames to choose from but I personally love the ‘Metal Stand’ and the ‘Wide Wood’ ones. Photo information such as likes, comments, timestamp etc. is hidden in an overlay which is shown with a mouse hover. This saves space without compromising on functionality and I definitely prefer it over Carousel’s implementation. Instaview comes with multi-touch support and a customizable interface which certainly can be improved upon. Just like Carousel, you can view and save full size images in Instaview. As far as notifications are concerned, badge on the icon and little paper in the corner of a stream are the two ways of getting notified of unveiled photos.

Slideshow is the big weapon in Instaview’s armory. The individual streams suddenly start making a lot more sense with slideshow. As the name suggests, you can cycle through images in a particular stream by putting it on slideshow. The duration and sequence of the images can be tweaked in the slideshow options. If you come to think of your Mac as a living room, then these slideshows would be the digital photo frames decorating it.

RougeSheep likes to believe that users would enjoy multiple streams–and slideshows, of course–more than a single integrated feed but I’m not totally sold on the idea. It is certainly fun at times, but the clutter it creates on the desktop isn’t very pleasing to the eye. It is definitely not something you’d like to have when you’re trying to be productive. Although Instaview does let you view your Instagram feed in a single stream, if you wish to view favorites, popular photos or other such stuff, then creating multiple streams is your only option. On the whole, Instaview takes an aggressive approach towards Instagram and the initial reviews in the Mac App Store have been encouraging. You can grab the app for $4.99 from there.

The native-full blown look of Instadesk seems a bit too overwhelming for a simple app providing access to a photo-sharing service. Instaview is the more fun and peppy way of going through your Instagram feed and I’m sure it’ll find its own niche of users.
I however prefer the simple yet beautiful Carousel interface that houses all Instagram features under a single roof without creating clutter on my desktop. Instadesk is the cheapest way to go about things but both Instaview and Carousel retail for the same price, so take your pick wisely.

Album Artwork got a whole new meaning when Apple debuted the Coverflow UI half a decade ago. It seemed like an awesome way to browse through your albums until you found out that half the songs in your iTunes library lacked album artwork or did not have the proper metadata. It is a struggle to dig up metadata/artwork and manually add it to individual songs. Tagalicious steps in here and makes it a pain free one-click process. It beautifies your library by fetching metadata, artwork and lyrics for your songs with a single click. If you get your songs from shady places, your iTunes library desperately needs a Tagalicious makeover.

Tagalicious features a three-column interface wherein the left-most column houses the library and the playlists, songs occupy the middle column while the existing and fetched metadata/artwork is displayed in the right-most column. One of the best features of Tagalicious is batch-lookup. Select a bunch of songs or your entire library for that matter and Tagalicious will scour the web for tags for the selected songs. Songs whose details have been grabbed, display a circular badge with three-dots. The badge shows a red exclamation mark for songs whose data could not be fetched. Once the new tags have been pulled from the web, you can mix and match between already existing metadata and the new one. So for instance, you can select the track name, artist, genre from the fetched metadata but retain the album name. That brings us to the question, why would you ever want to do that? Tagalicious uses intelligent algorithm to detect songs, pretty much similar to Shazam, but it’s not perfect. Songs sometimes make their way into multiple albums and this is where the conspiracy begins. I might have the whole album but Tagalicious cunningly detects one of the songs as part of another album. This brings us to the point about trusting Tagalicious judgement. I would say Tagalicious gets it accurate 95% of the time. There might be few cases like the one I mentioned above, but overall it does a fine job.

Another quirk in the app is how the album artwork is automatically selected for a song. There is no uniformity and songs from same album sometimes get tagged with artwork of different resolution. Also there is no way to let Tagalicious know that I prefer a 500 x 500px image as album cover or the highest resolution one it can find. It randomly selects one even though I might already have a higher resolution one added which freaks me out. It does let me select from a bunch of images it has gathered from around the web, which just about saves the day. Lyrics are found only for a few tracks but I’m not complaining as RIAA in the past has cracked down against lyrics posted online. In short, to have a perfectly tagged library, you will have to browse through the fetched tags to find any discrepancies and rectify them. But with an easy to use interface and high accuracy, the desire of having a perfectly tagged music library is no longer a distant dream.

Tagalicious v1.5.2 works perfectly well on both Lion and Snow Leopard. Mac App Store currently stocks v1.5.1 but the latest version, submitted 10 days ago by the little app factory, should be approved very soon. One feature that I’d love to see added in Tagalicious is manual editing of metadata. Although you can do that in iTunes itself, but switching to iTunes to do the dirty job kind of kills the whole purpose of using a separate app for the task. There might be a few glitches but the app on the whole works amazing well and is retails for $9.99 on the Mac App Store. Highly recommended if you have a messed up iTunes library.

If you haven’t already heard, Apple just announced on their Q3 2011 Earnings call that Mac OS X Lion will definitely be landing tomorrow. Upgrading to a shiny new OS is exciting as you get to play with new stuff, everything feels snappier and all the eye candy makes you drool. But the upgrade story doesn’t always have a happy ending. Sometimes, there are hiccups in the process and your computer might become slow after the upgrade or your favorite apps might not work. It’s like going on an adventure trip only to come back bruised screaming in pain. Alright, that was a bit exaggerated but here is a quick checklist of stuff to do before switching to Lion so that your Lion upgrade goes as smoothly as possible.

Cleanup

AppZapper

I am pretty sure everyone’s Applications folder is filled up with hundreds of apps that have been downloaded over the years. Some of the apps you like and start using while others just lie there occupying valuable disk space. This is where AppZapper comes in handy. Manually dragging an app to Trash deletes the app, but the support files still remain on the system. AppZapper takes care of that.  It sucks the life out of useless apps, leaving no trace of it on your system. Another feature of AppZapper called Hit List lets you organize apps by size and how frequently you have used them, so use AppZapper to delete the apps you really don’t need, hence freeing up your hard disk.

DaisyDisk

DaisyDisk is one of my favorite Mac apps. It looks beautiful and works really great. DaisyDisk will scan your hard disks and present the content as an interactive chart. DaisyDisk makes it extremely easy to find out where you have been wasting your disk space. DaisyDisk even includes hidden files in the scans, so you may come across those too and delete them if they are unnecessary. Also a quick look into your Downloads folder might help free up few gigabytes as lot of junk files accumulate there if you don’t make an effort to organize the files regularly.

Update

System Update

Check if all updates Apple has released have been installed before the OS upgrade. Some of the updates Apple releases are critical and may be necessary for Lion update, so it’s recommended that you follow these steps. For most basic users, here is how updating works. Click on the Apple icon in the left corner of the menu bar and then click on ‘Software Update’. The system will then check with Apple servers for the latest updates and download them. You will be asked to install updates and restart the computer if necessary once they are downloaded.

Application Update

You certainly don’t want to end up on Lion only to find out your favorite mail or calendar apps don’t work, leaving you in the lurch. With the introduction of Mac App Store, updating applications downloaded from the store has become a piece of cake. Fire up Mac App Store and hit the Updates tab and see to it all apps are up to date. Now, there will be apps that you’d gotten from individual developer sites and they require manual update. Open every such app and manually check for updates. This is a painful process but is extremely essential to make your upgrade trouble-free.

Backup

Time Machine

There is never a bad time to do a backup and there isn’t a better one just before an OS upgrade. There is a slim chance that something may go really wrong during your upgrade and you may have to go back to your old system, hence backing up your system is extremely necessary. Apple has made system backups extremely easy for users. Just plug in your external HDD and open the Time Machine app from your applications. Time Machine will automatically back up everything to your external hard disk. You can leave out non-essential folders if you are running low on external hard drive space. And just in case anything goes wrong, you can boot from your Time Machine backup by holding down the Option key during startup.

SuperDuper

For those who want to take extra precaution, we recommend that you use SuperDuper. SuperDuper will basically clone your hard disk as it is to an external hard disk. The SuperDuper backup is also fully bootable. While Time Machine is part of Snow Leopard, SuperDuper is a third-party app that costs money but is totally worth it, if something goes horribly wrong during the upgrade.

Compatibility

Developers work really hard to make sure that the apps you use on your current operating system will work flawlessly on the upgrade too, but sometimes there are problems, and the app might need some time to work peoperly on the new operating system. If you use an application that is extremely important to you or if it is part of your job , you should check the app’s compatibility with Lion before pressing the upgrade button. The guys over at RoaringApps have done an excellent job of compiling a list of all the apps and their status on Lion. Alternatively, you can visit developer websites or their twitter feeds to check the status of compatibility.

System

Sometimes there is a chance that apps might not work properly or your system may slow down if there are permission errors. Taking care of these errors before upgrading is always a good thing to do. You can repair disk permissions using Apple’s own Disk Utility application. The Disk Utility app is located in the Utilities folder inside Applications. Open the app and select your startup disk from the list on the left. Click on the first aid tab and then click Repair Disk Permissions.

The Lion upgrade is going to be delivered via Mac App Store, so there is no standing in line at the Apple Store this time. If you follow the above-mentioned advice, you’ll make sure Lion upgrade process is super smooth. If you still hit a snag or have any questions, just call us out @smokingapples and we’ll try our best to help you. And when the Lion update finally releases, connect your Mac to a stable internet connection, pour yourself a glass of your favorite drink, sit back and enjoy.