Vox 1.0 makes beautiful music

The short version of this post: Vox is a music player with a beautiful interface and an elegant feature set. I love it. Vox 1.0 was released today after being in public beta for a while. It's a free music player for Mac that was originally created as a developer's side project. While it became quite popular, it never reached its full potential. That changes today. I've been using the beta for a couple of weeks now, and I'm loving it as an iTunes alternative for my local music. I'm a heavy Spotify user, so Simplify is still always open as well, but Vox has completely replaced iTunes for playing music from my local library. Vox handles all popular lossless and lossy formats: FLAC MP3 AAC Musepack Monkey's Audio OGG Vorbis Apple Lossless AIFF, WAV, IT, MOD, XM and others. It works with its own playlists for files on your drive, your iTunes library (including playlists) and internet radio (premium feature). The audio quality is outstanding, and there's a built-in 10-band equalizer with presets. Headphone listening is a pleasure with Bauer Stereo, and it can even pause when headphones are unplugged. The interface is compact and elegant, with all of the controls you need in a small space. You can even close the window and use controls in your menu bar, either spread out with prev / play / pause / next in a row, or a single icon that drops down a menu for those. Further, you can display album artwork in the Dock instead of the application icon, and right-clicking provides all the controls in a standard OS X Dock popup. There are subtle niceties such as gesture support for volume and playback position. Just put your cursor over the progress bar and scroll up and down or left and right to scrub through the track. Same for the volume button, which doubles as an output selector. Dragging an audio file over it overlays drop zones where you can add it to the current playlist, or clear the queue and play it immediately. Speaking of outputs, it works perfectly with Airfoil Speakers and AirPlay devices. The playback window can be "floated" to stay on top of other windows and easily assigned to appear on all spaces. Or not, your choice. Vox also has some great system integration. It can pause your music when you get a Skype call, and it sends full album artwork to Growl for alert styles that support it. You can customize global shortcut keys for playback and volume control, and with an additional plugin, you can enable support for various remotes, headphone controls and keyboard media keys. Last.fm scrobbling is built in, and there are more features on the way, including BowTie theme compatibility and a Take Five plugin. At the price of zero dollars, I can't see any reason why any music lover wouldn't go check out Vox right now. Also, the developers are running a little promo over at my own site, so hop on by to see what's up!

SteadyTune for Mac

Agile Partners released SteadyTune for Mac today. It's a simple app that gives you a tuner for stringed instruments in your menu bar, and it's an amazingly accurate alternative to the tuners built into apps like Logic Pro. It uses a completely new algorithm from Agile Partners that provides a stable and accurate meter. You can define your instrument type and listen for all notes, or define a tuning to detect just certain pitches. It has presets for an array of instruments ranging from six- and 12-string guitars all the way through banjo, ukulele, violin and double bass. The entire meter glows red and green as you near the perfect pitch, which makes it easy to use from a distance. SteadyTune can be configured to stay on top of other windows, and you can set the input device to listen on and define a hotkey to pop it up and hide it. SteadyTune is just US$4.99 on the Mac App Store, and check out the website for more information. If you play a stringed instrument, this app is great on its own or in combination with any recording software you happen to use.

Agile Partners releases Lick of the Day 2.0

"Wait, who's Brett Terpstra? Does that guy still write here?" Yes, he does, on special occasions. The release of Lick of the Day 2.0 seemed like a decent reason to come out of hiding. Lick of the Day is an app from Agile Partners for iPhone and iPad which teaches guitar players new skills in an easy-to-digest video and interactive format (see previous coverage by Matt Tinsley). With each lesson you get a high-quality video that includes explanations, fast and slow versions as well as tips for making the most of picking patterns and finger positions. Each lick also includes tab / notation, text narrative and backing tracks for practicing. The live fingerboard representation as the tab plays for you is one of my favorite parts of the app. In version 2, Agile partners with TrueFire to include 20 new Lick Packs that cover 500 blues, rock, jazz, rockabilly and acoustic lessons. Basically, if you play guitar, there's something there to enhance your ability, whether you're just getting started or a seasoned pro. They don't talk down to you; they present the music theory and techniques while building from the simple to the highly skilled, with enough instruction along the way to get you there. My personal guitar skills have enhanced tenfold over the last year, due in large part to this app. I'm excited to see all of the new content and features coming out in such a valuable part of my music toolkit. Check out Lick of the Day in the App Store. It's free, with each "Lick Pack" being an in-app purchase (US$2.99) with free samples from the pack to try out before purchasing.

Calling all web developers: Engadget is hiring!

AOL Tech -- the team behind Engadget, TUAW, Joystiq, Massively and more -- is looking for a great front-end developer who can help us take Engadget and our other blogs to new levels. The job is a full-time remote worker position, so the ideal candidate has good time management skills and deals well with working outside of an office. It also means that you get to work with a great team for a great company, get great benefits and a chance to exercise your skills in a high-visibility job, all without having to relocate! The description: Front-end developer for AOL Tech (Engadget, TUAW, Joystiq, Massively). The ideal candidate is highly proficient in JavaScript/jQuery, comfortable with PHP / mySQL and experienced in web design, optimization and related technologies for desktop and mobile. A solid understanding of mobile-first design is a must. Requirements High proficiency in JavaScript/jQuery Familiar with spriting, lazy loading, and other general performance-optimized techniques. Mac access for compatibility with current tools HTML5/CSS3 Git SSH If you're interested in joining us, please send us a resume and contact information!

AmpKit for Mac released, guitar nerds rejoice

AmpKit has just released a Mac version of its awesome iOS guitar effect and recording tool. Lucky me, I've had a preview version for a little while now, and I've really enjoyed putting it through its paces. Everything you get in the iOS app is there: pedals, heads, cabs and amazing presets for just about any style of guitar or bass. There's the tuner, meters and metronome, plus the recording capability. It's everything I liked about the iPhone and iPad versions, bigger and with all of the settings more easily accessible on one panel. The Mac version comes with built-in recording tools (including non-destructive re-amping) and 23 backing tracks. You can choose any input and use any analog or digital interface with it. I tested with an M-Audio FastTrack and got great results, but I'm sure a more advanced interface (and nicer guitar) could get some great output. If you're a GarageBand or Logic user, you always have the option of using SoundFlower to pipe the audio into your DAW of choice. I did it and it worked flawlessly. The level of detail you can find in the controls is impressive. Put a Taos Rectifier stack together, set up the mic model and mic position, and then start tweaking channel, volume, drive, presence, bass, mid and treble until you find the perfect sound. Add a rack of pedals and control the settings individually. Start from the dozens of built-in presets and add save your own as you build them. You can even share your setups with other AmpKit users on Mac or iOS with a click. For the nerds: almost every menu command has a keyboard shortcut, and they're fully scriptable. If you're into it (and I am), you can turn any input device into triggers for switching stacks, starting and stopping recording, and playing and pausing backup tracks. I have an extra Magic Trackpad, an iPad and a MIDI keyboard, which -- combined with BetterTouchTool, BTT Remote and KeyboardMaestro -- give me a ton of ways to trigger easily while I'm playing. Short version: if you play guitar or bass and would like an infinite range of sounds without buying thousands of dollars worth of gear, take a look at AmpKit for Mac. For $49.99 you get more gear than you'd pay a few hundred for with similar apps, and more than you'd ever manage to collect in physical form. Add a decent set of monitors and you can rock out any time you want. Have a look.

Everything cool about Curio just got better

Curio, one of my long-time favorite brainstorming and project management applications, has received a massive update with version 8. If you've never seen Curio, it's a highly visual environment for collecting information, lists, mind maps, websites, PDFs, emails and much more into organized projects and "spaces." You can collect, present, share and manage all kinds of information using an organization method that works for you. Whether you prefer a spatial, visual layout or a more rigid view of your data, Curio provides an amazing set of tools. The release notes for version 8 are rather immense, but definitely worth looking through. Here are a few highlights: All-new interface (fewer visible buttons, but more power) Improved mind-mapping tools Improved sharing options for projects, spaces and figures Repository-based group access to resources Split view for working in multiple spaces in a project Mountain Lion Reminders/iCal integration Bookmarks More robust audio/video recording Improved Evernote integration The list goes on. It's honestly more than I could cover in this post. There are even features which aren't specifically called out in the release notes, but which make me a bit giddy. For example, drag an OPML file (from a mind map or outliner application) onto a project space, and Curio will ask you what to turn it into: mind map, index card, outline, etc. Brilliant. You can purchase Curio 8 for US$99, and current users of either the Mac App Store version or a version purchased from Zengobi directly can upgrade for $49.99. There is a free 25-day trial available at Zengobi's site, and I highly recommend checking it out.

Sony VAIO Duo 11 slider PC hands-on

Sony Xperia T Press Shots

VoodooPad 5: wiki magic

For those of us who nerd out about things like desktop wikis, VoodooPad 5 (from the creator of Acorn) is an exciting release. It brings new capabilities so powerful that they should come with a "for good, not evil" warning. If you're not familiar with VoodooPad, it's a desktop wiki with media embedding capabilities, a scriptable interface and a lot of power under the hood. Whether you want to use it for note-taking, project management or even maintaining documentation and live websites, it's a powerhouse. We may have mentioned it once or twice before. What's so great about version 5? First, Dropbox sync is greatly improved. You can even share docs with multiple people and see who edited what, when. For those of us of the Markdown persuasion, there's a new page type specifically for Markdown, with editing features and syntax highlighting. If you build large documents -- say, a documentation project for your software -- you can publish the entire document as a PDF or ePub book. There's a new feature called "Collections" that lets you create tables of contents and determine page order, which makes the export features much more useful for more linear output formats. We've always been able to do fun things like write event scripts that search for certain @tags and compile them, but the new To-Dos palette offers a faster, customizable solution for this. There are more flexible event scripts, new scripting language support (including the ability to write scripts in JavaScript). There are even "scriptlets," your own small scripts that can be embedded directly within a page. There's plenty more, as you can see in the release notes. VoodooPad 5 is available in the Mac App Store for US$24.99 (limited time price), or directly from Flying Meat's store (same price).

Byword for iOS released

Those who know me know that Byword has become my favorite writing tool. I've been keeping my mouth shut about this release during the beta testing period, but I'm really excited to announce it's arrival: Byword for iOS. The iOS version includes the Markdown-editing features that I love on the Mac, and has full iCloud and Dropbox sync between devices. There's an update to the Desktop version as well, enabling iCloud support for the multi-device sync. You can start typing on your Mac, pick up your iPhone and walk away, then continue typing wherever you end up. Your text is ready and waiting for you. Byword for iOS is a universal app, and one price gets you editing bliss on your iPhone, iPad and iPod touch (or whatever combination you happen to have). The price is starting at US $2.99, and will start going up by $1 every three days until it reaches its standard price of US $4.99. Byword for Mac is available on the Mac App Store for $9.99. Even without the new iOS companion app, it's an excellent writing tool. Portability just makes it that much more useful to me. If you write on a Mac, and especially if you write in Markdown (see the TUAW Markdown Primer) Byword is a gorgeous and elegant environment to do it in. The feature set looks sparse; everything just works. You don't need to see a bunch of buttons, you can just type. Features such as automatic list continuation, selection wrapping, and unobtrusive word count just happen, and additional requirements are filled by keyboard shortcuts. It's worth every penny to me.

Agile Partners rock GuitarToolkit 2.0

Agile Partners (who've come up at TUAW a few times) have released GuitarToolkit 2.0, a major upgrade to the original app which adds extensive features and an iPad version. GuitarToolkit boasts a range of tools geared at guitar and bass players, but now includes enough flexibility to work with any fretted instrument you can imagine. This is a free update for existing customers, and additional functionality is available as a one-time, US $4.99 in-app upgrade. In addition to being redesigned to take advantage of the iPad's size, the new release expands from 500,000 chords to over 2,000,000 chords and scales--and now--arpeggios. There's full capo support, too: slide to any fret and scales and arpeggios automatically adjust. All of GuitarToolkit's features support six, seven, and twelve string guitars, as well as four, five and six string bass, banjo, mandolin and ukulele. The GuitarToolkit+ upgrade activates interactive Chord Sheets (a great tool for composition and building chord progressions), an Advanced Metronome (with visible flash option), a drum machine and Custom Instruments. Drum patterns can contain as many as 32 tracks, and you control time signature, number of bars and have access to 75 sounds in nine different categories. The Advanced Metronome is available immediately on the iPad, and coming shortly to the iPhone/iPod touch. The Custom Instruments capability is pretty cool, especially if you're playing something that doesn't necessarily fit into the standard guitar mold. Choose an instrument type, string and pickup type, assign a tuning, even add a capo if you like. GuitarToolkit+ includes great-sounding samples for every combination, as well as over 60 amp/effects presets powered by AmpKit. The tuner in GuitarToolkit is highly accurate and supports just about any tuning you can imagine (including custom tunings). More than I'll ever use, I'm sure. There's also a high-contrast mode to make sure you can use it in any lighting situation. All told, if you play a fretted instrument of any kind, the US $9.99 app (and the US $4.99 in-app upgrade) will probably pay off pretty quickly. This is the only app I've seen that offers this kind of flexibility and provides as many composition tools. Check it out in the App Store.

Postbox 3 launches with more social, more integration

We've tracked the progress of the Postbox email client for a while now, and it keeps getting better. Postbox -- an evolution of the Mozilla email client -- combines ease-of-use and email power tools to create a full-featured client with great polish. Version 3.0 brings with it not only new features, but a variety of improvements to system integration as well. More GMail features, including native "Label" support, "Important" view, "Send and Archive," support for GMail shortcuts and the ability to add detected dates as Google Calendar events. More social features, such as importing avatars from Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter and more, displaying job titles and company names from LinkedIn, easy access to LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter profiles and the ability to update Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn right from the email client. More integration with services including Dropbox, Evernote, iCal/Google Calendar, and Growl 1.3. Version 3 also adds Lion Full Screen support and multi-touch gestures. There's more, including a new "Favorites Bar" that's worth checking out. Postbox also includes the ability to create a set of "canned responses" -- templates tailored for various types of repetitive inquiries -- quickly accessible when replying. Postbox has come a long way as far as being "Mac-like," and this release is looking great to me so far. If you bought Postbox after August 15th, 2011, this upgrade is free. Previous users can upgrade for US$9.95. A new Postbox license runs US$29.95. If you're looking for an alternative to Mail with a full suite of social and system integration features, Postbox is a good bet.

Students and iPads: ACU study shows positive results

The first time I mentioned Abilene Christian University, it was because it was handing out iPhones to students. The next time was a year later when I followed up with an interview about the school's methods and research findings. Its approach to incorporating technology into education was both unobtrusive and highly effective, and it almost made me want to go back to school again. This year, as Mike Rose mentioned a little while ago, the studies go on and the results continue to impress. Now that the iPad is available, students are being equipped with a rich set of tools that can be used for learning; they can also be used to spend time on social networks, blogging, chatting with friends... all with ACU's blessing. There are no mandates that either teachers or students have to use the iPads. The fact that the iPad is as much a social tool as anything else is something that ACU has embraced, modifying many of its curriculums to work more effectively with the new technology. Among the students, the approval rating for the program is in the upper 90%, with the highest numbers coming from the youngest classes (100% for the class of 2015). Test scores have been shown to improve markedly (+25%) when notes are taken and texts annotated using the iPad. The numbers are all great, but that's not what really catches my attention about this story. What's most interesting to me is how the professors at ACU have voluntarily adapted their teaching styles to work with new technologies. The administration has provided all of the tools for a highly social, highly connected environment, and teachers and students alike have taken impressive advantage of the opportunities. The curriculum, as well, has been shifting to include rich media creation as part of everyday learning. Obviously, the iPad isn't making the difference alone. It's a conduit, a tool for taking advantage of the Internet, a network of friends and a new way of looking at education. Well, not new, really. Thoreau's classroom is in full effect here. In many classes students are interactively building the syllabus, creating the questions and finding the answers. The professors are taking on a new role as "coaches," focusing more on helping students learn to solve problems and answer questions than on rote learning and testing. Some professors have stopped traditional lecturing entirely, and have seen improved comprehension and test results across the board. In one class at ACU, students spend their class-time in the surrounding communities, armed with iPads, doing service work and solving real-world problems. They are asked to blog their experiences as they happen. Images, thoughts, discoveries and more are all captured in blog form, and the blog ultimately becomes the test. As an Apple fan, I'm thrilled that the iPad--and the iPhone before it--were chosen to be the center of this program. The technology (including a media creation studio donated by AT&T) shines brightly in this scenario. Without the active support of students, their teachers and the administration, though, the technology would just be a hindrance while the status quo was maintained. It's inspiring to see education taking what is, in my opinion, a very positive leap forward at ACU.

TextMate 2 alpha before Christmas?

According to a blog post at MacroMates this morning, an alpha version of TextMate 2 will be available by December 25th. As a longtime TextMate fan(atic), this news fills me with cheer usually reserved for closer to that date. A very merry Christmas, indeed. TextMate is an extensible text editor and development tool and has been among the top contenders for developers, web designers and even writers for years now. Version 2 has been promised many times over the past few years without fulfillment. A hard timeline has even been mentioned before, but I can't help but get my hopes up for this one. Here's hoping that the MacroMates team follows through and brings us the sequel to my all-time favorite text editor. In the meantime, Espresso 2 is coming along nicely, Sublime Text and Chocolat are rising as contenders, BBEdit is receiving plenty of love and more and more people are tackling the Vim learning curve. If and when TextMate 2 arrives, it will be up against some stiff competition.

Yoink takes the drag out of file dragging

Lion users, have you ever tried to drag a file between full-screen apps? It's a bear to do, especially with a trackpad. Matthias Gansrigler at Eternal Storms (no stranger to TUAW) has solved this problem with an app called Yoink. Yoink simply watches for you to start dragging a file and when the app notices this dragging motion, it opens a small drawer on the side of your screen. You can drag files to the drawer, and even stack multiple files in there, then switch spaces and drag them back out. It's simple, it's effective and it solves the problem quite elegantly. Check out Yoink on the Mac App Store, where you can pick it up for US$2.99. For a video of Yoink in action, or a 15-day trial, visit the Yoink homepage.

Clarify brings focus to your screen-based documentation

Clarify -- now in Public Beta -- is Mango Learning System's new product for communicating screen-based instructions quickly and easily. It's something like a successor to ScreenSteps (which history will show I'm a big fan of), but in the words of developer Greg Devore, "while ScreenSteps was aimed at documentation, Clarify is aimed at communication." Clarify provides a simple set of tools for taking screenshots, adding annotations, writing descriptions and then sharing the final step-by-step instructions you create using the free screensteps.me service or by email. The tools are an evolution of what was found in ScreenSteps, and are both better looking and easier to use. You can take delayed screenshots (for setting up a dropdown menu before snapping, for example) and you can repeat prior screenshot location and dimensions, which is great for documenting things like navigating web pages where the only changes are within the browser window. The annotation tools are robust but not overwhelming, and the text editing tools are more Cocoa-like and familiar than ScreenSteps'. Sharing via ScreenSteps.me is free and provides a dead-simple way to get your communication to its destination. You can also deliver it by email, but using the service allows easy updates and export to plain HTML, styled HTML or just images as well. If all of this sounds useful for you, grab the free public beta and give it a whirl. Final pricing is undetermined at the moment but will be less than ScreenSteps. While Clarify is in beta it's a great time to offer new suggestions and help out with the development of the final release!

Paragraft gets iOS Markdown editing right

I just discovered Paragraft, a text editor for iPad and iPhone that boasts some ingenious Markdown features (if I've lost you already, check out the TUAW Markdown Primer for a crash course). The good parts of Paragraft blew me away enough that I'm able to overlook an ugly icon and some bad interface decisions to deliver a fairly glowing endorsement: this is the first app I've found that has really allowed Markdown on iOS to make sense. There's no shortage of Markdown-enabled apps on any Apple platform right now, and I love that. I love Markdown, and while it's far superior to writing HTML or dealing with Rich Text in an iOS environment, I always miss the Markdown speed I can achieve in TextMate and other text editors on the Mac. Nebulous Notes has the flexibility to start getting there, but you have to build all the macros yourself. Other apps handle auto-continuing lists, maybe adding bold and italics, but still leave you digging through multiple levels of iOS keyboards to get to some symbols. TextExpander Touch can help quite a bit, too, but none of these really tap the capabilities of the iPhone and iPad. Paragraft has made me begin to rethink the possibilities.

Prototypes makes iPhone mockups a breeze

This is a cool one, at least for iPhone app designers. Prototypes is a Mac app that lets you take those handcrafted mockups of iPhone screens and turn them into a clickable demo you can share with any iPhone or iPod touch user. Prototypes takes just about any image format, including straight Photoshop PSD files. Once you drag them into your project, adding hotspots is as easy as clicking and dragging. Create a hotspot and then drag the link to whatever page should be loaded when it's tapped. You can assign a "back" action as well. All links can have a transition (in any direction) assigned to them. You can even add notes that display when a page is loaded and then disappear. Aside from its ease-of-use, the real beauty of Prototypes is the free web service that comes with it. When you share a mockup from within the app, you get a ptyp.es url and a PIN. Have your client, your teammates, your boss or whomever log in to ptyp.es. They'll be asked to install the web app on their home page, after which they can enter your PIN and click through your mockup. Prototypes currently only works on iPhones and iPod touches, but the developer expects to roll out iPad support in the next couple of months. At US$39.99, it's not a cheap investment, but if you deal with iPhone mockups regularly, this could be a lifesaver. The fact that you get the web service without a subscription makes the up-front price seem quite reasonable, at least to me. You can try out a pre-built prototype at the Prototypes website, and purchase it directly on the Mac App Store.

Code Pilot 2.0 with Xcode 4 compatibility

Macoscope has released version 2.0 of its Xcode navigation plug-in, Code Pilot. Technically, it's still a beta -- judging from the 2.0b6 version number -- but it's been rock solid for me so far. This version brings Xcode 4 compatibility and a revamped interface. If you code and you haven't tried it, definitely take a look. Code Pilot attaches to Shift-Command-X in Xcode, and the hotkey brings up a HUD with a search field focused. As you type, it quickly and intelligently filters the files in your project down to the one you were looking for. It also searches symbol names across the board or within the selected file (add a space after the filename). It's similar to Xcode's Open Quickly, but smarter and easier to install than PeepCode's PeepOpen (which is great in MacVim and TextMate but a bit less friendly in Xcode). Macoscope, also behind Productive! Magazine for iPad and the Nozbe apps for iPad and iPhone, has gained a reputation for refined design. Code Pilot is a great example of smart, unobtrusive UI with some serious utility behind it. The free download is good for 10 days, at which point you'll need a license (US$29.95). Users who purchased v1.x in 2011 get v2.0 for free, and 1.x owners who purchased before that get a 50% discount.

AirStash Wireless Flash Drive