I thought it might be nice to have a thread devoted to sharing news about newly released apps, major updates to existing apps, and little known apps that someone has recently discovered. In that spirit, I thought it might be good to have some ground rules for this thread.

1. Post the following at the top of each post:

App name:
Description:
Platforms:
Payment model:
Website:
Reviews (if any):
Notes:

Example:

App: Clozemaster

Description: The “cloze” of Clozemaster relates to a cloze deletion test, where you are given a sentence with a missing word and you need to identify what the missing word is. Cloze tests are therefore a great method of learning to use words and grammar in context.

Platforms: Web, Android, iOS

URL: https://www.clozemaster.com/

Review: http://kotobites.com/2018/11/12/clozemaster-review/

Notes: I haven't used this much, but it looks like a useful app for those who have already mastered the basics in a language.

2. Longer discussions about any individual app should be moved to a new thread, leaving this thread just for announcements of new apps. That way people who follow this thread for new app announcements won't have to wade through long off-topic discussions or arguments.

3. Avoid minor updates, well known apps, or excessive self-promotion. (I guess it is OK to announce a new app if you are the developer, but please state that in the post.)

4. Stick to the theme of this forum and only post productivity related apps, not games or entertainment apps.

That's it. I hope this idea is welcomed by other forum members.

Very nice concept @Luhmann.

I'll share an app that has been around a while but I just found it a few days ago.

1 App name: SuperTab
2 Description: App switcher app for macOS. Does the typical app switcher thing -- expanded exponentially to include multiple custom tabes. Very useful.
3 Platforms: macOS only
4 Payment model: One-time purchase + upgrade fee when applicable
5 Website: https://supertab.me
6 Reviews (if any): SuperTab's biggest fan -- convinced me: Bakari Chavanu at https://macautomationtips.com/supertab
There is also a link on Chavanu's blog a referral link providing a 60% discount on SuperTab -- net cost is then $8 USD.


Notes: App switchers are a niche and not for everyone. I'm never satisfied with the switcher provided with OS X or macOS. I have tried Drag Thing (https://dragthing.com which is reaching end of life because of the 64-bit transition. Drag Thing's developer saw no market for the product and did not want to invest the time to update their app to 64-bit. Another one is Contexts (contexts.io) which is simpler than SuperTab and seems to be focused mainly on making context-switching easier. Another switcher is Witch (https://manytricks.com/witch/ which is similar to Contexts in that it expands on the basic capabilities of the built-in macOS switcher.

SuperTab does what Contexts, and Witch do (in its own way) but adds several utilities to the mix. This sort of multi-tool approach can be wonderful if you like it, and overwhelmingly annoying if you don't. That's what makes app-switching a niche that's not for everyone.

Active Applications - your active applications
Application Windows - all windows of all applications in all Spaces
Recent Applications - the applications you've recently opened
Recent Documents - the documents you've recently opened
Recent Folders - the folders you've recently accessed
Folder Contents - the contents of any folder you choose
Dock Items - some or all the items from your Dock
Calendar Items - instantly see your Calendar Items and their details
Clipboard History - the recent contents of your Mac's Clipboard
Dropbox Contents - access to your Dropbox and all its contents
Tagged Items - the files, folders & applications with the Tags or Labels you specify
Finder Sidebar Items - items that appear in the "Sidebar" of Finder Windows
Snagit Captures - instantly preview, copy, share and open your Snagit Captures
Custom Items - Custom Items Tab Rows let you choose their contents. Add any:
Files, Folders & Applications
System Preferences, such as System Notifications, iCloud, Time Machine, etc
Multiple Clipboards to keep snippets of Text or Images available for instant re-use
Web Site Bookmarks to your favorite Web Sites
Custom-Configured Screenshots and invoke them with a single click of the mouse
Stopwatches to time how long something takes without digging out your phone
Countdown Timers to make sure you don't miss out on something important!
Meta-Folders to quickly access any group of files, folders or apps that you choose
Display Configurations to switch to your favorite Display Configurations with a single click
Saved Spotlight Searches to access the results of a Spotlight Search.
Auto-Types and have SuperTab automatically type commonly used phrases for you

Yes, I like and use SuperTab, and have watched its development with interest. Its features are much more extensive than the somewhat similar but now more or less apparently abandoned Fresh, and it is more useful than the various third-party replacements for the Mac dock that I have tried.

Hi, Paul,

For some reason the link you provided doesn't work for me. Here's the link I found through Google:

http://www.supertab.me/SuperTab.html

In case others also have trouble. (And thanks for the heads up about SuperTab.)

Steve Z.

Paul Korm wrote:

Very nice concept @Luhmann.

I'll share an app that has been around a while but I just found it a few
days ago.

1 App name: SuperTab
2 Description: App switcher app for macOS. Does the typical app
switcher thing -- expanded exponentially to include multiple custom
tabes. Very useful.
3 Platforms: macOS only
4 Payment model: One-time purchase + upgrade fee when applicable
5 Website: https://supertab.me
6 Reviews (if any): SuperTab's biggest fan -- convinced me: Bakari
Chavanu at https://macautomationtips.com/supertab
There is also a link on Chavanu's blog a referral link providing a
60% discount on SuperTab -- net cost is then $8 USD.


Notes: App switchers are a niche and not for everyone. I'm never
satisfied with the switcher provided with OS X or macOS. I have tried
Drag Thing (https://dragthing.com which is reaching end of life because
of the 64-bit transition. Drag Thing's developer saw no market for the
product and did not want to invest the time to update their app to
64-bit. Another one is Contexts (contexts.io) which is simpler than
SuperTab and seems to be focused mainly on making context-switching
easier. Another switcher is Witch (https://manytricks.com/witch/
which is similar to Contexts in that it expands on the basic
capabilities of the built-in macOS switcher.

SuperTab does what Contexts, and Witch do (in its own way) but adds
several utilities to the mix. This sort of multi-tool approach can be
wonderful if you like it, and overwhelmingly annoying if you don't.
That's what makes app-switching a niche that's not for everyone.

Active Applications - your active applications
Application Windows - all windows of all applications in all Spaces
Recent Applications - the applications you've recently opened
Recent Documents - the documents you've recently opened
Recent Folders - the folders you've recently accessed
Folder Contents - the contents of any folder you choose
Dock Items - some or all the items from your Dock
Calendar Items - instantly see your Calendar Items and their details
Clipboard History - the recent contents of your Mac's Clipboard
Dropbox Contents - access to your Dropbox and all its contents
Tagged Items - the files, folders & applications with the Tags or Labels
you specify
Finder Sidebar Items - items that appear in the "Sidebar" of Finder
Windows
Snagit Captures - instantly preview, copy, share and open your Snagit
Captures
Custom Items - Custom Items Tab Rows let you choose their contents. Add
any:
Files, Folders & Applications
System Preferences, such as System Notifications, iCloud, Time Machine,
etc
Multiple Clipboards to keep snippets of Text or Images available for
instant re-use
Web Site Bookmarks to your favorite Web Sites
Custom-Configured Screenshots and invoke them with a single click of the
mouse
Stopwatches to time how long something takes without digging out your
phone
Countdown Timers to make sure you don't miss out on something important!
Meta-Folders to quickly access any group of files, folders or apps that
you choose
Display Configurations to switch to your favorite Display Configurations
with a single click
Saved Spotlight Searches to access the results of a Spotlight Search.
Auto-Types and have SuperTab automatically type commonly used phrases
for you

Just discovered a Todoist / Trello / TickTick alternative called ClickUp. Anyone tried it? First impression is that it is powerful but takes a bit of learning to set up the way you want. (Many features can be turned on or off for each "space".) Also, free, but seems hard to opt-out of marketing emails.

https://app.clickup.com

Sorry, this is probably a better URL:

https://clickup.com/

Thanks, looks interesting. They sure are developing quickly, looks like they've only been around a year or so.

The "pricing" on the front page is vague so I dug for more details, which I found here:

https://docs.clickup.com/f-a-q/free-forever-unlimited-and-business-plans


Luhmann wrote:

https://clickup.com/

yosemite wrote:

Thanks, looks interesting. They sure are developing quickly, looks like
they've only been around a year or so.

The "pricing" on the front page is vague so I dug for more details,
which I found here:

https://docs.clickup.com/f-a-q/free-forever-unlimited-and-business-plans


Luhmann wrote:
> https://clickup.com/

While quite comprehensive, this app looks interesting and seems to have gathered a lot of reviews on comparison sites. Has anybody actually used it? And if so, what are your thoughts?

--Ken

I find the current user interface overly complex and difficult to use, but version 2 is in beta and should come out this summer. I am not a beta tester, but I will look at Clickup again after they release that version... One thing that I did like about it was the ability to make different lists work in different ways. This is useful because one of the problems with Dynalist / Todoist / 2Do is that each has only one way of treating lists. Being able to customize which features are available for different lists could help make it easier to use one app for multiple purposes. Let's see what version 2 looks like...

Ken wrote:

While quite comprehensive, this app looks interesting and seems to have
gathered a lot of reviews on comparison sites. Has anybody actually
used it? And if so, what are your thoughts?

--Ken

Luhmann wrote:

I find the current user interface overly complex and difficult to use,
but version 2 is in beta and should come out this summer. I am not a
beta tester, but I will look at Clickup again after they release that
version... One thing that I did like about it was the ability to make
different lists work in different ways. This is useful because one of
the problems with Dynalist / Todoist / 2Do is that each has only one way
of treating lists. Being able to customize which features are available
for different lists could help make it easier to use one app for
multiple purposes. Let's see what version 2 looks like...

Good to hear. I took the plunge last night and signed up. It is a bit complex and somewhat visually hard to read at first glance, but I am hoping to see what can be done once I find my way around a bit better.

--Ken

I'm under the impression it's on v2, as most the help docs refer to that and they describe exactly what I'm using. I've been playing around with it and am having trouble finding any reference to the version though.

Luhmann wrote:

I find the current user interface overly complex and difficult to use,
but version 2 is in beta and should come out this summer. I am not a
beta tester, but I will look at Clickup again after they release that
version...
>--Ken

I've been playing around with Clickup too and I see it as a direct competitor to the modern group project managers like Monday, Wrike, Smartsheet, Asana etc. Though it's ability to customize the features and workflows between workspaces makes it a candidate to be a true personal/work/team task manager.

As a personal task manager, it feels a lot like MyLifeOrganized where it has pretty deep capability (dependencies, custom metadata, etc) but you of course sacrifice fluidity for that. As all CRIMPers know, complexity and fluidity are almost always a direct trade-off, though Clickup does seem to strike a nice balance. Todoist is my daily driver for two reasons, rapid mobile entry from anywhere with that sweet natural language processing and infinite nesting. The quick entry for Clickup isn't bad but not as friction free as todoist. Clickup does do subtasks but only one level. Though that's on a task that is already nested under a hierarchy of Workplace/Space/Folder(optional)/List/Task/Subtask... So you can definitely make a complex hierarchy but the depth isn't fluid like with a todoist/workflowy/dynalist etc.

My main interest is with the Gantt charts, as I'm looking for a modern (cloud based) platform to share project updates at work. In my view, there are two different animals when it comes to gantt charts 1. Infinite Nesting (Microsoft Project, Infoqube, MindManager etc) 2. Shallow Gantts (Clickup, Smartsheet, Airtable, and hopefully Notion soon). The shallow gantts are simply plotting the tasks under the shallow and static hierarchy of the task manager and you can't just keep freely add sub-trees. You also have to fumble around to get the output to look right, like plotting milestones and phases are usually workarounds compared to the Infinite Nest Gantts. However, there's an argument to be made that the powerful infinite nesters are overkill for all but the most complex construction projects so it's nice that we now can add a light gantt layer to the modern task platforms.

Clickup does have an independent notes interface, but it's very rudimentary. It does have nice notes and attachments as part of tasks. In fact the task metadata is great with custom fields and powerful dependencies that you can cross-link with tasks in other lists. Then the different view toggles kanban, calendar, gantt, box etc can be drilled down to different levels. So you can see a calendar view of just this project, or every work project plus your personal tasks that are only visible to you. I'm not sure if I'm ready to jump to it as a unifying platform for my personal and work projects but it's definitely the best option for that if I want to be able to do gantt charts.

Pretty sure they would make a big announcement when it is released, and nothing is yet on their blog. The macOS and iOS apps are still at version 1. However, it does look like they might have jumped the gun with their documentation, which is strange, but ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

nathanb wrote:

I'm under the impression it's on v2,

App name: Easy Data Transform
Description: Merge, sort, filter, reformat etc tabular and list data.
Platforms: Windows and Mac.
Payment model: Currently free.
Website: http://easydatatransform.com/
Reviews (if any): Only announced today!
Notes:

This is our new product. It isn't really a knowledge management product or an outliner. So it is perhaps a bit cheeky listing it here. But some people who have large amounts of disparate data they need to feed into other tools might find it useful.

Currently we are letting people use it for free in an extended beta. If anyone does try it, we would be interested to hear any feedback.

Luhmann wrote:

Pretty sure they would make a big announcement when it is released, and
nothing is yet on their blog. The macOS and iOS apps are still at
version 1. However, it does look like they might have jumped the gun
with their documentation, which is strange, but
¯\_(ツ)_/¯

nathanb wrote:
I'm under the impression it's on v2,

Interesting. I've been referencing that documentation often because it describes the intent of their design decisions pretty well. Every article disclaims that it's about v2 and the dates on the entries don't give more detail than 'over a week' old. If you are right then 2.0 must be almost mostly visual tweaks, I have yet to notice any help article that is obviously wrong. No wonder I couldn't find any grand V-2.0 announcement in scanning their blog.

It should be a much more substantive change than that. See the FAQ:

https://docs.clickup.com/en/articles/2849096-clickup-2-0-faq

This was updated only a week ago, so it seems clear that the new version has not been released yet.

Thanks, this looks really useful! I will give it a try and report back.

A couple of quick questions:

- Is it your intention to take it further towards something like FlowHeater https://flowheater.net/en/# ? Batch processing, in particular, may be very useful to automate regular transformation tasks.

- Are you thinking of linking it to Hyperplan in some way?

- Would you consider a Linux version?


Andy Brice wrote:

App name: Easy Data Transform
Description: Merge, sort, filter, reformat etc tabular and list data.
Platforms: Windows and Mac.
Payment model: Currently free.
Website: http://easydatatransform.com/
Reviews (if any): Only announced today!

Alexander Deliyannis wrote:

Thanks, this looks really useful! I will give it a try and report back.

Alexander

Feedback would be very welcome.

A couple of quick questions:

- Is it your intention to take it further towards something like
FlowHeater https://flowheater.net/en/# ? Batch processing, in
particular, may be very useful to automate regular transformation tasks.

The emphasis at present is more on interactive transformations.

But it will already do batch processing. It detects when input file(s) have changes, processes the changes and write(s) the to the output files. But you need the app running for this to work. At some point we may also create a server version, especially for batch operations.

Input/output formats are fairly limited at present. It can input delimited text (e.g. CSV) and (if you have Excel installed) xls/xlsx. And it can ouput delimited text (e.g. CSV). ODBC input/output is also high on the list. What other input/output formats we support depends on what customers ask for.

I hadn't heard of flowheater. I will take a look. Is it something you have used?

- Are you thinking of linking it to Hyperplan in some way?

Not sure how much overlap there is. They are in quite different markets. But given that both can import and export CSV, they could complement each other.

- Would you consider a Linux version?

Possibly. But I'm not sure there will ever be enough demand to justify it commercially. Especially when you take account the headache of all the Linux distros.

Andy

Click up is probably the best in its class right now. It's really phenomenal (esp v2.0).

I'm pretty set on my personal workflow being handled via a simple calendar and text documents (à la org-mode) but I use click up with my team and it's a killer service. However, since I only have a few people working with me I probably don't need the full capability that it offers. Eventually my hope is to move to a self-hosted version of Taiga which is a bit less powerful, but open source & secure software is quite important to me moving forward.

I couldn't resist trying ClickUp. It's very cool-looking, but a bit overwhelming. I know I'm being a twit about things, but I really dislike all the Electron webapps masquerading as desktop apps. So either I'll be waiting forever because native apps are dead, OR Catalyst will somehow make a difference and there will be modern native macOS versions of these webapps.

Either way, for now, I'm sticking with Trello because unlike me, the rest of my team does not understand my CRIMPing ways.

Ah! The Curse of the CRIMPer...

I feel a film coming on. Perhaps we could persuade Leonardo di Caprio to star...?

App name: iData (consisting of iData Pro and iData Mobile)

Description: Flexible database app with free-form rich-text notes field; many different searching/filtering options

Platforms: macOS, iOS

Payment model: Single license payment / upgrade payment for new versions

Website: http://www.idatapartners.com (possibly one of the ugliest websites I've ever seen!)

Reviews (if any): Looks like an interesting app; not many reviews available, but it's reminiscent of ListPro on Windows/Palm

Notes: