ReadKit
Where to read your read-it-latters
when it’s later
Your digital reading pile can get as
disorganized as that stack of magazines on the nightstand, especially if you
use more than one service. ReadKit streamlines your reading with offline
support for Instapaper, Pocket, and Readability, plus bookmarks from Pinboard
and Delicious. (Pinboard and Instapaper require paid accounts.) ReadKit lists
each account in the sidebar, including categories such as Delicious and
Pinboard’s private folders, and the way Pocket splits your entries into
Articles, Videos, and Images. Mouse over a service’s name and select Hide to
collapse the lists.
Instapaper,
Delicious, Pocket, Readability, and Pinboard, all in one client
The toolbar along the bottom has a button
to switch the view from folders to tags, and a tag button under the preview
pane lets you add new tags to each entry. You can search to filter, hide, or
show any of the panels, tweak the article font and interface theme, and display
the unread count in the dock. Buttons at the top let you send an article to
Evernote, Facebook, Twitter, email, or iMessage, or mark it read or as a
favorite. When you switch to Pinboard or Delicious, those buttons change to a
browser-like forward/back/refresh scheme. The internal browser renders pages
well, including streaming video, but we did hit some hiccups when loading pages
with pop-ups. And you can’t manage your folders within ReadKit – you have to
use each service’s site or app, and then refresh ReadKit to see the changes.
The bottom line
Saving articles for later reading works
best if you actually go back and read them later, and ReadKit makes it easy.
·
Product: ReadKit 1.2
·
Company: Webin
·
Contact: www.readkitapp.com
·
Price: $4.99
·
Requirements: 64-bit processor, OS X 10.7 or
later
·
Positives: Simple, effective way to organize
tons of offline reading material. Good interface and stable performance.
·
Negatives: Only one reading list visible at any
given time. No ability to make custom folders to drag in articles from
different services.
·
Rated (Great): 4/5
Doo document organizer
How to find things in the cloud
With our files scattered across so many
cloud services, it can be a pain to remember where we put things. With Doo
Document Organizer, that problem is a thing of the past.
Think of Doo as kind of like a Finder for
the cloud. Once you link your storage services – Dropbox, Google Drive, and
SkyDrive – it quickly indexes your files and folders and presents them all for
easy viewing, either as a giant list or organized by location. It does the same
for your email or any local folder on your Mac; just tell Doo where to look and
it will add whatever it finds to your library. And if you’re wary about letting
Doo see too much, it’s easy to eliminate folders and wide swaths of files from
its prying eyes.
With
Doo’s sorting options, you’ll never forget which cloud is storing your
document.
Much like the Finder, there’s no actual
editing to be done in Doo. In simple terms, it’s like a dynamic snapshot of
your documents; none of your files are actually moved or copied, but anything
can be accessed in an instant and quickly opened in its associated app. You can
view your documents in preview or list mode, and finding things is a snap
thanks to predictive search, coupled with powerful, multi-layered sorting.
Constant syncing makes sure everything stays current, and a handy duplicate
finder helps eliminate clutter.
Like other cloud services, Doo puts a limit
on its free tier, and while the 1GB cap is one of lowest we’ve seen, a bit of
selection should keep Doo humming along. We were bummed to learn that Doo
couldn’t sync our iCloud documents, and while we were interested to add our
mail accounts, it required us to set far too many filtering rules to make it
useful.
The bottom line
If you’ve ever wished for a cloud-powered
Finder, you can’t Do much better than this.
·
Product: Doo 1.0.5
·
Company: Doo.net
·
Contact: http://doo.net
·
Price: Free. (Storage beyond the free 1GB starts
at $4.99/month for 10GB).
·
Requirements: OS X 10.8.2 or later.
·
Positives: Excellent file handling. Powerful
sorting and searching. Speedy syncing
·
Negatives: Small storage cap requires vigilance.
No support for iCloud files.
·
Rated (Great): 4/5
Dropmark
Share stuff as easily as sharing
links
Sharing links is easy. Send them with
Messages or email. Use Facebook, Twitter, Google+, or any other social network
to share with your friends and colleagues. But what happens when you need to
share a collection of stuff? Dropmark aims to simplify this process, allowing
you to share not only links and images, but videos, files, music, and nearly
anything else on your Mac.
Dropmark installs as a menu bar item that
is tightly integrated with the Dropmark website. Find something you like, drag
it to the Dropmark menu, drop it into one of your Collections, and it’s
instantly added to Dropmark’s cloud. Collections make sharing a bunch of stuff
as easy as sending someone a single link, giving them read-only access. You can
also collaborate by sharing collections with another Dropmark user.
Dropmark
combines a web-based interface with a Mac menubar item for quickly collecting
& sharing.
Dropmark accepts all kinds of items: Web
links, text files, images from iPhoto, mp3s, and even tracks from SoundCloud,
all synced to our Dropmark account without a problem. If you’re more interested
in clipping items from the web, you don’t even need the Mac menu bar applet: Dropmark’s
web interface offers a sidebar for easy uploading, and a bookmarklet.
By default, collections are only available
to you. You can also share with anyone who has the link, or make your
collections public. Public collections are viewable at username.dropmark.com,
but Pro users can specify a custom domain. Pro users also get 25GB of storage
(compared to 250MB for free accounts), uploading by email, display options, and
search capabilities.
The bottom line
Dropmark is great for creating, sharing,
and collaborating on scrapbooks full of related stuff.
·
Product: Dropmark
·
Company: Oak Studios
·
Contact: www.dropmark.com
·
Price: Free. ($5/moth or $48/year for Pro
account)
·
Requirements: 64-bit processor, OS X 10.7 or later
·
Positives: Sharing links, photos, and local
files made easy. Three privacy levels. Drag-and-drop uploads.
·
Negatives: Occasional upload glitches.
·
Rated (Great): 4/5
