Micromat’s TechToolPro 6 is the bundle headliner this time around, offering some of the most comprehensive diagnostic and repair tools for your OS X system available anywhere. TechToolPro 6 is the most recent version and normally retails for $99.99 on its own. It checks your drives for potential errors or signs of failure, helps you rebuild your disk directories and optimize performance, plus recovers data from corrupt drives.

Another highlight is Postbox 3, the latest iteration of one of the best options out there for power email users who aren’t satisfied with what the build-in Mail.app offers. It’s a better fit and better designed than Microsoft’s Outlook for the Mac, and it’s a great Gmail client, too. The only downside is that there is no Exchange support, but it has a load of organization and filtering features that make tackling even the most unruly of inboxes a much easier task. Postbox 3 is normally $30 on its own.

One more app on the list that merits closer inspection is Neverwinter Nights 2. It’s a few years old now, but the game really stands up well despite its age. RPG fans will love it, especially if you enjoyed the first installment or if you’re a fan of games in the Diablo vein. Ordinarily, Neverwinter Nights 2 retails for $20 on the Mac App Store.

There are eight other apps in the bundle, too, as well as one more for the first 15,000 buyers. There is something for everyone, including the FontPack Pro Master edition, which ordinarily retails for $300 and includes every typeface designed by the SummitType font foundry (handy for designers), and Hear, an app that adds audio equalizer options to every app on your Mac (nice for the audiophiles in the crowd).

The deal lasts until Dec. 21, so you still have another 16 days to decide if it’s tantalizing enough to merit your hard-earned cash.

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Find My Friends. A new app that lets you locate family and friends who agree to share their location with you on a map. This is included free in iCloud, and you have lots of controls over privacy, including setting specific times for sharing.

Find My iPhone. Introduced under MobileMe, it’s included free with iCloud. Lets you track your registered devices should they get lost. Now works with Macs, too, under Lion.

Free email. iCloud borrows the Me.com domain from its predecessor to provide free email addresses to anyone who wants one.

Contact, calendar, reminder, bookmark, note syncing. Automatically, in the background, all the content listed as well as email will be synced across iOS 5 and Lion devices, so long as you’re signed in, have an active network connection (Wi-Fi or 3G) and have syncing turned on.

Photo Stream. View photos taken from your iPhone automatically in your iPad’s image gallery, or in iPhoto on the desktop, or on your Apple TV. Basically, take a photo once and have it everywhere. Photo Stream automatically takes your 1,000 latest photos and keeps them on iOS devices, plus you can opt to keep them in your Camera Roll permanently.

Documents in the Cloud. Shared libraries of cloud-based document storage will make it easy to start a document in an app on your iOS device and continue it on the desktop, or vice versa. This will gradually make its way out to third-party apps, too.

Backup and automatic downloads. You can now restore purchases of apps, books and music (U.S. only for now) to devices associated with your Apple ID, and also set them up to automatically download content you purchase elsewhere. Finally, you can back up your device’s settings, data and apps directly to iCloud and then restore from that should you need to do a fresh install.

5 GB free; storage upgrades available. Everyone gets 5 GB of iCloud storage (including your email, backups and other data) free, but if you need more you can pay to get it. $20 per year gets you an additional 10 GB of storage, $40 gets you 20 GB more and $100 secures 50 GB for a total of 55 GB.

iCloud will be available to all iOS 5 users when that update arrives on Oct. 12, and to Mac owners running OS X Lion at the same time.

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1. Reeder

Most of us likely do a lot of reading on our Macs. Reeder for Mac is a great way to make that reading even more of a pleasure. The RSS app ties into your Google Reader account, and syncs read and unread status Google and with Reeder for iOS devices. The Mac version was already a lot like the iPad version when it first came out, and with full-screen support in the latest version, it’s even more so. Grab a coffee, but leave the newspaper on the table; Reeder with full-screen active provides a distraction-free environment for catching up with all the latest.

2. Screens

When you need to remotely access your computer, there isn’t always an easy solution, especially when you’re trying to connect from the road. Screens (combined with Screens Connect for hassle-free remote access) is a great way to quickly and easily setup and manage VNC access between Macs. With full-screen support, working on your home computer away from home (or your work computer from home) feels even more like you’re actually working on the target machine, since everything you see is on the remote Mac.

3. Fluid

I noted this update when it arrived, just ahead of Lion’s release, but it’s worth noting again. Fluid provides the ability to turn any website into its own, dedicated Mac app by creating a site-specific browser (SSB). Facebook, Google Docs, and Google Plus are all favorite Fluid apps of mine, and full-screen support means I can keep them even more safely contained away from more productive, work-related apps and content.

4. MarsEdit

If you’re a regular blogger with multiple sites on the go, you’ve probably heard of the Mac standby MarsEdit. It’s a blogging client that’s compatible with most major blogging services, including Blogger and Tumblr, and it’s a native Mac app. MarsEdit’s latest update allows you to compose and edit posts in full-screen mode, which means you can get down to writing in a much more distraction-free environment.

5. Sparrow

Apple’s new Mail app in Lion remedies a lot of the problems many users had with it, and brings some nice new features as well, but that doesn’t mean it’ll feel right for everyone. Alternatives are always appreciated, and none maybe more so than Sparrow, a nice light native email client originally designed for Gmail. Sparrow now works with most other email services as well, and it has a refreshing simplicity that Apple’s own offering can’t match. Plus, now that it has full-screen support, it provides a great environment for catching up on your correspondence in a really focused way.

Those aren’t the only apps with full-screen support, but they are my favorite. What are yours, and which would you like to see get the update that don’t have it yet?

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A full-screen world

While it may seem a largely cosmetic feature, in Lion, full-screen apps are assigned their own space and get pinned to the top of the screen when you access Mission Control. You can access Mission Control to see all your spaces by swiping up with three fingers. You can also swipe from space to space by swiping to the left or right with three or four fingers. Depending on how you’ve assigned your spaces in Mission Control, it may be quicker to access other apps than cmd-tabbing. One downside, though, is that multiple apps running in full screen can’t occupy the same space. The biggest downside to full screen is losing the ability to drag a file from the Finder to a mail message as an attachment. Naturally, if I kick it out of full screen I can drag attachments in just fine, so it isn’t a huge problem.

Conversations

If you’ve grown to like Gmail or Outlook’s message-threading features, you’ll also like how it works in Mail. If there’s a conversation, you’ll see the latest mail message in your Inbox and a counter in the lower-right corner of the preview telling you how many messages are in this conversation.

Each conversation looks like the above screenshot. While you can’t make the page graphic (message boxes with a raised, shadowed appearance) go away — setting “show classic view” in Preferences only changes how the Inbox list looks, not the conversation messages — I quite like the look.

Better searches

Apple advertises searches as being better: Simply type in anything you can remember and you should stand a better chance of finding what you’re looking for. Using a slew of search phrases I had great results. The only time it got stymied is when I searched “word attachment.” It can search for messages that have attachments, just not apparently the app attached to it. I couldn’t find an easy way to search all of my mailboxes at once; the best I could do is all of the Inboxes, which doesn’t do me any good if the mail message is my All Mail Gmail folder. For that, I found creating a Smart Mailbox was the best way to search everything thoroughly.

Cosmetic touch-ups

There are a few cosmetic items that are welcome additions. One is the ability to hide frequently quoted text, so you don’t get long email messages that also contain the previous 10 emails in the chain. You can also see the first two lines of the email in the message list, too. There’s a new Favorites bar that lets you pin frequently used folders to the top of the screen and displays the unread-messages count. Heavy folders and rules users should appreciate this.

Final thoughts

Mail in OS X Lion gets a much-needed upgrade. Mail was one of the Lion changes I was looking forward to, and it hasn’t disappointed me. I haven’t run into any of the problems I’ve encountered with previous versions (endlessly updating Inboxes, messages that refuse to be marked as read, messages that refuse to be sent, SMTP servers that refuse to be remembered). If, like me, you’re a heavy user of OS X Mail, I think you’ll like this new version.

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The just-released Postbox 2.0 introduces a handful of new features that include Quick Moves, a Focus Pane, Quick Replies and better Conversation Views.

The threaded Conversation View is pretty well done with quick reply buttons readily available to respond to any particular email within the chain. I also really like the Inspector Pane that gives you some shortcuts, including all the links contained within the email thread.

The Focus Pane is all about organization. Quickly navigate to emails that match a date or topic, or are unread. If you want to deal with an email later, drag it to the “Later” topic and come back to it or click on “Today” to see emails only from today. The idea is that if organize your mail better, you’ll save time and be free of distractions.

Speaking of distractions, you can post directly to Twitter, Facebook or FriendFeed from the menu bar also.

Pros:

Conversation View is very well done, with quick navigation, and the Inspector Pane could be very useful for link-happy users. Organizing mail into topics is accomplished quickly by dragging and dropping. The Focus Pane drills down to what’s really important. Keyboard shortcuts are a time saver for those who like to keep it old school.

Cons:

It’s $40, and the free Apple Mail works well enough for most. Organizing mail into topics requires commitment, and not all users care that much. There’s also no Exchange support. This is disappointing, considering Apple Mail has it built-in and business users can be notoriously organized when it comes to email.

Summary:

Postbox 2.0 supports POP and IMAP protocols, but has no Exchange support. There’s a 30-day trial, and it’s $40 if you want to keep it after that. If Apple’s Mail isn’t quite delivering and you need more organization, Postbox is probably the solution for you.

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According to MacStories Fernando Valente, a Mac software developer, emailed the Apple CEO questioning him on whether or not such a service would become a reality. After the email was sent, Valente, like many others, was not expecting a response. But much to his surprise only a few hours after sending it, he received one. The email from Steve Jobs was brief and to the point, simply stating that “nope,” no such service is on the way.

Fernando’s email was sent following last week’s widespread rumor that such a service was on the way. The rumor hinted that the speculated Mac App store would follow the same principles as the current iTunes store, with a strict approval process also in place.

However, Steve’s typically candid response has finally set the record straight, no doubt to the dismay of some, but to the delight of others. There will be no Mac App Store. At least not in the foreseeable future.

Would you like to see a Mac specific app store selling approved OS X software? Let us know in the comments.

The Setup

1. First off, you’re going to need a Gmail account. You can either use an existing one or set up a new one. If you want an existing Gmail account to be part of your new universal inbox, I’d suggest using that one instead of setting up new one and having to fetch mail from there as well. If you need to set up a new account, you can do it by going to the Gmail homepage and clicking ‘Create an account’.
2. Once you’ve logged into your account, locate the Settings page, the link to which can be found in the top right corner, next to your email address. When it has loaded, open up the Accounts and Import tab.
3. Set up your first email account for Gmail to check for you by clicking ‘Add POP3 email account’, which is the third white button from the top. This opens a new window for you to input the details of the email account you want to be checked.

Getting Gmail to Check Other Accounts

1. The first thing you need to enter is the email address for the account you want to be checked. Then click ‘Next Step’.
   
2. Another screen will appear asking for specific details such as username, password and server settings. If you are unsure about any of these options, your service provider will most likely have a help page. It will most likely be a page explaining how to access your emails from a desktop client, however you can use this information as well. Once you have added your information, click ‘Add account’.
   
3. You’ll be taken to another screen asking if you want to send mail from the account you’ve just set up. Whether you want to or not is up to you (you can always change this later). If you decide not to do this, any emails you send from your iPhone will have a From line as your Gmail account.
   
4. If you do decide to do it, you’ll be prompted to enter a few more details about your email account. This is not crucial to this technique, however, so I won’t be going through this.

Your Gmail account will now check your email account and pull in any emails that come through. You can add up to five accounts for Gmail to check, so this will accommodate almost everyone’s needs.

Access on Your iPhone

Now that you’ve got Gmail putting emails from other accounts in its inbox, you’re mostly there. All you need to do now is set up Gmail on your iPhone so that you can check it from there.

1. Go to Mail, Contacts, Calendars under the Settings app.
2. Tap ‘Add account’ to add the Gmail account.
3. Tap the Gmail logo to have your iPhone automatically set up the server settings that always stay the same for Gmail accounts.
   
4. Enter your details and tap Save.

Your Gmail account is now all ready to go on your iPhone and you can access it through the Mail app. If you check your emails then Gmail should have imported some of your recent emails from the other accounts, and any new emails you receive will be in the same inbox.

Conclusion

Obviously this isn’t the same as a proper unified inbox — Gmail only checks other email accounts for new mail every hour. This is the next best thing though, and it’ll get you by until Apple announces the official feature in the next iPhone OS. The upside is it doesn’t cost anything and you can get it now.

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As a small business owner/sole proprietor, connecting with customers is hard. There are all sorts of communication tools available, with social media being the most prevalent today. However, as old-school as it might seem, email is still the killer-app for the web. And, given that, you must have a strategy to connect with your customers via email. Thankfully, there are many tools on the Mac available to help you do just that.

What type of email campaigns might you use? Some examples might include:

• Marketing Slicks
• Press Releases
• Newsletters
• Advertisements
• And more

For the purpose of this article, let’s look at both Pro editions of Direct Mail from e3 Software and MaxBulk Mailer from MaxProg. Both applications are relatively easy to use, although I found Direct Mail to be a little easier to work with overall. Each version has more features than their basic counterparts. To see a comparison list between the standard and pro features, please read here (Direct Mail) and here (MaxBulk).

Direct Mail Pro 2.2.3

When you first launch Direct Mail Pro, you receive a warning about sending SPAM. This is noteworthy, because of the two apps, only Direct Mail Pro mentions this as a potential issue.

SPAM nanny screen from Direct Mail

Upon agreement, you are presented with the main application and can see the options available. Direct Mail Pro automatically detects and uses any email accounts already present on your computer. To get started, I created a sample email (I copied the HTML from another email) and then added Mail Merge tags for the date and first name (there are tags available):

Direct Mail Initial Window with an example Email - credit comes from U2.com

Direct Mail Pro integrates with the Address Book, Microsoft Entourage and Daylite (as well as others) so that you can easily add users or groups. Once the users are added, click Send Message…

Direct Mail Pro includes (for a significant upgrade fee of $60) an email delivery service if you would rather not use your own email account.

Send Message Dialog Box

After you click Send, you’ll receive another SPAM warning. In some ways, this is irritating, although I can understand the precaution from the developer. Frankly, there should be an option to not see this dialog box.

SPAM nanny dialog box, round II

With the included e3 Delivery Service in Direct Mail Pro, you can track emails and view reports that include the email message, statistics, any hyperlinks, if the email was received by its audience as well as any potential bounced emails:

Direct Mail Pro History Tab with Reports/Results

MaxBulk Mailer Pro 7.1

When compared to Direct Mail Pro, MaxBulk Mailer Pro is a similar, yet different animal. MaxBulk takes a more hands-on approach to solving the email campaign problem. There is much more configuration involved than Direct Mail Pro, and with that configuration comes a little more flexibility.

There are no SPAM warnings when you first run MaxBulk Mailer Pro. The application window is very similar to Direct Mail Pro in that you have main some main tabs and simple toolbar for managing your email creation. In the example below, I have created a plain text email and provided some initial tags and specified formatting.

MaxBulk Mailer Pro Message Window with Tags

Unlike Direct Mail Pro, you do have to configure your email settings in the Settings tab. This is more cumbersome and can take some trial and error to ensure you have the right configuration prior to sending your message. Further, there is a preview tab that displays what the final message will look like and allows you to render your message in a browser.

Once your message has been sent, you receive a confirmation email with the relevant statistics:

MaxBulk Mailer Pro Delivery Report

A unique feature to MaxBulk Mailer Pro is that you can configure your own server to process the results of any email campaigns you send (this takes a little more configuration and advanced knowledge of database and FTP setup). Compared to Direct Mail Pro which includes its e3 Delivery service (and for a $60 premium), this is a nice feature.

MaxBulk Mailer Pro MLM Installation Dialog Box

Conclusion

Are you a do-it-yourselfer or do you like tools that do the work for you? If you’re the former, then I recommend MaxBulk Mailer. If you’re the latter, then I recommend Direct Mail Pro. Of course, there are other factors you need to consider, including:

Pricing

• MaxBulk Mailer Pro is $59.90, which includes the ability to track email messages that you set up on your own server.
• Direct Mail Pro is $119, but it includes the ability to track email messages, handle bounced emails and more without any extra work on your end.

Application Integration

• Native: Apple Address Book, Microsoft Entourage, Apple Mail, CSV files and more.
• Via a separate plugin, you can import contacts from Marketcircle’s Daylite as well.

As for me, I chose Direct Mail Pro. I find the product is more polished and it makes email creation and management easier. In the end, I don’t think you will fail to accomplish your customer communication goal with either program.

FTC Disclaimer: Not-for-resale copies were provided for this review.

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So, it’s a bit disjointing when a few errant notes are played out of tune. If you’ve managed to survive this disaster of a metaphor this far, you know I’m talking about Bad News. A few numbers-heavy reports this week present us with news that, if not entirely bad, is at least disappointing…

According to Electronista, NPD Group reported this week that the Blackberry Curve — of all things! — kept the iPhone 3GS from the title of first place handset in this summer’s smartphone handset sales in Northern America. Verizon’s “Buy One Get One Free” deal is said to have been the culprit; it not only offered two handsets for the price of one but also lowered the average selling price of a ‘feature phone’ handset from the same period the previous year ($88 down to $85). The iPhone 3GS and the older 3G took second and third spots respectively, which is not too shabby considering they were only beaten-out on price.

Devious Droids

More recently, Verizon’s wily ways have proven (again!) to be bad news for Apple’s smartphone. In its BrandIndex report last week, YouGov announced that Motorola’s Droid had a loyalty score of 29.3 among younger men, easily beating the iPhone’s score of 22. Why is Verizon to blame for Motorola’s success? YouGov say that loyalty scores for Motorola remain largely unchanged, so they attribute the success of the Droid to Verizon’s cunning ad campaign that has very openly criticised AT&T’s spotty 3G coverage and poured scorn on the iPhone, decrying its closed software platform, low-resolution camera and lack of multitasking ability.

Might not sound so bad, but consider that just prior to Verizon’s ad campaign, the iPhone’s loyalty score was running at a high of 48.1! It seems obvious that Verizon’s advertising was hugely effective; irrespective of whether or not the Droid is a superior platform, Verizon managed to significantly influence customer perception.

Hungry Hungry Handsets

It’s not all bad news, not really; according to a recent study conducted by AdMob and reported by Hardmac, the iPhone has captured 50 percent of the world’s 3G network bandwidth. Other mobile OS’s are trailing far behind it seems, with Symbian taking second place with 25 percent share. Android takes third place with 11 percent and RIM and Windows Mobile fail to make double digits.

I said it’s not all bad news, but the carriers might disagree with me. They’re suffering at the hands of smartphone-wielding customers and their bandwidth-hungry handsets. AT&T has been gradually upgrading its 3G network to try to cope with the added strain of millions of data-hungry mobile devices but it’s an expensive upgrade that will take years to complete. But, still — nice to know we iPhone users are being a nuisance and shaking things up a bit for The Man!

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The email, as quoted by 9to5 Mac’s Seth Weintraub, says:

Just reading again – where did anyone promise tethering by EOY? Where did you see that? We promised MMS by end of summer and ended up being a few days late for that…

In their defence, 9to5 Mac was channeling reports from TechCrunch and CNET which got them to arrive at the “before end of year” conclusion. You can hardly blame them — CNET’s headline in November 2008 read “AT&T confirms tethering coming to iPhone in 2009.” That’s pretty unequivocal as far as assertions go, right? Yet, I don’t recall anyone from AT&T sending CNET a snippy email in the interim…

Last week I wrote how AT&T told the Wall Street Journal that it needed ‘more time’ to work on tethering functionality. I also mentioned how AT&T’s CEO Ralph De La Vega said, way back in 2008, that tethering would be available “soon.” A year later it’s not unreasonable to wonder just what De La Vega’s definition of “soon” might be.

Add together the history of dropped calls, patchy 3G coverage and recent reports that the company might start throttling data for iPhone users, the snarky email above only adds to the sorry state of affairs at AT&T. However kindly you may choose to interpret that email, there are countless ways it might have been more professionally composed.

For a company still enjoying exclusive distribution and service rights for the iPhone across America, (and the prestige and profits that partnership with Apple entails) its performance in the last two years can only make us hope Apple is considering offering the iPhone to other cell carriers willing (and actually able) to do the job properly.

In any case, while the email doesn’t specifically deny tethering will become a reality this year, it certainly makes the proposition sound unlikely. AT&T announced last month it is working to expand its network, and have invested heavily in the hardware upgrades necessary to do so. That’s welcome news to long suffering customers, but those upgrades aren’t going to be completed until the end of 2011.

Or, as Mr De La Vega might put it, “soon.”

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