With Fridays dedicated to sharing some of my favorite free apps, I use Wednesdays to share some of my favorite paid apps. That said, let me get this out of the way: paying $12.99 for an app you use multiple times a day shouldn’t be considered “expensive” by any measure. The free app economy made bad guys out of those looking to get paid for their work, but think about that for a second: shouldn’t these app developers be rewarded financially for making the apps we rely on and enjoy using everyday, and if so, isn’t a one-time purchase of $12.99 rather negligible?
There are some fantastic paid apps out there these days, showcasing the efforts of a very talented and creative bunch of app developers. Supporting the app development community financially is the best way to insure great apps are developed in the future – and that’s important to us all.
Worth It iOS App of The Week
Of the dozens of apps out there that allow you to add text onto an image, Over is one of the more popular and more powerful choices. We’ve been Over users since its release, and it’s evolved well over its lifespan, with an expansive font library, a bunch of add-on graphic packs, and now after a recent update Over offers the ability to overlay a PNG logo (in-app purchase) onto any image, which is great if you’re looking to watermark your images.
At $1.99, it’s considerably more advanced than the other competing apps, and if you have the need to add text to photos, this is the app to buy.
Worth It Mac App of The Week
Cloud storage is a wonderful thing, especially in light of the relatively limited capacity of the SSD drives in most modern Mac laptops. What’s perhaps less than wonderful is the bunch of individual apps you need be running at all times to access that cloud storage. These apps (Dropbox, Box, Google Drive, OneDrive, etc.) tax system resources like available RAM, battery life, storage space, and that’s often less than ideal. Fortunately there’s Expandrive, the new go-to app when it comes to accessing cloud storage services.
Expandrive allows you to mount all your cloud storage services as virtual drives right on your desktop. This way, they’re incredibly easy to access – even allowing apps to open and save documents directly to the cloud service of your choice. As handy as that is, what’s fantastic if storage space is at a premium and you have an Internet connection, is that none of the cloud services sync to your Mac, and only pulls down individual files upon your request.
Another truly outstanding feature of Expandrive is the ability to connect to multiple instances of Google Drive, Dropbox, etc. Using the services’ dedicated apps you’d have to log out of one account and log back into another account to access both – with Expandrive that’s no longer an issue because you can simultaneously access multiple cloud drives from the same provider.
So here’s the thing, Expandrive is $49.95. That’s a significant investment to replace a a handful of apps that you’ve likely already been using for free – however, if you offset that expense with the cost of SSD storage, and the very finite availability of internal drive space on Apple’s latest portables, it begins to make perfect sense.
