After a mis-spent youth in the '80s as a service tech and salesperson at a now-closed Apple dealership, AppleInsider's Mike Wuerthele spent nearly a decade in the US Navy through the '90s as a submarine reactor chemist, where he routinely had to suffer through two Captains on the USS Hyman G Rickover (SSN-709) "borrowing" his MacWeek magazines before he got a chance to read them.
During his time in the Navy as a nuclear reactor water chemist, Mike was also instrumental in migrating the submarine fleet into the computer age, and assisted the US Army with its PowerMac G3 program. At the tail-end of his Navy service, he proposed a variant of the PowerMac G3 server program for the assorted military shipyards.
After his exit from the Navy, Mike spent 11 years in federal service as a commercial tech analyst, worked in an assortment of independent dealers, and supported a large swathe of Apple customers in the Washington DC area.
In 2012, he parlayed his experience discussing Apple and other tech companies with the federal government into a gig at MacNN and its sister site Electronista in 2012. Following the closure of those publications in July 2016, Mike moved over to AppleInsider as a content contributor. He is now the Managing Editor of AppleInsider.
You tend to know when you need a project management app. You'd be a little crazy to plan a small, intimate dinner party with a project management app but you'd be insane to build an office block without something like OmniPlan.
OmniOutliner 3 is a brainstorming app as well as a writer's tool, and with Wednesday's update brings a pared down Essentials options to the iPad. AppleInsider delves into what's good and bad about the new release.
The more technically-minded you are, and the less dependent on paper, the more you'll love Ulysses, the comprehensive writing tool for both Mac and iOS.
You'll buy Loopback for one job, and then keep finding more uses for this sound routing app for your Mac.
The latest version of the eBook creator application Vellum does just about everything to streamline book creation for iBooks, Kindle and paperback, other than write the text itself.
The Keymand iPad app connects to a Mac, and acts like a beefy, user-configurable MacBook Pro Touch Bar.
If you already know what a soundboard is, you want Farrago from long-time audio application vendors Rogue Amoeba
The new Pixelmator Pro is best described as what you would get if Apple had designed its own image editing suite.
The keyboard and keystroke automation tool update brings along more than 100 new and refined features.
The latest update to MindNode 5 for Mac and iOS brings small refinements, large features, and a redesign to the mind mapping stalwart. AppleInsider offers a closer look.
AppleInsider gets a published author to take a look at the Scrivener update, with new highlights including a much called-for rewrite of the app's Compile feature, and an interface modernization.
Light mode and improvements to Page Flip are welcome but it's still the number of books available that make the latest version of Amazon's Kindle app for iPhone and iPad a must.
TuneInstructor is ostensibly designed to organize iTunes and play your music — but a lack of coherent English tutorials and bizarre user interface choices make it bewildering.
A refresh of the long-time Mac drawing app from the Omni Group now pulls in images and text from other apps.
The popular but niche word processor chiefly used by academics and technical authors has just been updated, with 95 new features.
Lucidchart brings rapid diagrams and flowcharts to Mac and iOS, in an interface that should feel very comfortable to old-time Mac users familiar with the classic MacDraw II or Microsoft Vizio.
Users get improved controls, and can decide what other people see in the latest version of the PDF manipulation and markup tool.
Extensive editing, titling and annotation features recently added to ScreenFlow 7 make it a serious production tool.
The persistent, nagging To Do app Due adds watchOS 3 features in its latest version 2.5 update to keep you working, and focused on your critical task at hand.
If you wrote it, read it or saw it on your Mac, Atlas Recall can find it again swiftly and easily. One of AppleInsider's overloaded staffers gives it a whirl.
Screens 4 by Edovia lets you see and control the screen of one Mac from another. Wherever you are in the world, you can get your own files, see your own documents and even run apps you don't have with you.
It's hard to go back to an more ordinary PDF annotator after using LiquidText, but it is not the ultimate PDF tool for the iPad.
This year's upgrade to FileMaker Pro 16 brings small but key improvements to the database app — and AppleInsider gives you a brief overview.
AppleInsider didn't think Open and Save dialogs needed fixing, but it turns out that they could be improved — and this app does it so well you might get addicted.
Nothing can beat having the iPhone's camera with you but many, many tools can better how that camera shoots documents and what you can do with them later. AppleInsider staffers show you what apps and hardware we use to scan everything from single receipts to the contents of a history archive.
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Mike Wuerthele and William Gallagher
