Category: Mac

How to adjust the Dock size

The quickest way to change the size of the Dock is to hover your mouse cursor over the broken “divider” line until you get an icon that has two little triangles.

Once you get that icon on the Dock over those broken lines, click and hold and move your mouse upward for a larger dock or move it downward to make the Dock smaller.

How to install a third party screen saver that you downloaded for the Mac.

Found this cool Zombie screensaver so we’ll install it on the Mac.

Open the downloaded file folder and you should see a “.saver” file. There are several ways you can install a screen saver on the Mac.

1. Double click the “.saver” file and it may install itself.

2. Drag the file to the “~/Library/Screen Savers/”. The easy way to get there is by clicking on the Hard Drive icon on your desktop then click “Library” folder then the “Screen Saver” folder.

The last step is to change the our current screensaver to the new one we just installed. Right click on a empty space on the desktop. Select “Change Desktop Background”.

Click “Screen Saver”.

Your new screen saver will probably be listed under “Other”.

Gimp is a free open source image editing program available for just about every platform which includes the Mac, Linux, and Windows. It’s arguably the best free alternative to Photoshop. What makes Gimp so popular is the large user base who are very knowledgeable.

GimpShop is a version of Gimp which was created to act and feel like Photoshop. If you’re a seasoned Photoshop user then Gimpshop was made for you to feel right at home.

Seashore is also open source like Gimp but unlike Gimp it’s only available on the Mac. Based on the Mac Cocoa framework this image editor features most things you would expect from a great image editor like textures, gradients, and multiple layer support.

ChocoFlop image editor uses Apple’s CoreImage technology. One of the features of this editor is how lightweight it which makes it super fast even on older Mac hardware.

iPhoto is a free basic image editor from Apple available for Mac users. Not really for a power user but its good for basic stuff like adjusting brightness, scaling, cropping, and fixing red-eyes and managing your images on a Mac.

Preview on the Mac is more than just a image viewer, and it’s good for basic image editing. To see what it can do when viewing an image inside Preview go to Help > Preview Help.

Apple have come an incredibly long way over the past decade. From the release of the very first version of OS X, right through to the iPhone 4 and iPad in recent weeks, the change we’ve seen both in technology and Apple as a company has been remarkable.

We’re paying homage to this fascinating journey today with our very own infographic, highlighting the rise of Apple over the past ten years!

Embedding this MacTastik strip elsewhere? Please provide a link back to this post and to NCWinters.com

Everyone knows that apples are a healthy food—hence the saying “an apple a day keeps the doctor way”. But people rarely think to ask what Apples eat. When your Mac starts gobbling up too much fattening hard drive space, it’s time to call in a different kind of doctor. One that goes by the name of “Xslimmer”.

Xslimmer is a simple, effective application for safely reclaiming the surprisingly large amounts of hard drive space that can get taken up by parts of applications you don’t actually need. It’s not a compression app, although its developer LateNiteSoft also makes a product called Squeeze that compresses your files in place. Instead, Xslimmer frees up hard drive space by stripping unneeded translations and binaries from your applications.

A Look Behind the Scenes

Confused? Feel skeptical about being able to delete parts of software without blowing something up? I don’t blame you—I felt the same way the first time I used Xslimmer. An understanding of exactly what’s going on may help you feel a little bit more relaxed.

Language Files

Most applications, both those made by Apple and those made by other developers, come packed with everything they need to survive in any environment they may encounter. For one thing, they often include as many translations as the developer can afford or find volunteers to create. That may mean there are help and interface files for—in the case of Apple applications—up to eighteen languages. If you only use one (or even two or three), Xslimmer can delete the files for the other seventeen or so without endangering your application at all.

Universal Binaries

Another feature of many applications is that they ship as “universal binaries”. While some new Apple fans may be more familiar with “universal binaries” referring to applications that can run on both the iPad and the iPhone with a different interface on each, the term is rather older than that.

A few years ago, when Apple switched its entire Mac lineup from the PowerPC processors that were quickly becoming obsolete over to incompatible Intel chips, Apple started encouraging developers to ship their applications as two separate binaries (one to run on PowerPC Macs, and one to run on Intel Macs) jammed into the same app.

That way, users wouldn’t have to worry about which kind of processor they had—they could just download one big application and be sure it would run, no matter what.

32 & 64 Bit

A few developers even went a step further—they optimised their code separately for 32- and 64-bit PowerPC processors, and again for 32- and 64-bit Intel processors. The end result can be applications that are nearly four times as large as they need to be to run on one particular computer.

Xslimmer can strip out any binaries that aren’t needed for your particular machine. Doing this kind of cleaning up can be dangerous to certain applications, but for the most part the hard drive space savings make up for the few reinstallations you may need to make.

How Does Xslimmer Work?

Xslimmer has a very simple interaction model: you drag applications into it, you tell it to slim them, and it slims them. Really. That’s about as complex as it needs to be.

The Launch Screen

You can either drag apps directly into Xslimmer from Finder, if you have just an app or several you want to slim, or you can take advantage of Xslimmer’s genie feature. Genie does a once-over of your computer, finds just about every application that isn’t required for the system or part of Apple’s Developer Tools, and offers to slim all of them at once.

Xslimmer Genie

There are certain applications that, for one reason or another, Xslimmer can’t slim. Some are blacklisted applications like Dropbox and pretty much everything by Adobe; those are applications that will break if Xslimmer tries to slim them.

LateNiteSoft does a pretty good job of blacklisting breakable apps and Xslimmer has been around for a good while, so you shouldn’t have to worry too much about it accidentally breaking any applications unless you’re using something brand new that it hasn’t seen before.

You may also encounter apps that “cannot be slimmed further”; that should only happen if you’ve used Xslimmer or a similar tool before. Finally, there are certain applications that require an administrator password to slim. These are almost always Apple applications or apps placed by an installer rather than dragged and dropped into the Applications folder by a user. This is just a side effect of how installers work on OS X; those apps are no more likely to get broken than any other.

Next to each application there is a globe or set of globes, showing whether that application has languages that can be trimmed, and a “universal binary” or processor icon indicating whether there are unnecessary binaries that can be stripped.

By default, Xslimmer will try to strip both of these from each application, although it can be ordered to leave one or the other alone in the Preferences. You can also choose to get info on any app, to get a clearer picture of exactly how much space will be freed by slimming it, as well as how it will be freed.

Application Information

The clear button will handily clear out apps that can’t be slimmed. You can easily add or remove apps from the list using the plus and minus buttons at the bottom left, and then you’re free to start slimming.

The first time you hit the Slim! button, you’ll be confronted with a warning that offers to make backups of all of your applications before slimming them:

First Slim Warning

This is potentially useful, but it does sort of defeat the purpose of clearing out hard drive space. I’ve come to trust Xslimmer pretty completely, and I no longer make backups before slimming.

Slimming Complete!

Once Xslimmer has freed a gig or two of space for you, your slimming history lives under History (shock), just in case you ever need to know—for example—exactly when you stripped down Firefox. That’s almost the end of what the app can do.

Using the preferences, it can also automatically compress newly slimmed apps using Snow Leopard’s transparent compression technology, choose which binaries you want to trim (all except the native ones, or all except the very best ones), exclude certain apps and folders from having their content slimmed, choose where backups are kept, and pick which languages you want to keep around.

History

Why Xslimmer?

There are several applications with similar features to Xslimmer. First is Monolingual, a free and open source app that accomplishes the same goals, but in a less well-designed interface. Trimmit can only handle one application at a time, but trims out some things even Xslimmer misses. Unfortunately, it takes approach of drag-and-drop simplicity even further, to the point where there’s no blacklist or other feature protecting your apps from being nuked by a careless trim. Trimmit is best used in concert with Xslimmer to cut slimmable applications down even further.

Xslimmer is a brilliant and quite safe (and at $14.95, relatively inexpensive) standalone method of putting your Mac on a diet and regaining some lost hard drive space. If your hard drive space is at a premium, or if you often make fresh installs, Xslimmer can be an invaluable maintenance tool.

In this Quick Look, we’re highlighting AnyBizSoft PDF to EPUB for Mac. The developer describes AnyBizSoft PDF to EPUB as an app designed to convert PDF eBooks from PDF to EPUB format on Mac OS X. EPUB (short for electronic publication) is designed for reflowable content so that the text display can be optimized for diverse devices. After PDF to EPUB conversion, Mac users can transfer EPUB eBooks to iPad, iPhone, iPod Touch, etc for fantastic reading experience.

Read on for more information, screenshots and a 30% off discount from the AnyBizSoft team!

Screenshots

AnyBizSoft PDF to EPUB: Interface

AnyBizSoft PDF to EPUB (click for large view)

About the App

Here are the top five features you can expect to see in the latest version:

• Good Preservation: Retain original text, layout, images, and hyperlinks of PDF eBooks in the output EPUB eBooks
• Two Conversion Methods: Convert text and images to EPUB or convert each page as an image to EPUB
• Support Encrypted PDF eBooks Conversion
• Support Batch Conversion: Convert up to 50 PDF eBooks at one time
• Support Partial Conversion: Customize page ranges or select specific pages of each PDF file to convert

Requirements: Mac OS X 10.5 or later, Intel (32bit) 512MHz, 100MB and above

Price: $49

Developer: AnyBizSoft Studio

The AnyBizSoft team has been generous enough to offer our readers a 30% Off Discount!

Vote for a Review

Would you like to see us write a full review of AnyBizSoft PDF to EPUB for Mac? Have your say in our poll:

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Quick Look posts are paid submissions offering only a brief overview of an app. Vote in the poll if you think this app is worth an in-depth AppStorm review! If you’re a developer and would like to have your app profiled, you can submit it here.

Macs are awesome straight out of the box, but that doesn’t mean that you can’t make them a lot better with a few quality downloads.

Today we’ve rounded up eighty of the most handy utilities to improve the basic functionality of your Mac in a number of ways. Below you’ll find almost every kind of utility you could need, from hardware controllers to maintenance software and file organization tools.

Hardware Utilities

Dimmer for Mac – Dimmer is a free application that allows you to adjust the brightness of your display. Don’t worry… I know that there’s two special keys on the keyboard that do that for you, but currently there are 17 different brightness options for you to select on a Mac which, by all means is enough.

Dimmer for Mac

Display Maestro – Display Maestro gives you full control over attached displays, allowing the usage of all available resolutions and bit depths. This is done by ignoring the operating system setting of hiding potentially unsafe resolutions.

Drive Genius – Try Drive Genius 3, the best hard drive utility on the Mac platform – DrivePulse, Enhanced Defrag, DriveSlim, Enhanced Repartition are only a few of the award-winning features of Drive Genius 3.

SMART Utility – SMART Utility is an application to scan the internal hardware diagnostics system of hard drives. SMART (Self-Monitoring, Analysis, and Reporting Technology) is a system built into hard drives by their manufacturers to report on various measurements(called attributes) of a hard drive’s operation. The attributes can be used to detect when a hard drive is having mechanical or electrical problems, and can indicate when the hard drive is failing.

SMART Utility

Watts – Why use Watts? The battery needs to be recalibrated from time to time to keep the onscreen battery time and percent display accurate, and to keep the battery operating at maximum efficiency.

Files and Windows

A Better Finder Attributes – Change the file attributes that the Finder won’t let you touch.

A Better Finder Attributes

Afloat – Download it and it will add many window management features to most Mac applications. Keep windows afloat on top of all others, pin windows to the desktop, turn a window into an “overlay” on your screen that doesn’t hinder your work and more!

Berokyo – Berokyo lets you take control over your desktop and organize all your favorite and frequently used applications, documents, files, folders and webpages into one or more customizable multi-shelf cabinets that will keep them out
of sight but yet close at hand and ready to be launched.

Blast – Blast keeps track of the files you’ve been using on your computer and gives you super easy and lightning fast access to them.

Boxtop – Launch and quit applications from the menubar. Acts like another dock.

Breeze – Breeze gives you simple window management on Mac OS X through a concept called “window states”. When you save a window state, Breeze remembers the relative size and position of the focused window.

Breeze

Camouflage – Do you have way too many items on your desktop? Do you hate cleaning up that mess? Camouflage is the right utility for you. It hides all the icons and leaves nothing but the pure wallpaper.

Compress Files – Compress Files is an easy-to-use tool for compress, archive, encrypt files and omit Mac-specific invisible files.

Dragoman – Dragoman batch converts image, photo, music, sound and archive files. It supports the popular image file formats JPEG, PDF, TIFF and PNG, as well as digital camera formats from Canon, Kodak, Sony, Nikon, Olympus and Fuji cameras.

DropDMG – The easiest way to create and work with Mac disk images.

DropDMG

DropLook – Unfortunately, Quick Look is a little bit shy and lonesome: if you’re viewing a Quick Look preview and switch to another application, the preview goes into hiding, and you can only ever have one Quick Look preview open at a time. Unlike Quick Look, DropLook windows stay open when you switch to another application, and you can open multiple preview windows at a time.

HoudahSpot – HoudahSpot helps you manage your files by assigning tags to them. Tags are non-hierarchical keywords assigned to files, and the organizational purpose of tags is similar to that of folders. However, a crucial difference is that a file may be assigned several tags and be located by any of them, no matter where they are.

invisibliX – invisibliX is a little application to work with invisible files in Finder. Show/mask/modify visibility status.

Jump – Jump is a cool utility designed to quickly launch applications, open documents, or access folders. When there is not enough space
in the Apple Dock, you can use Jump to store an endless number of items! It can be used in conjunction with the Apple Dock or as its replacement.

moveAddict – moveAddict is a Snow Leopard-only application that provides a functionality the Finder was missing, the ability to move files using the keyboard. It’s meant to replace dragging and dropping for anyone that would rather use the keyboard instead of the mouse.

NameChanger – Rename a list of files quickly and easily. See how the names will change as you type.

NameChanger

PrimeFiles – Primefiles lets you quickly launch applications, open documents and browse folders from any application. With PrimeFiles, you can reduce the number of items in the Apple Dock or the Finder sidebar and have all your favorite files at hand.

Raskin – Inspired by Jef Raskin, our zoomable user interface shows you all the stuff on your computer on a single surface. Using zoom and pan to view, arrange and open documents feels so right.

Stay – If you’re fastidious about keeping your windows tidy, Stay is for you. Stay ensures that your windows are always where you want them to be, even as you connect and disconnect displays.

Switché – Switché is a Snow Leopard-only application that can be used to replace the default CMD+Tab application switcher. Switché doesn’t try to reinvent the wheel and uses Exposé for all of its functions. Switché can easily CMD+Tab between applications, or individual windows.

Maintenance

AppCleaner – AppCleaner is a small application which allows you to thoroughly uninstall unwanted apps.

AppCleaner

CleanMyMac – Enjoy a clean mac with a few easy clicks! The world’s easiest-to-use maintenance solution. This all-in-one tool includes everything you need to keep your Mac clean and healthy.

Cocktail – The application serves up a scrumptious mix of maintenance tools and interface tweaks, all accessible via a comprehensive graphical interface. Most of Cocktail’s major features are arranged in five basic categories. In addition, a Pilot lets you clean, repair and optimize your system with one click of the button.

DaisyDisk – Analyze disk usage and free up disk space on Mac – DaisyDisk scans your disks and presents their content as interactive maps where you can easily spot unusually large files and remove them to get more free space. The map gives you an overview of your data, so you always know what your hard disks are filled with.

IceClean – IceClean is a powerful System Maintenance and Optimization Tool using only UNIX built-in System Tasks to help your Mac stay healty and to keep it running smoothly. Version 3.0 is now completely renewed in Scripting and Cocoa Interface for help you in faster and useful Tasks Managing of All Unix Power.

MainMenu – MainMenu is a powerful maintenance tool to keep your Mac running like new, packed in a slick and simple interface. Improve application performance, make searching faster and speed up your disk access.

MainMenu

MacCleanse – MacCleanse is a small yet powerful application geared towards purifying your system. In only seconds, it can perform over fifty tasks which would take nearly an hour to perform manually. Safely erasing caches, logs, cookies, histories, and more… MacCleanse won’t miss a thing and could reclaim hundreds of megabytes of storage space.

MacKeeper – MacKeeper offers a new approach to system maintenance that will: Support you and your Mac with essential utilities, tools and online services, extend your Mac’s features for even more flexibility and guarantee you 24/7 professional support

MacPilot – Scared of the terminal or can’t be bothered to remember those commands to customize your system the way you want? MacPilot is your digital savior. Easily enable and disable hidden features in Mac OS X, optimize and repair your system, and perform numerous routine maintenance operations with the click of a button!

MacPilot

Socks – Socks is a utility for troubleshooting, maintaining, optimizing, and customizing Mac OS X.

Tidy Up! – Tidy Up! is a complete duplicate finder and disk tidiness utility.

Icons and Dock

IconBox – conBox 2.0 is an iPhoto like application that enables you to store, manage & change your icons or dock using simple drag & drop like functionality which has been seamlessly integrated into our new “Box” system.

IconBox

Dock Menus – Is your dock cluttered and interfering with your workflow? Dock Menus is your saviour! With Dock Menus, you can create docks that can be moved around your screen. The dock menus act exactly like your dock, so like the rest of your Mac, it is easy to use. Everybody loves to personalize things. With Dock Menus you can customize your dock menus to reflect your personality and how you work.

Dock Spaces – A tiny application that allows you to have up to 10 different docks and swap anytime you want from the menu bar.

Backup Utilities

Carbon Copy Cloner – Spinning for years at 75MPH, your hard drive’s catastrophic crash could really hinder your productivity. Use CCC to make a bootable backup of your digital life today!

Carbon Copy Cloner

ChronoSync – ChronoSync is the complete data management utility that allows you to efficiently synchronize or backup files and folders from one disk location to another.

File Synchronization – Synchronize multiple pairs of folders or files. It has been designed to be easy to use and quick to do the job. It was based originally on the File Synchronization tool provided by Apple with the old Mac OS, but has a few improvements and features to help get the job done quickly and efficiently.

ForeverSave – ForeverSave automatically creates versions of your documents. In case you lose one, just restore it and continue your work.

Get Backup – Get Backup gracefully combines various backup capabilities, such as scheduling, compression tools, the ability to restore an archive on any computer without necessarily using Get Backup, and much more. And, more amazingly, that all these come free of charge.

SmartBackup – SmartBackup is an easy to use alternative backup application for Mac OS X. SmartBackup can create fast and efficient backups of your data, or a full bootable clone of your system.

SmartBackup

Twin – Twin is the most flexible online backup solution for Mac OS X, compatible with most Internet servers: FTP, FTPS, SFTP, WebDAV, Amazon S3, MobileMe. It even supports offline backups to external drives.

Privacy and Security

Exces – Exces. Simple, pretty, secure. Exces allows you to protect your precious files with the click of a button. Just pick a password, lock, and you’re good to go. Exces uses the strong, uncracked AES encryption standard.

MacHider – Cutting edge solution to hide your private data. MacHider is an innovative product intended to put out of sight your confidential information from third parties or other unwanted eyes.

MacHider

Prey – Prey is a lightweight application that will help you track and find your laptop if it ever gets stolen. It works in all operating systems and not only is it Open Source but also completely free.

Tiptoe – The first privacy application to bring a “private browsing” like feature to all sorts of applications. Tiptoe lets you chat, view images and movies, edit documents and more with the confidence that a trail of your actions won’t be stored. If you need it to, Tiptoe can clean up your old trails.

VigiMac – VigiMac is a free tool to track your Mac on the Net if it has been stolen. VigiMac is not intrusive and uses very low bandwidth. Once the script is installed and your Mac is registered, it is possible to know its location in case of theft (if it can connect on the Net and if you follow our few advices).

Watchmac – Watchmac monitors your Mac for possible infringements. For instance, when someone tries to unlock your screensaver but fails to enter the correct password, Watchmac will record this event and can even take pictures using the built-in (or an externally connected iSight).

MacHider

Mouse and Trackpad

DwellClick – DwellClick lets you use your Mac without clicking. Just use your mouse or trackpad to point where you want to click, and DwellClick will generate a click for you. And with its unique Auto Drag feature, dragging is effortless too.

MagicPrefs – Extend the functionality and configuration options of the Apple Magic Mouse.

MagicPrefs

Mouseposé – Mouseposé 3 is an essential tool for everyone doing presentations or demos. If turned on, it dims the screen and puts a spotlight on the area around the mouse pointer, easily guiding the audience‘s attention to an area of interest.

MouseWizard – Do you want more from your Magic Mouse? MouseWizard is a simple utility to enhance the use of your Magic Mouse. You can easily customize your Magic Mouse to increase your productivity.

Sesamouse – The Magic Mouse hardware is full of potential — so much more than scrolling and swiping. Sesamouse interprets more motions, letting you zoom and rotate in gesture-capable apps like iPhoto and Preview. It even sends information about each finger on the mouse’s surface to software that supports advanced multitouch. Just open Sesamouse to open sesame!

Automation

Apptivate – There are a lot of applications that would be better if you could assign a system wide hotkey for them. This is where Apptivate comes into the picture. Apptivate lets you assign a system wide shortcut for any application or script file on your system for easy access any time.

Cronette – Cronette it’s a software to specify tasks to be launched automatically by the Mac. It can be used on unattended Mac Servers or also on regular Mac workstations for tasks to execute during the night or for recurring tasks to be performed on a regular basis.

Cockpit – You are looking for a way to run scripts, tasks and even more with a click of a button or just with a hotkey? With Cockpit you can do all this and even more.

Cockpit

Copy Path Finder Button – This button enables you to copy the POSIX path of one or more Finder items to the clipboard. Drag Copy Path.app to your applications folder or elsewhere and from there to Finder’s toolbar.

FastScripts – Powerful script management utility. Instant access to your scripts, by keyboard shortcut or menubar.

MacSpeech Dictate – MacSpeech Dictate provides a whole new way to interact with your Mac. Instead of typing, use your voice to input text; rather than clicking your mouse, just speak commands. With MacSpeech Dictate, it’s easy.

Keyboard Maestro – With Keyboard Maestro you can design a custom action sequence with your own shortcuts and use them at any time, you can navigate through running applications and open windows with Program Switcher, and you can work with an unlimited number of clipboards – all by pressing simple keystrokes.

Keyboard Maestro

Desktop Enhancements

DateLine – DateLine displays a linear calendar on your Mac desktop which provides easy access to iCal and your events. The appearance of the DateLine is endlessly customizable and themeable.

GeekTool – A PrefPane (System Preferences module) for Mac OS 10.5. It let you display on your desktop different kind of informations, provided 3 default plugins .

Hyperspaces – Hyperspaces works with Apple’s Spaces to let you customize each Space so that it’s recognisably different from the others. It does this through a set of great visual decorations.

Hyperspaces

iCalViewer – iCalViewer displays iCal calendar events as boxes dynamically moving towards a finish line which is now. It can do this on the desktop, in a window, or even over your screen-saver.

iDeskCal – iDeskCal embeds your calendar on your desktop, above your wallpaper but below your desktop items. With iDeskCal you can quickly and effortlessly know exactly what is on your calendar for the current day, and beyond.

iDeskCal

SaneDesk – Spaces are great and we all use them. What about your desktop? Desktop always stays the same: wallpaper, desktop icons and dock do not change. What if you could change them on the fly, depending on what you want to do? Hide desktop icons entirely or show them all? That would be like adding entirely new dimension to regular spaces.

Misc

AppChest – AppChest is a smart new elegant way of storing your application licenses as well as checking out today‘s latest and greatest Mac application deals.

AppChest

Blitz – Focusing on a running application with Blitz suspends all other apps in the foreground. Some programs may seem like they would require very little of the CPU, but could actually be hogging more than their fair share. By suspending these apps with Blitz, your Mac will be able to dedicate maximum power to your present task. Defocusing will resume your other apps right where they left off.

Caffeine – Caffeine is a tiny program that puts an icon in the right side of your menu bar. Click it to prevent your Mac from automatically going to sleep, dimming the screen or starting screen savers. Click it again to go back. Right-click (or ?-click) the icon to show the menu.

iStat Menus – The most advanced system notifier. Monitors CPU, disk usage, battery, network, disk activity, memory and more.

iStat Menus

Jet Lag – Jet Lag runs invisibly in the background to automatically change your Mac’s timezone. Do yourself a favor and never worry about your clock again.

Presto – Quickly insert greetings, frequently used text or phrases, and signatures.

Snapplr – Snapplr is the ultimate screenshot tool for Mac OS X. It’s tightly integrated into the system and thus a perfect replacement for the original tool. Yet Snapplr is totally easy to use and adds some great features that make sharing screenshots a breeze.

Stuf – Stuf is a clipboard manager with a difference, you can copy and paste between different Macs over your wired or wireless network!

Stuf

WebSaver – The powerful, easy and affordable way to create screensaver with content of your own choice.

WhatKey – WhatKey helps you know you’re pressing the correct key shown in a keyboard shortcut. By holding down option on your keyboard for a couple seconds you get a nice bezel.

Tell Us Your Favorite Mac Utilities!

In order to decrease the overflow with past articles and continue to provide you with fresh content, the list above has many notable absences (no Quicksilver!?).

Leave a comment below and let us know both what your favorites are from the selection above as well as any must-have apps you use that didn’t make the list!

ClipMenu is an incredibly neat little app that we’ve mentioned in several recent articles here on AppStorm. However, we’ve never given it a proper review and wanted to take the time to show you just how cool it is.

If you’ve downloaded ClipMenu before and only given it a brief try, there is a lot of functionality that you might have missed. Below we’ll walk you through the full feature set so you can be sure to take full advantage of all that the application does.

The Search Begins

There are tons of clipboard managers for Mac. Some of them are simple context menus, others have full-fledged GUIs and huge features sets. The ultimate solution for you pretty much comes down to what you’re looking for in this type of app.

When I set off in search for the perfect clipboard manager I had very specific needs. First, it needed to be free. It’s a fairly simple concept and I just knew there would be enough free options available to forgo dishing out twenty bucks for glorified copy/paste functionality. Obviously, it also needed to track an extensive history of both text and images.

These requirements are fairly simple and easy to find in free apps. One feature that really limited my options though was speed; it had to be super fast and keyboard shortcut driven.

One final thing that I was searching for was a solid snippet manager. As a full-time writer and web designer, I wanted something to organize all the various snippets of text and code that I use on a daily basis. In fact, this was really an entirely different search. In my mind I was looking for two different apps: a clipboard manager and a snippets manager.

Originally, I thought Jumpcut was part of the solution. It works great, is completely free and served me well for months. However, I was still coming up short in the snippets area. Then one day, on this very site, I came across a brief mention of an app called ClipMenu. Once I realized all that it did I switched instantly and never looked back.

This little free app is so fully featured and perfect at what it does that it felt like discovering Quicksilver all over again. To see what I mean, let’s jump in and look at all the features.

The Clipboard Manager

First and foremost ClipMenu is a clipboard manager. The clipboard is an incredibly handy utility on every operating system but is unfortunately usually limited to recalling only the most recent item copied. Clipboard managers enhance the clipboard by giving you the ability to recall several formerly clipped items.

At its core, ClipMenu is an incredibly simple menu-based tool. One click on the icon in your menu bar brings up a menu with the past twenty items you copied to the clipboard.

ClipMenu Clipboard History

When you click on the item that you want, it will automatically be pasted into whatever application is currently active.

Types of Data

ClipMenu isn’t limited to simple text snippets. Instead it recognizes eight unique types of data that are automatically stored and recalled through your normal copy and paste commands.

Types of Data

As you can see in the preference panel above, you can choose to disable any type of data that you don’t want included. For instance, if you frequently copy very large images and don’t want to bog down your machine by keeping these in the memory, simply uncheck the boxes relating to images.

It’s Where You Are

The key feature that makes ClipMenu so fast is that you don’t have to travel all the way to the menu bar every time you want to use it.

Pop Up Menu

Instead, a quick keyboard shortcut of your choosing brings up a floating menu wherever your cursor happens to be. This allows you to quickly call up the menu, grab the item you want and get back to what you were doing without wasting time traveling around the screen.

General Options

One of the greatest things about ClipMenu is that nearly everything it does is completely customizable.

General Options

As you can see in the image above, you can customize various features such as how many items you want to store, the order the items are displayed, exporting options, applications to exclude and even the icon that is shown in the menu bar (there are lots of choices).

Menu Options

In addition to general behavior options, you can customize a lot of attributes relating to the menu itself.

Menu Options

You can control the behavior of how many items are stored in a folder, how long the preview text is, the size of the preview images, the length of tooltips, etc.

If you’re a complete control freak like me, the ability to change all of this for your own workflow is excellent. However, if you favor a simpler setup, you don’t have to touch a single one of these settings as they are all perfectly functional by default.

Actions

Yet another feature that makes ClipMenu so powerful is the ability to perform a plethora of actions on a string of text.

Actions

There are tons of preset actions to change the case of a string, surround it in tags, convert it to plain text, etc. You can even create and drag in your own custom actions.

Under the Actions menu, you can assign a keyboard shortcut to a given action. For instance, I have option-click set to “paste as plain text.” Notice that I also have control-click set to open the action window so I can access any actions to which I haven’t assigned a shortcut.

Keep in mind that these actions can be applied to either clipboard items or the snippets that we’ll examine in the next section.

Snippets

As I mentioned above, apart from recalling your clipboard history, ClipMenu can also permanently store frequently used text snippets.

Snippets

These snippets can be anything you find yourself typing manually on a daily basis: portions of code, email signatures, website passwords, etc. If you’re a developer, this is awesome for all those little bits HTML, CSS and JavaScript that you can never remember or simply don’t want to manually type out all the time. One of the few features I’d love to see added to this app is optional syntax highlighting for snippets, which is unfortunately not present.

You can organize snippets into folders, rearrange their order and recall/insert them quickly with the same keyboard shortcut that you use to call up your clipboard history.

The Best Free Clipboard Manager?

If this isn’t one of the most fully featured free clipboard managers you’ve ever seen, I’d love to know what is.

The simple non-intrusive design makes ClipMenu one of those apps that really starts to feel like a default part of the operating system, so much so that you feel a bit lost when you sit down at a Mac without it.

If you’re willing to drop some cash, there are definitely prettier, more powerful premium options out there such as iClipboard and Clips, but I personally find the interfaces of some of these apps to be a little too big and distracting for a simple copy and paste tool and actually prefer the scaled-back no-hassle ClipMenu workflow.

Conclusion

To sum up, ClipMenu is a fast and remarkably fully-featured clipboard and snippet manager that is powerful enough to get the job done and simple enough to improve your workflow without complicating it.

As you can probably tell, I really love this app and use it more than almost any other utility on my Mac. A huge thanks to Naotaka Morimoto for taking the time to build such a handy utility and then distributing it free.

Leave a comment below and let us know what clipboard manager you use and how it stacks up to ClipMenu both in features and in price.

Envato, the company behind AppStorm, is turning four! To celebrate we’ve just released our Birthday Bundle for 2010 and it’s even more MASSIVE than last year!

Envato Birthday Bundle 2010

What do you get?

• Over $400 of Envato Marketplace files including WordPress themes, graphics, audio, video and more!
• $50 of hosting from MediaTemple
• A $10 discount on any RockablePress book

How much does it cost? Just $20! Check out all the details at envato.com/birthday-bundle/2010.

But you’d better hurry. The bundle is available for five days only and runs out on Tuesday, August 24 at 12:00pm Melbourne (Australia) time.

In this Quick Look, we’re highlighting Raskin. The developer describes Raskin as a desktop user interface Inspired by Jef Raskin which shows you all the stuff on your computer on one single surface. And – with its intuitive zoom and pan navigation – Raskin lets you view, arrange and open documents with ease. In minutes you’ll discover the simplicity and intelligence of our desktop alternative. Raskin has been optimized to run on Mac OS X Snow Leopard.

Read on for more information and screenshots!

Screenshots

Raskin

Raskin

About the App

Here are the top five features you can expect to see in the latest version:

• Zoom and pan to open, find, edit and organize documents.
• Quickly navigate across the Raskin Surface
• Trackpad, Magic Trackpad, and Magic Mouse gesture enabled
• “Zoom away” from any document straight into Raskin [??-Scroll or ??R]
• “Zoom in” to open document in its application

Requirements: Mac OS X 10.6.3

Price: $49

Developer: Raskin Software LLC

Vote for a Review

Would you like to see us write a full review of Raskin? Have your say in our poll:

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Quick Look posts are paid submissions offering only a brief overview of an app. Vote in the poll if you think this app is worth an in-depth AppStorm review! If you’re a developer and would like to have your app profiled, you can submit it here.

In my last software review, I covered Blast, an application that shows you the recent files you’ve open or modified. In a similar spirit – but with more of a creative, professional spin – I’d like to introduce you to GridIron Software’s Flow.

Flow’s main goal is to help you stay sane and organized with all of the different files and projects you have cluttered around your Mac or Window’s box. Instead of creating a large ‘collection bucket’ for your files or automatically sort them as you create them, Flow takes a different approach, more on that after the break.

How It Works

When you first launch Flow, it will go through an installer to get started. Afterwards, you should notice that you have both an icon in your Applications folder as well as a hexagonal icon that will sit in your menu bar.

UI Highlights

Flow’s approach to keeping your creative files organized is different than most pieces of software. It keeps track of where every file lives and how that file is connected to others on your system. So, instead of forcing rules or structure onto your creative process, it just is an omnipresent application that follows what you make on your computer- be it a Photoshop file, Illustrator document, a Final Cut Pro project or any other creative endeavor.

Going With the Flow

I found Flow to have a fairly high learning curve. I would highly recommend you to check out the numerous videos and screencasts they have on their website. It really helps understanding what the software is designed to do before you try to integrate it within your workflow.

To make things clearer, here’s a usecase example. I created an Indesign file that had other images and layers plugged into it. Instead of jumping into Adobe’s Indesign program to find a specific layer that contains a PNG of the client’s logo, we can open the file in Flow. At that point, Flow will display a easy to follow flowchart to map what raw files are used to create that Illustrator file on the left and the exported versions on the right. As a result, we can easily find the same logo to incorporate into another project.

Main Window

Flow incorporates built-in versioning, so if you accidentally make an unwanted change, you can revert back to an earlier version. Their versioning system is similar to a Time Machine backup- but without the external drive and space-time-continuum restoration interface.

Versioning

Archiving and File Saving

Once a project has been completed it can be hard to figure out where all the documents are, spread across your computer. Flow makes archiving these (or Packaging as they call it) a cinch! Just open the Flow map document and package it. This will compress the project full of files into one simple document that can be stored on an external drive or restored if the client needs to change anything.

With Flow’s ability to track files used in various projects, it will help save you if you try to delete a necessary file. Flow will alert you whenever you try to throw a file away that might be used in a project and offers a simple ‘Recover’ option. Hopefully this will prevent last minute recreations of needed layers and media due to accidental deletions.

Dashboard

Collaborating and Time Tracking

Packaging

Working with others and sharing files across drives is also fairly effortless with Flow. It has the ability to track files that are stored on a server as well as remember files that go offline (if you take your work laptop home for instance). Whenever you’re in the Flow software, you can easily see the location (or last known location) of any file by clicking it inside the flowchart.

If you need to let a colleague finish up a project for you, you can use the archive feature to package up everything associated with a working project and ship the document off. As long as your collaborators have Flow, they can unpackage and redeploy the project without skipping a beat.

Another great feature of Flow is its internal time tracking system. The software records the time you work on the file, making sure every billable hour is logged. From daily to project wide reports, Flow ensures you can have accurate estimates and invoices without needing another piece of software.

Time Report

Problems with Flow

While I really enjoyed the number of videos available from GridIron Software, I had a very difficult time figuring out how to use Flow in the right manner. I felt a little lost, but maybe it was just my expectations and approach to use Flow.

Flow isn’t magic, and doesn’t work for every type of freelancer out there. However, I’ve found it doing quite a superb job with Final Cut, web development, and Adobe Creative Suite projects.

It works with CS5, if you’re using the latest version of Adobe’s software.

Finally, if you install Flow on a trial basis, when the trial ends the software beings to bug you about the trial experience. Even after trying to close the ‘nag’ screen repeatedly, it would pop up every hour or so to ask again.

I really wish the developers would realize that they are probably getting more negative feedback than if they had simply given an option to ‘Never Ask Again’. It just leaves a bitter aftertaste that I’m sure isn’t pushing people to buy the software.

Nag Screen

Wrapping it Up

If you find yourself getting stressed out about files scattered all over the place or if you are constantly deleting and recreating files, Flow can help stop the ‘chaos.’ I would definitely recommend that you give it a shot and download it.

However, if you are already using another file organization system- either your own system or another software based organizer- you’ll be better off saving the $199 (this one doesn’t come cheap!). GridIron Software does offer 50% for students and other enterprise based pricing.

What do you do to keep sane and organized? Is Flow the software you were looking for? Leave a comment with your system or opinion!

Have you ever longed for something a little more extensive than the AirPort Wi-Fi menu built into OS X? iStumbler is a simple utility that helps you find AirPort networks, Bluetooth devices, Bonjour services and Location information with your Mac.

Today, we’re going to look into this app a little further, and compare it to another competing piece of software that does a similar thing. Prepare to discover everything there is to know about the digital airwaves surrounding your Mac!

Getting Started

When you first launch iStumbler, it asks to use your current location. Any Mac application that uses this information needs to request permission first – it’s a standard process, so feel free to answer “OK”!

Location Information

Wireless

Labelled “AirPort”, this section shows plenty of detail about the wireless networks surrounding you:

Here are the main columns to look out for:

• Secure – This shows whether a network is protected by any encryption and, if so, what level of encryption that is
• Protocol – Apple’s latest computers support the 802.11n standard, so you can look for Wireless networks that run at this faster protocol.
• Network Name – Fairly self explanatory, this is the name of the network in question (you can see this from the AirPort Menu Bar interface normally)
• Level/Signal – Showing a visual and percentage representation of the signal strength picked up from the network. This is far more accurate than anything else available easily on OS X.

This information gives you everything you need to pick the best available Wi-Fi network at any given point in time.

You can see a graph towards the top of the window showing the “Signal to Noise Histogram”. This can be detached from the window and shown as a floating panel by clicking the unusually shaped circle to the left of the graph.

Bluetooth

The next pane to take a look at is Bluetooth. As you’d expect, this shows any and all the Bluetooth devices currently broadcasting around you:

Bluetooth Details

In my case, it has just picked up my Wireless Apple Keyboard/Mouse. Bluetooth on both my iPad and iPhone is turned off, so these can’t be found by iStumbler.

The information shown here is more limited than that of the Wi-Fi panel, but you have the additional option of being able to Set up a particular device, or initiate Pairing.

These two buttons launch the OS X Bluetooth Setup Assistant for doing just that, and make the screen slightly more useful than being a mere browser.

Bonjour

Finally, Bonjour shows all the Bonjour enabled devices and services on both your local network, and your MobileMe account (if you have one set up):

Bonjour

I could see the three different Bonjour-enabled hardware devices currently attached to my local network – two MacBooks, and a Time Capsule.

Clicking on any of these shows the available Bonjour services (such as File Sharing, Screen Sharing and Apple Remote Desktop), and you can launch the related application directly from within iStumbler.

Because I have Back to My Mac enabled on a computer elsewhere in the country, I can also see the relevant services for that machine (and easily launch Screen or File Sharing).

Preferences

A few different preferences are available for configuring how the application works:

Preferences

The “Remember” option sets the length of time for which iStumbler will remember a particular network after it goes out of range. The app doesn’t store networks indefinitely, as it would gradually use up more and more system memory.

You can also tweak a few user interface settings, have iStumbler automatically connect you to the best available network, specify which type of Bluetooth devices to scan for, and adjust a few location settings.

Air Radar

AirRadar for Mac

Another tool worth considering for this purpose is Air Radar. This app has a far prettier interface, but is limited to scanning for Wi-Fi networks. It comes in at the price of $19.95 for use on a single computer, which might be a little expensive for the few extra features offered.

Conclusion

If you’re something of a wireless junkie, or regularly travel between different locations when working, iStumbler could offer a great solution. It’s excellent for diagnosing network problems, and the increased accuracy of the signal readout can help you better optimise your home network.

Although it has the benefit of being free, it suffers from one of the common problems with open source software on the Mac – a fairly basic interface design. For it’s very technical and functional purpose, though, this isn’t a major problem.

For many Mac users, the standard AirPort Menu Bar interface will more than meet your needs. If you’ve ever longed for something more advanced, iStumbler is probably exactly what you’re looking for.