Category: Mac

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“Tinker, v.: attempt to repair or improve something in a casual or desultory way, often to no useful effect.”

If I could get back just some of the time that I have spent tinkering with computers over the years, I think I might be able to extend my lifetime quite significantly. One of the great things about OS X is that it actually requires little tinkering (and yes, some systems do require quite a lot of it!).

If you simply hand over control to the operating system, things will generally run quite smoothly. This does, though, also mean giving up on some choice, and so some freedom.

There are many apps available that help you to change various aspects of your Mac’s appearance and the way it generally runs. One of the best, and widest known, is Marcel Bresink’s TinkerTool. Join us after the jump as we explore what this app can do for you.

First Things First

Before we even get started, here’s step one of Mac Use 101: go make a backup of your system before you even install TinkerTool. Better yet: make two – a Time Machine backup and an image of your hard-drive with either SuperDuper! or Carbon Copy Cloner.

Okay, done that? Then let’s continue…

TinkerTool presents you with a tabbed interface with 11 sections. Each of these allows you to tweak various aspects of your setup, from relatively minor, aesthetic settings, to in-depth, arcane ones.

Finder

The first tab, as its title suggests, lets you fine-tune aspects of the Finder. Here you can make relatively minor changes like altering animation settings, disabling sound effects or enabling the display of hidden files, or major changes like turning off your Mac’s Desktop features.

Think carefully before you do this – and, uh *cough*, you did make a backup, right?

A nice thing to do on this page is turning on the display of transparent covers when using Quick Look to inspect folders, which lets you quickly see what’s inside a folder:

It’s not very useful, actually, but it sure is pretty!

Dock

This tab lets you change various aspects of your Dock, such as forcing it into 2D display mode rather than the 3D glassy appearance that is standard in Snow Leopard:

You can also use this section to add a ‘recent items’ stack to the right of your Dock, and can put in place certain restrictions, like making it impossible for users to resize the Dock, or to alter it in any way. This is very useful if you’re managing an environment in which various people are accessing a number of Macs.

General

The General tabs lumps together everything that doesn’t fit anywhere else, so it covers a pretty broad range of settings, from specifying where scroll arrows appear to setting the format for screenshots and the default location they’re saved to.

You can also decide to turn off the Dashboard, or to put it into Developer Mode, which allows you to drag widgets out of Dashboard and run them as ordinary apps.

Applications

Under Applications, you will find a few settings to do things like display the diagnostic menu in Address Book and control what alerts (if any) are displayed on those (hopefully rare) occasions that applications crash.

You can also choose here to add an ‘Eject’ button to your menubar if you’re more of a mouse-user than a keyboarder.

Snow Leopard

This tab lets you change settings specific to Snow Leopard, disabling some new features or rolling back behaviour to the way things were before upgrading from OS X 10.5.

A recent addition to the app are some useful settings for iTunes – adding the ability to give half-star ratings, among other things.

Fonts

Here you can set your system-wide default fonts – not all applications will respect your choices here, but most will.

As you’ll see, I’m a bit of a Helvetica man! If you want to have a play with different settings to see what suits you best, it’s easy to reset everything to the default fonts.

By the way, Droid Sans, one of the fonts you’ll see I use, is a particularly nice sans serif produced by Google – it’s available for free download here.

Font Smoothing

This tab lets you specify the size at which OS X’s font smoothing operates, and the style in which it is applied – which relates to different forms of display:

Login Items

Here you can alter the list of applications or helpers that run automatically when you log into your account. A nice feature here, which isn’t available in the Login Items section under User Accounts in System Preferences (another place you can adjust what runs when your machine starts up), is the ability to deactivate an item in the list without needing to completely remove it.

Safari

Use this section to tweak a few aspects of Safari: whether PDFs are displayed within the browser window or fed through to your default PDF viewing application, whether or not you receive a warning when you close a page with un-submitted form information, and a couple of things to do with how your browser records and displays the History of sites you’ve visited.

QuickTime X

On this tab you can make some changes to the appearance and behaviour of QuickTime, as well as fine-tuning a couple of things to do with editing video in QuickTime.

Reset

This is an important tab: it lets you reset any tinkering you’ve done, so that you can return to the default, pre-tinkered settings – very helpful if anything goes a little haywire…

In Closing

So that’s a quick walkthrough of the various sections of TinkerTool. Everything that you can do with TinkerTool can be done in other ways – there are other apps that can help you change the appearance and behaviour of your Dock (Candybar, for instance), and a quick Google search will turn up Terminal commands to accomplish this and just about everything else TinkerTool can do.

But since TinkerTool does all these things in a single app, and since it’s free, there’s no reason not to add it to your arsenal. It’s a fairly polished app, with a responsive developer, and there’s a whole lot to like about it.

Or… You could simply accept that Apple have put a lot of thought and care into the default settings, and just give up on that little bit of freedom and let them take care of things. And that might just free you up to get on with other things, and spend a little less time tinkering!

Today we’re going to take a look at five sites that are completely dedicated to showcasing and reviewing free Mac software. They may not be the biggest and best app sites out there, but they definitely make it easy to find lots of quality software that you don’t have to spend a cent to use.

Just to be thorough, we’ve also thrown in a few sites that don’t focus solely on free software but still have plenty of excellent free apps on display.

App Addiction

Odds are, if you’re an AppStorm reader, you suffer from the same condition as all of the writers here, including myself: complete and utter app addiction.

We simply love Mac applications. The world is full of amazingly talented developers constantly dishing out great pieces of software and we spend hours searching for, reading about, downloading and trying them.

Unless you’re an avid software pirate or a millionaire trust fund brat, app addiction can leave you penniless in no time. Fortunately, for every developer out there who puts out a $50 app, there’s at least one (often more) willing to create a free alternative. Granted, the quality tends to be a lot higher among paid apps, but with apps like Evernote, Quicksilver, and Cloud out there, it’s hard to complain about the mountain of Mac software that’s available free to anyone who wants it.

The Problem with App Sites

Since it can be a little tricky to find quality sources for free Mac software, we decided to help you out by scouring the web for websites dedicated to compiling and/or distributing free applications. This turned out to be no easy task.

Though there are tons of great websites out there for downloading Mac applications of all kinds, there are very few sites dedicated 100% to free apps. Many of those that do exist seem to be outdated, ugly, abandoned, completely choked with ads, or all of the above.

Fortunately there are definitely a few gems in the mix. Let’s take a look at a few sites that, regardless of aesthetics, seem to provide a particularly great collection of free software.

App Donkey

We’ll start with the best one I could find. I like to think of App Donkey as the Craigslist of free Mac software. It’s definitely not the prettiest site of its kind, but it’s by far the most resourceful and efficient.

The home page of the site doesn’t waste time and space with lengthy introductions or fancy graphics, it goes straight into the huge list of free apps. Each app is shown as an icon with a brief description arranged in a grid. There’s a list of categories on the left and links for browsing the pages on both the top and bottom of the app grid.

When you click on an app you are taken to a page with a longer description, a screenshot, and various helpful items such as ratings, file size, and a link to the developer site.

App Donkey allows you to quickly add apps that you like to a download queue so when you’re done browsing you can simply hit a button to download everything at once.

Overall, App Donkey is an amazing site. There are plenty of apps listed that are no longer free or out of development, but for the most part you won’t have any trouble loading up on more free apps than your hard drive can hold.

FreeMacWare

FreeMacWare definitely isn’t the most visually pleasing place to find free Mac software, and it’s not as easy to use as App Donkey, but it does have a ton of free software.

FreeMacWare features a daily free Mac download. Each app’s icon is shown along with a description and links to download or visit the developer’s site. Unfortunately, they don’t seem to post app screenshots so it’s difficult to tell if you’ll like a given app.

Their archives date back to 2005 and each app is neatly categorized so there are tons of apps to browse through and download. Though the site is helpful, it is in desperate need of a design overhaul. The blinking download links and cluttered page styles make for a dizzying experience. Still, if you’re looking for free Mac apps, it’s a great resource.

FreeMacApps

FreeMacApps has a much more limited collection that the previous two sites, but actually fares pretty decent in the graphics category. The site conveniently lists all the apps on a single page divided into categories.

Each app is shown as a simple icon and is essentially just a link to the developer website so there aren’t any descriptions, screenshots or any information of any kind beyond the name of the app. However, the site is directly related to TwistedMac, a blog review apps in much more depth.

FreeMacApps is great if you’re already familiar with a lot of Mac applications and what their icons look like so you can quickly scroll through the page and spot apps that you don’t recognize and want to learn more about.

ThriftMac

ThriftMac is not so much a free app gallery as it is a blog about Mac freeware. Every few days they take a look at a new piece of free Mac software.

The post structure and length varies considerably from one to the next. There is almost always a very brief description of the app and a link to the developer website. Frequently, this is all you get. However, they do occasionally post more in-depth reviews and screenshots.

Along the top of the site there is a horizontal list of categories so you can easily find the types of apps you’re looking for. Clicking on a category brings up an alphabetical list of every app in that category. This feature really helps the browsing experience by adding a gallery-like experience to a blog format.

Free Mac App a Day

Free Mac App a Day is a cleverly themed blog that had an original aim of posting a new free Mac application every single day. Unfortunately, this proved to be a little ambitious and the author eventually slacked off a bit. The site is still progressing though, a recent post suggests a lot of changes coming in the near future.

Regardless of where the direction of the site will go in the future, it’s currently still a great place to find free Mac applications (though many are quite dated). As with ThriftMac, the apps are broken up into categories and each application is given a thoughtful mini-review with a download link.

Other Places to Find Free Apps

The sites above represent the best I could that were solely dedicated to pointing out free applications. This is convenient for anyone who doesn’t want to sort through tons of apps that they can’t afford to find the free downloads.

However, most of the best Mac application sites on the web feature both free and premium apps. So after giving each of the sites above a shot, you should definitely stop by the following pages as well.

Basically, all the sites below are simply huge depositories of Mac software. For me, the most notable site here is i use this. I simply love this site and drop by weekly to keep up on the latest and greatest software available for Mac.

Of course, there’s also the official Apple downloads section. Though they’ve removed the direct link from their homepage, the downloads section definitely still exists and is overflowing with great software (free and otherwise).

i use this

Apple – Downloads

Softpedia

Mac – CNET Download.com

Download A to Z

BrotherSoft

Where Do You Find Free Mac Apps?

The sites above represent some of the best sites we could find, if we’ve missed your favorite source leave a comment with a link below along with the main reason you think it’s so great.

Also be sure to check out our roundup of 100 Incredibly Useful Free Mac Apps where you’ll find our picks for the best free Mac software in existence.

Financial megalith Intuit, the company most famously know for its Quickbooks application, has picked up independent financial mac app maker Midnight Apps and its popular Cha-Ching product. What does that mean for Cha-Ching users? It’s not altogether clear yet, but given Intuit’s history with their users after the Mint.com acquisition, you’d be forgiven for thinking things are about to go downhill with Cha-Ching.

TechCrunch reports today that in fact Intuit managed to hire Cha-Ching’s team some months ago and is only now wrapping up an acquisition of thieir code and graphics.

Meanwhiles the Cha-Ching website has switched to a notice site pushing people to Quicken for Mac or the web alternative Mint.com.

Other Mac Finance Apps!

Fortunately there are lots of alternative Mac Apps for Finance and Money Management, and you can read about some of them right here on Mac.AppStorm, including:

• iBank: The Financial Manager for Mac
• Cashculator: Financial Planning for the Future
• Money: Finances and Banking on Your Mac
• Roundup of 7 Great Mac Apps for Money Management
• And from Web.AppStorm: 12 Web Based Money Management Apps

What’s your take on the acquisition?

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”!

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:

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):

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:

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

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.

MacKeeper has been a sponsor at AppStorm for quite a while now and many of you have probably seen the ads and wondered what the app is all about. Though we are in no way obligated to review the apps of our sponsors, this one is good enough that we wanted to share it with you.

Below we’ll go through the many features and utilities included in MacKeeper and discuss how you can use it to keep your Mac both safe and optimized.

The All-In-One Maintenance Solution

One of the reasons that Macs are so appealing is that they require so little maintenance. Everything “just works” on a Mac and for the most part, will continue to do so for some time to come. However, seasoned Mac users are aware of several possible ways to optimize the performance of their machines and clear off needlessly occupied storage space.

Tasks such as clearing universal binaries, stripping extra languages, removing duplicate files and dumping caches have been traditionally handled by a handful of apps, but lately a few all-in-one solutions have popped up promising to provide nearly all of your Mac maintenance needs in on convenient place.

Very few of these apps are more powerful or thorough than MacKeeper. This excellent piece of software makes complex system management tasks a breeze and even adds a few killer bonus features like security and proper app deletion.

The Gist

The primary interface of MacKeeper is shown below. It’s very basic and easy for even complete novices to understand.

On the left is a series of functions and categories that affect the content that appears in the middle area. As you can see below, the default section is the Status screen. Here you can see the status of the operations you’ve run. Once you’ve run a few of the functions available in MacKeeper you’ll quickly start to see the benefits add up here.

The various tools and services are divided into four main categories: security, data control, cleaning and optimization. Within these four categories are tons of useful features but overall, these comprise the four primary functions that you will use MacKeeper to accomplish.

Below we’ll take a look at each of these four categories and the various functions therein.

Security

The security component is an Anti-Theft service that comes bundled with the application (eventually, yearly fees apply). The service is a lot like that of an app I recently reviewed called Hidden.

Basically what the service does is track the location of your Mac in the event that it gets lost or stolen. Using your MacKeeper account, you can log in online from any computer and inform the service that your Mac was stolen.

After this the service will continually check to see if your Mac pops up online. When it does, you’ll receive detailed reports on its location and a phone call informing you how to present the information to the police so you can get your Mac back.

Shown above is a handy graphic from the MacKeeper website that sums up the anti-theft service pretty well.

Data Control

The Data Control component contains five sections: Data Encryptor, Undelete, Shredder, Backup and ZeoDisk.

Data Encryptor

The Data Encryptor allows you secure files that you don’t want to allow just anyone to have access to. When you add a file to this section and lock it, the file becomes invisible and is only accessible by entering a user-set password in MacKeeper.

This is excellent if you store any sensitive financial or personal data on your machine that could prove harmful if your computer were ever stolen.

Undelete

The Undelete service is an incredibly useful feature that actually allows you to recover files that may have been recently accidentally deleted from your Mac or any connected storage devices.

To use this feature, simply navigate to the drive you want to recover a file from and hit “Start Scan.” The scan may take awhile due to the scattered nature of the data after a delete operation but eventually you’ll see a list of recoverable files pop up.

Keep in mind that this service isn’t magic and won’t be able to recover any files that were deleted a significant amount of time ago. The more recent the deletion, the more likely MacKeeper will be able to recover the file.

Shredder

After the end of a lifelong battle with a few oversized adolescent turtles, the Shredder has a new job in the business of deleting Mac files.

As the previous feature proves, deleting a file doesn’t necessarily mean that it’s gone for good. There are plenty of recovery options that allow someone to revive files from your machine even after you’ve emptied your trash.

Deleting files with the Shredder ensures that no data recovery software will ever be able to bring them back. To use it, simply drag in the files that you want to be rid of and say adios.

Just be careful, the point of this feature is to kill files forever so if you accidentally delete something important, you’re screwed.

Backup and ZeoDisk

MacKeeper allows you to run automated backups of your data to the destination of your choice. You can choose from a number of options including another folder on your Mac, an FTP server or a WebDAV server.

ZeoDisk is a backup option that gives you 3GB of online storage. However, this feature has not yet launched and will be coming sometime in the near future.

Cleaning

Even straight out of the box, your Mac can have gigs and gigs of unnecessary clutter eating up precious hard drive space. And after a few months or years of use, the clutter really starts to pile up.

One of the best features of MacKeeper is its ability to easily reclaim your lost HD space by scanning for a the following items: universal binaries, caches, duplicate files, multiple language support files, logs, and old files that you haven’t accessed in a long time.

All of these basically work the same way. You either run one scan that looks for all the unnecessary clutter or click on an individual category to view all the storage that’s being eaten up by particular items of that type. For instance, clicking on the language category will allow you to easily strip additional language support from any or all of the apps that you want.

There’s also a utility for analyzing your overall disk usage and another for properly deleting applications (Wise Uninstaller). The latter of these is something you should use any time you want to delete an app. Simply throwing applications in the trash leaves all kinds of associated files stranded throughout your system. Tools like this automatically collect the scattered files and throw them away together.

Optimization

The three tools under the optimization category are Update Tracker, Login Items and Default Apps. The Update Tracker is similar to AppFresh in that it automatically checks for updates for installed applications and allows you to quickly and easily download them. Strangely enough though, despite the fact that AppFresh says I have 70 updates available, MacKeeper was unable to find any.

Login Items is essentially the exact functionality you find in System Preferences. Basically, you can decide which applications and services are launched automatically when your computer starts up.

Default Apps is a super useful utility that allows you to quickly view and control the default application for all the file extensions on your machine. This makes it simple to perform tasks like forcing all Word documents to open in Pages or all JPGs to open in Photoshop.

Does it Work?

Aside from the bit of trouble I encountered with the Update Tracker feature, MacKeeper performed excellently. When you really dig in and start using this app it’s hard not to be impressed at just how much functionality they crammed into a single app. Repairing disk permissions is literally the only frequent maintenance-related task I can think of that MacKeeper doesn’t perform.

The data control and optimization features are extremely nice to have, but the cleaning features are really where the app shines for me. Since I work on a MacBook, GBs of storage are a precious commodity and I’m constantly looking for ways to save space.

MacKeeper single-handedly replaced the four or five other apps on my hard drive that I was using to keep caches, languages, binaries, logs, etc. under control.

The UI couldn’t be simpler and there are built-in video tutorials for literally every feature. My recommendation: download the trial and see if you can talk yourself out of spending the forty bucks to get the full version (it won’t be easy).

Conclusion

To sum up, MacKeeper is an incredibly powerful maintenance utility for OS X. The four key areas it covers are security, data control, cleaning and optimization. With it you can do everything from tracking lost Macs and password protecting files to recovering deleted files and freeing up hard drive space.

MacKeeper is really easy for anyone to use and walks you through every step of every feature. MacKeeper licenses are for life but you can optionally subscribe to the theft-protection, customer support and ZeoDisk features.

Also be sure to check out CleanMyMac, a very similar utility with a slick UI and a slightly smaller price tag.

If you regularly work with the same pieces of code or text on your Mac, an application such as Snippets can be a fantastic way to save a huge amount of time. Snippets is a powerful application that stores your most valuable pieces of code for you to reuse in different projects over and over again.

I’m pleased to announce that we have three copies of Snippets to give away to a few lucky readers. To enter the competition this week, you simply need to do two things:

1. Post a link to this competition – either on your website, or via Twitter
2. Leave a comment, letting me know where you posted the link

Simple! The competition will run for one week, and I’ll pick three winning comments at random on Friday 20th August. Best of luck!

We’ve collected the top five reviews, roundups and how-to articles from across the AppStorm network in July. Whether you’re interested in Mac, iPhone, or Web apps, there’s bound to be something you didn’t spot over the course of the month.

Now would be a good time to explore a part of the AppStorm Network you’ve never seen before!

Best of iPhone.AppStorm

Best of Web.AppStorm

Best of Mac.AppStorm

Share Your Ideas

Is there something in particular you’d like to see on the site next month? We’d absolutely love to hear your suggestions for articles, topics and giveaways – just let us know in the comments. Thanks for reading AppStorm!