Category: Tutorials

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:

Would you like to see AnyBizSoft PDF to EPUB for Mac reviewed in-depth on AppStorm?online surveys

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:

Would you like to see Raskin reviewed in-depth on AppStorm?Market Research

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!

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

“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?

Finder Preferences

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:

Transparent Quick Look

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

Dock

Dock Preferences

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:

Simple 2D Dock

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.

General Preferences

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.

Application Preferences

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

Menu Bar Eject

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.

Snow Leopard Preferences

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.

System Fonts

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:

Font Smoothing

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.

Login Items

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.

Safari Preferences

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.

Advanced QuickTime Settings

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.

App Donkey

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 App Page

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

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.

FreeMacApps

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.

ThriftMac

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.

Free Mac App a Day

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

i use this

Apple – Downloads

Apple – Downloads

Softpedia

Softpedia

Mac – CNET Download.com

CNET

Download A to Z

Download A to Z

BrotherSoft

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”!

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.

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.

MacKeeper

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.

MacKeeper Interface

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.

The Four Primary Functions

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.

Anti-Theft Service Rundown

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.

Data Encryptor

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.

Undelete

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.

Shredder

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.

Shredder

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.

One-Click Scan

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

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!

When I first started using Twitter, I relied on the browser interface, and that seemed good enough. And then I discovered Twitterrific, which provided a better-designed and more enjoyable experience. And then I got an iPhone, and – as they say – that changed everything. After a few hours using the original version of Tweetie, I found it very difficult to use any other client, either on the desktop or my iPhone. Thankfully, not too long afterwards, Atebits released the desktop version of Tweetie, and all was well in Twitterland.

This status quo remained for a long time: Tweetie on iPhone, Tweetie on desktop. But then things changed. Specifically, Twitter bought Tweetie. A few months passed, and then a new version of the iPhone app was released. I’m not entirely sure why I didn’t like it – but I know I wasn’t alone in feeling this way. The King had been deposed. A recent update to the desktop version changed little, and I found myself wanting a change – I decided to leave behind the world of Tweetie-now-become-Twitter…

And so began a quest for a new Twitter client – really for a clutch of Twitter clients: for iPhone, Macbook, and iPad. This market is pretty full now, and I’ve tried most of them. Here I’m going to give a tour of Kiwi, which is a fairly recent addition to the list of desktop apps available.

Looking Good!

Kiwi’s biggest selling point is its good looks, and the fact that you can easily change its appearance by choosing from a growing pool of themes, hosted on a dedicated website. A number of very talented people have contributed some great designs. This is the Milky theme, my current favourite:

Kiwi

Nice and clean, legible and stylish. What’s harder to demonstrate in a screenshot is that this theme – and many others – include some subtle animations; so when I mouseover a tweet, the message above and below it shift slightly, to show that it currently has focus:

Interface Close-up

Clicking on that small ‘reply’ tab on the right pops up a text entry box so that you can type your reply directly:

Replying to a Tweet

Otherwise, you could either click on the button at bottom-left or hit [cmd]+[n] to compose a new tweet.

Now, the problem with writing about an app that is so theme-based is that different themes can make it operate in quite different ways. Take, for instance, marking a tweet as a favourite: the Milky theme doesn’t display a star icon to make this easier, while many other themes do, among them Pushpin:

Alternative Themes

You can, of course, simply right-click on any tweet and you’ll receive a menu that includes an option for favouriting, or you could use a keyboard shortcut:

Right-Click Menu

You can search directly from the main window, using the small search area at bottom-right.

Unread Tweets!

Finally, you may have noticed that little fella in my menubar – he’s green to let me know that I have unread tweets:

Working With Kiwi

In use, Kiwi is very similar to Tweetie – I’m not suggesting that this new app copied the appearance or functionality of the older, but the truth is that Tweetie simply got most things right. Here you have buttons in the toolbar to switch between your Home, Retweets, Mentions, Direct Messages, and Favourites Timelines.

There are also keyboard shortcuts for each of these, as there are for most other functions (retweeting, marking as a favourite, refreshing, etc.), making Kiwi a great choice for keyboard addicts. And, of course, you can edit your toolbar to remove any of the Timelines that you don’t use (as I’ve done with retweets).

You can easily add a number of Twitter accounts to Kiwi, as well as setting up saved searches, and adding a Tumblr account in case you want to quickly repost anything you come across. If you have multiple accounts setup, you can use an Accounts window to switch between these, or just click on the avatar image in the toolbar to cycle through them:

Cross-Posting & Multiple Accounts

I would love if Kiwi added support for a few of the other services that many iPhone clients now work with, especially Instapaper and Pinboard. I find it interesting that iOS Twitter clients are usually much more full-featured than Mac desktop clients. I assume developers decide that all these features are more easily accessible from your desktop browser, and so leave them out.

The one feature that I really miss – especially when I’m doing research on a particular topic – is the ability to quickly translate from within Kiwi (and this is true for every other desktop Twitter client I’ve tried, whereas it’s possible in many iOS apps).

Inline Images

Kiwi supports inline display of images – this is a great feature that allows you to see in a moment whether or not you want to click through to see a full-size version of a picture:

Inline Images

Growl Integration

Kiwi works with Growl to keep you up to date on any new activity. This works well, but it took me quite a while to work out how I could get more control over when I receive notifications: I don’t want to be disturbed every time somebody tells the world about a cute cat video.

But I do like to know when a friend sends me a direct message or a public reply. To fine-tune your preferences here, you need to go into the settings for each account, and then click on ‘Notifications’, and then you can get things set up exactly as you like them:

Notification Options

Once you’ve tracked down where to set things up to your liking, Kiwi actually gives you more control than most other Twitter apps.

Rules

Kiwi also includes Rules, which allow you to set up persistent responses to particular triggers – so you can have every Tweet that mentions a subject you’re interested in highlighted in red, for example. Or you could have Tweets that raise a particular issue hidden from view.

I’ve not delved into this feature at much depth, but I think it could be very useful if you’re a Power User in search of information on issues that interest you, or if you’re keen to thin out your Timelines.

A Few Issues

Other than the matter of a few tools I would like to have onboard (translations, in particular), I have a few other issues with Kiwi.

I can’t figure out how to view a user’s Profile. In Tweetie, that’s as easy as clicking on their avatar, and once there, you can click to zoom in on their avatar, view their recent Timelines, Favourites, and their Profile information. In Kiwi, clicking on a username or avatar takes you to that user’s Timeline, but you don’t seem to be able to get any further information, or take a closer look at how they’re representing themselves online.

Double-clicking on a tweet shows you a thread view, which works well, but then getting back to your Timeline doesn’t work so smoothly – neither the keyboard shortcut nor the toolbar button helps: you need to click onto one of your other Timelines and then click back to your Home Timeline.

And while Kiwi in many ways outshines another of its rivals, Echofon, what that app has that Kiwi doesn’t is its tight integration between its various versions. Okay, I know that Kiwi doesn’t have an iOS version (yet?), but Echofon’s synchronisation between Firefox, iPhone and desktop versions is a killer feature (sadly, the iPad version doesn’t currently sync with the others…). And this feature alone might lead some people to choose Echofon over Kiwi.

In Closing

Kiwi is a polished Twitter client with some really great features. It’s proved to be stable in use (it wasn’t a few months back), is great to look at, and will probably meet most users needs very well.

Do you have a favourite Twitter client? Let us know in the comments – we’re always pleased to learn about new apps, or to have holes in our knowledge of the app landscape pointed out.

With your help, we can give our readers the most comprehensive overview possible. And if you’ve some good advice to offer in my search for the perfect Twitter client, I’ll be very happy to hear it!