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Now that the iconic plastic MacBook series has come to an end, many Mac owners will be considering purchasing a MacBook Air as their primary computer. The Air is an awesome choice and will provide a user experience and build quality second to none, but those blistering SSD speeds do come with some compromise in hard drive space. The article below will guide through some steps you can take and applications you can use, to get the most out of the space you have.

Keep in mind that you don’t need a MacBook Air, or even an SSD to benefit from the tips below, as it can never hurt to de-clutter your hard drive and keep your Mac in good shape, whichever model it is.

Backup First

The following tips are not too advanced or risky and are unlikely to cause any harm to your Mac, but it’s still essential to backup your data fully before moving forward.

If you’d like to make a complete, bootable copy of your hard drive, head over to our guide on doing so using Carbon Copy Cloner. With this out of the way, let’s get started!

AppTrap

AppTrap uninstall prompt

Apple decided not to include an uninstaller with OS X and most users regularly drag-and-drop unwanted apps into their Trash. There’s nothing wrong with this method (it won’t hurt your Mac), but most of the time there will be plenty of residue of data left behind by the deleted app. This usually takes the form of small preference files, but can sometimes include larger system files too, which can eventually build up over time.

There’s a few different applications which will take care of uninstalling for you and after trying out most of them, I like AppTrap the most. AppTrap is a free program which has a very small memory footprint and unobtrusively runs in the background without you ever having to worry about it. It works like this; each time you go to delete an app, AppTrap will pop up with the above window and prompt you to decide whether to remove this app fully – which means move all associated system files into the Trash, or not. The prompt will also often come on when an app updates itself, so in these circumstances you can just click “no.”

An added bonus of AppTrap is that when choosing a complete uninstall of an application, you’ll know that should you decide to re-install it at a later date, you’ll have a clean slate, as the app won’t remember your preferences.

CleanMyMac

A typical CleanMyMac scan

Over time, OS X will store cache files to help it launch and run applications and services more quickly. This is a completely normal and healthy aspect of Mac computing, but over time these cache’s can grow to a significant size and, rather than speed things up, can bloat your system.

The worst offenders are typically web browsers, especially Safari, but other apps can build up cache files too. Cleaning your Mac’s cache is not something you need to do every week, or even every month, but infrequently. To perform this, I love CleanMyMac, an app with many strengths besides just cache cleaning.

CleanMyMac is a flexible and accessible application which can be a one-stop solution to all the space saving tasks covered here, with options for uninstalling applications, cache cleaning and more. Many applications come with code built-in to enable their use on older non-Intel Macs such as the iBook G4 and this code can build up to take away a big portion of hard drive space. Similarly, additional language translations are often buried into an app and this can take up a surprisingly large amount of space too.

A word of caution however: There are some programs which do not perform well after being ‘slimmed down’ in the way which CleanMyMac performs, and in order to protect against this, CleanMyMac comes with its own blacklist. I have never ran into any problems using the application on several Macs, running Leopard, Snow Leopard and Lion respectively – though as always, make sure you’ve got a backup before proceeding to slim your Mac.

Onyx

Cleaning pane offers choice of cache-removal

Though more of an all-round maintenance tool than confined to space saving alone, Onyx offers enough features and options related to reducing clutter that I feel it warrants inclusion here. On launch, Onyx will scan your system disk for any errors. Following this, the user can then verify and/or repair permissions, delete cache’s and find out system information. As you can see in the screenshot above, choosing the ‘Cleaning’ pane from Onyx’s main window brings up further options to purge the cache, organised by type. Head over to this in-depth review by Quintin to get a closer look at this great free software.

Replace iTunes With Spotify

Spotify has an excellent library of both mainstream and obscure artists

Recently reviewed in full here on Mac.AppStorm, Spotify is a great music streaming service which will help save space on your Mac and give you the chance to check out new music too! Music, even when compressed into MP3, is by nature quite large and even the most modest iTunes library can take up a very big chunk of your hard drive’s real estate. By signing up for Spotify, one can have a huge repository of music, anytime and anywhere, so long as you’ve got a healthy internet connection. There are other such services of course (also check out Rdio), but at the moment Spotify seems to be leading the pack and doing so at just $5 a month or free with built-in advertising.

Though it may not be quite practical to completely replace iTunes with Spotify, even just maintaining a bare iTunes library for when you have no internet connection will save you a lot of space!

Move Your iTunes Library To An External HDD

Moving your iTunes Library

Should you wish to keep a large iTunes library, you may prefer to move your media to an external hard drive instead. Here’s how to do this:

First quit iTunes and navigate to your iTunes folder on your Mac. This should be in User Name > Music > iTunes – then simply drag and drop the iTunes folder into your external hard drive and wait for it to copy.

Next up, you need to launch iTunes and go to “Preferences” and “Advanced”, then click on the “Change” button to choose the new library location.

Remember to make sure you have another backup before you delete your media off your Mac!

Final Thoughts

Saving space on your Mac has more to do with attitude and approach than any other factor. By running apps like CleanMyMac infrequently and only installing apps which you need to use regularly, you can help save a lot of data and keep your Mac bloat-free. In addition to this and the apps mentioned above, another method of saving space on your Mac is to look for lightweight alternatives to larger programs, replacing Pages with TextEdit, Photoshop with Pixelmator and so on.

Have you got any space saving techniques, tricks or tips? Let us know about them in the comments!

The past decade has been a remarkable one for Apple. They’ve revitalized and reinvented their product line several times and have even shifted a large portion of their vision and focus to devices that didn’t exist in the 90s.

Innovation has been the name of the game since Jobs took back the helm right before the turn of the century. This spirit of innovation has brought Apple back from the grave and kept customers forking out cash on major device purchases on at least an annual basis.

The Passing of An Era

Now that Steve Jobs has stepped down as CEO, speculation abounds as to where Apple is headed in the future. Popular opinion seems to peg Apple Inc. as a company that has officially been put into autopilot. Jobs spent the last decade building an empire and surrounding himself with people that could run it upon his departure, now all they have to do is not screw up what he built.

The Apple Hardware Lineup

The product line is a solid one: two types of MacBooks (Pro and Air), three desktop Mac choices (Mac Mini, iMac and MacPro), three traditional iPods (Shuffle, Nano and Classic) and four iOS devices (iPod Touch, iPhone, iPad and Apple TV). This is of course in addition to the pending release of iCloud, which ties all of this hardware together with a nice cloud-shaped bow.

With all these great products, Apple is set and can now function on marketing and upgrading those products, continually offering refreshes that are just good enough to keep us reaching for our credit cards.

Cult of Mac recently published an article to this tune titled “iPod. iPhone. iPad. Why Apple is Done Inventing New Devices.” In this article, the author states, “Now that Apple has product lines that offer the best experience for creating and consuming content, both on the desk and on the go, no further product lines need to be added.” So you see, beyond claiming that Apple won’t invent any new device categories, the author seems to think that you can stop expecting new product lines altogether from Apple for quite some time.

Will Apple Really Sit Still for a While?

This argument definitely makes sense, Apple is indeed set up fairly well in its current state. However, the personal electronics industry has thrived on Apple’s innovation for so long that cutting it off cold turkey may not be a realistic solution for continued market cap growth.

DailyFinanace sees a dire outlook for this path and went so far as to say that “Steve Jobs’ departure, and the subsequent loss of his innovative leadership, may leave Apple up a creek without a paddle.”

Apple’s DNA

Forunately, the corporate culture inside of Apple doesn’t seem to be one that would even strive for keeping things nice and smooth while avoiding new product risks. I doubt that Tim Cook wants his claim to fame to be “I kept everything fairly stable for a few years.”

To put it another way, laying low isn’t what Apple does. They push the boundaries and transform niche products into household items that we can’t live without.

To be honest, we’ve reached a point where I don’t really know what Apple has up their collective sleeves. People saw the iPad coming from so far away that it was easy to know what to look forward to for quite some time, the current situation though has people stumped and they have nothing left but to suggest that we’ve reached the end of the innovative era.

If there’s one thing that I’ve learned from decades as an Apple user, it’s that just because the market doesn’t know what it wants the next big thing to be, that doesn’t mean Apple isn’t hard at work on something that we’ll line up in droves to get our hands on.

Is an iTV in the Works?

So where does this leave us? Someone else says Apple is done creating new product lines for a while, I say don’t count them out so quickly, neither seems to be a truly informed opinion based on anything but speculation. If we put our ears to the ground of the ever-churning Apple rumor mills, what do we hear?

Strangely enough, we’ve circled around to a rumor that seems to resurface every few years: that Apple will soon be releasing an actual television product, distinct from its current set top box, the Apple TV.

Rumors of the existence of this “iTV” have recently been published on VentureBeat, CNET, ABC News, PC World and scores of other tech sites. This time around, these rumors come partnered with a television subscription service which supposedly has cable companies shaking in their boots.

Is This Thing Real?

The physical television game is already an industry with plenty of fierce competitors, I don’t think it’s impossible that Apple will enter it, but I don’t necessarily see a clear reason for them to do so.

Despite the fact that they’ve yet to turn the existing Apple TV into a must-have product, it makes far more sense for them to completely rethink this product yet again than to suddenly jump into making full on televisions.

The current Apple TV connects to existing televisions, making it possible for Apple to infiltrate nearly every living room. A dedicated Apple television set would alienate lots of customers with existing expensive, large screen, high definition televisions. I suppose it’s possible for Apple to pursue both avenues or even simply partner with existing television manufacturers like Google did.

One thing is for sure, televisions are in fact evolving from dumb terminals into software-driven products and Apple has already shown that this is a market they intend on owning. This nut has merely proved much more difficult to crack than the first-try raving success than they had with the cell phone market. I’m excited to see what they have in store in this arena.

Here’s to Looking Forward

Despite popular opinion, Apple isn’t about to take a step back and stop expanding their product lines or forgo attempting to take over even more markets with untapped potential. This recipe for success has served them well and they haven’t yet encountered a reason to abandon it.

Whether it’s the iTV or something we haven’t even thought of yet, you can bet there are secret dungeons in the deep, dark Apple castle where members of that legendary R&D team are piecing together future branches of the Apply family tree. My metaphors are so confusingly mixed at this point that it’s time for you to chime in. Is apple on autopilot or hard at work on the next big thing? If the latter, what will that next big thing be?

Most people have started to cringe at the idea of installing yet another text editor on their computer, especially one that promises distraction-free writing environments and Markdown support. It starts sounding familiar to apps like iA Writer, WriteRoom and Byword.

You must keep in mind that the word processor isn’t the tool keeping you from being able to crank out that perfect novel, blog post or tweet. The writing is still ultimately up to you. These are tools and should be respected as such. Getting a better text editor isn’t going to make you a better writer- no more than a nicer hammer, guitar or paint-brush set is going to make you a better handyman, musician or artist.

With those warnings in mind, let me show you around Macchiato, a Markdown-centric text editor.

A Primer on Markdown

In case you’re a bit confused, Markdown is a special language for writing. Instead of writing in HTML, a writer can craft their file in plain text using special characters to denote certain HTML functions. For instance, using the “#” symbol multiple times around a line makes it into a header. Asterisks around a word or phrase emphasize it. In the end you’re left with a still very readable piece of text, which can be easily transformed into a blog post or other written work for the web.

Macchiato supports many of Markdown’s styling options, including bold, italics, lists, underscore syntax, blog quotes as well as in-line and blocks of code.

All the Markdown formats available in Macchiato

Processing vs. Styling

One of the few distinctions the developer has made through their very beautiful, simple website is the lack of support of Markdown processing. This application is made to write the text and directly saves out only using .md or the Markdown file format. However, this application will not process your .md files into raw HTML. It won’t even let you save the file out as a .txt format. You could say that Macchiato is a Markdown only application.

Instead of concentrating on parsing the file from the raw text imputed into HTML, Macchiato stylizes the text right in front of your eyes. As you start to use the application and enter text in Markdown format, the text appears the way it would appear online. As soon as you emphasize a word, for instance, it becomes italicized. As soon as you start a new line with the “#” symbol, it jumps to the size and weight to what a header line would be. You get a running live preview of what you’re text will look like, as your editing the raw Markdown syntax, without needing a separate window open like most programs.

Features Beyond Just Markdown Support

One of the few shocking things about this app is the lack of a preference pane at all. Hitting the typical keyboard shortcut to open the preference pane generates an annoying alert sound. Instead of giving you the customization one would expect from a text editor, it has stripped it all away, à la iA Writer.

Macchiato preferences, or lack thereof.

Macchiato is very much Lion ready. For instance, it supports the Lion fullscreen mode, Autosave feature and Version history tools. All of which are wonderful to have in a text editor.

When in fullscreen mode, the application does eliminate the distractions and notifications most have built into their computers. One thing I particularly like is how in both fullscreen and windowed modes, the word count appears in the top right hand corner.

Macchiato's Word Count

I really enjoyed using the new Find and Replace system in Lion, which is also implemented in Macchiato. The UI around the Find and Replace toolbar does break a bit in Fullscreen and wide modes though.

Find and Replace

Some Gripes and Confusions

There are still some bugs that need to be worked out, as most near 1.0.x apps have.

For example, there are several menu options that have been disabled but still show up in the drop downs. I could never find when there would be a time that the application would let me show a toolbar or customize it for that matter.

There are some built-in options to select text, then apply a bold or italic style to them. On a single select a word-then select a style basis, it works fine. The downside is when you select bold (or italics) without selecting a line and accidentally hit it again to disable, it adds more bold inducing asterisk marks and leads to quite a bit of confusion.

One thing I’m not 100% certain about, but wanted to address, is I feel there is a slight delay to my writing. When I hit the keys there is a minuscule moment before it appears onscreen. I do have the sense that the program is trying to catch up after a while, but it is still just a tad delayed. This is incredibly frustrating and seems to get worse over time. (I did find that a quick Quit and relaunching of the application fixed the delays for a while after.)

Wrap-Up

Macchiato is a fine application for writing, and I hope that some of the bugs that I have pointed out today will be addressed in a future update. I had a fine time writing this review in Macchiato and really enjoyed the Markdown support and features built into the core of this text editor.

One downside is that Macchiato has no trial available on their website. You’re forced to bite the bullet and download it for $19.99 from the Mac App Store. I found that a bit steep and would love to see a timed trial of some sort available for those who would rather not just try this app on a whim.

I could see Macchiato becoming my go-to text editor for writing (and ousting iA Writer) in no time. However some of the bugs and the lack of .txt support have made me reconsider giving it the “prestige” of being my word processor of choice.

What are your thoughts? Have you given Macchiato some time as your word processor? Also, what are your opinions of the new standard text editor price point of $19.99? With both iA Writer and Macchiato priced about the same, which would you chose?

We’ve collected the top four reviews, roundups and how-to articles from across the AppStorm network in August. Whether you’re interested in Mac, iPhone, iPad, Web, or Android 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!

Thanks for reading AppStorm, and I hope you enjoy looking over some of our favourite posts from last month!

Best of iPad.AppStorm

Best of Android.AppStorm

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!