Author Archive

Sure, the iPhone camera has been the butt of gadget criticism and the weakest link of what is a life changing, traditional computer use reducing gift from the Apple tree. With the release of the iPhone 3G, there have been some questions regarding design choices:
“Why can’t we take close up pictures?”
“Why is it still 2 megapixels?”
“Why won’t this thing get off its dock and make me a cup of coffee?”

I can’t speak to the latter two questions, but I want to impart a little DIY innovation to make the most out of your iPhone camera. Want to take close up pictures without breaking your warranty, an old digital camera, or purchasing that ugly clarification case with the sliding macro lens? Follow me…

My buddy was in town this past week on tour with his band, and he wanted to hang out. He was excited to show me a new way to make a ringtone in iTunes. I suggested he just use Garageband, but he thought that his way was cooler and made him look like a computer genius. It took him a good 5 minutes to remember all the steps for creating the ringtone, but by the time I finished my coffee, he had his incoming calls blazing Matisyahu’s “King Without a Crown”.

I feel the need to apologize for what this post will do to your menubar. I know this is a personal struggle for you, and you don’t need MacApper as an enabler. So here it goes: I’m sorry, but this post will add another app to your menubar clutter. That said, I think it’s ok to embrace the clutter of a menubar in exchange for other things. When it comes to cleaning up your desktop, menu space is fair game, and this little app can do wonders removing volumes from the mess that is your desktop.

Sometimes you don’t know what you’ve been missing until you try something new. My first experience at Chick-Fil-A was like that. I ordered the char-grilled chicken club combo with sweet tea and polynesian sauce, and suddenly I don’t want to order another chicken sandwich from anyone else. Smart Scroll is just like the sandwich, but with scrolling. 

Let me put my swami hat on and see if I can make a prediction: You access broadband through a router. If you’re trying to use your computer in some other capacity than checking your email or drudgefoxcnn.com, then you may have had to forward ports using your router’s setup screen. Accessing the succulent features of rolling your own “Back To My Mac” and “Screen Sharing” always amounted to static port forwarding, until now.

Most likely, you’ve run into this problem in the last two hours. You’ve copied some text, pasted it into a document, copied some other text, pasted it, gone back to the first text block and copied it again. The problem with cutting/copying and pasting is its inability to multitask. Now I’m not one to clutter up your menu bar, but this free app is worth the real estate.

Jumpcut, a free minimalist clipboard buffering application, is a great way to keep track of your clipboard history. Once you start Jumpcut, it “listens” for your text clipboard entries and remembers them. These text clippings can be accessed through the menu:

There are plenty of options out there for folder synchronization on your mac. Sure, you can run various menubar applications, use your terminal magic skillz, or you could use an application that you’ve been using all along to do something a little different. In an attempt to streamline your processor activity, Cyberduck can not only satisfy your FTP, SFTP and Amazon S3 browsing needs, but also synchronize folders over these connections as well.

First, you’ll need to identify a folder to sync with on your remote host. Then, bust open your file menu and select Synchronize.

Before reading this post, you may want to make a promise to yourself. You will clean up your inbox. You will keep it organized and finally actualize those “my weakness is perfectionism” claims you made in your job interview. So go ahead, build a tiny altar to GTD, and click the jump for some free life-changing inbox organization.

In-Dev software, the developers of MailTags, have a sweet little Mail.app add on for those of us who are phasing out the mouse. Mail Act-On for Leopard is a free app that lets you move, flag, color, and set due dates for messages you receive in your Inbox. All it takes is a little set up:

You know what you need? A GUI to edit your launchd config files. It’s ok if you don’t know what that means. How about this: download this free app and get your files organized effortlessly. In a previous post, I provided 4 of my most used Automator Apps that will assist you in your daily Mac routine. This post will show you how to run these apps automatically using a free application from Peter Borg.

I love apps that reduce the amount of work that I have to do. When I can sit down on my MBP and things happen without me doing a thing, I fall in love with technology all over again. There’s something about downloading a file and immediately interacting with it and not having to worry about where it should go. I’ve been using this free little app to manage my files, and I’ve created a video to show you how it’s done.

 

 SmartShuno [3:22m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

Sometimes you need a chord and you just don’t know where to find it. The rhetorical situation gets worse if you’re messing around with an alternate tuning that your googled chord charts have never heard of. Harmonic Sense has created a powerful little app that can open up a new musical world for guitar players of any skill level.

Admittedly, I’m a bit of a snob when it comes to music. If I need a chord, I’m going to find it with my ears. But ChordMate makes it easy to cheat. Check out my video review to see some of my favorite features.

In the never-ending quest to organize my life, I’ve developed some tools to make the fight a bit easier. Most of the disorganization on my MBP comes from my internet browsing. I am constantly generating a pile of files that need to be processed, but my nonexistent attention span is always taking me to the next beta release before I have a chance to unzip and install the previous one. Thanks to a couple of organizational suggestions from GTDers, though, I have been able to get things under control. I’ve developed a few automator applications that should make your internet gleaning more about collection and less about mounting, zipping, and the like. First, let me explain my system for handling new files.

The giveaway of YummySoup! licenses has come to a close. You may recall that I shared some of my favorite YummySoup! features, and Hungry Seacow Software was gracious enough to giveaway three licenses to those who shared an improvement suggestion. It turns out that your comments and suggestions blew the developer’s mind. Ken from Hungry Seacow was so excited to have his mind blown that he sweetened the deal. Jump with me to the goodies.

First, HSS decided to throw in two more licenses for the giveaway! This means that we have 5 winners instead of 3. Let me congratulate the following randomly selected winners:

A while back I reviewed iStopMotion2 by Boinx Software and displayed my stop motion skills for the web to see. You, in turn, responded with your own creative creations using the incredibly intuitive iStopMotion2 demo. Everyone did an excellent job! Three winners have been randomly selected and here they are in no particular order:

Mark Rowland
Sabrina
derphilipp

Thanks to everyone who participated. I encourage you to pick up even just the demo version and see what you can come up with. Kids eat this stuff up, so spend some time with them this weekend and put together a Lego reenactment of Gettysburg or your own rendition of this piece of British Cinema.

Recently at MacApper, Emily did a comparison of YummySoup! and Connoisseur. Since HungrySeacow Software has given us three licenses to giveaway, I thought I would outline a few of my favorite things in YummySoup! with a video tribute.

One of the features that sold me on YummySoup! was the Automatic Import feature that supported the heavy hitters of online recipes. I’m not one to create a recipe, but I definitely know how to mooch. Thus, recipe management software that can automatically import is a must.