Archive for the 'Productivity' Category

The difference between a new computer user and a power user is all in the keyboard. With the many menu commands in Mac OS X, if you really want to save time on your computer, you have to use keyboard shortcuts. Though it can be hard to memorize all the keyboard shortcuts in all your applications at once. Keycue, from Ergonis Software, presents a viable solution to this problem by allowing you to learn new shortcuts as you work.

One of the most grudging management tasks is renaming files, especially when you have many and they all need to be similarly renamed. For example: you want to rename a dozen photos from “DSC003123.jpg” to something more meaningful like “Wedding-Pictures-23.jpg.” Dare to be Creative has released version 3 of it’s batch renaming utility, the aptly named Renamer4Mac, a solution to this mind numbing task.

Renamer4Mac allows you to rename files with 5 variables. Search & Replace and Convert Case do exactly what they suggest. Insert and Remove allows you to respectively add or remove characters at any point in a filename. Finally, Renamer4Mac can number files in different ways, as in with numbers or letters or a combination of the two.

Nowadays, there are so many distractions to keep you from your work: social networking, surfing the web, AIM and Twitter, just to name a few. There are many ways to keep us from using these things, and today I am going to talk about one of the easier ones. It’s called WriteRoom.

WriteRoom, by Hog Bay Software is a tool for working without distractions. It puts a black (or any color you want) background behind a text editor. It is very easy to use, and really does help to keep you from getting distracted, even if you have ADD!

Early last year, we compared several well-known Mac FTP clients. Though we established that Transmit was King, CyberDuck always stood out as a cheap, no-frills version.

However, that was version 2. With Leopard now well into it’s third iteration (10.5.2), CyberDuck has also been flapping it’s wings once again, but does it fly? Let’s take a look.

Have you have ever wanted to share a group of your really good photos, but your pictures were too big to post to your favorite photo sharing site? When I shoot 150 - 200 photos on a trip with my DSLR, family and friends always want a copy of what I am shooting.  That started my search for a free and simple way to crunch my photos, fast! I stumbled upon KStudio’s Resize!, a batch image resize program that resizes your images to various parameters. Resize! does a great job of saving time when uploading or burning the photos that you want to share.  I could fire up my Photoshop Elements (or the Creative Suite version of Photoshop) and Aperture application to resize photos, but Resize! really makes that unnecessary. The program’s interface is simple while still providing robust options.

Debates and arguments have always been brewing with regards to desktop versus web apps. While one camp will argue about convenience and having your data available everywhere, the other will side with speed, privacy and reliability that desktop apps can provide.

While I seriously doubt the holy war will end anytime soon, here’s an app that will provide some middleground. It’s called Google Notifier for OS X.

Working on your Mac these days can be quite exhilarating; with all the wonderful apps and tools at your disposal, multi-tasking has become easier than ever. The downside, of course, is that now there are so many things on the go to help us be more organized, more productive, and more efficient with our work that it’s becoming harder and harder to focus on actually doing it. The folks over at Freeverse are here to help, though, with their deceptively simple piece of productivity software called Think.

“Your mom told you: Clean up, if you ever want to find your stuff again. Well, she didn’t know HoudahSpot!” is the tagline for HoudahSpot, by Houdah Software, the creators of HoudahGEO. But the tagline falls short of describing the true power of this application. There is so much in this little app (weighing in at 8MB) that it was hard to write a review over everything; I still don’t know if I’ve used everything that this app has to offer.

As if being a great app isn’t enough, you’ve got a chance to win a free license for HoudaSpot! Read to the end to learn how.

I’ve been moving around a lot lately due to telecommuting. It’s nice to escape the cubicle, but this need to wander means that I occasionally have to mess with the location settings in my network pref pane, depending on which WiFi network I’m on.

I’m not sure of your reasons for more than one location setting, but I have an answer that will let you set it, and forget it!

For most of us, we have and use different identities. Some of us may have one identity for friends and family and another identity for freelancing and so on. With all these identities, we need a way to bring them all together into one.

I have four email accounts that I use the most, which means I have four different mailboxes that I check often. When using mail.app, the left sidebar of your mail.app application can become a mess with all of its folders. I decided to figure out a way to make my four mailboxes, one.

Word Processors are one of those things that just about everyone needs. The question, then, is how much of one do you really need? On one end of the spectrum, you have a Vespa, aka TextEdit. Although TextEdit is great for dealing with plain text (such as HTML files), it is lacking when it comes to actual Word Processing.

On the other end of the spectrum, you have the tank, Microsoft Word, the current industry leader. In addition to being expensive it has a million and one features that are difficult to navigate and makes the program into a serious resource hog. In between those two extremes, you have Nisus Writer Express, from Nisus Software, which is more like a BMW.

I own several to-do or GTD apps: TaskPaper, Opal, OmniOutliner, OmniFocus, OmniPlan, Merlin, Apple Mail’s To-Do List, iCal, NoteMind, and Things.

I have used them all at one time or another, and I have tried and deleted half a dozen more. With so many different task managers to choose from, what could possibly make any one stick out over the others? Plenty.

For the record, all of the apps I mentioned are good for what they do. Some are strictly for outline-style lists with checkboxes and the like; some are text-based, and follow the notion of keeping it simple; some are full-fledged project-management applications, and are good for long-range planning, but not so good for keeping up on day-to-day tasks.

Have you ever been writing something on your Mac, and found that you needed to use a special character? Whether it be a foreign currency symbol, obscure accents, or even another language, PopChar is here to help. PopChar is a little application that sits in the background on your Mac. When you need to insert a special character, all you need to do is click the little “P” in your menubar, and PopChar will appear. It offers every single character that you will ever need - both ASCII and Unicode.

Stacks, Apple’s latest enhancement to the Dock in 10.5 Leopard, provides a limited pop-up view into folders and their contents.

With Stacks you have the choice of folder contents ‘fanning’ out from the Dock or displaying in a grid. But if you’re someone that likes easy access to all your applications from the Dock, then Stacks may not be right for you.

Enter Todos. Todos has been around since 10.4 Tiger and although not a Dock extension of any sort, it provides a single view of all the applications in multiple folders similar to the single folder view provided by Stacks.

Nowadays, the average Mac user has many different statuses he or she needs to update. Twitter, Facebook, Jaiku, Tumblr, and now even your chat status require constant updating and tending to.

Using an old status would just be plain careless now, wouldn’t it? However, constantly traveling to each and every one of these websites and typing in the same one to two sentence status several times is just plain tedious.