Archive for the 'Utilities' 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.

Lets face it — TextEdit is underpowered. It is the only text editor Apple gives us, and it’s just that; a text editor. You can go in certain directions and get a CSS editor, or an HTML editor, but what about an Everything editor? That is where TextMate comes in. Just as it is dubbed, it is the missing editor for OS X.

Since Apple introduced the framework, Core Image powered editing applications have sprung up like Starbucks. From Pixelmator to Acorn, they’re everywhere to be found. Even so, there’s always room to innovate. Rhapsoft’s LiveQuartz, now at version 1.8, is a good example.

LiveQuartz has most of the standard image editing tools you might expect from a modern image editing application: layers, a rudimentary brush engine, selection lasso tools, a text engine, and filters. Like other editors powered by Core Image, LiveQuartz is fast and its filters operate in near realtime. Notable features which LiveQuartz lacks include layer styles and alpha masks.

Some people have a hard time keeping track of where all their money goes. Cents, from MacMage, is a very simple application that helps you do just that! You can add different purchases to Cents and it will tell you how much you have spent. Cents is a very simple app, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t useful.

My wife and I had been pretty happy with the copy of Quicken that came with our computers. All that changed a few weeks ago, when she told me that Quicken was no longer sufficient for our needs. As she is a professional accountant and I am just a writer, I didn’t question her. So started the search for a new finance program/service.

Using flash cards is a great way to study for an exam, but sometimes they can be annoying to make. What if you just want to make a short note? Or one with a picture? With Mental Case you can easily create flash cards or short notes.

Mental Case has a very clean interface; the toolbar on top lets you create cases and notes and start viewing a slideshow, and a bar on the left lets you select your cases so you can edit your notes.

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.

There are many functionalities of USB and Firewire external drives that make things easier — saving directly onto them, backing up to them as a drive, and easiness to mount and see in Finder. These features have finally been brought to servers and online drives with ExpanDrive.

ExpanDrive, by Magnetk adds the functionalities listed above to network drives and servers. It treats all drives equally. Now, there are already a lot of file transfer apps and apps that connect to servers, but ExpanDrive is much different from all of these. Instead of having an external application to connect to a server, ExpanDrive uses Finder directly. It mounts a new drive in the Finder that is treated as a regular external drive rather than a server.

There are currently many RSS applications out for Mac, but none of them are quite like Times. Times reinvents the user interface of an RSS reader by making it look similar to a newspaper. With a simple interface, Times makes it easy for anyone to read and view RSS feeds. It also has many special effects to make it look even better.

Organizing digital videos isn’t easy. The vast majority of music files have been in MP3 format since the digital music explosion, but videos are a different story: MP4, H.264, DiVx, Xvid, WMV, M4V, MOV, AVI containers. When you download a movie, you never really know what to expect, and neither does iTunes, which only plays a limited number of video file types. So users who download movie files are forced to use QuickTime or third-party software to convert them to another format, which is always a lengthy process. Fortunately, though, there is an alternative:

iTunes has many often-forgotten features. Among them are the web radio, visualizer, and (what I think is the coolest) shared music libraries. iTunes users on the same wireless network can share their entire music libraries (or only specific playlists) with each other by turning on “Sharing” in iTunes’ preferences (in either the Mac or PC version of iTunes). Once both computers are setup to share libraries, users at both ends can browse each other’s libraries and stream each other’s music. However, there is no way to download the music; users can only listen.

Last year there were rumors being spread about the end of InputManagers in Leopard. The rumors contained horrifying details about the end of InputManager and SIMBL. One developer, Emanuele Vulcano, developed PlugSuit, a new way to apply SIMBL InputManagers. This guarantees that these plug-ins would not meet their demise. Although the rumors turned out to be false, this development ensures the existence of application plug-ins for years to come.

A lot of the time, most of us are completely busy with work and other daily activities. It can take a lot out of you, and sometimes we need a way to regain energy during the day in a short period of time. There are not very many Mac applications that can help you do this, but there is one that stands out amongst the rest: Pzizz.

The DMG file format dates as far back as Apple System 7. In Mac OS X 10.3, Apple “wow”ed the world, including me, by creating a faster way to mount disk images upon one’s desktop. As of not so long ago, Apple released Mac OS X 10.5, but this almighty revision of the Mac operating system did not include any faster ways to mount disk images, so a developer at Liquid Lunch decided to take matters into its own hands. He created Flashmount for this generation of “multi-taskers” and “speed demons”.

With the release of Leopard came over 300 new features. Some of these new features includes Time Machine, Screen Sharing, and Quick Look. I find Quick Look to be the most useful addition to Mac OS X. Upon installing Leopard, Mac users had one gripe — they complained that Quick Look could not handle all of the file extensions that they used in their daily lives. To solve this problem, developers created plug-ins for Quick Look in order to make it more compatible with different file extensions.