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Daily Mac App: Brightness Slider
Using a Mac laptop at night is great thanks to automatic-brightness controls and a backlit keyboard. Trouble is that sometimes even the lowest setting is too bright for midnight screen gazing. That's where Brightness Slider comes in. It's a menu bar utility that lets you adjust the screen's backlight brightness. It gives you linear control over your backlight and lets you dim your screen even further than either the brightness keys or System Preferences allow you to go without turning off the backlight completely. Unlike other applications that allow you to "dim" your screen, such as Sunset, which actually put a shade or dark tint over your screen to reduce perceived brightness, Brightness Slider gives you direct control over the actual backlight. If you ever wish you had quick access to finer grained control over your Mac's backlight than the backlight keys F1 and F2 give you, or you want it just a little bit dimmer at night, then Brightness Slider is worth a free download from the Mac App Store.
Daily Mac App: Memo
I've written about quite a few note-taking apps in my pursuit of the best one. Most shy away from the Post-It note paradigm because OS X comes with Stickies, a pretty decent representation of the repositionable note, but Memo takes it head-on. Memo is basically Stickies with iCloud and password support. Create a new little yellow note, write yourself a reminder, text snippet or love-letter to your Mac, and move it to where you need it. Like many other programs, the note sits behind the active window and can be easily resized to accommodate more text. The notes can be password protected by clicking the little padlock icon, which keeps prying eyes out of your business if you're letting someone else use your Mac. You can change the font used, size of text and all the standard paragraph formatting you might expect. Unfortunately you can't change the colour of the note itself -- it's yellow for offline memos, blue for cloud memos and green for private memos, which are secured with a password. The blue "Cloud Memos" sync with iCloud to any Mac or iDevice with your iCloud ID and the free Memo app for the iPhone or iPad. If you're looking for a Stickies replacement for just text, Memo has a couple of advantages that might make it worth looking at. It's free, available in the Mac App Store and has free companion apps for the iPhone and iPad.
Daily Mac App: Image Bucket
You don't realize how important batch processing is until you are faced with 50 photos that need to be resized from 3872 x 2592 to 640 x 480. Processing each photo one-by-one in an image editing app would take an hour. Instead of wasting your time with such a tedious task, you can turn to an app like Image Bucket, which will do all the work for you. Image Bucket is a batch image processing app for OS X. It'll let you resize, flip, rotate and watermark a group of images all at once. You can even change the file format of an image or modify the name of a file by tacking on a prefix or postfix. The app can sit in the dock or at the side of your desktop. You simply select the files or folders you want to batch process and drag them onto the app. This will open a dialog box with all the different resize, rename, and watermark options. Select your option, click start and sit back while the images are processed. The app is pretty fast; a batch of 10 images takes about 5 seconds to process. The batch tool does a good job modifying the images, but it's not perfect. The rename option doesn't fully rename the files. It adds a prefix and a postfix, but won't replace the name. This is inconvenient when you're doing screenshots and want to get rid of the date and time stamp in the image's name. The app also doesn't have any algorithm options for resizing. As a result, the images are not as sharp as they could be. This is fine if the image is going to end up on a general website, not so good if you want it to showcase your photography skills. Overall, I am pleased with Image Bucket. It's a nice companion to Pixelmator which I use for basic image editing. It's fast and always available in the dock which makes it easy to use. And for $3.99, it's priced favorably, too.
Daily Mac App: FormatMatch
Copying and pasting text is something everyone does. In OS X you have two choices by default -- copy and paste, which retains formatting; or paste and match style, which strips out the source formatting. If you're like me, you almost never want the source formatting. Cmd+V is the shortcut for regular pasting and Cmd+Shift+V is usually for paste and match style. However, depending on the program, the latter's shortcut is sometimes Cmd+Shift+Opt+V, which is a bit of a stretch for my poor fingers. You can streamline this process using FormatMatch to paste plain text at all times. When enabled, the menu bar utility makes pasting plain text the primary function for Cmd+V. A keyboard shortcut will disable FormatMatch when you want to retain styling. While it solves one of my pet hates, I wish you could disable the menu bar icon. If you're like me and almost never want the formatting to come with the text and can't remember the right shortcut key combo for paste and match style depending on the program, then check out the free FormatMatch from the Mac App Store. Alternatively, if you don't like the switchable app approach, you can swap the shortcuts for paste and paste and match style as this tip suggests.
Daily Mac App: Starred
If you're a Gmail user who leverages more than the simple mail potential of Google's email service, you'll know how valuable labels, stars and other organizational features are. Trouble is, to take advantage of them you normally have to resort to using the Gmail web app in its various guises, or an app like Sparrow Mail. Starring emails and threads is particularly useful if you don't have time to process the information there and then, but don't want the email to get lost in the sea of your incoming email. A simple little menu bar application, Starred, makes using stars in Gmail even more useful. The tiny little app sits in your menu bar as a star with a counter. The counter tells you how many starred emails you have currently in your account. Clicking on the icon spits out a drop-down menu that gives you the subjects and senders, as well as the first line of the starred emails. Click on the snippets and you're presented with a plain text pop-up of the email, allowing you to read and deal with the emails without having to open up your email client or the Gmail web app. The only thing that it's currently missing is the ability to remove stars directly from the app -- for now you have to head into the Gmail web app to do that. Starred is a nice and simple, free app that should fit into your workflow nicely if you're a hardcore Gmail user and don't already use something like Sparrow Mail or Mailplane on your Mac. If you star things for later, give Starred a whirl.
Daily Mac App: iZip Archiver
Simple handling of compressed archives is a breeze on a Mac, simply secondary-click and hit "Compress". Likewise opening a zip file is as easy as a double-click. But what happens when you want to get a bit more advanced with your compression archives? That's where something like iZip Archiver steps in. iZip Archiver is available from both the Mac App Store and directly from the developer's site. The version available in the Mac App Store is a fairly limited application, but the free version available from izip.com allows you to do a couple of things that your Mac can't do natively, even with the likes of The Unarchiver, TinyExpander or Stuffit Expander installed. Essentially iZip Archiver will allow you to create archives in .zip format, secure them with a passcode and share them via files.com. That bit of the app doesn't really add anything to the default Mac-archiving experience. But what it will do is allow you to open and edit archives without extracting them first. Opening an archive mounts it like an external drive or .dmg, and allows you to look through the contents, open, edit, rename or extract single files, as well as add to or delete items from the archive. In this way you can add files you'd forgotten to zip up, or remove files you no longer want in your archive without having to unzip and re-zip them. For small archives it only saves a little time, but for really massive archives, skipping the extraction step will save you heaps of time. iZip Archiver supports ZIP, ZIPX, RAR, TAR, TAR.GZ and 7ZIP files, so most common archives are covered. There are other alternatives like BetterZip 2 and Stuffit Deluxe to name just two, but most of them aren't free. So if you're looking for a free tool for the occasional archive modification, iZip Archiver will do the job for you for nothing. The restricted iZip Archiver is available from the Mac App Store, while the more fully featured version is available directly from the developer's site.
Daily Mac App: Quick Note
Lots of people still use notepads to jot down quick reminders, even when they're in front of their Macs. Quick Note is a note taking utility that gives you the simple, quick writing experience of a pad of paper on your desk, but on your Mac. Simplicity and speed are key in this kind of app and thankfully Quick Note delivers. It's super simple. Click the "+" for a new note and type away. It gives you a pleasing yellow lined paper-style note pad, complete with a black leather textured top, that reminds me of some of the A4 "refill" pads I chewed through when I was a kid revising for exams. Type your note and it's saved in the pop-out drawer to the side complete with a search tool for easy access. Simple and efficient. If you want your notes synced to different Macs, currently Quick Note has support for cloud syncing via Diigo.com, but support for Google Docs, Dropbox and some other cloud services are "coming soon" according to the developer. Quick Note is a simple, straightforward note taking utility that can replace that paper pad you still keep next to your Mac for scribbling down notes. If you're not after the complexity of something like Evernote, and alternatives like QuickNotes or OS X's own Stickies are too simple for you, then Quick Note could be the app for you. It's free, but ad-supported -- thankfully you can quickly close the advert so it's not intrusive in its current implementation. Checking it out if you're still looking for that perfect note taking app for your Mac.
Daily Mac App: Tic Toc
Tic Toc for Mac (US$4.99) from Overcommitted is a simple task timer that sits unobtrusively in your menu bar while you work. It's a great option for those who must monitor time spent on a task. There are no client records, project management features or support files. Simply create a task, start the timer and get to it. Here's how Tic Toc for Mac works. Once installed, Tic Toc places an icon in your Mac's menu bar. Click it to create your first task. A slip appears. Give your task a name and click Save. The task then appears in a list which shows its title, most recent modification date and time spent on it over the last day and the last week. Click Start to begin timing. The task's title appears next to the menu bar icon (you can turn that off). Finally, set the idle timer to watch for periods of inactivity between five minutes and one hour, so that Tic Toc won't record time accrued while you're away. What's nice is that you can maintain several timers simultaneously (you double-dipper you) and export your data to XML or CSV. From there, simply import with your favorite financial software, project manager and so on. Tic Toc isn't for everyone. For as much as it does, there's a lot missing. As I said, you won't build projects with Tic Toc or manage client information. But that's really not the point. Those looking for a simple, reliable task timer that works as advertised ought to consider Tic Toc. At five bucks, it's an easy investment.
Daily Mac App: Snap App
Taking screenshots on Mac OS is easy thanks to its decent built-in capture utilities, but taking nice ones is not as simple as you might think. App Snap is a developer-orientated screenshot utility that makes taking screenshots for app display a bit easier to manage. It's not just handy for developers, the utility is great for anyone who regularly takes screen captures of application windows, whether it's in an iOS or Android simulator or just regular desktop Mac apps. App Snap does what most other capture utilities will do, takes an image of the window of the app in question. Where it really shines is in the ability to quickly create aesthetically pleasing captures without having to mess around clearing your desktop and worrying about image sizes or aspect ratios. Once you've captured your window, App Snap will place the capture on an App Store orientated background, in this case the default desktop wallpaper at the right size and ratio for submission to Apple. It automatically obscures finder and anything else you might have on your desktop and gives you a nice clean App Store-ready capture in one click. In writing up these Daily Mac Apps, I often fight with screen capture tools with a combination of OS X's built-in tools, SnagIt and Skitch, aided by BackDrop to obscure the rubbish I have littering my desktop. App Snap has replaced all those apps with one click for US$0.99 If you're an developer for the Mac or iOS app stores, or even the Android Market, then App Snap could be a great addition to your workflow that takes the hassle out of screen captures.
Daily Mac App: Gelatin
Some tasks need a really simple, straightforward, no-nonsense app to get the job done. Combining PDF files is one of those tasks, and Gelatin is the app to do it. Preview can do a similar thing, but it's certainly not as straightforward as Gelatin. The app offers a window to drag-and-drop the files you want combined together onto. Select them in finder in the order you want them melded and drop them onto Gelatin. The app will take care of the rest spitting out a PDF with all the files you've dropped onto it joined end-to-end. You can take the file and edit it up with Preview, email it off or save it. Gelatin is free for a limited time and is worth a download for the shear ease of use. If you ever need to combine PDF files, making Gelatin part of your workflow could save you time and effort.
Daily Mac App: Muscle System Pro II
Back in March I raved about 3D 4 Medical's Muscle System Pro II iPad app. It's a photo-realistic 3D atlas of the human body that allows the user to navigate through layers of muscles with the touch of their finger. The app is so good it's found a foothold among must-have apps at medical school across the country. For those of you who work or study in the medical fields, or just have an interest in anatomy, I'm happy to say that 3D 4 Medical has now brought Muscle System Pro II to the Mac. Like its iPad brother, Muscle System Pro II for Mac allows users to look up 433 of the major muscles in the human body. Users can tap on a muscle's pin to get more information about the muscle, such as its origin, insertion, and action. Particularly helpful for students is that the app allows you to insert your own pins into a muscle and make your own notes for each individual muscle. The app also offers an interactive quiz which tests the user's knowledge of muscular anatomy. If you're a fan of the iPad app, be sure to check out the Mac version. The 3D models look absolutely amazing on a 27 inch iMac display and its just nice to be able to access a powerful research and study tool on any device of your choice. Muscle System Pro II for Mac is US$19.99 in the Mac App Store. For users interested in anatomy, 3D 4 Medical has also brought some of their other iPad apps to the Mac platform, including Skeletal System Pro II, Brain Pro, and Heart Pro. %Gallery-138704%
Daily Mac App: Discovr Music
Music discovery has become harder and harder, especially if you, like me, don't listen to the radio. There are quite a few radio-type music discovery services, things like Last.fm and even Spotify will do it. But what about when you simply want to search, listen to snippets and explore artists that might tickle your fancy based on your favorite bands? Discovr Music does just that. It allows you to explore a plethora of artists, all linked in a mind-map style interface. Start by searching for your artist of choice. From there you can listen to song clips, read their biographies, get links out to their music videos on you tube, as well as links to Last.fm, iTunes, Amazon, MySpace, Spotify, Rdio, Mog and even Rhapsody. Bouncing back to the map you can visually explore similar artists, and a simple double click takes you into their info page, to preview songs and see whether you like them. It's a really engaging and slick experience. It's certainly a lot faster and more effective for finding new artists you might like than relying on the radio-style suggestions of Last.fm and their ilk. The problem I have with Discovr Music, and something that comes from the modern expectation that, rightly or wrongly, everything should be free -- it's US$4.99. Although the music search is good, the clips of songs are just that, clips. I can appreciate that a developer needs to make money, but $5 just seems a bit steep to me -- it is purely a music discovery app, not something to replace the likes of Spotify. Having said that, the app works well, is a great alternative to the likes of Last.fm for music discovery, and if you're into music and finding new artists, then you'll probably find it's $5 well spent.
Daily Mac App: Screen Snake
Remember the old cellphone game Snake? It's been around longer than I've been alive, but became a hit once it became standard on Nokia cellphones. I have fond memories of standing in cold registration lines in college and playing the game as I waited to sign up for classes. Screen Snake is a free version of that game that's been ported to the Mac. It's as easy to play as the cellphone version and launching the game automatically starts the snake crawling across your Mac's screen. There's a few options for changing the snake size, but there's no ability to pause the game at this time or keeping score on the free version. The paid version (US$1.99) adds more levels and scores. It's a good time-waster, and if you're looking for a splash of nostalgia, this is a good game to keep around.
Daily Mac App: Tunesque
Apple's app and media world is pretty extensive -- music, videos, books, apps and games. Tunesque makes searching both the iTunes Store and the Mac App Store a breeze, right from your menu bar. It has to be said that searching for things within either the Mac App Store or iTunes isn't the easiest of operations. For starters you actually have to fire up one of two apps, and let's be honest here -- iTunes isn't the fastest program around. You can't search both stores at the same time either, so it's a double job if you're looking for something like Evernote for both the Mac and the iPhone. The tiny little app sits in your menu bar waiting for a search command. Simply click the button and start typing, just like you would with Spotlight. By default Tunesque will display everything -- music, movies, TV shows, artists, Mac apps, iOS apps, eBooks, audiobooks, podcasts and even iTunes U; but you can refine your search areas if you're never going to want to pull up things from iTunes U, for instance. You can also choose which country store to search too, meaning that by default you can search another country's store or of course your local one. Tunesque will search as you type in you keywords and give you all the possible results in a drop-down menu. You can then navigate the list with the arrow keys, or a mouse hover, with a nice little pop-up summary of the highlighted search result displayed to the side, just like Spotlight does in Lion. Once you've found what you're looking for it's just a case of hitting enter, or clicking on the correct entry, to be taken to the appropriate store. It's a great aggregator that makes searching the Apple media and app stores an absolute breeze. It's one of those apps that makes you question why Apple didn't build that kind of functionality straight into Spotlight, and it has changed the way I search iTunes and the App Stores. Tunesque is a great little app, and best of all it's available for free from the Mac App Store, so give it a whirl and let us know what you think.
Daily Mac App: iClip
I missed out on iClip during its initial heyday a few years ago, so I was pleased to see it make a comeback. The OS X utility keeps a copy of almost anything that can be sent to the clipboard. It'll also organize those into scrapbooks or however you want. iClip sits off to the right side of the screen and acts like OS X's dock. It's normally hidden by default, and the preference options are robust and allows you to customize how big the iClip dock is and where on the screen it is. If you have a second display hooked up, you also can set iClip up to be used just on the main display. When you copy an item to the clipboard, it immediately gets sent to iClip. I had a little trouble distinguishing among the different clips at first. Right clicking an older clip will send it back to either the program you have active or the clipboard so it can be used immediately. Double-clicking on saved URLs automatically takes you back into Safari. If you select an item and click the arrows next to the individual bubble in iClip, the down arrow will copy it to iClip and the up arrow will send it to the program you're working in. With text, you have the ability to open the clip and edit it as well. You can create a text clip from scratch in this manner as well. You're also supposed to be able to drag and drop clips from one bin to another, but I wasn't able to do that, and that's pretty frustrating. A program such as iClip can be very useful, and I see myself using it in my design work to keep basic elements at my fingers that aren't always stored in an InDesign library. Some might balk at the price. It runs US$9.99 as an introductory price, and those who are using older versions of iClip will have to pay to upgrade. I think it should probably stay around this price level, if not go down a couple dollars to compete with other programs such as Clipboard History, which is $4.99.
Daily Mac App: QREncoder
QR codes are a great way of instantly sharing information with a quick camera snap? QREncoder is app for your Mac that'll let you quickly and easily generate them for printing, uploading and sharing. You can encode almost any sort of text into a QR code: a URL, phone number, text message, email address, twitter handle -- maybe even a haiku. QREncoder makes creating codes easy. Fire up the app, select the type of code you want, and bung your text in the box. You've got a choice of size for your QR code, 5, 6, 9 and 12px and you can save it as a PNG for later use. QREncoder is quick, easy to use and free from the Mac App Store, so is well worth checking out if you want to create quick response codes.
Daily Mac App: Trillian
When Cerulean Studio made an alpha version of its Trillian software available for the Mac in early 2010, I wasn't very impressed. There were no buddy icons, the product didn't resemble the images released for it, there was no group chat support, a good many of the options didn't work, therer were no chat logs and more. At the time, I recommended sticking with Adium or Pidgin. I'm very pleased to say that nearly two years later, Trillian has developed into a solid text-based instant messaging client for the Mac. Trillian is available as a free download in the Mac App Store now, and it has gone through a vast number of improvements. While there's still not as many features as Adium, it's a solid client. Like Adium, it has integrated Facebook and Twitter, and I actually like these features better on Trillian than Adium. It also syncs with the free Trillian for iPhone, which means you can start a conversation on your Mac and pick up where you left off on the iPhone if you need to run somewhere. The sync is the standout feature for Trillian, and for those of us who need to maintain IM sync on the go, that might be the feature that gets you to use this. You still have to register for a Trillian account if you don't have one, but since you gain syncing ability for chats and settings, it's not as nitpicky of an issue as it was for me last year. Some of the cons I found last year still exist. There is still no group chat ability, which prevents Trillian from adding IRC. It's light on customization, for that you'll need Adium. There's no audio/video/Skype integration, but that's something I've lived with regardless because I use Adium. Not all the buddy icons come through OK, the most success seems to be the ones associated with AIM and Yahoo accounts. You can log chats now, which that alone makes it worth considering for me as a Mac client. I like the way the chat logs are handled. Right click on each user, and you can access the history, including a calendar for easy access to certain dates. Trillian Pro is available for $12 a year, which allows chat logs to be stored in the cloud and no ads, though there are currently no ads in the Mac version anyhow. If you need a solid text-based IM client with updates handled through the Mac App Store and syncing, Trillian is a good way to go. If you want more features and customization, stick with Adium. If you want audio, video or Skype, you'll be stuck juggling multiple clients regardless.
Daily Mac App: App Tamer
Last week we covered BatterySqueezer, an app designed to throttle browser processes when backgrounded. Today we'll take a look at App Tamer, a similar non-Mac App Store app that takes things further. App Tamer goes beyond throttling and will actually put applications into suspended animation. It also will tackle any program that you wish, not just limited to browsers. By default it will pause resource-heavy apps such as Photoshop and Chrome when not in use, saving all but a tiny percentage of their CPU usage. Configuration options include the ability to put a shadow mask over paused programs, helping to identify them as suspended. You also can define the period of activity before App Tamer does its thing. App Tamer will wake the paused app with user-configurable time periods, which by default is every 5 minutes. This helps prevent the app from crashing out. When you switch back to a paused application, App Tamer resuscitates the program with almost instant results -- there didn't seem much in the way of perceivable lag in my testing on a 2011 MacBook Pro. Everything then runs normally until you click away, putting the app back into suspended animation. In my rather unscientific testing, App Tamer more or less killed all CPU demands of paused applications. This led to much more free resources without the need to kill the apps when not in use. Your milage, as they say, will vary -- but a free trial is available, so you can see whether it's going to do what you need without commitment. So, if you're looking for something that goes beyond just browser throttling -- App Tamer will set you back $15 and should help you reclaim CPU-cycles, reduce heat and increase your multi-tasking battery life. Hat tip to Mystakill
Daily Mac App: Disk Speed Test
You've got a shiny new SSD-equipped machine, but you're wondering just how fast that SSD really is. Disk Speed Test from Blackmagic will give you a quick, straightforward answer. It's incredibly easy to use. Disk Speed Test writes large chunks of data to your chosen disk and then reads that data, giving you a real-world read/write speed in MB/s. The program then tells you what kind of uncompressed video that drive will be able to handle and allows you to save the results as a screenshot. As you can see from the image above, my magnetic hard drive-equipped MacBook Pro isn't going to win any speed awards. It also couldn't handle anything above uncompressed SD video according to the app -- but then again that's not the sort of thing I would even dream of trying. If you're looking to capture uncompressed video direct to a disk, Disk Speed Test will give you an indication of whether it's going to be up to the job. So, if you're curious about your hard disk speed, regardless of whether it's just a simple magnetic hard drive, an internal SSD, a network mounted disk array, or even a beast of a Thunderbolt SSD drive -- Disk Speed Test will quickly and easily answer that for you with just one click. Blackmagic's Disk Speed Test is available for free from the Mac App Store.
Daily Mac App: Sound Cloud
You're a SoundCloud user. You love playing tracks on your Mac and love the idea of SoundCloud, but hate the fact that your poor old Mac sounds like a jet engine whenever you play a track thanks to Flash. SoundCloud app to the rescue. The official SoundCloud app brings "the full SoundCloud web experience to your Mac" allowing you to play tracks directly from your SoundCloud account, search, favorite and create playlists all using a native app. The sounds stream pretty instantly, while tag search is also supported so you can go exploring either through keyword search, through users or tags and save the good stuff for later. You can even drag-and-drop SoundCloud URLs onto the SoundCloud dock icon to create playlists. The SoundCloud app also supports the built-in Mac media keys, so you can pause and skip tracks like you would with iTunes. Growl support is bundled too, so if you've got Growl installed it'll notify you of track changes. The only disadvantage of using the desktop app over the in-browser SoundCloud site is that only tracks which have been made available for 3rd party applications within SoundCloud will appear in the app. For the rest you'll have to resort to the website. For me that didn't make much difference as my favorite stuff was all present in the app without issue. Recording your own stuff is a doddle with the desktop app thanks to the nice big "Share Your Sound" tab in the top left that reveals a massive "Rec" button that you simply hit to record from your Mac. If you're into SoundCloud, but hate that you have to use Flash, then check out the SoundCloud desktop app -- it's free and works pretty well.
