Samuel Gibbs

As an Apple lover and a user of a plethora of gadgets, games, and other fun things, Samuel’s used, talked, ‘casted and written about them all. As a British scientist turned journalist, he often has a slightly jaded view of the world and, of course, loves to moan about the weather.

Articles by Samuel Gibbs

TUAW's Daily Mac App: Disk Alarm
On today's portable Macs, especially those packing SSDs, storage space can be somewhat limited. It can be pretty easy to fill up all available space with a few large downloads, rendering your computer starved of space and creaking under the strain. Problem is, unless you watch your HDD space like a hawk, there aren't many visual cues as to when you're running low on space, and that's what Disk Alarm aims to put right. Disk Alarm does one thing; it checks the amount of free space you have on your main drive and alerts you when you get below a user-definable threshold. It's nice and simple -- you adjust one slider to set the threshold and one to set the check interval. You can get Disk Alarm to play an audible alert along with a warning when your disk gets low, but it'll also show how much free space you have in your menu bar for at-a-glance reassurance. The application used to be able to hide up into the menu bar when you closed the settings window, but as of a recent update, Apple blocked the version that had that ability. Hopefully the developer can find some way around Apple's odd blockade, but in the meantime, Cmd+W will close just the window and leave the menu bar icon. Disk Alarm is available for US$3.99 from the Mac App Store, and should save you time and heartache the next time you run out of space. If you've got any good experiences or favorite alternatives to Disk Alarm, sound off in the comments.
PadRacer lets you draw your own track, join two iPads together and steer with iPhones
Retro 2D top-down racing is enjoying somewhat of a comeback thanks to the iPad. The large screen and adaptable control schemes mean that games like Micro Machines are once again fun to play on a portable screen. PadRacer is one such top-down racing game that takes retro to a whole new level and attempts to leverage the power of the iPad and iPhone to bring an enjoyable social gaming experience. %Gallery-124399%
TUAW's Daily Mac App: Diarie
Have you ever wished you could get that private dear-diary experience in a digital form? I'm not talking about the kinds of things you share with the world on a blog or the schedules you keep in iCal, but the old-fashioned diary into which you poured your life experiences? Diarie attempts to capture that traditional analog experience on your Mac. It gives you the appearance of a binder with diary entries on one side and an index on the other. You can embed images, title your entries under a date and even password protect it so that only you have access to it -- perfect for those who use a shared computer. The typeface and text size are customizable, but that's about it. A simple, straightforward diary. While the daily diary has gone somewhat out of fashion, if you're looking to keep your memoirs somewhere, the US$1.99 Diarie is a well-crafted, if slightly limited offering that's well worth considering.
SpotiMy brings Spotify playback control to the menu bar, but that's it
Spotify might not have made it across the pond just yet, but that doesn't mean millions of Mac users aren't getting their music fix via the ad-supported or premium streaming service. A new Mac App Store app called SpotiMy aims to enhance the Spotify experience of Mac users by letting them control playback right from the menu bar. The little app adds a menu bar icon with drop-down previous, pause/play and next track buttons. Unfortunately that's about all you're going to get for your US$0.99. In fact you can easily and quickly control Spotify playback using the existing media keys on any Mac keyboard, which makes the app practically redundant for anyone with said keyboard. SpotiMy shows that there is potential for Spotify add-ons like the plethora available for iTunes. At the moment SpotiMy doesn't bring anything you can't do better with a keyboard to the table and therefore I can't recommend it. But the developer is keen to add to the app, with its current form very much a simple start. If track selection, or playlist support, along with what's playing and some other control features make it into the app, a menu bar Spotify control app could be really useful. One to watch but not buy, unless you desperately want Spotify menu bar playback control right now.
TUAW's Daily Mac App: BetterSnapTool
If there's one good thing that Windows 7 users have built-in that Mac users don't, it's window snapping. In Windows 7 you can drag a window to the top of the screen to maximize it, or to the left or right side of the screen to make it fill half the display. BetterSnapTool is window snapping for OS X on steroids. Whether you want to snap and expand to full screen, half screen (either horizontally or vertically), one-third of a screen, quarter screen, centered or even centered or maximized on the next monitor, BetterSnapTool has a gesture or keyboard shortcut to do it. Options include the ability to define your own keyboard shortcuts, all 17 of them, turn on or off the various screen edge snapping gestures, as well as a whole host of settings for the preview window. If you're a fan of manually resizing or moving windows, BetterSnapTool includes a system of window resizing and movement using a modifier key and the movement of your mouse -- you don't even have to click. You can even make the OS X window traffic lights do set things with right or middle clicks, or define a task to a title bar double-click. As the name might suggest, there are other apps that do similar things to BetterSnapTool. Cinch, for instance, gives you some of the screen edge gestures, but none that I've tried have had such a comprehensive and easy to use list of snap options. Even the optional menu bar icon is rather attractive and looks like a mini Battenberg cake. While there are other applications that do similar things, including the recently featured Flexiglass, BetterSnapTool is certainly one of the best and an absolute steal at US$1.99.
TUAW's Daily Mac App: SketchMee
There are lots of auto-sketching applications available for iOS -- you can see their results littering Twitter every now and again. The Mac, however, has a lot more horsepower to play with, and SketchMee really takes advantage of it. SketchMee sketches you, or anything else you like, from a photo. Whether it's in chalk, pencil or a combo of the two, SketchMee will render any image in a pretty great approximation of a sketch. Almost all the sketch parameters can be altered to taste or desired effect. Options include paper size, color, material, margin, opacity, stroke width, intensity, color and detail. For someone like me, who has the artistic ability of a gnat, having something that can instantly sketch an image is wonderful. I'd like to see an option for skill, so that I could at least attempt to match one of the sketches with my fair hand, but then again, it'd have to be kindergarten level for that. Whether it's indulging your long-lost love of landscapes, or creating a quick sketch of the girl next door, the US$7.99 SketchMee will do you proud. Just don't try and pass it off as your own work.
TUAW's Daily Mac App: DeepFocus
When you're in a noisy environment, such as a café or study room, or even when there's just the odd sound to distract you in a room of silence, concentrating can be difficult. You could play some music, but often music can be just as distracting as the background noise, especially when you're trying to put words down on a page. DeepFocus, a US$1.99 app available from the Mac App Store, aims to solve the problem without music, allowing you to concentrate without aural distractions. It does this by creating a wall of sound, generating random sound patterns defined by a set soundscape or theme, overlaid on white noise. The white noise helps to block out background sounds, while the soundscape gives you just enough (but not too much) to focus on, allowing you to concentrate. The app comes packing eight different soundscapes for you to choose from, with themes like the seaside to the urban landscape. You first select a soundscape from the menu bar and click 'Enter DeepFocus!' Headphones are, of course, a must, and a good set of sound isolators or noise-cancelling headphones will definitely enhance the experience. The white noise works to some extent, but you will still be able to hear a modicum of what's happening around you. Both the white noise background volume and the 'auralscape' volume can be independently controlled to taste, while an option for a 'Low level noise mask' is also present. A timer is included in the menu bar, showing you how long you've been in 'DeepFocus,' but thankfully, it can be turned off. If you have trouble concentrating in a noisy environment, or even in a relatively quiet one, DeepFocus could be the answer if, like me, you can't get by with music alone.
Biometric face recognition for jailbroken iPhones with RecognizeMe
Have you ever wished your iPhone 4 would recognize your face and let you past the lock screen? RecognizeMe, a facial recognition lock screen tweak for the jailbroken iPhone 4, does just that. Simply hit the RecognizeMe button on the lock screen and let the phone scan your face using the front facing camera. The app can be trained to recognize your ugly mug, while the threshold for a match is adjustable. If RecognizeMe confirms your identity, it'll unlock your iPhone. If a match isn't found, it'll prompt you to enter your password, so at least you can't be locked out of your phone if you haven't shaved this morning or (gasp!) this month. There are drawbacks to RecognizeMe, however. One is that it takes time to scan your face -- long enough that it would have been quicker to enter in your PIN or password manually. Secondly, it should also work off a 2D image, which means anyone with a photo of you can trick it into unlocking your iPhone. Still, it's a novelty that could be useful, and it's certainly something we'll want to see more of going forward. RecognizeMe will be available for purchase in the Cydia store soon (it wasn't available at the time of writing) for a launch price of US$6.99. Read on for a video of the app in action. [via Redmond Pie] Cheers Jeff
TUAW's Daily Mac App: Translucent
For the most part your Mac just works, but for some of us, we want a little more information on how well our Macs are working and what's doing what, when. That's where apps like the mainstay of the Mac monitors, iStat Pro and iStat Menus come in. Today we'll be taking a quick look at a small, US$2.99 Mac App Store iStat Menus alternative called Translucent. Translucent sits in your menu bar, just like iStat Menus, providing real-time information on processor utilization, memory and disk usage (including USB mass storage), as well as network activity. You can customize what's shown, the color, the number of CPU cores displayed and a disk activity indicator. The problem with Translucent, however, is that it takes up between 3 percent to 8 percent of your CPU capacity on its own. Now 3 percent isn't a lot, but if you're interested enough to monitor your computer utilization on a minute-by-minute basis, then you're unlikely to want anything taking up unnecessary resources. The other thing is that because it sits in the menu bar constantly, you're going to want it to look good. It's not that Translucent necessarily looks bad, it's just that the icons and activity monitors don't look sharp and contrast heavily with most of the other well designed icons I have sitting in my menu bar. While aesthetics come down to personal preference, other donation-ware options, such as the iStat Pro Dashboard widget or the more fully featured $16 iStat Menus, offer more options, look better and use less resources. Translucent is not bad for the price, but there are better alternatives out there.
TUAW's Daily Mac App: ColorWash
Those with an artistic bent have been making color-isolated photos in Photoshop for years, but a recent crop of quick and easy tools for doing just that has allowed novices (like me) to create some of the same beautiful photos in a fraction of the time. ColorWash, currently US$0.99 in the Mac App Store, is one such program. It allows you to make color-isolated photos in minutes. You load your image of choice into the app, which will then remove all color from it, giving you a grayscale photo canvas. You then 'paint' the color back in using a brush tool, restoring the original colors into the areas of the photo that you want to. If painting the colors back in sounds like hard work, there's also an automatic fill tool to detect edges and colors and either fill in or remove the color automatically from a selection (although we had mixed results using this tool). ColorWash is great for anyone who just wants to play around with their photos. But those looking for more advanced features, options and control over the image, or even just pinch-to-zoom, should probably look elsewhere.
TUAW's Daily Mac App: MenuPop
Have you ever wished you had more power from your context menu? That you could have all the menu bar options at your cursor without having to switch your focus to the top of the screen and the menu bar itself? MenuPop shoehorns all of the menu bar options into a contextual app dependent upon a pop-up menu that appears right next to your cursor. The app allows you to control any function in virtually any program from a menu that can be activated with an alternate mouse click or a keyboard shortcut. If you're one of the increasing numbers of dual-screen, large-monitor users, having all of the options the menu bar easily accessible via mouse keep your focus on the task at hand and speeds up common operations for non-keyboard jockeys. The keyboard shortcut or mouse button is user customizable, although those with a two-button mouse will be limited to the keyboard shortcut. Text size is user controllable as well, with the option to show the Apple and Application menus, too. MenuPop is available for US$4.99 from the Mac App Store.
TUAW's Daily Mac App: Flexiglass
There are many things that OS X does well, and a few things that it could do better. One area of potential weakness is window management, and that's where Flexiglass comes in. Flexiglass, a US$7.99 (currently 20% off) app from the Mac App Store, adds to and enhances the built-in window management features of OS X. It allows you to quickly resize and move a window using any part of said window when a modifier key is held down (the Option key by default), not just the title bar or the resize corner. With the modifier key, a left click and drag allows you to move the window, while a right click resizes the window, altering its size from the bottom or right hand-side edges. If on a trackpad, one, two or three-finger mousing does the same. The result is a fast and efficient means of window movement and resizing that doesn't get in the way of normal operations. Flexiglass also allows you to move and resize windows to set positions like full screen, half screen horizontally or vertically by dragging the window to the edges of the screen or through keyboard shortcuts. An option to double click the title bar or right click the green zoom button to maximize a window is also included, while a right click on the red button will quit the program, not just close the window. Flexiglass rolls in many features found in other separate apps, with lots of options to enable or disable features that you don't want. It's a fast, slick experience that caters to keyboard and mouse jockeys alike, so it's well worth considering if you find OS X lacking in the window management department.
TUAW's Daily Mac App: CmdVees
The ability to copy and paste text is a staple of the modern OS. Even iOS can do it, but on the Mac, the default clipboard behavior can be a bit limiting at times. CmdVees is a US$4.99 ($0.99 when reviewed) Mac App Store utility that acts as an extension to the OS X clipboard, allowing sequential clippings instead of forcing one copy to overwrite the next. Say you want to copy three things from one app to another separately -- with the default Mac clipboard behavior, you'd have to swop between those two apps three separate times (once for each piece of text you want to copy over). CmdVees allows you to copy the three pieces of text sequentially, one after the other, and then paste those clippings back in the order that you copied them, or combine them into one clipping. Once each clipping has been pasted via Cmd+V, it's removed from the CmdVees clipboard, making it a quick, one-time copy and paste enhancement, which allows for rapid re-arrangement of text among many other previously tedious activities. If you need something else, including multiple pastes from one clipping, you can use Cmd+Shift+V or activate it from the CmdVees menu bar app, which allows you to see everything on your clipboard, the shortcuts for various functions, and pasting of items via a single click. You can also tell CmdVees to strip out formatting from text, which is incredibly handy if you happen to write for a living. We've previously covered another $0.99 tool from the MAS for similar uses, Clippy; there are also free alternatives (Jumpcut, ClipMenu), and the $2.99 but more sophisticated Clyppan along with its free, five-clippings-max sibling Clyppan Lite.
TUAW's Daily Mac App: Shuttie
Ever wanted to leave your Mac running unattended at night, but don't want it running all night long? Today's Daily Mac App will help you do just that. Shuttie allows you to bind one of six actions to a countdown timer, allowing you to shutdown, restart, sleep or logout of your Mac, or fire off an AppleScript or an alert. You select the action you want, the countdown time and hit the activate button. Shuttie will provide periodic Growl notifications as it counts down to zero, as well as a timer on its dock icon, and then it will initiate whichever activity you've got selected. Loading an AppleScript is a drag-and-drop affair while your desired alert text is entered into a text box. Sure, there are other ways of doing this kind of thing, but Shuttie is a good way to set up these tasks to be performed remotely. It's US$1.99 in the Mac App Store.
TUAW's Daily Mac App: unDock
When you're using a MacBook in the vicinity of a desk, you're likely to have a lot of things plugged into it. Be it hard drives, flash drives, memory cards or any other type of storage, we all know how bitterly OS X complains when you just pull them out. When you're in a hurry to get out the door, the last thing you want to do is eject 15 different drives. Luckily, as with many Mac-related issues, there's a simple solution to the problem, and that's unDock. UnDock does one-click ejection, or undocking, of every mass storage drive you've got connected to your Mac. Any networked drives or optical media can be ejected as well, and for anything else, you've got the option to fire off an AppleScript at the same time. It can be triggered from a customizable shortcut key or a menu bar utility, while Growl takes care of the notifications. Once the operation is complete, which is nearly instantaneous for anything that doesn't need to spin-up before being ejected, the menu bar icon stops flashing and you're good to go. While you can achieve the same task for free with an AppleScript, if you have a portable Mac with more than one USB drive plugged in at any one time and aren't comfortable messing with AppleScripts, then this US$0.99 app could be a real time saver.
TUAW's Daily Mac App: Minutes
Timers are a dime-a-dozen these days. Whether you're using the built-in Timer app on the iPhone or one of the myriad of cloud-based timer apps or widgets, it doesn't take much to do the job. Minutes is a simple Mac App Store timer app that spawned from a Dashboard widget of the same name. The app exemplifies ease of use, presenting you with a cute little timer box complete with countdown clock at its center. Drag the little arrow around the clock to set the time and click the button to start it. The app can play a cute little default alarm tone, start playing a playlist in iTunes or stop iTunes playing once the countdown has finished. Each action has a fun little animation attached to it with each new timer dropping down from the top of your screen and the clock shaking once the countdown is complete. You can change the color of the timer among four colors, set it to use a 24-hour clock and have as many timers as you want on screen at a time. If you need the digital equivalent of an egg timer on your Mac, you can't go wrong with the cute little US$0.99 Minutes.
Amazon Cloud Player now streams music on the iPhone and iPad
We're not sure how long this has been possible, but at launch, Amazon's Cloud Player refused to stream songs from your Cloud Drive in Mobile Safari, with the only alternative being selecting 'Download' instead of play. Now Amazon has quietly flicked the switch that allows Cloud Player to work properly in Mobile Safari, once you get past the "Your browser isn't supported screen," complete with background playback and control, meaning that you can pause the music and skip tracks right from the multitasking bar. If you haven't tried Amazon's Cloud Player, and you've got an iPhone, iPod touch or iPad, perhaps now's the time to give it a test drive. You get 5 GB of free storage up front, and you can upload and stream any tracks you already have with it. Anything purchased from the Amazon MP3 store can be automatically added to your Cloud Drive without counting against your storage quota. What's more, Amazon will give you an extra 15 GB of free storage when you purchase at least one MP3 album, bringing your storage limit up to 20 GB. While any web app implementation isn't going to be as good as a really great native app, using the Cloud Player in Mobile Safari with background playback and control isn't a bad option at all -- plus it works outside the US, too. [via TechCrunch]
TUAW's Daily Mac App: Rear View Mirror
The Mac App Store is full of useful apps, but it's also full of pretty silly little ones. Today's Daily Mac App is a mix of both. Rear View Mirror, is an app that helps you see what's happening behind you using your iSight or FaceTime HD camera. It essentially gives you a rearview mirror analogous to what you have in a car, displaying a video feed from your camera in a re-sizable simulation of said mirror. The app will display images from the top left, top right, the entire top, or the full feed from your camera. The idea is that you place it at the top of your screen somewhere out of the way, allowing you to see anyone sneaking up on you from behind. If you've ever worked in a coffee shop, library or any other public place where people come and go behind you, you've been worried about people sneaking up on you from behind or if you're just plain nosy, then this fun little US$0.99 Mac App Store app is for you.
Cydia Search lets you search for jailbreak apps from your desktop
Searching for the perfect Jailbreak app in Cydia on the iPhone can be a frustratingly slow experience. Cydia Search from Planet-iPhones.com eases your pain by allowing you to browse through the plethora of Cydia apps by category, repository or author, all from the comfort of a desktop browser. If you know what you're looking for, you can search by name, description, author, version number or one of the many other search filters, which should make short work of finding what you're looking for. Once you've located a package you're interested in, you can check out who wrote it, the price, the current version, which repository it's stored on, as well as view the actual Cydia entry as it would appear on an iPhone. While this isn't the first implementation of a desktop Cydia interface -- ModMyi also provides a searchable front end for Cydia on the desktop -- Cydia Search provides a fast, slick experience that's well worth checking out. It's great for those people sitting on the fence as to whether or not they want to jailbreak their iDevice since it allows them to view all the programs, add-ons, tweaks and themes before they take the plunge. Likewise, if you're looking for a new app or update, Cydia Search will allow you to find what you're looking for before you head to Cydia on your device to download it.
TUAW's Daily Mac App: InstaDesk
Have you ever wished you could get the Instagram experience on your desktop? Well, that's what the guys behind InstaDesk thought when they set out to use the recently released Instagram API. InstaDesk is a cool US$1.99 app from the Mac App Store that lets you view your feed, what's popular, or your own pictures. It also lets you view your followers and who you follow, and you can search for new users, all from within a familiar, Mac-like interface. The app sits in your menu bar, showing you the number of new photos available at a glance and opening up to the full size app you see above. You can view the images full size, view and post comments on your fellow Instagrammers' creations, and "Like" some choice ones directly from the app. You can download images to your Mac, share them via email, Facebook or Twitter, or open them in a browser. You can even create your own albums of photos and view them in a slideshow with some really great transition effects. About the only thing that InstaDesk doesn't do is allow you to post from your Mac to Instagram. Unfortunately, that's something that's simply not allowed by Instagram API, and therefore there's not much the folks behind InstaDesk can do about it. Does that make the app less useful? Perhaps. But if you're more a consumer of photos rather than a poster, InstaDesk provides a slick, simple, desktop way to view and appreciate the photos of others.

...