utility
Latest
Five social apps to help you make a decision
Anyone who knows me well understands that I hate making decisions. From what to eat to where to go on vacation, I'd rather have little to no choice in the matter. For decision-avoiding people like me, there are a growing number of social decision-making apps that let you turn to your friends or the internet at large to help you make a decision. Here are five of them I have stumbled upon recently. Seesaw for iPhone [iPhone; Free] Seesaw allows you take a photo of your choices and then share them with the community to help you make a decision. You can also send your seesaws to your friends in your address book and they can respond without signing up for the service or installing the app. Loop -- Social Polling [iPhone; Free] Loop is a social polling app that lets you ask any question and get an instant answer. People responding to questions can do so without downloading or installing anything. It's more than just life decisions -- you can loop in your Pinboard or Amazon items, so you can use it for shopping advice and more. The app also allows you to create private polls and display an infographic of the voting results from a poll. Deciderr -- Social Decision-Making [iPhone; Free] Deciderr is a social app that lets you post a "Yes or No" question to help you make a decision. You can post your own questions or respond to questions posted by the people you follow. You can also share your question on Twitter or Facebook. PeepAdvice [iPhone; Free] PeepAdvice allows you to get advice quickly by asking simple questions with two choices that are open for voting. Your followers can then chime in with their favorite choice. PeepAdvice is a wide-open forum for discussing health, romance, purchases and more. Polar [iPhone; Free] Polar is a social polling app that lets people both vote and comment on your polls. As you share polls, you can build a following and follow others on the social network. You can chat with others and create or share polls right within the chat messages. It's a social experience that's part talking, part decision-making.
Recent Menu lets you find recently-used files quickly
If you open and close many files throughout the course of a day, at some point you may forget what you named a file or even which program you used to create or open a file. Recent Menu from developer Tim Schroeder addresses this annoyance with a menu item app. Most programs include an Open Recent command in the File menu, which allows you to easily locate a file on which you worked in the past few days. The number of items in a recent list depends on how many files you opened and how you set the program's preferences. Most probably each of your apps has a different number of recently opened files that it shows, but Recent Menu shows you all the files and folders you accessed, depending on how you set it up. Recent Menu Set Up When you first install Recent Menu, you must grant access to your file system to launch Recent Menu at startup. Instead of a simple dialog to accomplish that, the program includes a File System Access button. The second item you choose is a keyboard shortcut to use with the app. Unfortunately Recent Menu does not offer any suggestions and the first few I tried yielded a message that the shortcut is already in use by a system-wide shortcut. You can see the list of OS X keyboard shortcuts in use by the system in Apple's "OS X keyboard shortcuts" support doc. I found that Command-F13 is unused, so that's the Hotkey I chose. Recent Menu appears in your Finder menu and chronologically lists the files and folders you opened recently. According to the developer, Tim Schroeder, this is based on the premise that "files and folders you have recently used are likely to be used again soon." Upon first install of Recent Menu I was surprised to see that every app I'd launched the day before appeared in the menu. I really did not want to see email I'd marked as SPAM show up in my menu, so I read the Help file to see what kinds of customizations I could apply. How It Works Spotlight provides the data that Recent Menu uses. The Spotlight data is linked to Recent Menu according to your filter settings and presets in the recently accessed item list. You decide the length of time in hours that Recent Menu monitors file and folder access to display on the menu in the preferences Search tab. You can also choose whether to show only user and application folders or all local folders. You cannot keep track of items stored in a cloud-based storage or accesses over a network though. In the Filter Preferences tab, you tell Recent Menu which types of files to display and in what order, although within the type list, items are chronological. You add or delete filters using the plus (+) and minus (-) buttons. It looks simple enough, if you choose Filename as the search criteria, but I was stumped when I wanted to list only TIF or PSD (Photoshop) image files. I needed to choose UTI in the Search for box. UTI is specified instead of file type, because that is what Spotlight uses to categorize your documents. The UTI (Uniform Type Identifier) is an Apple specific text string that identifies an item type, which was implemented in Mac OS X 10.4. A list of system UTIs exists in Apple's Developer Library, but why should I have to root around the developer library to enable a simple search key? It worked fine, but I just found this option more complex than I want in a supposedly simple menu item. Generally, I do not access the same files over and over, but I do open the same folders daily. I park them in my Dock for easy access. This does make my Dock crowded though. Recent Menu alleviates Dock congestion because it can list folders in its menu. The program falls short though if you do not set enough items to display in the list. You can choose up to 30 items to display in each category. Also, it does not list items opened from within a program. It only shows files that you opened through the Finder. You can also hover your mouse over an item in Recent Menu's list and a tool tip appears that tells you the path to the file. This is a handy feature. Do You Need Recent Menu? The one option I need did not exist, which makes Recent Menu less useful to me. I was hoping Recent Menu would let me park items I use sporadically in the bottom of the menu, but that is not the way it is designed. For example, I want to park my photo watermark template and keep it there, because I use it frequently, but not daily. So, while Recent Menu did not solve my problem, you may find it useful for your work. It works well in OS X 10.8.x and does what it is supposed to do, although a bit complex to set up, if you want specific file types listed. I tested Recent Menu version 1.2.2, which requires OS X 10.7.4 (Lion) and up. It is free on the App store, so give it a try and see if it helps speed up your workflow.
Stellar Phoenix Mac Data Recovery's version 6 now available
Stellar Data Recovery announced an upgrade to their data recovery product this week. Mac Data Recovery 6 recovers deleted files with their original file names intact, which is a first in the Mac market. It can reclaim documents, images, movies, and other files from HFS, HFS+, FAT, ExFAT and NTFS file systems. In addition to recovering data from your internal or external hard drive, Mac Data Recovery 6 can also retrieve files from SD cards, flash, USB devices, and even deleted volumes. According to Stellar, the updated Mac Data Recovery software includes a new scanning engine that is up to 30% faster than previous versions. It can also recover files from boot camp partitions. In addition, Stellar's Raw Recovery feature allows you to recover more than 122 different file types. Mac Data Recovery 6 works in Mac OS X 10.4 (Tiger) and up and supports English, French, German, Spanish, Italian, and Dutch. You can try Stellar Phoenix Mac Data Recovery 6 for free [direct download link], but it only scans and previews recoverable data. To actually save that data, you can purchase the product for US$99.00 directly from the site.
Decompress with The Unarchiver
When I was asked to review The Unarchiver 2.7, a free decompression utility from Dag Ågren/WAHa, I thought "Who needs this program, when Mac OS X opens most common archive formats?" I quickly found out that thousands of people rely on The Unarchiver to do tasks that lie beyond the scope of built-in Archive Utility.app found in OS X. First I spoke to a loyal user, Barry Porter, an Apple Consultants Network member from Delray Beach, Fla. He said, "I use it everyday. It's great. I haven't found an archive it can't open. I use it because the built-in program is very limited in what it can create and open. You never need to open the program, it just works in the background unarchiving stuff." That's a glowing recommendation, so I put The Unarchiver to my own test. Back in the old days, it was common practice to archive files by compressing them so that they fit on a floppy disk or CD. If you happen to have saved those files onto a hard drive socked away for safekeeping, today you are hard-pressed to open those files. The Unarchiver can decompress many file types, so rejoice, because you can actually open DiskDoubler, Compact Pro and PackIt files now. I dug up some seriously old files to test The Unarchiver. I found some .sit files from 1994 and The Unarchiver opened them. Oh joy! Anyone need an Macintosh FTP list from 1995? (Curiously though, my search for files created before 1999 found over 1000 files created in 1969. I'm pretty sure that's not right! Must be a backup from a crashed drive... but I digress...) If you use more current formats and various download sites, you may encounter RAR or Tar files. No problem for The Unarchiver there either. If you find bugs or have a problem, Dag Ågren maintains an old-school support board on which you can ask questions. Also included is support for over 29 languages and DOS and Windows formats. To install, you only need to download it from the App Store. The program runs in the background. When you double-click on the application, all you see is the Preferences window. The only time you have to interact with the program is to give it permission to write to a folder, if you want to extract an archive into the same folder in which it lives. If you're curious and want to know exactly how many different archive formats exist, first look at The Unarchiver Supported formats page. Second, take a gander at Wikipedia's "List of archive formats." This handy page explains all of the file extensions used on various platforms for archived and compressed formats. In short, if you need to open archives of any flavor, you can't go wrong installing The Unarchiver. If you like it, you can donate to help Dag Ågren's development efforts for other programs too. Requirements: OS X 10.6.0 or later
Ailing Mac? Try Drive Genius 3
When your Mac starts acting unreliably your first line of defense is Apple's Disk Utility, but that solves a small number of problems, such as permissions and disk verification and repair. A good second line of defense is Drive Genius 3 for Mac from Prosoft Engineering. Drive Genius offers repair and maintenance utilities you can use to make sure your hard drive runs at maximum efficiency. This US$99 suite of programs includes the following modules: Information, Defrag, DriveSlim, Repair, Scan, DrivePulse, Integrity Check, Initialize, Repartition, Duplicate, Shred, Benchtest, and Sector Edit. When you launch Drive Genius you can choose any one of the available utilities from a set of icons displayed across two screens. Each module presents an option to choose a drive, volume or files and folders on the right, depending on the utility's purpose. Options available for each utility appear in the main window with simple instructions. A question mark icon on the bottom right opens the help file. The simple Preferences offer three options. You can choose to show the custom animation of data moving around a disk as a tool works, check for updates, and turn on email notification when a tool finishes its task. This last preference is a subtle reminder that many of the functions take a significant amount of time to run. The Modules The Information module provides a complete description of your hard drive, probably more information than you want. The balance of the modules are best run after you backup your data, in case of unexpected problems. Scan, Integrity Check, and Benchtest run read and write tests on your hard drive. They check for bad blocks, the health of your hardware, and in Benchtest, test the drives read and write speeds. As these tests sort of hammer on your drive, any electrical interruption or serious drive problem can result in data loss. That's one good reason to make sure you have a good backup or copy of your drive on hand. The Duplicate module can create a backup for you, but as with many of these tools, it will not copy your current start-up drive unless you start from a different drive. Duplicate creates a bit-by-bit copy of your drive, so you must use a blank drive of equal or greater size to use it. Personally, I prefer Carbon Copy Cloner or SuperDuper! to backup my drives, but including a backup module in Drive Genius just makes sense. It's actually best to use the Drive Genius startup disk from which to run most of the tools. These tests chew through quite a bit of time, so make sure you run the programs when you don't need the machine for a number of hours. The problem I often solve using Drive Genius 3 is a slow drive and one that mysteriously is eating up space at a surprising rate. That's where DriveSlim and Defrag come in handy. DriveSlim is useful to search for large files, duplicate files over 1 MB, Unused Localizations (language files you don't need), Universal Binaries, and Cache and Temporary files you no longer need. I'm not quite sure I understand how it works though. I wasn't happy with the way DriveSlim displays the information, I found that it showed duplicates that were not, but only with files over 320 MB. On one drive, using Mac OS X 10.6.8, it listed both duplicate files and on another, in OS X 10.8, it listed only one file and I had to search for the duplicate in the Finder to see where it was stored. I then manually removed the file stored in the wrong folder. I'm sure that's not the way the tool was designed to work, but I was not confident to just check a box next to the DriveSlim found file and have it decide which file to keep, where to alias that file, or where to back up the file. You can choose which of the files to locate, but if you choose to act on only one type of file, you must run DriveSlim again to work on another type of file. Time consuming to say the least. Even though most people claim you don't need to defragment a Mac-based hard drive, the OS actually only defragments files that are less than 20 MB. If you create or edit sound, video, or photographic files, you may have some hefty sized files on your drive(s). As Apple states in one of its manpages for XSan: "There are two major types of fragmentation to note: file fragmentation and free space fragmentation." "A file extent is a contiguous allocation unit within a file. When a large enough contiguous space cannot be found to allocate to a file, multiple smaller file extents are created. Each extent represents a different physical spot in a storage pool. Requiring multiple extents to address file data impacts performance in a number of ways." In short, if pieces of the file you want to use are scattered all over your hard drive, it is working harder to deliver that file to you, slowing your workflow, and potentially reducing the lifespan of your hard drive. In checking a couple of my hard drives I found movie files that were divided into over 2000 fragments and photo files with over 100 fragments. When you run Defrag the files are concatenated into one whole file and the free space is moved to one area. I did test defragmenting my startup drive, not a recommended action to take, but I have a current backup. Drive Genius reboots your Mac into the Command Line and runs the defrag command, which also repairs your drive and reboots your Mac when its done. It worked fine, but a bit unnerving to watch. The Repair module seems to duplicate the functions of Disk Utility, such as verify and repair disk errors and permissions. It will also rebuild the drive's catalog file. The rest of the modules are aimed at setting up your drives. You can Initialize a drive and format it for GUID (recommended for Intel Macs) or use the old Apple Partition Map. You can also Repartition a volume, but not your start up drive–unless you start off the Drive Genius 3 disc. Partitioning lets you divide one drive into multiple volumes. I seem to be one of the few people who still partitions my drives and use this function when I first use a new drive. Explanation of initializing, partitioning, and Sector Editing your drive are beyond the scope of this review, but you can find more information on the Drive Genius site and in the Help file. One word of caution, if you do not know exactly what you are doing, never use Sector Edit, because it can corrupt the drive and render files useless. Last is the newest module, added in Drive Genius 2, DrivePulse. This module loads into your Apple menu bar and monitors your drives in the background. I found it unnecessary on my new iMac, but have used it in the past on older machines. It checks for fragmentation, and file and physical drive problems. On my new iMac most of the drives I loaded yielded a Pending status. It checks drives when the machine is idle, so it doesn't interrupt your work. You can turn it off from the menu item or within Drive Genius. Conclusion The one thing Drive Genius will not do is run any tests on a drive that has serious physical problems, which is a shame. I started my tests using a 160 GB Iomega Ego that had trouble mounting. Anyone who deals with drives knows that clicks means ensuing death, but usually you have a little time to remove your files before the drive goes belly up. Well, this drive with three partitions fell off my desktop within 5 minutes. Drive Genius could see it initially, but would not run any tests and I couldn't recover anything from it. Drive Genius 3 is especially useful if you create or edit very large files. For this review, I tested version 3.2.2, but have also used version 1 and 2 in the past. The price of Drive Genius pales against the cost of a new hard drive. At about $7.60 per module, it helps you keep your machine lean and mean and working at peak efficiency. Requirements: Intel-based Mac OS X 10.6.8 to 10.8.x 1 GB RAM Does not support Drobo drives Limited support for FAT32, ExFAT, NTFS, and Software RAID Upgrade from competing product for $75
Origin Stories: Joel Grasmeyer, Construction Cost Estimator
I met up with Joel a while ago and we struck up a conversation about estimating construction costs because my father-in-law had been a contractor. He had what looked like a great app for estimating these costs, and it's now available for iPhone, iPad and Mac. In this Origin Stories I talk to Joel about why he created this app, which is pretty much what you'd expect -- he had a problem of lousy tools for on-site estimating and he solved it using a clever app.
Use Automator to get the Airport Utility 5.6.1 working on OS X 10.8
When I acquired a second printer dedicated to making prints and photos, I decided to dig the older Airport Express I have out of a drawer and set it up to be a wireless print server for that printer. However, I ran into a bit of a snafu: the older Airport Expresses require AirPort Utility 5.6.1 to run. It's still available on Apple's website, but even though it's easy to obtain, you can't run it in Mountain Lion. The actual AirPort Utility 5.6.1 software runs just fine on Mountain Lion. Its installer, however, isn't compatible. The solution I initially discovered, thanks to Douglas Urner in the Apple support communities, was to use Terminal to extract the AirPortUtility.pkg from the installer and dig the app out of it. It worked great, and it nets you a working copy of AirPort Utility 5.6.1. But UI designer Frank Tisellano makes this even easier. He developed an Automator workflow does all the coding work for you. This is the solution for those who aren't comfortable with diving into the inner workings of your Mac. Here's what to do: Download the AirPort Utility 5.6.1 installer from Apple. Download Tisellano's workflow from his website. Drag the AirPort Utility installer file onto the extracted workflow item. Don't just run the workflow, otherwise it won't work properly. Authorize any permissions needed and let the workflow do its magic. Once it's finished, you'll see an AirPortTemp and the older AirPort Utility sitting on your desktop. Move the AirPort Utility to your Utilities folder, trash the other folders, and you're good to go!
TUAW Origin Stories: Bartender
We wrote up Bartender for Mac as a Friday Favorite some time ago, even though the app isn't out of beta. In this Origin Stories, I speak with Ben Surtees, who has been programming since he was 15. Check out the story behind Bartender in the video below, and the app itself if you're tired of menu bar items cluttering your Mac.
TUAW Origin Stories: PDF Cabinet
PDF Cabinet is one of many PDF tools on the App Store, but Cabinet features some niceties like real-time collaboration and drag-and-drop document management. It also sports a skeumorphic or "real-world" look, complete with stitched leather, if you're into that sort of thing. In the video below, we talk to Andrey Podshibyakin, one of the creators of PDF Cabinet, about how it came to be.
Notification Hacking with Scheduled Notifications utility
A while back, Matt Gemmell wrote a great little US$3.00 utility called Sticky Notifications that merged Mountain Lion's notification center with sticky notes. It allows you to pin reminders to your desktop. Now, Jeremy Tregunna has released a time-triggered twist on the idea. His Scheduled Notifications utility lets you specify when you want to be pinged. "I was using Sticky Notifications to remind myself to do a couple things at a time," he writes, "These were things which i didn't need to do now, but in 10 or 30 minutes. They were eating up space on my screen and covering my inspector panels in Xcode." He wanted to be able to fire them up, but have them trigger at a specified time. So he got to work and put together a utility that would use real-world formatting (like "tomorrow at 5PM") and an easy-to-fill-out form. The result is Scheduled Notifications ($2.99), which he will distribute both through his own site and, once he gets through Apple's hoops, the Mac App Store. I gave the app a try and found it easy to use. You can schedule notifications and then preview what notifications are coming up. It does have a few quirks, as you would expect in an early release. For example, new notifications don't always show up properly in the upcoming (Command-U) list. That said, it's a simple, friendly utility that many OS X Mountain Lions users will find helpful -- and being sold at a price that won't break the bank.
Liquid Information is like a Swiss Army knife for text
Liquid Information is one of those time-saving utilities that you can't live without once you start using it. Advertised as a "Swiss Army knife of text," the OS X utility lets you select a string of text in any app then search, look up, translate, calculate and share that information quickly. All you have to do is select your text and hit "command-@" to pull up the list of available actions in Liquid Information. Keyboard shortcut gurus can get fancy with commands like "command-shift-2 r,w" which will automatically search your selected text on Wikipedia or "command-shift-2-t,e,g" which will translate your text from English to German. You can download Liquid Information from the Mac App Store for $0.99. You can see how it works in the video below and test it out for yourself on the company's website. Liquid Information is running the server version of the tool, which lets you select text on the site and tap the liquid droplet to search, translate and more.
Gemini now finds duplicates in iPhoto and iTunes
Gemini from MacPaw is one of those utilities you don't use every day, but is extremely handy to have around. The OS X software excels at finding duplicate files on internal drives, external drives or network volumes. It scans a folder at lightning speed, while giving you the option to view your duplicate files and choose which ones you want to remove. The latest update to Version 1.3 adds the ability to remove duplicates from your iPhoto and iTunes library. The app is a must-have if you're like me and have thousands of photos and song tracks scattered about your drives. Version 1.3 also now supports Mountain Lion and the Retina MacBook Pro. You can find out more about Gemini on MacPaw's website and read through our review of the utility from earlier this year. For a short time, Gemini is on sale for US$6.99 in the Mac App Store. This is a 30 percent discount of its regular $9.99 price tag.
TUAW Origin Stories: Picky
Picky used to be Pod+, but since WWDC (when this was filmed), the developer has changed the name. The idea behind Picky is simple: a tool for quickly filtering through artists and songs by viewing them based on how many songs of theirs are on your iOS device. When Pod+ became Picky, the dev who created it (Charles Joseph) gave it a substantial UI facelift. The result is a simple tool for picky music listeners. In this Origin Stories, we learn why Charles made Picky. As you can imagine, he wanted to tame his own music collection.
Daily iPhone App: GPS4CAM adds geolocation to your DSLR photos
While many photography applications like iPhoto and Aperture can make use of GPS information in terms of grouping pictures by location, there aren't a lot of cameras that have built-in GPS receivers. Of course, that's not a problem if you do all or most of your photography with an iPhone, since all photos taken with the Camera app are automatically stamped with the latitude and longitude of the spot where the image was captured. But what do photographers do when taking photos with their favorite DSLR or compact camera that doesn't have a GPS receiver? That's where GPS4CAM (US$2.99) comes into play. The app, which doesn't require attachment to a cellular network or Wi-Fi during operation, is designed to capture your exact location at specific points in time. The workflow for using GPS4CAM is simple. At the beginning of a trip, whether it's a one-hour hike in the foothills or a 90-day expedition, you press a large green button to indicate to the app that you want to start capturing your location. There are four different settings for location capture: standard (every five minutes), energy saving (captured via GSM, requires a cellular signal), precise (every 30 seconds), or manual (you need to shake the phone to capture the location). %Gallery-164058% As you go about your trip, the app is capturing time and location information. At the end of your trip, you press an "Export" button to generate a 2D QR bar code, and then take a photo of the bar code with the same camera you've been using to take the photos. If you've captured a lot of images during your trip, the app may generate multiple QR codes, all of which you need to take photos of. Next, you move your thousands of photos from the camera to a folder on your Mac or PC. Developer Michael Diguet has written a desktop app for Mac and Windows that is downloadable for free. What does the desktop app do? It goes through the images from your camera, grabs the QR bar codes, and then matches the time stamp in the EXIF photo information data to time and location information stored in the QR codes. Each image is then updated with the GPS information. At the end of the process, you can import the images with the GPS data into your favorite photography app. In order to test-drive the app, I used while running some errands earlier in the week. My camera? A Canon PowerShot SX30IS "Super Zoom", with no built-in GPS capability. At each stop on my little trip, I took a picture, then shook the iPhone to capture the GPS information in GPS4CAM. The app vibrates the phone to let you know that it has done a GPS capture, so I was concerned when it vibrated twice (indicating a double capture) at a few stops. At the end of my errand run I "exported" the QR code and dutifully snapped a photo. The GPS4CAM desktop app is quite minimalistic, just asking for the location of the input and output folders for your photos. After creating a couple of folders, moving the images off of my camera and into the input folder, and then letting the app do its work, it took less than a minute to geotag all of the images. By the way, you can also look at maps of each trip -- that's shown in the main post image at the top of this review. A red dot indicates a location where that can be zoomed into to reveal other more precise locations, while a green dot is a single tag point. After importing those photos into iPhoto, I was happy to see that they did properly reflect the locations of where the photos were taken. That's going to save my wife -- the person in our household who does most of the organization and publishing of our vacation photos -- a lot of time, since she will no longer have to manually enter locations. GPS4CAM puts the photos of the QR codes into a special folder so you don't import them into iPhoto or Aperture, and also generates a .GPX (GPS eXchange Format) file if you want to throw that into Google Earth. GPS4CAM works flawlessly and quickly, and is an excellent addition to the app library of any photographer with an iPhone.
Friday Favorite: Bartender
There comes a time in a power user's life when the number of his menu bar applications exceeds the amount of real estate in the menu bar, a condition made worse by primary applications with a lot of menus. The cure for this? A handy little app, which is still undergoing testing, called Bartender. Bartender will roll up menu bar items into one little drop-down menu bar item. That's pretty much it! You can have Bartender hide something entirely, or just pop it under the Bartender menu bar icon. Keep in mind this is still in beta, so many of my TUAW colleagues weren't able to put system icons into Bartender, but I was. Your mileage may vary, but while the app is in beta it is basically free. You can also choose to buy it now for $7.50, which is half what it will cost when it is out of beta. If, like me, your menu bar has exceeded the width of what your screen can handle, try Bartender. It's just what you were looking for.
Friday Favorite: Desktop Tidy
Part of my blogging workflow uses Skitch for screenshots. As a result, I wind up with images all over my desktop at the end of the day like, well, a messy desktop after a busy day. If you find yourself with files constantly cluttering your desktop as well, check out Desktop Tidy on the Mac App Store. It'll hide those files clogging up your workspace at intervals you set, from every few seconds to every few days. But wait, there's more! Desktop Tidy includes a ton of customization features. Sure, it stashes your files away in your Library folder where Spotlight won't index them (and Finder likes to hide the Library folder by default these days), but that's part of the beauty of the app. Using the menu bar, you'll easily see what files were sent over, make them come back, or search and organize them on the fly. Here's a neat trick: Ctrl-clicking an item in the menu will restore it to your desktop. There are filters for filetypes which will allow you to easily spot the files you may typically save to the desktop. In my case these are image files, and Desktop Tidy comes already configured to show a filter of images, easily accessed from the menu bar. In a way, this is easier than mucking about on the desktop itself. Yes there are other tools and ways to do this, but I think Tidy gives the user a ton of options and ease of use for a decent price (currently US$4.99). Check out Desktop Tidy if you just can't stand having all those files littering your desktop, no matter how tiny you make them.
Steam store reveals a handful of new categories, hints at non-gaming app possibilities
Steam's Android app has thrown up a selection of new categories that point to the possibility of productivity apps and other types of non-gaming software being sold in the near-future. Ranging from photo editing to accounting, there's ten categories that aren't available on the desktop version. It would open up yet another branch for Valve, which already offers books and movies through its online store, but until these categories get fleshed-out -- they're currently empty -- we're left guessing as to what it's likely to offer.
DevJuice: Sim Launcher updated
Landon Fuller of the Plausible Labs cooperative has just updated simlaunch, a github project that allows you to create iOS Simulator application bundles that launch from the desktop. This utility helps developers to share builds for testing, for promotion, and for fun that run on the Mac without need for hardware, special signing permissions, or ad hoc provisions. Although I contributed to the original project, all the updates were performed by Landon and all kudos and thanks should be aimed in his direction. Simlaunch is released under the MIT license (which is similar to BSD).
The Heart of the Wild controversy: Should players be allowed to change specs in combat?
In a recent Mists of Pandaria beta build, the tooltip for one of the currently inaccessible druid talents, Heart of the Wild, was significantly rewritten and updated. The full tooltip is long, but the key assumption is that every six minutes, a druid of any spec can click a button and automatically be able change to another combat role for 45 seconds, with little drop-off in effectiveness. Restoration druids can start dealing damage, DPSers of either persuasion can throw around some heals or tank an add, and guardian tanks can even spread around a few HoTs without having to leave Bear Form and turn into paste. That's the theory, anyway. As you can imagine, this idea generated some heated debate in the druid blogger community. The noted Lissanna of Restokin called it "(likely) the the least used talent out of any talent tree in the history of the game" Murmurs also agreed, saying "HotW has a pure functionality problem. It can never truly fulfill the position that it is attempting to grasp." In opposition, Tangedyn, the co-creator of the Mew feral druid simulator and frequent contributor to The Inconspicuous Bear, wrote "... there's no reason to deny druids that want the versatility the capability to perform to their best of their abilities." So who's right? Well, let's take a closer look at both sides of the argument, since this debate brings up several important issues to any WoW raider.
HP's On-Screen Display Utility released, aims to alleviate Envy 15 screen color complaints
Back when we reviewed HP's latest Envy 15, we found a glaring issue with its otherwise spectacular 1080p IPS display -- namely, its less-than-pleasing color reproduction. Making good on a promise it made back in March, HP has finally released its On-Screen Display Utility software for the machine in hopes of quelling user complaints. If you'll recall, HP stated that the displays are of a higher quality than other laptop panels, which can make colors look odd in comparison. That said, while this gesture is certainly welcome, at least one tipster wrote in to complain that he "wasn't able to get a satisfactory change. It's basically just gamma adjustment and r/g/b sliders." Of course, we've only cited one anecdote here, so if you've got an Envy 15 you'd like to test this on, hit up the source link below. Be sure to let us know your results in the comments. [Thanks, Anthony]
