Monthly Archives: April 2012

InsomniaX: Disable Sleep On Idle Or Lid Close While On Battery Or AC [Mac]

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MacBooks, like all other laptops, go to sleep when their lids are closed. The benefits of this simple function are multiple; you can close the lid and leave your MacBook with the assurance that it will be locked, and should you have forgotten to power it off, the power consumption will be minimized. That, nevertheless, doesn’t mean you always want the lid to trigger this function. Windows allows you to disable this function completely, but Mac, unfortunately, does not. InsomniaX is a free Mac app that not only lets you disable Mac’s idle sleep function, but also lets you stop your MacBook from entering sleep mode when you close the lid. The app lets you define these settings based on the power source, i.e., if the MacBook is running on battery, you may choose to allow it to enter sleep mode when the lid closes or the system is idle, and disable this behavior when it is plugged in. Read More

SaveGram For Android: Batch-Download Photos From Any Public Instagram Profile

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If the reputation of the popular photo-editing and sharing sensation, Instagram, was impressive among iOS users, the debut of its Android client in the Google Play Store has been nothing less than a fairy tale. First, the app almost instantly shot up to the number one spot among Android apps from the social genre, then the service itself got acquired by the social network giant, Facebook, at a staggering price of $1 billion. The official Android (or even iOS) client of Instagram is good at letting you apply retro filters on your photos and share them on the network, but what if you wished to download your entire Instagram photo collection to your newly bought Samsung Galaxy Note? What if you were to add to your local image library all the gorgeous snaps that your Instagram followers have uploaded on the network publicly? New to the Google Play Store, SaveGram is an Android app that lets you access, explore and save the entire collection of photos that have been shared on Instagram by any user (including you and your followers). Read More

BusyFlow: Manage All Your Cloud-Based Apps From One Place For More Effective Collaboration [Web]

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Multiple productivity apps allow you to manage your projects and tasks more effectively, but switching between all of them can be a cumbersome process. BusyFlow is a workspace that creates the easiest way for you and your team to collaborate and manage all your cloud apps, such as DropBox, Google Docs, Pivotal Tracker, Google Calendar etc, through a unified interface. With it, you can easily juggle files, notes and tasks between your apps with a simple click or drag. Additionally, you can create a private wall for each project, and discuss any task, document, event, image or link together with your team. You can also add tags, edit or comment and add more collaborators. This smart web application is meant for the teams working together on a particular project, to be able to access, synchronize and discuss the same data in real time. As the developer's webpage illustrates, the service is particularly useful for developer teams, media agencies, power internet users and consultants. More after the break. Read More

Crusper: Perform Simple Tasks By Moving Mouse Cursor Over Screen Corners

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Moving the cursor around and clicking programs and files to access them is quite convenient, but if you were looking for a rather quick way to perform simple computer tasks, then you should give Crusper a try. This application has been developed to use screen corners and mouse movements to perform common tasks, ranging from opening a program, file or folder to restarting or shutting down. The utility sits in the system tray and silently tracks every mouse movement, without hogging system performance too much. When you move the mouse to a corner of the screen, it immediately performs the specified task. Moreover, you can create a combination of screen corners, like the top left + bottom right, to perform more operations. Details to follow. Read More

How To Backup iPhone SAM Activation Ticket To The Cloud via Cookie [Cydia]

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To those who like to stay up to date with the latest news regarding the jailbreak world, SAM is nothing new by any means. You must also have heard of the new method through which it has become possible to carrier-unlock any jailbroken iPhone on any baseband and firmware, in a few simple steps (discussed here in detail). Although the method seemed to be a blessing from the heavens, Apple was quick to react, and is in the process of updating their servers to block the SAM unlock altogether. The jailbreak community, as always, is one step ahead. Enter Cookie, a Cydia tweak that backs up your activation ticket to the cloud, so that you can restore it at any time you want! Read More

Metanota: View, Create & Sync Notes From Your SimpleNote Account [Mac]

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If you’re an avid SimpleNote user, you might be a little disappointed with the fact that its Mac app is still under wraps. As far as Apple's ecosystem goes, you can only check notes on your iPad or iPhone. If you’re not good at waiting, and do not like to use the service’s web interface, you can download one of the many third party apps available for SimpleNote. Metanota is one such app; it is a free SimpleNote client for Mac that regularly checks for updates, syncs notes you’ve created on your iOS device to your desktop, and lets you view or edit them. The app supports a search feature and lets you create folders to keep your notes organized. The free version of Metanota is ad-supported, but that can be changed by upgrading to the full version (paid). The ad itself, however, is unobtrusive, and if you feel it doesn’t bother you much, you can continue using it without the upgrade. Read More

xShredder: Overwrite Free Space & MFT, Wipe Disk, Shred Folders & Files

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When you delete a file, it goes to the Recycle Bin. To remove it completely from your hard drive, you have to delete it from the Recycle Bin as well. However, even after you have completely removed it from your hard disk, one can easily recover the deleted file using a powerful data recovery utility, such as previously reviewed Recuva. Although data recovery software come useful in situations where you delete something by mistake, anyone with malicious intentions and the right set of tools can easily recover and access deleted sensitive information from your hard drive. xShredder is an open source application for Windows that allows you to protect your privacy by overwriting free space as well as shredding confidential files using powerful permanent data removal techniques. The program provides multiple shredding methods including British HMG IS5 Base Line, US Army AR380 19, German VSITR, and Peter Gutmann. Further details after the break. Read More

LSBrightSlider: Add Brightness Slider To iOS Lock Screen [Cydia]

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Jailbreaking your iPhone, iPod touch or iPad not only opens the device up to several useful tweaks, but also a lot of appearance enhancements. The Cydia store is full of themes and fonts that let you make cosmetic changes to your iDevice, while utilities and tweaks add or change functionality of certain aspects of the OS. It is a testament to the comprehensiveness of the Cydia store that there is no area of Apple’s mobile OS that cannot be altered using the tweaks available in it. A large percentage of Cydia tweaks focus on the lockscreen, and LSBrightSlider is the latest addition to the list of such tweaks. The functionality it offers is a simple but useful one. Using LSBrightSlider, people with jailbroken iOS devices get a new slider on their lockscreen, which can be used to change the brightness level of the display. Read More

Create Custom Keyboard Shortcuts & Reassign Function Keys On Mac [Tip]

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For avid computer users, keyboard shortcuts make the usage of an app extremely convenient, and when they’re missing, it is annoying, to say the least. For many apps, a function, and a highly useful one at that, may lack a hotkey, but there is a simple workaround for it in OS X. If the apps you’re using lack the shortcuts you need, you can add them yourself from System Preferences. Additionally, if you don’t utilize your function keys for the purpose they are meant for, you can reassign them to work in your favorite apps instead. This little tip describes how you can add a custom shortcut for any app, and disable & reassign your function keys. Read More

Preference-Aware Music Events Tracking App Bandsintown Concerts Comes To Android

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Bandsintown is a popular Facebook app that keeps the music enthusiasts apprised of the upcoming live concerts and performances of their favorite music bands/artists. An iOS variant of the app has been around in the iTunes App Store for quite some time, while the Android version has just hit the Play Store. Using Bandsintown Concerts for Android, you can start tracking concerts and performances of your favorite music celebrities who are scheduled to perform in virtually any part of the world. Not just that - the app also scans your music library to fetch all the music artists that you listen to regularly, and lets you track their concerts with utmost ease. For each artist that you wish to track, the app fetches a list of their upcoming live shows, displaying the date, time, venue and location of each concert. Read More

Ambientweet Is An Intuituve, Hotkey-Controlled Twitter Client For Mac

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Not all Twitter users are the same, and similarly, not all Twitter clients are made to work the same way. For the Twitter users who tweet very often and are as glued to their timeline, clients like Tweetdeck might be the right choice. However, those users who don’t treat their Twitter feed like holy scriptures, but like to keep up with the news just the same, minimalistic ones are better. Ambientweet is one such minimalistic Twitter client for Mac that works almost entirely with keyboard shortcuts. It displays one tweet at a time as a notification on your desktop, and cycles through the ones you’ve received. There are buttons for quickly retweeting, replying, favoriting or posting a tweet, but for going through a particular user’s tweets or scrolling through the ones in your feed, you will have to use keyboard shortcuts. Read More

Bartender Adds A Hidden Toolbar To Unclutter The System Menu Bar [Mac]

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Although Mac OS X menu bar lets you quickly access frequently used applications and their different functions, it doesn’t provide you with an option to manage as well as, hide/unhide all menu bar applications and system utilities’ icons. If you often struggle finding the application icon in menu bar, Bartender may help. The application works just like Windows notification icon customizer that lets users keep only selected applications icons and indicators in system tray, and all other icons can be easily accessed with a click. Bartender offers an additional toolbar, where you can not only keep the applications’ icons of your choice, but also manage them with ease. Furthermore, it comes with a wide range of features that let you easily organize menu bar applications' icons. You can select any active/passive menu bar app from Applications folder and add it to Bartender’s bar. Talking of the additional menu bar, it can be viewed by clicking Bartender’s icon in system menu bar. You can also bring it up using a specified hotkey combination. Keep reading for more details. Read More

Preview PDF Files In Windows Explorer Without Changing Default PDF Viewer

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One of the most used document formats is arguably the PDF. Hop onto any site and you'd see various type of documents, all in PDF, ranging from Brochures to Instructions manuals to other guides. Adobe Reader is undoubtedly one of the best PDF file viewers out there (Adobe is the company behind the format, after all). Its used by the masses to work with PDF files everyday. The problem with Adobe PDF Reader however, is that it is not a lightweight application. Low-end PCs often take a lot of time while rendering PDF documents within Adobe Reader, and therefore, most people who have outdated machines like to other use third-party applications, for reading PDF documents, which are lightweight and less resource hungry. We at AddictiveTips love previously reviewed Sumatra PDF Viewer and use it ourselves too. It is a lightweight PDF reader for Windows that happily makes peace with low-end hardware. However, unlike Adobe Reader, SumatraPDF and other lightweight PDF viewers do not provide users with PDF document preview in Windows Explorer. Luckily, we have found another solution that do provide you the very same. Labelled as PDF Preview, it is an application for Windows 7 that lets you preview PDF files within Windows Explorer without changing your default PDF viewer. It also installs an additional PDF Viewer to read PDF documents, but it doesn't require you to change PDF file associations to get the preview. Does this application fare well with SumatraPDF? We will find this out. Read More

OpinionCloud Creates A Word Cloud To Summarize YouTube & Flickr Comments [Chrome, Firefox]

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Comments on popular services like Flickr and YouTube can be quite useful when you want to find out what the crowd thinks about a particular video or photo, but at the same time, too many comments can make things complicated, especially if they span multiple pages. OpinionCloud, a Chrome extension and Firefox Add-on, changes the way you read user comments on YouTube and Flickr. It does this by summarizing comments into a negative and positive word cloud of sorts, providing an overview of the overall public opinion. The bigger the word, the more common its occurrence is, and the colors denote positive or negative points of view. Moreover, clicking one of the words pulls up a list of related comments. All of this appears underneath the video, and you can easily toggle the keywords on and off by clicking the OpinionCloud button. With it, you can simply  and look at decent videos and photos that actually interest you. Read More

Control Google Music Playback From Chrome Toolbar

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If you use Chrome and love listening to your favorite tracks on Google Music, then you should give GoogleMusic For Chrome a try. This nifty little extension adds a button to your toolbar that, when clicked, reveals controls for playing, pausing, and skipping to the next song within a pop-up. You can use these controls to conveniently control playback without having to constantly switch tabs. Moreover, it displays the track title and artist name at the bottom of the pop-up, and allows you to control playback through keyboard shortcuts, provided the pop-up is open. Read More

Use Siri To Search & Download Images From The Web With JpgToSiri [Cydia]

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Not that Siri isn’t already pretty useful, but for those who feel it could have been better in some aspects, there are many Cydia tweaks that enhance the talking assistant's abilities. If you have a jailbroken iPhone 4S, or any other device with access to Siri (through SiriPort, for instance), there are some really cool things you can make Siri do. However, there aren’t many tweaks that combine usefulness and fun in as perfect a proportion as the newly released JpgToSiri does. JpgToSiri, as the name implies, adds the ability to search photos through Siri. You can simply ask Siri to show you a photo of anything, and a random JPEG image will appear right within the conversation. Not just that, users can even save the images to their camera roll, or share them with friends. This means that the tweak converts Siri into a pretty decent image search engine! Read More

Gifture For iPhone: Create GIF Animations, Apply Filters & Share, Instagram Style

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The popular photo sharing service, Instagram, has had such a huge impact on the development environment for iOS, that there are many apps which copy Instagram’s functionality, while another large contingent of apps borrow the basic idea behind it, but switch a key component with something else. Gifture is an iPhone app that falls in the second category, and is designed to be the Instagram for animations. Animations have always been popular among users, but they weren’t really widespread, as it wasn’t easy in the past to create them. This, however, changed with the multitude of apps that allow easy GIF creation, making it possible for even the novice users to showcase their creativity in this domain. Gifture does that, but that’s just a part of its working. Once you have created animations using the app, you can edit them in Gifture’s own editor, which incorporates a number of beautiful filters, and bunldes the option to choose the frame rate at which the animation is played. Then, you can share the animation over the app’s own network, or publish it to other social media. Read More

CloneSpy Helps You Free Disk Space By Identifying Duplicate Files Based On Name & Data

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Some users randomly store files on their computers, which may result in having multiple copies of the same files at different locations. This is especially the case when we download files such as music, videos, documents, photos etc., from the internet, not knowing if we already possess a copy. It not only fills your hard drive with duplicate content, but also hogs down overall PC performance. CloneSpy is a useful tool that can help you delete these duplicates within a few minutes, depending on how much junk you have on your hard drive. It comes with a user-friendly interface and a powerful scanning engine to locate files with not only same names, but also identical data. Read More

Disable iOS Notification Center While Running Full-Screen Apps [Cydia]

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Some time back, we covered a Cydia tweak by the name of DisableNC, which allowed jailbroken iPhone, iPad or iPod touch users to avoid accidentally pulling down the Notification Center while playing games. DisableNC is basically an SBSettings toggle, which is added to the SBSettings panel, and can be controlled from there. While everything about DisableNC worked absolutely fine, it had one major shortcoming - it cannot be used for full screen apps other than games. If you are an iOS user, you must be aware of the fact that most apps work in full screen mode, and pulling down the notification center while using them is almost as annoying as doing it in games. This is why DisableNC Switch has been released in the Cydia store, which is a standalone tweak and lets its users disable Notification Center in all apps running in full screen mode. So, this implies that you don't need separate NC disablers for games and other apps, as DisableNC Switch works its magic on all the apps in your jailbroken iPhone, iPad or iPod touch. Read More

Track Your Workout Behavior And Calorie Intake With Fitness Tk

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Staying fit and healthy is one of the key factors for success. It makes you feel confident about the daily challenges of life. Who doesn’t want to stay beefed up? Admit it or not, we all aspire to look like the infamous Tyler Durden did in Fight Club. However, effective exercise techniques also require an effective fitness plan to keep your workout habits in check. If you’re looking for a software solution to track your workout plans, then Fitness Tk is probably what you need. It's a feature-rich application that provides you with a variety of options such as tracking all your Cardio and Weightlifting exercises, planning and saving your running and cycling routes, tracking food intake, generating plots of training statistics, accessing data from cloud server and more. Read on for further details. Read More