Fatima Wahab

Mac Editor
Twitter: @Fatiwahab Follow me on Google+

Collaborate Online On Design Projects With Marqueed

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Collaborating on projects remotely is never easy; the simple process of giving and getting feedback can turn into a long dragged-out conversation. You often face difficulty trying to get your point across or trying to understand what someone else is saying. For designers, this can become a recurring problem if they aren’t using a good collaboration service. Marqueed is built for this very purpose. It’s a simple web service that lets you create public and private ‘Collections’ of images, and work on them in collaboration with others. Let's find out more about the service after the jump. Read More

Copy & Save Email Content From Mail In OS X With Mail Clips

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Like any other form of communication, its not just an email's content that's important, but also the other information they contain, including email addresses and names, subject, headers, and other metadata. This information can come useful in many circumstances, but most email apps hide it in order to keep everything simple and clutter-free. Mail Clips is a free Mac app available in the Mac App Store that lets you copy this information from a selected message in Mail. You can copy the complete text in a message, its subject, the sender and recipients’ email addresses, their names, the header message and ID, the date and time it was sent on, and the HTML source of an email. It can also save a message in PDF and RTF format, and add the sender and recipients to your address book. While you can do all of this from the Mail app by opening an email, selecting the information and then copying it manually, Mail Clips offers you the short way around. Read More

Airmail: OS X Mail Client With Dropbox Support, Easy Filtering & A Great UI [Review]

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Mail and Sparrow are two of the most popular email clients for the OS X platform. Being the default email client, Mail enjoys a larger user base, while Sparrow is usually preferred by those who have used its iOS variant. Both these clients are quite good in themselves but there will always be room for improvement, new features and better apps. Airmail is a great new option. It is a Mac email client for Gmail, Yahoo, AOL, and iCloud that syncs attachments to your Dropbox account, supports multiple accounts, and has an excellent email filtering feature. Let's learn more about this app after the jump. Read More

Attach To Gmail From Cloud, Image Hosting Services & Facebook [Chrome]

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Google Drive has been integrated in Gmail so that you can attach a file to a new email directly from your Google Drive cloud storage. The feature is very handy for Google Drive users, but it’s of no use to those of us who primarily use some other cloud storage service. Cloudy is a Chrome extension that lets you attach files to your emails from a large number of cloud services including Google Drive, Dropbox, Box, Facebook, Picasa, Instagram, Flickr, Github, FTP, Evernote, and more. Furthermore, it can also connect with your computer’s webcam and record a video or take a picture to directly attach with your email. The extension also gives you the option to upload files from your computer, pick attachments from other emails in your account, and search & attach images from Wikipedia, Flickr, and Google Image Search. The best thing about the extension is that it works flawlessly with Gmail’s new Compose view. Read More

How To Select & Copy Text From A File In OS X Quicklook

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OS X comes equipped with everything a regular user might need to complete everyday tasks. You will, of course, need to install apps to serve your specific needs, but even in their absence, OS X ensures you can manage the basics like opening/creating documents, viewing pictures, chatting, and sending & receiving emails without the need for third-party software. For viewing documents, OS X has Preview - a feature rich app that opens a large number of file formats, allows you to fill PDF forms, and open old versions of a file. In addition to Preview, OS X also offers the Quicklook feature that, as its name implies, gives you a quick view of a file. It’s the go-to app if you want to see what’s in a document without actually opening it even in Preview. The only problem with it is it won’t let you select text when you open a text or PDF file. That’s not to say it can’t be done; the feature is very much there and can be enabled with a Terminal command detailed after the break. Read More

Screenhero For OS X: Screen Sharing With IM & Multi-User Collaboration

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Screen sharing apps can be really handy for getting remote assistance by letting someone else control your computer remotely, or simply showing others something you're doing on your computer while staying in control yourself. Screenhero is a Mac app (with a Windows client still under development) that allows you to share your screen with anyone who has a Screenhero account, while adding a handy feature to the mix. You retain control of your Mac while the person you share your screen with can also control your system if you choose. It might sound confusing to work with, as you will have two cursors moving around on your screen, but Screenhero makes it easy to distinguish the two by adding the name of the user to their cursor. The app allows you to share your entire screen or just a single app’s window. It also features a built-in chat client and you can switch to sharing an app's window during a live session. Read More

How To Embed A Vine Video On Any Website

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Twitter’s Vine app has already started to emerge as a source of lots of videos, some good, some bad, and some horrible, making their way to your timeline. The Vine app itself is very restricted as far as sharing is concerned; it lets you share only the videos you’ve made yourself, and that too only on Twitter or Facebook. You cannot even copy the link for your own videos, and for videos by others that you come across in the Vine app, there are no options for sharing at all. That doesn’t mean you can’t share the videos elsewhere though. A Vine video that’s been shared on Twitter can be shared anywhere you want on the web, and it can also be embedded like any other video. In what follows, we will guide you through the details of doing both. Read More

Get Evernote Integration In Gmail With Powerbot For Chrome & Firefox

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Gmail is an excellent email services, not just because of its speed but also because it’s great at helping us keep things organized. Evernote is an equally excellent service that helps you note down important things and access them from everywhere. Imagine if Gmail and Evernote could be connected. Powerbot for Gmail is an extension for Chrome and an add-on for Firefox that does just that. It lets you insert notes or notebooks from Evernote in to an email from Gmail’s web interface, and save an email thread, complete with attachments and all, to a notebook in Evernote. The notebooks/notes you add to an email become public in order to be viewed by your recipient. When you add an email thread to Evernote from Gmail’s interface, it lets you add tags and comments before saving it. Once saved, the extension will indicate where a message has been saved in Evernote, and also give you the option to view it there. Read More

Convert Vine Videos To GIF Animations On Mac With VineGifR

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Twitter’s Vine app is to videos what Twitter itself is to blogging. It weeds out the possibility of having every minute detail in a video, and forces you to focus on what actually matters, by restricting the maximum clip length to a mere 6 seconds, similar to how a single tweet can't exceed 140 characters. Before these 6 second videos invaded your Twitter timeline, there were GIFs that offers (and still offer) pretty much the same thing on not just Twitter, but the rest of the internet as well, sans the sound of course. VineGifR is a free Mac app that lets you turn a Vine video in to a GIF file, so that you can easily share it on any website, Tumblr being the most popular example. All you need to do is paste the URL of the video into the app and in five minutes, your GIF will be ready. The GIF quality is pretty good, the app is reasonably fast, and there are no watermarks whatsoever. Read More

Get Buttery Smooth Keyboard Scrolling In Google Chrome

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Scrolling a web page with your keyboard is anything but smooth. Every element on the page begins trembling, making it extremely hard - even for someone with good eyes - to scan the page while it's scrolling. Though this might not be as big of an issue as most users prefer using the mouse or trackpad anyway. For those who prefer to work with the keyboard for navigation, there is Smooth Key Scroll - a Chrome extension that makes scrolling with your keyboard smoother by ignoring the repeat rate of navigation keys, and thus, removing the jitters that we usually see on a scrolling web page. Once enabled, scrolling with your keyboard actually seems smoother than scrolling with your mouse. You can manage the scroll speed - speed it up drastically or slow it down to a fine scroll - by pressing the Alt or Ctrl key with a navigation key. It even makes use of Chrome flags to further improve rendering of pages while you're scrolling. Read More

FileDesk Is An OS X File Manager With Tabbed Browsing & Bookmarks

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Finder in OS X is good enough file browser for most users, and it holds up enough in terms of features against the Windows 8 File Explorer. For those who would like to have more features in Finder, there is XtraFinder to add them for you. Though if you’d rather not go with an add-on app like XtraFinder and are more interested in a third-party file browser, FileDesk LITE is a free Mac app available in the Mac App Store that can prove to be a good alternative. FileDesk LITE supports tabbed browsing and has a quick launch button for the Launch Pad. The tabbed browsing feature is very intelligent; it remembers your open tabs upon quitting it and can restore them upon launching it again. Folders can be bookmarked and when browsing a particular folder in FileDesk LITE, you can view a complete list of folder within that folder from the app’s left side bar. You can add any folder to the left side bar for quick access. Files can be sorted by name, size, kind and label. The app also shows you previews for many types of files, and a ‘Show enclosing folder’ button allows you to quickly open the parent folder of the item. Read More

Edit A Tweet Before Retweeting From Twitter’s Web Interface

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The Retweet button in Twitter’s web interface serves two purposes; it allows you to easily share something in your feed with your followers, and it gives credit to the original tweeter for their tweet. What it doesn’t let you do however, is edit the tweet before retweeting it. Even though most third-party Twitter clients and even Twitter's own iOS and Android apps, mobile website and TweetDeck client offer you this functionality, but for some reason it has been left out from the Twitter website. If you want to edit a tweet before you share it with your followers, you will have to do so manually by selecting and copying the original tweet's text, pasting it into the tweet compose box, adding the user’s Twitter handle, editing it, and then finally sending it out to your followers, and all these steps might just discourage some users from retweeting a tweet at all. Classic Retweet is an extension available for Chrome and Firefox that allows you to edit a tweet before retweeting it without all this hassle. Read More

Find The Email An Attachment Was Saved From In Mac OS X Mail

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A common problem with a bulky inbox is finding emails. Almost every email service and client has a search feature, with some offering very smart parameters for refining the search (like Gmail’s web interface) but still, at times quickly finding the right email can be a pain. Similarly, if you’ve downloaded an attachment that came with an email and are trying to trace it back to the original message, you could be out of luck if you have renamed the file in the meantime, and will likely need to go through several emails individually to find it since for the most part, you are relying on memory to remember who the email was from, or a snippet from the email’s subject. If you’re using the default Mail app on a Mac, though, finding the email that an attachment came with is much easier than you know, as every attachment that you download saves details of where the file originated from i.e. the email’s sender and subject. You can use this to find the original email thread. Read More

View iCloud, Google Or Yahoo Calendar Events On OS X Desktop With ICEfree

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One of our top Mac apps from last year was Mindfu - a $1.99 productivity app that puts the day’s iCal (Calendar in Mountain Lion) events on your desktop in an elegant chronological timeline. Though if you aren’t in the mood for spending money on an app like that, ICUfree is a free alternative now available on the Mac App Store. At the core, it does what Mindful does but in addition, it can display events up to 3 months in advance. The app gives you the choice to view events from your local, iCloud Google, or Yahoo! calendars, though at present, you can only view events from one type of calendar at a time. Currently happening events and those that are coming up are all distinguished from each other. Read More

Send Copied Text Between iOS & OS X Over iCloud With CloudClip

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Clipboard on our computers are among those things that we just know are there, use them without any second thought. Keeping in mind how much convenience we get out of the clipboard, imagine the utility you would get from a cloud clipboard in today's world where most of us use multiple devices. CloudClip is a free Mac app available in the Mac App Store with a free iOS companion app that gives you just that - a clipboard on the cloud, using iCloud to let you send your copied text between your iOS device and your Mac. Since the app uses iCloud, you won’t have to sign up for any other service; with the apps installed and iCloud enabled on all your devices, you need only copy text and it will sync between them. Read More

Browse Instagram In A Beautiful Pinterest-Like Layout With Share.me

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Instagram rolled out profiles last year, complete with a Facebook-like cover photo. While the interface is lacking in many basic features, still something is better than nothing. There have been many services in the past to give you a web interface for Instagram even before it had one of its own, and  Share.me is the newest member of the list. What makes it different however, is its Pinterest-like approach to displaying the images that have been shared on the service. It also makes it considerably easier to find new users, by grouping them under categories. You can view a single user’s images by clicking on their username. You can also like images, comment on them, and share them on Facebook, Twitter, and Pinterest. Read More

How To Add, Rename & View Status Of Bluetooth Devices In OS X [Guide]

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Apple manufactures some really great Bluetooth devices that you can connect with your Mac or iPad. The devices themselves are excellent but pairing them to a Mac can sometimes turn into a tedious task. Once Bluetooth devices are paired with your Mac, OS X provides you a preference pane full of options for managing them. If you’re looking for a guide to give you a quick but comprehensive tour of the Bluetooth settings, you're in the right place. Read More

Tonido Allows Remote File Access & Cloud Sync Across All Major Platforms [Review]

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Syncing files between two computers isn’t a novel concept and services like Dropbox, SkyDrive, Google Drive and many others have simplified it greatly. If you want to able to access files from your PC on your smartphone; you can sync them over one of these services. The only problem here is that given the limited storage space, you can’t sync all your files; and you will always have to choose the files to sync by adding them to your cloud storage folder, or setting a custom folder to sync (offered by only a few such services). Tonido is service with free apps available for Mac, PC, and Linux and free mobile clients for Android, iOS, Windows Phone, and Blackberry that allows you to access all your files on any device from another. Additionally, it lets you sync 2GB of files between your devices for free. Though instead of offering both these services from the same apps, Tonido splits file access and file syncing between two different apps. Here is a simple breakdown of how you can set it all up. Read More

How To View & Edit Google Drive Presentations While Offline

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Google Drive makes sure you have access to your important files no matter where you are. Though the primary concern with any cloud storage service is losing access to your data when you don’t have an internet connection, which can and does happen at times even when you are least expecting it. For reasons like this and many others, Google Drive has been offering an offline mode that allows you to access your documents in Google Chrome even when you’re not online. In its latest update, Google has added support for presentations to this offline mode, allowing you to edit, view and present them without requiring an internet connection. It requires you install two Chrome apps and change a few of your Google Drive settings. The process is simple and detailed below. Read More

Use Any USB Drive As A Key To Lock Or Unlock Your Mac’s Screen

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We’ve covered quite a few apps for locking your Mac screen. What OS X and most screen locking apps for OS X all have in common is the use of a text password for security. And then there are some apps that allow you to lock/unlock your screen by drawing a pattern across a grid, or unlocking the screen when a particular Bluetooth device is in range. USB Screen Lock is a Mac app worth $0.99 that takes a different approach to locking and unlocking your Mac; it uses a USB flash drive as a key to lock and unlock your screen. Removing or ejecting the drive will instantly lock your Mac. The app also lets you add an additional layer of security by setting a password. To unlock your Mac, you must insert the USB and then enter the password (if configured) to get to your desktop. Read More