Fatima Wahab

Mac Editor
Twitter: @Fatiwahab Follow me on Google+

Gather & Play Music From Multiple Sources Under One Roof With Songdrop

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We listen to music from a lot of different sources; SoundCloud, Grooveshark, Pandora, YouTube, Last.fm, the list just goes on and one. At times, the services we use decide to play nice with each other and allow us to transfer our preferences from one to the other. At other times, we can use apps to help us connect these services and consolidate our listening experience in just one service. Songdrop is one such web service that acts as a song aggregator. It allows you to add songs to groups, which the service calls Mixes, from any website. There is a small catch though: you can drop a song (add it to the service) only from the song's own page. In addition to creating your own mixes, you can search other users’ mixes too and if you like the songs they have, you can drop them into your own collection. The service also has a dedicated Chrome extension, while users of other browsers can use the service’s bookmarklet to add songs. Read More

Select, Duplicate, Close & Freeze Multiple Tabs At Once In Firefox

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A few days ago, Chrome - my preferred browser - started reloading the home page over and over in a continuous loop. While I tried to sort the problem out, I needed a browser to work with and I turned to Firefox, which I believe is just as good. Using it regularly really makes you appreciate it, but one little feature that I found missing was that I couldn’t select multiple tabs and drag them out as a separate window. Not being able to randomly select multiple tabs also meant I couldn’t pin them all at once or close them. Fortunately, I came across a solution to some of these shortcomings in the form of MultiplaceHolder, a Firefox add-on that allows you to select multiple tabs by clicking each while holding down the Ctrl key. The tabs can then be closed, duplicated, or frozen. Read More

Create A Clean, Well-Structured Resume Online Using Represent

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LinkedIn is the leading social network for connecting with professionals. You can upload your resume to it, or it can generate one for you from the information you’ve entered in your profile. The problem with these resumes is that they aren’t very attractive. You more or less have to create a proper resume yourself and use LinkedIn as a means of sharing it. Represent is a web service that allows you to create a resume you can easily share via email, or on Twitter and Facebook. It is a six-step process that asks you to enter a brief description about yourself, your work experience, academic history, skills & contact information, and select the resume's color & layout. Read More

Hexels Is A Mac Drawing Tool That Crafts Unique, Polygonal Artwork

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Mac OS X does not come with a built-in drawing tool like MS Paint in Windows. There are quote a few third-party apps, both free and paid, available for OS X that mimic MS Paint, so your basic drawing needs are easily taken care of. Hexels is a a drawing tool with an edge. Well, six of them to be precise, as you'll shortly see. The app has the usual tools you find in a drawing app, but its brushes are entirely different; instead of the usual rounded or slanted brush, you get one shaped likes a hexagon. There are additional shapes available too and should you choose to upgrade to Hexels Pro, you will be able to create your own shapes as well. Apart from the unique brush shape, the brush itself paints with a glow effect that you can tweak. There is also a built-in grid that makes it easier for you to paint. Read More

Remotely Control Mac Brightness, Volume & Media Apps From Android

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There are quite a few apps available in the App Store that allow you to control your Mac. Likewise, there is an equivalent number of apps in the Mac App Store that allow you to control your iOS device. We have covered a fair number of both, but if your desktop computer is a Mac and your preferred phone runs Android, you might not find many apps to bridge this gap. Mac Remote is an Android app that lets you control iTunes, VLC player, iPhoto, Spotify, Quicktime, MPplayerX, and Preview on your Mac. You can also use it to put your Mac system to sleep, shut it down, and increase or decrease its brightness and volume levels. Mac Remote works over your Wi-Fi network and requires you to manually connect your Mac to the app. No Mac app is required in the process. Read More

Find The Perfect Laptop For Yourself In Under A Minute With Swogo

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Buying a laptop with little to no knowledge of what kind of hardware specifications would suit your needs best can be something of a nightmare. You might end up buying the wrong machine, or paying too much for an inferior system. Swogo is a simple web app that can help you make the right decision, or point you in the right direction at the very least. The app asks you to set a budget, specify what you want to use the computer for, select a screen size, choose some additional features (like BluRay drive or HDMI), and mention any brand preference that you may have. Swogo will then hunt down the perfect laptop(s) for you. It’s a simple six-step process that caters to your needs and budget; there is no need to create an account or anything. Just visit the app's website, and click ‘Get started’. Read More

Kiwi Is A Compact App.Net Client For Mac With Twitter Support

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App.net has recently announced free accounts and if you’re on good terms with someone who has a premium account (they only get two invites per account), you might have gotten lucky enough to get an invite to one. So far as the look and functionality of the service is concerned, App.net is similar to Twitter and if you’re looking for a nice desktop client to read and manage your App.net feed, Kiwi is a good option. It’s a Mac app worth $3.99 (users with App.net accounts can get it for free) that looks very much like a standard Twitter client. It is meant for your App.net account with the added feature to post simultaneously to App.net and Twitter. You must be running Mountain Lion and have an App.net account to use Kiwi. Your Twitter account should be connected in System Preferences>Mail, Contacts & Calendars if you want to post to Twitter. Read More

Disable Firefox Remember Password Popup While Keeping Password Manager Enabled

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Like other leading browsers, Firefox has a password manager that offers to remember your password every time you log into any website or web service. If you don’t want it to remember the password for a particular website ever, you can disable the feature for that website by using the dropdown arrow next to the 'Remember Password' button on the popup and asking it to never offer to remember passwords for the current website. This popup appears on every website and the only way to hide it is to disable the password manager altogether from Firefox’s options. The downside of doing this is that Firefox will no longer automatically fill the login and password info for websites that you've asked it to remember passwords for. If you still want to use the feature but are annoyed by the popup appearing on every page where you sign in, give Password Dialog Begone a try. It’s a Firefox add-on that blocks the popup without disabling the password manager entirely. Read More

How To Change The Notification Center Alert Sound In OS X

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The Notification Center is one of the highlights of Mountain Lion, and we've written about a few handy Notification Center tips to help you make the best of it, including one on changing the Notification Center background. It is still a relatively new feature of the OS, and some might go so far as to call it rough around the edges for the simple reason that customizing it is difficult. Even something as basic as changing the sound alert for the Notification Center isn't supported, at least not in the stock System Preferences. It is still possible to do so, and we've got the instructions for you. Read More

Evernote For Mac Gets New Menu Bar Helper; Adds Drag & Drop Clipper

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Evernote for Mac underwent a major design overhaul a short while ago and the difference between the old and new version’s interface isn't just monumental; it’s amazing! Evernote 5 looks like a real Mac app now - beautiful and well designed. While the app's UI was overhauled significantly, Evernote didn't do much about its Menu Bar options until now. The Evernote Mac app has just been bumped to version 5.0.6 now, and this latest update features a Menu Bar popup that actually goes with the look of the rest of the app. The functionality is pretty much the same as before, but the new interface is easier to use and allows you to add files by dragging & dropping them on the popup. Read More

Create Custom, Combined Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, & Tumblr Feeds With mybucketz

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There are too many social networks out there, and too little time to keep up with all of them. In all fairness, not everything that appears in your news feed or timeline is worth reading, nor is it all equally important. mybucketz is a web service to bring more organization to your Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, and Tumblr feeds. It lets you create ‘buckets’ of your friends or people you are following on these networks. These buckets then act as groups for reading updates only from the people you've added to them. It does take time to create buckets and organize all your contacts into them but once done with this one-time process, your feed reading experience will become much better. At the very least, it will be free of updates from apps, and promoted or sponsored content. Read More

Actotracker Auto-Records A History Of All Activity On Your Mac

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If you’ve ever come to work on a Monday and wondered what were you doing on Friday, you’re not alone. You might also have suddenly drawn a blank while working on multiple tasks, and completely forgotten what it was that you were doing. Worst still, you might have spent a considerable amount of time looking for a file or folder, only to discover that you've lost it again because you forgetfully closed everything. Actotracker is a free Mac app that built for keeping a record of all your activity on your Mac. It tracks wherever you go, whatever app you use, and which URLs you visit. It can also takes screenshots of apps' states. Furthermore, you can add notes and also manually specify apps or places that Actotracker should mark. Your history is searchable and can be filtered by day, week, month, or app. Read More

How To Remove Facebook Suggested Pages & Posts In Firefox

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Facebook suggests friends for you to add and pages that you might like, which is fine; as the suggestions are presented on the right in a very unobtrusive manner. You can easily ignore them when you’re reading your feed, but the same can’t be said for the suggested and promoted stories that appear in your News feed. Promoted and suggested posts/pages can easily be mistaken as items in your feed if you miss the ‘promoted’ or ‘suggested’ sign. We covered Hide Facebook Suggested Posts for Chrome last year that allowed you to hide the suggested posts. If you've been looking for a Firefox add-on that does the same, look no further. Remove Facebook Suggested Pages and Posts takes care of blocking both suggested posts and promoted stories (from pages and from users) from Facebook on Firefox. Read More

Auto-Refresh Any Website At Regular Intervals To Monitor Changes

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Auto Web Page Refresh Software is a Windows app by Danaav that, as its name implies, automatically refreshes web pages to take the hassle out of keeping track of their updated content. It comes with its own web browser, which refreshes any web page that you navigate to at regular intervals. You can define how often a website should be refreshed in seconds and how many times it should be refreshed before it stops. It’s a very simple utility that you can use to monitor feeds or new content on websites that do not support live updates. Since it comes with its own browser, you will be able to keep your regular web browsing tasks separate from the page you want to monitor and your browser’s performance will not be dragged down. Read More

Filter Your Twitter Feed By Images, Videos, Text & More With TwitLamp

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Your Twitter feed is usually full of all types of content, including simple text tweets, links, images, videos, and audio. While you can see the videos and images that have been shared by a single user separately when you visit their profile, but you can’t apply similar filters to your timeline, without having to use a more powerful third-party desktop twitter app. TwitLamp is a free web service (with a pro plan) that lets you filter all tweets on your own timeline, as well as tweets by any user based on the type. Specifically, you can filter video, audio, links, images, text, and hashtagged tweets. The free version has a few limitations on how often your feed will be refreshed and how many times a day you can use the filters. Read More

Prevent OS X From Sleeping Indefinitely Or While Running Certain Apps

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When Mountain Lion debuted, one annoyance that surfaced with the OS was that it kept going to sleep when idle. Disabling this feature didn't seem to work, and we had to resort to Terminal commands and apps to keep it from sleeping. What both these methods do is prevent sleep based on a time preset. Though what if you want Mountain Lion to sleep only after a certain app has finished working and quit? In other words, what if you want to prevent sleep mode as long as a particular app is running? Wimoweh is a free Mac app that lets you do just that. It prevents OS X from sleeping indefinitely, or if a particular app is running, and you can define the app(s) that will keep it awake. Wimoweh also tells you which apps are preventing your OS from going to sleep; they might be apps that you have enabled to prevent sleep via Wimoweh, or other apps that require your system to stay awake while they are working. In the latter case, Wimoweh makes it easier for you to find out which app is keeping your system awake. Read More

Skimr Is A Bare-Bones RSS Feed Reader For Desktop & Mobile Web

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RSS readers for your desktop computer aren't hard to find; we've covered a whole host of them for both Windows and OS X. We've also covered quite a few of them for reading feeds in your browser, but there isn't much out there to rival Google Reader. If, however, you’re in the market for a minimal RSS reader that won’t let you get caught up in the news feed, give Skimr a try. It’s an RSS reader with a simple, scaled-down interface that gives you a list of all recent news items with a snippet from each one, rather than providing you the preview of a news story or showing the whole story complete with images and videos. Think of it as a table of contents for the news that is posted to a website daily. It doesn't connect with your Google account, but you can add any website to it that you like, with a few popular tech websites already added by default but if you aren't a fan of tech news, you can replace them with your own favorite websites. Read More

Take Full Or Cropped Screenshots Of Web Pages On Mac With Paparazzi!

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If you want to take a screenshot of your desktop, a portion of your desktop, or any window, you can easily find countless apps to do so. If you want to take a screenshot of a web page though, that is a different story. For the most part, you will have to rely on a browser extension, and most of those don't offer a lot of options. Mac users now have another option for this in Paparazzi!. It is a free Mac app that lets you take full page or cropped screenshots of any website. Paparazzi! scales images so that they look the right way for different screen sizes. It lets you define a size when saving the file so that you don’t have to resize the image later. You can also take time-delayed screenshots of the web page. Paparazzi! can remember your last 10 (or more) searches and import your bookmarks from any of the browsers installed on your Mac. It supports Notification Center alerts, image compression, saving to PDF, JPEG, PNG, and TIFF formats, customizing the output file's name based on a predefined syntax, and adding presets for the cropping and minimum screenshot size. There are no watermarks on the output image and the app acts like a browser itself to allow you to view web pages for taking their screenshots. Read More

Easily Design Custom Tabs With Media Content For Facebook Pages

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Facebook Pages are so common that everyone and their cat seems to have one. Though easy to create, they can prove to be somewhat difficult to customize for the average Joe, especially when it comes to tasks like adding multimedia to a tab. Tab Creator is a Facebook app that gives you an excellent tab creator and editor for your Facebook Pages. It allows you to create new tabs and provides built-in templates for Pages related to music, photography, artists, restaurants, online shops, and real estate. You can also create a blank tab, and use Tab Creator's excellent editor to add elements to it. Taking hint from Photoshop, each element that you add to a Page represents a layer, and layers can be organized any way you want. Read on for more information. Read More

Transfer Clipboard & Song Playback Position Between iPhone & Mac With BeamApp

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We’ve covered about a dozen different apps that let you send files from your iPhone to your Mac and vice versa; some free, some paid; some gorgeous, and others ugly. What they all have in common is that they work over Wi-Fi. The apps are useful if you don’t want to connect your phone to your Mac with a cable, or if you don’t have your cable at hand. BeamApp is a free Mac app available in the Mac App Store with an iOS companion app that allows you to send and receive items from your clipboard to your Mac over the internet regardless of whether they are on the same Wi-Fi network or not. The content you can bean could be email addresses, navigation directions, phone numbers, or a URL. When a website URL is sent from your iPhone to a Mac, BeamApp for Mac opens it in your default browser. In addition to sending and receiving content from your clipboard, you can also send the current song playing in the iPod app on your iPhone to your Mac. Read More