Quickfire Is A Unique Mac Video Player For Reviewing & Annotating Videos

Most video players are built just to let you watch movies, offering features to help you adjust sound and video playback settings, load chapters or episodes, create playlists, and manage the size of the video frame. Quickfire on the other hand, is a different kind of video player built with a focus on reviewing videos, rather than merely watching them. Available for free in the Mac App Store, Quickfire sports the normal functions of an ordinary video player and adds several reviewing features on top of that to let you manage the color grades for a video and apply it to other videos in the same playlist, adjust where a movie begins playback i.e. add video handles, take snapshots of a frame anytime during playback, flag videos, mask the player, mirror the image, export a video’s audio, link an audio file to a movie, add notes, and draw over a frame with a freehand drawing tool. The changes are all saved in Quickfire’s own format (QFS). Read More

RemindMeAgain For OS X Nags You With Repeated Reminders To Complete A Task

Reminders in Mountain Lion is a feature-rich app that saves your reminders to iCloud and syncs them to your iOS device. Though what if you just want to be reminded about a single thing time and time again on a recurring basis? RemindMeAgain is a free app available on the Mac App Store that does just that. You can set a reminder, which will then popup at regular intervals defined by you. When dismissed, the timer is reset and the app reminds you again after your pre-defined interval has passed. Reminders in Mountain Lion is perfectly equipped to give you repeating reminders but RemindMeAgain isn’t meant to replace Reminders; it’s meant to give you that constant nagging on your Mac that about something important, without giving you alerts on your iOS devices. Read More

View Song Lyrics On YouTube & Grooveshark From Nine Sources

A lot of desktop music players support on-screen lyrics, but if you mostly listen to music on YouTube or Grooveshark, you might have little or no options for viewing song lyrics. On YouTube, channels add lyrics to within the song video's description or, at times, within the video itself, but it’s rare. YouTube Lyrics is an extension available for Chrome, Firefox, Safari, Opera, and Internet Explorer that displays lyrics for the current song playing in YouTube or Grooveshark in a small popup within the respective tab. The extension searches and loads lyrics from one of nine sources that you can manage from its options page. Read More

Add A Text-Only Grayscale Reading Mode To Google Chrome

Reading online can either be enjoyable or distracting, depending on what you’re reading and how you’re reading it. At times, just the links or images on a website are interesting enough that you compulsively end up exploring more content than you originally intended to. Text Mode is a Chrome extension that can help make websites less interesting and keep you focused on what it you visited the website to do, by hiding distracting content such as images, videos, and additional frames for content like flash, leaving behind nothing but text on a page. In addition, it also removes all colors from the website. The extension doesn’t just work on one page; once enabled, it will open everything in your browser in what can best be termed as a minimal, grayscale mode. Read More

Set Gmail To Auto-Delete Emails Older Than A Set Number Days

A few days ago, we reviewed Mailstrom, an amazing web service that helps you clean your messy inbox. It’s an amazing service that can help tame even the wildest inboxes and it’s worked great for us. Once your inbox is clean though, you might want to keep it clean. The simplest way to do that would be to read your email regularly, archive the messages you want to keep and delete the useless ones. Of course, if it were really that simple, we wouldn’t have messy inboxes to begin with. If you’re often unable to remove read messages or unimportant ones from your inbox, you can use the following Google Script to automate it for you. Read More

Easily Capture Facebook Statuses, Blur Names & Share To Imgur From Chrome

Everyone has friends on Facebook who happen to post updates funny or ridiculous enough to warrant being shared with the rest of the world via Twitter or Reddit. No matter how you share what your friends wrote, it's always smart (and is the norm) to blur out their names, profile pictures and any other information that might aid in identifying them. Status Snapper is a Chrome extension built solely for this purpose. It takes a screenshot of whichever update you select from your Facebook feed, automatically blurs names, places and profile pictures out, and uploads the resulting image to Imgur. Read More

Make Videos On Web Pages Sticky To Scroll While You Watch Them [Chrome]

No matter what website you watch a video on, you can not scroll and explore the rest of the page freely without losing focus of the video. Even on websites like Facebook and YouTube where comments appear below the video player and a user might be interested in reading them, there isn’t any way to read the comments and watch the video at the same time. Video Tape is a Chrome extension that works on just about any web page with a a video embedded in it. The extension allows you to reposition the video player anywhere on the web page in a way that it sticks to that position and you are free to scroll and explore the rest of the page. Read More

How To Set Your iCloud Photo Stream As Screensaver On Mac OS X

The iPad lets you see a slideshow of your camera roll or Photo Stream images on your lock screen. It’s a nice feature that gives you something better than the default wallpaper to look at when you pick up your iPad. If you’ve got iPhoto or Aperture installed and iCloud set up on your Mac, you can use the images in your Photo stream as a screensaver on your Mac as well. You will not even need any additional app for the purpose other than the ones just mentioned, and it’s likely that iPhoto came pre-installed with your Mac already if it’s a recent purchase. You will be able to set your entire Photo Stream or just one of the recent streams as your screensaver. Read More

PixelPumper Is An OS X Live Writer Alternative For WordPress Blogging

I have a little confession to make: although I review a lot of Mac apps, I write about them on a PC - a Windows PC! My preferred program to write posts in is Windows Live Writer, which I prefer over the clutter of WordPress's own editor. I've never been able to write a single review on a Mac until today, thanks to Pixel Pumper. It's a Mac app available for free in the Mac App Store but it will soon carry a larger price tag (it's free until they iron out all the bugs). Pixel Pumper is the closet alternative to Windows Live Writer that you can find on Mac. It connects with your WordPress-powered website and allows you to save a local draft of the post, or publish one directly. You can retrieve old posts to edit them, insert images & hyperlinks, add tags, set categories, and choose a featured image for your post. Read More

Stream All Activity In A Chrome Tab To Any Device Or Browser

Good screen sharing solutions are hard to come by. Even if you are familiar with a really great app for this purpose, it's likely it might not be installed on the system you're using. At times like this, a browser extension that lets you stream your screen to another system is possibly the quickest solution you could hope for. Dead Simple Screen Sharing is a Chrome extension that allows you to stream the tab or web page you're looking at to a device that sports a web browser. This means any device; even a Symbian phone (in theory) should be able to receive your browser’s broadcast, though nothing can be said of the quality or stability of the video stream. The recipient need not have the extension installed, of course. Read More

Temporarily Archive & Set Followup Reminders For Emails In Gmail [Chrome]

Reading all your new email messages everyday is a routine task that many do without any trouble. The real problem with email is remembering to reply to an important email or to follow up on one that you’ve sent. We’ve covered some reminder tools to help you manage follow ups. MailFred is a Chrome extension with the same purpose. It integrates itself in Gmail’s interface and allows you to schedule reminders for any received email. The reminder can be set for as early as 4 hours from the time it is set, to any future date. This is, of course, typical of such a tool; what sets MailFred apart is that when you schedule a reminder, the email itself can be archived, marked as unread, moved to your inbox, or starred. That is, you can choose to either keep an email out of your inbox until it is time to reply to it or follow up on it, or you can keep it marked as unread and in your inbox until you are finished with it. Read More

Mailstrom Helps You Reach Inbox Zero By Deleting & Archiving Emails

Almost every single time we feature a tool to help sort your emails and manage your replies better, we take the time out to remind you of the importance of getting your act together and reaching inbox zero. We take it all back - you can continue to procrastinate for the rest of your life and still have zero messages in your inbox, thanks to Mailstrom. It’s a simple yet pure genius web service with the aim to help you achieve the much coveted inbox zero. Mailstrom isn’t a magic button that you push to make all your useless emails disappear; the deleting and archiving process is still manual, but the service organizes your emails in such a way that you can tell at a single glance which ones you should keep, and which ones are better discarded. After that, deleting and archiving can be performed en masse and within a few minutes or hours (depending on the amount of emails you have), your inbox should be clean. Mailstrom works with Gmail, Yahoo! Mail, Hotmail, and almost all other email services. It also lets you unsubscribe to newsletters. Read More

A Look At New Features In Firefox 19

Firefox 19 will be officially released tomorrow, but it’s available for download right away for those eager to try it out ASAP. Most end users will have little or nothing to look forward to with this update, with the only noteworthy change being you no longer need the PDF.js extension developed by Mozilla installed in Firefox to natively open PDFs. The native PDF viewer has been greatly improved, and you can now view PDF files in the browser without having to rely on any add-on for the purpose. Apart from that, Firefox comes with a new about:telemetry page that allows you to see the the performance data collected by the browser. The feature to collect this data was introduced in Firefox 7, and now after twelve versions, Mozilla has given it a dedicated page. An add-on is also available now to replicate this page on older versions. Apart from these, there are the usual bug fixes, security updates and a Browser Debugger tool for add-on and browser developers. Read More

Leaf Is A Sleek, Compact Google Reader Client For Mac OS X

Leaf is a brand new RSS reader app for Mac available in the Mac App Store for $3.99. It can connect with your Google account and import all your RSS feeds from Google Reader. The feeds can be viewed in a tiny window, and the news item can be opened in your browser or shared using one of the many sharing options supported by Mountain Lion. On the surface, Leaf boasts a beautiful UI for reading your RSS feeds while under the hood, it’s a reasonably good way to manage them as well. While it wouldn’t let you create new folders, it will import the ones you’ve created in Google Reader and allow you to move feeds between them. You can add additional feeds from within Leaf, and the app also gives you the option to set it as the default RSS reader. Read More

Holmes Remembers What You Last Searched For In Your Chrome Bookmarks

We’ve covered quite a few extensions for managing, sorting, cleaning up and removing duplicates from your bookmarks. There’s an extension for just about anything and everything you might want to do with bookmarks. Holmes is yet another bookmarks extension for Google Chrome that allows you to search your bookmarks from the Omnibar as well as from the extension’s own little popup. What sets Holmes apart from the rest is its ability to remember your last search. It has a nice interface, and gives you very accurate search results. If you have any bookmarklets added to your Bookmarks Bar, you can have Holmes exclude them from the search. Additionally, Homles can list the twenty recent pages you bookmarked, or show only the newest bookmarks that match your search. Read More

Minus Releases iPhone And Android Apps With Chat Feature [Review]

Popular image sharing service Minus has released an app for both iOS and Android platforms. While Minus’ web interface encourages you to share files, the mobile apps encourage you to make friends with other users of the service who are nearby, making it more of a proximity-based people discovery service in addition to merely being a photo sharing app. Minus for iOS and Android allows you to take pictures, add filters and edit pictures via the Aviary image editor that’s integrated in the app, and lets you find pictures taken near you by other users. ‘Pictures nearby’ is how you are encouraged to find friends to connect with, though you can search for users by name as well. A chat feature allows you to share messages, images and your current location with any user.  Interface wise, the app has a lot going on and it will probably take you a little time learning where everything is. Read More

View Image Size, Dimensions & Date From Right-Click Menu In Chrome

If you’ve used Google Image Search lately, you must have noticed that images in the search results can now be viewed directly on the search result page itself. Information about the image including it’s size and dimensions is also shown, giving you a good idea on whether it is suitable for your use or not. If you would like the same functionality for images anywhere on the web, Image Size Info is a Chrome Extension that gives you just that. It adds a ‘Image Size Info’ option to the right-click context menu for all images, which opens a small pop up in your tab displaying the image’s URL, dimensions, the size it’s currently displayed in, and its file size. You can also open the image's source directly. Read More

Firefox Nightly 21 Brings Modern UI App To Windows 8

Mozilla promised a Windows 8 Modern UI Firefox app and it’s now available on the Firefox Nightly channel. The Nightly channel is Firefox’s experimental version for the very latest but potentially unstable releases, which means a stable version of the Firefox Modern UI app will not be available for a while till everything is completely sorted out. Developers and anyone just generally curious on what the app will look like can download the Nightly build now. The Modern UI app is low on features at the moment, thought the desktop version is fully functional. In its present state, it is much like Internet Explorer 10 in Windows 8, which has both desktop and Modern UI versions working independently of each other. Read More

Use Hand Gestures To Control YouTube, Netflix, Pandora & Grooveshark In Chrome With Flutter

Flutter is an amazing app available for Mac and Windows that lets you control iTunes, Windows Media Player, Spotify, Powerpoint, Netflix and more by using your webcam and hand gestures. We have previously reviewed both Flutter for Mac and Flutter for Windows, and if you aren’t using this app, you’re missing out on a great ninja-like way to change whatever music you’re playing without even touching your computer. The Flutter desktop app controls desktop apps for the aforementioned services but for those of you who listen to music or watch videos in your browser, there is the Flutter Chrome extension. To use the extension, you must have the Flutter desktop app already installed. The extension allows the app to control YouTube, Grooveshark, Netflix, and Pandora regardless of which tab or window they are open in. Read More

How To Change Default Font Size In Mac OS X Notes App

Notes is a simple OS X app that allows you to create notes, organize them into folders, search for them, and sync them with the Notes app on your iPhone, iPad or iPod touch over iCloud. The app offers a reasonable number features that any ordinary note-taking app would have, and a few customization options that allow you to change the color and type of the font in a particular note. What it doesn’t have is a way for you to change the default font size for all notes. The app has no settings that you can change, but that doesn't mean you can't do anything about it at all. All it takes to change the default font size, is a little change in the app’s DefaultFonts.plist file. The file can be edited using any text editor of your choice. The change is easily reversible, and does not require running any complicated commands. Read More