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Accent: Quickly Insert Accented Characters, Copy URL Escape Codes On Mac

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Inserting accented characters in Mac isn’t really difficult, as we explained in a tip just last week; all you need to do is hold down a particular character key, and the letter will appear. The one caveat of this tip is that you must have disabled repeating a letter, and that can lead to some inconvenience when typing. There is still the option to use the Option key, but that is obviously the long way that most might want to avoid. For just these unique situations, there is Accent, a Mac app worth $0.99 in the Mac App Store that lets you view all accented characters and some basic symbols that are normally difficult to insert. The app lists them in a large, tiled layout, and you can copy a character for pasting anywhere by just clicking it. Additionally, the app lets you copy URL escape codes for any of the characters. Read More

[Giveaway] Mailsum: Mac Email Client That Tells You How Well You Handle Your Mail

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If you’re someone who operates more than one email ID, and most people usually juggle a work and personal ID, you know that it isn’t always easy to manage the two side by side. Additionally, email is one of those things that just eat away at your time; if you don’t read/answer email, your work gets hampered, but if you set to answering every single email, you might just end up neglecting other important tasks. It’s one of the double-edged swords of modern day. Mailsum is a Mac app worth $4.99 that might help you manage your email better; the app gives you insight into how you handle email on your Mac. It gives a detailed account of how often you send and reply to emails, how much time you take to respond to an email, how many go unanswered and much more. Read More

Add A File To An Existing Archive & Password Protect It On Mac [Tip]

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Compressing files and creating archives in Mac is easily accomplished through the default utility, Archive, which compresses to a whole host of formats. Files can be compressed in command line as well via the Terminal, but having to compress files or folders through the command line is much more complicated and inconvenient, which is why it’s best to use the tool provided. If you aren’t a fan of the native utility for some reason, there are plenty of other apps that you can use instead. and if nothing else works for you, the Terminal really isn’t going anywhere. One advantage that Terminal holds in this regard, is that, in addition to being able to create archives, you can add a file to an existing one through a few simple commands. This can save you a lot of clutter; you can add files to a single archive as per your need, and not have a mess of archives in a folder or on your desktop. Read More

How To Set Default Apps For Files & Actions On Mac OS X [Tip]

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If you’re new to Mac or have just recently discovered that your Mac runs smoother if you use third-party apps as opposed to the default ones, you might be exploring how to set an app as the default one for its relevant file types. Unfortunately, this isn’t very easy to do. Many rightly go to the Open with… options of a file and set defaults there but either that doesn't always work, or the changes are reverted for no apparent reason. What you need is a more permanent way to change default apps. In what follows, we will tell you how you can set an app as the default for one or several formats. Read More

Amoneon: Add Neon Brush Strokes, Shapes & Text To Images [Mac]

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Slightly complicated but worth figuring out nonetheless, Amoneon is a free Mac app that lets you edit your pictures. The major feature that the apps boasts of, is its neon brush that you can use to paint over an image. It has a whole host of additional great features other than the neon brush; you can add shapes, solid color and gradient overlays, resize, crop, manage the hue, saturation, contrast and brightness of an image, and add text. The effects are brilliant, and in addition to the neon light brush, Amoneon also lets you add neon spirographs to an image. The dimensions of shapes that you add to an image can be customized, as well as the color and opacity. If used the right way, the app and it’s gradient overlay effects act as an excellent way of adding colorized effects to photos. The images bear no watermark; however, the app saves to its own format that you have to append an image format extension to. Read More

AirServer: Comprehensive Mac & PC AirPlay Suite With Screen Mirroring

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I’ve never tried to hide my preference for iOS over Android, and for multiple reasons. While both platforms have a healthy share of strengths and weaknesses, iOS offers certain features (natively) that tip the scale, at least for me, in its favor, one of them being AirPlay. The formerly-labeled-AirTunes protocol received a feature and nomenclature overhaul back in 2010, whence it included not just audio, but any kind of media to be streamed to any AirPlay compatible device. Then, with iOS 5, Apple pooled in AirPlay mirroring, allowing you to replicate your supportive iPhone, iPod touch or iPad’s entire screen on the likes of compatible HDTVs, laptops, Macs etc. Speaking of Windows PCs and Macs in this regard, there’s perhaps no shortage of AirPlay apps for both platforms, paid or free, that offer pretty reasonable functionality. That’s why I was not too enthusiastic about AirServer, an AirPlay server application for Mac and Windows that claims to be way ahead of all its peers. Turns out, my skepticism was ill-warranted, as the app clearly blows away all the competition. Read More

Tag Folders: Add Tags & Spotlight Comments To Folders For Better Search [Mac]

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Mac OS X lets you add Spotlight comments to any file or folder you want. These comments help you find files later on; when you type a filename or a search query in Spotlight, the comments are also indexed and displayed with the results, helping you identify files. A much simpler approach to finding files would be to tag them, which, unfortunately, isn’t supported. Tag Folders is a free, open-source Mac app that adds this very feature. The app lets you add tags to all files and folders on your system,  allowing you to create a special folder anywhere on your Mac. All sub-folders subsequently added to this folder are tags, and files added to them are associated with these tags. The tags are searchable in Spotlight in the standard comma- or space-separated formats. Read More

How To Disable Elastic Scrolling In Mac OS X Lion [Tip]

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iOS devices have a very neat little trick to their scrolling, known as ‘elastic scrolling’, that is, if you continue to scroll past the end of a page or try to scroll upwards more than you can, there is a limit to which you can do that before the page or app snaps back to the bottom or top of the window. The utility behind this isn’t exactly clear (we believe it to be purely aesthetic), but it has been mimicked in OS X Lion. If you aren’t fond of trying to see just how low you can drag the page before it snaps back, you can disable this feature with a simple Terminal command. Read on for details. Read More

SlideMode Makes It Easier To Select Text With The Trackpad [Mac]

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The brilliant gesture support in OS X Lion is best complemented through the usage of Apple's Magic Trackpad, or vice versa, should you prefer it that way. If you’re on a MacBook, you get a trackpad anyway. The gestures are all excellent, highly convenient and make you, well, feel like a ninja when you use them. But, as they say, all good things come at a cost, and there is one thing that is slightly difficult to manage with the trackpad - text selection. SlideMode is a free Mac app that makes this easier and adds two other simple tweaks for users who don’t have a trackpad. What the app basically does is make selecting text easier for you, whether you’re using a mouse or trackpad. Read More

Easy Video Converter Supports 80 Media File Formats And Drag & Drop [Mac]

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Among all the genres of apps that we have covered, a large chunk probably consists of video converters. Being as abundant as they are, most of the free offerings are fairly functional and feature-rich. Easy Video Converter, as the name implies, is a free Mac app that converts video formats. What the name doesn’t imply is that it’s a media file converter that can convert files into 80 different formats. The app was previously worth $9.99 in the Mac App Store, and has now gone free. In addition to the large number of output formats that it supports, the app also lets you resize videos, and change frame and bit rates. You may manage these variables for audio and video files separately. Read More

Mashduo: Compare iTunes Libraries & Export List Of Missing Songs [Mac]

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Creating a good music library takes a lot of time and effort. One scenario, the more common one, is where you just keep adding music files randomly to iTunes, but an organized library requires more than that. If you’re out to create the best music library ever, or just a reasonably good one that you can brag about, it might be a good idea to take a look at what you friends listen to and start off with the songs they have. Mashduo is a free Mac app that will help you do just that. The app compares iTunes library XML files. You can, at any given time, view the differences between two XML files, both graphically and in a list. You may then export the complete list of songs that aren't common between the two. Read More

Backup & Restore Emails From One Gmail Account To Another With Gmvault

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When it comes to backing up Gmail email archive, most users opt-in for desktop email clients like Mozilla Thunderbird, Microsoft Outlook etc., to quickly backup not only emails, but also Google calendar and contacts. In order to backup emails from Google Mail account, one just needs to correctly configure email client for required account to save all the emails for offline viewing. Nevertheless, email clients do not support restoring backed up emails from one account to another, and often fail to retrieve the emails in original format. Gmvault is a freshly baked console-based application for Windows, Mac OS X and Linux OS that has been developed to change the way you backup and restore emails from multiple Gmail accounts. Even though it doesn’t offer you a GUI (Graphical User Interface) to perform the backup operation, the console application comes with a simple sync and restore commands support to quickly save emails on your hard drive and restore them to specified Gmail account. Details to follow after the jump. Read More

[Giveaway] EdgeCase Prevents Unintentionally Moving Mouse Cursor Between Displays [Mac]

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If you work with multiple monitors, you must have noticed that your mouse doesn't always understand that you didn’t mean for it to move to the next display, even though you continued to move it to the left or right of the screen. The mouse is meant to act like that, and it only makes sense that you would be able to move the mouse comfortably between two displays. There are, nevertheless, usage scenarios where the second display attached to you system is really meant to monitor a feed or an app or any other system activity. You don’t necessarily need it for performing your ‘work’, and that’s when your cursor jumping between monitors gets irritating. EdgeCase is a Mac app worth $4.99 in the Mac App Store that prevents the mouse from accidentally jumping between displays. Read More

Have Mac Terminal Audibly Announce The Completion Of A Command [Tip]

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Growl notifications are perhaps the best, and arguably the most popular, desktop notification system for OS X Lion. Many app developers integrate support for these notifications in their apps, and OS X Mountain Lion now supports a similar feature. As far as notifications for apps are concerned, Growl handles them well. If, however, you need a notification system for Terminal, one that would tell you when a command has successfully completed, you can add one of your own. Unlike Growl notifications, these are audio alerts that announce when a command has been executed, and make use of the text-to-speech (TTS) utility in Mac. The process requires you to add an additional command and the text that should be announced, at the end of the command you are running. How? Read past the break. Read More

Remove The Mac Dock Delay When Auto-Hide Feature Is Enabled [Tip]

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The Dock in Mac provides an easy way to launch your frequently used apps. The space it offers is limited though, and that is why most users reserve it for apps like a text editor or web browser etc. Mac OS X lets you auto-hide Dock when you aren’t using it and access it by simply hovering the mouse pointer. If you choose to auto-hide the Dock, then you may have noticed that it takes a few milliseconds (very long and annoying milliseconds) to reveal itself when you move your mouse to the edge of the screen. The time delay is obviously there to prevent the Dock from reappearing when you don’t intend to use it, but it can get annoying when you do want it to appear. This tip lets you remove that little time delay and have the Dock popping up on the slightest mouse hover. Read More

PhotoGrok: EXIF-Based Image & File Viewer With Metadata Filters

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EXIF, or Exchangeable Image File Format, is a standard that specifies the formats for images, sound and other important tags commonly used by digital cameras, scanners and other systems, which handle recorded image and sound files. You can view this metadata information in the default Windows properties of images and other files. The default Windows Explorer lists down all meta data of images in the Details view, but it is a bit limited in its EXIF data representation. Handling an image collection using just the default options can be a bit difficult for a professional photographer. PhotoGrok is a Java-based application that allows you to view images and other file types grouped together according to metadata. More on PhotoGrok after the break. Read More

Quickly View & Insert Accented Characters When Typing On Mac [Tip]

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If you’ve ever eaten at a French or Mexican restaurant, and afterwards tried to tell a friend over email or text message what you had, it’s likely that you had difficulty in spelling out the name of the dish, since both French and Spanish have special accented characters. Many words in the English language, like cliché and Résumé, that originate from French, make use of accented letters, and when writing emails or using them as part of ordinary everyday writing, you might face difficulty because your keyboard doesn’t have a quick option for printing these characters. For Mac users, these options are actually easily accessible in any app that allows text input. Read More

Walletx: Feature-Rich Password Manager With Encrypted Dropbox Sync Support [Mac]

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From a security perspective, Macs haven’t been having a great time lately. Just last month, the Flash Trojan had many people scanning their systems for a possible infection, and now the news of the password exposing bug in OS X 10.7.3 is going to leave you wondering how secure your login credentials are. Undoubtedly, Apple will have a fix for this, just like with the Trojan. In the event that you’ve been unaffected by either of these incidents, it’s time to count your lucky stars and at the same time, perhaps consider putting your information behind an extra layer of protection. Walletx is a free Mac app that lets you store your important information, like login IDs, passwords, credit card numbers, insurance information, home address, banking information, contact numbers, emergency numbers, and more. The app allows you to create several separate databases (or profiles), and save items to them. This is helpful when you want to keep your work and personal information in the same place, but avoid mixing them up, or just make it easier to retrieve later. The app additionally allows you to sync data to Dropbox, so that it is available across different Macs. Walletx saves information in its own format, and the data saved to Dropbox is password protected. Read More

[Giveaway] DragonDrop Makes Drag & Drop Easier By Providing A Temporary Holder For Copying Files [Mac]

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If you’ve used a Windows PC, you know there is no such thing as Desktop Spaces like there are in Mac, and, without question, they are an excellent feature to have. While they make it extremely easy to manage windows and group your work by the apps you have opened, it can sometimes be inconvenient when you have to move an item from one desktop space to another. DragonDrop is a Mac app, worth $4.99 in the Mac App Store, that acts as a ‘holder’ for any file, folder or text you want to copy and paste from one location or space to another. The app works entirely in the Menu Bar and captures anything you drop onto it, leaving you free to use your mouse for clicking, selecting and dragging other things around. Read More