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We’ve covered several clipboard managers, like TextBom, Clipboard History and rePasta, all of which let you save multiple text snippets to a central clipboard. They aim to make it easier to copy text for later use, but what they do not focus on is reusing it. Often enough, there is always some sort of redundant text that we have to type repeatedly over the course of a single day, like a postal address or an email ID. ClipAssist is a Mac app that lets you type in text and save it by title. The text can then be selected by clicking its title and pasted anywhere. While the previously covered apps aimed to make copying and recording text easy, this app focuses on making their usage more convenient.

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Last year in December, we covered an app called DaisyDisk worth $9.99, which is well beyond the upper price point for paid apps and easily warranted a giveaway. For those who missed our giveaway, or didn’t score a license, here is a free alternative. DiskScanner is a Mac app that does pretty much what DaisyDisk did; it gives you a graphical overview of disk space consumption in a pie-graph, where each folder is represented by a section of the disc. The size of the section corresponds to the amount of memory the file/folder occupies. You can scan all types of folders and mounted disk drives using this app, and easily browse folders. While the app is similar in functionality to DaisyDisk, it does have less appealing visuals, but nothing that you can’t ignore. It also does not support drag & drop folders to scan them.

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Reading on an iPad is unquestionably fun; the device itself is enough to tempt you to read, even if you’d rather wait for the movie. To make it better, Apple has iBooks, an iOS app available for free in the App Store that makes reading both fun and interactive. The app itself is extremely popular, and now Apple has released iBooks Author; a Mac app that lets you create ebooks in all their splendor for reading in iBooks. The app might just be a publisher’s dream come true; it comes with six templates that can be modified, you can add just about any kind of content, be it movies or audio files, slideshows, charts, tables or 3D objects. The templates are fully equipped to support basic book elements, like glossary, preface, table of contents and more. It additionally lets you import whole chapters from a Pages and/or Word file.

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Stickies is simple note taking app that comes pre-installed with your Mac. The main reason for using this app, if any, is perhaps that it is already there. It doesn’t sync with iCloud and doesn’t let you conveniently browse through all notes that you’ve added. Quick Note is a free Mac app from Diigo that lets you sync notes using its service. You can add as many notes as you like, store them locally, view and switch through multiple notes from the same window and search them by their title. The app has spell check, grammar check and autocorrect built in and supports cut, copy and paste functions.

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Many photo editors let you pick colors from any part of an open image, but few apps allow you to do this universally, i.e., on any part of your screen, regardless of which app is active or what webpage you have open. Pick is a Mac app that is a universal color picker. Once you launch the app – either from the menu bar or from the keyboard shortcut – mesh magnifier replaces your cursor and actively picks the color of whichever area you hover it over. The app can give you the color code in several different formats, and will work regardless of which apps are running.

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We’ve covered several apps that allow you to use your webcam as a small scale security camera. iSentry is a Mac app that is similar in functionality, but diverse; in addition to detecting motion in the camera’s view, it lets you capture it as either a video or as a series photos. The videos and photos can be saved to your local drive, or uploaded to iSentry’s web service. You can select a sensitivity level for the app, and if any movement in the camera’s view exceeds that sensitivity limit, it will sound an alarm, take photos and/or record a video of the activity. The app can also send you email alerts whenever it detects too much movement.

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You can natively open PDF files on a Mac or in your browser. Finding a way to open a PDF is no big deal, but what you want to do with a PDF once it’s open is entirely different. You’ll read it, of course, but you might want to highlight parts of it, take shots of the pages, add notes or encircle parts of it. For all that and more, there is Skim, a free Mac app that is a PDF reader at the core, and is equipped with enough features to make it a full fledged research tool. The app gives you multiple tools for annotating and making notes, maintain bookmarks and view any PDF as a presentation.

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We previously reviewed a Mac app called Numi, a very basic editor that allowed you to add text within your calculations. The app is ideal if you do multiple interrelated arithmetic calculations and forgot why or how you arrived at a particular amount. CalcMadeEasy Free is a Mac app that automatically records the calculations you perform using the app’s built in calculator. You can add notes, and have the app record all calculations to it. The notes are simple text that can copy and paste anywhere. The app is ideal if you don’t want to be bothered with writing down your calculations, but would like a record of them nevertheless.

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If your desktop routinely looks like someone threw up icons on it, it might mean one of two things; you are either a bad organizer, or just too lazy to clean your desktop clutter. It can actually be both these things, but whatever it is that keeps you from cleaning up the mess on your screen, it needs a solution before you run out of places to click. Clean My Desktop is a Mac app that works wonders; it analyzes and sorts all files and icons on your desktop, categorizes them as Applications, Documents, Pictures, Movies, Music, Source Code, Folders and Aliases, and separates them into folders. All folders are created as sub-folder in any location of your choice.

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Editing, merging, and extracting PDFs is a normal function that just about anyone might need. In late December, we covered PDFDesk, an app that allowed you to extract pages from PDF documents in multiple image and PDF formats. Gelatin, that wonderful stuff that the elf ears in Lord Of The Rings were made of, is a Mac app that lets you merge two PDF files into one. The app has a simple drag & drop interface, and seamlessly merges two PDFs into one, without adding any sort of watermark. The app is also free of PDF size restrictions, which means, regardless of the file size or the number of pages in the PDF, you can merge it with another.

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Finding apps, desktop, mobile or web, that add color filters to your images is no big deal. What’s slightly harder to do is to find an easy-to-use app that lets you color just a portion of an image without losing the image details themselves. InstantPhotoColor is a free Mac app that does just that. It has a single function, and that is, to color your images(s). The app saves images to PNG or JPG format. Using the built-in brush tool and the color selector, pick out a color, and drag the brush over whichever area you want to color.

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Spotlight search in Mac is, no doubt, one of the best utilities there is. It lets you search across any and all folders for all kinds of files, and remembers your frequently used files and apps so that the results are always more meaningful. While it is an excellent global search for the entire system, it does lack filters. iFileX is a Mac app that that lets you add several search criteria when you are looking for a file. Search can be narrowed down by name, modification date, creation date, size, folder or alias. You can also limit your search by specifying a particular location.

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