Mac OS X | 5/49 | AddictiveTips

Organize Apps, Files & Folders Into Dock-Like Menus On OS X Desktop With DockMenus

by Fatima Wahab on February 02, 2013

Mac OS X

The Dock in OS X is where your favorite apps and folders go, providing quick access to apps and files that you need frequently. Though apart from being limited in capacity, it also wouldn't let you group apps together unless you put them into a folder, and doing so means losing quick, one-click access to them. DockMenus is a Mac app worth $2.99 in the Mac App Store that gives you extra docks. You can create any number of Dock-like menus and add apps, files or folders to them. The menus can be named, set to stay on top of all windows, and snapped to the side where they disappear much like the default Dock’s auto hide feature. The menus can also be ‘pinned’ so that their position isn’t accidentally changed. You can also add Trash to a menu, and dragging & dropping a file its icon will send it to Trash. The opacity of a menu and its background can be changed from one of the presets available in the menu’s settings. Read More

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

by Fatima Wahab on February 01, 2013

Mac OS X

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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

Design Your Own Fonts With BirdFont For Windows, Mac & Linux

by Waqas Ahmed on February 01, 2013

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The right way to market a product or service is to choose a captivating logo for your brand, and when it comes to designing such a logo or other material related to your brand identity, using the right font play a pivotal role. Using a poor typeface in your branding can result in a bad impression on your potential customer base, as it makes your brand look unprofessional. If you’re looking for a way to create your own fonts, give BirdFont a shot. It’s an open-source tool that lets you create various font characters from scratch by drawing vector outlines for them. The application also allows exporting and importing fonts in TTF, EOT and SVG formats. Read More

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

by Fatima Wahab on January 31, 2013

Mac OS X

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

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

by Fatima Wahab on January 30, 2013

Mac OS X

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

Convert Vine Videos To GIF Animations On Mac With VineGifR

by Fatima Wahab on January 29, 2013

Mac OS X

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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

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

by Fatima Wahab on January 28, 2013

Mac OS X

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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

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

by Fatima Wahab on January 26, 2013

Mac OS X

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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

Download Android App APKs From Google Play Store To Your Desktop

by Waqas Ahmed on January 25, 2013

Back in February 2012, we reviewed a Google Chrome extension that lets you download APK files of Android apps from Google Play directly to your PC, to be able to manually sideload them to your device. This method helps you grab any app that you are otherwise having problems installing to your device due to regional restrictions. Though that extension required some tinkering after Chrome's latest updates, and stopped working for some altogether. Today, we're bringing you a Windows app called Real APK Leecher that provides a more convenient way to download Android applications to your PC by similarly using your Google account associated with your device. Read More

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

by Fatima Wahab on January 25, 2013

Mac OS X

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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

by Fatima Wahab on January 25, 2013

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Mac OS X

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

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

by Fatima Wahab on January 24, 2013

Mac OS X

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]

by Fatima Wahab on January 24, 2013

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

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

by Fatima Wahab on January 24, 2013

Mac OS X

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

jMovieManager Offers All You Need From A Film & TV Series Organizer

by Waqas Ahmed on January 23, 2013

If you have a large collection of movies and TV series on your computer, keeping it all organized manually can be a hassle. Previously, we have covered some very fascinating movie and TV series managers for Windows, both in standard and Modern-UI flavors, including DVD Chief, Coollector Movie Database or TrackSeries, just to name a few. Today, I came across another one such app called jMovieManager and was impressed by its interface and features. It is a Java-based application that lets you access your entire offline movie and TV show collection complete with all metadata, from its intuitive UI. This way, you don’t have to rely on websites such as IMDb all the time to manually look up information, and will be able to play any of these videos right from the app at any time, without having to find them individually on your disk. Moreover, the app is portable, thus saving you the hassle of going through any installation process while allowing you to take your movie collection on the go in organized format on a portable disk! Read More

Find & Remove Duplicate Photos From Your iPhoto Library

by Fatima Wahab on January 23, 2013

Mac OS X

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iPhoto is one of the most sophisticated Mac apps available for managing your photo library. It lets you organize photos according to albums and events, and manage your Photostream as well as the pictures in your library. The application also helps you import pictures from external media devices, and keep them organized. When importing photos from different devices or streams, one often runs into the issue of duplicate photos; iPhoto warns you when you are about to save a duplicate to your library but in case you have already copied or created duplicate files in your library, iPhoto doesn't offer any feature to track them down for clean up your library later. DuplicateCleanerForiPhoto is a free Mac app available in the Mac App Store that aims to address that shortcoming of iPhoto, allowing you to scan your iPhoto library for duplicates and delete them. Read More

Browse & Manage iCloud Files From Your Mac With Plain Cloud

by Fatima Wahab on January 22, 2013

Mac OS X

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In Mountain Lion, Apple introduced deeper integration of iCloud throughout the OS, giving apps like Preview and TextEdit the ability to save files directly to iCloud. Saving files to iCloud and opening them via an app is easy enough, but there isn’t any official way as of yet to browse your files on iCloud itself. Plain Cloud is a free Mac app that lets you do just that, with the files neatly grouped based on the app they were created in. The files can be accessed on your hard drive if you know where to look or how to find the iCloud folder. While finding the iCloud folder on your Mac isn't hard, navigating to it can be a pain, and that's what Plain Cloud does for you. It basically provides you with shortcuts for opening the respective folder locations for these files. Read More

CleverFeed Is An OS X RSS Reader That Sorts Feeds By Your Interests

by Fatima Wahab on January 21, 2013

Mac OS X

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Whether you follow them as part of your work routine or just to read the latest posts on your favorite websites, going through RSS feeds can be quite time-consuming. The practical way to go through them and conserve time is to read the posts that seem most interesting from their titles and postpone others for later. This is obviously a manual filtering job and will tax your time daily. CleverFeed is a free Mac app that aims to automate this. As its name implies, CleverFeed sorts your feeds intelligently. It asks you to like the posts that seem most interesting to you and then tag them with keywords. The app analyzes how you tag different posts, scans their content, and finds similar ones that are likely to interest you. Its recommendations improve with time as it learns more about your reading preferences. CleverFeed imports feeds directly from your Google account so you'll still have to use Google Reader to add new feeds or manage existing ones. Read More