Mac OS X | 6/49 | AddictiveTips

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

Add Notes To Each Edge Of Your Mac’s Screen With Moof!

by Fatima Wahab on January 21, 2013

Mac OS X

Note taking apps aren’t rare for OS X, and the default Notes app in Mountain Lion is quite good. It syncs over iCloud, so for little bits of text or information that you want to remember and view on your iOS device, it’s a good option. However, if you’re looking for something that concentrates more on being easily accessible, Moof! Notes is a free Mac app that you should try out. Moof! Notes can be brought to the front in pretty much the same way a Hot Corner is invoked. The app has four active regions on your screen and clicking one of these launches it, displaying a blank note that you can enter text into. The notes are saved in RTF format and collapse to whichever side they were created on. The notes remain open so long as the app is running, making it easy to add more text to them. Notes can also be created by dragging text over an active side of the screen. Read More

Securely Delete Individual Items From OS X Trash With Supercan

by Fatima Wahab on January 20, 2013

Mac OS X

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If you've ever found yourself in the middle of the OS X vs Windows features debate, you might have noticed how Trash can or Recycle Bin are rarely ever compared. While this might be because a delete operation doesn't sound like a big deal but lets face it, Trash in OS X has a major shortcoming compared to Windows’ Recycle Bin: you can’t delete the items in it one by one, and even if you want to permanently remove a single file from Trash, you have to empty it all. Supercan is a free Mac app that solves this problem. It syncs with Trash and lists each file that you've sent to it, allowing you to permanently remove individual items. In addition to deleting files the normal way, Supercan also supports secure deletion (file shredding), which overwrites sectors your disk to ensure deleted data can’t be recovered by file recovery apps. Read More

CloudPull Regularly Backs Up Gmail, Contacts & Other Google Account Data To Your Mac

by Fatima Wahab on January 17, 2013

Mac OS X

OS X’s Mail client is quite feature-rich for most of us but if your needs are slightly out of the ordinary, it might not quite cut it for you. The level of customization it offers for some of its features sometimes falls short. One feature of the app that doesn't offer a high level of customize is email backup. Mail only lets you choose the account to back up emails from, and should you want to narrow it down to a mailbox or a label (in Gmail), you'll be out of luck. If you need to backup data from your Gmail account on your Mac and have control over the backup process, give CloudPull Free a try. It’s a free app available in the Mac App Store that downloads data from your Google Account including emails, calendars, contacts, RSS feed subscriptions, and your Google Drive. For emails, it lets you select labels and mailboxes to download messages from. The app runs in the background and continuously monitors your Google account for new items, while keeping point-in-time snapshot of your mailbox (for 90 days) that you can restore in the Mail app. Contacts can be imported in Contacts app, calendar tin the Calendar app, RSS feed subscriptions in Safari, and emails in the Mail app. You can also selectively store messages from a label. Read More

Use Your iPad As A Keyboard Shortcuts Panel For Your Mac With HotKeys

by Fatima Wahab on January 14, 2013

Mac OS X

The concept of using the iPad as a companion device for your Mac has been quite popular, which is why you can find a large number of iPad mounts to attach to your iMac, or simpler stands to place the tablet beside it. Apps like take this concept to the next level by letting you mirror your Mac or PC's display to an iPad, turning it into a second screen. If you’re more than happy with the solitary screen you use your Mac on, and are looking for some other way your iPad could compliment your Mac, give HotKeys a try. It’s a free Mac app that works in conjunction with a free iPad client. The latter turns your iPad into a keypad for OS X shortcuts. It comes with two key packs already configured; one for normal OS X functions and the other for Photoshop. You can add your own set of shortcuts, edit existing ones, or create a new key pack, then use them to perform various actions on your Mac with quick taps on your iPad. Read More

Create QR Codes For Text, Links, Maps, Contacts & WiFi Networks On Mac

by Fatima Wahab on January 12, 2013

Mac OS X

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QR codes are quite useful for quickly accessing information from our mobile devices. This mostly includes URLs for websites, links to apps' installation pages, links to map locations, and promotion codes for discounts. Though that's not it - QR codes can hold just about any kind of information that you want to embed into them. QR Factory is a $4.99 app available in the Mac App Store that lets you create QR codes for addresses, contact cards, Wi-Fi networks, emails, plain text and phone numbers. The QR codes can be customized in a number of ways; you can change the foreground and background color, add a gradient, manage the roundness of the code pattern, and customize the size of the final output. These codes can be saved in PNG format, and printed to place anywhere for others to scan them. Read More

Selectively Add Or Remove Colors In An Image With Color Splash Pro

by Fatima Wahab on January 12, 2013

Mac OS X

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Almost a year ago, we reviewed a very famous app called Color Splash Smart that allowed you to selectively color parts of a photograph. It’s a great effect to add to your photos when you want to highlight a particular subject or region in it. Unfortunately, Color Splash Smart is no longer free and if you are looking for a free alternative for it, give Color Splash Pro a shot. It's a free Mac app that does pretty much the same thing as Color Splash Smart. While it has fewer features in terms of the extra stuff like crop and resize tools, you can easily find all those in several other free apps so that shouldn't be a problem. Let's find out more about Color Splash Pro after the jump. Read More

How To Restart The Mac OS X Dock With An App Or Terminal Command

by Fatima Wahab on January 10, 2013

Mac OS X

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A majority of end users might not be familiar with the purpose of restarting the OS X Dock. It’s something you need to do at times should you ever decide to go tinkering with the system’s default settings or run a few Terminal commands. The method itself involves the execution of a Terminal command, as the UI provides no way to do so. Where the command is fairly simple, most regular users would prefer a one-click alternative in the form of an app or executable script. If you're looking for such a solution, try DockRestarter, an easy solution that comes in both app and script form. Read More

PDFNut For Mac Is A Great PDF Reader With Tabbed Viewing

by Fatima Wahab on January 08, 2013

Mac OS X

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Ever since I started using a web browser that supported tabs (something that didn’t happen for me until Chrome debuted), I’ve always felt that tabs were the right way to view any and all types of content. They make browsing and navigation easy and the lack of window clutter is an added advantage. This is one of the reasons why I find the lack of tabbed browsing in both Finder on Mac and File Explorer on Windows 8 to be perplexing. The good thing is, the tabbed browsing trend has caught on and spread to all sorts of applications over the years. PDFNut is a free Mac app available in the Mac App Store that applies this concept to PDF viewing. The app lets you open multiple PDF files in different tabs, features a bookshelf that you can add files to by dragging & dropping them onto the app, allows bookmarking and annotating pages, searching text within a PDF file and supports table of contents. Read More

100 Best Mac Apps Of Year 2012

by Fatima Wahab on January 06, 2013

Mac OS X

Another year has gone by and it’s been a good one for OS X apps. Continuing our tradition from previous years, here is a list of some the best apps we covered during the last one. 2012 was split between two versions of OS X; Lion and Mountain Lion. Each of these versions had their own share of features that inspired developers to create apps. We came across a fair number of Mac apps meant to deal with the problems users experienced when they upgraded to Mountain Lion. Apart from these OS-centric apps, we reviewed the usual utilities for everyday work; productivity apps, music players, to-do lists managers, system tweakers and more. With the new year now in full swing, you might want to see if a little something from last year will help you enjoy a better user experience. Read More

Batch Resize, Watermark & Compress Images Easily Using Snap Converter

by Fatima Wahab on January 02, 2013

Mac OS X

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You can find a whole host of screenshot and image editing apps for OS X, Skitch being one of the most famous and comprehensive ones among the lot. With most of these apps and utilities though, what you get is one thing done well; you will find an app that is excellent at compressing images with little to no loss of quality, another one that's great at renaming files in bulk, and yet another one that rocks at adding watermarks to them. What's hard to find is a Swiss Army knife that does all such related tasks, and does them really well. Snap Converter is a Mac app worth $ 3.99 in the Mac App Store that handles five major functions for images in bulk: it lets you resize, rename, compress, convert between popular image formats, and add a watermark to images. Read More

What Is VoIP And How You Can Use It To Reduce Your Phone Bill

by Awais Imran on December 28, 2012

Voice over Internet Protocol – or VoIP – is the next big revolution in the telecommunication industry. What it does, essentially, is turn analog voice signals into digital packets that can be sent over the Internet instead of going through your wireless carrier, in a way that is no different from other data that is transmitted through the Internet. It’s a lot cheaper for both the customers and the service provider, offers higher quality audio than your standard phone call and is a lot more reliable in many cases. And it’s got wireless carriers scared out of their wits. In what follows, we will discuss the advantages and disadvantages of using VoIP over traditional telecommunication methods. Read More