There’s no doubt that the default archive utility in Mac does what it’s supposed to do, but that certainly doesn’t mean it is the only archive utility you will ever need. There is a slew of other file archiving tools out there, and some are more feature rich than others, or present a better interface than the default one. iPackr is a free Mac app that is just one of the many options available. Not only does it tout a great interface, but also previews files in folders, lets you compress and extract them, supports a simple drag & drop interface, and lets you create and manage folders.
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By Fatima on March 22, 2012
Adding a file comment helps you find it more easily using the Spotlight search in Mac, but imagine having to add the same comment to a whole batch of files. Not only is it a tedious process, but it also involves accessing the right-click context menu for each file. A shortcut can be to add all these files to a single folder and add the comment to the folder only, but if files get moved around, your comment will not help you find it. Commenteer is a free Mac app that lets you manage file and folder comments in batches. It allows you to perform the same comment action (add, remove, print a comment) on all files within a folder.
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By Fatima on March 22, 2012
Desktop spaces in Mac make it easy to manage multiple apps and windows. Compared to Expose in Snow Leopard, Desktop Spaces, coupled with Mission Control, let you easily distribute and organize your work without overthinking it. While this feature is mostly convenient, it does get difficult to switch files from one space to another, or between two apps that you have open in different spaces. Droppy is a Mac app worth $0.99 in the Mac App store that gives you a simplified way of transferring files between two apps on different desktop spaces. The app adds a wormhole area to the screen, visible across all spaces, where you can dock a file. You can then swipe between desktop spaces and drag the file onto the app you want to add it to.
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By Fatima on March 21, 2012
Email is possibly one of the best things about the internet, until it starts to pile up and your inbox has more numbers on it than that miles on your car. While you might eventually get to reading all those messages that have piled up, it would be a lot easier if they were sorted, so you can decide which ones to tackle first. Email Filing Assistant Lite is a free Mac app that works in conjunction with Apple Mail and sorts emails based on past filtering patterns that you’ve used. The app creates an index of the email boxes you’ve added and the types of emails in them. When you get new messages, you can have the app filter them out as per the index it’s created.
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By Fatima on March 21, 2012
‘There’s an app for that’ is both a great and annoying thing to hear when you’re Mac user, since not everyone will tell what app to use when you’re trying to get something done. Writing is just one of those things that everyone does, and finding a good text editor is important. If you’re looking for something that covers the basics of text editing, Story Lite is a free Mac App that will let you input text, apply a border to the page, adjust text alignment, undo and redo functions, change the font and background color and highlight text. The app lets you create several editor boxes, and you can write in each one of them, which is useful if you’re creating a particularly long document and want to keep different parts of it separate until you’re ready to compile them.
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By Fatima on March 21, 2012
If you own an iOS device, chances are high that you’re deeply and irrevocably in love it. That said, you might still have the occasional peeves and irritations and wouldn’t mind a solution. If, at any point in the day, you feel like you could use a bigger keyboard and you happen to use a Mac, you can redirect your Mac keyboard to work on your iOS device. Admittedly, you won’t experience discomfort with an iPad’s on-screen keyboard, but typing on the iPhone’s keyboard isn’t always the easiest thing to do. 1Keyboard is a free Mac app that lets you use your Mac keyboard to type to your iOS device. It connects via Bluetooth and does not require an iOS client to be installed.
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By Fatima on March 20, 2012
We’ve covered quite a few apps that let you control your Mac from an iOS device or send and transfer files between the two. What most, if not all, of these apps have in common is a price tag, usually for the iOS client. Deliver is a free Mac app with a free iOS counterpart that lets you transfer files and text between your Mac and iOS device. You can password protect the transfers, and ensure only authorized iOS devices can send you files. The app works over Wi-Fi and file transfers can be initiated on both Mac and the iOS device.
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By Fatima on March 20, 2012
Some apps play nice, others not so much. At some point, we download a seemingly innocent app that will do what it says and be easily banished when we’re tired of it or have no use for it. However, it later turns out that app is there to stay, whether we like it or not. Evil apps? Not necessarily. Some apps have more files than others, and depending on what they do, they copy those files to different locations. While you can delete these apps, finding and tracking down the rest of the files isn’t easy. If you haven’t enabled viewing hidden files, it is likely you won’t get to the Saved Application State folder in Library, and will retain some files from an installed, and later removed, app. App Zap is an app uninstaller for Mac that is worth $4.99 in the Mac app store that not only lets you delete files, but also view and selectively remove files created by the app or the app itself.
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By Fatima on March 20, 2012
We’ve covered Twitter clients for Mac in the past and what they all do is let you read your Tweets, Tweet to your followers, retweet people you follow, send messages and reply to tweets. There are, however, other things that one might be interested in when it comes to a Twitter client. While many people need these clients to monitor their feeds, there are people who need a client that will tell them when they have been followed or unfollowed. Bird Bell is a free Mac app that, in addition to notifying you when one of your tweets has been favorited, retweeted or you’ve been added to a list, also tells you if you’ve gained or lost a follower. The app supports Growl notifications, and lets you manage more than one account.
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By Fatima on March 19, 2012
How cluttered does your desktop have to be before you decide it is time to tidy up a bit? Desktop clutter isn’t necessarily (and always) a result of too many icons; it can look like an unorganized litter of wet hungry kittens if you have too many open windows. At the best of it, you stop working in app and leave it open as you move on to another app. Houdini is a free Mac app that helps you hide this type of clutter. It lets you choose a time frame between fifteen second to five minutes, and if the app hasn’t bee used for the specified interval, Houdini will hide it. Remember that Mac already suspends apps, and there is a difference between closing and quitting an app so you won’t be looking at apps eating up extra resources.
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By Fatima on March 19, 2012
iCal is one of the popular default Mac apps; it is widely preferred as a great way to manage tasks, events, reminders and a to-do list. If you use iCal extensively, you might have felt the need to know how much time you are spending on your tasks. Your tasks are distributed among different calendars, and if you ever need to know how much time you need to put aside for a particular task, you will have to check it manually. iCal Time-Recording is a free Mac app that acts much like a plugin for iCal, and calculates the time spent on any one task. The app gives you weekly statistics, and lets you use it to either add tasks, or add and calculate time for tasks added in iCal.
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By Fatima on March 19, 2012
If you’ve transitioned to Mac from a Windows PC, you will probably have figured out that Finder is to Mac what Windows Explorer is to Windows. You will also find that there are some options from the right-click context menu of a file that were there on your Windows PC, but are missing in Finder. Even if you’re a long time Mac user, some commands like moving or copying a file, finding the file path, viewing hidden items etc, are some actions that you could do with having in the right-click context menu. XtraFinder is a free Mac app that adds these and other features to both the Finder menu and a file’s right-click context menu. In summary, the app will automatically arrange folders at the top, arrange items by name when in icon view, Collapse all, Show hidden items, refresh, copy file path, create a new file, copy or move a file to another destination, refresh, select multiple files, view contents of a folder as sub-menu and launch an app as root.
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By Fatima on March 19, 2012
The Stickies app in Mac is bare bone when it comes to features, and doesn’t sync across your other Apple devices. Similarly, you will find few other note apps out there that will let you sync notes between two devices. NVALT is a free Mac app that lets you create as many notes as you like, lets you link one or several notes within another note, supports basic text-styling attributes like bold, italicize, underline and strike through, and much more. It also allows you to encrypt notes, and sync them across devices via a third party service SimpleNote. Notes are saved locally to your system and not to the cloud. Only when you enable syncing are the notes uploaded to SimpleNote’s cloud server.
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By Fatima on March 17, 2012
Apps that add effects to photos are as common as perhaps water, so if you ever decide to use one, you want to make sure it offers you both a good range of effects as well as good execution. uSketch is a free Mac app that applies filters to your photos, and its interface alone will blow you away. In addition to its 19 filters that are 100% customizable, the app also has a wide range of sketch effects that are executed very well. You can use the app to take photos directly from webcam, or add ones from your system. It also lets you print, email and share photos on Twitter, Facebook and Flickr.
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By Fatima on March 17, 2012
We recently covered an app, Easy File Hider, worth $1.99, which allows you to change the visibility attribute of a file to Hidden. In the spirit of hiding things from the world and anyone who uses your Mac, here is a little tip to keep files from appearing in Spotlight search and in ‘All Files’ in the Mac Finder. The fact is, hidden files will be visible if you’ve enabled Mac to show them in Finder. They can be searched for from Spotlight, and if you were to view All Files in Finder, they will be listed with their respective file types. Hiding folders and their contents from Spotlight and All Files involves nothing more than a quick visit to the System Preferences.
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By Fatima on March 16, 2012
