Do you favor apps that will add icons to the menu bar as opposed to the Dock? If yes, then no doubt you save plenty of precious space on the Dock and trade it out for a little clutter on the menu bar. For many users this isn’t a bad trade off, but what can be a little annoying, to downright counter productive, is the order these app icons appear in. Every time you start your system, all apps that you’ve set to start at login rearrange themselves on the menu bar. It is makes it utterly pointless to remember which icon was where, and means you will need to take a good squint-eyed look at the menu bar each time you want to launch an app. MenuBar ReArranger is a very useful Mac app available for $4.99 in the Mac App Store that can solve this problem forever. The app does what you would expect to be native behavior in Mac (but isn’t), and lets you re-order the icons on the menu bar to suit your needs.
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By Fatima on February 20, 2012
Keyboard shortcuts add convenience to how we use an app and our system as a whole. Many users, who need to work on different projects and use multiple apps at the same time, will use a combination of mouse and trackpad gestures and keyboard shortcuts just to get things done faster. It is for this reason that many of us have a soft spot for app that support keyboard shortcuts and get butterflies if we can edit a shortcut to our own liking. While these shortcuts are great, they sometimes end up conflicting with other apps and more power apps might even conflict with universal shortcuts. ShortStop is a simple Mac app available for $2.99 in the Mac App Store that allows you to toggle between apps and their enabled shortcuts. You can set the system to ignore shortcuts that are associated with an app, and enable them as per your requirement.
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By Fatima on February 17, 2012
Looking for a tool that can help you easily work with text in all applications? What you might need is an universal text assistant that can perform numerous text-related operations without having to use exhaustive hotkey combinations. PopClip is small, menu bar application that comes with a variety of text-related options to help you compose emails, change file/folder names, type text, open mail links, search the web etc. The application has been developed to prevent you from doing lengthy text-related tasks, such as copying and pasting text from one app to another, searching the web, opening file and email links, and correcting spelling mistakes. It provides a small, on-screen menu with text to perform all the related operations with a click. For instance, if you want to compose an email, just select the email address, and click the @ button to open default email client for composing mail. Read past the break for more.
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By Usman on February 16, 2012
When it comes to photo editing apps for iOS, you have to make a choice between thoroughness and convenience. There is a class of apps which let you make changes to photos on an iPhone with a single tap, while others make sure that you get the exact result you set out looking for. Paint FX is an app which combines these two categories in perfect proportion. While using this app, you don’t get stuck trying to do too much before you actually get to see some change in your photo, but on the other hand, it also offers a respectable amount of customization. The app has a lot of filters and photo effects, and you can change them as well to match your needs.
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By Hamza on February 16, 2012
Twitter clients are nothing new to iOS, and the iTunes App Store is full to the brim with them, if not overflown already. The deep Twitter integration that iOS 5 users enjoy has made the microblogging network an integral part of many iPhone users’ lives. Then, coming back to Twitter clients, you get a lot of good options to choose from, including the official Twitter app, which is elegantly laid out, neat and super functional. Taking all this in account, one is hard pressed to find a Twitter client that outshines the competition, and Twittelator Neue does just that. It is, hands down, the most beautiful Twitter client ever released (yet) on any platform, mobile and desktop alike. Details past the break.
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By Aatif Khan on February 15, 2012
There are a multitude of apps that let you control and/or access your Mac from your iPhone. For the true Apple fan, uniting an iPhone with a Mac must be something like an Apple device marriage. Regardless of your sentiments for the concept, it is pretty useful, to say the least. Air Media Server is a free Mac app that lets you access all files on your Mac from your iPhone. You will need to install the iOS app which costs $1.99 in the Apple App Store. Both iOS device and Mac have to be on the same Wi-Fi network for you to be able to view the files. The files aren’t just a preview, if you have the correct app installed, you can modify them from your iOS device, as well.
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By Fatima on February 15, 2012
Do you often keep duplicate files on your system on purpose? Some people might do so to ensure they always have a copy of a file in its original format while they play around with the duplicate. Others might just accidently end up downloading the same file again and again and saving them to a different folder each time. Clutter creating habits aside, even the best of us end up with duplicate versions of the same files, and it is hard to track them down. Gemini is a Mac app worth $4.99 in the Mac App Store that is a superb duplicate finder. It doesn’t automatically remove files; rather, it allows you to decide which ones to remove. The app can detect duplicates based on the name, and even if a file name is appended with (1) to avoid overwriting an old version, the app treats it as a duplicate as such.
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By Fatima on February 13, 2012
The iPhone 4S’ most advertised, and arguably most distinguishing, feature was Siri – the virtual personal assistant that you’d have either come to love or hate, if you’ve been interacting with her (with due apology to Dr. Rajesh Koothrapali from The Big Bang Theory). Despite the beta tag that Siri carries, it works pretty smooth, and has been a cause of envy for most iOS users that didn’t have the iPhone 4S. On the jailbreak front, solutions like Spire Siri port piqued a lot of interest, but they remain heavily dependent on a lot of features (jailbroken device, for one, and working iPhone 4S keys for another). Then there have been apps like Dragon Dictation and Dragon Go!, but none really compared to Siri when it came to ease of use. Speaktoit Assistant, however, looks at changing that, and for good. Details past the break.
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By Aatif Khan on February 13, 2012
Spotlight search in Mac is plain amazing. Even if you advocate actively for Windows PCs and insist that the Start Search is possibly one of the best features to have come to Windows, you will still be blown with the search results from Spotlight. While it is amazing and all, it does have a few limitations, or, as some might say, slight complications. The file type search isn’t as conspicuous as it should be, and the iFileX utility reviewed earlier was one way to make it easier. SearchInFiles is a Mac app that is free for a very limited time (just a few hours), which lets you search text within files and display the results by line number. The app works with TXT, RTF, HTM, CSS, XML, C, M and Java files. PDF files are not supported.
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By Fatima on February 13, 2012
Tilt-Shift photography is the use of camera movements on small and medium format cameras, and the use of tilt for selective focus, for simulating a miniature scene. Sometimes, the term is also used when the shallow depth of field is simulated with digital post processing. Normally, a tilt-shift lens is required to achieve the desired effect optically. This special tilting lens for simulating a macro shot or a miniature scene costs a huge sum of money, and if you don’t have that kind of extra money to spend on it, it is easy to produce the same effect digitally. The great thing about applying the tilt-shift effect using digital post processing is that, neither you lose the quality of an image, nor you gain anything if you use an expensive lens for the job. Artensoft Tilt-Shift Generator is an image editor for Windows that produces convincing, natural looking tilt-shift scenes and works as good as a real lens. More on Tilt-Shift Generator after the break.
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By Fawad on February 10, 2012
You may, or may not, have heard of creating vRAM disks and making your system faster. A Virtual RAM disk can be created using the internal hard disk memory, or you can just buy one. For those of you that know what RAM is meant to do, understand that a vRAM disk is a virtual disk that can can read and write to files faster than to your hard disk. The simplest reason (and there are many other complex ones) to the added speed is that a virtual drive isn’t a separate machine component that requires actual moving parts to read and write information. For the truly tech savvy who know the ins and outs of creating RAM disks, there is an entirely different world of information out there. For simpler users, more specifically, Mac users, there is iRamDisk, an app worth $1.99 in the Mac App Store which allows you to create virtual RAM disks and mount them as regular drives.
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By Fatima on February 10, 2012
Keyboard shortcuts are dead useful. The universal application of Command + C, Command + V etc., across different OS, is a proof of just how convenient they are. Turbodo is a Mac app worth $4.99 that takes universal shortcuts to a new level. It allows you to create shortcuts for just about any file, folder and app on your Mac. The app runs unobtrusively in the System Menu Bar, and no matter which app you are working in, or which desktop space you’re on, the app enforces the shortcuts you create. You can open and execute several files and apps from just one shortcut. The app has a drag & drop interface for adding executable items.
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By Fatima on February 9, 2012
When it comes to mobile devices, or more specifically, smart phones, on-screen keyboards are now the norm. Although Samsung did recently debut the Samsung Galaxy Note featuring a stylus in an Apple mocking super bowl ad, the fact is, people are now accustomed to using their fingers to operate on-screen keyboards. As such, these on-screen keyboards are easy to use; few of us will ever lose our finger and turn to a stylus (in the event that you do lose your finger, a stylus is the last thing you need to worry about). While the iPhone keyboard is super responsive and easy to use, it might, at one point, become an annoyance to type from your device. Type2Phone is a Mac app available for $4.99 that allows you to use the keyboard attached to your Mac to type on the iPhone. This app requires no iOS client whatsoever, and simply pairs and connects with the device over Bluetooth.
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By Fatima on February 9, 2012
Earlier last month, we reviewed two Mac apps, Blotter and Mindful, that put the current day’s iCal events in a translucent display on your desktop. Both apps present a convenient way to always have your daily events on your desktop. NewsBar is a Mac app available for $4.99 on the Mac app store that does the same to your RSS feed. It is feature rich app that allows you to dock your feed to any side of the display, or view it as a floating window. The app supports feed search, marking items as favorites, setting keyword alerts and choosing a unique color for each feed. It lets you add just about any RSS feed, or import your items from Google Reader.
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By Fatima on February 8, 2012
Google released Gmail Offline a while back, a Chrome app that allowed you to view your Gmail account offline. The app was meant for Chrome alone, and all other browsers were pretty much left out. What’s more, the app wasn’t a backup solution. BackUp Gmail is a Mac app available for $1.99 in the Mac App Store that allows you to back up all email messages in your Gmail account to anywhere on your hard drive. The app is nothing more than a downloader for all your inbox messages. You can set up a regular time interval for when the app will back up messages, or enter a given time when the app will perform a backup daily. The messages are readable in Apple’s default mail client, and not encrypted in any way. It works for both Gmail and Google Apps accounts.
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By Fatima on February 7, 2012
