Tag Archives: App

Rename: Edit File Names & Add Spotlight Comments In Bulk [Mac]

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Batch file renaming is often needed when you have to organize a large number of files, and their names make little or no sense. Image files from your camera are the first thing that come to mind, but the need to clean up file names can occur for just about any file type. Rename is a batch file renaming app for Mac, which, unlike many file renaming apps that we covered earlier, has multiple ways of changing the file names; with Rename, you can simply select an entire folder that contains the files you want rename, enter a word that is found in the file name, and the app will find and rename it. It saves you the trouble of having to select a file that is to be renamed, or finding it from a large folder. Other features of this app include adding a serial number to all files and folders within any folder, appending a suffix or prefix to a file name, adding spotlight tags in bulk, and removing a given number of characters from the start or end of a file name. Read More

Framator: Resize Windows With Pixel Precision For Screencasts & More [Mac]

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We’ve detailed Mac’s built-in screenshot capturing ability that works with Preview earlier, and no one can say that it lacks full functionality. Compared to it, the screenshot feature in Windows is almost useless, and PC users have to download a third part app to take a half-decent snapshot of their screen. Preview may have screenshot actions covered, but there are multiple other instances where you might need to sketch out pixel specific dimensions on their screen, like when creating a screencast. Framator is a free Mac app that allows you to create a frame and customize its dimensions as per your requirements. The frame can be moved around on the screen, and all icons and windows within the frame can be used normally. The app is free until the end of June, and since the functionality is rather minimal, free seems the best price to get it for. It comes with two frame presets that are ideal for submitting app screenshots to the Apple Store, so developers might be more interested in this app than the casual user. Read More

Cut with Drag & Drop: Mac OS X Dock Shortcut For Moving Files & Folders

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We’ve previously covered two apps for Mac, Droppy and DragonDrop, both of which make it convenient to drag & drop files or folders between desktop spaces. Both apps carry a price tag, and while their interface is excellent and they work without any glitches whatsoever, there is still the fact that you have to pay for a very basic sort of functionality. Cut with Drag & Drop is a free Mac app that is somewhat similar to both the former apps. It won't help you move files between desktop spaces; rather, it provides a docking station for moving a file or folder to a new location. Read More

Favorites: Rate Files By Importance To Better Organize Them [Mac]

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For organizing bookmarks and web material, bookmarks are the right thing, and it’s only too bad that there isn’t something similar in Mac for your files. While files are theoretically organized into folders, there is often the problem of distinguishing identical files that are, in fact, different versions. It isn’t just the file names that make it hard to find them again; often you forget what a file is called, or don’t have the time to add it to the right folder. Favorites is a Mac app worth $4.99 in the Mac App Store that lets you rate files by their importance. It acts as an organizer for these rated files, and lets you create folders for the type of files you need to mark. Files can be filtered by their rating or searched for. The app also lets you quickly preview a file, or open it. Read More

View iOS Apps Download Percentage & Disable Deletion While Loading

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Downloading a large-sized app on iOS devices can prove to be a total nightmare at times. The download might get paused if you inadvertently touch the app’s icon once, or your Wi-Fi might become inactive without warning if you keep your iPhone in sleep mode for too long. Even if you ignore all these problems, the whole App Store download experience is not one of the neatest features of iOS. Although the blue download bar gives you a rough estimate regarding the remaining download time, it is not as good as having a concrete download percentage. That’s what AppCent is here for. The new Cydia tweak will display the percentage of downloaded content instead of the Loading moniker. If you want to make the App Store download procedure even more streamlined, give I’m Downloading a shot. This second tweak disables the delete button for all incomplete downloads, ensuring that you at least give the app a try before trashing it. Read More

PDF Toolkit: Compress PDFs, Extract Text And Images In Different Sizes [Mac]

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Feature rich free PDF tools and/or editors are hard to come by. PDF is one of the most common formats for viewing image rich documents on a slew of devices and that leaves you with little choice except to pay up for a halfway decent PDF tool or use several free alternative apps instead of a single one. PDF Toolkit is a PDF editing app for Mac that normally costs $4.99 but is free this month (makes you love Summer, doesn’t it?). PDF Toolkit isn’t for editing a PDF file i.e., you cannot add or remove text and images from a file. What you can do is merge multiple PDFs into a single file. Unlike free tools that only let you merge 2 files into one, PDF Toolkit gives you the freedom to merge as many files as you want. It can extract pages from a file, either in order or as per user specifications and create a new PDF from the extracted pages. Additionally, you can extract text and images from a file and compress it on four different standards to reduce the size. Note that this compression does not mean adding it to a zipped file, compression with PDF Toolkit is different and discussed in detail below. Read More

Typ-O: Mac OS X Text Editor With Grammar Check & Next Word Prediction

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Spell check, as we’ve often said before, is a life saver in many situations, and perhaps that's why it exists universally in Mac OS X. Another equally useful feature, though not natively present in OS X, is grammar check. Normally, what you have to work with is a spell check and auto-correct feature that will correct those little typos you make, but can seriously alter the meaning of a sentence if it doesn’t predict a word correctly. Typ-O is a three-in-one Mac app with a text editor that creates and saves files in RTF format, a spelling and grammar checker, and a quick typing tool that allows you to insert a word via the function keys on your keyboard, so that you don’t have to type them out. Typ-O supports both American and UK English, and German. It adjusts its suggestions and the degree of corrections it needs to make, based on your language skills. Read More

Inbox Classic: Task Management For Email, Reminders, Apps & Files [Mac]

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We’ve reviewed to-do list and task managers in abundance, each with its own way of managing lists and its own flow of things. A common feature among these kinds of apps is that they break away from the existing ones that you use, and have you re-create new tasks, projects and reminders from scratch. Most will sync items from Mac Calendar, but that is pretty much as far as it will go. Inbox Classic is a free Mac app that is a careful balance between the existing tools you use to keep track of important tasks, and the need to order them differently. Inbox Classic takes items from Mail, Calendar, and your hard disk, and is like a consolidated inbox for all incoming tasks; once emails, projects, reminders, and any other documents you might be working on, are ‘collected,’ the app lets you add timers and tasks to track your progress. In addition to the tasks, processes and projects you add, the app also lets you add agendas, research items or any other task or file you may be waiting for or plan on doing. Read More

iClapper: Clap To Control iTunes Or Trigger Any Action In Mac OS X

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We reviewed faceMe last week, an excellent app that triggered actions on your Mac when it detected someone was sitting in front of it. Flutter (full review) is a similar app, in that it, too, takes visual cues from the webcam and allows you to control iTunes, Spotify etc. iClapper is a Mac app, free for a limited time, that takes audio clues and uses them to trigger actions. These audio clues are simple clap sequences, and the number of times you clap tells iClapper which action to trigger. By default, the app comes with pre-added actions for running iTunes, playing/pausing it, skipping to the next song and starting the screensaver. You can add additional actions via an AppleScript and record custom clap sequences. Natively, the app recognizes single, double and three claps. Read More

Site Collector: Take Periodic Screenshots Of Entire Web Pages [Mac]

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The need to take screenshots isn’t just confined to your desktop. For many intents and purposes, screenshots of web pages are also required. For longer pages, this can be a challenge, since you will have to scroll several times to see the full page. There are browser extensions and add-ons built to do this, but they don’t always work for all types of sites, or ‘break’ after a while. For Mac users, there is a simple solution; Site Collector is a free Mac app that not only takes screenshots of entire webpages, but also allows you to schedule your captures by a predefined time interval. Site Collector is something of a screenshot aggregation tool for multiple websites. It allows you to enter several websites and select how frequently the app should capture a full page screenshot of each one. The screenshots are free of the browser window, although the preview is always shown in Safari. Read More

Pixen Is A Simple Mac OS X Paint Tool With Supports For Layers

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Preview, the default image viewer in Mac, supports some very basic image editing functionality. There isn’t, however, any native Mac app that lets you extensively edit or even create an image with simple brush or shape tools, and that’s why you will see lots of apps vying for the spot. For those who love something that is visually pleasing to use as well as feature-rich, PaintBrush (read review here) is one option. For those looking for layer support and would like to do more with the image itself, there is Pixen, a free Mac app that lets you paint in layers. It allows you to create and edit layers on an image and has all the usual selection, shape and paint tools you find on regular image editors. Read More

NoteBar Is An iPhone-Inspired Note Taking App For Mac OS X

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NoteBar is a Mac app worth $1.99 in the Mac App Store that looks just like the stock iOS Notes app, even with the same features; you can add notes (the first line of a note becomes the title), long titles are shortened, notes can be searched and shared via email, exported as a text file, printed and copied to the clipboard. Even on the interface front, expect the buttons to be exactly where you find them on the iPhone app, with the only slight change being that the note background doesn’t look resemble a margined notebook page. Read More

faceMe Opens Files & Apps Using Your Webcam & Face Detection [Mac]

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Controlling your devices via simple gestures that are read through your webcam might seem a futuristic idea, but as recently covered app Flutter showed (read full review here), it isn’t that far away any more. If you think waving your hand infront of your webcam to trigger iTunes was cool, you’re going to love faceMe. It’s a Mac app worth $1.99, and is, literally, worth every penny you pay. Like Flutter, it too is triggered by what the webcam sees; only, instead of being limited to a single app, faceMe lets you launch an audio file, a video or an app, quit an open app, open a file or speak predefined text when it detects a face. More on this marvellous app after the break. Read More

Tagit: Easily Add Tags To Files/Folders, Search Exclusively By Tags [Mac]

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Keeping files organized isn’t easy, especially if you’re a chronic procrastinator. OS X, however, has quite a few ways of making sure that you don’t lose your data. On that note, Spotlight comments and file tags help keep files more organized. Tools like Tag Folders (full review here) are just one of many that help you manage files via tags, and Tagit is yet another free app for Mac that helps you add tags to files and search exclusively by them. It is handy when you want to forgo the other filters that Spotlight uses when searching for a file, and focus only on the tags that you’ve used. Read More

Lightshot: Take Screenshots On Mac OS X, Edit & Share Them Online

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Screenshot tools are something you just can’t get enough of. Until you find the very perfect tool that lets you capture screenshots via brain waves, it’s safe to say that there will always be yet-another-tool with a different set of features. Lightshot Screenshot is a free Mac app that, as the name implies, is for taking screenshots. What’s great about this app is that it comes with an online image editor, the interface of which is exactly like that of the Pixlr online image editor (full review here) with image layer support. You can capture any area on your screen and open it in your default browser for editing, upload it and get the link to the image directly on your desktop or share it via email (opens in the default email client), on Twitter & Facebook, and search for it on Tineye or Google Images. Now that's impressive, even by our high standards! Read More

AppVegas For WP7 Makes App Discovery Fun & Easy

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The Windows Phone 7 Marketplace has finally started to grow at a reasonable pace, and is fast approaching the 100,000 mark. It is not always easy finding good apps when there are so many of them in an environment, and that is why there are a lot of app discovery tools available for WP7, like the previously covered App Flow (review). However, App Flow is not the only good app discovery tool out there for Mango users, and the newest sensation in this genre is AppVegas. Using this app, you can check out all the latest additions to the Marketplace with complete ease. You can browse through the app on the basis of categories, while it is also possible to define search perimeters of your own to find the perfect app. Details past the break. Read More

Cookiepix: Create Collage Desktop Backgrounds; Apply Several Effects To Individual Images [Mac]

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Finding a simple plain textured desktop background or a complex color rich one isn’t difficult, but nothing beats family photos or anything else that you may have personally snapped. Cookiepix Lite is a free Mac app that lets you combine your favorite pictures and create a desktop background out of them. The app is much like a collage maker that can help you create a wallpaper featuring whatever images you want. It comes with several styles that you can apply to images, and also has color and corner effects for better customization (where the latter simply makes the image look as if it were folded from a corner). Images can be zoomed in to focus on a particular spot, tilted and placed one over the other. More after the break. Read More

Doit.im Mini: Group Time-Defined Tasks By Projects & Sync Them [Mac]

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Doit.im Mini is a free Mac app for managing your tasks. It allows you to group tasks by projects and runs unobtrusively in the Menu Bar. The app’s interface is just one of the main reasons to give it a try, so elegant and simple it is. To use the app, you have to sign up for a free account. Doit.im Mini can be accessed easily via the built-in keyboard shortcuts that you can modify to suit your usage. Additionally, the app allows you to quickly add tasks via the ‘Smart Add’ feature, which has shortcuts and syntax support for quickly recording the time and deadline for a project or a task. The syntax is simple and allows you to append time and date to a task in addition to adding a new project. Read More

MLookerCL: Media Viewer That Supports Slideshows & Video Playlists [Mac]

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Most free file viewers are just apps that allow you to read a particular set of file formats, and stay restricted to one particular genre of files, like audios, videos, images etc. Any other sophisticated features are likely to be sitting behind a price tag. MLookerCL is a free Mac app that is, at the core, a viewer for all types of media files. In functionality, it allows you to create playlists of audio or video files you want to view, and play multiple images in a slide show. The app allows you to view basic file information via a simple shortcut and can compress JPGs. Additionally, MLookerCL will allow you to play videos as a desktop background. Read More

Webmailer: Redirect All Mailto: Links To Open In Default Browser [Mac]

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A while back, we reviewed RCDefaultApp, a Mac preference pane that makes it easy to set default apps in your Mac. The only slight shortcoming with the pane was that it wasn’t developed for Lion and might act a little glitchy. Webmailer is a free Mac preference pane that helps you redirect mailto: links to your web browser or any other app that you would like to handle all your email through. This is built specifically if you aren’t a fan of Mail and would love a different way to handle emails. The preference pane handles mailto: links that originate in a third party app, and redirects them to the app you want (like your browser). Read More