Tag Archives: mac

Encode Videos Or Extract Their Audio Using Mac Finder [Tip]

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The Finder in Mac is generally just a file explorer with no hardcore features that would warrant calling it anything else, but it isn’t really as bare as it seems. As far as videos are concerned, the Finder can do much more. Specifically, you can use the Finder to encode and resize videos, as well as to extract their audio. The feature, built into Mac, requires no codecs to be installed, and works only on files that Mac supports. Hence, Flash files cannot utilize this encoding, but the common MP4s can be used without needing to think twice. Read More

Sort Apps Into Folders & Turn The Mac Dock Into A Launcher [Tip]

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App launchers are a pretty popular genre, and many different types of launchers are developed to cater to unique, individual needs. Both paid and free app launchers are available for those who aren’t happy with the default Launchpad, but if you really want to keep things organized (kill the procrastinator in you), you can clean up your apps, sort them and make a great app launcher all by yourself that is easily accessible from the Dock. To set the record straight, you aren’t going to create an app or anything like that. The concept to this DIY launcher is to have your apps sorted into folders, which will then be named after what the apps in them do. For example, a folder named Music will have apps that help tweak or play audio. Read on to see how you can make your own app launcher. 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

Shift+Option Volume Precision Controls Return To Mac OS X Lion [Tip]

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Finding the perfect spot, whether you’re just trying to adjust your pillow at night or trying to set the volume on your Mac, is tedious, to say the least. The latter was made all the more difficult when OS X 10.7 took away the ability to increase or decrease the volume by one-fourth of a volume block. The precision was dearly missed particularly by musicphiles and generally by all users. Just as the option disappeared magically, it has returned the same way (it might have something to do with the OS X 10.7.4 update, but magic sounds cooler). You can now increase the volume bit by bit once again. Hold down the Shift+Option key combination when using the volume keys on your keyboard, and the volume will increase or decrease ever so slightly until it is just right. 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

Digitally Sign A PDF Document Using Mac Preview & Your Webcam [Tip]

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Electronically signing a document is much easier and faster than printing it out, signing it with a pen and then scanning and emailing it. Normally, you would go looking for an app that, in addition to editing a PDF, also supports adding signatures. While you can dish out some bucks and grab such apps from Mac App Store, if you just need a method for adding digital signature, there is already a built-in way to do it in OS X Lion. Preview in Mac is more than just an app for opening files; as covered in earlier tips, it does much more, such as taking screenshots and adding e-signatures to PDFs. All you need is a good webcam - possibly a high quality one - and adding a signature is only a matter of a few clicks. Read More

Remove Mac App Window Drop Shadows Completely Or Just For Screenshots [Tip]

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Application windows in Mac appear to float on your desktop and this effect is created using drop shadows around the edges of the window. While Windows 7 also supports shadows, the effect is nothing like what you see in Mac. In addition to the visual appeal, these shadows also help distinguish one app window’s edge from that of another. Although the shadows contribute to both functionality and visual appeal, they become somewhat useless and even ugly when they show up in a screenshot. In this post, we will guide you through the process of disabling shadow effect from both app windows and screenshots. 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

DXPurge: Auto-Remove Junk Files While Transferring Data From Mac OS X To Windows

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Often, when you transfer files and folders from Mac OS X to Windows via flash drives, memory cards, external drives or other means, Mac OS X creates junk files (like .DS_Store) in each folder present in your removable storage medium. Although these files usually remain hidden to the user, they consume precious storage space, and since these files have no use in Windows, you may want to get rid of them anyway. Removing all the junk files yourself may prove to be quite a tedious task, as one has to enable the show all hidden files option from the Folder Options dialog, and then manually remove the hidden, junk files. Wouldn't it have been more convenient if you could quickly delete all the junk files in one go? Don't be worried yet, as DXPurge does just that. It's a Windows application, which is designed to get rid of junk files transferred from Mac OS X to your external storage medium. The process of removing files is easy as a pie, all you need to do is drag the folders that you copied from Mac over the application window, and it will automatically remove all the junk files present within them. 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

Best Ways To Send Text & Share Files From Your Mac To Other Devices

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One of the most common ways people send files or text is over email or instant messengers. Messengers are excellent if you’re sending text to someone other than yourself, but if you need to send it to yourself or to another system that you might be using, a messenger might not be the best option. As far as sending files to yourself is concerned, you almost always email them. In both scenarios, you’re emailing files because you want them on a different system, but you’re achieving that at the expense of cluttering your email inbox. Here are a few methods where you can send files and text from Mac to any device, i.e., Android, iPhone, iPad, another Mac or a Windows PC. 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

How To Permanently Delete A Single File From Mac Using Terminal [Tip]

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A very basic thing to do, but still not commonly known, is how to delete a single file permanently from your Mac. Moving a file to Trash means it’s still there and can be restored any time, not to mention eating up precious space. The slight problem with Trash is that if you want to remove a particular file from it, i.e., permanently delete it, you have to remove all of them. In the event you have just a single file to remove (wipe permanently off the face of your hard drive and the earth itself), you go to the Terminal and execute the simplest of commands. Read More

Take Time-Delayed Screenshots With Mac Preview & 3 Other Tricks [Tip]

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On the surface of it, Mac’s default image viewer seems lacklustre. Sure, it lets you view your images, and is, in effect, the Mac’s sole native screenshot taking tool, but it doesn’t seem as feature rich as it should be. That's perhaps why you often find a whole host of screenshot tools for Mac, but Preview can actually do more. This little tip not only shows you how to take a time-delayed screenshot of your entire screen via Preview, but also how to resize the selected screenshot area proportionately along either y-axis or x-axis, and how to move the selection area around to a different part of the screen. Read More

Sip: Color Picker Tool That Converts To 12 Color Formats [Mac]

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Last year, we covered Color Picker Pro and Gradient, both of which are eyedropper tools with slightly varying purposes. Gradient allows you to pick and combine two colors to get CSS code for the resulting gradient, while Color Picker Pro is excellent when working with two displays. Gradient has gone paid since our review, while Color Picker Pro is still free. Although a remarkable app, it converts colors to 6 formats. Sip is a free Mac app that not only has an excellent and minimalist interface, but translates color into 12 different color modes. In addition to the large number of formats, the app records all colors that you pick, lets you choose the number of items it saves, and supports keyboard shortcuts. Read More

CleanMyDrive: Remove DS_Store & Thumbs.db From Mounted Drives [Mac]

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CleanMyMac is a famous Mac maintenance software from the same people who later developed Gemini (read full review here). Their disk cleaning app, CleanMyDrive, has just gone free, has an amazing interface and is available for download in the Mac App Store. The app runs in the Menu Bar, automatically detects when a new drive is mounted, and gives you the option to rid it of junk each time it is mounted. If you’re wondering just what this ‘junk’ is, it’s all the useless DS_Store, Thumbs.db etc files and your soft copy of Twilight (not really, you’ll have to delete that manually). It also lets you quickly unmount and or all drives from the Menu Bar. It’s a fairly small utility, but nevertheless useful for freeing up space that you should never have to lose in the first place. Read More

CheatSheet: View A Complete List Of Keyboard Shortcuts For Any App In Mac

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Shortcuts are remarkably convenient, and discovering a shortcut is possibly the equivalent of panning for gold and finding a large nugget. New and neat tricks in Mac are discovered all the time, since there isn’t a very detailed official manual of all the cool things you can do on your Mac using just the keyboard. The same goes for apps; normally, shortcuts for apps that work in the Menu Bar can be found in their preferences, but that is true only for the select few that are well developed. For apps that work from the Dock, there’s no simple way of finding all shortcuts. CheatSheet is a free Mac app that makes it easy to view keyboard shortcuts for any app. It is particularly useful when you install a new and complex app that will likely take time to learn. Read More

Simplayfy: Search Music & Control iTunes From The Menu Bar [Mac]

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Apps for controlling iTunes aren’t rare, and they are mostly free. A typical iTunes control app lets you stop/resume music playback, most of them sporting one-click operation and functionality. Simplayfy is a free Mac app that, despite putting the play/pause function two clicks away, lets you search your iTunes library as well. The app supports extended controls for iTunes and gives you on-screen notifications when a new song begins or changes in iTunes. The app is free for a limited time, without actually specifying the duration the "limited time" entitles to. Read More

Ctrl Alt Delete: Quickly View Active Apps & Force Quit Them [Mac]

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To force quit an app in OS X Lion, you can use the Command+Option+Escape shortcut and quickly bring up the active apps window with options to force quit them. Apps can also be forced to quit individually from the right-click menu of an app’s icon in the Dock. The shortcoming of all these options, however, is that only apps that are actively running in the Dock can be quit. There are many apps that run from the Menu Bar, and processes that run in the background, which you can’t stop using this approach. Ctrl Alt Delete is a free Mac app that extends the options you get and makes it easier to quit any app or process. It is mapped to work with the Control+Alt+Delete key combination, which is the Windows shortcut for bringing up system options including the Task Manager (the Windows equivalent to Activity Monitor). Since there is no Alt key in Mac, the combination you will use is Control+Option+Delete. The app not only quits apps, but can also hide them and force your system to log off, sleep, restart or shutdown. Read More