As more of our documents get moved off our local drives and into the cloud, it can be difficult to stay on top of them all. I keep stuff scattered around in my Gmail account, Dropbox folder, and laptop, among many other places, and can have a hard time remembering where a particular item is.
The developers of Found recognized this problem and created an interesting solution. Using a search concept similar to Spotlight, Found searches not only your local machine but also common cloud services. Any app designed to help you find files needs to do so quickly, using an intuitive interface. How does Found fare under these important conditions?
Mac OS X offers users a fair amount of options to streamline our everyday workflows. You can have your computer set to turn on and off automatically based on the time and day of the week. You can use Automator to perform a series of repetitive steps, and anyone with a basic programming background can use AppleScript to their advantage.
If you find yourself logging in and out of your system frequently, then taking the time to set your login items can save you the hassle of constantly having to re-open your most frequently used apps. Startupizer from Gentle Bytes improves Mac’s login item preferences by adding a few neat features.
I spent two years living in Paraguay, where temperatures are scorching hot and air conditioning is practically non-existent. I had my old MacBook with me the whole time, which I routinely had to open up and clean Paraguay’s ubiquitous red dirt out of. Despite my best efforts, it died an early death, and the culprit, a tech later explained, was heat.
Keeping your Mac cool not only extends its life, but also improves performance. There are a few available utilities that help you keep tabs on your computer’s temperature using the built-in sensors that Macs have. Temperature Gauge from Tunabelly Software is the latest of these apps on the scene.
Of all the GUI features on the Mac operating system, perhaps the most iconic is the Dock. It offers users a quick place to launch commonly used apps, as well as switch between those which are currently open. However, with the explosion of available apps for the Mac, the utility of the Dock has come into question among a growing number of users. For anyone who commonly opens dozens of different apps on a daily basis, it just isn’t feasible to look around looking for what you need.
Fortunately, a number of options have emerged to help us launch apps without ever needing to look at the Dock. OS X Lion introduced Launchpad, which quickly displays all of your applications. Power-users have long found options like Quicksilver to be faster and more powerful. Bevy, from Berg Design, was designed to be fast like Quicksilver while still having a more tangible interface like Launchpad. Let’s check it out.
There was a time when my desk was perpetually covered in Post-It notes. I used to have to write down every little task I needed to complete for a project, and then keep track of them in an admittedly chaotic manner. Fortunately for people like me, various methods such as Getting Things Done have inspired fantastic productivity apps that make our lives more organized.
Such productivity apps are a dime a dozen, but today we are going to be looking at two task managers that set themselves apart. Producteev and Wunderkit are two powerful task managers that offer a similar set of features. I’ve spent the last few weeks playing around with each of these apps, and we are going to look at how their features stack up against each other.
I’m something of a neat freak when it comes to keeping my computer organized. When I use a friend’s computer and find the desktop littered with old, poorly named files like “WordDoc1,” I start to feel nauseous and begin rethinking our friendship. Consequently, I love to see new utilities for the Mac that help me keep things in order on my laptop.
OS X has never been great when it comes to moving files around. It prefers to just copy a file when you drag it rather than move it completely. Furthermore, having a bunch of windows open can make navigating to your destination difficult when you’re dragging something and you have your mouse button pressed down. DragonDrop is an app that saves people like myself who are frequently moving files around the headache of dealing with these problems.
Due to its cross-compatibility and wide range of uses, the PDF has been a wildly popular document type for years. Despite the ubiquity of the PDF, there has been relatively little innovation in way we view and interact with these documents. Most PDF viewers simply show you the file with no bells or whistles.
HyperPDF from NeoMobili aims to break the boring mold of PDF viewers by introducing some new ways to read, markup, edit, and share your documents. Are the features worth an upgrade from your current PDF client?
I’ve recently started toying with the idea of upgrading my MacBook Pro’s stock 500 GB hard drive with a new SSD. The cost of an SSD that comes anywhere close to 500 gigs is terrifying, so I’ve been shopping around for a drive that has less than half of that capacity. In order to determine if I could survive with a comparatively diminutive drive, I’ve begun some serious spring cleaning.
There are a ton of great apps out there for keeping your Mac’s hard drive clean. FIPLAB joins this crowded market with a very simple utility called Disk Doctor. I’ve employed it in my quest to squeeze my disk usage down to SSD capacity. Read on to find out how it fared in my tests.
Despite being a relatively old system, File Transfer Protocol (FTP) still has great value to those of us who deal with uploading and downloading lots of data between servers. Some have argued that FTP is dying, along with hierarchical file systems. However, for anyone who has ever worked on a website or dealt with servers like Amazon’s S3, FTP is still the fastest way to manage all your files.
There are plenty of options out there for Mac users who need a solid FTP client. The most important factors for most users when deciding which is best tend to be speed, layout, and price. Today we are going to look a fresh look at the recently updated ForkLift from Binary Nights (version 2.5), and see how it stacks up against the competition.
Since being introduced in 2001, iTunes’ features have expanded well beyond its name. Once a simple music player, it has evolved beyond the realm of tunes and into a hub for just about all the media on our Macs. It also features an enormous digital content store, and is the program responsible for syncing all of that stuff to our iDevices. Many users, like myself, have complained for years that the expanding features of iTunes have let it become a bloated piece of software.
Tomahawk is an open-source media player that cuts out some unnecessary iTunes bloat, while trying to create some more relevant functionality in the important area of actually playing music. Do its features make it a viable iTunes replacement on your computer, or is it just another mundane addition to an already oversaturated market of iTunes alternatives?
