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While Apple hasn’t had the best history with cloud computing services, their new iCloud platform promises to bring something completely new to the space. Instead of offering their traditional mix of Google Apps and Dropbox, Apple has reinvented the way they see the Cloud.
That being said, the platform hasn’t seen the rapid adoption of some of Apple’s other products, but we’ve still been able to round up a variety of great “hidden” features, newly-compatible apps, and other little tweaks to help you get the most out of your iCloud experience.
Thanks to iTunes, podcasts have become increasingly popular, and with the power of the Mac anyone can harness that popularity and create their own.
This guide will walk you through every step of creating your own podcast, from getting the right hardware to publishing it online. This is the definitive guide to podcasting on the Mac -just add content!
Many people have bandwidth limits with their ISPs, and with the amount of tempting content on the web these days, it can be hard to stick within these limits. Software such as SurplusMeter is great for tracking your bandwidth usage, but there’s no way of seeing what is using up your bandwidth.
Enter Rubbernet, a new app from Conceited Software which tracks what apps are accessing your network connection, and how much bandwidth they are using. If some third-party software is accessing your network without your permission, you can find out and try to stop it.
Not only is this useful for monitoring bandwidth usage, but it can be used to detect any software which might be secretly sending out personal data of yours. A great concept for an app, but does it work in practice? Let’s take a look.
Ever wanted to backup the masses of data that you’ve got stored up in the Google cloud? All those emails, documents, calendar events, and contacts? It’s a valid question, and something that most of us have no doubt considered from time to time.
But why would you need to backup your Google data? There are two main reasons; firstly, nothing is perfect and there is always the slim chance that your data stored with Google could be lost. Secondly, whilst very generous, Google’s free storage does run out at a point and when reached, you may wish to copy all old data to your computer to delete off the server.
BackupGoo is an easy to use application designed to backup all of your digital “stuff” stored with Google. In this article, we’ll be taking a look at the ins and outs of BackupGoo, as well as another app which can do a similar thing.
Thanks to the hundreds of one-click file sharing websites online, the use of FTP for casually sharing files has drastically reduced. The protocol is all but relegated to just uploading and downloading files to a server. But as simple as file sharing websites are, using them means giving up a lot of control over the data you have uploaded.
If you want to retain this level of security and control, FTP is still the way to go. Now you might say, Mac OS X comes with a built in FTP Server, so why would anyone want to pay for a third party solution? Read on after the break to find out how and why Rumpus is a better solution for creating your own server.
For many OS X users, iChat is a program only opened once. You’ll start a video chat with your other Mac-using friend, or try a screen sharing session as you both race for mouse control supremacy and try to update each other’s Facebook status. Soon, however, the novelty wears off, the Adium .dmg lands in your downloads stack and iChat sits collecting dust in the long forgotten regions of your dock.
That was my situation anyway, until I heard about Chax.
Chax is a free, BSD licensed app that promises to improve the iChat experience. In this way, it’s like a Glims for iChat, but where Glims boosts Safari with big features like full screen browsing, Chax focuses on more modest app improvements – but ones that should no doubt be indispensable for heavy iChat users.
In recent years, countless Mac Twitter applications have sprung up seemingly in an instant and died just as quickly. One app that has stayed strong ever since the beginning of the Twitter application revolution is TweetDeck. Its powerful feature set and intense multi-column format, though hated by some, is still a favorite among many power users.
Today we’ll go over ten simple tips that will help new and advanced users alike get the most out of using TweetDeck as the ultimate social media application.
WebSaver is simple in concept: it allows you to set a series of websites as your screen saver. You need only enter a few URLs and it will automatically load a fullscreen page and cycle between your various sites.
Today we’ll look at how to set it up, what some of the various options are and our ultimate impressions regarding the software.
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I’m just getting to the end of my sixteenth year of using email. In this time, I’ve used around twenty different email addresses and have usually operated several accounts at once. Email accumulates incredibly quickly and I, as I’m sure many of you to, have many thousands of email messages on my MacBook.
For years I did what most of us do: stored messages in various well-pruned folders. I then moved to rely on Gmail’s labels and its awesome search capabilities. Eventually I moved on from Gmail to FastMail, started using Mailtags, and took the step of tagging my messages, getting rid of folders, and dumping everything into a single archive. Sadly, Mailtags hasn’t quite made the jump to Snow Leopard yet (and I’ve had problems with the beta), so I’m waiting for a full and final update to be released. Until that happy day, I’ve been pleased to spend the last week experimenting with Rocketbox, and I can see this little app becoming a fixture in my email workflow.
Many of us have more than one web browser on our Mac – I have copies of Safari, Firefox, Opera, Camino, Google Chrome and various others. Although I certainly don’t use them all regularly (Safari is my browser of choice), I do open them all occasionally to try out new features and test the appearance of a website.
If you regularly use different browsers, manually opening them and copy-and-pasting links into specific ones can become frustrating. You can only have one “default browser” on OS X, and there’s no easy way to quickly specify which particular one to use at any given time.
Today’s How-To will be introducing an application called Choosy, which helps to make running multiple browsers far more enjoyable.
