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Earlier this year, everyone’s favorite blog editor announced a completely new version. MarsEdit 3 introduces a number of new and powerful features that address most if not all of the shortfalls we pointed out in a previous review.
Today we’ll give a brief overview of MarsEdit for newcomers. Along the way we’ll point out all of the new features and discuss how much they improve the overall experience.
There was a time when having a download manager made a real difference to one’s experience of using the internet. There are places where this is still true. A few years ago, I spent a month in a remote part of India, where I struggled to top 2k download speeds with my laptop’s modem connecting via a fixed line. I literally waited an hour some days just to download a morning’s email.
A download manager wouldn’t have helped all that much with those messages, but it would have made a huge difference if I had wanted to download any software, music or video files.
That’s the most common use of a download manager: pausing and restarting downloads, scheduling them for later in the day, perhaps after you’ve gone to bed, so that massive download can be ready and waiting in the morning. There are now a number of download managers that can do a whole lot more than this. Speed Download has been the big-hitter for a long time, but (though I bought a licence for the app) I’ve never got along with it.
Recently, I’ve switched over to using Leech, which makes no claim to being as powerful, but turns out to be an excellent, lightweight option that might just do everything you need.
OS X menu bar apps continue to stretch the bounds of what you’d expect from a simple tool that runs in the background. MailCue follows this trend by taking the place of the most powerful menu bar mail notifier I’ve ever come across.
Below we’ll take a look at what makes MailCue special and why it just might become your new favorite email tool.
Congratulations on your ownership of a Mac! Because of that you have been blessed with a mammoth range of FTP (as well as SFTP, WebDav and Amazon S3) clients that you can use to browse and manage your files on a remote server.
One of the main players in the FTP game is Cyberduck – a free, open-source application that is quite possibly the best solution (for its price) currently available on Mac. It can connect to FTP, SFTP, WebDav, Cloud Files, Google Docs and Amazon S3. Cyberduck is written by David V. Kocher however as mentioned before, it’s an open-source software, so the application is constantly improved by many people around the world.
Read on to find out whether it fits the bill for you.
I have tried a number of online backup solutions – among them Mozy, Carbonite, JungleDisk, MobileMe’s iDisk, and CrashPlan. This article is not about those products, but I can tell you that all of them let me down in one way or another.
I hit problems with one of them when disaster struck and I found that I couldn’t actually use my backup files; another was terribly, unusably slow and gave little control over when backups were run; another kept my MacBook’s fan’s running all the time, because the backup app was leaking memory all over the place.
Despite all these disappointments, I do feel that I need an off-site backup (along with my Time Machine and SuperDuper! backups) – it’s an extra line of protection that helps me feel more secure – so I’ve kept looking for a solution that’ll do the best possible job.
For the last few months, I’ve been using Dropbox and, although it’s not expressly designed for the purpose of backup, it just works, and I’ve been very happy with the service. My only complaint is that Dropbox is a little expensive for my needs – after all, I’m only currently using 12% of the 50GB my $10/month buys.
I recently came across Haystack Software’s Arq, and I’m thinking this may be a very good option for keeping online backups running smoothly and seamlessly. Join me after the break for a walkthrough of its features.
Tumblr has become a wildly popular blogging platform for many reasons. It’s easy enough for beginners to pick up in an instant, and powerful enough to customize to your heart’s content.
The online Tumblr interface is surely not lacking, but some users still prefer the feel of a desktop environment. Today we’ll look at an application designed to help you publish to your Tumblr account on your Mac: myTumblr from MOApp.
Today we’re going to look at an awesome new hybrid Mac application and web service called CloudApp. It’s completely free, extremely easy to use, and very useful for anyone looking for a better way to share files.
We’ll take a look at the app’s main functionality along with the accompanying web app and rich plugin system.
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Apple’s Safari browser remains an incredibly popular choice for Mac users everywhere, and is highly regarded for keeping up to date with the latest advances in web technology. Personally, I use and love it for the simplicity offered – it’s fast, lean, and feels like a clutter-free window to the web.
On the first day of WWDC, Apple announced the release of Safari 5, the latest incarnation of their browser. Today we’ll be taking a quick look at what’s new, and whether it’s worth getting excited about.
It seems fairly clear now that Google has won the RSS war. There aren’t many serious contenders for the title now that Newsgator has closed down their own aggregators and shifted their users over to Google Reader. Bloglines, though it has a pretty good web interface, seems to have suffered by comparison.
There are of course other options out there (Fever is a favourite among the more tech savvy), but of these three who were a while ago the main contenders, Google seems to have come out with the greatest number of users and the most rapidly developing platform.
Today we’ll be taking a look at a desktop companion to the Google Reader juggernaut. Gruml is a relatively new RSS reader for the Mac that syncs well with the service, and offers plenty of customisation options. Join us after the jump for a quick tour of its main features.
We spend more and more time reading web pages. So much of the information we take in each day comes from the sites we visit, whether that be in the course of work, pleasure, or study. If you have the time to spend on following a trail of links and reading whatever crosses your screen, just as it grabs your attention, you’re luckier than most of us.
Mostly we have to rely on some system for saving things of interest so that we don’t lose out. Today we’ll be taking a look at one tool in particular; QuietRead.
