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About a year and a half ago Apple revealed iCloud — its cross device syncing solution. With iCloud we were supposed to be able to easily sync and edit documents on all of our devices. While iCloud has lived up to this promise in many regards, iCloud document syncing is different from other syncing solutions in that it does away with the traditional file / folder paradigm and stores documents “in the app.” While this approach works well most of the time, other times, it is nice to manage documents and folders outside of iCloud’s in app interface.
That is where Cloud Mate comes in. It’s well known that you can manage iCloud documents from the Mobile Documents folder hidden away in the Library folder, and there are also free options like Plain Cloud that clean up the messy file names you find in the Mobile Documents folder. So what does Cloud Mate add that theses other solutions don’t have? Read on to find out and see if Cloud Mate can solve your iCloud document management needs.
If you’re in the tech support business or are even the designated “family tech support representative”, then you probably know how frustrating it can be to try and resolve a computer problem over the phone with a user who isn’t very computer literate.
Enter TeamViewer, a remote support tool that’s more than just simple screen sharing. It’s free, doesn’t require Java, and actually works great. Let’s take a look.
I love to see new games move to the Mac, but I’m primarily a console gamer. The difference for me is the console controller, and while I could invest in a Mac gaming controller, there’s some cost involved there, and, well, I already have my consoles for games like that.
That doesn’t mean I don’t sometimes want a game controller for my Mac, but I can’t exactly plug my DualShock 3 into my USB port. My hopes haven’t been far off, though, because WJoy is a tiny app that will connect your Wii Remote and Mac, allowing you to use it as a controller for Mac games. We’ll see if it works as advertised. (more…)
If you’re a devotee of Login Items, you may have begun to feel a certain heaviness in your Mac’s startup. Login Items tells OS X what it should launch when you turn your computer on, and I’ve been known to throw just about everything I’m going to need for the day in there. Too much, though, and you may begin to notice a lag.
Holding off on launching all of those applications would go a long way to helping, but I’m the impatient type. It seems Delay Start, a tiny app with one function, will do the waiting for me, though, so I can stagger how my apps are opened and stop bogging down my Login Items quite so much. We’ll see how much of a difference this uni-tasker can make. (more…)
There are plenty of screen capture apps, but they all seem to do too much or too little. If you haven’t found an app for creating and editing screen shots beyond what comes standard in Mac OS X, it’s likely because what’s available either gets in your way or doesn’t have enough features to make it worth a switch.
I’m right there in the same camp as you. I take a lot of screen captures and have tried a handful of different apps, but nothing’s ever stuck. Maybe Monosnap, a tiny screen capture app with a pile of features, will change all that. We’ll take a look at Monosnap and see if it has the chops to make me switch from the default OS X tools. (more…)
HyperDock is a fantastic app that brings some great features from Windows to the Mac. HyperDock’s developer hasn’t been lazing around, though. Next down the pipeline is HyperSwitch, a sister app to HyperDock that relies entirely on your keyboard.
HyperSwitch puts a lot of the great features of HyperDock at your fingertips, quite literally. Though still in beta, this promises to be a great app if its predecessor is anything to go by. Will HyperSwitch manage to dethrone HyperDock? Let’s try it out! (more…)
Our giveaway is now closed; congrats to our winners!
There sure are a lot of keyboard shortcuts to remember, especially in some of the bigger third-party apps. I’ve pretty much given up memorizing them all, and usually just look to the menus to find what I want. The problem is that always going to the menu, especially if I’m in an app that uses a lot of menu commands like an image editor, is that I’m being constantly pulled out of the workspace and away from what I’m actually doing.
MenuMate is a nifty little app that will sit in your menu bar or disappear altogether until its needed, but once triggered, it gives you all your application’s menu items to choose from, right where you’re working. We’ll try out MenuMate and see if it’s the timesaver it claims to be and really solves the shortcut problem … and then give you the chance to win a free copy of MenuMate! (more…)
I’m subscribed to a bunch of different cloud storage services, so I have all these extra folders all over my computer. Nothing actually seems to be where it should and it can be hard remembering where I stuck something during my last round of “organization.” I’m on the look out for anything that can really get my Finder organized and save me from myself.
That’s where ClawMenu comes in, as a sort of hybrid of Finder and Launchbar. A place to add shortcuts for your applications, folders and files, it’ll allow you to browse all of that mess, too. How does it stand up against the real thing, though? (more…)
The attention span of people is way shorter than it used to be, and it only seems to be getting worse. Waxing poetic about stuff isn’t an effective measure if you are in a quest to reach out to a wider audience (to be precise, the younger audience). Pictures and videos seem to do the trick, though.
When you are writing a tutorial, blogpost, or a book, screenshots at regular intervals for sure will increase the chance of getting the message across quickly. Video walkthroughs are even better. There are many free and premium tools that can help you with both the tasks. Voila is one among them and I hear good things about the app all the time.
A new version of the app went on sale recently, and I grabbed the opportunity to check for myself how useful Voila actually is.
In Mac OS X 10.7 Lion, Apple introduced what appeared to be a pretty promising feature called AirDrop. The goal was simple: to let you simply share files across your local network without the need for emails, flash drives, or complicated setups. Unfortunately, despite their efforts to bring the Mac and iOS to some level of feature parity, over two years later, AirDrop is still a Mac only feature.
Enter Instashare, an app which claims to be “AirDrop for iOS and OSX”, and plans to add Windows and Android versions in the near future. So, did the developers behind Instashare really beat Apple at their own game? Read on to find out!
