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Utilities
This year, with the launch of Lion, Apple has been all about “Back to the Mac” – Taking great features from iOS, and porting them over to OS X. For the most part, this has been fairly successful. For this reason, it makes sense that many iOS developers would do the same.
In this roundup, we’ll have a look at the biggest success stories in this field. The developers featured here didn’t just rebuild the interface for OS X, they enhanced the app to rival (and often surpass) their iOS counterparts.
At any given time, there’s a lot going on in your computer’s brain. You may be focusing on writing an important email or watching a video, but that doesn’t mean your CPU is likewise focusing its attention. It’s still assigning valuable resources to that open web page you have in the background and that Twitter client chirping away on your desktop.
App Tamer is an incredibly handy little app that finds all these processes and helps you pause those that aren’t important until you need them again. This helps cut down on CPU time, battery usage and even heat! Follow along as we take a closer look.
I have something of a confession to make – I’m very particular when it comes to computers. While I can walk around with two week’s beard growth or drive in a mud splattered car for most of the summer without a care, my Mac has to be ‘just so’. After all, my Mac is what I work on, it’s what I record my music onto and, since I don’t want a television in the house, my Mac is what I tend to digest most of my entertainment on too.
In order to keep everything as I like it, my Mac must be organized perfectly with a system of folders, colour coded files and, above all, a clean Desktop. Despite my best efforts however, this isn’t always practical, as there are no amount of temporary folders which can replace the speed and usefulness of using the Desktop as a place to temporarily store files for later categorising and/or deleting.
That’s why clutter-cleaning applications are so useful, affording the user the best of both worlds. Here’s some of the best available at the moment.
The Mac App Store has brought about a whole mess of new utilities that make your Mac more functional than ever.
Today we’re going to dive and find thirty particularly useful utilities that you’ll definitely want to check out and consider downloading.
At AppStorm, we pride ourselves on finding and presenting the very best apps. But have you ever stopped to think where we find all our wonderful apps? They don’t just appear on our doorsteps, we have to go out and search for the very best and most recent apps.
In this roundup, I’ll cover some of the best ways to seek out awesome apps. If you’re looking to discover new Mac software, you can’t go wrong with these wonderful sources.
With thousands of apps on the Mac App Store, there’s bound to be some hidden treasures. Unfortunately, there are also plenty of apps that are just containers for sales pitches or overly designed slideshows of real estate. There are a lot of apps that, quite simply, don’t belong on the Mac, and the quantity of those apps makes it difficult to uncover the true gems.
For this roundup, I searched the Mac App Store for solid-looking apps that hadn’t received enough ratings for Apple to give it an average score. I didn’t limit myself to one category. I just looked for apps that seemed to know what they were doing, despite not having an audience to do it to. I think I found some real treasures.
In my mind, data is holds an equal level of importance to my physical possessions. In a recent post, we covered a perfect backup strategy for your Mac. In that, we discussed two off-site options: Dropbox and CrashPlan.
Today I’m going to take a closer look at some other options for off-site and online backup, to give you a full spectrum of solutions to choose from.
The humble menu bar is a fascinating part of the Mac OS X interface. It’s always visible, and holds a remarkably prominent position on your display – far more so than the Dock.
Some people love to keep it as empty as possible, while others have so many menu bar apps that it’s literally full to overflowing. Whichever camp you fall into, almost everyone has at least one or two apps that they feel are worthy of a place in the magical menu bar.
Today we’re going to take a close look at 25 different apps that offer really useful menu bar functionality. Each has a short description, and a example video of the app in-use.
I’m not for one moment suggesting that you download and run all of these. That would be crazy. Rather I hope that you’ll find one or two that particularly stand out for you, and become a permanent resident in the top-right corner of your display…
Last summer, my MacBook was stolen. It had no protection, no password, no data encrypted, and the thief had access to all of my emails through Mail.app. I even found out that the thief, or the subsequent buyer of my beautiful Macbook, had been using my Instapaper account to bookmark his own webpages! (I have changed my password since).
After that horrible experience was over and I had my new Macbook, some of the first things that I did with it were increase its security, and look into theft-recovery apps.
Anti-theft apps, or theft-recovery apps, provide you with useful information, like location and IP address, once your computer gets lost or stolen. Some even give you access to your computer’s webcam, and a few take care of the whole recovery process of your Mac.
Keep on reading to see some of our favorite apps!
Hidden deep inside your Applications directory is a folder marked “Utilities”. To a lot of people, this cold, generic title will scare you away, and many will never venture inside, or if they do, won’t want to open up any of those frightening-sounding applications for fear of ruining something.
This is unfortunate, as your Utilities folder harbours a wealth of great apps with beautiful icons and wonderful UIs, all designed to make your experience on a Mac even easier.
Even to the most experienced Mac user, some of the utilities will lie unused. You might know Terminal and System Profiler, but won’t have a clue what Grapher or Console does. In this bumper article, I hope to show you what you can do with these mysterious apps, and how your Mac might just get a whole lot better!
