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10 FREE Mac apps you can’t do without

alan — Fri, 24 Jul 2009 18:55:41 +0000

I won’t list the obvious such as Illustrator, Photoshop, MS Word etc but more those little apps that you’ve probably not even heard of. There’s absolutely loads of them – yes, even for us Mac users – but which ones should you download. I’ve chosen 10 here that I use on a daily basis – I’m sure there’s others out there and I’d be interested to know what little hidden gems you know of that you think other should use… Remember it has to be FREE!

Unread Mail Count

Mail unread menu sits in your menu bar and lets you know, at-a-glance, how many unread emails you have in Apple Mail. You can also configure the app to exclude mailboxes so only notifying you of your important emails.

Search bookmarks from any browser

Allbookmarks sits in your menu bar and acts as a little search tool for all the web browsers you have on your Mac. If you’re anything like me I chop and change between Safari, Firefox and Camino and add bookmarks to each of them. From the menu

Follow up previously sent emails

How many times have you sent an email and then realised you’d forgotten to say something… It happens to me all the time. Mailfollowup adds another button in Apple Mail so when you select your previously sent email you can choose to Follow Up that message which is basically like a Reply function but sends to the recipient and not you. One of my used little apps

Force empty your trashcan (that’s a bin to us British folk!)

Every now and again there’s something in your trash that you can’t delete – don’t ask me why it can’t be deleted! Anyway, by running Force Empty Trash your trashcan will be all clean and empty once more.

Alternative Music and Video Player

iTunes and Quicktime player are great but there’s times when you have a folder full of music that you want to play without having to add it to iTunes and I do find that some DivX movies play a lot better in VLC Player with better audio sync and correct aspect ratios. Simply drag anything to it’s window and click Play – it will then play it in the order it appears.

BitTorrent Client

I’ve used pretty much all the torrent apps out there and always come back to Transmission. It only has a small window and really is very basic.

Twitter

It seems the entire universe is into Twitter at the moment and whether it’s just another passing fad or whether it’s here to stay we all need a Twitter client that sits on our desktop informing of us of Stephen Fry’s latest twhirl is a lovely little Twitter app, allowing multiple accounts, notifications of new messages, shorten long urls, and lots of search functionality

Notepad

I don’t like the way Apple have incorporated their Notes app into Mail. I just don’t think it works and because of that I never use it. Instead xPad is a great alternative, allowing you to add new notes within a single window. It’s an incredibly simple app but that’s what actually makes it great.

Video and Voice calls

If you haven’t already got Skype then where have you been? Skype allows you to communicate with other Skype users for free via video and/or voice. It also offers very cheap calls to most countries.

Files and Folder sizes

Ever wonder just what is taking up all that space on your Mac? Well, it can help if you can see everything in one clear and concise window so you can then decide what to move or delete to free up valuable some space. Whatsize does this fantastically well… It’s free for measuring up to 20gb of space or $12.95 to measure anything. Don’t just go and delete stuff willy-nilly as it might be vital for the functionality of your Mac – best to check first before you do.

And finally… One to get that’s not free but you should get

All I want from a task list is something very simple. On most of the task managers you end up taking more time adding tasks than it actually takes to perform them! I never need due dates, times, notifications etc etc etc so if you want something easy, quick and simple then look no further than Taskpaper. It’s actually so simple I’ve started to use it as a notes app as well… You can go ahead and download it before choosing to purchase it but I think you should as you’ll love it’s simplicity.

10 Top Widgets for your Mac

alan — Thu, 12 Mar 2009 14:47:21 +0000

There’s literally thousands of widgets available for your Mac, but before you know it you’ll have cluttered up yet another part of your Mac with things you don’t really need and very rarely use. So which ones are actually useful and worth the download? Here’s 10, in no particular order, that I use.

iCal Events: Keep track of your upcoming events at-a-glance. You can also specify which calendars to include.

Currency Converter: Add as many currencies as you like – type in the amount you’d like to convert and see the exchange rate in all of your chosen currencies.

Happy Birthdays: Takes data from iCal and displays days remaining, date of birth and age at next birthday. No more excuses for those forgotten birthdays now!

iStat Nano: A system monitor that tracks all kinds of useful information such as processes, battery, machine temperature, fans. Very useful for all those techy details you need to know at-a-glance.

Montastic: Keeps track of your websites to make sure they’re all live with no downtime.

Word Counter: Not only counts the amount of words but also characters and instances of text. You can copy-paste into the text field or type away.

Designers Toolbox: Some useful conversion tools including paper sizes, HTML unicode characters, website font sizes, upload/download time for specific file sizes and connection speeds.

Countdown: Specify a future time and date and this widget will countdown the days, hours, minutes and seconds until that event. Useful for things like holidays or meetings

Corporate Ipsum: When you’re at the design stage of your project it’s unlikely the client will have the correct, if any, copy for their site. Use this Lorem Ipsum creator to generate some random text.

CharacterPal: If you regularly use special characters i.e. those ones that aren’t shown on your keyboard then this is an absolute must. Hover over a character to see what key combination you have to type.

10 Useful Sites for Web Developers

3 FREE Apps to protect your PC

alan — Mon, 30 Mar 2009 12:45:47 +0000

Luckily I own a Mac and one of the major benefits is that I don’t have to worry about viruses and all other kinds of dirty things infecting my system. But, I do have Parallels Desktop which acts as a Virtual PC on my Mac. So, I do need to protect this partition and you’ll be surprised that you don’t have to shell out even more money to protect your system – here’s 3 great, and FREE apps that you should install.

Ad-Aware Free
Offers real-time protection against malicious processes and infected programs that try to start or run on your system.

AVG Free Antivirus
This protects your PC from viruses, spyware, adware and trojens. They also offer 2 paid versions of the application which furthers your security but the basic FREE version will do just fine.

Spybot Search and Destroy
Detects and removes spyware from your system. Spyware silently tracks your behaviour such as keystrokes and then sends it to evil people so they can then sell on to advertising companies or worse still use those details to login to sites you regularly visit.

Now, you may wonder why I’ve listed three apps when AVG seems to do everything – well, I’m just being overprotective and when it comes to PC’s you need to be. New viruses, trojens and suchlike pop up on a daily basis so it’s better that three apps are protecting your system as they’ll be far higher chance you’ll stay fully protected.

A point to remember: Make sure you you keep everything up to date with all three of these applications. Yes, it may be a little annoying when they want to keep downloading updates and virus definitions but you’ll thank them when something nasty is spotted and eliminated at the root.

Create an HTML Signature for Apple Mail

alan — Wed, 13 May 2009 18:54:45 +0000

Apple Mail is great, such a pleasant email client to use for work and play but there’s one frustrating thing and that’s that there’s no obvious way of creating an html signature. So you’re stuck with just having text.

Now with that said, when you do create your HTML signature don’t go over the top and create one with loads of images that will take a day to load. Email clients often ask the user whether it’s safe to download the images – so your signature may not be seen in all the glory you wanted.

So here’s how:

1. Create your HTML signature using an html editor such as TextWrangler (FREE), Adobe Dreamweaver or similar. If you’re using CSS to style your elements then you’ll need to do this inline as some email clients, notably Gmail, don’t display internal stylesheets.

2. View your HTML page in Safari and choose File > Save and make sure the Format is set to Web Archive. You can call it whatever you like as we’ll be renaming the file anyway.

3. Okay, in Apple Mail create a new Signature by going to File > Preferences and select the Signatures tab. Add anything to your signature – we’ll be changing it to your new one anyway. When done close the Preferences Window and Quit Mail.

4. Now go to your Desktop and navigate to User > Library > Mail > Signatures and locate the signature you’ve just created (you’ll have to look at the Modified Date because the file name is a bit long and doesn’t relate to what you’ve created. Copy the entire name of that file.

5. Locate the file you saved in Step 2 and rename it with that you’ve just copied.

6. Drag the renamed file into your Signatures folder and choose Replace when prompted.

Now, when you open up Mail and view your Signatures you’ll see your new version there. It’s worth testing it by sending to various email clients such as Hotmail, Gmail and Outlook just to see if it looks the same.

iPhone to Mac Wireless Networking

alan — Sun, 21 Jun 2009 10:30:02 +0000

If you’ve got a jailbroken iPhone then you might want to connect to your iPhone from your Mac in order to add or retrieve files and folders. Whatever you want to do here’s how you do it.

Install OpenSSH from your Cydia App

Connect to your iPhone from a FTP app such as Transmit or Cyberduck using the SSH (SFTP) Protocol. For this you’ll need to know what IP address your iPhone is connecting to your Wireless Network with (go into your iPhone Settings > Wi-Fi and click the arrow next to your Wireless Network then make a note of your IP address (it might be that your IP address is dynamic so check this again if your connection doesn’t initially work.
For the username and password enter “root” and “alpine”
Now, you should have access to your iPhone’s file structure – make sure you know what you’re doing though as you don’t want to remove anything that’s vital to the workings of the iPhone!

If your FTP App doesn’t find your iPhone (and mine didn’t straight away) you may need to open a port on your router. Again, not a tricky thing to do and it’s best to follow this guide to port forwarding on portforward.com.

Remove attachments from Apple Mail emails

alan — Thu, 04 Jun 2009 10:55:39 +0000

Attachments can be pretty big and more often than not once you receive an email you’ll have saved that attachment to your Mac for safekeeping. Before you know it you’ll have hundreds of megabytes of emails on your Mac and wondering how on earth to make them smaller.

I need to refer back to emails so I really do need to keep them safe but I no longer need the large attachments so if you didn’t know you can simply click on the message in question and go to Message > Remove Attachments. Simple as that!

Remove the shadow from Mac Screen Grabs

alan — Thu, 26 Mar 2009 16:31:01 +0000

When you take a screenshot in OSX Leopard (Apple Shift 4 or Apple Shift 4 SpaceBar) you get a large outer shadow appear when you then view that image in Preview or Photoshop. It can be really useful to remove that shadow when you want to take screengrabs for presentations.

To remove it open Terminal (Applications/Utilities) and copy and paste this code:

defaults write com.apple.screencapture disable-shadow -bool true

followed by this:

killall SystemUIServer

To get the shadow back copy and paste this:

defaults write com.apple.screencapture disable-shadow -bool false

followed by:

killall SystemUIServer

Stay secure, use more than one password

alan — Mon, 04 May 2009 09:59:27 +0000

We’re all guilty of it – you generally have one, maybe two, passwords that you use for everything you log in to on the web. Now, we all know this isn’t the most secure way of doing things but when you have to have usernames and passwords for hundreds of sites then how are you supposed to remember more than one or two?

Just think if someone found out your one and only password. How easy would it be for them to go through every, popular, online site – login and buy something – a nice present from you to them!

There are Password Manager Apps for both Mac and PC that allow you to store all of your passwords (and other vital data) and then open up that data using just one password. For the Mac there’s 1Password and for the PC there’s Login King. Both currently retail for $39.95 (around £26) but that really is money well spent.

From now on whenever you have to open a new online account it’s simple enough to choose a secure password in the knowledge that you don’t need to remember it. In fact, go back through your existing online accounts and choose a new password.

A very useful site, to help choose a secure password is goodpassword.com. If you want your password to be really secure then leave all the default options and also check the (.?:;!,) checkbox. This will then include less commonly used characters in your password.

Testing websites in IE6, IE7 and IE8 on a Mac

alan — Fri, 23 Oct 2009 18:35:42 +0000

When designing and developing websites it’s important to test in all of the most popular browsers. Those are currently Firefox, IE6, IE7, IE8, Google Chrome and Safari. For some reason PC users don’t seem to update their version of Internet Explorer so as each new version arrives on the scene we then have to develop for those very old browsers. Anyway, here’s how to do it…

1. Firstly purchase and install Parallels Desktop which will enable you to run Windows on your Mac (you will also need to purchase a copy of Windows XP).

2. Windows XP has Internet Explorer 6 included so what you’ll now need to do is create a clone of your virtual machine so you can then run IE7 and IE8.

3. Open the new virtual machine and then upgrade IE6 to IE8. From there you’ll then be able to view sites as they appear in IE7 by clicking the little broken page icon next to the address bar.

4. On your newly cloned machine then download Firefox and Google Chrome so you can then test your sites in those browsers too.

5. Yes, you will still have to open up your old virtual machine to view websites in IE6 but this is a far better representation of your sites and more stable solution than using IE6 emulators which are a bit hit-and-miss.

Keep checking the latest browser stats to see when that dreaded IE6 will die a painful death!

Web Browsing Tips #1: Find in Page

alan — Tue, 31 Mar 2009 07:19:22 +0000

The Internet can be a very big and daunting place for all of us. It’s unknown the exact amount of web pages that exists on the World Wide Web but it’s well over a billion, so being able to find exactly what you’re after can be a tricky task. Over the coming weeks we’ll try to demystify and help you become a superb surfer. The tips will be in no particular order so keep checking back or better still subscribe to the email updates (enter your email address on the right) to receive the tips direct to your email inbox.

It’s more than likely you’ll have used Google or another search engine to get to a website so you’ll already have an idea of what you’re after. Rather than hunting around the page simply use the browser’s Find in page function, type in a keyword/phrase and hit find. By clicking the Return Key you’ll then be able to quickly go through all instances of this search term. You can then quickly scan the sentence to see if that’s useful for you. Shortcuts; Mac: Command (Apple Key) + F, PC: Ctrl + F