Posted on March 8, 2009
DropLink is a new Mac app that’s in the beta stages currently, but looks very promising. Essentially it’s a droplet that sits in your Dock and lets you upload a file by dragging it to the DropLink icon. Once the upload finishes (indicated by an out-of-the-way progress bar and a Growl notification), the link is copied to your clipboard. It’s simple, yet effective reminder of the usefulness of minimal applications that can make your life that much easier.
Posted on February 12, 2009
I was recently contacted by a certain Tiffany of TuneUp Media. After giving me a brief insight into her company’s product, I was sold. TuneUp for Mac is an excellent iTunes plugin that fills in the blanks in your iTunes library, so to speak. TuneUp will examine your music and fetch album artwork, fix the ID3 tags, and add even more information. It can also tell you about upcoming concerts for the current artist. It’s really a nice piece of software, and is perfect for anyone with a less-than-optimal iTunes library. The free version will fix up to 500 songs and add up to 50 sets of album artwork for you. An unlimited version (TuneUp Gold) is available on the developer’s site (listed below) for a very reasonable $20.
Posted on November 16, 2008
GrandPerspective is an awesome utility that can inspect your filesystem and graphically show you what’s taking up room. It’s extremely useful for cleaning out your Mac, and finding the chunky files on your hard drive that are just taking up space. Unfortunately, GrandPerspective is unable to reveal or delete files within the app–you have to find and delete them yourself. However, a 1.0 release is imminent, so we may see some additional functionality soon.
Posted on November 14, 2008
DownloadMonitor is an innovative little app that adds back some of the functionality lost by users of Safari. It can react to conditions of downloaded files on your computer, which is truly something that Apple should have thought of. It’s basically the download manager that wasn’t included with your browser. It has full AppleScript and Automator support, and an awesome little HUD window indicating downloading status. Pretty cool.
Posted on November 13, 2008
Ghost is an excellent little utility that can work with hidden files in OS X. Ghost’s ingenious system for hiding and unhiding your own files is so obvious that I’m not sure how everyone else missed it. All you do is drag a file into Ghost, and check or uncheck to hide or unhide, respectively. Ghost also has an option to show or hide all hidden files in Finder, which is much faster than running the lengthy “defaults write com.apple.Finder AppleShowAllFiles TRUE” command in Terminal over and over. This app is a must-have for people who need to work with hidden files on their Mac.
Posted on November 12, 2008
DiffMerge is an awesome file comparison tool that lets you select two sources, and compare them. You can compare folders, individual files, or even several files at once. Once compared, you can merge them (which works quite well, I might add), or choose from a few other options. Overall it’s a great app with awesome performance, and is definitely worth a glance if you need to merge several items. As an added bonus, it comes with an equally awesome command line tool.
