Posted on October 5, 2009
Magnifique is a is a nifty app that allows you to theme your Mac with a completely revamped interface. Many themes (which you download and apply with Magnifique) are available for free, and are for the most part very well-designed. It’s intuitive and effective, and an excellent app to have if you’re getting bored with the Mac OS X UI (or just want to get rid of those nasty Aqua elements!). My current favorite theme is “Disinmaso”, which is a mashup of two themes by interface designer Susumu Yoshida called “Disingenuous” and “Umaso”.
Read the rest of this entry »
Posted on July 16, 2009
One of the more frustrating aspects of dealing with USB-based connectivity is that there’s no standard for deciding how devices are dealt with when plugged into your computer. Cameras by Flexibits takes an ultra-simple approach at filling this software gap by providing one place to specify what should happen when you plug in a camera. Within its pane in System Preferences, you can choose what you want to happen when certain cameras are plugged in. It supports an unlimited amount of cameras, and even iPods. It will only ask what you want to do (in the form of a popup dialog) once, but your decision can be changed within the aforementioned pane. In summary, if you have a lot of USB devices, Cameras can help you sort out the actions so you won’t be overwhelmed when plugging them in.
Read the rest of this entry »
Posted on July 4, 2009
AddressBookSync matches your Facebook friends to your OS X Address Book contacts. It then adds profile avatars, birthdays and location info to your contact cards. Obviously, it can’t sync that information if your friends didn’t fill in those fields on their profile. AddressBookSync also allows you to manually match a Facebook friend to a contact that it doesn’t recognize. This is helpful for friends who, for example, only have their last initial and not their full name on their profile.
Read the rest of this entry »
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.
Read the rest of this entry »
Posted on November 20, 2008
Dockless is a convenient little Mac app that can keep an application’s icon from showing in the Dock while it runs. It has a simple interface that presents you with a clean checklist, and it automatically finds applications for you. This app is fully functional in that it even lets you make Apple’s applications (like Spotlight) show up in the Dock while they’re running.
Read the rest of this entry »
Posted on November 17, 2008
GeekTool is awesome. It’s essentially a Terminal window, but it’s on your desktop. So, while doing other work, you can see the output of Terminal (whether it be from a UNIX program or from a system output log). For all you UNIX geeks out there, this is your calling. By the way, it says it works on Panther and Tiger, but it also works on Leopard (in a nice little preference pane!).
Read the rest of this entry »
